Work-immanent criticism served as political retreat under Nazism and after 1945

Evidence

At around the same time as Adorno was offering his interpretation of Mörike’s almost free-verse poem Auf einer Wanderung', Emil Staiger published an interpretation of Mörike's Auf eine Lampe’, a kind of poetic still life in iambic trimeter. Staiger was the most impressive of the literary critics who after 1945 published studies that became standard works of what was called work-immanent' interpretation. Under the Nazis, this approach had offered critics like Max Kommerell a way of avoiding ideological demands, and after 1945 it became a way of avoiding genuinely fresh thinking that enjoyed wide popularity. Wolfgang Kayser wrote the standard textbook for this approach with his introduction to the study of literature, The Linguistic Work of Art, published in 1948. In his Basic Concepts of Poetics, first published in 1946, Staiger drafted a fundamental poetics’ following Heideggera phenomenology of the purely ideal essences of lyric, epic and drama. These he regarded on the one hand as literary-critical terms for general human possibilities and, on the other, as fields for the manifold possibilities of poetic composition. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2224

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the reader’s critical-theory interest in how academic methods function as political evasions — parallels Horkheimer/Adorno’s charge that formalism evades social totality. — connects to: Nazi rule and restoration alienated postwar Germans from utopian-social criticism; Nazism suppressed the social-democratic constitutional tradition until the late 1960s — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2372; The Allied ban on political activity eased Nazi and conservative continuity in German institutions — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1640 (+1 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: to what extent did work-immanent criticism function as quiet internal opposition versus accommodation across different Nazi-era critics?