"In an essay published in 1952, Auerbach remarked that Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur had become increasingly inadequate, explaining the difficulty of a philologist from a single cultural tradition to be able to approach a world in which so many languages and so many cultural traditions interact." Erich Auerbach goes into depth about his belief that one must look for both starting points and concrete details from which the "global process can be inductively reconstructed." In the conclusion to Auerbach's Mimesis, he stated "The ongoing unification of the world is most concretely visible now in the unprejudiced, precise, interior and exterior representation of the random moment in the lives of different people.” It is the same kind of class struggle approach in the cultural field that they had taken in the economic field, assembling the shortcoming against the privileged.
Auerbach, in his essay published in 1952, criticized Goethe's concept of Weltliteratur for failing to adequately address the complexities of a world with numerous languages and cultural traditions interacting. He argued that philologists from single cultures face difficulties understanding this globalized landscape.