Afterwards, much appears that in medio rerum was hardly noticed: retrospection, a vantage which permits concentrating and bestowal of attentiveness, may see otherwise, if not more or better, than did contemporaneous eyes. And stronger emphasis will accrue to the difference when this later moment is also situated elsewhere, with the look back comprising a view from outside.
Audition, too, once no longer amidst, indeed now located extra res, may perceive differently than it had – where ears are pealed intently enough.
Ears and eyes both had the advantage of the exterior in 1960, at the moment when a book known familiarly by name but not more deeply, one nearing already in that year its own middle-age, was assessed afresh or for the first time in its fullness by the reading public. The sights and sounds (the smells too sometimes) contained in Lawrence’s last novel, as it happened to be, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, were broadcast widely by the levelling of charges of obscenity at the publisher of an unexpurgated version, an accusation that resulted in a sensational court case in London and the house’s eventual acquittal, whereupon immediately the edition became a great best-seller. In the sheer commercial success of it I take no interest, but the pivotal character of the event, which, more than a harbinger, actively ushered in the sixties (a libertine if not liberty-loving decade), is worthy of further thought (the censorious urge had to assume other forms, other guises thereafter). By dint of the thirty-plus years elapsed, readers circa 1960 stood at quite a remove from the surroundings in which the novel gestated and was born, and hence could see and, even more markedly, hear in it and in them nuances, qualities, tones that the contemporaries almost by definition could not. Between the personage of the title and her husband, who returned from the frontlines a cripple and impotent, difficulties in their relations occurred ever more often in the course of the novel, that is, during the 1920s, turning their affairs into an arena for personal stratagems and subterfuges whose substructures of cruelty, however, would become more clearly recognisable only after another World War had supervened, and then mainly with a further delay (none of these developments really dawned on anyone all at once, overnight, as it were). Yet a perceptual alchemy was effected, and as our scene is London, the passage of a few decades brought about such a rupture with the conventional life of the earlier period, that this antecedent region came to be regarded as though it had been a rather foreign country.
Some of the protagonists of the campaign to publish the novel in the form in which he completed it, may have meant to do justice to its early deceased author, as a late act of friendship. Yet, from today’s vantage-point, which seems at least as exterior to theirs as their own was with regard to that of the 1920s, such intentions can disclose aspects other than those they themselves would readily have noticed. So, the posthumous restitution of the text, in this case, could by way of inadvertent consequence have prompted the literary public to revisit the circumstances of decades prior, where the dangers posed to books, including their burning, did often spring from the institutions of literary life themselves. The role played by Germany’s libraries in readying the bonfires of 1933, was an extreme instance of this systemic propensity towards self-destruction – but the manifestations were numerous: accordingly, when all of it is borne in mind, some bits amongst the novel’s scenes of the pursuit of literature in the London of the twenties start to pulse bleakly, darkly, finally. Hence, on account of its many thousands of copies put into circulation at the outset of the 1960s, one might well ask, from the outside of our present, how far that chatter in it was already overheard then and there.
Across the Channel, around the same year, a number of contemplative authors were turning their attention back several decades, towards similar environs of the literary life as it was led in the early part of the century, repelled yet also attracted by its fateful inclination to do away with itself (then as now, the fascination of that earlier period is pronounced). Their works, however, were literature assembled by other means – the cinema. In some cases the mood they sought both to explore and to convey* was neither an outright nostalgia nor an obtrusive sorrow and pity, but rather a particular variety of melancholy, of the kind aroused when it is realised how that self-destructive chapter in the recent history of literature continues to supply a large part of the diet by which (for better or for worse) minds live their lives. That is, in other words, the feeling tied to a recognition of the fact of one’s complicity simply as a member of the public (a condition which no “repression” necessarily keeps concealed), whether this awareness arose forcefully with some delay after the World War, circa 1960, or emerges as though in another wave, now again, albeit perhaps more tenuously though still with dismay, sixty-some years later, amidst the darkness of our todays. However, let me confine myself to the early sixties, when a flowering of creativity in Paris was witnessed: of these works of literature by other means, it was Truffaut’s film, Jules et Jim, that offered both the most profound and the most delicate presentation of this melancholy.
* But without the sort of automaticity at which Alfred Hitchcock liked to aim, in effect playing upon the audience as though it were an organ (comme si je jouais de l’orgue), as he said more than once, film being used to elicit a mass-emotion (utiliser l’art cinématographique pour créer une émotion de masse). (Consult the transcript in François Truffaut, Le Cinema selon Hitchcock, 13.)
Well-known is the film’s basis in the eponymous novel by Henri Pierre Roché, which he began during the Second World War and published in the early 1950s, drawing upon his close relations before the First with Franz and Helen Hessel, and in a manner doing justice to them. (As réfugiés provenant d’Allemagne they had arrived again in France towards the end of the thirties; he passed away in 1941 in Sanary-sur-Mer, she would die in Paris in 1982, a nonagenarian. His several books have been re-issued, while many scattered texts of hers were collected in an anthology published ten years ago.) Noticed by some* is the large role played in the film by the score, the memorable work of Georges Delerue: it contributes greatly to delineate the melancholy mood, which is to say, the confluence of the protagonists’ vaguer presentiments with the film’s own distinct awareness, both pertaining to one and the same circumstance, that here an entire way of life was bringing itself to an end. By the tones of this music a spectator’s view can become the retrospection from without to which is shown what earlier could not legibly have been noted, in an ἀναγνώρισις that then calls forth the shedding of the tears which at last do admit, Yes, that is how it was.
* e. g., Bosley Crowther, “Screen: ‘Jules and Jim’”
Even so, only a critic both knowledgeable and sensitive, who also spoke well of the music’s role in the film, did find it worthwhile to mention the fires in the year 1933, seen on the screen in a cinema, hence suggestive of the impending end, and then to reflect on their meaning. The film is, in a way, a tribute to the books that were burned; I can’t think of another movie so full of books, and of references to books and of writing and translating books. Books were the blood of these characters: they took their ideas of life from books, and writing books was their idea of living.* What these lives and living also comprised, she hardly had need to say, nor to characterise the metabolism with literature that was so crucial to this way of life: an allusion sufficed. From her remark then, and more so when it is read against our own context today, one may infer that subsequently, even the most dedicated of relations with literary works would have been, will be of a different kind than those before the cataclysm.
* Pauline Kael, “Movie Chronicle: Little Men,” “Jules and Jim”
Of the creators (applying the term generically) who were formed by and survived the Second World War, a number of the best died conspicuously young. Young in two senses: early in terms of lifespan, and without suffering the last indignity, an evaporation of their creative powers. Of this set Truffaut (1932-84) was the latest, chronologically speaking, whereas Michel Foucault (1926-84) exemplifies the upper limit of their longevity (in this connection as in others he demarcates the borderline); of them the first and also the youngest was Yves Klein (1928-62), while Jean Barraqué (1928-73) and Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-73) were in the middle in both respects. – Of course, in the absence of a paradigmatic case, that of the eldest of them, Paul Celan (Paul Antschel, 1920-70), no inkling of their commonality would have arisen to begin with. To him is owed something more, therefore: further thought, gratefully given.
No claim is made here that the War persisted as a force in each of their lives and thus eventually did them in! Nor that they were afflicted by it with trauma (that question-begging concept) which undermined them by stages and then ultimately allowed the job to be finished by other vectors. A little reflection – which need not hail from the outside – should clarify the over-reach in proposals like those.
Quite at variance with anything of the sort, however, is the suggestion that the War continued afterward to concern them. All of them, in their different ways, recurred to it as a topic for thought and a theme for their creative efforts, sometimes overtly, more often tangentially or elliptically. Currents of melancholy running through their works and their lives, perhaps drew some of their energy from this source.
The notion of a faceless music or writing, which one encounters in and around the works of Barraqué and Foucault, if considered attentively, conveys the traces of that species of melancholy. (Not succumbed to, nor vanquished, somehow the mood was lived with instead.) Throughout Celan’s ouvrages its reverberations are there for the hearing: his poetic innovations are often memorable not least because in them melancholy becomes a creative agent.
Frequently, in his poems, pensive chords are created of two nouns compounded into a substantive (as the German language loves to do) which until then one never would have believed might cohere, along with an implicit third element, the initial audition of an unlikely affinity – the poet’s prior intuition that their pairing was to be an Unwahlnichtverwandtschaft from out of whose double negative a term in some sense positive or even new could still result. Yet at most that hope had been small and extra-poetic; now it got submerged as the undertone in the bittersweet thought-provoking sound of things somehow misfitting together.* But for how much longer they will, an intent listener may wonder, insofar as through these coinages nothing sings but the singing, at least as they occur in some of his lines.
* The phrase, taken here in another way, was devised by a misfit across the Atlantic who might have been kin to these Continentals, Andy Warhol (1928-87): see the account of the Factory included in the chapter on 1967 in his memoir, POPism.
How better to open one’s ears to the melancholy in this ποίησις than by listening to the poet’s recitation* of his renowned if not well-fathomed work, “Todesfuge”?
* Probably this recitation was recorded in 1958 (see Cornelia Epping-Jäger, “,Diese Stimme mußte angefochten werden‘,” fn. 43), though further information is not provided. More recently the recording of 1952 has surfaced: it is included on the CD compilation, Paul Celan liest Todesfuge.
The tones of mourning are obvious: his own parents fell victim in the devastation, and after the War he had little reason to stay in Romania, or to settle in the Vienna to which he escaped in 1947 and where, in his debut (though soon repudiated) collection, issued the next year, “Todesfuge” was published.* Already the poet had set out for the Paris where he would choose to make his home; the decision may intimate that melancholy need not always be antithetical to activity, but can conduce to energetic undertakings, and especially those involving some significant change of locale, an individual’s curative relocation towards or into an outside.
* Concerning this poem, by now a vast field of essays has sprung up. Without prejudice to the qualities of the rest, let me mention three: Alwin Binder, “Die Meister aus Deutschland,” Alfred Hoelzel, “Paul Celan – The Poet as Jew,” and Heinrich Stiehler, “Die Zeit der Todesfuge.” – Curiously, a Romanian translation by the poet’s friend Petre Solomon, under the title “Tangoul mortii,” was the first version to appear, in Bucharest in 1947.
Anhand solcher schwammigen, für den Deutschunterricht bestimmten Formulierungen läßt sich erkennen, wie genau in diesem Gedicht seine eigene Rezeption gestaltet ist. Es enthält die „Versuchung“, sich von seinem « Rhythmus der Sprache », von der « musikalischen Dynamik der Fuge als Tanzbewegung », von seiner vielgepriesenen Schönheit einlullen zu lassen. […] Eine satirische Komponente erhält es erst, wenn man sich das in ihm enthaltene Ent-Schuldungs-Angebot erarbeitet hat. Dann kann das Gedicht gelesen werden, als ob es […] im voraus kritisierte, wie man in Deutschland die eigene Geschichte rezipieren werde.
— Alwin Binder, “Die Meister aus Deutschland”
Afterwards as he was in any case and outside as he had placed himself, over against the recent history of Germany and its totalitarian rule, the poet could discern more in the sounds and sights of what had transpired than those who had not broken away from it, over whom an attachment to its continuity still held sway. Assisted by this discernment, as the War came to a close the poet already began to anticipate how campaigns of self-exculpation would be mounted from the German side; especially with the composition of “Todesfuge” he sought in advance to defuse and outwit them, on a number of fronts, as is clarified in the analysis by Alwin Binder. According to him, a montage of citations from and allusions to the works of others, featured deliberately in the “fugue” (this generic part of the title is itself suggestive) in order to elicit from the German audience, firstly, expressions of appreciation of its quasi-musical qualities, as though admiring remarks would constitute anything like a movement towards restitution, and secondly, the adducing of bits of theodicy or other sorts of theologoumena, as though by this to explain away all the horrors: precisely so these listeners, upon further reflection, could comprehend what they had done and were still doing, that at last they might separate radically from it and all its wellsprings. Most probably, however, those capable of such a step would prove few in number. – So re-stated, I find plausible his analysis of what the work had hoped to accomplish, and should simply like to add that thereby Celan did compose his “Todesfuge” in accord with the exalted notion, propounded long before by Heinrich Heine, that the true poem must never be a deed (eine That) but rather always an event (ein Ereigniß).*
* Die Bäder von Lukka, ch. xi
“Todesfuge” is an event insofar as the separating-out of one part of its German audience, to whom it proposes ways through and beyond their predilections and predispositions, such that these itinerants, undergoing a veritable μετάνοια and no longer merely babbling about one and its conceivable suitability for themselves and for the others, subsequently can become quite different than they were, the choicer part of this audience set against the rest whom the recurrent phantasmata in their history continue to animate, nach wie vor – insofar as a shibbolethic cleft has been matched by the poet’s achievement in his own realm, sifting the language and situating its elements afresh, not least by honouring the cadences that his and its enemies sought to expel or extinguish, the poem does count as an Ereignis!
Celan, amongst his several gifts, had a way with satire from the first, as per the essay by Binder, and where better to take it further, to extend its possibilities within the language, than in the city that often succoured literary and other exiles from German-speaking regions, Paris? There he could enjoy a congenial outside – much as a century earlier it had embraced several of them, and especially Heine.
To hear the wit, humour, irony amidst his sorrow, Paris should be borne in mind.
In 1952, Celan visited Germany at the invitation of the Gruppe 47. His Austrian friends, Bachmann and the journalist and author Milo Dor, had commended him to the organiser, Hans Werner Richter, in April, while the latter was on a visit in Vienna. At its gathering the next month in Niendorf, on the Baltic, the poet recited his “Todesfuge,” but in that audience many ears were not so keen.*
* An extended criticism of the Gruppe 47 has been offered by Klaus Briegleb in a study, Mißachtung und Tabu, wherein the Niendorf meeting features prominently: the Tagung may largely have occasioned his inquiry to begin with. – Also informative is the essay by Larisa Cercel, “Zum übersetzerischen Hörwerk Paul Celans,” and the one by Epping-Jäger mentioned earlier, along with another which complements it, “Der ›unerlässlich ruhige Ton‹” (in part the two overlap).
Das Celan-Kapitel […] hat ein besonderes Gewicht. Es zu schreiben hat, wie man so sagt, besonders viel gekostet.
— Klaus Briegleb, Mißachtung und Tabu, i, “,Vorbei‘”
Certainly, the avowed stance of the Gruppe 47 was in opposition to German totalitarianism – yet the very brusqueness of its rejection (which can already be heard in the sheer sound of one of its favourite terms, “Kahlschlag”) did arouse some suspicion that there might be more, or rather, less to the break than one would have preferred to think. Shortly after her arrival in Niendorf from Vienna, Bachmann considered leaving, so dubious did she find some of the attendees. Am zweiten Abend wollte ich abreisen, weil ein Gespräch, dessen Voraussetzungen ich nicht kannte, mich plötzlich denken ließ, ich sei unter deutsche Nazis gefallen,* she wrote much later (in a Roman notebook, dated 1961): on the second evening I wanted to depart, because a conversation whose unstated assumptions I wasn’t familiar with, suddenly made me think I had fallen amongst a bunch of German Nazis. In point of fact, though they hushed it up as long as they could, some members had participated in National Socialist organisations. One of these cases in particular, a much-lauded author, known also for his ignoble sniping in the direction of the state of Israel, kept his involvement unspoken until his last years – a feat possible only by the complaisance of others, of course.**
* The note is quoted in Mißachtung und Tabu, iii, “Die Zeit nach Niendorf kann kommen.” ** Further thoughts on this case and its implications, were offered by Briegleb in an interview with Lutz Kinkel, “Akte Grass.”
Not surprisingly, therefore, Celan, having arrived before the Viennese contingent, found the welcome he was given to be distinctly curious, as he wrote some days afterwards (in a letter of May 31) to Gisèle Lestrange in Paris (with whom he was married later that year). Nor did the initial awkwardness dissipate: later in the meeting-hall he was greeted without sympathy, to put it mildly, indeed with a mixture of incomprehension and disdain, as one may infer from a vignette of the reading which was published later (in 1961). Ein Mann namens Paul Celan (niemand hatte den Namen vorher gehört) begann, singend und sehr weltentrückt, seine Gedichte zu sprechen* – wrote one of the attendees, equipping his statement with a sibilant undertone, which I’ll convey freely as follows: a man by the name of Paul Celan (nobody had heard the name before) began, rapt in song off in his own world, to utter his poems. A response such as this, though surely he disliked it intensely, perhaps in some sense was anticipated by the poet, and even factored in somehow in advance, as per the idea of his poem as Ereignis.
* Walter Jens, Deutsche Literatur der Gegenwart, iv
Consider closely the summary provided by Celan in his letter to Lestrange.
J’ai lu à haute voix, j’avais l’impression de joindre, au-delà de ces têtes – qui étaient rarement bonnes – un espace où les “voix du silence” étaient encore accueillies. . . (André Malraux and Maurice Blanchot together, with Valéry in support – quite a trio! Though the voices the poet was thinking of, may have spoken also in other manners than silently.) L’effet fut net. – Had he reckoned with it as likely? – Cette voix, en l’occurrence la mienne, qui ne glissa pas à travers les mots comme celle des autres, mais s’y arrêta souvent dans une méditation à laquelle je ne pouvais [pas] ne pas participer pleinement et avec tout mon cœur, – cette voix-là devait être désavouée pour que les oreilles des lecteurs de journaux n’en gardạṣṣẹṇṭ pas le souvenir. . .
The sorrowful recollection he delivered in this manner, but only to those whose ears were open enough to hear it, related to the ways his native tongue had been taught him, and hence it comprised a doing of justice to that early instruction and to the teachers, above all, to the mother who had raised him with and to a love of the German language. Without delving unduly into the particulars, suffice it to note that in the home a correct literary German was spoken at her insistence, at school Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist were read extensively, while in both he delighted and excelled in recitation, on the model of the declamatory practices which were developed towards the end of the nineteenth century in theatres in Munich, Berlin, and especially Vienna, at the Burgtheater, and propagated thereafter by the performances of companies on tour, amongst other channels – notably, recordings on vinyl. The formative influence of all this did not remain limited to a special mode of speaking he reserved for poetry, but was manifest also, perhaps to a lesser degree, in his everyday speech as well: his German generally tended towards an exacting correctness and presented an audible affiliation with the Viennese sort.* Thus it evinced, in a phrase, the vocal embrace of gesture. (Alas, the terminology now current in this area seems thin, not really apt: for instance, the concept of a Sprachduktus is less than precise.) By this gestural ability he could bring silence to speech, with true finesse, and it was just this which the poet sought to do in his recitation of “Todesfuge,” thereby commemorating as he could those with whom, lovingly and with care, he had learned the Muttersprache.
* This summary draws upon “,Diese Stimme mußte angefochten werden‘,” fn. 70, “Der ›unerlässlich ruhige Ton‹,” fns. 62, 63, 67, and section 3.2, on the poet’s “Sprechweise,” in “Zum übersetzerischen Hörwerk Paul Celans.”
Imagine then the deep affront he would have felt after the recital in Niendorf, when what remained of this inheritance, that is to say, his own voice, was set by the attendees amongst all the items they wanted to see kahlgeschlagen!
Leave aside the judgement that his performance simply was poor that evening* – something which is conceivable, yes, but unlikely: the poet’s recital was indeed heard and rejected fundamentally by many of those in the audience.
* This was the opinion of his friend Dor, who wrote of the Tagung in his memoirs, Auf dem falschen Dampfer, “Lamento über meine jüdischen Freunde.”
More than twenty years later, the response was spoken of, or rather, spoken again, in a present-tense narration, by Richter in a radio broadcast. The key sentences: Seine Stimme klingt mir zu hell, zu pathetisch. Sie gefällt mir nicht. Wir haben uns das Pathos längst abgewöhnt.* His voice sounds too clear to me, too declamatory. I don’t like it. We got over the habit of pathos a long time ago. The immediacy of his recollection, however, did retouch what, by other accounts, actually was said that evening.
* “Wie entstand und was war die Gruppe 47?,” iii, “Niendorf, Mai 1952”
A few years after this broadcast, the attendee whose sentence I quoted before, recalled the event again, a bit more fully. Als Celan zum ersten Mal auftrat, da sagte man: «Das kann doch kaum jemand hören!», er las sehr pathetisch. Wir haben darüber gelacht, «Der liest ja wie Goebbels!», sagte einer. Er wurde ausgelacht* – this sounds like an unretouched account. When Celan performed for the first time, it was said, “How can anyone listen to this!,” he was reading in such a declamatory way. We laughed at it. “That guy’s reading just like Goebbels!,” someone said. Celan was drowned out by laughter. The comparison came from Richter, according to another friend of the poet.** Nor was that all he said. As Dor reports, Celan, to his ear, had recited in singsong, like in synagogue – in einem Singsang vorgelesen wie in einer Synagoge.
* interview in Tübingen, October 15, 1976, quoted in
Heinz Ludwig Arnold, Die Gruppe 47, “Literarischer Paradigmenwechsel”
** Hermann Lenz, “Erinnerungen an Paul Celan”
All these ss leave me in some dismay. Draughts from the poisoned springs of anti-Semitic invective – are beverages I would rather discard untouched while familiarising myself with the reception of the poet’s work. But since the responses in 1952 do form part of the historical record, they prompt me to revisit the long history behind such associations of ideas. Not really willingly, and hence with all the more care, I’ll descend into these murky regions, exiting them again as quickly as I can, much as I imagine Celan himself had done or, at least, did attempt. Yet perhaps some humour can be drawn forth from them along the way, even so.
Stubborn persistence is commonly attributed by their enemies (and sometimes, though perhaps with another valence, also by their friends) to the Jews – but very remarkable for their obduracy are the categorisations within which, all too often, the latter have been placed. Ideas, here, are accepted prejudicially, not arrived at through empirical inquiry, with fresh eyes and ears. Arguing anyone out of them, by reference to observable fact, as opposed to notions merely assumed, will be a task difficult at best; in the initial opting for them, an element of choice inheres (even sometimes a variety of self-indulgence) which afterwards one feels obliged by amour-propre to uphold, and so, to withdraw this assent, an experience on the order of a true change of heart, a μετάνοια must supervene: for, at bottom, a system of categories has to be arranged anew, and this never is simple to accomplish.
Easier, by contrast, is to condense some of these idées fixes into a further iteration: this was done, in a manner whose resonance one hears even today, and audibly so in the words Richter saw fit to utter in 1952, by Richard Wagner, polemicising a century before against “Judaism in music” and the quality of the German spoken by Jews.* The animosity to which he would also lend a dramatico-comical shape – as which one can term it a Cosimanathema** – pertained to the sound of their manner of speaking (Sprechweise) which the composer sought to simulate on the page, typifying it as hissing, shrieking, humming, and grumbling (ein zischender, schrillender, summsender und murksender Lautausdruck). To this accentuation of the old prejudice’s linguistic aspect, Celan turned his attention at the end of the 1950s, touching on the matter obliquely in one of his few texts in prose.***
* The essay, “Das Judenthum in der Musik,” was first published in 1850, lightly disguised under the pseudonym K. Freigedank. ** This portmanteau is taken from the parody by a contemporary wit, Richard Schmidt-Cabanis: Hepp, hepp! oder Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, act iii. *** In a thesis by Carina Schneeweiß, “Paul Celans ,Gespräch im Gebirg‘ in Bezug auf Richard Wagners ,Das Judentum in der Musik‘,” the role of the composer in the poet’s work is inquired into in detail.
There was indeed much to accentuate; Wagner drew implicitly upon a large fund of materials. It was the myth of the Wandering Jew (der ewige Jude), originating centuries before, which provided the thread. Already the long survival of the Jews as a people, otherwise by then a cause of some perplexity, began to be interpreted antagonistically, as an interminable penalty for an immense offence; and although I cannot dwell on questions posed in theology, nor in metaphysics, the idea of a permanent existence, set amidst and yet excepted from the limited period of everything under nature’s sway, was conceived in privative terms, as a state of being condemned never to die, caught in a duration that would extend virtually sempiternally because even death rejected it. So, instead of encountering mortality at some point, as does every natural entity, a perpetual errancy afflicts this people, a sheerly external rapport to the lands and languages it will pass through forever, that is, until the last day of the world itself. – Thus spoke the myth.
As though to underscore its content, the ghastly figure whose undying existence it envisions, this potent myth too has led a very long life: even today it is not finally dead. One of the several reasons for this persistence (its own longevity through the course of historical time did itself become and thus still remains not the least amongst them!) may be identified in the guarantee which, as per the myth, the Jewish people’s deathless existence seemed to provide for the continuity of the Christian religion, from the latter’s beginning up until that moment more than a millennium later, in the Middle Ages as those centuries now are known, as well as thenceforth. By the sheer perseverance of the Wandering Jew as the myth depicted this people to be, some reassurance was offered to the Christians concerning the integrity of the founding and the subsequent history of their own faith, an asseveration couched in negative terms, but nonetheless reassuring.
To this myth an especial credence was lent throughout the regions where the populace spoke Middle High German, in this or that dialect, the vernaculars from which the Yiddish language originated. The degradation brought about by the conditions under which the Ashkenazim were obligated to live, left marks upon their manner of speech (Sprechweise) and especially on its sound, that is, both the tonality and the volume of it. And, the sonic effect becoming more pronounced as the oppression worsened (these years also witnessed the expulsions which led to the establishment of Jewish communities further east, in Poland), their tongues, both the incipient Yiddish of everyday life and the Hebrew of religious practice, whenever they impinged on German ears, were increasingly heard as being ugly. Then this emergent perception of ugliness began to stand in a twofold relation to the myth, confirming the latter’s plausibility amongst its audience even further, while also drawing from it the energy whereby other qualities were supplanted more and more which otherwise could still have been heard in the Jews’ speech. After all this had gone on for some length of time, the process could perpetuate itself to a great degree, automatically, the prejudicial ideas by which it was sustained now coming to be imbued with an overwhelming self-evidence.
The perception of their ugliness was not disrupted in the course of the upheavals brought about by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Rather, the dislike aroused by the sound of the Jews’ languages, in German ears, may have grown more definite during the sixteenth century. A large claim, surely, but for it a piece of evidence can be adduced, a remark in a treatise about music by the Lutheran theologian Cyriacus Spangenberg (1528-1604), which he wrote in 1598 though the text only was published in full many years later, during the Wagnerian period in 1861, unearthed from an archive in Strasbourg. Hebrew music in antiquity was one of his topics, even though, as he acknowledged, primary sources for it were sparse; but he ventured to suggest that it would have been worthy of attention, musically speaking, at least by contrast to that of their descendants in his own times. Eß ist aber leichtlich Zu muetmaßen, Daß Ihre Musica nicht ein solche Confus vnnd vngeschickt werckh gewesen, Allß der ietzigen Juden Ellendt geheul, geschrey, vnndt geplerre In Ihren Schulen vnnd Synagogen.* Yet it is easy to conjecture that their musical works were not at all confounded and awkward, as is the miserable howling, shouting, and clamouring of today’s Jews in their schools and synagogues. In this context he had no need to mention the Wandering Jew: it sufficed to allude to the degradation under which the Jews lived, and the rest his readers would have supplied themselves, as being self-explanatory.
* “Von der edlen vnnd hochberüembten Kunst der Musica,”
“Von der Hebræer Singekunst”
Nor did the myth vanish from German minds in the course of the next century, the seventeenth. Again a large claim, and for it also a single attestation: here, not the supposed ugliness of Jewish speech, but rather an alleged trickery, was the feature focused on by the scholar Johann Christoph Wagenseil (1633-1705), whose writings on musical topics were consulted later by Wagner and the Wagnerians.* He did so in one of the first studies of the Yiddish language, which they may also have read, published in 1699 in Prussia, in Königsberg.** Perhaps this locale was significant, as by then German merchants were more active in Eastern Europe and thus in regular contact with Yiddish-speaking counterparts there, in addition to those with whom they dealt at home: they had cause to take into account the differences amongst the varieties of Yiddish, and to devote some time to a study of the language, rather than rely incautiously on the greater proximity of its more western dialects to their own tongue. Probably these commercial activities formed the implicit context when his reader was warned to be on guard against the sharp practice and even deceitfulness of the speaker of Yiddish. Bad pronunciation of German or of his own language which the latter might adopt when he spoke either, could be a feint or wily stratagem. Er dürffte wol gar glauben/ daß dergleichen falsch-ausgesprochne Wort/ nichts auf sich haben/ und wie sie nichts bedeuten/ also von keiner Verbindlichkeit seyen.*** He might very well believe that any such wrongly-pronounced words would be without value: as they do not signify anything, neither do they entail any obligation. Into this allegation there is no need to delve; instead I shall simply note that trickery is endemic in the commercial professions generally, which were amongst the few then legally open to Jews, and that – this more to the point at issue – such a restriction accorded fully with the myth, being as though tailor-made to furnish it with additional evidence and thus to bolster its acceptance.
* For an account of this author, see the essay by Harry Zohn and M. C. Davis, “Johann Christoph Wagenseil, Polymath.” ** The capital until 1701.
*** Belehrung der Jüdisch-Teutschen Red- und Schreibart, Fürtrag
A third instance in which the influence of the myth may be noted, stems from the immemorial storehouses of German folklore and hence cannot be assigned a date like the others. It figures in an entry in an encyclopædia of popular superstitions, the Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, in the fourth volume, published in 1931/32; there the personage of a Jew is often given the role of outcast or outsider. Es gilt als verdienstlich, ihn zu betrügen und zu überlisten* – this summarises a common attitude towards conduct permissible and desirable with regard to him: deceiving and outwitting him is thought to be a sign of merit. How not to notice the myth by which such an interaction is as though haunted?
* Will-Erich Peuckert, “Jude, Jüdin”
The eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment, moved energetically against supernatural beliefs generally – but in German-speaking regions the myth of the Wandering Jew lived on, albeit with some modifications. Sometimes the still legible theological background was faded out, thus obscuring the reason alleged for his undying condition to the point of inexplicability, and so the consequences for himself of the deed he supposedly once had perpetrated, were re-imagined as stemming from what he essentially always had been, was, and would ever be. Moreover, and this perhaps not by accident, in what is probably the best example of such an up-dating, greater emphasis was bestowed upon the – to ears which the myth had tuned – awful sound of his speech, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Loath I am even to introduce these two notations, as they hail from the pen of an admirable author and thinker, Lichtenberg, though their character as jottings in his private journals might suggest a way to excuse the prejudices in them. Namely, that these thoughts were not really his own, but rather the materials upon which he was conducting an experiment, tapping them with his mind in order then to observe the sound they emitted. Support might be lent such a defence by the heading he gave to the notebook wherein they occur: “Vermischte Einfälle, verdaut und unverdaute, Begebenheiten, die mich besonders angehn. auch hier und da Excerpte, und Bemerckungen, die an einem andern Ort gnauer eingetragen oder sonst von mir genüzt sind.” (Various ideas, digested and undigested, items that concern me particularly, as well as, here and there, excerpts and remarks I recorded elsewhere more precisely, or that were otherwise used by me.) And the date inscribed could represent a pertinent detail: January 1, 1789. – But be all that as it may. The first of them is the following.
Sperlinge und Juden: selbst die Liebe zu ihren Jungen äussert sich mit einer Art von Heftigkeit, daß man glaubt die Kinder seyen eine Waare und die Liebe gegen sie eine Speculation. – Den Tempel Salomons könte man die Gottes Börse nennen, wo sie den Handel mit dem lieben Gott schlossen. Der ganze Gottesdienst der Juden sieht mehr einem Börsen Geschäfft ähnlich.*
* Sudelbuch J, 720
And the second, omitting only a literary illustration.
Zu meiner Vergleichung der Juden mit den Sperlingen könte auch noch hinzugethan werden das entsezliche Getöse wenn man ihnen die Jungen raubt, das gar keine Zärtlichkeit verräth, sondern eine Art von Börsen Geschrey. Das Volck Gottes hat nie etwas getaugt, sondern ist allezeit ein infames Volck gewesen. […] Ihr Morgen Gesang, die Reveil ist ein unerträgliches Geschrey und Geschwätz.*
* Sudelbuch J, 115
Sparrows and Jews: even the love for their young is expressed with a sort of fervour, such that one believes the children are taken for a commodity, while the love for them is speculation. – The temple of Solomon could be called God’s stock exchange, where they closed deals with God. The entire religion of the Jews looks more like transactions on the stock exchange.
To my comparison of the Jews with sparrows, there could also be added the atrocious clamour when they are robbed of their young, which betrays no tenderness at all, but rather is shouting such as one hears in the stock exchange. God’s people never was good for anything, but always has been an infamous people. Their morning song, the réveil, is an unbearable hue and cry.
Setting aside the prejudicial imagery in these vignettes, as being an iteration of the myth’s main points, an atmosphere of rapine and violence also hovers over them, which does not emanate from the Jewish side. Perhaps measure was being taken of storms whose coming the aphorist had begun to sense, and some caution urged. – Here as well I should recall the peculiar fact that at the moments when Jews in Germany and Austria obtained civil status and received German surnames, often the latter were drawn from avian nomenclature (such as Adler, Federn, Schnabel).
Effacement of the soteriological explanation (even though some traces remained), notable during the later eighteenth century, may have helped bring it about that the myth could interest writers not simply as a topic for reflection but also, more specifically, as a subject. Thus did Goethe take it in an early poem at the end of the 1760s or the first half of the 1770s, “Der ewige Jude. Fragmentarisch” (published posthumously). During his young years in Frankfurt, from close by he would have been able to observe the Judengasse – the Ghetto – and to notice the tenacity and perseverance of the Jewish community which made the best of the oppressive conditions imposed upon it; later on, he, aware of this degradation, would have regarded with an ironic grin the common remonstrances taking the Jews to task for their habitual economic behaviour, as he could trace the latter back to the professions to which they were mainly confined, discerning in the anti-Jewish animus the hallmarks of self-fulfilling prophecy. Probity, intellectual and moral, probably induced in him an inner distance from those prejudices, a more quiet counterpart to the forthright declaration of opposition to them and the exclusions they engendered and ratified, written in 1771 and published around ten years later, by his fellow author (and occasional composer), Adolph Knigge.
Das ist unsre christliche Art mit einem Volke umzugehen, das dieselben Freyheitsrechte der Menschheit wie wir hat, von welchem wir auf gewisse Art abstammen, das wenigstens mehr Originalität, Eigenheit, und mehr Reinigkeit der Sitten unter sich erhalten hat, als wir, und welches wir nun zwingen, indem wir ihm, auf die unedelste Art, alle Mittel zu andrem Erwerbe abschneiden, sich vom Wucher zu nähren. Die Juden helfen sich unter einander, halten zusammen, führen selten Processe unter sich, indeß wir, die ungroßmüthigen Unterdrücker, uns um nichtsbedeutende Kleinigkeiten, um unnütze Meinungen, verfolgen.
— Adolph Knigge, Der Roman meines Lebens,
vol. iv, Vier und zwanzigster Brief
(Frankfurt, November 11, 1771)
Goethe, though we might have to exert our ears a bit to hear it, actually admired one of the foremost creations to stem from the Judengasse, emerging out of the many-sided adversity with which its residents had to contend, as though in a minor triumph over them: namely, the variety of Yiddish spoken there, which he studied early in the 1760s and whose sound he honoured in a short text written in 1768, the “Judenpredigt.”*
* It first came to the public’s notice in 1856. – An essay by Theodore Huebener, “How Goethe Learned Languages,” recounts the youth’s linguistic progress.
A first acquaintance with this text suggests how primarily it was the liveliness of the tongue which attracted him. Thus was confounded any expectation, fostered by the old myth, of witnessing a decrepitude of language linked to an undying existence eked out by a people condemned! Quite otherwise here: grandiose and immense perspectives were eschewed (rendered a source of bemusement), while attention was mainly paid to the linguistic capacity of Yiddish in the present, its spirited energy – and inherent fund of humour. This sum of qualities, the result of a long history from which new surprises might still come, he welcomed; Goethe, then at least, did not let himself fall into the trap of confusing whatever we’ve heard from others with that which we really do possess by our own intuitional experience (der Fall, dasjenige was wir von andern gehört, mit dem zu verwechseln, was wir wirklich aus eigner anschauender Erfahrung besitzen)* – for, in this instance, his clear-eyed Anschauung, which with him usually stems from the “scientia intuitiva” of a philosopher he held in high esteem, also included a conscientious Zuhörung.
* Aus meinem Leben, vol. i, bk. i
Jewish history, regarded by the myth under the aspect of finality, here by contrast was understood as open-ended and ongoing, hence susceptible, also on account of the degradations inflicted upon the people, of improvement and betterment. With considerable delicacy, Goethe evinced appreciation for the hint of sempiternity this history conveyed, over against any unthinking acceptance of the waxing and waning of the merely natural. The stance, I suggest, helps to decipher a remark in his autobiography which one otherwise might not understand very well.
Recalling how it happened that the study of Yiddish led him to learn Hebrew, he offered a clarification. Wie nun dergleichen Dinge, wenn sie einmal im Gang sind, kein Ende und keine Gränzen haben, so ging es auch hier: denn indem ich mir das barocke Judendeutsch zuzueignen und es eben so gut zu schreiben suchte, als ich es lesen konnte, fand ich bald, daß mir die Kenntnis des Hebräischen fehlte, wovon sich das moderne verdorbene und verzerrte allein ableiten und mit einiger Sicherheit behandeln ließ.* Much as with things which, once under way, know no end nor limits, so it was here: for, in seeking to acquire that peculiar Yiddish and to write it as well as I could read it, I soon found I lacked the knowledge of Hebrew, from which the modern, blighted, warped idiom alone could be derived and treated with any certainty.
* Aus meinem Leben, vol. i, bk. iv
Derjenige, welcher dazu bestimmt war, unsrer Sprache eine Bildung und Form zu geben, die sie vorher nicht hatte, und zuerst ihre Perioden zum edlen und körnichten philosophischen Ausdruck zu ründen, ward in dem Lerm und Gewirre einer gemeinen Judenschule erzogen, wo sein Ohr nichts als Mißtöne und Uebellaute in der Sprache auffangen konnte.
— Carl Philipp Moritz, Denkwürdigkeiten,
vol. i, no. ii: “Ueber Moses Mendelssohn”
His opinion here of the Yiddish of Frankfurt, and implicitly of its sound in particular, may bear a derogatory undertone – although much depends on the precise valence to be heard in words like “barock” or “behandeln” as he musters them – yet it does seem he was speaking of peculiarities brought about by the circumstances, and thus of a tractable linguistic problem, indeed, of obstacles that might elicit salutary efforts, along the lines, mutatis mutandis, of the declaration Carl Philipp Moritz had offered in his eulogy of Moses Mendelssohn, when touching on the matter of his friend’s ability in German. Hence, one may conclude, Goethe displayed a sincere interest in the vitality and even the incipient wit of Yiddish, which could set an example to other languages, and obviously to German, especially if, on the other side, deficiencies under which it laboured were amended by the Hebrew to which the tongue owed some part of its lexicon as well as other inspiration.
How little such a programme, if the idea may credibly be attributed to Goethe, would have comported with the oppression in the German-speaking regions of the Jews, prior to their formal emancipation, should not be difficult to imagine.
Probably during the Napoleonic period, the moment when the emancipation of German Jewry first was put on the agenda in a real, tangible manner, Goethe penned a most interesting reflection on the Jews, their language, and what he called the people’s intrinsic character or essence (Wesen). These lines appeared posthumously, but they seem at times to echo in the works he himself published.*
* I use the text from the later edition.
Jüdisches Wesen:
Energie der Grund von allem.
Unmittelbare Zwecke.
Keiner, auch nur der kleinste geringste Jude, der nicht entschiedenes Bestreben verriethe, und zwar ein irdisches, zeitliches, augenblickliches.
Judensprache hat etwas Pathetisches.*
* Maximen und Reflexionen, Aus dem Nachlaß, 1330
Jewish essence: energy the basis of everything. Immediate aims. None of them, even the littlest, least important Jew, who does not reveal a determined endeavour, indeed, a worldly, temporal, momentary one. Jews’ speech has something declamatory about it.
Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,
Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.
Was man nicht nützt ist eine schwere Last,
Nur was der Augenblick erschafft, das kann er nützen.— Goethe, Faust, “Nacht”
To gloss briefly this note: energy came to play such a role, as through a long and in principle interminable (that by its own dedication, not due to a curse from without, as per the myth) history a great fund of it was accumulated. And much the same held true of the wit by then available as a resource in their language, either Yiddish or, thenceforth, a spirited German: this too could have been derived from the stock a very long historical experience had amassed. That it be acquired, to the greater good of the tongue generally, the poet very much wanted to see. Moreover, to this storehouse of wit a supple feeling for the sound of it was closely linked, a certain sonic effervescence expressive of the resolve towards improvement, still self-consciously aware of the unpleasant tonality induced by oppressions which were gradually being surmounted, yet with hope for its acoustic amelioration once a full emancipation began to be realised (such was the anticipation early in the nineteenth century). And this keenness of ear was matched by the quality of utterance called “declamatory” (pathetisch) – displaying something of the character of lines spoken in the theatre, manifesting virtually a thespian presence of mind.
One need not stumble over the sounds which individual words in this private notation by Goethe may emit, as long as the admiration resonant in the whole is heard. Theatrical quality was far from opprobrious to his ear or in his vocabulary, and, apart from that, the signs of energy and of activity generally delighted him.
Wenn sich nun in unseren Gesichtszügen die Spur überstandenen Leidens, durchgeführter Thätigkeit nicht auslöschen läßt, so ist es kein Wunder, wenn Alles was von uns und unserem Bestreben übrig bleibt dieselbe Spur trägt und dem aufmerksamen Beobachter auf ein Daseyn hindeutet das, in einer glücklichsten Entfaltung, so wie in der nothgedrungensten Beschränkung, sich gleich zu bleiben und, wo nicht immer die Würde, doch wenigstens die Hartnäckigkeit des menschlichen Wesens durchzuführen trachtete.
— Goethe, “Antik und modern”
Sources of wit gleaned over nearly immemorial stretches of historical adversity – nota bene, the melancholy which such hardships provoked, added and still adds itself to their number! – the reality of all this was not alien to the poet. Traces of sorrow never fully effaced, caring attention may remark also in the joy amidst the bleakness.
Enlivening and leavening of language by wit generally, and in particular that of the German tongue (die Sprache) by Jewish wit (der Witz), became prominent as a topic of conversation and reflection in the years when Jews were emancipated initially, during the Napoleonic era. It was then that the first compendia of their humour began to be published, and the literary public evidently started to enjoy these books’ tangy Judenkirschen (literally, Jews’ cherries), as the pithy-pitted delicacies they offered were known.* Thus readers could get acquainted with a previously unsuspected branch of humour, and perhaps, in augmenting their Witzenschaft, as the language wittily encourages one to say, even learn to tell better jokes on their own behalf along the way.
* This term seems to diverge from the other sense, used to designate the Physalis alkekengi plant and its fruit, yet perhaps there was a connection to begin with. But what do I know? I am not a botanist. – To the crop of these new compendia there may be a sardonic allusion in Achim von Arnim’s Halle, ein Studentenspiel, act i, scene i. His play’s protagonist is Ahasverus.
When bitten, these cherries, however, also brought to mind the degradations out of which Jewish humour grew, as being in one respect their supplement, softening the experience of them, while in the long run fostering quick-wittedness as a fitting defence. Now, if the wit which had been honed through all of it, was to instil some unheard-of spirit into the language, then this inheritance would also pass into the latter somehow, maybe sonically too. Anticipating an unsettled result, so surprising it is not, if at that point hesitations did make themselves felt.
Der von Chamisso geschilderte ist nur der Schatten eines Schlemihls.
— Anton Rée, Die Sprachverhältnisse der heutigen Juden, ch. iv, fn.
Then as well, literature was introduced to an unfortunate figure from the Ashkenazic world, even if his features paled beside the original.
The compiler of one of these first anthologies, Lippmann Moses Büschenthal (1784-1818), did not neglect to address the salient issue in the preface to his book, published in 1812. Noth und Schwäche – dieß lehrt uns das weibliche Geschlecht – gebären die List, und List ist Mutter des Witzes; daher man auch unter den gedrückten und dürftigen Landjuden denselben bey weitem häufiger, als bey den reichern, antrifft.* Such new insight this is not, but nonetheless, in context, his phrasing was thought-provoking. Plight and weakness – this the female sex teaches us – give birth to cunning, and cunning is the mother of wit; hence one encounters the latter amongst oppressed, destitute rural Jews far more frequently than amongst their wealthy brethren. Wit, humour, and cunning: fruit of adversity generally, together they represented more specifically an index of the poverty which had been, to a high degree, imposed on the Jews. This material legacy would not be remedied very quickly, and even the reformers, early in the nineteenth century, began to intuit how the consequences of oppression barely past, even in the better cases, would impinge upon the futures of those who in the present, in their less reflective moments at least, still tended to take for granted all those arrangements.
* Sammlung witziger Einfälle von Juden, Vorerinnerung
Within the German-speaking domain, though their circumstances were improving, some pungent whiff of difference still wafted about the Jews who were making an entrance into the republic of letters or the literary-minded beau monde, for whom not a baptismal certificate (Taufzettel), as Heine said, but rather their verbal wit, in writing and speech, was the ticket to the cultured Europe (das Entréebillett zur europäischen Kultur),* even though such attestations they often felt compelled to show at the door, whether they were in Berlin or Frankfurt, or in Paris. Adding further complexity to the scene, alongside them stood another set of Jews, those whom centuries of schooling in small commercial enterprises had readied for the next role, whereby the skilled and successful could ascend into the uppermost reaches of international high finance, employing their considerable wits to quite other ends than to wit. – Between these groups, exemplified by the poet passing from apartment to apartment, and by James Mayer de Rothschild (1792-1868) holding court in the rue Laffitte, antipathy came into play in their relations, which often tended towards iciness. They may have mingled, but they did not mix.
* “Gedanken und Einfälle,” ii
Emancipation continued to be debated in the aftermath of the Napoleonic period, and, though many of the new policies were rescinded, a complete victory of the reaction, a full return to the old order did not seem likely. However, at times, on the streets matters looked rather different, notably during the violent outbreaks in 1819, the Hep-Hep riots, which without much exaggeration can be called pogroms avant la lettre. Hep, the rioters’ rallying cry, seemed at the time* to derive from the old phrase Hierosolyma est perdita, and from its revival one might infer that the myth of the Wandering Jew also was circulating once more. Its appeal grew in proportion to their material and monetary prosperity, which increasingly was conspicuous. Implicitly the phenomenon was traced back to the older penury, thought somehow to conceal an analogue of the latter, because, after all, in some respect they simply had to be impoverished! – thus the myth then insisted. By this haunting idée fixe, a prism was lent to perception, another trap to fall into laid out, of the type identified by Goethe.
* vide “Letter on the Present Persecution of the Jews”
A phantasma of their inward poverty, spooking through Jew-hating heads: against this opponent, admittedly nearly impossible to dispatch, Ludwig Börne set out, the riots of two years before still much on his mind, in an 1821 polemic against the latest anti-Jewish academic screed (a genre which, during the nineteenth century, not to mention afterwards, never had been, was, nor would be in short supply). The challenge prompted him to draw upon his own very ample store of wit, and throughout his essay, though bitter in parts (why should the judgement in this case not be marked by bitterness?), moments akin to the Judenkirschen occur to divert and bemuse, adding pungency to the Jean Paulian practice he so highly esteemed.
He took the measure of his opponents’ motives – with a play on words.
Ihr habt die Juden immer verfolgt, aber euer Kopf ist besser geworden, Ihr sucht jezt was Ihr früher nicht gethan, euere Verfolgung zu rechtfertigen. Ihr haßt die Juden nicht, weil sie es verdienen; Ihr haßt sie, und sucht so gut Ihr’s könnt, zu beweisen, daß sie es verdienen, und Ihr haßt sie, weil sie – verdienen.*
* “Der ewige Jude”
This wordplay does translate to English, though something vanishes in the process. Still, the humour can be conveyed as follows: You always persecuted the Jews, but your minds are improving, now you seek to do what you neglected before, to justify your persecution. You do not hate the Jews because they deserve it: you hate them, and try as best you can to prove that they deserve and have earned it, and you hate them because they – earn.
Quick-wittedness, distinguishing itself in the present, had been trained up by their commercial activities and then their forays in finance: the main livelihoods, to say it once more, which Ashkenazim were allowed to practice. So, it figured amongst the results of the long oppression itself, albeit one which the oppressors at the time had never intended. From this inadvertence, much later, came the peculiar ire of their would-be successors! As such, the ire tended to dissipate of its accord, in the absence of their own efforts to exacerbate it, an itch they scratched over and over by brooding on the phenomenon of Jewish eminence in the economy.
All this Börne saw through, humorously alerting well-disposed readers to its existence. What he did not do (how could he possibly have?), was to say that the wit he and his fellows displayed, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic era, aroused a very similar ire. It too had been categorised as a deep fund, accumulated over long stretches of an oppressive history, likewise as an unanticipated result, and thus this fruit became all the more offensive to the Jew-haters from 1815 onwards.
With his own prominence, alongside Moritz Gottlieb Saphir (1795-1858) and Heine, the matter was not exactly an obscure topic in the 1820s and afterwards, so probably he had reflected on it. Here he may have been reluctant to proceed, as at this point a delicate distinction calls out to be made.
Alloyed in the animosity against the German Jews, a further motive seems clear, one equally if not more a factor in the tenacity of this prejudice. It was, in a word, envy. An animus difficult to speak of: always, apparently, it can claim itself to be non-existent, in this much like hypocrisy. Yet the challenge should not furnish an excuse for silence, either, so long as in such a dispute, the plaintiff agrees it will remain the impartial observer’s prerogative to determine which side to believe.
Although in concreto they often overlap, envy and jealousy are separate forces (perhaps each pertains largely to a distinct temperament within the manifold that is human nature). Nothing within the jealous prevents any of them from admitting to the jealousy, whereas envy is insidious: someone in its grip does not, indeed cannot avow this to be the case, so degrading is envy, and not only to the envious. Only once the envy has been surpassed, left behind, by a μετάνοια or some other decisive step, where all that remains from it is the regret one did fall into it, will someone acknowledge that it held sway. – Yet this spatio-temporality also permits those who are both malicious and clever to feign the earlier existence of their own envy. Who ever seriously has said that the human heart is not perverse?
What do I think provoked the ire of the – Jew-enviers? (The why? of their animosity I need not here examine.) Above all, the resilience throughout the course of a long history of degradation, from which another flowering and new fruit was springing forth in their times, confounding the myth’s old stereotypes and its share also in the most recent of the philosophy of history’s constructions: this they envied, even despite themselves. Would they ever have lasted a tenth, done a hundredth as much, if condemned to like circumstances? – the ill-disposed may have queried their own characters, in their most honest moments. But, sadly for everyone, this hidden self-interrogation kept within narrow limits, and terminated mainly by arousing further bursts of the same animosity, new outbreaks of the ressentiment.
For my notion of envy’s role in stoking the animosity, two items I shall mention in particular. They date effectively to the 1830s.*
* Leaving the envious aside, it is remarkable how the myth circulated again from the start of the decade onwards. Thenceforth the Wandering Jew was heard from repeatedly in the venues of literature, sightings of Ahasuerus were frequent. Both Chamisso and Lenau, for example, wrote poems on the theme.
The first hails from that cornucopia of thoughts about humour and sundry other topics by Carl Julius Weber (1767-1832), published posthumously under the sign of the laughing philosopher par excellence, in twelve tomes. More precisely, in the essay on “wit and ingenuity” (Witz und Scharfsinn) in the premier volume, the author extends his admiration to Jewish accomplishments in this field, while also (without much laughter) declaring his opposition to them generically and their emancipation in particular. Then occurs a note about the proper time (das Tempo), the moment but also the speed specific to each – thinking wistfully more of groups than of persons. Die größte Sünde in der Welt ist die Sünde gegen das Tempo, jeder hat sein Tempo, und nur wenige mehr als Einmal. War unser Tempo schon oder soll es noch kommen?* The greatest sin in the world, is the sin against tempo; everyone has his tempo, and only a few have it more than once. Has our tempo already gone by, or shall it still come? So, the undying existence of the Wandering Jew testified to the greatest sin in the world, and yet, with the new flourishing of the Jews, to the latter are vouchsafed indeed more than one “tempo,” hard-won gifts of which their multifarious ingenuity and wit is evidence. How then not to hear the envy in the author’s own peculiar question?
* Dymocritos, vol. i, ch. xxiii
Second, in a critical study by Hermann Marggraff (1809-64) of recent German literature, there is a riposte to the crop of witty Jewish authors, first and foremost Heine, since nearly a decade in Parisian exile. Barrages of jeux d’esprit, it seems, had provoked this critic to counter with an attempt at humour of his own. Reading through the latest writings, he said, so möchte ich nicht beten: Herr, erlöse uns vom Uebel, sondern erlöse uns vom Witze, der unser Uebel ist in Ewigkeit: Amen!* I should not like to pray: Lord, deliver us from evil, but rather: deliver us from wit, which is our evil unto eternity, amen. A meagre joke, paying a tribute plaintively despite itself to the exile’s Jewish harvest, his resource of high spirits! Hence, what better word for the German critic’s shade of green, than envy?
* Deutschland’s jüngste Literatur- und Culturepoche, bk. viii
Well, the precise sound of these two statements, an impartial observer may assess.
Paris exuberant around him, if the poet took notice of these envious undertones from across the Rhine, I imagine the sly smile on his lips, the laughter not with but rather at such clumsy instances of humour, still entrapped in the old myth without exactly striving to break free. Yet there were alongside them many others; while even those who had freed themselves from it, at times erred in the other direction, into an over-compensation which, while hardly as odious as the ancient prejudice, nonetheless can mistake even the smallest things as of representative significance, thus detracting from the perception of whatever is really there in them, ensuring its recollection will be a blur. Evidently this mnemonic distortion too played a role in the poet’s case, such that some who knew him would afterwards disagree with one another on his very appearance, leaving subsequent readers in perplexity, as was noted in the 1920s by a writer who later also had to flee Germany, Heinz Pol.
Haß, Mißgunst, Neid, Liebe, Freundschaft, jede dieser Eigenschaften ließ ihren Besitzer den Dichter anders sehen.
Aber wo ist Wahrheit, wer hat nun wirklich den Heine so gesehen und geschildert, wie er war und sich gab? […]
[…] Kann man noch den zeitgenössischen Berichten […] einen historischen Wert beimessen, wenn diese Zeitgenossen sich noch nicht einmal darüber einig sind, ob ihr Mann blonde oder schwarze Haare besitzt?— Heinz Pol,
“Wie sah Heine aus?”
Myth whether at its most potent or at its least, but especially whenever envy adds covert force to it, springs the trap upon the heedless that was spoken of by Goethe. Nor is it easy to fly from: the corrective may bring the escapees no nearer the, as he said, real intuition of the things small and large which human history could disclose.
How then to enter into a rapport with them?
Sooft es den Juden schlecht ging, klagten sie nicht die böse Umwelt an, sondern sahen darin die Strafe für ihre eigenen Sünden. Solche Haltung ergibt sich daraus, daß die Juden ihr Verhalten immer am göttlichen Gesetz gemessen haben. Aus dieser Haltung heraus haben sie auch als erste […] eine selbstkritische, fast überobjektive Geschichtsschreibung geschaffen. Soll man folglich schließen, daß alle jüdischen Witze, die sich über Juden negativ äußern, Ausdruck echten jüdischen Selbstverständnisses sind? Nein. Auch die Antisemiten und jene Juden, die die Selbstachtung […] eingebüßt haben, sagen dem jüdischen Volk Schlechtes nach.
— Salcia Landmann,
Der jüdische Witz, Einleitung,
“Selbstkritische und antisemitische Witze”
Impartiality towards oneself and one’s fellows, is requisite for the proper study of history and may be practiced while studying it, guarding against myths even as they too are studied; pronounced in the forms of Jewish humour are the criticisms from which a self-critical historiography stems, as is proposed by Salcia Landmann: hence by their pointed jokes against themselves, opting for the historical over the mythic becomes a habit.
Outlining all this in the shape of something like a syllogism, as I’ve just done, might seem odd, itself a poor jest or bad witticism – but for those the remedy is found amidst these historical-minded arrangements themselves: the retort of a sharper joke. And, at least one hopes so, calumnies, libels, slanders may be outwitted in the same, incipiently literary way. Amidst these expansive horizons, wordplay is in its element, and through its several channels humour attempts to keep myth at bay.
Heine, for his part, had thought with great depth about the place of humour in human life generally, and about the role of jokes, particularly amongst friends.
In the middle of 1855, not a year before his death, Heine was visited by Saphir.* The latter wrote of the meeting, and of his friendship with Börne, late in July.
* Their relations are addressed by Péter Varga in an essay, “Heinrich Heine und seine jüdischen Freunde.”
Reflecting on the disputes Heine excelled in and wherein he gave free rein to his sharp wit, and the altercation with Börne above all, Saphir spoke a few words about the way of life he had led once affranchi in Paris, already as though in a Nachruf, this not without warrant, given the reality of the poet’s illness then.
Flâneurs afoot in the city, or in the countryside regarded as though it were urban, find things that are without aim, quite like them. This flower, this spring, this echo, this scent of the forests, this laughing landscape (die Blume, die Quelle, das Echo, der Wälderduft, die lachende Landschaft) are no guides, said Saphir. (Yet sometimes, as one knows, these moments prove not so aimless, overpowering us to abscond with our ideas, opinions, or other items of interest.) Thus too the poet’s humour. Heines Bosheiten selbst, glaub’ ich, haben auch keinen Zweck, sie sind bei ihm eben auch eine Formation seines Geistes. Er fragt sie auch nicht: wohin? Er bekümmert sich nicht um ihre Wirkung. Even Heine’s animadversions, I believe, have no goal; with him they are just a conformation of his mind. He does not ask them for directions, either, nor has he any concern regarding their effect. – I spoke with him about this: of the many injuries he inflicted even upon friends. “Oh,” he said, “whom is one to poke fun at, if not one’s friends? Enemies will be offended anyhow! Friends should show how friendly they are by not taking our jokes badly.” – I must admit, there’s method in it! Ich sprach mit ihm davon, von den vielen Verletzungen, welche er selbst Freunden anthut. „Ach,“ sagte er, „über wen soll man denn Witze machen als über seine Freunde? Die Feinde nehmen es einem gleich übel! Die Freunde eben sollen uns die Freundschaft erzeugen, unsere Witze nicht übel zu nehmen.“ – Ich muß gestehen, da ist doch Methode d’rin!* The method in it became more distinct in the city which comprised the flâneur’s native habitat, offering refuge for exiles from elsewhere throughout the nineteenth century, a field where the wit in their language could ripen, honing itself beyond the walls within which it was still kept back there. So perhaps nowhere more than in Paris could Jewish authors from the German realms impart to their relations and works the fructification of humour by which, if properly understood, that is, taken as a historical force, the general bitterness would be assuaged, the friendships bettered: without these accomplishments being anything other than incidental to humour, whose very existence is reason enough.
* “Pariser Briefe” (Humorist, vol. 19, no. 209)
Already before exiling himself to Paris, Heine had intuited that humour, by virtue of the role it plays in comedy, might contain a specifically historical force. As such, from it great energy could flow into a poetic event (Ereignis), therewith exploding the reigning myths and, even more notably, dissolving away the usual preference to succumb to myth altogether in the first place . . .
Man har tillagt Tyskerne en lignende Evne til at begribe alt Fremmed og gjennem Oversættelse eller indtrængende Forstaaelse tilegne sig det. De have i højeste Mon denne Evne. Men den er hos dem af anden Art. […] Franskmændene, der ikke forstode Grækerne, kom dem i deres Produktion langt nærmere end Tyskerne, der forstod dem.
— Georg Brandes, Indtryk fra Rusland,
“Iagttagelser og Overvejelser,” iii
– Comedy?
– Yes, comedy. It is slighted so easily, or even automatically, by comparison to tragedy, but in fact the comic may apprehend the darker sides of human reality, especially the suffering, in a more apt, more serious manner, as some have noticed, despite the weight of common opinion on this point. Yet translating the awareness into creative activity that would produce an event and not a deed is a challenge, and it is made all the more difficult whenever poetic taste has been corrupted by prolonged contact with theories – the theories of those who’ve studied comedy exhaustively, and reduced it nearly to death with their formulæ. Ach, der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland!
Dieser Troubadour des Jammers, geschwächt an Leib und Seele, versuchte es, den gewaltigsten, phantasiereichsten und witzigsten Dichter der jugendlichen Griechenwelt nachzuahmen! Nichts ist wahrlich widerwärtiger als diese krampfhafte Ohnmacht, die sich wie Kühnheit aufblasen möchte, diese mühsam zusammengetragenen Invektiven, denen der Schimmel des verjährten Grolls anklebt, und dieser silbenstecherisch ängstlich nachgeahmte Geistestaumel. Wie sich von selbst versteht, zeigt sich in des Grafen Werk keine Spur von einer tiefen Weltvernichtungsidee, die jedem aristophanischen Lustspiele zum Grunde liegt, und die darin, wie ein phantastisch ironischer Zauberbaum, emporschießt mit blühendem Gedankenschmuck, singenden Nachtigallnestern und kletternden Affen. Eine solche Idee, mit dem Todesjubel und dem Zerstörungsfeuerwerk, das dazu gehört, durften wir freilich von dem armen Grafen nicht erwarten.
— Heine, Die Bäder von Lukka, ch. xi
For his part, the noble poetaster whose efforts had called forth that distinction from Heine, may or may not have spent much time on the theory, but their permutations of comic themes never amounted to deeds, let alone to events. They did however elicit some scathing remarks from the poet, soon to depart for Paris, including a scintillating passage through which saunter ideas about the role in comedy of irony, humour, and wit – assembling there to dispatch myth.
If human life is to be experienced in its real variety and variation, requisite is that the confinement within myth be abandoned, in favour of a properly historical attitude, along with the impartiality correlate to it. The motif of world-annihilation (Weltvernichtung), in the best comedy, foments upheaval in this regard: the world such works seek to raze, is the unfree realm over which myth holds sway, which, so far as poetry is concerned, no mere deed but only an event can hope to shatter.
Aristophanes is inexhaustible. So many are the ways people suffer under their own inclinations towards partiality, so varied the condensates of the look, sound, and taste of a real impartialness, so joyous the funeral rites when myth departs the human world! – The idea germinated across the Rhine, but came to bloom in Paris.
With myth dispatched, history and history’s God entering on the stage, an observer starts to notice everywhere the workings of a sense of humour that is quite odd (recall the word used by Goethe). – Life in Paris also occasioned this judgement.
Bemusement engendered by the strange humour of the world, though bittersweet, runs through his late autobiographical text, composed by Heine not in the tragic mode of a confession, but as a cheeky set of admissions or avowals, as per the title. Amongst them is one which intuits how superior comedy at its best can be.
Ach! der Spott Gottes lastet schwer auf mir. Der große Autor des Weltalls, der Aristophanes des Himmels, wollte dem kleinen irdischen, sogenannten deutschen Aristophanes recht grell darthun, wie die witzigsten Sarcasmen desselben nur armselige Spöttereien gewesen im Vergleich mit den seinigen, und wie kläglich ich ihm nachstehen muß im Humor, in der colossalen Spaßmacherei.*
* Geständnisse
Playful-pointed rivalry with which the poet’s relations with his friends was leavened, recurs in this passage, as if to show he did not call a halt before his own person when it came to the vital activity of making jokes, and to suggest those he issued at his own expense, against himself, were the better or the best of them, even considering the competition! Could this ironic object-lesson in impartiality ever have been written elsewhere than around the middle of the nineteenth century in Paris? – I’ll put it into English as follows: Oh! God’s mockery weighs heavily upon me. The universe’s great author, the Aristophanes of heaven, wanted to make it glaringly clear to the little earth-bound “German Aristophanes” how the latter’s most witty sarcasms were but paltry mockeries in comparison with his own, and how pitifully inferior to him I must be in humour, in jesting on a colossal scale.
The scale on which the humour was manifest, is historical: this the poet really had no need to add. History continuously discloses what one never expects, while the recurrence of the same scenes will hardly ever be noticed – once myth has been escorted from the theatre. Such was the serious punch-line of the best comedy.
The combination of ‘Weltvernichtung’ with the nightingales and monkeys sounds rather like a performance of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung in a circus.
— David Pugh,
“Heine’s Aristophanes Complex and
the Ambivalence of Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen”
Yet this autobiographical text the literary public largely ignored, the poet having been written off by many some time before (to this denigration the old myth itself may have lent some force). And even those who’ve delved into his thinking about the superiority of comedy, often display their incomprehension or lack of sensitivity to some rather obvious distinctions. Thus, to cite an egregious idea, the poet’s suggestion regarding the destructive intent in the works of Aristophanes, is said to anticipate Wagner in the mode of a farce. Never mind that this sets the relation of the poet and the composer on its head – some inadvertent humour attaches to the oblivious issuance of this inverted comparison, though in the narrow sectors of the literary public where such an essay circulates, academic as they are, it isn’t likely to be noticed at all.
Surely it is unwarranted to ignore the fundamental opting for myth by Wagner, so different than history’s importance with Heine? All the more so, as amongst the mythic figures the composer embraced, the Wandering Jew was very prominent.*
* Not being nor wanting to become anything like a specialist in Wagneriana, as far as I know the most incisive study of the composer’s attitudes towards Jewry and Jews is the book by Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner: Race and Revolution. His broader work, German Question/Jewish Question, complements it. See also the account in Wagners Hitler: Der Prophet und sein Vollstrecker, by Joachim Köhler, and an essay by Matthias Küntzel, occasioned by the bicentennial, “Wagner war Avantgarde – als Musiker und Antisemit.” Notable too is David P. Goldman, “Why We Can’t Hear Wagner’s Music.”
In Anbetracht des insonderheit providentiellen Umstandes, daß Mein aus Gold und Elfenbein allein im Mittelpunkt der Erde herzustellendes, für die mimo-plasto-canto-chronische Aufführung Meines neuesten Wunderwerkes gewidmete[s] Allgebäu „Asyl für Wahnfriedlinge“ durch die ihrer Natur nach essentielle Zugeknöpftheit der durch Mich aus ihrem Nichtsein zum theilweisen Sein zu wecken versucht gewordenen Juden nicht in der für Mein Da-und-vorhanden-sein gesetzten Zeit zu Stande gekommen ist, theile Ich Mein Drama als Buch Meinen Lesern mit. Niemand wird es verstehn, und so einer behauptet, er verstehe Mich, so lügt er; denn Meines gleichen wächst nicht. Für höher entwickelte Wesen künftiger Epochen theile Ich jedoch schon im 19. Jahrhundert dieser gegen Meine Größe verschwindenden Zeitrechnung mit, daß in der Ganzheit dieses musikalischen Werkes vor Allem der große Gedanke sich ausstrahlen wird, daß nicht nur die Juden im Allgemeinen, sondern der „ewige Jude“ besonders etwas höchst Antimusikalisches ist, so daß Ich sein der Tiefe der musikalischen Spekulation feindliches Wesen am Besten durch eine die Grenzen des unmusikalisch-Erreichbaren hinter sich lassende Thonthat dargestellt habe. Der historischen Echtheit wegen habe Ich nicht gezögert, an den geeigneten Stellen Motive aus – mit Respekt zu melden! – Mendelssohn und Meyerbeer, natürlich gewaltig umgearbeitet, anzubringen. Uebrigens sehe Ich nicht ein, warum Ich Meine Leser eines weiteren Wortes würdige.
— Fritz Mauthner,
“Nach berühmten Mustern,” ivDie deutsche Heldenarmee hätte ihre unsterblichen Siege nie errungen, wenn die Männer, die Deutschland „züchtet“, so verweichlicht gewesen wären, wie Jener, der sie besungen.
— Daniel Spitzer,
“Briefe Richard Wagner’s an eine Putzmacherin”
(Neue Freie Presse, no. 4600)
If, impartially, one inquires into the composer’s animosity towards the poet, seeking a motive, envy’s role cannot really be denied. The venom he spat at the alleged deficient quality of Jewish speech, in his 1850 essay, was aroused in him by the poet’s great feeling for the German language, attesting to his enviousness even despite himself. Now, since my interest here does not lie in the details of his life, nor the recesses of his psyche, I shall not venture further into the matter of the composer’s own envy; but in this connection his eschewal of acts of gratitude, whether inner or outer, a quasi-ethical position he worked out at that time, may be mentioned.* According to his views, such acts merely were expressions of the egoism reigning in – please excuse me for citing his usual epithet, one bequest amongst a noxious legacy – modern “Jewified” society, and so he could reject them in principle, his self-regard intact. Very convenient in the case of an egotist such as he! Of course, the intrinsic peculiarity of this attitude was noticed by some amongst his contemporaries; well-known satirists skewered his awkward posturing and certain other predilections, especially during the 1870s, as anti-Semitism was more and more stridently expressed: Fritz Mauthner parodied the master’s pomposity of manner and style, while Daniel Spitzer dwelt upon his love of fine fabrics, particularly for undergarments, pointing out all the haggling he engaged in with the milliner whose services he hired, and then half-proposed a few rather obvious questions. Later, more diagnostically and yet still with some humour, after the composer’s death, during the fin de siècle, the “mannmännlich” (a neologism Karl Heinrich Ulrichs had fashioned in 1864) eros displayed in the final works, and around the Festspiele locales, was addressed by Oskar Panizza, in “Bayreuth und die Homosexualität”; while several years before, in a note to the first Nachschrift in Der Fall Wagner, one of his own last texts, Nietzsche speculated mischievously on the familial background of his erstwhile friend and on the significance of the surname of the latter’s birth father. – Bearing these indications in mind, is it so misguided to hear a turbulent envy churning up behind the composer’s outbursts, especially against Heine?
* For his ideas about gratitude, see the parenthetical paragraph in the sketch of an abandoned work: Jesus von Nazareth, ii, “Vom Tod.”
While reflecting upon Wagner’s behaviour, professional and personal, more and more palpably do I sense throughout, shadowing him like a companion, the figure of the old myth. From the side it authorised his appalling comportment vis-à-vis Jewish colleagues, the cat-and-mouse games he played with them (though with some complicity on their part), most notoriously the cruel treatment he meted out to the conductor Hermann Levi: as per the myth, this these Jews had earned.
Properly historical assessment is situated on a different plane: implicitly this was the exiled poet’s belief, and it was taught by the Western left at its best moments during the nineteenth century and later. For his part, the composer never budged from the mythic evaluation that the abuse – or even worse – was due to the Jews. (“Die Juden sind unser Unglück!”)
History it was not which led Wagner to the Meistersinger von Nürnberg, but myth. The corpus of the myth’s notions concerning the Jews’ manner of speech, stood behind the figure of Beckmesser; by this typification, both musical and textual, the composer sought to play upon his audience, as though it too were an instrument: while the results aimed at, were not those of a poetic event, but rather, akin to a deed.*
* Three essays amongst the critical literature which I’ve found illuminating, are Reinhard Metzger, “Eine geheime Botschaft in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg und Parsifal,” Barry Millington, “Nuremberg Trial: Is there anti-semitism in Die Meistersinger?,” and Karl A. Zaenker, “The Bedeviled Beckmesser: Another Look at Anti-Semitic Stereotypes in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.”
How the comical character-role (komische Charakterrolle) should be played, Wagner himself outlined in his letter of January 22, 1868 to Gustav Hölzel, whom he was seeking to engage for the part: he wanted an actor skilled in music, to convey a testy (heftiger) and screeching tone of speech (kreischender Sprachton). – In the text of the prize-song, the influence of “Der Jud’ im Dorn,” by the Brothers Grimm, was noted by Thomas Mann, in a letter of December 6, 1949 to Emil Praetorius; while Ernst Bloch, in his essay “Über Beckmessers Preislied-Text,” sought in effect to defuse the objections by casting it as a piece of dadaism avant la lettre. – Of interest is also Gustav Mahler’s awareness of what Wagner had intended with the role of Mime in Siegfried: his opinion was recorded by Natalie Bauer-Lechner in September 1898.*
* See Herbert Killian, Gustav Mahler in den Erinnerungen von Natalie Bauer-Lechner, pt. ii, “Spieljahr 1898/1899.” The remarks are quite provocative and bear thinking on.
Wenn Richard Wagner ebenso fanatische Gegner hätte, als er zu seinem Unglück fanatische Anhänger besitzt, er würde mit grenzenlosem Spott heimgeschickt werden. Es zeigt von gar zu schlechtem Geschmack, heute noch im Herzen Deutschlands den Stabreim „Hep-Hep“ zu rufen. Richard Wagner hat sich so lange mit mittelalterlichen Stoffen beschäftigt, daß er nun über Hals und Kopf in mittelalterlichen Dingen gefangen sitzt.
— Mauthner, “Das evangelisch-musikalische Kirchenblatt”
Interpretations cancel one another out if they multiply too much: what will then take their place, if not facts? With the first performances, there exists a factual record of how audiences responded, and it tends to confirm the work was not an event, but rather, deliberately a deed. The prize-song especially drew forth the “Hep! Hep!” cry from one part, hissing and booing from the other, not surprisingly, for by then the composer had issued his 1850 essay again, which as an interpretive key to the text did not lack for clarity: the resulting tensions and altercations were noted with satisfaction by him and his clique. Strife, one hardly exaggerates to say, it was his aim to foment and heighten, in order to supply the old myth with fresh energy and adduce new scenes to illustrate it. The composer’s skill at – almost mechanically – playing upon the audience, was contributed mainly in the service of this goal.
A contemporary account, of the Vienna premiere, reported an instructive fact. It suggests what myth, especially this myth, can do, within the setting of a theatre.
Applaudirende und Zischende standen sich in dem übervollen Hause so schroff gegenüber, dass es eine Zeitlang den Anschein hatte, als werde sich die interessante allgemeine Keilerei, welche den Schluss des zweiten Acts verherrlicht, in den Zuschauerraum fortpflanzen.*
* entry in the “Berichte. Nachrichten und Bemerkungen”
The ring of German journalism in 1870, I’ll convey as follows: people applauding or hissing stood so brusquely opposite one another in the overcrowded theatre, that for a while it seemed as though the attention-getting public brawl with which the second act closed gloriously, would be re-created in the auditorium.
Over the action on stage, the incipience of a pogrom seems to hover, and anxious presentiment of it informs the lines delivered by Beckmesser.* Off-scene, egging the strife on, there is the myth. It scored a twofold victory in this debut in Vienna, replicating the quarrel in the opera by a near-scuffle within the audience, moving the latter to amusement and approval (“Hep! Hep!”) regarding the testy screeching (heftiger, kreischender Sprachton), on one side, calling forth from the dissenters – a hissing (zischend) response, as though to demonstrate by a further piece of sonic evidence that it had been right all along. To speak against it, is to speak for it. How then to oppose the myth, if its constituent elements do tend to spread contagiously?
* Their ominous sound is traced carefully in the study by Zaenker.
Outdoing the opera’s humour, such as it was, might be one way, and the amusingly anonymous parody by Schmidt-Cabanis, did this rather well. Laughter could prompt the mischievous idea that the composer, as composer and, why should I not venture to say it, as a type of demagogue, needed “the Jews” and would have had to invent “them” if “they” did not exist; such were the phantasmata by which an economy of effort sought to raise from phlegmatic slumber the dissonances and noise he and German music required. Wittily indeed, to the parodic Aufmesser was given the honour of measuring out this intuition. Thus, voicing his distaste for a colleague’s song, in his official capacity, he contrasted it to his own entry, then starting to gestate in his mind. (The version in English doggerel I’ve appended gives a bit of the sense or nonsense: the humorous rhythm however is elusive.)
Und dann, betrachtet man’s im Ganzen,
Wo ist denn eine Spur von Dissonanzen?
Auch im Orchester wurde gar kein Lärm gemacht;
(entschlossen) Den Menschen hab’ ich mit ’nem Volkslied im Verdacht!*
(And look at it without the “hences” –
Where is there a trace of the dissonances?
Nor did the orchestra let any noise be heard;
(resolute) For those fellows I have got a folk-song reserved!)
In these lines there is humour and some wordplay, yet the parodist’s point is sharp: this venturesome music will evince and exude no less strife than did the tenacious myth presiding over its birth, and probably more. For impartial observers, early in the 1870s and afterwards, the hint would have been thought-provoking. Of course, those who attended the composer’s performances not least in order to blurt out the “Hep! Hep!,” had no ear for the criticism.
* Hepp, hepp!, act i
How had ears become inured? If any explanation can be proposed for a fault so widespread, the system of education through which members of the literate and musical public had passed, with fewer and fewer exceptions as the nineteenth century advanced, did bear some share of the responsibility – but an indirect one.
Henry Adams studied in Berlin at the end of the 1850s; the following are a few of his observations, published nearly fifty years later on.
The arbitrary training given to the memory was stupefying; the strain that the memory endured was a form of torture; and the feats that the boys performed, without complaint, were pitiable. No other faculty than the memory seemed to be recognised. Least of all was any use made of reason, either analytic, synthetic or dogmatic. The German government did not encourage reasoning.
All State-education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarising the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State-purposes. The German machine was terribly efficient. Its effect on the children was pathetic. […]
[…] [T]he curious and perplexing result of the total failure of German education was that the student’s only clear gain, – his single step to a higher life, – came from time wasted; studies neglected; vices indulged; education reversed; – it came from the despised beer-garden and music-hall; and it was accidental, unintended, unforeseen.*
* The Education of Henry Adams, ch. v
Pathetic was this result, and the scraps of free humanity which emerged from the system often revolted against it much as he suggested, by a deliberate neglect of their formation (Bildung), whiling away the hours on the beauties or charms of less self-edifying pursuits. Yet those were the better cases; in the more unfortunate instances, the revolt took sourer forms, including – the issue here – a decision to inflict intellectual mutilation upon themselves, by prolonged traffic with charlatans and espousal of their agendas, though with an inner unseriousness, indicative that the whole posture had been donned earlier as something of a pastime.* Very often, I suspect, from these circles of the accidental, unintended, unforeseen came noxious concert-goers who would have greeted the debut of an opera by a “Hep! Hep!”
* Here I also think of the antics of some of today’s “theoretical” partisans of the composer. See the last text in Gerhard Scheit, Im Ameisenstaat.
The old myth lent some comfort of mind to these Wagnerians, a bit of assurance as they ambled over the swamp-grounds of stereotyped notions taken from a variety of purveyors, whether the anti-Semitic agitators in Berlin, the Schopenhauerians, the first German Darwinians, or even second-hand dealers in passages from the works of Gobineau and Renan.* Had the stragglers any presentiment where it would lead? Thickets of idées fixes in the lower reaches of the literary world, as they ramified from decade to decade, began to adumbrate its later self-destruction. In 1933 all that undergrowth served as the kindling.
* Worthy of note is how often the latter’s ouvrages, and especially his 1859 essay, “Nouvelles considérations sur le caractère général des peuples sémitiques, et en particulier sur leur tendance au monothéisme,” are taken as substantiation for the charges of sterility and monotony levelled at the Judaic spiritual inheritance, by reason of the structure of Hebrew as a Semitic language as he and much of the century’s linguistic science understood it. This understanding, however, some scholars did criticise, though those who rely on Renan seldom acknowledge these discussions. See, first and foremost, Heymann Steinthal, “Zur Charakteristik der semitischen Völker,” published in 1860. – À propos of the French savant, the term “anti-Semitism,” coined late in the 1870s by the anti-Semites themselves, was first foreshadowed also in 1860, appearing in an adjectival form in a notice by the bibliographer Moritz Steinschneider of the essay by Steinthal.
Die Juden sind im unsichern Europa die stärkste Rasse: denn sie sind dem Rest durch die Länge ihrer Entwicklung überlegen. Ihre Organisation setzt ein reicheres Werden, eine gefährlichere Laufbahn, eine größere Zahl von Stufen voraus, als alle andren Völker aufweisen können. Aber das ist beinahe eine Formel für Überlegenheit. – […] Die Dauer im Dasein einer Rasse entscheidet mit Nothwendigkeit über die Höhe ihrer Entwicklung: die älteste muß die höchste sein. – […] Ihre Gescheutheit hindert die Juden, auf unsere Weise närrisch zu werden […]. Es scheint, sie sind ehemals zu gut geimpft worden, ein wenig blutig selbst, und dies unter allen Nationen: sie verfallen nicht leicht mehr unsrer rabies, der rabies nationalis. Sie sind heute selbst ein antidoton gegen diese letzte Krankheit der europäischen Vernunft. – Die Juden allein haben im modernen Europa an die supremste Form der Geistigkeit gestreift: das ist die geniale Buffonerie. Mit Offenbach, mit Heinrich Heine ist die Potenz der europäischen Cultur wirklich überboten; in dieser Weise steht es den andren Rassen noch nicht frei, Geist zu haben. […] – Heute macht man Heine in Deutschland ein Verbrechen daraus, Geschmack gehabt zu haben – gelacht zu haben: die Deutschen selbst nämlich nehmen sich heute verzweifelt ernst. –
— Nietzsche,
notebook, July-August 1888 (18, 3)Im jetzigen Frankreich ist […] der Wille am schlimmsten erkrankt; und Frankreich, welches immer eine meisterhafte Geschicklichkeit gehabt hat, auch die verhängnisvollen Wendungen seines Geistes in’s Reizende und Verführerische umzukehren, zeigt heute recht eigentlich als Schule und Schaustellung aller Zauber der Skepsis sein Cultur-Übergewicht über Europa.
— Nietzsche,
Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Sechstes Hauptstück, 208NB. den Juden Muth zu machen zu neuen Eigenschaften, nachdem sie in neue Daseinsbedingungen übergetreten sind: so war es meinem Instinkte allein gemäß, und auf diesem Wege habe ich mich auch durch eine giftträgerische Gegenbewegung, die jetzt gerade obenauf ist, nicht irre machen lassen.
— Nietzsche,
notebook, fall 1887 (9, 109)
Nietzsche, once fortuitously extricated from the company of the Wagnerians, could already hear the catastrophic strife towards which deeds such as the composer’s opera sought to entrance the disaffected, which in a near future would overtake everything in Europe if another force did not check it quite soon: an awareness, so it seems to me, which moved the philosopher to reflect further on the cultural pre-eminence of Paris, setting aside myth in favour of history, much as the exiled poet had done for whom he now expressed the highest conceivable esteem, embarking nearly as a flâneur on thought-strolls about the capital and its role as a locale where the wit of the prototypical good Europeans really could flower and summon forth the best efforts of everyone else, who thus might also immunise themselves to some degree against the envious temptation finely swathed in this or that colour as a virtue, and raise themselves to appreciate the peculiar ironies of all their common history, with the bittersweet laughter of a real liberation; he warned between the lines of demagogic ventures in music or politics, and put himself in question by a sensibility new for him, trying out an approximation to the humour of the Jews.
Debility of the will, a main theme of the philosopher, had a variation spun upon it: by this condition Paris was able to be the school and showcase of all the charms of skepticism (Schule und Schaustellung aller Zauber der Skepsis), amongst them the greatest wit, the historical Aristophanic ironist in exile from across the Rhine.* At times, therefore, this philosophical rubric was itself put forward mischievously, in an ironic cast of mind: also in it there is a charming humour to be heard (although probably not by Heideggerian ears), a jest at the expense of the Schopenhauerians and the anti-Semites, a serious joke to counteract the old myth’s appeal (which was a question of volition too). Whatever was the state of the will that conduced to taking delight in a “Que sais-je ?” spoken by a Jewish wit from Germany (who might repeat the verb to lend the phrase a hint of Singsang wie in einer Synagoge), at least in his mood of 1886-87 it met with an admiring approval by Nietzsche.
* Note should also be taken of the French writers with a history in Alsace. Of the greatest of them, on the centennial of his death, the Jewish contexts were called to mind by Antoine Compagnon in Proust du côté juif, while the sense of humour which informed this author’s long novel had already been extolled a few years after he died by Denis Saurat, as deriving from a Judaic tradition, in a study of the “Judaïsme de Proust.”
The philosopher had a prescient sense for the carrefour in his times, and generally thought about matters under this aspect. So too with Jewish wit: as he remarked, the new qualities (neue Eigenschaften) which might arise, once the next chapter in the people’s history had commenced, whatever it was to be, depending on which route would soon enough be trodden, provided to him one of the topics his mind circled about. Had he lived a long life (yes, it is hard to imagine, I know) and come to learn of some who were continuing where Börne, Saphir, Heine had left off, authors like Karl Kraus and Theodor Lessing, around 1900 and later, whose wit was issued in darker tints, commensurate with the decay of European society and the literary world more particularly which had progressed so much further in the interval, he would have studied their works with recognition and attention.
Antisemitismus heißt jene Sinnesart, die etwa den zehnten Teil der Vorwürfe ernst meint, die der Börsenwitz gegen das eigene Blut parat hat. Die Juden leben in einer Inzucht des Humors. Sie dürfen sich untereinander übereinander lustig machen. Aber wehe, wenn sie dabei auseinander kommen!
— Karl Kraus, “Nachts” (Die Fackel, vol. xv, no. 381-83)
„Der Seele, die nur sich gedichtet hat,
Das große Schöne in die Welt gehaucht.
Dem Geiste, der nur sich vernichtet hat
Doch immer neu aus sich emporgetaucht,
Dem Volke, das sich selbst gerichtet hat
Und nun den fremden Richter nicht mehr braucht.“— Theodor Lessing, Der jüdische Selbsthass, “Vorhalle,” epigraph
Trenchant criticism of the mores, whose rate of decomposition accelerated throughout the age of power-politics and imperialism, becoming a mad rush during the years running up to the World War, reveals these authors’ intuition that they were witnessing the protracted suicide of a whole way of life. As much as they could, they marshalled irony, sarcasm, and wit to dissuade their readers from joining in; yet in their more self-critical moods they did not repress the idea that humour was corrosive, not a real remedy.
This other side to all humour, the internecine tendencies in it, came most into evidence amongst Jews in environs where anti-Semitism and self-hatred were rampant: here Vienna springs to mind, but the problem was very widespread.
Nach meiner Meinung offenbart sich in der jüdischen Selbstironie die Resignation dessen, der nicht kämpfen will. Die jüdische Selbstironie ist als jene Form der Selbstbefreiung anzusehen, durch die sich der Jude von dem lastenden Druck des gesellschaftlichen Erniedrigtseins immer von neuem erlöst. Der Jude geht auf diese Weise dem Kampfe aus dem Wege, er entwaffnet den Gegner, indem er diesen in geistreicher Weise übertrumpft, und viel schlagender, als dieser es vermag, beweist: „Ja, ja, du hast schon recht.“ Es gibt bekanntlich keine feinere und auch keine bessere Form des Eigenschutzes, sofern man über keine Keule verfügt, mit der man dem Gegner zur gegebenen Zeit den Schädel einschlagen kann, und insofern diese letztere Methode dem Wesen des betreffenden Unterdrückten widerspricht.
— Eduard Fuchs, Die Juden in der Karikatur, pt. ii, xi
The joke as a vehicle of self-criticism, did come to the fore in Jewish humour with verve perhaps unmatched. And beyond this vital function, often these jokes also allowed doubts concerning the raison d’être of the people’s history to be voiced – and, by this same act, to be answered fittingly: if they aroused laughter, this was the answer, or a good part of it! Under the conditions in which they frequently were made to live, such an effect played a considerable role in the Jews’ relations with Gentiles. Much as did the fine ironies they directed against themselves at moments of difficulty: by this opponents were disarmed without engaging in the overt battle they sought, by a semblance of concession, a tactic well summarised by Eduard Fuchs. Self-criticism but at the same time self-defence – a smart and even elegant move. Yet the turn of the screw came when this method itself, on account of its cleverness, became an object of the envy at work in animosity towards the Jews: then no longer would its use assuage the latter, but only add to it. And this, I submit, took place more and more often during the course of the nineteenth century in Germany and Austria. Whereby the self-deprecating irony, and even Jewish humour altogether, was put in a quandary, rendered uncertain of how best to proceed; perhaps it was largely thenceforth that the internecine squabbles and the self-hatred began to intensify, which later were noted by Kraus and probed by Lessing. And the remark by Nietzsche about applauding the emergence of new qualities amongst the Jews, as they embarked on whatever the next chapter in their history was to be, is rightly set here as well.
[N]icht nur die Vokale fehlen, sonder jegliche Interpunktion, vor allem Fragezeichen und Punkte, und dies in einer Literatur, die beinahe ausschließlich aus Fragen und Antworten besteht. Dies macht eine der Hauptschwierigkeiten des sogenannten „Lernens“ aus, aber es wird zugleich eine Quelle für eine besondere Art jüdischer Witze, die wir vielleicht „Betonungswitze“ nennen können. Ebenso nämlich, wie beim Talmudlernen die fehlende optische Interpunktion durch eine akustische ersetzt wird, durch jenes Heben der Stimme bei einer Frage und Senken bei einer Antwort, durch jenen eigentümlichen Singsang, […] ebenso macht der jüdische Witz vielfachen Gebrauch von der Deutbarkeit einer Frage als Antwort, einer Antwort als Frage.
— Ernst Simon, “Zum Problem des jüdischen Witzes,” ii
How far, how much of the inherited fund of humour might be carried along, was then more and more a pointed question. At times it also was posed in the mode of a joke, calling forth laughter – bittersweet ironic sounds. Perhaps in advance these conveyed a bit of assurance that a significant part of the legacy would indeed live on. And this moment too witnessed a blooming of studies that did not pulverise the subject, but touched it lightly, leaving it a field unscathed, being themselves imbued with a modicum of the same humour. Of these essays, fruit of the 1920s, one, still written in German, not in French, in Montparnasse or the Marais, let alone in the Russian of Leningrad or the capital (that next chapter whose opening had been hoped for by Fuchs* until the close of the decade), nor in English, off in the East End, or across the ocean on the Lower East Side or amidst Brooklyn’s outer tenements, and published back in Germany by the writer, who had already emigrated, Ernst Simon, is of especial interest, not least by dint of the place where he thought it through, Jerusalem. Elsewhere, would the essential share, in this humour’s gestation and endurance, of untold years when “Lernen” was cultivated, in long colloquies punctuated in response to the state of the text by questions transformed into answers and answers into questions (and into what its exclamations?), have been outlined sine ira et studio, acknowledgement given the cadences that feature amongst the most specific qualities it inherits, the singsong?
* Regarding Fuchs, see Thomas Huonker, Revolution, Moral & Kunst.
Celan, therefore, had cause for perturbation when after the recitation this epithet was so rudely thrust in his face. (As for the lengthy excursus above, my apologies.)
Used casually like that, the word denigrates, poised as though nearly to efface the traces of the annihilation itself: it was a grave offence against the memory.* (Here, to say “the memory” is also to say “memory’s rhythm” and “memory’s cadence.”) Stumbling over the insult of it, more than seventy years afterwards, I am brought back to recall how many were the hands which the literary world turned against itself, when some of its own institutions collected items for the flames in 1933.
* On this point, see Maurice Blanchot, “N’oubliez pas !” – Also his essay (with translations of a few of the poems) on Celan, “Le dernier à parler.”
And yet I find it hard to decide to what degree the insult in it, which does seem undeniable, had been specifically intended by Richter. Perhaps his too was a case of someone who did not reflect on the way his actions would look and sound from the standpoints of other people, nor consider how things more generally might be perceived from elsewhere. If so, by his rude remarks one bumps into a tangle of as yet but poorly-named states of heedlessness, thoughtlessness, and stupidity which need not connote a lack of intelligence: attitudes that become terrifying when one finds them multiplied on a mass scale, extremely so under totalitarian rule, and remain in the aftermath disconcerting to consider earnestly, for instance, when one tries to analyse in personal terms someone who manifests anything of the kind. – Problems such as these, as one knows, were grappled with by Hannah Arendt throughout her years of thinking with all due seriousness about the conditions of political life during the twentieth century.
One such was encountered during the Second World War by Ernst Jünger, on leave from a tour of duty in Paris, which he noted down in his journal, publishing the text first in 1949. The vignette is the following.
Fahrt zum Friseur. Dort Unterhaltung über die russischen Gefangenen, die man aus den Lagern zur Arbeit schickt.
»Da sollen böse Bruder drunter sein. Die fressen den Hunden das Futter weg.«
Wörtlich notiert. Oft hat man den Eindruck, daß der deutsche Bürger vom Teufel geritten wird.*
* Strahlungen (1949), “Das Erste Pariser Tagebuch” (Kirchhorst, May 12, 1942)
Trip to the barbershop. There a conversation about Russian prisoners who’ve been put to work outside the camps. “It seems there’re some bad types amongst them. They’re devouring all the dogs’ feed.” Noted verbatim. Often one has the impression the typical German is led around by the devil.
Prompting the last remark, was this fellow’s expression of surprise at behaviour necessitated amidst the conditions which the Germans themselves had imposed: as though only the effects of it were noticed, albeit minimally, with no thought at all taken for the actual causes. (How genuine the surprise may have been under the circumstances, is not my concern here.) That would have required some attempt to judge the whole matter from the Russian slave-labourers’ position, but the German seemed incapable of it. This incapacity struck Arendt too, and she referred to the incident years later, in her 1964 radio interview with Joachim Fest. Her remarks about it are sharp. – One wonders whether she knew that in the second edition of the book, in 1962, the author omitted the comment which had closed the vignette.
This peculiar limitation of mind, more particularly of imagination, many Germans could have resolved to cast aside, in 1945, thereby seizing the chance to make a new beginning for their country. Instead the opportunity was squandered, and by 1960 at the latest the failure was quite obvious to anyone paying serious attention. Common opinion did exhibit the incapacity Jünger had observed during the war, and in a collection of essays he published that year, there was one which included a sketch of a few of the assumptions many Germans had come to accept. Whether he himself was amongst their number, the author took care not to say.
Die Diffamierung setzt Teilnahme an der Gesellschaft voraus. Wo das Leiden stark wird, greifen weder Diffamierung noch Ironie mehr an; sie verlieren ihre verletzende Kraft. Daher können Völker, die eine starke Beziehung zum Leiden besitzen, wie die Russen und die Juden, zwar leicht diffamiert werden, aber sie treten in die Rolle des Diffamierten nicht ein. Das fällt sowohl an ihrem politischen Verhalten wie im Gespräch mit ihren Gebildeten auf.*
* Sgraffiti, “Provokation und Replik”
His sentences, as clipped as ever, I’ll put into English as follows: To be defamed, presupposes a participation in society. Wherever suffering becomes intense, neither defamation nor irony is effective any longer; they forfeit their power to injure. Hence, peoples who have a strong relation to suffering, such as the Russians and the Jews, can be defamed easily, but they do not enter into the role of the defamed. This is noticeable both in their political conduct and when speaking with the cultivated amongst them.
Here it goes without saying that the defamation, and also the exclusion from the role of the defamed of Russians and Jews, comes from the German side, and just as little as had the fellow in the barbershop in 1942, so too in 1960 everyone remained unaffected by the idea of realising how the actions of those others were in part the result of the arrangements they themselves set up. During the war it had been a matter of camps and slave-labour; after it, of the allocation of categories and of the subsuming of other peoples into them. Evasion of responsibility was a constant.
Such is the, as it were, skeletal structure of this mentality as the author anatomised it: I’ve summarised his lines in order to forestall the sort of inversion which would, in a further evasive manœuvre, impute the classificatory operations to those who were – and, alas, still are – their objects.
Suffering then is a state which those peoples have, as with Börne I can ironically say, earned. The preliminary decision to categorise them as being such, remained firmly in the German grip, and it was kept there with a stubbornness to match the tenacity by which the old myth has endured.
Μετάνοια by which one countermanded that decision and its effects upon oneself, would then have been conspicuous, a small event. Who dared to take the risk, all the less when as though in compensation one was able to speak “conscientiously” about everything and nothing?
Wenn ich den »Spiegel« »korrupt« nannte, so muß ich deutlicher sagen, was ich meine. […] Unter »korrupt« meine ich: er hat keine Gesinnung, keine politische Konzeption, keine Linie und keine Ziele. Er entspringt den Aggressionsbedürfnissen, den Enthüllung- und Sensationsbedürfnissen der Masse, in die die Minister selber eingeschlossen sind. Der Geist ist nihilistisch im Gewande vorausgesetzter »moralischer« Selbstverständlichkeiten. Er »enthüllt« beliebig politisch relevante und andere Dinge. Er hat einen negativistisch-hochmütigen Stil entwickelt, der sich sogar auf die Leserzuschriften überträgt, die er veröffentlicht. Keine Spur von Anstand, keine Noblesse, kein Gehalt. […] Aber Du hast m. E. völlig Recht: daß der »Spiegel« da ist, ist für die Bundesrepublik notwendig. Weil unsere gesamte Presse […] faktisch und uneingestanden unter Einschüchterungen lebt, also nicht in gutem Stil und positiver Gesinnung leistet, was heute für Demokratien das Dringendste ist: Aufdeckung der Realitäten, überzeugende und begründende Urteile – darum ist der »Spiegel« da. Was man unter diesen Umständen nicht wegwünschen kann, den bellenden Köter, mit dem braucht man sich selber nicht einzulassen.
— Karl Jaspers, letter to Hannah Arendt
(December 19, 1962)Es war mir ungemein interessant, weil der Augstein, ein ganz unscheinbarer kleiner Mann mit scharfer Intelligenz und enormem präsentem Wissen, mir Eindruck machte. Ein ganz »moderner« Mensch, völlig unabhängig, auch seinem »Spiegel« gegenüber! […] Ich kann nicht sagen, daß ich dem Mann vertraue, im Gegenteil, aber ich stehe ihm noch ganz fragend gegenüber. So ein Mann ist mir noch nicht begegnet. Es war mir, als ob ich Verwandtschaft spüre und dann den Abgrund.
— Jaspers, letter to Arendt
(February 28, 1965)
Celan’s inauspicious first direct encounter with the German literati who were re-grouping in the Federal Republic, was replicated later on, when his relations with its literary world often went awry. In the press his works at times elicited anti-Semitic aggression, and this in years when West German journalism generally subordinated itself to the demands of the state, except for the role played by the Spiegel, whose opposition, however, remained largely negative; finally, not wanting his poem to be grossly misused any longer as window-dressing, the poet began to avoid public recitations of the “Todesfuge.”
Negative as was the character of its opposition, at the centre of that newsmagazine, the founder and editor-in-chief, Rudolf Augstein, made an inconsistent impression upon interlocutors such as Arendt and Jaspers. With the latter he conducted an incisive interview in 1965; the next year he oversaw the famous conversation with Martin Heidegger, which was agreed to only on condition that the transcript be published posthumously. Rather obviously the questioning was devised to offer the philosopher a chance to exculpate himself for his conduct in 1933 and after – an evasion one really should distinguish from the expression of genuine contrition, let alone the acceptance of responsibility for what he had said and done. Yet this crucial distinction would have been hard to make under the circumstances, given that the organisation of the meeting largely had been entrusted to an assistant whose own record was far from pristine.* Thus, at least in part, the exchanges were marred by pretence: they cleared nothing up.
* Regarding this whole episode, consult the study by Lutz Hachmeister, Heideggers Testament: Der Philosoph, der Spiegel und die SS.
Clarification of the issue was an aim which prompted Celan to visit Heidegger. It does not seem his wish was met, though one hardly knows much for certain.*
* A recounting and analysis of their relations is provided by James K. Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951-1970. – See also the more recent presentation by Hans-Peter Kunisch, Todtnauberg: Die Geschichte von Paul Celan, Martin Heidegger und ihrer unmöglichen Begegnung.
Yet even so, one imagines that the rapport between them during those days was marked by tact and thought, conducing to a special attitude towards the German language, and even perhaps to some bouts of humour.
Never intruding, in all probability, was anything like crass behaviour, of the sort which Richter later spoke of while recounting in a present-tense narration the initial meeting of the group he founded. What follows is the kernel of it.
Was bei allen ebenfalls unbemerkt zum Ausdruck kommt, ist die nur auf die Aussage zielende Sprache der »Landser«, die Reduzierung der Sprache auf das Notwendige, eine Abkehr vom Leerlauf der schönen Worte und eine Hinwendung zu ihrem unmittelbaren Realitätsbezug. Sie haben es alle gelernt in der Masse des Volkes, in der sie gelebt haben, jahrelang, tagaus, tagein, in den Kompanien, in den Kasernen, in den Lagern und Gefangenenlagern. Sie haben in dieser Zeit immer am Rande der menschlichen Existenz gelebt. Das hat sie mißtrauisch und hellhörig gemacht.
Ich empfinde es so in diesen Tagen. Aber es wird nicht darüber gesprochen. Es gibt kein Theoretisieren, nur Kritik am Gegenstand, an dem gerade Vorgelesenen. Und die Freude an der Kritik, an der alle teilnehmen, der gelesen hat, wie der, der noch lesen will. Woher kommt diese Lust am kritisieren, diese Radikalität, diese Rücksichtslosigkeit gegenüber dem engsten Freund? Sie kommt auch für mich überraschend.*
* “Wie entstand und was war die Gruppe 47?,” ii, “September 1947”
His text was first presented to the public as a radio broadcast in 1974, an origin which might account for the rhythms that distinguish a number of his sentences: they have something rhapsodic about them. In this case there is a certain irony in the sheer fact of such a sonic quality, and accordingly one wonders what the result would have been, had a recitation of them ever been attempted by Celan.
In search of a recording I’ve not ventured; there is no need to seek outside the text, in this case. – The cadences can be brought into English without much difficulty.
What in everyone’s case likewise comes unremarked to expression, is the soldiers’ language that aims only to state things, the reducing of language to the necessary, turning away from the idling of fine words, towards the direct linkage they have to reality. They all learned it in the masses of the people where they lived, for years, day in, day out, in the battalions, in the barracks, in the camps and prisoners’ camps. Throughout this time, they always lived on the margins of human existence. That made them suspicious and keen-eared. – That’s my sense of it, during these days. But it isn’t talked about. There’s no theorising, only the critique of the subject matter, of the reading which had just finished. And the joy taken in criticism, in which everyone participates, those who have read, and those who still want to read. Where does this desire to criticise come from, this radicalism, this ruthlessness towards one’s closest friend? For me too it comes as a surprise.
For my part, I shall set aside the touching-up of what actually went on, either at this founding in 1947 or in Niendorf, in 1952 – along with these plaintive sounds of self-pity. Yet my mistrust is aroused, my ears keen when I read his avowal of the predilection for ruthless criticism of one’s friends. Here a contrast comes to mind, though it seems he never would have recognised the point of contact: as stated, in the group’s “critical” practice I notice nothing less nor more than a substitute for the levity vis-à-vis his friends which had come as easily as the poetic impetus itself to Heine. To vary Kraus’ remark and Theodor Lessing’s line: by its founder’s own testimony, in this group a bad humour was inbred, rendering it eine Gruppe, die einen fremden Richter noch braucht, one still in need of another, higher judge.
1960 saw the first publication of Landmann’s work on Jewish humour. Its intent was commemorative and historical, explicit in its awareness that to a great extent only the pieces of the tradition, the many pages of jokes transcribed, remained, but not the way of life through whose centuries the fund of wit had developed.* And yet, on the basis of her collection and drawing on other sources, it seemed possible to imagine that even from the remnants some efflorescence might come, as long as they were studied and taken to heart in the right way, another chapter in the story with a different tone than the earlier, but still resonant with a characteristic sound.
* In particular, see “Der jüdische Witz in der Gegenwart und sein Tod” in the introductory essay in Der jüdische Witz.
Er hatte das Gedächtnis eines gnadlosen Engels, zu jeder Zeit erinnerte er sich; er hatte einfach ein Gedächtnis, keinen Haß, aber eben dies unmenschliche Vermögen, alles aufzubewahren und einen wissen zu lassen, daß er wußte.
— Ingeborg Bachmann, “Unter Mördern und Irren”
Around that same time, Celan’s relations with the German literary world were disfigured by increasing tensions, and his memory of all that had happened added to the distress. Several of his friendships collapsed under the strain of it.
As a long-accumulated resource, humour too has or even is a power of memory, and in these years, so it seems to me, the poetic undertaking, even when its results were hermetic or abstruse, was punctuated by flashes of it. These hinted at other intonations that could then, and still can, relieve the hardships or steal one away from them, for a while. Perhaps the key example: when he moved to invest that most Wagnerian word, “Verjudung,” with a different sound and to apply the term afresh, it suggests mischievous intent and yields ironic effects, some ingredients of an event, doesn’t it?* – In the best case an impartial witness may find that it does. – With wordplay, too, the poet sought to extend the sense of humour a bit further, after the catastrophe.
* See the portrait of this period in his lover’s memoir: Brigitta Eisenreich, Celans Kreidestern, “Erinnertes: Paul Celan,” “›Verjuden‹ (1961-1962).”
Someday time may suffice to test out these and a few other ideas on the terse late “Keine Sandkunst mehr,” published in 1967, and “Port Bou – deutsch?,” composed in July the next year.*
* Concerning the former poem, see the lecture by Giuseppe Bevilacqua, “Celans Keine Sandkunst mehr”; regarding the latter, consult the essay by Jean Bollack, “Celan devant Benjamin en soixante-huit,” as well as the book by Ulisse Dogà, «Port Bou – deutsch?» Paul Celan liest Walter Benjamin.
Provisionally, in conclusion. Myth’s appeal, as with the figure of the Wandering Jew, shows what damage is done by the power of memory when perverted, set against itself and its better alternative as well, a proper awareness of history. Yet the latter may put memory as a power into another quandary: the more it recollects, the less humane it will be, and this consequence may affect the spirit of justice on all scales (recall the old dilemma: summum ius, summa iniuria).
A long tradition of wit, itself a mnemonic force, may assist substantially to amend the others (but without chattering about the matter). Towards this end, it should roam freely, translating, misfitting itself in directions none did foresee or forehear.