An Unsentimental Education

FROM EXILE TO THE INSTITUTE

LAURE ADLER There's something, George Steiner, that your friend Alexis Philonenko mentions in Cahiers de L'Herne: your arm, the deformity, that physical challenge. He talks about it, and suggests it might have been a source of suffering for you all your life. Yet you never talk about it.

GEORGE STEINER It's very difficult for me to look at it objectively, of course. The decisive factor in my life was my mother's genius — she was a great Viennese woman. She spoke several languages: French, Hungarian, Italian, English; she was fiercely proud, but in a completely private way; and she had marvelous self-assurance.

I must have been around three or four — I can't remember exactly, but the moment was life altering. The first few years of my life were very difficult because my arm was more or less attached to my body; the treatments were very painful; I went from one hospital to the next to have it corrected. My mother said to me, "You are so lucky! You'll never have to do your military service!" What she said changed my life. "You are so lucky!" It was amazing that she could say that. And she was right. I was able to go to graduate school two or three years before my peers who had to do their military service.

Imagine: being able to say that to her son! I hate today's therapeutic culture, which uses euphemisms to describe the handicapped: "We're going to deal with this as a social advantage," and so on. That's wrong: it's very difficult, it's a serious problem, but it can also be beneficial. I was raised at a time when we weren't given aspirin or candy. There were shoes with zippers — very easy to put on. "No," my mother said, "you're going to learn how to tie your laces." I can tell you, it was hard. Anyone with two good hands doesn't even think about it, but it's an incredible achievement to be able to tie shoe laces. I yelled, I cried, and after six or seven months I managed to tie my shoes. And my mother said, "You can write with your left hand." I refused. Then she held my other hand behind my back, "You're going to learn to write with your bad hand — yes, you are." And she taught me how. I was able to draw pictures and sketch with my left hand. It was a metaphysics of effort. It was a metaphysics of will, discipline, and especially happiness to see all that as a great privilege; and it continued throughout my life.

I think it also enabled me to understand certain conditions, certain problems, that must be confronted by those with infirmities, problems that human Apollos, those fortunate to have a magnificent body and marvelous health, find difficult to grasp. What are the connections between physical and mental suffering and intellectual effort? We still don't understand this very well. Let's never forget that Beethoven was deaf, Nietzsche had terrible migraines, and Socrates was ugly. It's fascinating to find out what another person has had to overcome. I always ask myself this question when I meet someone: What has that person experienced? What has been his or her victory — or major defeat?

L.A. In Errata you tell how your father, who was born in Vienna and understood very quickly that Nazism was on the rise, left Vienna and moved to Paris with his family. And so you were born in Paris, and one day when you were very young, you witnessed a demonstration where people were shouting, "Kill the Jews!"

G.S. Yes, that was known as the Stavisky affair. It was an obscure scandal but is remembered because the extreme right in France keeps bringing it up. One of the marchers was a Colonel de La Rocque. Today he seems like a rather sinister clown, but he was taken very seriously at the time. I was quite close to the march, near the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, and was running home up rue de la Pompe with my nanny because a small group of demonstrators of the extreme Right was approaching, led by Colonel de La Rocque. "Kill the Jews!" A phrase that would become "Better Hitler than Communism." This was happening in a neighborhood (rue de la Pompe, avenue Paul-Doumer) where there was a large population of Jewish bourgeois. My mother, not because she was afraid, but rather out of respect for old-fashioned conventions, said to my nanny and me, "Oh! lower the blinds." In came my father, who exclaimed, "Raise the blinds." He led me onto our little balcony. I remember the scene vividly: "Kill the Jews! Kill the Jews!" He said to me very calmly, "This is called history, and you must never be afraid." For a child of six, those words were transformative. Since that time, I know what to call history, and if I'm afraid, I'm ashamed; and I try not to be afraid.

It was an enormous advantage for me to know very early on who Hitler was, and that knowledge provided me with me an "unsentimental" education. From the year of my birth, in 1929, my father had predicted with absolute clarity — I have his journals — what was going to happen. Nothing surprised him.

L.A. So your father, who had foreseen what was going to happen in a Europe inflamed by Nazism, then decided to move his family to the United States. How did that come about?

G.S. The French prime minister, Paul Reynaud, had decided at the last minute that the country desperately needed fighter planes, Grummans. My father was sent to New York with some other financial bigwigs to negotiate the purchase of fighter planes for France. When he arrived in New York, something incredible happened. We sometimes forget that New York was a neutral city, completely neutral, with a lot of Nazis there on business, the Swastika pinned on their collars, as well as Nazi bankers also on buying trips or there for financial negotiations. At a Wall Street club a German who had been a close friend of my father's — this man ran the large Siemens company, which still exists — noticed him at a table and had a message sent over to him. My father tore up the note in front of everyone and didn't even acknowledge his friend. He didn't want to listen to him or see him. But his friend waited for him in the men's room, took him by the shoulders, and said, "Listen to me. This very year we're going to go through France like a hot knife through butter. Get your family out of there whatever the cost!" This took place before the fateful Wannsee conference, but already the big German bankers and CEOs knew what was happening from Polish accounts, as well as reports from the Wehrmacht in Poland; they knew that Jews would all be killed. Not how, or by what method, but they knew in principle: the Jews were going to be massacred.

This was 1940, right before the German invasion. Fortunately, my father took the warning very seriously. He asked Paul Reynaud permission for his family — my mother, my sister and me — to join him in the U.S., and Reynaud granted it. But my mother refused:...