Reappraisals (11 page)

CHAPTER III

The Jewish Europe of Manès Sperber

The conventional history of Europe in the twentieth century begins with the collapse of continental empires in the course of World War I. From Lenin’s revolution in 1917 there arose a vision that in time came to seem the only alternative to the descent into Fascism of much of the civilized world. Following the heroic struggles of World War II and the defeat of Fascism, the choice for thinking people seemed to lie between Communism and liberal democracy; but the latter was polluted for many by its imperialist ambitions, by the self-serving character of its democratic proclamations. Only at the end of the century, in our own day, has Communism, too, lost its last shreds of credibility, leaving the field to an uncertain liberalism shorn of confidence and purpose.

That is the history of our century, as it seemed, and seems, to many in its time; and only in retrospect, and slowly, have its deeper and more convoluted patterns and meanings been unraveled and acknowledged, by scholars and participants alike. But there is another history of our era, a “virtual history” of the twentieth century, and it is the story of those men and women who lived through the century and also saw through it, who understood its meaning as it unfolded. There were not many of them. They did not need to wait for 1945, or 1989, to know what had happenedand what it had meant, to see beyond the illusions. For various reasons, they saw across the veil earlier. Most of them are now dead. Some of them died young, paying dearly for their disquieting perspicacity. A strikingly large number of these clear-sighted voyagers through the century were Jews, many from East-Central Europe.

Manès Sperber was one of them. He is not very well known in the English-reading world; he wrote mainly in German, occasionally in French. His major work of fiction,
Like a Tear in the Ocean
, which appeared in 1949, is a very long, semiautobiographical roman à clef and not widely read. Its subject matter is a little like that of the early novels of André Malraux: It dissects the thoughts and the actions of small groups of intellectuals, revolutionaries, and conspirators adrift in the century. Unlike Malraux, however, Sperber was never attracted to “historic personalities” of the Left or the Right. Indeed, the elegiac mood of his book, and its intellectual tone, is more reminiscent of Arthur Koestler in
Darkness at Noon
or Victor Serge in
The Case of Comrade Tulayev
, two other ex-Communists obsessed with their former allegiance.

But Sperber was an influential man in his day. He was a member of that brilliant fellowship of exile in postwar Paris that included Czesław Miłosz, Kot Jelenski, Ignazio Silone, Boris Souvarine, François Fejtö, and Arthur Koestler. From 1946 he held a strategic editorial position at Calmann-Levy, the French publishing house, where he published in French some of the most significant writing from German-speaking Central Europe. He was also, with Koestler, Raymond Aron, Michael Polanyi, Edward Shils, and Stephen Spender, one of the animators of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the 1950s. It has been suggested that he and Koestler drew on their Comintern experience at the Berlin meeting of 1950, when the official justification and description of the Congress for Cultural Freedom was being drawn up. While others discussed and argued interminably, Sperber and Koestler put forward a preprepared text and got it voted through. If so, this would make Sperber one of the founding fathers of cold war liberalism, which is a bit misleading, since he also remained a lifelong friend of the non-Communist left. He even served with Raymond Aron and André Malraux, in 1945, in the latter’s short-lived Ministry of Information, a “ministry of all the talents” intended to assist in the postwar recovery of French cultural and intellectuallife; and he co-wrote, with Koestler and Albert Camus, an influential pamphlet against the death penalty.

Sperber’s memoirs, which were published in German in the 1970s and have now appeared in English, have little to say about all that.
³
They take us from his birth in Austrian Galicia in 1905 to the end of World War II and his decision to settle in Paris, where he stayed until his death in 1984. Even for the period they cover, the memoirs are sketchy and selective. Sperber was an enthusiastic practitioner of Adlerian psychology between the wars, and wrote two books about its founder; but we learn little of this, and nothing at all of his reasons for breaking with Adler and his ideas. This is a pity, since Sperber was deeply and permanently influenced by Adler’s categories: His book is full of sometimes heavy-handed psychological “insights,” describing men whose lives were framed by a commitment to Communism as “suffering from the superpersonal reference compulsion,” digressing into a clinical consideration upon “disactualized memory,” and so on. Sperber even admits to some community of ideas with Wilhelm Reich (another Galician Jew who went to Berlin by way of Vienna); and he concedes that the rabbinical emphasis upon interpretation makes psychology a Jewish science par excellence.

The memoirs suffer a little, too, from Sperber’s need to write them from memory. His early life, as we shall see, hardly lent itself to the peaceful accumulation of a private archive. Sometimes, when at a loss, he recycles material from his novel as though it were a primary source— quoting Doino Faber, his fictional alter ego, as evidence for a contemporary event or attitude. But none of this matters once he gets down to his story, a narrative of the first half of his life told as a tale of five cities.

The first of those cities was Zablotow, an undistinguished shtetl in Galicia on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Here Sperber, raised among impoverished
luftmenschen
who had no visible means of support and lived for the coming of the Messiah, learned to be a Jew. Not only did he study Hebrew and Jewish texts, but he imbibed also the historical essence of Jewish identity, becoming aware of Christian hostility by the time he was four, partaking in and observing the rituals of remembrance and celebration that conflated past and present, distance and proximity. He learned the word
Yerushalayim
, or Jerusalem, before being told the name of his own village; and “I knew the name of Captain Dreyfus before I knew my own.” The pogrom in Kishinev in 1903 and the pogrom in Blois in 1171 formed, from his earliest days, an undifferentiated element in his own sense of identity and vulnerability. A good student, Sperber was expected by his learned father and grandfather to follow in their ways.

World War I tore up Sperber’s world—quite literally, since the Austrian-Russian battles took place in the region of Zablotow—and deposited him, a solitary, frightened adolescent, already rootless, in Vienna. He stayed in Vienna for nine years, forging the love-hate relationship with the place that was so common in his generation. It was during this time that Sperber lost his faith, though not his sense of identity. Like many Jewish adolescents, then and since, he turned for a while to a radical left-wing Zionist movement, Hashomer Hatzair, or the Young Guard, as a sort of halfway house between Judaism and assimilation. In the process, he acquired that curious anticonventional moral fervor borrowed by some of the Zionist youth movements from the pre-1914 German
Wandervogel
clubs: from the echoes of which, Sperber says, he never rid himself completely.

It was in Vienna that he discovered and embraced Alfred Adler and his ideas, but in other ways the Vienna years were for Sperber a time of frustration, a period of “antitheses,” when he was caught between faith and skepticism, community and individual, bond and fracture. Like others, he blamed Vienna for these dilemmas, though he confesses to having embraced the place all the more with each disappointment. In contrast to the novelist Joseph Roth, another Galician Jew, Sperber kept his distance from Austria, the reality and the myth. Roth went further in his search for assimilation, attributing to the defunct monarchy a supercosmopolitanism that would compensate for his own and others’ lost Jewishness, making of Austria-Hungary a place for people without a place. As Roth would observe in
The Emperor’s Tomb
, the true Austria was not the Austro-Germans in Graz or Salzburg; it was the Slavs, the Muslims, and the Jews at the imperial peripheries: Only they bore true allegiance to the crown. And he was right. For the shtetl Jews especially, as Sperber notes, the Emperor Franz Josef I meant more than he did for anyone else. He was the guarantor of their civil rights, their only shield against the coming of hatred and despotism. As Sperber’s own father lamented in 1916, upon hearing of the old emperor’s death, “Austria has died with him. He was a good emperor for us. Now everything will be uncertain! It is a great misfortune for us Jews.” It was.