Literature as History of Social Change

The celebrated American novelist, Mark Twain, had recounted an incident he had witnessed during his tour of Europe in 1892. He was invited to a banquet at the University of Berlin. When everyone was seated Mark Twain saw ‘the end of the house rising to its feet, saw it rise abreast the advancing guard all along like a wave’. Then a little man with his long hair and Emer- sonian face entered the hall and the whole house rose – ‘rose and shouted and stamped and clapped and banged the beer mugs. Just simply a storm.’ The man who was the object of such an unusual adulation was none other than Theodor Mommson, the author of the three-volume History of Rome and of more than 1,500 published works. A few years later, in 1902, Mommson received the Nobel Prize for literature – the
only historian ever to achieve this distinction.