If you have never had a conversation with Tony La Vopa—and I mean a serious, four-hour conversation, in which topics range from Rousseau to the Final Four to marzipan to Kant—you have missed out on one of academia's great pleasures. Tony is one of intellectual history's most beloved conversationalists: because he knows many things, because he loves to tell stories, because he listens, because he argues. He also, incidentally, has mastered the pithy, but somehow personal, email: he once wrote me, simply “You’re not resting,” and another time: “I’m alarmed about your porcelain addiction.” Those readers who know Tony only from his work on this journal or his published works will know the clarity, deep intelligence, and admirable density of his research and his editing, but may not know much about the conversations that he has sustained and that have sustained him across his career, and haven't caught the impish glint in his eye when he launches into a story about his own current fetishes (photography, gooseberry Küchen), or lightly, invitingly, teases you about your own (according to Tony, mine include “loony men in gray suits”). And so, having had the pleasure of being a friend, coconspirator, and conversation partner of Tony's for several decades now, I have gladly accepted the honor of further acquainting Modern Intellectual History's readership with the career and contributions (so far!) of Anthony J. La Vopa, whose work has done so much to make intellectual history the thriving field it is today.

Reviewing five recent books in German classical and oriental studies, this essay argues that the question of archaic Greece's debts to the Orient remains a particularly lively one in German-speaking Europe. Like their predecessors in previous generations, iconoclastic classicists like Walter Burkert, oriental archaeologists like Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948) and maverick outsiders like Raoul Schrott have attacked the enraptured view of ‘the Greek miracle’ familiar to those educated in classical Gymnasien. And yet the question of Greek cultural autonomy is still alive, in part because there are too many uncertainties for it to be answered definitively, and in part because it continues to play a role in attempts to define modern European identity.

Focusing on the study of the ancient Orient in fin-de-siècle Germany, this essay argues that “orientalism” had a wider range of cultural consequences than the term usually evokes in studies of Western imperialism and its ideologies. The essay describes the development of a generational movement in German scholarship that was characterized by its vigorous championing of the Orient over and against the dominant tendency to isolate and exalt classical civilizations, and especially ancient Greece, and by its role in destabilizing Western presumptions. It demonstrates that the furor orientalis did contribute to the decentering of the Greeks and the ancient Hebrews, bequeathing to the twentieth century both a much deeper and more diverse picture of the ancient Near East and an obsession with origins that could be mobilized by racist propagandists. The essay offers three case studies of groups which exemplified this furor—the Panbabylonists; the Religious-Historical School; and the iconoclastic mythographer Heinrich Zimmer, who represents a strong strain of Schopenhauerian Indology. It concludes by suggesting the more constructive directions taken by orientalists outside Germany in the 1920s–1940s, and poses the question: how long will the peaceful solutions they promoted last?

Since about 1880 there has been a significant change in the way we talk about art and music, and, in particular, the way art and music are spoken about in academic institutions. We now largely undertake studies of art and music under the rubric of historical style and use the category of style as a limiting concept, both temporal and technical, to explain, evaluate, and understand the work of art. One particular sense of style, which may be described as the structural-historical, came to prominence at the end of the last century as the result of attempts by art and music historians to carve out for themselves an interpretive, social, and institutional space atop that Olympus of academia, the German—here specifically the Viennese—Universität.