Franz Baermann Steiner: A Stranger in the World 9781800732711

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FRANZ BAERMANN STEINER

Methodology and History in Anthropology Series Editors: David Parkin, Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford David Gellner, Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford Nayanika Mathur, Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford Recent volumes: Volume 42

Volume 37

Franz Baermann Steiner: A Stranger in the World

Crossing Histories and Ethnographies: Following Colonial Historicities in Timor-Leste

Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon Volume 41

Anthropology and Ethnography Are NOT Equivalent: Reorienting Anthropology for the Future Edited by Irfan Ahmad Volume 40

Search After Method: Sensing, Moving, and Imagining in Anthropological Fieldwork Edited by Julie Laplante, Ari Gandsman and Willow Scobie Volume 39

After Society: Anthropological Trajectories out of Oxford

Edited by Ricardo Roque and Elizabeth G. Traube Volume 36

Engaging Evil: A Moral Anthropology Edited by William C. Olsen and Thomas J. Csordas Volume 35

Medicinal Rule: A Historical Anthropology of Kingship in East and Central Africa Koen Stroeken Volume 34

Who Are ‘We’? Reimagining Alterity and Affinity in Anthropology

Edited by João Pina-Cabral and Glenn Bowman

Edited by Liana Chua and Nayanika Mathur

Volume 38

Expeditionary Anthropology: Teamwork, Travel and the ‘Science of Man’

Total Atheism: Secular Activism and the Politics of Difference in South India Stefan Binder

Volume 33

Edited by Martin Thomas and Amanda Harris

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/methodology-and-history-in-anthropology

FRANZ BAERMANN STEINER A Stranger in the World

Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2022 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2022 Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Adler, Jeremy D., author. | Fardon, Richard, author. Title: Franz Baermann Steiner : a stranger in the world / Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2022. | Series: Methodology and history in anthropology ; Volume 42 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021028824 (print) | LCCN 2021028825 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800732704 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800732711 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Steiner, Franz Baermann, 1909-1952. | Steiner, Franz Baermann, 1909-1952--Influence. | Anthropology--Europe--History-20th century. | Anthropologists--England--Biography. | Poets--England--Biography. | Jewish authors--Biography. Classification: LCC GN21.S775 A74 2022 (print) | LCC GN21.S775 (ebook) | DDC 301.092 [B]--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021028824 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021028825

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-270-4 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-271-1 ebook

CONTENTS

List of Figures vii Acknowledgements ix Introduction. A Brief Life

1

Part I. An Oriental in the West Chapter 1. Beginnings: The Prague German-Jewish Community 9 Chapter 2. Student Days in Prague and Jerusalem

29

Chapter 3. First Ethnological Studies in Vienna and London, and Fieldwork in Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia

42

Chapter 4. The Impact of the Early English Years

61

Chapter 5. The Exile

78

Chapter 6. The Oxford Anthropologist

99

Part II. Orientpolitik, Value and Civilization: The Social Thought Chapter 7. Beyond ‘Culture Circles’: The Field Trip Revisited

121

Chapter 8. Zionism, Political and Cultural Critique

134

Chapter 9. On Slavery

148

Chapter 10. Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard

162

Chapter 11. Labour and Value

172

Chapter 12. Civilization and Taboo

179

Chapter 13. Simmel and Aristotle

191

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Part III. The Poet Anthropologist Chapter 14. Conquests

201

Chapter 15. Kafka in England

216

Chapter 16. The Chief Sociological Principle

226

Chapter 17. Suffering and Value

239

Chapter 18. In Search of the Universal Mathesis 247 References 252 Manuscript Sources 253 F.B.S.’s Unpublished Writings in the Schiller-Nationalmuseum, Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar

253

Unpublished Letters to and about F.B.S. and Memoirs Concerning Him at the Schiller-Nationalmuseum, Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar

255

F.B.S.’s Unpublished Writings and Other Sources in the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford

256

F.B.S.’s Letters to Veza and Elias Canetti, Private Collection, Zürich

256

Letters and Other Written Communications to the Authors

256

Published Sources

257

Selection of F.B.S.’s Published Writings

257

Published Sources Cited

258

Index of Names 275 Index of Subjects 281

FIGURES

Figure 1.1 Suse Steiner and Franz Steiner. Circa 1925. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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Figure 2.1 Suse Steiner, 1932, photographer František Drtikol. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner. 40 Figure 2.2 Franz Steiner after his return from Palestine, 1932, photographer probably František Drtikol. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner. 41 Figure 3.1 Ruthenian farmsteads, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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Figure 3.2 Ruthenian market, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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Figure 3.3 Gypsy homes in Ruthenia, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner. 58 Figure 3.4 Gypsy school, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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Figure 5.1 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky in her living room-cum-studio in Amersham with Veza Canetti, 1940 or shortly after. © Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust 2021.

84

Figure 5.2 Elias Canetti, Grinzing, Vienna, 1936. © Johanna Canetti. 87 Figure 5.3 H.G. Adler after his return from the camps, 1945. © The Estate of H.G. Adler.

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Figures

Figure 6.1 Franz Steiner and Iris Murdoch, Trafalgar Square, autumn 1952, unknown photographer. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

113

Figure 6.2 Iris Murdoch, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

116

Figure 7.1 Ruthenian shepherd, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner. 125 Figure 7.2 Ruthenian pipe player, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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Figure 7.3 Uniate religious procession in Ruthenia, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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Figure 7.4 Gypsy girl in Ruthenia, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner. 129 Figure 7.5 Ruthenian girl, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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Figure 7.6 Orthodox Jewish youth, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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Figure 7.7 Ruthenian women at market, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

132

Figure 17.1 Heinrich and Marta Steiner, Prague, 1938. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

242

Figure 18.1 Franz Steiner, circa 1952, photographer H.G. Adler. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is possible to appreciate Aristotle’s sociological thought much better now than during the last few centuries; and this is very significant, not only for the stage reached in the development of sociological reasoning but generally for our cultural situation. —Franz Steiner on Aristotle’s sociology

Two and a half decades have passed since we embarked on a project to edit and introduce Franz Steiner’s more important anthropological works to English-language readers in two volumes and to contextualize them with a selection of his political, aphoristic and poetic writings. We did so, as we put it then, ‘In the conviction that today’s intellectual climate … is a more auspicious moment for their appreciation’ than that of their composition (1999a/b: x). The reviews welcoming the collections proved our hopes were not misplaced;1 and, as we explain in our Introduction, numerous hands in subsequent years have steadily built an impressive scholarly edifice on the modest new foundations we laid. The two Introductions we wrote for those volumes had been conceived as a single biographical work, and they were published as such in the definitive German-language edition of Steiner’s work.2 So, we were delighted that Marion Berghahn, who took the risk of bringing our original publication into public view, reacted supportively to our intention to reunite the two halves of our English biography, in a revised, corrected and wholly updated form. Although we cannot be sure to have sourced all the latest literature, we are confident that this new version is up-to-date as regards research on Steiner and his circle and marks a decisive step beyond our original thoughts. Our feeling more than two decades ago now feels even more appropriate: Steiner would have recognized with approval the origins of many of the changes in our sociological reasoning and cultural situation that have occurred in the fifty [now seventy] years since he settled in Great Britain and set about transforming himself into an English-speaking

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anthropologist, though we can presume he would have expressed his inimitable doubts about others. It is a conducive moment, therefore, to consider his ideas together and to contextualize them ….

We might have gone further. Our subtitle – adapted from a late poem of Steiner’s that contains the line ‘What a stranger life is in the world’ (2000: 459) – reflects aspects of Steiner’s position as a poet-anthropologist-aphorist that we think bear underlining. Steiner’s stranger- or outsider-hood, in Simmel’s sense, is vital to understanding the circumstances of the insights he brought to mid-twentieth century anthropology. From Goethe’s day in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) down to Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), the figure of the outsider has formed a focal point in Central European thinking, and Steiner would have been cognizant of these strangers, who pay for their marginality with their lives. Moreover, among the favourite poets with whom he identified as a writer were Hölderlin and Trakl, who also lived on the margins. Steiner’s poem ‘To Hölderlin’ replicates the plural marginalities that Steiner experienced, chiefly as a German Jew in Prague and as a refugee in Oxford (2000: 81–82): Homelands remained, the lands of the flights remained, The paths of the flight … … Homelands remained, but who Dared to return home … … The lands of refuge remain, the other lands, Lands, which border and preserve their borders, And their people with limited opinions Seem pacified from long ago. Is it concord? Alas, no. Steiner nested his riven identity within a complex geography defined by the political discord of the longue durée. But if he shaped his alterity in terms of sociopolitical realities, there was also a religious dimension, which was that of the Zionist’s longing for Jerusalem. It is testimony to Steiner’s acceptance of his fissured identity, moreover, that as a Jew in Britain during the war he could devote a poem to an admired German poet: he invokes the poet’s ‘perfect pain’ and

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recalls the hostilities in images such as that of the ‘confused people’ (‘Volk’) and their ‘bleeding joy’. It is an ironic twist that the most sublime German poet, in the hands of a Jewish writer, should become a symbol of Germany’s conscience. As a well-read Prager, Steiner would also have been familiar with the theme of metaphysical homelessness as propounded by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, which could be defined by a distance from society or from God (Harper 1967) and tended to lead to pessimism or nihilism. Steiner grounded his solitude in his Judaism. There is no trace of nihilism in his work. To these complexities should be added those of Heidegger’s ‘uncanniness of being’ (‘Unheimlichkeit des Daseins’) in Being and Time (1949: 189). It is unclear when Steiner first read Heidegger, but the terminus ante quem is June 1950, the date he inscribed in his copy of Being and Time, which has survived in his library. This gives the best definition of Steiner’s existential otherness: ‘The un-homeliness must be understood as the most fundamental phenomenon existentially-ontologically.’ These various streams give an account of how Steiner’s self-understanding developed in the absence of an unequivocally defined national or ethnic identity. At the personal level, Steiner’s writing of poetry conflicts diametrically with the standard view of the poetic subject from Goethe to Celan: instead of the writing ‘self ’, Steiner employs several, differently grounded voices in many poems. Something similar happens in his scholarship. Since Malinowski, it had been customary to treat the anthropological method of participant observation relation as consisting of an observer and the observed, but Steiner prepares us to consider a series of polar complexities, or multiple frames of reference. To explore his origins is to anticipate his goals. Or, to put this another way: not just where he and his ideas came from but what came with them, the radical notion not simply of the individual who is estranged but of the estranged individual as a marked instance of human life as a stranger in the world. On these grounds, we would contest David Mills’s claim, citing Steiner among others, that there is a risk that in ‘focusing too closely on personalities … intellectual genealogies quickly become disciplinary charters’ (2008: 20). Our intention was the converse of this, to reveal a complexity of personal influences that are captured neither by histories of departments nor by boundary-marking exercises of disciplines; to present what João de Pina-Cabral has insightfully dubbed his ‘silenced legacy’ to European anthropology (2020: 210). The range of Steiner’s work by far exceeds the intellectual competence even two authors from different disciplines can bring to bear. We are increasingly struck by Steiner’s insistence, at a time of methodological holism, of the

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importance of the part and its complex adjacencies: its attachment or detachment, inclusion or exclusion, repetition and transformation and so on. His commitment to take so little for granted. We again offer our expressions of gratitude from twenty years ago, particularly conscious that few of those who wrote us personal communications then are any longer able to receive our thanks. That we are able to reflect on Steiner’s life and work at all is thanks, in the first instance, to those without whom his anthropological writings would not have been preserved in a useable fashion: H.G. Adler, as Steiner’s literary executor, preserved Steiner’s papers and devoted himself tirelessly to the promotion of his Nachlaß. Steiner’s close friend Dr Esther Frank typed up an invaluable three-volumed selection of his aphorisms. Laura Bohannan and Paul Bohannan each prepared two essays and one book of Steiner’s for publication. Sadly, one of the books never appeared. Laura Bohannan edited the texts broadly concerned with religion: Taboo, ‘Enslavement and the Early Hebrew Lineage System’ and ‘Chagga Truth’; for his part, Paul Bohannan edited the papers predominantly concerned with political economy: ‘Notes on Comparative Economics’, ‘Towards a Classification of Labour’ and an edition of ‘A Prolegomena to a Comparative Study of the Forms of Slavery’, which was not published in his lifetime. We are grateful to Laura and Paul for their kind encouragement in several transatlantic telephone calls. Alfons Fleischli’s doctoral dissertation provided an invaluable starting point for our study of Steiner’s life and works; he kindly made his correspondence available to us, and even following publication of a new biography by Ulrich van Loyen, we remain indebted to his biographical chapters on Steiner. We received overwhelming support from the then surviving friends and colleagues of Steiner’s Oxford period. Of his three living colleagues at the Institute: Mary Douglas and M.N. Srinivas each wrote memoirs that introduced the two edited volumes, and Mary also spoke to us on several occasions about Franz. Louis Dumont wrote us a moving private letter. Several other of Steiner’s contemporaries at Oxford or in London responded to written or personal enquiries, sometimes at great length: Paul Baxter, David Brokensha, Kenelm Burridge, Anand Chandavarkar, Ian Cunnison, Sir Raymond Firth, Ioan Lewis, John Middleton, Rodney Needham, William Newell, Julian Pitt-Rivers and David Pocock. Iris Murdoch, one of the few readers familiar with his private writings, profoundly encouraged us in our aim to revive interest in the writings of Franz Steiner and particularly championed the

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plan to publish his aphorisms. Thanks to her generosity and that of her husband, John Bayley, we were able to quote extracts from Miss Murdoch’s private journal on Steiner written in 1952–53, which were kindly made available to us by Dame Iris’s official biographer, Peter Conradi, who also provided us with helpful information after the publication of our original volumes, which is included here. Elias Canetti responded to our request to write a memoir on Steiner, published elsewhere, which has proved invaluable. Johanna Canetti kindly provided us with copies of Steiner’s letters to her father and permission to quote from his works as well as an unknown photograph of her father; Sybille Miller-Aichholz generously transcribed for us Steiner’s letters to her; and David Wright kindly lent us Steiner’s letters to him. Michael Hamburger was unfailing in his support of Steiner, both through his translations and his own writings. Mary Donovan thoughtfully shared her personal memories with us, and Franz’s cousin, Lise Seligmann, wrote and talked to us about Franz Steiner and took a constant interest in the publication of his works. Our efforts to promote Steiner’s work in Germany were generously supported by the poet and publisher Michael Krüger and the social scientist and founder of the splendid Geisteswissenschaften page on the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Henning Ritter. We would also like to extend a special word of thanks to Thedel von Wallmoden, publisher of Wallstein Verlag, who took it upon himself to issue a generous three-volumed edition of Steiner’s collected works, thereby for the first time bringing him to the attention of a wider public in the German-speaking world. Franz Baermann Steiner’s Nachlaß has been housed at the Schiller-Nationalmuseum, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, since November 1997. We remain grateful to Herr Jochen Meyer and the late Dr Inge Belke for making these papers available to us and to Herr Ulrich von Bülow for further assisting us in our research. The DLA has been quite exceptional in its support of our work, a fact we are honoured to record. The DLA also mounted a prestigious exhibition in 1998 curated by Dr Marcel Atze, ‘“Ortlose Botschaft”. Der Freundeskreis H.G. Adler, Elias Canetti und Franz Baermann Steiner im englischen Exil’ (‘Placeless Message’), which for the first time drew attention to this ‘circle of friendship’. The exhibition was also shown at important locations in Prague, Vienna and Berlin. The wide-ranging nature of Steiner’s prodigious scholarship would have overcome our flagging attempts to follow his footsteps to an even greater degree without the help of numerous scholars (we

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retain their affiliation at the time): David Arnold – Professor of South Asian History at SOAS; Professor Yehuda Bacon – Bezalel Art School, Jerusalem, for help with a reference on Hugo Bergman; Christian Bartolf – Director of the Gandhi-Informations-Zentrum in Berlin; Matthew Bell – Goethe scholar and historian of eighteenth-century German anthropology at King’s College London; D.C.K. Glass, also at King’s College London – German scholar and bibliographer extraordinary; Professor Sir Ernst Gombrich – formerly of the Warburg Institute, University of London; Linda Greenlick – Chief Librarian of the Jewish Chronicle; Michael Knibb – Samuel Davidson Professor of Old Testament Studies, King’s College London; Jeremy Lawrance – Professor of Spanish, University of Manchester; Mike Morris – Librarian of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology of Oxford University; Robert Pynsent – Professor of Czech Language and Literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies; David Riches – of the University of St. Andrews as an ethnographer of the Arctic and subarctic; J.W. Rogerson – Emeritus Professor of Theology at the University of Sheffield who gave us his views on Steiner’s ‘Hebrew Lineage’ article; Gabor Schabert – freelance scholar and linguist who provided us with an evaluation of Steiner’s unpublished first dissertation, on which we have relied for our assessment; Erhard Schüttpelz – wide-ranging scholar in the social sciences who filled some interesting bibliographical gaps and kept us up-to-date with current developments in Germany; Chris Thornhill – scholar of German social and political theory and sociologist of law, University of Manchester, for whose views on Steiner’s Simmel lectures and German social science we are grateful; Zdeneˇk Vašicˇek – historian of archaeology, political scientist and expert on all things Czech and Slovak; Bernard Wasserstein – President of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies for reading our accounts of Steiner’s Zionism and the relevant texts; Shamoon Zamir – scholar of English and American literature at King’s College London, who helped us with ethnopoetics. Professor David Parkin, then of SOAS University of London saw the link between our interests, brought us together and helped us through the sources at Oxford. Chris Rojek grasped the point of our project quickly and supported it consistently. Marion Berghahn put us in her debt by taking the risk of allowing full rein to our initial ambitions for a two-volume edition of Steiner’s works and subsequently saw the merit of publishing our extensively rewritten and extended introductions together as a freestanding intellectual biography.

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Michael Mack’s doctoral research at the University of Cambridge related Franz Steiner’s work to that of Steiner’s friend Elias Canetti. This has now been published (2001). We were grateful to Michael for his sincere support of this project and for permission to make use of his draft translation of ‘On the Process of Civilization’. His premature death is a profound loss for the field. Nicolas Ziegler, formerly a doctoral student at King’s College London, who wrote a thesis on Steiner’s poetry, was a constant support, too; he kindly made copies of many of Steiner’s letters and unpublished manuscripts for us and also made available two unpublished research papers, which we cite. In rendering extracts from Steiner’s Conquests, Jeremy Adler was helped by the poet Franz Wurm, who checked the translations against the originals and made many suggestions that were gratefully adopted, with the aim of reproducing Steiner’s idiosyncrasies to the maximum extent compatible with English usage. More than twenty years on, our remaining time is in our own hands. In the 1990s, when both in post, we were grateful to our Colleges for granting us periods of sabbatical leave in the academic year 1997–98 that enabled us to complete our research and editing. Grants from the Research Committees of the School of Humanities, King’s College London, and the School of Oriental and African Studies (both of the University of London) allowed us to engage the services of Carol Tully and Lisa Rowland as research assistants and of Christel Ahmad and Mary Warren, without whose help we could not have brought our original editorial project to completion. The intervening years have seen us accumulate further intellectual and practical debts: we renew thanks to our co-workers in this field, Erhard Schüttpelz and Carol Tully, as well as to the late John Middleton for personal letters following the publication of the volumes we edited. Grateful acknowledgement is made of João de PinaCabral (for a detailed reading), Gesa Dane, Chris Hann and Martyn Rady (for pointing us to recent scholarship on Ruthenia and help in understanding the circumstances in the 1930s), Ulrich van Loyen and David Wengrow (for the text we quote explaining the significance of Steiner’s thought for the volume he had completed as co-author just before David Graeber’s premature death). Frances Carey, Chair of the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, provided us with a photograph of Marie-Louise von Motesiczky and Veza Canetti, as well as an image of Marie-Louise von Motesiczky’s painting of Franz Steiner and Elias Canetti, entitled ‘Conversation in the Library’, now at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, Schiller-Nationalmuseum.

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We are most grateful both to Frances Carey, the Chair of the Trust, and to the other Trustees for permission to reproduce these images, and for a generous grant to support reproduction in colour. In order of our encounter with them, Tom Bonnington, Melissa Gannon, Caroline Kuhtz and Sarah Sibley have expertly (and gently) guided us through the editorial and production processes at Berghahn. Over twenty years ago, we acknowledged Eva Adler and Catherine Davies as constant supports. Happily, that circumstance is unchanged. We continue still to learn more than even we expected from the privilege of editing and thinking about Franz Baermann Steiner’s writings. The friendship we formed while doing so has deepened in the intervening years. J.A. and R.F. London 2021

Notes  1. See for instance, Henning Ritter, 2001 Times Literary Supplement 2 March, pp. 30–31; N.J. Allen, 2001 Comparative Criticism 23: 343–47; Aram Yengoyan, 2001, ‘On the Question of Heritage and Hierarchy in British Social Anthropology’, American Anthropologist 104(1): 334–39; Ritchie Robertson, 2000, Journal of European Studies 30(118): 242–44; Anselme Guezo, 1999, Sociologus Neue Folge 49(2): 247–49.   2. 2008, as the second of three volumes, also 2000 and 2009. For the reception of the anthropological writings in the German-speaking world, see among others Sven Hanuschek, 2008, ‘Das Tabu entsteht in Gefahr’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 7 November; Andreas Eckert, 2008, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 28 August; Ulrich van Loyen, 2008, Anthropos, 10 March; Daniel Jütte, 2008, ‘Anthropologe, Zeitdiagnostiker, Zionist’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 9 September; Stefan Ripplinger, 2008, Jungle World, 23 October; Gregor Thuswaldner, 2009, The Modern Language Review, 2 April; Manfred Bauschulte, 2010, Mittelweg, 15 October.

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, ‘Conversation in the Library’, London 1950. © Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust 2021.

INTRODUCTION A BRIEF LIFE

My created heart says so with every beat: Stay on the border … —Conquests, V, ‘The Lonely Man’

Franz Baermann Steiner occupies a unique place in modern social and cultural anthropology. The fact that his singularity was recognized by only a handful of influential contemporaries is attributable to his early death, which occurred – cruelly – just when he had embarked upon his most mature and innovative writings. Working at the confluence of many of the significant theories and methodologies of the twentieth century, in the early post-war years – and especially in the all-too-brief period he enjoyed as a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford from 1950–52 – he had begun to select from among these various currents. At the time of his death, he was developing an unprecedented synthesis in mid-century anthropological thought. Broadly speaking, Steiner’s thinking stakes out a territory between the Jewish Haskalah or Enlightenment, German post-Enlightenment philosophy, modern linguistic thought, Marxism, Central European ethnology, German sociology, British social anthropology and early structuralism. He deploys these resources with a scholarly passion for truth – which for Steiner is never far removed from its Biblical source – allied to an overriding concern for the right to self-determination for non-Western peoples, among whom he includes his own Jewish people. In their equal concern for geopolitics and detailed local ethnography, his writings foreshadow trends in anthropology that were to become apparent only as the twentieth century turned into the twenty-first. In their deep aversion to the imposition of Western values on non-Western peoples, his writings relentlessly expose biases brought by Western reporters to their texts. His work may, indeed, be read as entirely critical, which is how Evans-Pritchard presented Steiner’s lectures on taboo on their posthumous publication, but Steiner’s early deconstruction

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of Western presuppositions cleared the ground for a fundamental defence of the scholarly, political and religious values he held dear. Recognition of his scholarly significance has grown in the now more than twenty years since we edited a two-volume collection of Steiner’s work in English (Steiner 1999a, 1999b). Most tellingly, we have seen the twenty-first century publication in three volumes of his poetry, sociological writings and aphorisms (Steiner 2000, 2008, 2009), amounting to 1,800 pages in total – a substantial oeuvre for someone who published so little in his lifetime. A conference was devoted to Steiner’s work in 2000 immediately after the publication of our original volumes (Adler, Fardon and Tully 2003), and there has been wider interest in his close circle, for instance in the confluence of literature and anthropology in the London writings of Steiner, H.G. Adler and Elias Canetti (J. Adler and Dane 2014). Given the publication of these and other works, including full-length biographies of all three of these friends (Hanuschek 2005; Van Loyen 2011; Filkins 2019), the opportunity to revise our account for publication as a book was particularly welcome, not least since our studies had always felt like a book, and not simply on account of their length. Hence, we have rewritten some parts of our original Introductions, corrected others and added new materials. Our intention remains to set the development of Steiner’s ideas in a biographical context, recognizing Steiner’s affinity with various intellectual schools and pointing towards a synthesis of the ideas that he was beginning to wrest from his massive and extraordinarily wide-ranging scholarship in those two and a half years that he was a lecturer in the Institute of Social Anthropology at Oxford. To appreciate the numerous tensions this synthesis sought to contain, the reader needs to know something about the complexity of Franz Baermann Steiner: poet, aphorist, thinker, ethnologist, anthropological and philosophical theorist, Zionist, political activist, lecturer, friend and mentor. We summarize this briefly here to help orient the reader for our fuller account, some parts of which lead down byways less familiar to historians of anthropology. Born in Prague in the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the young Steiner fully partook in the intellectual ferment that characterized the early part of the twentieth century, just as he was to witness at first hand some of its greatest political cataclysms. His father’s life was shattered by the First World War. His own existence was undermined by the Second World War. Political and intellectual engagement were two of the opposite if ultimately complementary

Introduction3

facets of his life’s work. In the 1930s, he went through an early Marxist phase and subsequently studied at the Hebrew University in Palestine. His early Marxism was thereby tempered with political Zionism, and both these theories were to leave their trace on his anthropology. After completing his degree in linguistics at Prague, he went on to train in the Central European tradition of cultural anthropology at the University of Vienna, where he had the opportunity to study with some of the major exponents of the ‘culture circles’ school that then dominated German-speaking ethnology and was to exercise considerable influence in the United States. At this stage in his career, he specialized in Arctic ethnology. Then, in the mid- to late-1930s, he came to England, largely to study with Malinowski at the London School of Economics. However, he gravitated towards Oxford, where he became a student first of A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and, later, of E.E. Evans-Pritchard. Initially, he continued to concentrate on material culture but reached a turning point in his work around the year 1942. This was perhaps his period of deepest isolation. It was at this time that he started fully to internalize the persecution that his people were experiencing at Nazi hands, and a sense of this suffering appears to have transmuted his thinking. Yet great as the changes clearly were that took place around this time, it is hard to pin them down precisely. His scholarly focus, according to the prevailing mood in England, switched from the Arctic towards Africa, and from ethnology to the study of social institutions. And it was to the institution of slavery, a subject selected as a penance for his people’s suffering, that Steiner now devoted the best years of his life. Many of his deepest thoughts can be traced to this study. He also brought to this area a profound interest in religion, values and epistemology. The project was phenomenally wide in conception and involved Steiner in the comparative study of practically every known society – from Europe to North America, Africa, India and the Far East. Although only a fraction of this learning materialized in his writing, it provided a sociological grounding for all his other work. A project on this scale was doomed from the start; doomed also in its attempt to combine continental comparative method with British particularism. For even in its more specialized British garb, the habitual mode of his thought remained continental in its syncretism. This was to prove one of the many rewarding tensions in Steiner’s writing, the division between universal comparative aspirations and particular, local realities. From Evans-Pritchard himself to Mary Douglas, colleagues valued Steiner for his learning, which in Godfrey Lienhardt’s phrase made

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Steiner ‘an intellectual’s intellectual’. But there was also a less serious side to him. He was an avid sportsman – a great hiker and a skilful boxer (H.G. Adler [1953] 2006: 6). Thanks to his voracious reading – Professor Sir Ernst Gombrich always imagined Steiner as a veritable ‘bookworm’, practically eating his way through the stock at the British Museum (PC) – Steiner developed into a polymath. And his implicit but ever-present sense of universality informs the bewildering variety of projects he eventually worked on. From slavery, he was led to comparative economics, taboo and the theory of truth. In the early post-war years at Oxford, working beside Meyer Fortes, Godfrey Lienhardt, Mary Douglas, Paul and Laura Bohannan, Louis Dumont and M.N. Srinivas, Steiner emerged as a central intellect in that small group of Oxford anthropologists that Stefan Collini has called ‘the power-base from which the science of social structure could be developed as the defining core of the discipline of social anthropology’ (1996: 5). However, in a metonym for his fate, a celebrated picture of the members of the Institute of Social Anthropology at Oxford taken in 1949 (Stocking [1995] 1996: 428) does not include Steiner. The handwritten caption – itself omitted by Stocking – describes him as ‘missing’. Because of his early death, this has until recently been his fate in the historiography of modern British anthropology. He went ‘missing’ and gained scarcely a mention in such standard texts as Kuper’s Anthropology and Anthropologists (1973) and Stocking’s After Tylor ([1995] 1996). Yet had he lived longer, had he undertaken his projected field trip to Tanganyika and had he remained an academic, Steiner would presumably have remained at the centre of the anthropological stage and would have retired, if still at Oxford, only in 1976, aged sixty-seven, six years after Evans-Pritchard. There would be no need to write him back into the picture. He would have written himself into our consciousness by his own endeavours. Like his closest friends at Oxford, including Godfrey Lienhardt, Mary Douglas and Iris Murdoch, he would inevitably have achieved visible recognition, at the very least from the anthropological community but possibly – as was his undoubted ambition – among the wider reading public. Even so, there is enough in his extant writings to suggest that his impact on modern anthropology and anthropologists had already been substantial and that had he lived longer he would have influenced anthropological debates in the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His life and work anticipate several of these later interests, which have informed an emergent European anthropology with intellectual roots that include but are wider than

Introduction5

modern British social anthropology: the switching perspectives of the discipline between insider- and outsider-hood, the blurring of genres in scholarly production, the urge towards transdisciplinary investigative styles and philosophical grounding, and the more explicit acceptance that an author’s positionality has to be seen as something that both enables and slants their scholarly insights. To some degree, Steiner’s outsider status was endemic to other practitioners of the discipline. Like Malinowski, Firth, Schapera and the other ‘foreigners’ who Leach has observed were ‘mainly responsible for the high prestige that was attributed to “British” anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s’ (1984: 11), Steiner ‘assimilated himself into the lifestyle and conventions of Oxbridge academics’ but remained ‘highly ambivalent’ towards his ‘adopted milieu’. Yet Steiner was perhaps even more detached from the ‘British’ school than some of these others. While fully occupied at Oxford, Steiner was also busy on at least three other, quite separate fronts. He was at work on his poetry, which by itself would have sufficed for a life’s work. He was active politically as a Zionist. And he was engaged in wide-ranging discussions with another exile writer, the anthropological outsider and his own close friend, the future Nobel laureate Elias Canetti. In consequence of this complex arc, Steiner’s writing is marked by some very disparate cultural traces. In Marxism and Zionism, it is touched by some of the twentieth century’s most virulent ideologies; yet, like Canetti and Wittgenstein, he was also shaped by the anti-ideological streak in the century’s thought, exemplified by Karl Kraus and his cultural critique. This brings to Steiner’s other work, his aphorisms and the brief essays he wrote in German – as distinct from the anthropology, which he drafted and wrote exclusively in English from as early as 1938 – a wholly different character, closer to the ambit of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School than to Radcliffe-Brown or Evans-Pritchard. Though he may have been acquainted with Adorno’s writing, there is no evidence, however, that he knew Benjamin’s work; he appears to have reached his convergences with them by starting from similar premises and facing a similar situation. Despite the best efforts of Adorno and others, this major, but fragmentary and aphoristic, part of Steiner’s output was not published in the original German until 2009. Our English language selection (Steiner 1999b) was able only to hint at this substratum of concise thought that also informed Steiner’s English writings and accounts, in large measure, for their complexity.

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To grasp Steiner in the round, it must be remembered that at the same time as he was working and writing in English, using scholarly method, logic and argument, which are conventions inimical to the aphoristic mode, Steiner was privately writing a religiously grounded cultural critique in German. This led him into very different territory from that known to his Oxford colleagues. An area bordered by books like Masse und Macht (1960; Crowds and Power 1962), on which Canetti was working at that time, and Adorno and Horkheimer’s contemporaneous Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944; Dialectic of Enlightenment 1972). Yet whereas these latter have long since in differing degrees established themselves in the arena of modern critical debate and from there entered the wider scholarly sphere, Steiner’s contribution, though known to both Canetti and Adorno, had to await a belated discovery. Only when one juxtaposes Steiner’s two styles of production, the English scholarship with the Central European aphorisms, does the full picture of his thought begin to emerge.1

Note   1. Our referencing follows the original catalogue system based on H.G. Adler’s archive of Steiner’s papers, which are here referred to by box numbers, and Steiner’s own reference system of folder numbers and colours. The papers have now been catalogued according to the standard system in use at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (=DLA), Schiller Nationalmuseum, Marbach am Neckar. For details of the current system, and a reconciliation of the two systems, see the note introducing our References.

PART I

An Oriental in the West

Chapter 1

BEGINNINGS THE PRAGUE GERMAN-JEWISH COMMUNITY

There is a childhood, in pieces, sweetened by the cool sun. Three meagre firs in the garden of a limping suburb. Chimney stacks over the quarrelsome lust of blinded windows … —Conquests, II, ‘Memories’

Franz Steiner was born in the Prague suburb of Karlín (Karolinental) – at that time still a separate town – on 12 October 1909. In later years – following the old Jewish custom – he adopted the given name of his paternal grandfather and called himself Franz Baermann Steiner. Among his childhood acquaintances in Karlín was the young H.G. Adler, Steiner’s junior by a year, and the two boys became lifelong friends, sharing as they grew up mutual interests in biology, poetry and the social sciences (J. Adler 1996: 126). They belonged to a small circle of talented children living a stone’s throw from one another. From childhood to adolescence, these youngsters stimulated each other’s development and remained staunchly loyal to one another throughout the historical vicissitudes that overwhelmed them. They included Franz’s cousins, Lise Gross, who later emigrated to Australia, and her sister Lotte, who married the physicist Záboj Harvalík, with whom she removed to the United States. Another cousin was Gerta Weißbach, the wife of the philosopher Joseph Marcus, who later befriended Wittgenstein’s companion, Paul Engelmann, in Jerusalem. These precocious children were born into that small, hot-house community, the German-Jewish minority in Prague from which Kafka had also come just a few years earlier and which contributed so significantly to Central European culture in the first half of the twentieth century. If perhaps not quite comparable to Wittgenstein’s Vienna (Janik and Toulmin 1973), Kafka’s Prague was certainly one of the most intellectually lively of Central Europe’s cities, and Steiner’s circle seemed set to enrich Prague’s varied if fragile culture. Commenting on

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the city’s character in later life, Steiner summed up some of Prague’s paradoxes: ‘A town of narrow aspirations and terrifying historicity. Avignon and Königsberg in one. Or Toledo and Breslau.’ Steiner was perhaps the first to make the now common comparison between Prague and Dublin, major provincial centres that produced two of the century’s major writers, Kafka and Joyce: Modern German literature is unthinkable without the Prague literary circles. After all, the greatest poet and the greatest prose writer that German literature has produced in the first half of this century come from Prague: Rilke and Kafka. And the smaller figures clustered around them in manifold combinations, explaining and to a modest extent determining the appearance of the greater ones. The dominant position of Prague in this literary epoch has never been denied – because nobody had the courage to state the fact. But it is true none the less. There is only one parallel in the history of literature: the position of Dublin. Dublin was also a contemporary provincial capital and the centre of an oppressed country. In its relations to London, as in other things, Dublin recalls Prague. Here too there was a long-prepared flowering which lasted only two decades, and which is sharply distinct from the literary decay evident in English literature itself. Joyce, an exile like Rilke; Kafka as lonely as Synge and as local as Yeats … . (Steiner 1988: 57)

In the century of the outsider, the periphery became the centre – not least in the case of the Jewish migrants who moved from the Bohemian villages and small towns to Prague (Kieval 1988: 10). As we shall see, reflections on circles, colonialism, marginality and repression colour much of Steiner’s thought. Just as it is common to locate the origin of Kafka’s sense of alienation in his experience as a Prague German Jew, cut off both from his heritage in the past and the cultural centres of the present, it is helpful to view Steiner’s later life in terms of origins that are broadly similar to Kafka’s. After the Second World War, he himself implicitly drew the comparison in his poem ‘Kafka in England’, which grafts his thoughts about the exile’s isolation after Belsen onto an image of Kafka’s mysterious genius (Chapter 15). Steiner, following Kafka, turned his origins into his work by reflecting them, and so it will be helpful to review them in some detail. Around the time of Steiner’s childhood, Prague was celebrated by many writers and poets in the quasi-mythical terms that have since become captured in the watchword Praga magica (Ripellino 1994). Prague German writers emphasized the fantastic, the bizarre and the ghostly as central to their experience of the town. In this spirit, the Prague writer Paul Kornfeld called Prague a ‘metaphysical madhouse’ (Serke 1987: 284). Less wittily but no less evocatively, in his article on ‘German Writers from Prague’ published in the journal Wir

Beginnings11

(We) in 1906, Oskar Wiener, commenting on the destruction of the old Jewish quarters and the rebuilding of the city, described the town as follows: Prague, that unspeakably beautiful but dissolute castle on the Vltava! Old Prague is dying but a new, sober Prague is emerging from massive stones among the rubble. The place we loved which provided a homeland for all our dreams must die. We wander like disinherited spirits among the streets and mourn … . (Quoted by H.G. Adler 1976: 79)

Figure 1.1 Suse Steiner and Franz Steiner. Circa 1925. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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In 1919, introducing his anthology Deutsche Dichter aus Prag (German Poets from Prague), Wiener represented Prague once again in these terms, calling it ‘this city of eccentrics and visionary dreamers, this restless heart of Central Europe …’ (Wiener 1919: 5). From Bismarck – so it has been said, though the source seems elusive – to André Breton, the centrality of this apparently marginal city has been recognized from viewpoints as different as the military and the cultural (Serke 1987: 38, 377), and at several times during Steiner’s own lifetime, it had cause to be seen as lying at the heart of Europe. The perception lends centrality to Steiner’s own experience, too. Although it has recently been argued that the basic theme of Prague German Jewish literature in the interwar period was ‘the definition of personal identity and the situating of the individual in the world’ (Becher et al. 2017: 220), this is hardly true of Steiner and his friends, who were never so inward-looking. Nor did they share the popular escapist trend to lose themselves in historical subjects (Becher et al. 2017: 220). In this respect, Steiner and Adler were far closer to the Czech avant-garde. Yet there is another strand to the Prague intellectual world, namely its internationalism, which provided a suitable starting point for Steiner and Adler’s manifold interests (Becher et al. 2017: 412). At the end of the First World War, Prague became the capital of the vibrant new Czechoslovak Republic, under its cultured president, T.G. Masaryk (Hoensch 1987: 416–20). The proclamation of the republic marked the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and symbolized a new European order. The economic and industrial strength of the new country placed Czechoslovakia among the most advanced European states; in the late nineteenth century it grew into Austria-Hungary’s leading industrial region (Polišenský [1947] 1991: 100), and in 1918 it possessed three-fifths of its industrial capacity (Sayer 1998: 163). The economic rise was accompanied by an equally significant cultural development (Demetz 1997: 348–53; 394f.). Indeed, political modernization and cultural modernism were interconnected thanks to Masaryk’s policy of shaping a forward-looking polity by encouraging an aesthetic revival (Sayer 1998: 155f.), beginning with the renovation of the Prague Castle by a contemporary architect. Many telling stylistic details (like the obelisk before St. Vitus’s Cathedral) add a distinctly modern but discreet elegance to the ancient centre of Bohemian power. By virtue of their closeness to Masaryk, many Czech intellectuals, like the brothers Cˇapek, were to play a leading role in this young country. The arts flourished. Czechs like the composer Janácˇek and the novelist Hašek

Beginnings13

made international reputations. They were not isolated figures. Following the cultural surge of the late nineteenth century, all the arts continued to enjoy an extraordinary boom to an extent that has yet to be fully appreciated outside Czechoslovakia. Poetry, prose, drama, theatre, cabaret, music, painting, sculpture, photography, film, architecture, book-making and graphic design all produced major achievements. German-language culture likewise enjoyed a brief efflorescence that brought forth a host of significant writers in the generations just before Steiner and in his own age group. Max Brod and others have analysed the writing of ‘the Prague School’ (1966; Hoffmann 1997), and Jürgen Serke’s generous reassessment of Prague German literature treats almost fifty German-speaking writers from Bohemia, including Steiner himself (Serke 1987: 300–13). This was a coffee-house culture. A German contemporary of Steiner’s, Hermann Kesten, observed the scene, which may evoke nostalgia in us, with a more scornful eye: ‘The entire Prague School of writers is telephonically connected with God himself, they’re all coffee-house artists fitted out with mystical symbols of the world. Most of the objects of their desires also sit in the coffee-houses …’ (Serke 1987: 377). It requires little effort to imagine the young Steiner in this context. The common perception of Prague as being somehow central to Europe was, accordingly, very much a fact of life in his day, both culturally and politically. But this was a doomed world. After the Republic’s first ten peaceful years, stability was undermined (Polišenský [1947] 1991: 100), there were frequent political troubles and economic problems (see e.g. Sayer 1998: 164) and the imbalance between Czech and German aspirations, inbuilt into the new country from the start by Masaryk’s unwise marginalization of the German language, are said to have contributed to its collapse, although in fact the collapse is attributable less to Czechoslovakia’s supposed weaknesses than to its neighbours’ lack of principle. When the Nazis rose to power in 1933, Prague became a brief haven for many German nationals, including Bertolt Brecht and Heinrich Mann (Becher 1989), and Thomas Mann took out Czech citizenship in 1936, but the arrival of the German exiles heralded the end of an era; the Sudeten Germans in the Bohemian Lands – a group quite distinct from the Prague German Jews, which had developed its own national identity via its opposition to the new Republic (Hoensch 1987: 423) – desired incorporation into a Reich that was eager for Czechoslovakia’s territory and industrial power; after Czechoslovakia had existed independently for less than twenty years, it was broken up in 1938.

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The kind of unalloyed idealization often associated with the perception of Prague as a magical city, as in the quoted passage from Oskar Wiener, does not stand up to scrutiny. The American scholar Peter Demetz, who was born (in 1922) and bred in Prague, has often stressed Prague’s other, darker, violent side, a face of the city that was also to become Steiner’s Prague. Demetz is at pains to point out that the different groups dominating Prague’s cultural, social and political landscape – namely the Germans, the Czechs and the Jews – did not live harmoniously but competitively, both in practical day-to-day matters and at a deeper, structural level, as is evident even in their choice of professions and dwelling places in the city (1982: 278). Demetz also stresses the massive failures in Prague history. A comparative account would need to contextualize these events on a broader European canvas in which comparable violence was the norm at similar intervals: ‘Behind the ideal of a Golden Prague hide the people’s uprisings, the pogroms, the riots, the demonstrations, the arson attacks, the fights and plunderings of 1844, 1848, 1863, 1897, 1904, 1905, 1920, 1921 …’ (Demetz 1982: 278). The atrocities go back beyond the expatriation of all Protestants after the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, extend into the eighteenth century, and down to our own time, with the genocide perpetrated on Bohemian territory from 1940 to 1945, and the subsequent forcible expatriation of all Germans in 1945 to 1946 – these last two actions effectively robbing the city of two key groups, Germans and Jews, which formed the Prague Steiner knew. The consequences of the Munich Agreement, which determined the shape of the next fifty years in Europe, spelled the end of the Republic and, doing so, also decided Steiner’s fate. On 14–15 March 1939, Bohemia and Moravia were turned into a ‘Protectorate’. When Britain sold out Czechoslovakia to Hitler in vain in a bid for peace, the betrayal strengthened Hitler’s hold over Europe and prepared the end of the world into which Steiner had been born. Yet notwithstanding his own experience of these terrors, Demetz is also keen to point out the moments at which ‘multi-ethnicity’ and the ideal of a polyglot ‘Bohemian community’ in a peaceful homeland promoted by the logician and philosopher Bernard Bolzano (Demetz 1997: 275) proved to some small degree successful in Prague. Whilst not subscribing to the idealization of ‘Golden Prague’, he yet finds much to cherish. For Demetz, the Prague that Steiner inhabited was an essentially liberal community: There were many moments when Prague societies lived with each other, or at least next to each other, and the names of those who attempted to guide different people to tolerance and sympathy with

Beginnings15

each other deserve new respect today, whether they are famous or known only to the happy few. I am thinking of the philosopher Bernard Bolzano, of President T.G. Masaryk, his disciple Emanuel Rádl, and the German ministers who served Masaryk’s republic loyally in the shared government of 1926–38. I also think of Kafka’s onetime friend Milena Jesenská … . (Demetz 1997: xiif.)

Many of these conflicting forces apparent in Prague (and the interpretation of Prague) make themselves felt in Steiner’s thought: the city’s dominant sense of its multi-ethnic identity, so many of its writers’ predilection for myth and fantasy, but also the ideal of liberal humanism that Demetz himself represents and that formed such a strong element in Steiner’s own upbringing. The picture is further enriched by Steiner’s Judaism. Some comment on the German-speaking Jewish community in Prague is in order, since it is to this social group that a central tension in Steiner’s thought, which runs between Western and non-Western values, can be traced. At the turn of the century, it has been claimed that Jews made up as much as 8 per cent of the entire Bohemian population (Haumann 1990: 159). While this seems unlikely, even without allowing for under-registration of Jews, the proportion of Jews in Prague in the late nineteenth century did approach such a figure. The distinctive German Jewish community in Prague shared and shaped its city’s history in its own peculiar way, both by its perennial difference from its surrounds and by its considerable size. However, because identity had political implications, some caution in interpreting official figures for the ethnic breakdown of Prague’s population is necessary. Fewer citizens registered as Jews (rather than Germans or Czechs) under the Monarchy, while under the Republic more German speakers elected to register as Czechs (H.G. Adler 1976: 69; Rybár 1991b: 77). In 1880, the Prague population was thought to comprise 228,000 Czechs and 42,000 Germans; of these two groups over 20,500 were Jews. By 1921, when Steiner was twelve, largely thanks to migration from the smaller towns and the countryside, the Jewish population reached between 27,000 and 31,500, depending on the figures chosen, albeit both sets were presumably boosted in part by increased registrations. Although their numbers continued to grow, Jews subsequently declined as a proportion of Prague’s population thanks to burgeoning Czech numbers: in 1930, when Steiner was twenty-one, the Czech population had risen steeply to 806,000. German-speakers apparently remained at their 1880 level, but the Jewish population had grown steadily to reach 30–35,000, including the inner suburbs (Kieval 1988: 14).

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Thus, the Jewish community of Prague grew numerically by at least half over a fifty-year period but declined proportionally by the same factor. Though they endured expulsions, persecution, harassment and pogroms, Prague’s Jews entered the early years of the new Republic as a comparatively large if vulnerable social group, situated awkwardly between an ancient faith, Rabbinic law, religious rituals, and Hebrew and Yiddish on the one hand, and modernization, assimilation, civil state, modern Kultur and the Czech and German languages on the other. Kafka graphically defined the conflicting worlds that a Jewish writer in Prague felt compelled to bridge. He describes the ‘terrible inner situation’ of his generation, noting that most of the Jews who began to write in German ‘wanted to break away from Judaism, usually with the unclear agreement of their elders …; their hind legs still glued to the Judaism of their fathers while their front legs found nothing to stand on. The resulting despair was their inspiration’ (Kafka 1958: 337). These oppositions also proved an inspiration for Steiner. As H.G. Adler’s biographer Peter Filkins observes, Adler and Steiner were indebted to their heritage but were keen to establish their own position in the field of literature and scholarship (Filkins 2019: 37). Both strove to break new ground. For his part, in his mature thought, Steiner learned to generalize the local tensions between the Jewish, Czech and German peoples and identities into the tools for an intellectual analysis of modernity and, on a political level, into geopolitical principles. Today the Jewish world from which Steiner came has vanished. As we wander through Prague’s old Jewish quarter, we can perhaps imagine the bustling life that must once have filled its streets and the half a dozen synagogues that survive. The striking Old-New Synagogue, the oldest synagogue in Europe, with its ascetic front bears mute witness to seven centuries of Jewish history. In the old Jewish cemetery, the sunken tombstones loom before us like petrified ghosts. We may try to rediscover the past in the Prague Jewish Museum, where a belated piety pays homage to ritual – as if somehow a value could be attached to Torah rolls outside their use, and in the absence of the people to whom they had belonged. Perhaps we will also exercise our imagination and recall figures like the great sixteenth-century Rabbi Löw (Yehuda Liwa ben Bezalel) and the legends that surround his name. When he bravely confronted the Emperor Rudolph II on Charles Bridge, the faeces hurled at him in abuse turned to flowers. Most famously, we may recall the story of the clay Golem the Rabbi is said to have created, which formed an active part of the popular imagination in Steiner’s time – and does

Beginnings17

again today. Gustav Meyrink’s celebrated novel, Der Golem, appeared in 1915 when Steiner was six years old and was turned into a successful film with Paul Wegener in the lead in 1920. In the last year of his life, Steiner – still connecting with this world – bought a copy of the original edition. In the Prague of his day, clearly one could still witness a living Jewish community that had its roots in the Middle Ages and observe the immediate contiguity of ancient Jewish legend and secular modernity. That is no longer possible. Today even the aura that the ancient places and legends once exuded seems to have dispersed. The destruction of European Jewry also destroyed the relations between contemporary Prague and the Jewish past. As a scholar in England, Steiner bore conscious witness to this destruction. His mature scholarship, we shall see, derived in part from his need to respond to the convulsions that destroyed his people. In rescuing the values that their world enshrined, he returned to the cultural streams that had sustained them but been poisoned in his homeland. According to legend, Prague was built with stones removed from the Second Temple after its destruction by the Romans in AD 70. As to the facts, Jews are attested in Bohemia as early as the tenth century and were given their earliest privileges in Moravia in 1254 (Rybár 1991a: 26). Their history in Bohemia and Moravia is one of repeated persecutions, not least during the Enlightenment, which also saw the beginnings of Jewish emancipation, and this tension between repression and self-determination is often reflected in Steiner’s aphorisms. The Jewish population in the Prague Ghetto reached its greatest extent in the early eighteenth century, with around 12,000 inhabitants who worked both inside and outwith the Ghetto (Rybár 1991b: 53ff.). However, the Enlightenment was slow to affect Prague Jews; after the Prussian occupation of Prague in 1744, the Jews were accused of collaborating with the enemy, and the Ghetto was plundered. Subsequently, Empress Maria Theresa issued an imperial edict expelling them from the city, and they left in 1745. As a concession, they were permitted to remain ‘within two hours’ of Prague. They were readmitted in August 1748, not least thanks to the intercession of the local merchants (Rybár 1991b: 57). When Maria Theresa’s son Joseph II came to the throne in 1780, he initiated a period of reform. The overdue political improvements that he introduced in Austria-Hungary, such as the abolition of serfdom, also heralded the start of Jewish emancipation in Bohemia and Moravia. The Tolerance Patent of 1781 (Kieval 1988: 5), and the socalled System Patent of 1791, introduced limited religious freedom for Jews, who were tolerated as a minority, albeit without full civil

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rights. Discriminatory legislation still shackled them, like the limitation on marriage, which permitted only oldest sons to found a family; this grim practice was not abolished until 1847. However, Jews were freed from wearing their degrading yellow badge – reintroduced as a yellow star by the Nazis 150 years later – and were granted their first civil liberties, such as the permission to attend public schools and matriculate at the university. They were also increasingly permitted to reside outside the Ghetto walls. The economic reforms initiated in the Josephine period also played a major part in shaping the future life of Prague. It was now that the factories were founded in the city, such as those for printed cloth, which a century later were to give families like the Steiners and the Adlers their livelihood. The Enlightenment also introduced important internal changes to Jewish belief, and it needs to be stressed that the Jewish community in the Josephine period and after was by no means homogenous. Three different strands of belief now offered themselves to Prague Jews (Demetz 1997: 281f.), and Steiner was heir to each: the first, traditional orthodoxy; the second, the Frankist path, a mystical way that followed the Kabbalist false Messiah Sabbatai S.evi; and the third, the direction proposed by Moses Mendelssohn, the Enlightenment thinker who inaugurated Jewish emancipation. Although Steiner was initially cut off from each of these lines, his own, reinvented Judaism oscillates between Rabbinic Law, Kabbalism and rationalism. Intriguingly, it has been argued that his form of Judaism represented an ‘exodus’ from the aporia of modern civilization (Arnason 2019: 420). Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah and the various Josephine changes created the political, legal, religious and social preconditions for the process of assimilation that now set in during the nineteenth century and that eventually released an unprecedented wealth of talent – scholarly, scientific and artistic, not to mention entrepreneurial skills – into the gradually modernizing yet declining world of Austria-Hungary. A watershed came in 1848, when the proclamation of the first Austrian basic law introduced equality; in 1852, Jews were allowed to leave the Ghetto, and they subsequently achieved full citizenship rights in 1867 (Haumann 1990: 159). However, because at first the Jews tended to adopt German and not Czech as their language, their assimilation into the local community met with resistance; this was aggravated by the fact of the upper-class Prague Jews being disproportionately involved in the rapid modernization that was turning Bohemia into the most advanced region in the Monarchy. Traditional anti-Jewish opinion was exacerbated by a class struggle (Haumann 1990: 159). The

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situation was compounded further by the fact that just as the Jews were entering the civic arena, the Czechs themselves were asserting their identity against the German speakers in Bohemia and Moravia and were setting out on their own path towards self-determination. Enlightenment emancipation – contrary to the Enlightenment’s optimistic expectations – entailed a conflict between contemporaneously emancipating groups. This paradox was never fully resolved, as Steiner himself was to recognize more astutely than most. The late nineteenth century witnessed numerous assaults on the Jews, culminating in the notorious case of an alleged ritual murder – the Hilsner affair (Kieval 1988: 73–74, 79) – in 1899. An economic and cultural divide opened between the more successful, Germanspeaking Jews and their poorer brethren, who opted for the Czech language. This resulted in a dilemma. The former, even when tolerated by German-speakers, were often opposed by the Czechs, while the latter generally remained unacceptable to both the other groups. This division contributed to a serious loss of shared Jewish identity, out of which two new options emerged that both shaped Steiner. On the one hand, Czech social democracy preached toleration; and, on the other, Martin Buber’s ideas took root among the Prague Zionists, emphasizing dialogue, mediation and spiritual renewal. Steiner was deeply influenced by these patterns. His paternal family came from Tachov in Western Bohemia. His mother’s family was from Prague. His father fought in the First World War and never fully recovered from his experiences, which included fighting on the notorious Italian Isonzo front. When Franz was three years old, his sister Suse was born, by all accounts a talented but difficult child. In a series of photographs of Suse in her teens, taken by the Czech avantgarde photographer František Drtikol, she appears as an attractive, thoughtful, wilful girl (Figures 1.1 and 2.1, Chapter 2). Steiner doted on her. When she succumbed to an infection and suddenly died in 1932, he was heartbroken. Her death was the first of many blows that were to give his life an ultimately tragic pattern. He regularly spoke about Suse to his closest friends, even late in life, and a large number of photographs of her survive in his estate. Shortly after Steiner’s own, equally sudden death, Iris Murdoch poignantly recalled Suse in her diary: ‘20th anniversary of Franz’s sister. Agony!’ (Ms 1952–53: 3). Steiner’s family spoke German at home, although they could also speak Czech, and were fully assimilated to the bourgeois milieu typical of Prague Jewry. His parents did not practise Judaism, but H.G. Adler records that Franz first made acquaintance with Judaism

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at school, although we have not found any hard evidence for a specifically Jewish education at his school around 1920. His education in ‘classical’ languages would then have included Hebrew but not as part of a specifically Jewish education. By trade, his father was a small businessman. In the mid-1920s, he bought a shop in the centre of Prague selling waxed cloth, leather goods and linoleum. Later he moved to Dlouhá ulice, and from autumn 1934 the family lived on the top floor of the Sušický Palais. This provided them with a relatively solid financial foundation, enough to pay for Franz to travel, to enjoy a university education and to begin academic life as a freelance scholar. It was only in exile that Steiner began to suffer hardship. As to his views, his father tended towards atheism. Politically, he was a social democrat. By all accounts, he and his wife were an educated, well-read and humane couple. In later life, his father became an ideal figure for Steiner. Writing to Paul Bruell in 1947, he praises his father’s ‘strict logic and boundless shyness’ (Fleischli 1970: 9). Steiner’s finest, most moving poem, ‘Prayer in the Garden’, which is written as a meditation on the destruction of European Jewry, commemorates the birthday of his father and remembers the man as ‘the noblest earthly presence ever shown to me’ (Steiner 1992: 83). Steiner’s liberal family background enabled him to develop those interests that were to shape his career at a relatively early stage in his life. His childhood passion for reading never left him. In his autobiographical poem Eroberungen (Conquests, Steiner 1999b: 249–66), reading is one of the earliest memories he recalls: On either side of an open book The hours of the day fell away. (Conquests, II, ‘Memories’, l.14f.) Among the books that the young Steiner devoured, travel writing had a prominent place, including works by Nansen and Sven Hedin, and it is presumably to this early childhood interest that the first stirrings of his anthropological interests can be traced. In the Conquests, he recalls Robinson Crusoe, a figure who was to accompany Steiner throughout his life and provide him with a point of reference in his personal mythology, singling out Crusoe’s experience of solitude, his merging with his new environment, and what Steiner takes to be the growth of Crusoe’s ‘piety’: He had a lot to tell: How, many years ago, he had been hurled

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By black storms onto a land he feared That then became his own. How he grew together with the wilderness. ‘That feathered tree, for example, Is a proven friend. We both love the raging monkey in the branches.’ And he sighed, the sufferer: ‘I did not sail in vain. You make me pious.’ (Conquests, II, ‘Memories’, l.18ff.) Steiner does not offer an exact reproduction of Robinson Crusoe but transforms the story as a living myth. The youthful fascination with distant places and vegetation recorded here prefigures the later Steiner’s botanical and anthropological concerns. His emphasis on Robinson Crusoe’s piety foreshadows the subsequent closeness between Steiner’s religious thought and his scholarship. Indeed, Defoe’s novel sets out a leading idea in Steiner’s work. Steiner’s mature relativization of Western ideas in his aphorisms and anthropology is indebted to views he found expressed in literary accounts of non-Western civilizations which go back to Montaigne. Thus, in the chapter entitled ‘I See the Shore Spread with Bones’, Crusoe reflects on the barbarism of the cannibals and withholds condemnation of their non-Christian behaviour when he asks himself: What authority or call I had to pretend to be judge and executioner upon these men as criminals, whom Heaven had thought fit for so many ages to suffer unpunished to go on, and to be, as it were, the executioners of His judgements one upon another. … When I had considered this a little, it followed necessarily that I was certainly in the wrong in it; that these people were not murderers in the sense that I had before condemned them in my thoughts; any more than those Christians were murderers, who often put to death the prisoners taken in battle; or more frequently, upon many occasions, put whole troops of men to the sword, without giving quarter, though they may threw down their arms and submit. (Defoe [1719] 1994: 168f.)

The ‘piety’ that Steiner’s poem finds exemplified in Defoe’s narrative is no simple Christian faith – for that could be learned at home. What Crusoe has brought back from the ‘wilderness’ – and presumably what Steiner began to learn from Defoe in childhood – is a respect for values that lie beyond his own experience: the cannibals have no Christian values; their actions must be judged according to a different framework. Besides recognizing the validity inherent

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in native lore, Defoe affords the intellectual correlative a hearing: namely that Christian values may look different from the cannibal’s viewpoint. It is impossible to overlook the irony with which Defoe presents the virtuous Christians who ‘often put to death in battle’ and ‘give no quarter’ even though their opponents ‘may threw [sic] down their arms and submit’. Defoe’s contrasting of native with Christian virtue is one of the ultimate lessons that his hero brings back from the island. This attitude, as will be seen shortly, subsequently entered Steiner’s anthropological writing, notably Taboo, in his own characteristic technique: the reciprocal subordination of opposite values. In Steiner’s Taboo, just as native ideas are analysed in a Western critique, Western ideas undergo an implicit critique in the light of native practice. There are various possible sources for this technique, which Steiner will have encountered at different points in his career. Views similar to those Steiner met in Robinson Crusoe also figure in another favourite of his, Moby Dick. Steiner’s copy of Moby Dick, which bears his signature and the date 1941, has many reading marks, among them one against the penultimate paragraph of Chapter X, ‘A Bosom Friend’. The marked passage contains the following rumination: I was a good Christian: born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? Thought I … And what is the will of God? Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent little idol. (Melville [1851] 1938: 73)

The importance Steiner attached to Moby Dick can perhaps be seen from his lending his own copy to Mary Douglas after the War. Like Defoe, Melville recognizes the comparability of Christian and idolatrous practices. Steiner’s earliest reading, including Robinson Crusoe, reinforced by later books, clearly provided his mature work with a significant axis, even though it was to take quite some time for his religious views to emerge and for the technique of reciprocal subordination to develop into a highly effective intellectual tool. Before that came about, science and Marxism provided his world with its chief spiritual content. Another formative experience of Steiner’s childhood was his fascination with biology. Botany, zoology and entomology became lifelong interests. In the Conquests, he recalls his botanizing as follows:

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Wandering breathless along the scorched edge of the field: The green butterfly-net fluttering above his head. And every butterfly carried on its outstretched wings Coloured marks, the warm eyes of life. (Conquests, II, ‘Memories’, l.43ff.) The childish delight at the chase, so charmingly evoked in these lines, was backed up by a growing scientific interest. His first biographer Alfons Fleischli notes that Steiner spent his summer holidays studying caterpillars, butterflies, moths, beetles and other insects. In botany, he was particularly interested in mosses and lichens (Fleischli 1970: 11). Biology was eventually to become Steiner’s preferred subject of study at the university, but his poor eyesight prevented him from using a microscope and forced him to look elsewhere when deciding on a career. In 1920, Steiner entered the German State Gymnasium in Šteˇpánská Street in the centre of Prague. It had earlier been attended by such well-known writers as Max Brod and Franz Werfel. As Steiner later noted, many of the students in the generation before him became members of the celebrated Prague Circle of writers around Kafka and Brod (2009: 54). The school was noted for the high-flying intellectual flair of its pupils (Van Loyen 2011: 51–52). In 1925, it merged with the German State Gymnasium in Jindrˇišká Street. Attending the same class was Wolf Salus, son of the well-known Prague German poet Hugo Salus. Franz and Wolf Salus became firm friends. Hugo Salus had been a friend and mentor of Rilke, and an influence on Rilke’s early poetry, and one senses that through his early friendship with Wolf Salus, himself an aspiring poet (Brod 1966: 71–73), Steiner was beginning to gain entry to the literary world, which was subsequently such an important part of his life. However, literature did not immediately play a role in Steiner’s life at school. In the early 1920s, he joined a group of Wandervögel – the popular German youth movement, broadly comparable to Baden Powell’s Boy Scouts, though lacking the formal organization of the international scouting movement. H.G. Adler provided a vivid portrayal of the boys’ activities in his novel Panorama ([1968] 2011: 134–77). What distinguished the merry band of ‘Wanderers’ was its disapproval of the formalities of the British Boy Scouts and the nationalism of their German coevals (2011: 143): No one wants to know much about other organizations, on the one hand because they are too much like the military and practice battle charges, and on the other because they are too middle-class and seek

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out the approval of adults, some also being too nationalistic, others too internationalist, others belonging to some church, still others being appendages of political parties that are always yelling out some party slogan, real Wanderers not wanting to have anything to do with politics …

Its non-denominationalism distinguished this band of youths from the German Wandervögel, which were such a hotbed of nationalistic ideas. The particular brand of ideas that Steiner now embraced is described further by H.G. Adler in his ‘Letter to Dr Rabin’. (Chaim Rabin, a linguist and a Zionist of great learning, was a colleague of Steiner’s in Oxford, and after Steiner’s death, by which time Rabin had accepted a post at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, H.G. Adler took the opportunity of an enquiry by Rabin to write a long biographical assessment of his friend.) Commenting on Steiner’s adoption of the Wandervögel’s youthful ideals, Adler writes: He took the ideals very seriously and developed them according to his own ideas and took them to an extreme. A ‘Natural Life’ was what he wanted. He combined the opportunities that the hiking and summer camps gave him with his own scientific interests and so became a quite idiosyncratic member of the group. His social and socialist enthusiasms, which he carefully guarded from sentimentality, decided his life and his future. He even went so far as to reject all industrial products. He wanted to make his own equipment out of natural produce and almost went over to giving up paper and writing entirely on the bark taken from birch trees. (H.G. Adler Ms 1953: 3r., 2006: 11–12)

Steiner’s love of country walking and hiking dates to this period and continued into his time in England. Poems like ‘Dream of Loch Lomond’ (Steiner 1992: 5) reflect his love of the countryside, and his English colleagues knew Steiner from this side, too. Ian Cunnison first met him when rambling in the Lake District, and their conversation then convinced Cunnison to study anthropology at Oxford (Cunnison: PC). However, the ideals that Steiner developed as a Pfadfinder could not find fulfilment within the movement itself, and he left it in 1926 and joined the Roter Studentenbund (Red Student Union). He later joined another left-wing organization, though it is not clear which. It may have been the Kommunistische Jugend (Communist Youth Organization), or it may have been the Communist Party itself. Years later in a letter to the editor and critic Rudolf Hartung, in one of his most absorbing correspondences, Steiner recalled the period of his political activity ‘when I ran from meeting to meeting and knew Marx and Trotsky by heart’ (Fleischli 1970: 14). In his ‘Letter to Dr Rabin’, H.G. Adler analyses the various

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facets of Steiner’s thinking and behaviour in his late teens. First, he notes Steiner’s idealism, which corresponded largely to Bukharin’s thought. His lead ideas included social justice, free love, the abolition of money and common ownership of all property. Second, Adler notes how Steiner now turned to older people, including workers, foreigners and other outsiders (‘visionary dreamers’). Third, he confirms Steiner’s intensive study of Marxism, in which he displayed his characteristic thoroughness. As he later made it his business to read everything written on his research interests, he now read his way through all the major Marxist classics and many minor works, too. He read Marx himself, the pre-Marxist thinkers, as well as Lenin and Trotsky. His reading opened a perspective on sociology and developed an interest in distant peoples that had originated in his earlier reading of travel literature. Among the cultures and subjects that fascinated him were China and the Chinese Civil War, on which he began a study that has since been lost, as well as Mexico, India, colonialism and the problems faced by black people (H.G. Adler Ms 1953: 3v., 2006: 14). Although his Marxist phase lasted only about two years, the experience proved decisive. His future sense of political action and social justice would go hand in hand with sympathy for politically oppressed peoples and minorities. His interest in Marx himself also continued. He planned to give a major lecture series on Marx at Oxford but was dissuaded by Evans-Pritchard, who instead suggested the subject that became Taboo. More generally, it was the encounter with Marxism that opened a window on the social sciences for Steiner and so eventually led him to study social anthropology. As Johann Arnason has recently argued, moreover, Steiner’s understanding of Marx as a modern Descartes whose work is foundational for the human sciences continues to offer a useful key for interpreting Marxism (2020: 109–10). However, Steiner cut his links with all Marxist organizations in 1930. According to a letter Steiner wrote to Hartung, the event is recorded in a poem, which he composed in March 1930, and originally entitled ‘Turning back in the spring’. Here, Steiner asks, ‘Why did I argue with people’ and longs to ‘forget’ himself in the forest. Typically, the decision to break with his political past was taken over the course of several hikes in the Bohemian woods (Fleischli 1970: 13). The turn Steiner’s thought now took was towards mysticism in both its Western and Eastern varieties, an interest that actually appears to have begun during Steiner’s Marxist phase. He read the seventeenth-century poet Angelus Silesius and the German mystical writer Jacob Böhme. The latter interest is remarkable, though

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perhaps more understandable in the light of Martin Buber’s choice of Böhme (along with Nicolas of Cusa) as the subject of his dissertation (Schmidt 1991: 39–44). Steiner’s lifelong passion for Eastern religions was kindled by his reading of the Bhagavad Gita – his boyhood copy of the book survives in his literary estate today, inscribed in an ornate hand with his signature and the date ‘Prag Januar 1927’. The volume is hand-bound in leather – almost certainly by H.G. Adler’s father, the bookbinder Emil Adler – and is finely tooled in gold, with marbled endpapers of red, yellow and blue on a purple ground. The Introduction was removed before binding, as is also indicated on the contents page. The edition is in the standard and highly popular Diederich’s series, the attractively yellow-bound Religiöse Stimmen der Völker, but Steiner’s new binding lends the volume the overwhelming impression of a precious book, redesigned according to the seventeen-year-old’s somewhat mystical taste and cherished as a sacred object. Over ten years later at Oxford, the Gita was still Steiner’s favourite book (Frank Ms 1964). Steiner also encountered Chinese religious texts in the same series. His copy of Kung Futse is dated ‘IX 1928’, and his heavily annotated copy of Lao Tse ‘Prag XII 1928’. We can safely assume that Steiner’s Marxist phase, which on his own account ended in 1930, overlapped with his early interest in world religions. In later life also, political and religious themes were to coexist in Steiner’s thinking. The specific interest in Eastern religions, however, took its most concrete form not in Steiner’s scholarship, but in the religious syncretism evident in the autobiographical Conquests, where Buddhist, Taoist, Jewish and Muslim ideas are combined (J. Adler 1994a: 151ff.). The later 1920s also mark the beginnings of Steiner’s literary interests. Fleischli notes that among his favourite authors were E.T.A. Hoffmann, several of whose books still survive in his library from those years, and the Russian novelists, notably Dostoyevsky, who enjoyed immense popularity at that time. The former represented myth in the modern age; the latter uncovered the sphere of suffering, and so they shaped the world as later understood by Steiner as a mature thinker. The young Steiner also explored the poetry of Rilke, who became a lifelong favourite, and the German Jewish mystical poet Alfred Mombert, who had a major influence on his early poetry. He also appears to have discovered Kafka at an early stage: his well-worn, pencil-marked copy of the first edition of Das Schloß (The Castle), published in 1926, is inscribed ‘Prag Januar 1927’ – the same date as his Gita. Given that Steiner’s early literary tastes – with the possible exception of Mombert – exerted a lifelong hold over his

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imagination, we may ascribe to them a considerable formative effect. The later poet and anthropologist will have met several mature interests in his adolescent favourites: Hoffmann, Mombert and the mature Rilke share a common fascination with myth as a fruitful mode for recasting modern values. Adalbert Stifter, the nineteenth-century Austrian prose writer – who celebrates the Böhmerwald region, where the young Steiner spent his summers as a Pfadfinder – displays a scientifically exact eye for the linkage between specific landscapes and local people; this is allied to a morality both biblical in its austerity and humanist in its generosity, whilst Dostoyevsky and Kafka exhibit the incisive dual focus that connects a guilt-ridden inner world to a corrupt political scene. These diverse strands seem to have merged in Steiner’s thinking as late as 1942–45, when his poetry and anthropology took a decisive new turn. Looking back over the experiences of Steiner’s early Prague years, H.G. Adler summarizes his character and indicates how fully the future anthropologist and poet had developed even before he embarked on his studies. His summary indicates a complex, multifaceted figure whose personality encompassed the contradictory extremes of scientific analysis and religious mysticism, theology and sensuality: To the natural sciences he owed his precision, his love of detail, his reliability and self-control in his own work and writing, as well as the cool critique of his own achievements and those of others; to Marxism, which he first extended and then gave up as completely untenable, he owed his sense of social, historical and philosophical connexions within a universal mathesis, which he saw before him in his mind’s eye though he never developed it systematically – his deep mistrust of systems preserved him from that; he also owed to it his interest in people and human relations and in practically all peoples of the world; he did not wish to evaluate different peoples or play them off against one another, but to understand and explain them in their own uniqueness; finally he owed to Marxism the unprejudiced freedom with which he carefully confronted both natural peoples and the high cultures of the East and the West as an observer; and to mysticism and religion he owed his personal relationship to all phenomena, his imaginative penetration and overview of them, the actual essence of his art, which even when he was not treating religious themes he always understood as a religious act. The more mature Franz became, the more these elements inter-penetrated and their interplay can be seen in his most successful achievements. He also tried to nourish his relationships with women from the same roots, but many unhappy circumstances and an often overpowering sensuality largely prevented him from doing so. (H.G. Adler Ms 1953: 6v., 2006: 16–17)

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Some characteristics of Steiner’s later anthropological writings – such as his scientific exactness – are apparent here; others – like his mysticism – only become clear in his poetry and aphorisms. The idea that Steiner possessed an inexpressible, ‘universal mathesis’ that unified these contradictions – a hidden core at the centre of his strivings – is both an immensely suggestive construct for grasping his work and a tantalizing, ultimately unspecifiable idea. We shall return to this concept of a ‘universal mathesis’ in our later discussion and in conclusion.

Chapter 2

STUDENT DAYS IN PRAGUE AND JERUSALEM

In magnificent nights I spoke to the palms about my girl. Sure, they will forget me. but i, How can i escape their scraggy song? My dreams will leave me, And go back to Jerusalem. —‘Farewell to Jerusalem’

After completing his schooling at the Gymnasium in June 1928 with his Matura, Steiner enrolled as an examinable student at the German University of Prague in the autumn of 1928. Somewhat to the surprise of his friends, who expected him to study ethnology as his main subject, he specialized in comparative philology with special reference to Semitic languages. His choice of linguistics may have been prompted partly by his growing interest in Ancient Greek during his last year at school (H.G. Adler Ms 1953: 4v., 2006: 17), and partly because there was no Chair in Sociology in the German University at Prague at that time (Fleischli 1970: 14); there was only a single Professor of Anthropology and Ethnology, Professor Fritz Paudler, who had very few students. As we shall shortly note, there may also have been a different reason. Indology, another subject in which Steiner was interested initially, soon receded for academic purposes, while ethnology became increasingly important to him. He studied it as a minor subject with Paudler (with special reference to Eastern Europe, Asia Minor, Siberia and the Arctic) and also studied Völkerpsychologie as had Malinowski in Leipzig two decades earlier (Thornton with Skalník 1993: 14). Simultaneously, he took courses in Siberian ethnology and in Turkish studies as an external student at the Czech-language Charles University of Prague (with Professor Jan Rypka, a specialist in Greek, Turkish and Persian philology).

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Among the languages he studied, more or less assiduously, apart from Classical and Modern Arabic, were Hebrew, Turkish, Armenian, Persian, the Malayan languages, English, French and Russian. In later life at Oxford, though some of these dropped away, he was still acquainted with an extraordinary variety of languages: aside from the classical ones – which in his case meant Hebrew, Greek and Latin – he knew German, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Czech; he spoke Yiddish well; he had different degrees of competence in six other Slavonic languages, including Russian; he continued to speak colloquial Arabic; he gained a reading competence in Scandinavian languages and Dutch, and – to judge by his notebooks – he was teaching himself to read Chinese. It remains to be clarified whether Steiner had any contact with the celebrated Prague Linguistic Circle, which took a stand against de Saussure’s concept of the arbitrary sign, but its emphasis on the importance of functional and structural relations (Glanc 2010: 193) as well as synchronicity in linguistic study (Glanc 2010: 188–89) would have prepared him for the later concept of ‘the context of situation’ (Robins 1971) and other ideas of Malinowski. Moreover, the concern with folklore in the Prague Circle would have afforded Steiner a bridge between his field of study and his desired profession. As is clear from its foundational document, ‘Theses Presented to the First Congress of Slavic Philologists in Prague, 1929’, the Circle was explicitly interested in ‘material culture’, ‘economic and political geography’ and ‘physical geography’ (P. Steiner 1982: 21); it was also internationalist and cosmopolitan in orientation. In a small, tightly knit city like Prague and with an intellectually curious young man like Steiner, it seems highly likely that he would have had some form of contact with the Circle. The Circle’s pronounced interest in folklore and ritual (P. Steiner 1982: 32–46; 135–73) opened the door to a linguistic anthropology such as Steiner later practised in his studies on slavery. Here lay a path for him to connect linguistics, poetics and ethnography and by doing so unite his radical diversities. If he was in fact drawn to this modernistic group, who included Roman Jakobson among its leading lights, it might better explain his choice of linguistics as a field of study. There was also a strong philosophical school of phenomenology in Prague at this time, marked by an interest in the philosophy of Franz Brentano (Glanc 2010: 196), which was even encouraged by the President, T.G. Masaryk. Here too Steiner might have discovered guidance for his future direction as a social anthropologist: ‘The explanation of facts is … nothing other than establishing the connections between various phenomena and a number of general facts’ (Brentano 1926: 103). Steiner retained his interest in

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philosophy into his later years. Heidegger’s Being and Time, which, as we have noted, Steiner had in his library, was dedicated to Brentano’s pupil, Edmund Husserl (Heidegger 1949: flyleaf). Despite his empiricism in scholarly matters, Steiner retained a lasting fascination with metaphysics, a twinned approach that Brentano’s emphasis on scientific rigour in matters of philosophy will only have encouraged (Huemer 2019). Various thoughts on scientific categorization, etymology, comparative philology and linguistics form an integral part of his scholarship and, as we shall shortly have occasion to note, appear to have formed a point of departure for his thinking on specific topics. Between 1930 and 1931, Steiner interrupted his studies in Prague and spent a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Palestine, where he studied modern Arabic in the School of Oriental Studies. The idea of a Hebrew University in Palestine went back to the origins of the Zionist movement, having been discussed at the first Zionist Congress in 1897 and endorsed by Zionist conferences in Vienna and Minsk in 1902 (Gilbert 1998: 8). By 1914, money had been raised to buy a site on Mount Scopus ‘overlooking the Dome of the Rock and the Dead Sea’ (Gilbert 1998: 29). The University was eventually founded in 1918 and officially opened on Mount Scopus in 1925. For a young German-speaking Jewish scholar, studying in Jerusalem must have made good sense as an academic decision. Steiner also used the opportunity of the trip to pay a brief visit to Egypt and a more extensive one to Greece and Cyprus. In Jerusalem, after staying briefly with an Arab family, he was allegedly forced to move out by the British authorities (H.G. Adler Ms 1953: 5, 2006: 19) and then stayed with the Jewish philosopher Shmuel Hugo Bergman, a schoolfriend of Franz Kafka, and a lifelong supporter of Buber. Bergman himself does not appear to have taken Steiner seriously as an intellectual at this time. In a letter to Alfons Fleischli of 1967, he commented: ‘For me, Franz in those days was a charming young student, full of good humour, but I had no idea of his later significance’ (Fleischli 1970: 15). Bergman’s son Michael, however, formed a more positive picture – and his account explains why the older man found little to commend in his young guest. Writing in English to Fleischli, Michael Bergman remembers: ‘He made upon me a very profound impression … . He did not, however, pursue his studies very actively. … He believed that like a person afloat on the ocean, one should let life direct one without coercing life into a predetermined direction’ (1970: 15). Bergman’s influence on Steiner was long-standing. Steiner maintained contact with him, mainly via correspondence with Bergman’s

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wife Martha, until the end of his life. After the Second World War, Bergman himself wrote Steiner a letter highly appreciative of his poem ‘Gebet im Garten’ (Prayer in the Garden) and invited Steiner to return to the Hebrew University as a guest lecturer to speak on British social anthropology – a visit that never came about, presumably for lack of funding (Bergman Ms 1952). By that date, at least, the older man must have formed a better opinion of his former guest. As to Bergman’s effect on Steiner, we can well imagine that the philosopher – who had published on both physics and theology, was a good friend of Albert Einstein, and had been an intimate of Steiner’s most admired author, Franz Kafka – could have exerted a considerable fascination on the young student. At the Bergman home, Steiner could have seen for himself one of the earliest examples of Kafka’s handwriting (Wagenbach 1958: 50; Bergman 1969: 7) and listened to the conversation of a man who had debated philosophical, political and Zionist ideas with Kafka since their schooldays (Wagenbach 1958: 60–63; 107) and whose own thinking since his Prague days had developed aspects of Buber’s thought. Bergman, before he migrated to Palestine, had been one of the central figures in the development of Prague Zionism (Kieval 1988: 99–103; 113–16). His importance for Steiner may well have manifested itself in his developing attitude to Judaism, in the particular form of Zionism to which he now felt drawn. If Steiner’s later Jewish inwardness ultimately recalls Buber’s call for a spiritual revival (Friedmann 1988: 130), his synthesis of Oriental religions in his poetry also follows Bergman, ‘the great syncretist among his colleagues in Jerusalem’ (Kluback 1988: 134). At Bergman’s house in Jerusalem, the young Steiner may also have come into contact with Bergman’s plans concerning cooperation between Indians and Jews (Bergman 1985: 292) and will have encountered the thinking of Brit Shalom. According to Bergman’s diary, around the time when Steiner may have been staying, Brit Shalom meetings took place there on 25 October and 2 November 1930 (Bergman 1985: 316 and 319). Those present included Gershom Scholem and J.L. Magnes. Brit Shalom’s proposals for rapprochement between Jews and Arabs are subsequently reflected in Steiner’s own earliest publication, ‘Orientpolitik’ (1999b: 107–11). An ‘Appendix’ on Brit Shalom that appeared in the Jüdische Rundschau for 8 July 1927 explains its policy: The organisation begins from the premiss that the future of Palestine and the creation of a national homeland [for the Jews] can only be achieved on the basis of harmonious collaboration between Jews and Arabs. To this belongs – to start with quite non-political matters –

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getting to know each other and a friendly, non-aggressive attitude. The belief in the necessity of understanding and cooperation has to take root among both peoples. Brit Shalom regards propagating this view as one of its main tasks. … (Bergman 1985: 229)

Steiner’s first steps as a political writer follow the line here taken by Bergman and his influential friends. Besides a political orientation, Bergman may also have offered the young Steiner a new focus for his scholarship. Importantly, Bergman offered an ideal of comparative study. In an essay written for the silver jubilee of the Hebrew University, he stresses the pivotal role of Judaism as the spiritual centre of the University’s activities but pleads for comparative religion to be established there, too: Is not a Jewish university that fails to study the fundamentals of Comparative Religion something in the nature of a contradiction in terms? We do not teach the fundamentals of religion in general: we do not give our students the opportunity to become acquainted with the great religions of the world, and to contrast our own Judaism with the other great religions – those of India, Christianity and Islam. An Institute of Religious Studies, composed of several Chairs, is for us an essential need … . (Bergman 1950: 176)

It is perhaps not going too far to see in this model of Judaism – a Judaic spiritual centre surrounded by the comparative study of world religions – the same pattern that Steiner employed in his mature thinking. Steiner’s poetry and private writings similarly revolve around Judaism, but Conquests, his aphorisms and especially his scholarship afford an equal moral place for non-Jewish religions as part of his wider intellectual scheme. One may imagine the effect of Bergman’s teachings in the light of Kieval’s description of Bergman’s former Jewish circle in Prague, the Bar Kochbar group: [Bar Kochbar] interpreted cultural Zionism to mean that [an] upheaval was to transform assimilated Jews into national Jews [by means of] a personal, spiritual revolt. It was to take place within the consciousness of the individual, stripping one, as it were, of one’s assimilationist personality and rendering one for the first time culturally active and creative. (Kieval 1988: 106)

The more immediately obvious impact that the visit to Palestine had on Steiner was, then, on his self-understanding as a Jew. Steiner understood Judaism both as a modernizing force (through Zionism) and as an antiquarian power (through religious orthodoxy). In an aphorism he wrote after the war, Steiner considered the permanent relevance of Jerusalem, the ancient site of holiness:

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That, which the temple means today, can hardly be rebuilt by human beings, and so the Jews of Jerusalem, where they at last constitute the majority of the population, pray to God to erect the temple again, just like their brothers in the diaspora. (Steiner 2009: 80)

The aphorism continues by reflecting on this epochal fact. The archaic temple, which Steiner believes should be rebuilt, will serve as a symbol both for the Jewish people and for ‘humanity’ as a whole: the religion of the Hebrews, symbolized by the concrete reality of the temple, is for Steiner a gift to the world – presumably via such general ethical achievements as the Ten Commandments. As the temple’s mythical aura enters into the sphere of history and hence the political world, it can be seen to operate, like the Divinity itself, as if through a mystical hypostasis that infuses public affairs. There is, then, a direct link between Steiner’s yen for orthodoxy and his Zionism. According to Fleischli, the Jerusalem experience led Steiner to regard himself as ‘an Oriental born in the West’ (1970: 15). The view of the Jews as Orientals was (of course) a common one, enshrined in both the popular and the sociological thought of Steiner’s day. In a letter to her sister of 13 May 1939, the great Jewish poetess Gertrud Kolmar, who perished in Auschwitz, observed when considering where she might escape that she was a verhinderte Asiatin (a hindered Asiatic) (1970: 25); and for the economic historian Werner Sombart, the Oriental character of the Jews was axiomatic (1911: 340ff.). Steiner’s own Orientalism was quite distinct from such accounts of a homogeneous Jewish ‘race’ based on supposedly immutable biological continuities that derived either from the Jews’ origins in the East or from Buber’s different notion of Jewish ‘blood’ (Friedman 1988: 134). The former type of Orientalism entailed recognizing fixed biological and behavioural characteristics that survived in assimilation. Whilst accepting the historical origins of the Jewish people, Steiner’s own belief had nothing to do with biological ‘race’ and is perhaps closer to the more conceptual side of Buber’s belief in the Jews as Orientals. However, unlike the early Buber, Steiner’s positive acceptance of Jewish identity depended on embracing religious orthodoxy and, with Bergman, the Hebrew language (Friedmann 1988: 261). Steiner distanced himself from essential features of Buber’s philosophy, too, as in the following scathing remark directed against Buber’s I and Thou: God does not reveal himself in dialogue. He communicates with man. This gives rise to two misunderstandings.

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1. The belief that God is human. 2. The belief that the human monologue is a dialogue. Revelation cannot be answered. (1988: 86f.)

Steiner tried progressively to dissociate himself from ‘Western’ views and urged Jews to identify with their Oriental character and to seek solidarity with other Orientals. Later, we examine more closely the various tensions intrinsic in this progression; however, in nuce they are early variations on problems that will later be addressed by (and to) postcolonial critics located (either physically or intellectually) in the West and its traditions. Steiner’s ‘Orientpolitik’ (1936), although written after his Marxist phase, draws upon linked ideas of modernization, agricultural innovation and education close to the heart of many Jewish settlers in Palestine before statehood. He seeks common cause with Muslim Arab modernizers. By the time of his essay ‘On the Process of Civilization’ of 1944 and the ‘Letter to Mr Gandhi’ of 1946, Steiner’s views on a shared Oriental identity – now opposed to the modernizing ‘process of civilization’ in the West – have hardened, at least on an ideal (quasi mythological) level. Like the early Buber, he links Jewish and Indian religions, albeit without Buber’s sense of competition (Friedman 1988: 135f.). However, unresolved tensions remain. Although Steiner was sympathetic to a wide range of religious expression, one searches in vain in his writings for appreciation of two such traditions, between which he seems to find similarities: Protestantism (especially in its German form) and Islam (particularly in its more fundamental forms). Given his own ethnicity and religion, the pairing is strongly motivated. As Steiner’s Oriental solidarity is expressed less in a modernizing context, so Muslim Arabs seem to disappear from his analysis. And, despite his expressed antipathy to Western individualism, his own analytic tools (the logic, science and rationality he stresses) were transmitted to him through the same context within which Western ideas of individual rights, freedom of expression and conscience (and their antitheses) were developed. All this lay in the future. H.G. Adler sums up the immediate effect of Steiner’s year in Palestine as follows: He returned from Jerusalem a changed and a happy man. … Franz now emphasised his Jewishness, but it took some time before he could accommodate his new thoughts and feelings to his actual nature. … At first the contradictions between his origins and his previous views and his newly gained spirituality were apparent. This occasionally manifested itself in illogical behaviour and intolerance towards others. But gradually he managed to achieve a highly individual synthesis of his own private nature and received religion. He favoured a strictly

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traditional understanding of Judaism, disliked liberal tendencies, or at least found them dubious, although in practice he hardly kept to Jewish laws except in occasional sallies, when he observed individual ordinances. However, he never glossed this over, but felt it to be a weakness. He considered it beyond his power to resolve the matter. He never attended Synagogue regularly, and only began to see the value of attending during his Oxford days (from 1939). In his later years he recited the daily prayers (more in his heart than aloud) and uttered many blessings. He always considered his Jewish education to be inadequate, although he acquired considerable knowledge during repeated bouts of study. (H.G. Adler Ms 1953: 5v–6r, 2006: 20)

To contextualize this phase of Steiner’s development historically, it may be seen in the light of the Zionist cultural renewal promoted by Ahad Ha-Am and developed by Buber, which had such a strong following among Prague Jews, though Steiner’s orthodoxy and political Zionism distanced him from this group, bringing him closer to scholars like his revered model, Gershom Scholem. The experience of Palestine also had a decided effect on Steiner’s scholarly development. As Fleischli observes, he was prompted to find a new theoretical basis for his scholarship that would not simply impose Western categories and understandings on the East. However, before this insight could bear fruit, Steiner had to embark on a second period as a student, this time as an ethnologist. In 1935, Steiner completed his studies in Prague with a short and, we are advised, not very distinguished thesis (Schabert: PC), on word-formation in Arabic, entitled Studien zur arabischen Wurzelgeschichte (Studies on the History of Arabic Roots). The viva became the occasion for one of the earliest of the many stories Steiner liked to tell about himself. It involves his apparent ignorance of the Russian island of Sakhalin, which lies to the north of Japan; this nineteenth-century penal colony was well-known at the time, not least as the subject of a monograph by Chekhov, and it provided an obvious viva topic given Steiner’s interest in Siberian ethnology, but his chronic exam fever made him forget the name entirely. H.G. Adler reports: The chief examiner was Grohmann, the expert in Ethiopian studies, whom Franz did not like very much. He put him off so much that Slotty, the kindly Professor of General Philology and Indo-European, who was the co-examiner, had to calm him down. He offered Steiner a cigarette in the middle of the viva with the words: ‘Here you are, Steiner, have a smoke, then everything will go alright.’ Everything went well for a while, but then it was the turn of the ethnologist, Paudler, of whom Franz was particularly fond, to examine him. He was a touching and slightly confused fellow who was even more frightened of the exam than

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Franz himself. Paudler wanted to know something about Sakhalin, but Franz said nothing. … Then Paudler very nervously said: ‘Tell me something about the fauna. You must know something about the animals on Sakhalin.’ Franz remained silent. Almost pleading, Paudler asked: ‘So do tell us, Mr Steiner, what animals live on Sakhalin?’ At last Franz made his reply: ‘Camels!’ Paudler reached for his head and called out in horror: ‘Sakhalin and the camels!’ After many extraordinary somersaults, the viva came to a successful conclusion. (H.G. Adler Ms 1953: 5r., 2006: 18)

The Steiner of these early Prague years already appears to have divided his life into distinct segments: academic, Zionist, literary and sexual. His habit of living in mutually exclusive circles, which became more accentuated in his later years, makes it difficult for the biographer to reconstruct his life – especially with regard to his lovers, the identities of several of whom survive only as unidentifiable snapshots among his papers. The trait of seeking to balance seemingly incompatible ideas, apparent in the intellectual sphere of his life, translated socially into ‘an oppressive lack of coordination between apparently disparate social provinces’ (H.G. Adler Ms 1953: 7r.ff, 2006: 26). This abiding adolescent feature seems to have predisposed Steiner towards theories of a highly formal stripe: ‘culture circles’ ethnology, which seeks to account for the co-presence of associated cultural elements that differ in origin, and Simmelian formal sociology, which seeks to explain why the same individual may behave so differently in the various ‘social provinces’ of his life. As we shall see in more detail, he seeks to resolve these issues in Conquests (1999b: 249–66). According to H.G. Adler’s testimony (little other documentation survives) we know that Steiner enjoyed an active social life in Prague, building up a large circle of friends and the beginnings of a reputation as a poet in the city’s somewhat fading establishment as well as among the younger artists. In the view of Zdenek Vašicˇek (PC), whereas Jewish intellectuals in Prague until 1914 to 1918 tended to adopt German as their cultural ambient, after the First World War and with the foundation of Czechoslovakia, a greater number of Jews followed a cultural trend inaugurated in the later nineteenth century (Kieval 1988: 19; 27ff.) and assimilated more into the Czech context, with the result that the groups to which Steiner turned tended to be smaller and more marginal than the equivalent circles of Germanspeaking Jews before the War. This might explain the rather mixed groupings Steiner became involved with, though it must be said that in Prague, the rear-guard was inextricably entangled with the avantgarde, as can be seen in the tensions between Kafka’s conservative

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prose style and his innovative themes, or in the writings of Paul Leppin – according to Max Brod, the central figure in the German literary scene in Prague in the half-generation before Kafka (Brod 1966: 67). Thus, Leppin’s novel Severins Gang in die Finsternis (Severin’s Path into Darkness, 1914) disconcertingly mixes neo-Romantic, decadent imagery with eroticism, pornography, symbolism, dreams, astute psychology and vividly observed details in an almost surrealist, kaleidoscopic manner, anticipating Breton and Hrabal. This heady cocktail exaggeratedly reflects the world that fashioned Steiner’s interests. Steiner’s first steps as a Prague writer anticipate the pattern of his later progress in England as an anthropologist. In both contexts, he gravitated towards the leading figures of his day, without fully capitalizing on his recognition by becoming a public figure. In Prague, he entered the leading artistic circles and made friends with several colourful figures, including some of the best-known men of letters. He had long enjoyed links with the establishment through his school-friend Wolf Salus, whose father, Hugo, was a grand old man of Prague German letters, a poet whose skilful verse – published in a dozen volumes between 1898 and 1924 – exudes a melancholic lyricism. Hugo Salus, as Max Brod records, was a central figure among the Prague writers who first came into prominence two generations before Kafka and Brod (Brod 1966: 67). Steiner also met Max Brod himself, Kafka’s friend and perhaps the central figure of his own generation, as well as the celebrated Prague Expressionist poet Franz Werfel, albeit Steiner distanced himself from Werfel and others, despising what he regarded as their shallow pretensions. In his own generation, apart from Salus’s son, Steiner also had contact with the son of Kafka’s friend and correspondent, the poet Oskar Baum, and Paul Leppin jr. More surprisingly, perhaps, he made friends with Paul Leppin sr, author of both the aforementioned novel, Severins Gang in die Finsternis, and a suitably shocking satanic novel, Daniel Jesus (1905), on the constrictions imposed by Christianity. Though Leppin’s own days of dancing in drag on bar tops (Hoffmann 1982: 18) were ending in syphilitic decay, his work enjoyed a revival in the mid-1930s, and Steiner always retained a high opinion of him. In tales like Das Gespenst der Judenstadt (The Ghost of the Jewish Town), Leppin’s stylistic mastery and subtle evocations of old Prague rise above the rather crass eroticism: in just a few pages, via the tale of the sexually insatiable Johanna from the brothel beside the Synagogue, Leppin vividly evokes the end of the Ghetto and the downfall of old Prague (see Demetz 1982: 33–39).

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Steiner’s career began with readings from his poetry at Fritz Baum’s bookshop, and he was a co-founder of the literary circle Freie Gruppe Prag (The Prague Free Group), which gave a public poetry reading on 6 December 1929 that was reviewed in the Prague German newspapers, Prager Presse and Prager Tagblatt. The latter records that the high point of the evening was a Moritat (cabaret song) by Franz Steiner, ‘Das Lied von Bettys Strumpf’ (The Song of Betty’s Stocking), to which Gerta Freund danced most expressively with ‘passion’ and ‘wonderful gestures’ (Atze 1998: 13f.; Van Loyen 2011: 176–78). It was a few years later, some time in 1933, that Steiner and his friends formed a literary circle that was to last until 1938, when it dissolved of its own accord, largely for political reasons. The group comprised H.G. Adler, Steiner, the German writer Helmut Spiesmayr and the son of a well-known Prague artist, Peter Brömse. According to H.G. Adler’s chronology, this was the seventh group of Prague writers, separated by some years from the circle that included Kafka and Brod ([1976] 2010: 11–12). These writers understood their goal as a battle against what they took to be the unethical behaviour and the corruption of the Prague literary scene. No evidence has come to light of their activities. Although they can be understood as the last Prague circle of poets (J. Adler 2003: 54), they do not appear to have had any impact on the literary scene (Van Loyen 2011: 179). Noted young sculptors such as Mary Duras (Plichta 1961) and Bernard Reder (Baur 1961) also belonged to Steiner’s circle. He became friends with the mystical art deco painter and photographer František Drtikol, who taught Franz photography and took a series of hitherto unrecognized photographs of Steiner’s sister, Suse, and probably Franz himself, the former clearly made at the same sitting as several others preserved among Steiner’s papers (Fárová 1986: 42). Drtikol was a charismatic personality whose artistic blend of modernism, eroticism and syncretic mysticism cast a spell on young Czechs and Germans alike. In Drtikol, the young Steiner will have met a successful artist who renounced his career as a photographer to pursue his insights into the mystical light of the world – a path illuminated by both Christian and Buddhist imagery. The mystic tendency dominated the work of the Czech poet and prose-writer Emanuel Lešetický [Lešehrad] whose dramatic poem Planety from the volume Most nad sveˇtem (1932) Steiner translated into German as Die Planeten and published in 1935. The Czech title page calls the work a ‘symphonic triptych’, and the colophon refers to it as a ‘mystical oratorio’.

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Lešehrad, the Czech translator of Alfred Mombert (a German Jewish poet who exercised a profound influence on both Steiner and H.G. Adler), was also a noted occultist and wrote a history of secret societies in Bohemia. The action of Lešehrad’s symbolic drama of the planets takes place in the ‘terrestrial sphere’ and involves a dialogue between Earth, Night, the Spirit of Dead Humans and so on. Spiritualism and pathos are the hallmarks of this verse. In Steiner’s hands, the language possesses a stern nobility (occasionally echoing Goethe’s Faust) in which the future poet can be recognized. The book was brought out by a noted publisher, Orbis, and the cover was

Figure 2.1 Suse Steiner, 1932, photographer František Drtikol. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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done by a leading avant-garde designer, Jindrˇich Štyrský (see Primus 1990). Meanwhile, Steiner himself gave another poetry reading in 1933, this time together with his friend, the later scholar and critic Heinz Politzer (Atze 1998: 17). On this occasion, he read the first act of his play on Ramon Lull – discussed later – a work that has not survived, but the theme of which becomes understandable within the mystical Prague context. Altogether, Steiner’s friendships, readings and publications indicate that had it not been for the gathering political dangers, Steiner’s career as a young Prague poet seemed assured. Simultaneously, he was pursuing what were still his ‘ethnological’ studies as we see next.

Figure 2.2 Franz Steiner after his return from Palestine, 1932, photographer probably František Drtikol. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

Chapter 3

FIRST ETHNOLOGICAL STUDIES IN VIENNA AND LONDON, AND FIELDWORK IN SUB-CARPATHIAN RUTHENIA

Even to retain a little Of wandering journeys, countries, Over which the perfect sun Rises through fiery plains … —Conquests, IV, ‘To Retain a Little’

After completing his studies in Prague, Steiner involuntarily became a ‘wanderer’. So as to acquire a more thorough ethnological training than could be obtained at home, and following a pattern of movement typical for Prague Germans, in the autumn of 1935 he went to Vienna to study at the Ethnological Institute, specializing in Siberian ethnology – and it was in Arctic ethnology that he subsequently made his first academic publications (Steiner 1939a, 1941). India and the Arctic were perhaps the regions closest to his heart as a scholar. The former retained its hold chiefly on his religious sensibility and inclined him towards many of his friendships in England. The latter continued to appear in the form of Arctic or subarctic examples in mature writings; for example, ‘On the Process of Civilization’ (1999b: 123–28). He went to Vienna to study with some of the leading German-speaking ethnologists of the day: attending lectures and classes with Wilhelm Koppers, Father Schmidt and Heine-Geldern. Less typically, perhaps, and indicative of his quickly developing anthropological know-how, just over a year later he moved on via Paris to London to attend Malinowski’s seminars at the LSE and work in the Library of the British Museum, arriving in England in late autumn 1936. He remained until July 1937 and then

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returned briefly to Prague (Fleischli 1970: 20); after a short holiday at home, he made his first and only field trip, spending a few weeks in Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, which in the interwar years was part of the Czechoslovak Republic. Back in Prague, he delivered his first series of ethnological lectures – an ‘Einführung in die Kunstgeschichte der Naturvölker’ (Introduction to the History of Art of Primitive Peoples) – in autumn 1937 (Ms 1937a). At about this time, he also wrote his first ethnological study, an introduction to ethnology for young people (Ms 1937b), which remains unpublished. He stayed at home until the beginning of 1938, when he left again for England. By now, he was beginning to establish himself as a young scholar and wrote a paper on ‘Dog Sacrifices and Parturition Confession, their Relations to North-Eurasian Beliefs in Reincarnation’, which he presented at the Second International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Copenhagen, 1–6 August 1938 (Ms 1938; 1939b). What should have been a hopeful trip for the aspiring young academic at the threshold of his career was, however, fraught with difficulties, being overshadowed by Munich and the growing threat of a war, which Steiner already regarded as inevitable. A Czechoslovak national when he set sail for Copenhagen, he risked being barred from re-entry to the United Kingdom and had a foretaste of the entrapment that so many of his people, among them his own friends and family, were to suffer. In the event, his return to Britain proved unproblematic, but he never saw Prague, his home or his parents again. Nor did he ever again have a single, identifiable home. He had entered England as a student but remained as a refugee, unable to emigrate to the United States (where he had an uncle) and tragically incapable of helping his family in Bohemia, who were shortly to be ensnared in the greater tragedy of their nation. In Vienna, he had made friends with Paul Bruell, like Steiner an aspiring poet, to whom he addressed some of his most informative autobiographical letters; Bruell also preserved some of the earliest extant versions of Steiner’s poetry. It was in Vienna, too, that Steiner first met Elias Canetti, who lived there in the north-west district of Grinzing. H.G. Adler had invited Canetti to hold a reading in Prague in 1937 – Steiner was in London at the time – and suggested to him that he should meet Steiner on the latter’s return to Vienna (Canetti 1985: 341; Atze 1998: 24–27). This was the beginning of a friendship that became Steiner’s chief inspiration during his English period, when Steiner and Canetti developed an intense, mutually productive relationship that lasted – with one long interruption – from Canetti’s arrival in England in 1939 until Steiner’s death in 1952. Canetti’s

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biographer, Sven Hanuschek, calls Steiner ‘the most fascinating figure in Canetti’s circle’ during the war, ‘close to him in many ways’ (Hanuschek 2005: 330). It cannot be ruled out that it was Steiner who inspired him to take up Jewish themes in a handful of poems (Hanuschek 2005: 334). Canetti’s slightly implausible wish in the knowledge of the Shoah to become ‘wholly a Jew’, ‘I love the Jews’, also seems like an echo of Steiner (Hanuschek 2005: 336). The surviving letters between Canetti and Steiner indicate a passionate, occasionally strained and always vibrant friendship based on the two men’s profound mutual respect of each other’s artistic talent and scholarship. We have unfortunately found no documentary evidence of their meetings in Vienna. However, we may imagine Steiner in Vienna soaking up the cultural atmosphere, possibly attending such major events as a lecture by the Swedish geographer Sven Hedin and the Austrian writer Karl Kraus’s 700th and last public reading with Paul Bruell, as well as making major advances in his ethnological work (Van Loyen 2011: 201). Bruell reports that the Viennese period was for Franz a ‘happy and carefree time’, and he paints the following picture of his friend, clearly recognizable as a younger, less stricken predecessor of the figure recalled later by Iris Murdoch, who, unaware of Bruell’s letter, was to echo his sentiments many years later: He was young, lively and full of good humour, full of learning, full of literature and poetry, all together and all at once, and he coped with the difficulties and hardships of student life with ease. He studied assiduously, bought old and valuable books whenever he could … and was writing a novel which was partly serious, partly satirical … . (After Fleischli 1970: 18)

Bruell also reports on Steiner’s literary interests in the Viennese days. Hoffmann was still a special favourite. The Gita is again mentioned. But this list has widened out to include the Presocratics, Marcus Aurelius, Proust and Musil; a notable shift can be seen in his interest in English literature, including Thackeray and – a passion he was to share with Canetti – Blake, whose poetry Steiner now began to translate (Fleischli 1970: 18). As we have noted above, we sadly lack any evidence – beyond the fact that it happened (Hocheneder 2009: 191) – of Steiner’s meeting with Canetti in Vienna; but we may assume that he also met Canetti’s wife, the writer Veza Canetti, who then became an essential if acerbic part of Steiner’s circle in England (Sievers 2018: 256–61). H.G. Adler summarizes the motivation that drew Steiner to study in Vienna and that soon after led him to England, and he gives the earliest account we have of Steiner’s method. In Vienna and London:

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He wanted to acquire the necessary education and support to enable him to do fieldwork and prepare for an academic career. Franz owed both institutions a great deal, even if the direction he later took had little in common with them and was closer to the Oxford School and the work of a few individual Americans: a careful comparativistic ethnology, based on painstaking research in the field of study itself, which seeks to understand and explain neither by means of an a priori social theory nor by deriving its subject matter from a particular civilization or social group. The social theories and the psychology with which Western society past and present seeks to understand itself and other civilizations could not serve as the … basis for a science of this kind; it would have to be given up. Franz, who in a sense considered himself to be a by no means willing guest in the Western world, and therefore regarded it extremely critically, had little difficulty in adopting an unprejudiced attitude. In his reflections, he saw the Orient, and any other culture which he studied, in the mirror of the West, which was not an ideal for him …, but a technical tool; and even that was to be used carefully and with critical reflection. (H.G. Adler Ms 1953: 9v, 2006: 33)

This is the earliest appreciation we have of a method that is not employed explicitly in Steiner’s writing before the wartime aphorisms and does not surface fully in his anthropological work before the Oxford lectures: put at its simplest, the epistemology entails a critical balancing of Eastern and Western ideas. If, as Steiner contended in ‘Chagga Truth’ ([1954] 1999b: 244–50), all regimes of truth are relative to forms of life, then the status of exotic or non-Western beliefs depends upon the analyst’s commitment to (or distance from) that form of life. For his part, Steiner was complexly – sometimes almost contradictorily – committed at least to two forms of life: the academic community and the collective ideal of Oriental life. As a result, he weighed the standards of truth relative to each of these life forms in a single balance. The epistemological imperative to interpret each life form was inseparable from the ethical commitment to enact what the resultant insight entailed. Hence his epistemology was always consequential politically. Like theorists of a much later generation, Steiner saw clearly that the will to knowledge of, and the will to exercise power over, other societies were inseparable from the Western form of life. Western preconceptions were unable to reconcile common humanity with the recognition of essential difference: what was different must be eradicated or expelled. Therefore, any positive ethical commitment to non-Western life forms entailed some degree of antagonism towards Western beliefs: whilst, for example, accepting analytic tools from Aristotle, Simmel or Weber, Steiner vehemently opposes the kind of superstructures that, for example,

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post-Kantian idealism erected on such logical bases (Steiner [1966b] 1999b: 124f.). If H.G. Adler is right to locate the early crystallization of this epistemology in the Jerusalem and Viennese years, this has several important implications. Genetically, it confirms our assumptions about the literary antecedents of the method in texts like Robinson Crusoe and its experiential basis in Steiner’s turn to Zionism. Furthermore, it points to a long, slow evolution in Steiner’s thinking, from the moment of insight in Palestine around 1930 to the moment of execution in England between 1942–52. In terms of his output, we can note how Steiner only gradually achieved a shift from a private, aphoristic expression of his method to its application in the Oxford lectures, although to the end of his life crucial fissures remained between the different forms of his written expression. All this lends further credence to the sense that Steiner intuited an un-statable centripetal mathesis around which his work revolved – an idea we encounter again in Iris Murdoch’s literary transmutation of Canetti and Steiner in Message to the Planet. But let us return to the early years. It is time to consider Steiner’s ethnological background. His later anthropological writings frequently distinguish two sorts of ethnographic data. which, he emphasizes, need not be coextensive: ‘cultural elements’ and ‘social institutions’. The phrase ‘social institutions’ is clearly at home in British social anthropology (contemporaneously in Radcliffe-Brown 1933 or 1940 for instance); the concern for ‘cultural elements’ has roots in Steiner’s Central European training in ethnology, philology and linguistics or, more generally, in the Central European tradition of Völkerkunde, which was echoed only crudely in the British diffusionism anathematized by functionalists for its excesses. As Adam Kuper explains in expressly schematic terms: There was … by the early twentieth century an accepted distinction between a broadly geographical approach, which was concerned with migration, cultural diffusion and the classification of peoples and objects, and what was generally called the sociological approach, which dealt with social institutions. … The ethnologists inclined towards diffusionism. Cultures were patchworks of traits, borrowed from others, the superior traits moving outwards from a centre like the ripples made by a stone thrown into a pond – to echo a favourite analogy of diffusionist writers. (1996: 2–3)

Kuper is concerned with the British scene, but his distinctions make a useful introduction to German-language ethnology. Although they may seem diverse nowadays to an English-speaking reader, the combination of studies Steiner pursued as a student – philology,

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Semitic languages, ethnology, Völkerpsychologie – were historically related in the development of German anthropology. The traditional, text-critical approaches of German philology developed into German anthropology through the intermediate discipline of Psychologie, understood, as Steiner translates it in his curriculum vitae of 1939, as a type of social psychology. ‘To [German] Greek scholars, Psychologie literally signified the study of Geist, the great iconic concept of German romanticism’ (Whitman 1984: 218). German anthropology developed from roots in the Enlightenment that set it apart from Anglo-Saxon developments. These schools parted ways around 1800 (Bell 1994: 17f.): the amorphous field of Enlightenment anthropology stabilized in the nineteenth century as two distinct disciplines, Germanic philosophical anthropology and the Franco-Anglo-American discipline of empirical ethnology; whereas the latter considered eighteenth-century preoccupations to be unscientific, the former regarded them as foundational and rejoiced in extending the cultural heritage of philosophy from Leibniz to Hegel. Within this tradition, therefore, articulate thinkers from Lichtenberg and Herder down to Nietzsche, whose work crosses the boundaries between philosophical anthropology and social criticism, could directly affect the development of writers like Steiner and Canetti. Central to the German anthropological tradition was Herder’s definition of the Volksgeist inherited by Humboldt (Bunzl 1996: 20–22); Humboldt as philologist and anthropologist could hold in balance both the future German and Anglo-American concerns by treating classical philology as the study of the supreme expressions of the human Geist embodied in ancient Greek culture; at the same time, he developed his own nascent field of comparative linguistics, which he defined as the study of the relative expressions of the universal Geist within each specific Volksgeist. Language, thought, action and culture were conjoined in the specific Weltansicht (worldview) of each Volk. Importantly, Humboldt extended his research beyond Western Europe to include not only Chinese (Humboldt [1836] 1848: 329–35) but also the languages of the North American Indians (1848: 323– 39), thus opening quite radical cultural diversities for research. It should be added that Steiner held Humboldt in high regard as one of the leading figures of his age (2009: 176–77). In Whitman’s account, Bastian appears as the pivotal figure who annexed the legacy of the nexus between philology and Psychologie but without the strategic interests of a classical scholar (Whitman 1984: 226; Bunzl 1996: 43). In Bastian’s hands, the discipline of ethnology was transferred to the natural sciences. ‘Only because

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he lacked their loyalties [to classical civilizations] was he willing to look indiscriminately for genius in jungles and deserts. No philologist could have accomplished the productive introduction of philological understanding of the rise and nature of culture into the study of primitive man’ (Whitman 1984: 226). In his account of an overlapping period and set of personalities, James Ryding concurs in the judgement that for all the continuities between Bastian’s project and German historicism, it is to the natural scientific aspects of Bastian’s work that we should look to explain its institutional success (1975: 13). The competing claims of history and science were at the very foundation of the German-language project of ethnology. We know from his diary entries at the time of attending Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown’s seminars that Steiner was acquainting himself with the English-language reception of German scholars. In London, he records having read Alfred Haddon’s brief History of Anthropology (Diary II Ms 1936–37: fol.7v), which attributes to Bastian a major role in ‘the recognition of the importance of psychology in ethnology’ (Haddon 1934: 64) and, in Oxford, Robert Lowie’s then recently published The History of Ethnological Theory (1937). Steiner – like his teacher Heine-Geldern (1964: 410) – approved of Lowie’s chapter on ‘Bastian’ (Diary IV Ms 1939a: 20r). This is an amused and judicious account that whilst recognizing the faults in Bastian’s prolix, turgid style pays tribute to his importance in promoting the ‘gospel of saving vanishing data’ and his significance as a ‘forerunner’ of later developments in ethnology (Lowie 1937: 37 and 38). Bastian’s Humboldtian belief in the ‘psychic unity’ of mankind was expressed in his emphasis on the independent development of cultures. The later German ethnology we know Steiner to have studied, and which is reflected in his early writings, was concerned with disputes surrounding the ramifications of the contrary, diffusionist, position that asserted the essential uninventiveness of man. Steiner’s library contained several studies in this mode: among them Friedrich Ratzel’s Völkerkunde (3 volumes, 1885, 1886, 1888) and its successor, Georg Buschan’s edited Illustrierte Völkerkunde (in the three-volume edition of 1922; Book List Ms ?1953: 1). While also accepting the principle of ‘psychic unity’, Ratzel ‘reverses Bastian’s principle that resemblances are merely evidence of a common mentality. The uninventive human beings that were constantly migrating hither and yon simply transported what they had picked up as their cultural inventory’ (Lowie 1937: 123). According to Heine-Geldern, Ratzel was responsible for ending three decades of stagnation in German ethnology (1964: 411).

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It is clear that from his earliest training Steiner was immersed in debates concerning the problems of comparison and historical reconstruction, as well as the philosophical foundations of the different positions adopted. A small pamphlet that survives in his Nachlaß contains several reading marks, of the kind that we know from other works in his library suggest fairly detailed study. This text is an early pamphlet by Julius Lips (1895–1950), later to achieve recognition as the author of The Savage Hits Back (1937, with an introduction by Malinowski), entitled Einleitung in die vergleichende Völkerkunde (Introduction to Comparative Folkways; Leipzig 1928), which Steiner inscribed ‘IX 1934’. Then aged twenty-five, Steiner was studying in Prague for his D.Phil. and had yet to make the transition to ethnography. Lips’s pamphlet may provide a guide to the way he became familiar with the prevalent ideas and methods at an early stage of his interest in anthropology. It is noticeable, at all events, that Steiner’s first completed writings in anthropology contribute to the very debate about ethnographic problems in the Kulturgeschichte tradition that Lips describes. Lips’s exposition is highly critical of evolutionism, a purely speculative approach hardly worthy of the name ‘method’. He is scathing about the ‘construction’ of a history of mankind that leads from ‘primitive’ to more developed cultures using a völkerpsychologische Konstruktion (Lips 1928: 9) to flesh out the evidence of material culture. Such evolutionism relies on a theory of ‘elementary ideas’ shared by Tylor and Bastian but with precedents in Voltaire and Humboldt. According to Humboldt’s theory of the essential identity of the human spirit, similar cultural products appear under similar conditions in different geographical locations because they ‘are invented and must be continually reinvented independently of one another’ (Lips 1928: 10). The theory of ‘elementary ideas’ can thus be used to add an entirely speculative evolutionary narrative to the relations between a series of individual cultures. It is an approach that Steiner, like Lips and in common with post-Malinowskian British anthropology, consistently rejects. As the antithesis of this, Lips presents Ratzel’s ‘migration theory’, which presupposes that every artefact is invented only once and then migrates from one culture to another. It is necessary to study the complete migrations of cultural artefacts before conclusions can be reached about their development. Such migrations may be identified by studying the particular features of an object that are not essential to its nature and function. The task of ethnology is to study such ‘trickling through’ of cultural artefacts, which need

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not imply human migration. This is easier in neighbouring cultures than where similar artefacts appear in physically distant regions such as Melanesia, Africa and South America. The task is to translate ‘spatial simultaneity into temporal succession’, an approach shared with what in Britain became known as diffusionist theory and was portrayed, in the early twentieth century, as the antithesis of Malinowski’s functionalism, which emphasized rather the integrity of different cultures. The approach reflected in Steiner’s anthropology of 1937 to 1938 broadly derives from what Lips describes as the kulturhistorische Methode proposed by Leo Frobenius, in which migration theory was extended by the notion of ‘culture circles’ (Kulturkreise). As Steiner underlined in his copy, ‘Frobenius proposed linking not just individual artefacts, or elements, but entire cultural complexes.’ However, Frobenius himself did not develop this technique, and the extension of the culture circles method was left to Ankermann (for instance, 1905 and subsequently, largely in Africa) and Graebner, the latter defending the wider method in Die Methode der Ethnologie (1911). In order to move from the examination of individual artefacts to the delineation of ‘areas of homogeneous culture’, two criteria are proposed, as Steiner also underlined in his copy, ‘the formal criterion and the quantitative criterion. The former consists in determining the similarities of two objects, which do not necessarily arise out of the essence of that object or the materials used for making it.’ The quantitative criterion means that similarities should not be judged by isolated examples but whole groups of them – that is, not just animal fells, but bows, masks, clothes and the shapes of drums and houses. This collection of items is known as a ‘complex’. Widely spaced appearances of the same culture complex may derive from distant historical relations. But such relations must be demonstrable by the principle of continuity. If we consider the individual cultural regions which are spread across the whole earth with all their mixtures, contacts, overlays and overlappings, quite distinct cultural elements can be observed, which always reappear at quite different places across the earth with quite specific different cultural elements having the same connexion. The totality of the same cultural complexes across the whole earth we call a culture circle. (Lips 1928: 12)

The heterogeneous elements found in a culture circle are not linked by their inner nature but by purely external, historical facts. And it is the non-functional character of their association which holds out the possibility of deriving a history from their distribution.

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This theory of culture circles was influential in American cultural anthropology, especially in its application to indigenous North American cultures (see Harris 1968: 388–90 for reception by Lowie and Kluckhohn). Moreover, reference to ‘cultural elements’ in the review of Murdock published at the end of Steiner’s life suggests that he did not abandon his earlier professional formation but brought it into a productive relation with a sociological insight that matured in Oxford. However, for Steiner the systematic properties of the social phenomenon were to be found at the societal rather than cultural level of analysis. Thus, while sharing some of the sources of American cultural anthropology, and alert to issues of language and material culture more central to that tradition than to most mid-century British anthropology, Steiner cannot be described as a cultural holist. What most strikingly remains of his continental training – apart from his continued interest in linguistic context – is Steiner’s commitment to comparison, and his sensitivity to the difficulties of comparison. Moreover, the basic imagery of his comparison was not that common in British comparative anthropology, fundamentally of a coincidence between the boundaries of cultures and societies, but rather of a disjunction between the distribution of social and cultural phenomena. Thus, he never argued himself into the problem of explaining how inter-comprehensibility was possible at all for the inhabitants of different bounded cultures that were treated as if self-sufficient in their generation of meanings. Steiner’s earliest application of kulturhistorische Einordnung can be appreciated from his 1938 lecture on ‘Dog-Sacrifice …’, which is preserved in typescript and – with a slightly different emphasis – as an abstract. He identifies a cultural complex in various north-Eurasian subarctic societies that has the following features: there is belief in reincarnation, and newborn children are named according to this belief; oracles are used to assist in naming children; women in labour declaim the name of their child’s genitor and thus ease birth; dog sacrifice is made; a dog guards the underworld, and dogs may be conceived as guides for the souls that await reincarnation in such an underworld, which is presided over by a female deity. These features are connected by the need to identify which of the souls of the dead has been reincarnated. In this reincarnation complex, the role of shamans at birth – mentioned only in the lecture abstract – is less important than it is in cultures from which the reincarnation complex is absent. Here, Steiner seems to be emphasizing, contrary to extreme diffusionism, that local culture complexes may vary because they are integrated by social practices.

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Two other brief but scholarly articles of the same period are highly specialist contributions to disputes over the origins and distribution of items of material culture. A 1939 article on the Yakut xayik (usually kayak in English) is devoted to the critique of superficial readings of the distribution of skin boats among both Yakut and ‘Eskimos’. Looking at historical and linguistic evidence, as well as that of material culture, Steiner concluded that Yakut skin boats, if they ever existed, were probably introduced from the south-west and that, if xayik meant anything at all for Yakut, it probably referred to European boats. A 1941 article on the ulu, or semilunar knife, written on the basis of research in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, itself a case study in typological classification (Cranstone and Seidenberg 1984), is a studious illustrated account of specimens in East and South-East Asian, American, Polar and subarctic regions. Somewhat non-committal, Steiner argues, using the familiar terminology of disputes in Central European culture history, that the widely distributed forms had ‘ultimate historical connexions’, but in the present state of knowledge ‘we must, however, treat the coinciding similarities of derived forms as phenomena of independent convergence’ (1941: 12). In terms of specific content, there is remarkably little in common between these ethnological writings, of the late 1930s and early 1940s, and the social anthropological writings of his final Oxford period. However, their residue is an ease of thinking in broad comparative terms and a methodological skill in handling sources on a large scale that contrasts markedly with the initiation via intensive fieldwork that had become the hallmark of professionalized social anthropology. Having considered how one line of Steiner’s work remained constant from his first encounter with the ‘culture circles’ theory in Prague in 1934 down to his scholarly publications in 1941, it is time to consider his one and only field trip of summer 1937. For beside the constancy that embeds varieties of ‘culture circles’ theory into his most important writing, his thinking is replete with unexplained fractures. Steiner’s work is defined by loss. Loss of loved ones, most painfully. But no less catastrophically for his scholarship, the associated loss of records, notes, drafts, materials. The student of Steiner repeatedly runs up against empty spaces, memory holes, where we would expect records, documentation and extensive debate. The first case is his field trip, for which not even the notebooks have survived. The second, of course, is the original version of his thesis, about which we shall have more to say shortly. The choice of Ruthenia probably had political as well as ethnographic reasons for Steiner, which well accord with what we know about his later views.

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Almost all that survives in terms of documentation about that only field trip is a brief, largely factual article in the Central European Observer, written in English under the title ‘Gipsies [sic] in Carpathian Russia’, some photographs, a fine poem called ‘Ruthenian Village’ and the plans for a poem in the Conquests intended to deal with the trip – a segment that, tellingly, remained unwritten. We turn to the poetic evocations in Chapter 7, but the works in three genres – report, photography, poetry – are most suggestive when juxtaposed. Steiner’s photographs differ markedly from those favoured in the sumptuous volume on the region published in Czech the year before his field trip: this portrays the citizenry selectively, concentrating on Slav inhabitants (Zatloukal 1936: passim). Steiner’s images, by contrast, feature the Gypsies (we retain his term, though not his spelling of it) and the Jews; and instead of the national costumes favoured by his contemporary, he records day-to-day life and markets. It as if he and the Czech ethnographer were depicting two different worlds. If Franz Steiner’s great contemporaries are defined in terms of their fieldwork – Malinowski among the Trobriand Islanders, EvansPritchard among the Azande and Nuer – Steiner, whilst theoretically wedded to fieldwork, was perhaps the only one among his Oxford colleagues whose output is not tied to the field; although, if he had had his way after the war, we would have been able to list ‘Steiner among the Pygmies’. Malinowski, trapped in Australia by the outbreak of war, skilfully exploited the opportunity to explore Melanesia, but Steiner remained stuck in England, making use of his anthropological training to reflect at great length on England, the English – even the English weather (Chapter 15). Why did Steiner go to Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia? What were his research goals? What actually was his subject? Was he following Malinowski, who had holidayed in the Tatra Mountains while studying in Cracow and encountered shepherds whom he later described as ‘semi-savage Carpathian mountaineers’ (Thornton with Skalník 1993: 11)? Did he mean to study Ruthenians or Gypsies, or both, or was his unit of study bounded geographically? Ruthenia was part of Steiner’s native Czechoslovakia and may have afforded a relatively accessible site for a first field trip. ‘Carpathian Russia’, to use Steiner’s English translation, referred to a region transferred from Hungary to Slovakia. Carpatho-Russia was just one of several terms used for the region, including Carpatho-Ruthenia, Rusinia or Ruthenia. The names evoke the geographical location (the Carpathian Mountains) and the ethnic affinity of the majority of the population (East-Slavic

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inhabitants whose self-designation, Rusnak/Rusyn, derives from the noun Rus’) (Magocsi 2017: 5). According to a curriculum vitae he prepared in 1949, Steiner was planning to practise Malinowskian research methods in the field, and it may also have fitted in to his plans for other, more popular works, such as the Prague lectures. Among the ethnological books Steiner purchased in 1934, we find two photoessays in the popular series Schaubücher: Heinz Perckhammer’s Von China und Chinesen (On China and the Chinese, 1930), and Ewald Banse’s Frauen des Morgenlandes (Women of the East, 1929). In these books, high-quality photographs (including erotica masked as ethnology) are accompanied by a brief introductory essay. Perhaps the Carpathian trip might have led to a study of this kind. Certainly, the thirty-odd pictures that survive among Steiner’s papers include some excellent portraits (see Chapter 7). Ruthenia, which was the ‘least developed’ area of the AustroHungarian Empire, had become part of Czechoslovakia in 1918 and was one of the poorest areas in the new country. Its official name was Sub-Carpathian Russia (Krejcˇí and Machonin 1996: 37f.). Steiner’s published article is a drily factual account of Gypsies living in this eastern part of the Czechoslovak Republic as a small minority amidst a Ruthenian majority. Its appearance in the cosmopolitan Prague English-language newspaper The Central European Observer published from 1933 to 1938 by Orbis – the house that had brought out Steiner’s first book – is indicative of Steiner’s intellectual and political context. The paper’s dates tell the story of its leanings. It took a leftof-centre stance towards the rising Nazi threat and orientated itself towards England and America politically, emphasizing democratic values. Apart from international relations, it examined minorities at home, cautiously distancing itself from Sudeten politics, abjuring the politics of the old Empire and stressing the harmonious integration of ethnic minorities. Steiner’s piece thus falls into the same general frame with respect to Czechoslovakia as does his first published essay, ‘Orientpolitik’, within the context of pre-war Palestine: modernization, education and peaceful coexistence are the common themes. The Ruthenians, or little Russians, constituted the fifth largest ethnic group in the Republic (after Czechs, Germans, Slovaks and Hungarians) and lived in an area that had previously been – as Steiner tells us – a neglected frontier of the former Hungarian economic system. The gypsy population of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia was minute – here Steiner follows the dubious 1930 population census in putting their numbers at under fifteen hundred – and

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differed from the majority of more than thirty thousand Gypsies in the remainder of eastern Czechoslovakia, which had formed a more central part of the Hungarian economic system before 1918. In studying the Gypsies of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, Steiner was turning eastwards in several senses: the most easterly part of Czechoslovakia, the region that had previously belonged to the north-eastern corner of the Hungarian Kingdom and, in the Romanies, people whose

Figure 3.1 Ruthenian farmsteads, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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Eastern origins were traced from India. Moreover, like the Prague of his upbringing, and the Jerusalem of his coming into adulthood, Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia was politically and ethnically complex. Its languages included Russian, Ukrainian, Czech and Magyar (Krejcˇí and Machonin 1996: 38) as well as Romany and Yiddish. There is no evidence for van Loyen’s interesting thesis that Steiner was planning a monograph on Ruthenia on a scale comparable to Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (van Loyen 2011: 227); the surviving materials point to a far more specific and limited project. The region that had been a part of Hungary voluntarily attached itself to the jurisdiction of Czechoslovakia after the First World War; but tensions between the Czech state and Ruthenia ensued, followed by limitation of the Ruthenians’ place in the political process (Pejša 2016: passim). The autonomy intended for Ruthenia was not achieved in the settlement of 1928, leaving the region to wait another ten years to fulfil this aspiration. The economic situation was

Figure 3.2 Ruthenian market, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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dire (Magocsi 2017: 195, 198, 204), not least because the distance from Prague stymied any well-meaning attempts for improvement. Divisive groups such as the autonomists and the pro-Hungarians placed a further strain on the body politic, yet despite their efforts, Ruthenia made no headway towards independence in the 1920s and early 1930s, when its position grew ever more problematic. Given the difficulties of alleviating Ruthenia’s economic backwardness, much emphasis was placed on educational improvement, a theme in Steiner’s research too, and Ruthenian culture flourished (Rychlík and Rychlíková 2016: 226; Magocsi 2017: 207). But economically and politically the region did not thrive, remaining in the words of a historian a ‘state fragment’ before achieving autonomy in 1938 (Magocsi 2017: 198). This, then, was the uncomfortable if not tense political situation into which Steiner parachuted himself to do fieldwork on a scapegoated minority of Roma, within a minority of Ruthenians, who were themselves a minority in state population of almost 15 million. The Roma were apparently considered so irrelevant that they did not always feature in official statistics (Zatloukal 1936: 144; Rychlík and Rychlíková 2016: 169). They did so in 1930 when, in a Ruthenian population of 725,357, there were 91,225 Jews and 1,442 Gypsies, respectively 12.6% and 0.2% of the total. Although the smallest group, the Gypsies are likely to have been considerably more numerous than official statistics suggested (Magocsi 2017: 253, 264). According to Magocsi’s brief summary of the conventional account, unlike other groups in Ruthenia, Gypsies lacked organized communities. They were concentrated on the outskirts of a few villages in rural areas or at the edge of towns, mostly dwelling in badly built shacks. They worked as street cleaners, scrap metal dealers, shepherds and, most successfully, as musicians in hotels and restaurants (Magocsi 2017: 264). Steiner’s photographs portraying Roma cottages give the lie at least to some of these prejudices, while his photographs of a Roma school reflect Czechoslovakia’s interest in separate Roma education and the country’s boast to have established the first Roma school anywhere in the world (Magocsi 2017: 264). There might be some trace of ‘culture circles’ thinking in the way that Steiner situates the Gypsies in opening his article; however, there are equally plausible resonances from his period of reading the Marxist classics. The Gypsies of south and south-east Europe, he tells us, retained occupational specialisms from their days of settlement in India: coppersmithing and tinkery (skills complementary to communities based on agriculture), and musicianship (in demand in a

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‘feudal system of rural life or with an orientally influenced form of amusements and amusement establishments in town’). This analysis might apply to Slovakia, but Ruthenia was a different case: a marginal area of forestry, pastoralism and self-sufficient peasants that was unfavourable to the spread of Gypsies. Gypsy settlements were correspondingly limited to the larger towns in the plains, with the single exception of Rachov, the largest of the mountain settlements. Using the same 1930 census figures, Steiner notes that of the (presumably 1,442) people who returned themselves as Gypsies: 142 claimed to follow a ‘free calling’ (most as musicians), 314 were agricultural workers, 171 metalworkers, 216 non-agricultural labourers, and 37 beggars (a total of 880). Steiner’s further figures from the ‘social angle’ come to a total of 1,399, making it difficult to square this figure with either the preceding one or with the supposed gypsy population of Carpathian Russia. Leaving aside these obscurities, some conclusions – albeit not wholly explicit – seem to follow. The number of people practising the ‘traditional’ gypsy callings of metalworking and musicianship is matched by the number working in agriculture and exceeded by the number working as labourers in all spheres. Few Gypsies are beggars. Thus, the Gypsies are an example of a culturally and ethnically distinct category of people, living apart from the host community and relating to it through the

Figure 3.3 Gypsy homes in Ruthenia, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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market – to which they supply labour, commodities and cultural services. As an Oriental people, living among Westerners, and relating to them through the marketplace, the Gypsies could not but evoke for Steiner the situation of the Jews. Perhaps Steiner also saw analogies between the Jews as exiles from Israel and the Gypsies as travellers from India? The record is too slender to do more than guess, although below we shall add evidence from the poetic and photographic refractions of Steiner’s Ruthenian experience. The second, and longer, half of this brief paper suggests an explicit agenda concerned with education. Although most Gypsies spoke Romany, their language competences otherwise differed: some speaking Magyar, others Slovak or Ukrainian. Steiner then goes on to outline both how schooling exclusively for Gypsies evolved as a result of the difficulties that gypsy children both posed and experienced at Slovak schools, and how these gypsy schools had sought to cater for the special cultural and educational needs of their charges, as well as combating the social problems to which they were prone. In short, and in so far as its brevity supports a detailed reading, the single, published scholarly paper deriving from Steiner’s fieldwork seems to point in the same direction as his almost contemporary opinion expressed in the essay on ‘Orientpolitik’ (1936). ‘Serious cultural problems such as the question of emancipation are

Figure 3.4 Gypsy school, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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not broached, and it is impossible to speak of a planwise cultural policy in that respect’; nevertheless, Steiner suggests that the educational initiatives taken in respect of gypsy schooling are important. Like ‘Orientpolitik’, this brief essay seems to be the work of a man committed to the preservation of cultural differences and cultural identity but within an overall context of co-modernizing and simultaneously enfranchising populations – an optimistic vision that was not to survive the later 1930s.

Chapter 4

THE IMPACT OF THE EARLY ENGLISH YEARS

Don’t speak of the war, but don’t conceal it. Let others squander and catalogue All the infamous deeds and the vulgar conspiracy which preceded it, Let them mint their comfortable outrage in fashionable toys, Lamentably studious Let their flourishes adorn The great lamenting faces of the peoples … —Conquests, X, ‘The Wheels’

Steiner’s life curve displays a constant string of new beginnings, at first mostly positive, but later the falls in the graph are thrust ever deeper by loss, and a new rise finally became impossible. His first studies in Prague were followed by a reorientation in Jerusalem and a fresh start in Vienna. After Vienna came London. And – as he had now lost his homeland – Oxford, where he became a refugee and began another thesis. But as if that new beginning were not hard enough, he lost his thesis and all his notes and had to start yet again. Meanwhile, the presumed loss of his parents during the war was followed by the certain news of their death. His health suffered a reversal so extreme that not even the completion of his thesis and the final success, an appointment to an Oxford post, could save him. Friends who knew him from such different perspectives as Mary Douglas and H.G. Adler knew that his life was marked by tragedy. The biographers can hardly demur. The reading is supported by Steiner’s iconography, in which we discern a relentless shift from the self-confident and cheerful youth to an increasingly tormented, suffering man, who aged far beyond his forty years, though – from the accounts we have – we know that the carefree, fun-loving, life-affirming satyr was ever able to break through the mask of tragedy. This is how his friend the poet David Wright recalls him in his poem ‘Franz Steiner Remembered’:

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Franz, barely forty, an old man already: His face had a scorched look. It is my fancy Those burnings – books, then bodies, the nightmare Of middle Europe, unimagined here – Withered the skin of the survivor, Always unlucky Franz, man without family In exile from his language, living on. (Wright 1990: 10) Steiner did not like England much when he arrived and maintained an ambivalent, love-hate relationship with it afterwards, when he had come to know, admire and love many of its ways. To Bruell he wrote on 9 November 1936: It is cold and lonely here. Where are the happy days when all I lacked was a woman. And how expensive everything is – oh dear! I make a big detour around all the bookshops. (Fleischli 1970: 19)

Steiner’s view of English scholarship was similarly disparaging. Writing to H.G. Adler in Prague on 19 March 1939, he lambasts his host nation: The English are so backward in the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) that it makes one shudder. If they didn’t have the emigrés, many subjects would not be taught. … At the British Museum they don’t even have an expert on Armenian, they can’t even catalogue the relevant publications properly … . (Fleischli 1970: 22)

The discrepancy between Vienna and London clearly displeased him in every way. He concluded that he had only two alternatives: ‘America or linoleum’– that is, emigration or the family business (Fleischli 1970: 20). Yet both his parents’ idea that he apply for a Rockefeller in spring 1937, and his plans to emigrate to the United States in 1938, came to nothing. He was constitutionally incapable of dealing with authorities (H.G. Adler Ms 1953: 12f., 2006: 41). Writing to his friend and editor Rudolf Hartung after the war, he observed: I would not have been able to cope with a difficult situation under the Nazis and was far too awkward to manage a planned flight or emigration. (Fleischli 1970: 21)

His finances and his feelings began to suffer as the Nazi persecutions took effect. It became increasingly difficult for his parents to support him when restrictions on sending currency abroad were imposed in mid-March 1939. His father advised him to get a teaching job, and when he did not, he read his by now thirty-year-old son the riot act:

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You will have to break the habit of getting enthusiastic about something for a few weeks and then having no further interest in it. … You can’t go on like that any more. I’m no longer young enough or healthy enough to afford superfluous expenses. … (Fleischli 1970: 20)

Was the universality of the mature Steiner built upon the waywardness of his younger self ? Or did his father misunderstand him? Whichever the case, the deepening of his character that he underwent stood in direct proportion to the suffering he was now forced to witness. Not just the persecutions were hard; society’s moral collapse was too. In May 1939 Steiner’s father wrote: The horror of the time is the way in which people fail. All their worst characteristics multiply, so that the neighbour on whom you were counting suddenly disappears or just walks over you. Everyone thinks only of themselves. (Fleischli 1970: 21)

As the wall of censorship descended, ominous remarks reached him from his parents like ‘nothing has changed here’ and ‘all is well as always’. The final, shattering message from his mother came in a letter of 24 April 1940: There is nothing to write about us. What I most like to do is dream. I imagine what I will do when you come home, how I will clean everything for your arrival. As I say: dreams … (Fleischli 1970: 21)

As Fleischli notes, Steiner’s mother will have known that this was just a dream. Less than a year earlier, SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann had set up the Zentralamt in Prague, and the gradually increasing harassment of the Jews and the restrictions on their everyday life had begun; emigration became fraught with difficulties, and Jews were excluded from public institutions like schools, swimming pools and particular streets in Prague in what was to prove the prelude to their physical extinction, the Final Solution (H.G. Adler 1960: 3–15). Although Steiner was fortunate to find safety, he took upon himself the sufferings of his people and turned his life towards them, bending beneath the burden, until it broke him. Two traditional alternatives faced Steiner: marriage or further study. He became somewhat implausibly engaged to a New Zealander, Kae Faeron Hobhouse, but the relationship broke up. Continued study, the other alternative, was made possible by a chance meeting. As an intellectual refugee, Steiner was invited to visit Oxford around Christmas 1938, where he met Christopher Cookson, the retired Classicist and Fellow of Magdalen College. This time, Steiner fell on his feet. Cookson had previously been Secretary of the College’s Tutorial Board (i.e. Senior Tutor) when the German Expressionist

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poet Ernst Stadler attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar; but whereas Stadler never hit it off with Cookson, Steiner did (Sheppard 1994: 7, 12). Cookson – a man in his late seventies – invited Steiner to visit him for a few days after Christmas, and he stayed for ten years, until Cookson’s death in 1948. A pen portrait of Cookson suggests the basis of an affinity between the old man and his continental guest: like Steiner, Cookson hid ‘the kindliest of hearts’ beneath a ‘sarcastic tongue’ (Sheppard 1994: 7). Steiner was looked after by Cookson’s housekeeper, and Cookson supplemented his modest funds – he received grants from the Czechoslovak government in exile to support his studies during the war; nonetheless, Steiner gave an even more impoverished impression than necessary as he refused to save, spent extravagantly on books and nothing at all on clothes. Cookson was a senior figure in the College who had wielded great influence in his day, an influence he was presumably still able to command, as it was through Cookson that Steiner gained admittance to Magdalen and through him that he won an entrée to Oxford as a young anthropologist (Frank Ms 1964: 3). Cookson also gave Steiner an invaluable insight into English life. Mary Douglas relates how Steiner told her of the subterfuge that Cookson’s housekeeper employed to give the old man a Christmas present. Since this would have been inappropriate in one of her class, she presented the gift on behalf of his dog instead. This, as Mary Douglas recalls, gave rise to interesting reflections on class, Christmas-giving and animals (1999: 3–4). Altogether, the meeting with Cookson could hardly have come at a more opportune moment and assured that after Malinowski Steiner would meet the other two major figures in British anthropology of the day. The early London and Oxford years are a period of transition in Steiner’s work. We see him still applying the lessons of his Viennese studies in continental comparative method until about 1941; at the same time, we see him beginning to absorb a new set of concepts emanating from Durkheim and from his British teachers. To form some idea of the subjects Steiner worked on now, one can examine the materials in his Nachlaß. The notes are particularly tantalizing because of Steiner’s working method. His approach was to initiate a vast reading programme, designed to encompass everything in the field; to make often long excerpts from the sources and, where relevant, supplement them with maps and his own technically accomplished drawings and then store the materials systematically in envelopes and folders. What makes his findings so hard to evaluate is that Steiner made no notes on his hypotheses or conclusions but whenever necessary wrote up the results

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at great speed – as he eventually did with the final version of his Oxford dissertation. At first, he marked the folders in German, later in English. One large group of materials, from which his Copenhagen lecture must have come, concerns ‘The Reincarnation Complex in the Northern Hemisphere’. The regions and topics covered are: ‘General; Outside Northern Hemisphere; Finno-Ugrian; Samoyed; NE Asia; isolated tribes; Sin. Turks, Yak. (Mongols) Tangus; Eskimo; American Indians; North American Indians’ (beige folder in S28). There is also a vast amount of data collected separately on Shamanism. A related ‘cultural complex’, partly researched in the British Museum, includes ‘Funerary Boards and their relation to the Megalith Culture’ (orange folder in S21). Among the Oxford work on material culture, there is a major collection on arrow studies (the title in English now) and another on ‘European Outrigger Catamarans’, including a map titled, ‘Distribution of double-bladed paddle’ (blue folder). This project was probably influenced by Heine-Geldern, to whom Steiner left the material in a wartime will. The wealth of materials indicates a major study at an advanced stage. A world map included here shows the distribution areas of catamarans encircled and numbered and what are possibly routes of diffusion indicated by arrows. There is also a European map covering the distribution of dugouts, catamarans and compound catamarans. Other artefacts studied include: ‘Wooden horses’, ‘Funerary Decorations’, ‘Milk Churns’ (in S16) and ‘Cradles and Child-Carriers’ (green folders in S29). His unwritten project for a sociology of the elephant is documented only by a similar collection, ‘Diffusion, Taming and Worship of Elephants’ (green folder in S21). After the war, this theme surfaced as a poem, ‘Capturing Elephants’ (see Chapter 5) – anthropology and poetry truly underwent a symbiosis in Steiner’s work. All the independent studies of this transitional period can be understood within the context of ‘culture circles’ ethnology. Although they show evidence of research in London and Oxford, there is no sign of influence from Malinowski or Radcliffe-Brown. However, from the notebooks, we do know that at the same time as developing the Viennese method Steiner was receptive to a new world of theoretical concepts. The names of Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard have become iconic of the major currents in early modern British anthropology. Steiner came into contact with all three. Treating them as icons of the discipline is, admittedly, in part a convenient, if sometimes intellectually lazy, device; and in part, it also recognizes the propensity of those three figures to personalize their differences. Given

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the smallness of the British anthropological establishment of the interwar years, many practitioners of the discipline knew all three well, and – despite their misgivings – found themselves designated the followers of one or another. Sir Raymond Firth, describing himself as a Malinowskian in very qualified terms, noted how this trend has tended to ‘iron out nuances of theoretical statement’ (1975: 5). He also describes the complicity of the personalities involved in what amounted to self-stylization: Evans-Pritchard, for instance, was a great polariser, defining his views, first in reaction against Malinowski and then against Radcliffe-Brown, and using a skilful reductionism against the standpoint of each to state his own more trenchantly. (1975: 8)

We can imagine Steiner negotiating these relationships as he made his way into British anthropological circles. He may well have been drawn to England by Malinowski’s reputation, and it was through Malinowski (a quarter century his senior) that he had his initiation into British anthropology at the famous seminar Malinowski had established over a decade before, in 1924. A comment on the Trobriand Islanders, presumably mediated by Steiner, appears in H.G. Adler’s pre-war writings; and among Steiner’s early purchases in London, we find preserved a copy of Raymond Firth’s monograph with a Preface by Malinowski, We, The Tikopia, bought – in an extravagant moment when Steiner could not manage his ‘detour’ around the bookshops – in 1936, the publication year. Yet Steiner was not one of those immediately impressed by the hurly burly of Malinowski’s seminar. As he writes in his German diary on 21 February 1937: 2 o’clock. At a Malinowski seminar. Lasted 3 hours. Malinowski gave an introduction to what he understands by ‘Anthropology’. The usual ‘materialist’, ‘evolutionist’ rubbish, presented as if it were infallible. In attendance: Negroes, Chinese etc. (‘With the participation of the objects of enquiry themselves.’) I will visit the seminar regularly. Not because of the ethnology, but to learn English and meet people. (Diary II Ms 1936–37: 7v)

Whether Steiner recognized but repudiated Malinowski’s irony – or simply missed it – is unclear; but from the outset he numbers himself (the Oriental) among the ‘objects of enquiry’ ‘in attendance’. Hilda Kuper’s evocation of the same seminar only a few years earlier makes clear that it was a highly theatrical event (see also Goody 1995: 33–35, and 36–37 for the substance of the seminar): Evans-Pritchard was brilliant, really brilliant – as was Malinowski; they sparked off each other, and the sparks flew. Fortes, Nadel, and

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Hofstra … sat close together, and Malinowski labelled them ‘the Mandarins’ – and treated them abominably. He provoked and insulted them; it was at times quite extraordinary, but it was stimulating, and he did it deliberately. He was a master swordsman, and could make his thrusts dangerously sharp. (1984: 197–98)

Nothing could have been more remote from Steiner’s own cautious, questioning and self-effacing style of scholarship. His aphorism on ‘Conrad and Malinowski’ (1999b: 239–40) describes Malinowski as an anachronism – a man purveying a naively uncritical eighteenth-century rationalism. Malinowski’s desire that societies possess a telos strikes Steiner as tragicomically akin to Conrad’s ‘wish-nation’ of staunchly individualist English adventurers. Nonetheless, that same critical aphorism records Steiner’s debt to Malinowski: Steiner describes himself as Malinowski’s ‘student’. According to Esther Frank – a close friend in Steiner’s Oxford years, unconnected to the anthropological world – Steiner continued to value Malinowski as a teacher (Frank Ms 1964: 3). For Steiner, the term ‘teacher’ possessed Talmudic dignity, and loyalty to a teacher – notwithstanding any conflicts that might arise – was a paramount virtue. And, in many respects, these two men belonging to adjacent generations of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire possessed similarities, from their multilingualism to their debt to Ernst Mach and a shared poor eyesight. Traces of Malinowski’s influence can still be detected at various points in Steiner’s mature work, from the style of his poetic Variations, which recalls the verse forms Malinowski used for translating Trobriand magic, to Steiner’s ultimately misconceived aspiration to encyclopaedic monumentality in his Oxford dissertation. The invitation to visit Cookson at Oxford at the end of 1938 could hardly have come at a more opportune moment for Steiner’s anthropological development; for one thing, Malinowski could not provide Steiner with any assistance or instruction as he was to spend the war years in the United States; and for another, the invitation gave Steiner the opportunity to study with Radcliffe-Brown, who – having been elected to the Oxford Professorship in Anthropology in July 1936 but arriving in October 1937 – was in those days replacing Malinowski as ‘the head of the profession’ in England (Kuper [1973] 1996: 46; Mills 2007: 85). According to Esther Frank, Steiner genuinely liked Radcliffe-Brown (Frank Ms 1964: 3), and he for his part appears to have remained a loyal supporter of Steiner’s. However, the peripatetic Radcliffe-Brown’s influence at Oxford was short-lived. In 1943, he took up a post in Brazil as ‘diretor de “Cultura Ingles”’, a then emergent English language school, at the Escola Livre de Sociologia

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e Politica de São Paulo (Thomaz and de Pina-Cabral 2011: 188–89). Although described as war service, the exact circumstances of the posting, to which we return below, are unclear; his 1944 interview with the young Antonio Candido, to become an eminent sociologist and literary critic, struck the younger man as ‘vansittartismo’, a Germanophobia named after the British diplomat and writer Robert Vansittart, who argued militarism to be characteristic of German history. Whether Vansittart was a direct influence on RadcliffeBrown’s ideas, or on his posting, is not demonstrable from the historic record (Thomaz and de Pina-Cabral 2011: 190–91); historical essentialism and Radcliffe-Brownian functionalism would seem, on the face of it, to be at odds, though wartime makes strange alliances. We know from an inscription that on his return to Oxford RadcliffeBrown gave Steiner his own copy of Simmel’s Soziologie – probably as a gift on his retirement from the Oxford Chair – dedicating it ‘To Dr F.B. Steiner from A.R. Radcliffe-Brown 1946’, a nice gesture towards someone who formally remained his doctoral student. The gift had considerable symbolic value. Simmel was the only German sociologist mentioned respectfully in Radcliffe-Brown’s lectures (Srinivas 1973: 140), whose affiliation otherwise to the Année sociologique school was established at least as early as his 1910 Cambridge lectures (Stocking 1984a). Convergent views on Simmel, who was to become a subject for Steiner’s Oxford lectures, will undoubtedly have linked teacher and pupil. Other convergences will have included a shared interest in things Chinese. Steiner’s surviving notebooks give evidence of his attendance at Radcliffe-Brown’s classes, and his diary for 20–30 April 1939 records that he is ‘beginning to get used to RadcliffeBrown’s seminar’ (Diary IV Ms 1939a: fol. 20r). In the Nachlaß, we find much evidence of his attendance in the notes on ‘RB lectures’. A Spiral Notebook is labelled ‘RB Sem 2’. This contains an early indication of Steiner’s discovery of the French School via RadcliffeBrown: ‘Durkheim (i.) …. Solidarity 1. Mechanical 2. Organic …. Division of labour is in every case a union of labour. Union of labour: organic solidarity’. This is followed by ‘Sem RB 3’, on ‘differences between castes and classes in India (4 classes)’ – just five lines of notes – and the next ‘RB Sem’ on ‘polarity of joking relationship and avoidance’ – a celebrated analysis but accorded a total of one line by Steiner! Another spiral notebook labelled ‘Anthrop’ includes comments on ‘Cultural setting’ and lecture jottings, which appear to record Fortes, with remarks like ‘Western Sudan. French literature. Not reliable’. It is indicative of Steiner’s work at this stage that a reference to ‘E-P Witchcraft. Azande’ is followed by more culture

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circles material – some notes on ‘Sloven. Doppelboot’. As he moves from culture circles to social structuralism, major new preoccupations begin to enter Steiner’s horizon. The terminology in his notes now includes joking relationships, totemic avoidance, kinship and segmentation. If Steiner came to Britain to study functionalism, he quickly took another line. In this light, one suspects that the growing separation between Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown (Kuper [1973] 1996, but see also Mills 2007: 85–86), as well as Evans-Pritchard’s uncordial detestation of Malinowski, posed Steiner few problems of intellectual loyalty (Burton 1992: 32–34). The deterioration in relations between Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard may have been more problematic. It has been seen that, like Evans-Pritchard, Steiner could on occasion be generous to Malinowski; for instance, in Taboo when describing Malinowski’s essay in C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards’s The Meaning of Meaning (1923) as brilliant ([1956] 1999a: 119). In this essay, Malinowski’s notion of ‘the context of situation’ anticipated the concept of ‘language games’ formulated by Wittgenstein and shared by both Evans-Pritchard (Douglas 1980: 36–38; Gellner 1998: 145–56) and Steiner. Malinowski’s studies of the Trobriand Islanders created a crucial if generally ignored link between the philological method of Central European ethnology and the modern British school by their emphasis on the importance of the anthropologist’s acquiring and studying native languages. His description of the ‘context of situation’, although now grounded in particular circumstances, is clearly related to Humboldt’s notion of the ‘worldview’ tied to language, which manifested in stronger form in Whorf ’s hypotheses about the imbrications of language and thought. Steiner remains attentive to language both for analysis and description throughout his career, combining the nineteenth-century style of pursuing etymologies at the start of his thesis on slavery as in the ‘Tabu’ lectures but combining this with a more contemporary analytic approach. At some point between the 1930s and the end of the war, he seems to have envisaged, but later abandoned, implementing the Humboldtian project with some precision, as emerges in two letters from Joseph Marcus preserved in Steiner’s estate: ‘What has happened to your thoughts about “syntax – language character – ethnological character”. How far have you got?’ (26 December 1945). And then again: ‘What about your examination of the relation between the structure of language and a people?’ (29 March 1946). On Radcliffe-Brown’s advice, Steiner registered for a research degree at Oxford in the Michaelmas – or first – term of the academic

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year 1939–40. The subject was ‘A Comparative Study of the Forms of Slavery’ (awarded in 1949). The reason for his choice was twofold and signals the curious – indeed unique – convergence that now took place between his fate as a Jew in exile and British social anthropology. This meeting of cultures defines his mature work. On the one hand, the subject offered itself to him at the deepest level of his religious experience; he called it a ‘duty’ and a ‘sacrifice’ for the fate of the Jewish people (Fleischli 1970: 24): he took it upon himself to redefine in sociological terms the suffering of the Jews that had determined their lives from the day when Joseph – Steiner’s favourite biblical character – was sold into slavery, down to his family’s current suffering in Bohemia; and, on the other hand, the shift in focus to a social institution marks the turn from Central European ethnology to the more institutional British method of his mature phase. In one of his aphorisms, Steiner jokingly captures both his rejection of and his affection for what the discipline might achieve: ‘Not ethnology – but ethnosophy!’ (2009: 240). And yet, when we come to evaluate the change, Steiner’s loss of the materials for the first version of his thesis confronts us with a problem: we face the second major memory hole in his career. When we attempt to define exactly how and when his major turn took place and – most importantly – how Steiner’s own views crystallized in his encounter with Radcliffe-Brown, we simply lack the evidence. Later, Steiner was to complain that Radcliffe-Brown had misguidedly directed him to concentrate on legal systems in relation to slavery, which resulted in his losing himself in law studies (Frank Ms 1964: 2), but master and pupil seem to have remained on good terms. In Steiner’s later period, although he expresses profound intellectual disagreements with Radcliffe-Brown when lecturing both on ‘Tabu’ and on Simmel, Steiner – typically – still honours him as his ‘teacher’. Like Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown remained for him a mentor, an intellectual point of departure, a man whose ideas were to be considered seriously and who had posed what on Steiner’s terms were real problems to do with topics like totemism and taboo and concepts like structural form and value. To recapitulate. In the light of Steiner’s earlier ethnological work, it seems fair to associate Radcliffe-Brown with his turn towards a more sociological grasp of institutions. Radcliffe-Brown’s emphasis on the difference between historical and sociological method in anthropology (Kuper [1973] 1996: 45f.) will have fallen on fertile soil in Steiner’s case, since the latter was little disposed to history as a discipline. Radcliffe-Brown’s detestation of evolutionism will

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similarly have appealed to the pupil who first mocked this view in his ‘Ethnology for Young People’ (Ms 1937b), and his emphasis on analogies with methods employed in the natural sciences, especially biology and zoology, may have struck a chord in the young continental who began life as a botanist (Kuper [1973] 1996: 47). Likewise, Radcliffe-Brown’s emphasis on comparison (Kuper [1973] 1996: 51) will have provided Steiner with a natural extension of his earlier work. His geographical interests were also forced into new directions: as he complained to a friend, his fascination with Arctic ethnology (and India, too) met with no interest in England; essential Russian periodicals were impossible to find, and so he had to follow the prevailing trend, as he writes in his curriculum vitae of 1949, and study the ethnography of Africa (the region crucial to structural functional theorists). However, this was not all loss: for just as Malinowski’s functionalism helped Steiner transcend the limitations of Viennese ethnology, so Radcliffe-Brown’s structural functionalism enabled him to proceed beyond Malinowski, eventually to Simmel’s formal sociology. And in his turn, Radcliffe-Brown would give way to Evans-Pritchard as a reference figure. Steiner’s relatively brief encounter with Radcliffe-Brown was therefore decisive. Indeed, after acclimatizing to Radcliffe-Brown’s seminar, and with a rapidity that belied his awkwardness, Steiner made quick headway in networking among the Oxford school. His German diary for 10 May 1939 records: Met Evans-Pritchard. Has the best head [bedeutendster Kopf] among the English ethnologists. Really top class. Going to Yale in the Autumn as a Visiting Professor. His lectures on ‘The Theory of Magic’ are very good. To have a friend like that! (Diary IV Ms 1939a: 22r)

A day later, meeting the patron of both Malinowski and EvansPritchard, he notes: Meeting with Prof Seligman. A very fine chap [Ein sehr feiner Kerl]. Will support my request for a post with Radcliffe-Brown. (23r)

Although the outbreak of war changed the Oxford scene, it does not appear to have impeded Steiner’s advancement. Despite the vast comparative scope, he appears to have made rapid progress with his thesis. On 6 January 1942, Radcliffe-Brown wrote him a highly positive reference to support his grant from the Czechoslovak government in exile and optimistically anticipates an imminent conclusion: Dr Steiner’s book on Slavery should be completed in the autumn of this year. I hope to get it published by the Oxford University Press. … It is

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an excellent piece of work and will make an important contribution to the scientific study of human society which we in England call social anthropology. (Radcliffe-Brown: Ms 1942)

Even allowing for the window-dressing required in references (and that R-B wrote on the point of leaving Steiner under the supervision of ‘Professor Daryll Forde who is to act as my deputy’), it is hard to imagine that Radcliffe-Brown could have supported Steiner with such confident warmth if from their conversations he did not have a fair idea what the thesis would contain. However, Steiner had not yet actually begun writing up (Frank Ms 1964: 1). In spring 1942, fate intervened. Steiner regularly travelled between Oxford (where he worked at the Bodleian Library) and London (where he spent his days in the British Museum Reading Room). On a journey commuting between the two cities, the heavy suitcase containing his entire collection of material for the D.Phil. was lost, and he was handed a similar case containing the possessions, so he told H.G. Adler, of a luckless nurse. Writing much later to his friend Paul Bruell on 13 April 1947, Steiner was able to describe the loss with wry humour: for years I collected material for a highly interesting, innovative sociology of slavery taking various points into consideration. I worked on West African forfeit-slavery and Malayan parallels, I spent months exploring the caste systems and principles of bondage in India, I found a clever theory for manumission under Aztec law. … So the work grew so extensive that it almost filled a whole suitcase. And the suitcase was so heavy, that the man who stole it from the guarded baggage carriage must have believed that it was filled with jewellery or at least with sardines. (Fleischli 1970: 24)

Srinivas records another version of the tale (1999: 4–5) current in the Institute in which Franz left his briefcase outside the toilet when changing trains at Reading and had it stolen. These variants testify to Steiner’s relish in telling stories about himself, each appropriate to the recipient, but we do not feel that they cast doubt on the actual loss: as Srinivas noted, the Institute got to hear a version that recalls T.E. Lawrence’s celebrated loss, also in Reading, at Christmas 1919, of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. H.G. Adler – ever concerned about Steiner’s health – is regaled with the version in which Steiner is given a nurse’s possessions in exchange for his work, whilst the Viennese friend in exile in New York is treated to different translations of postwar value in the references to ‘jewellery’ or ‘sardines’. In each instance, Steiner has simply transformed the personal value of the lost article into the equivalent value that would best be appreciated by the listener.

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As to the fact of the loss, its occurrence is evidenced by Steiner’s correspondence about it with the Great Western Railway, which survives in his Nachlaß. On 23 May 1942, a ‘further’ but unsuccessful ‘investigation’ was announced, and on 24 August of that year solicitors acting on Steiner’s behalf acknowledged receipt of £50 from the Railway in compensation for the lost baggage, terms that they describe as ‘favourable’. By the time of writing his account to Bruell, Steiner had in some ways distanced himself from the disaster, but he was devastated, and the loss – he was not yet to know that it occurred in the same year that his parents fell victim to the Nazis – became for him and his friends a defining moment. David Wright remembers this scholarly bereavement in his elegy on Steiner: The notes and MS lost at Paddington With all the labour to be done again, (And done it was.) Always unlucky Franz …. (Wright 1990: 10)

Esther Frank confirms that the loss of his suitcase ‘with almost all his material’ was ‘a mighty shock’, from which ‘he never recovered’ (Frank Ms 1964: 1f.). Like the works of the victims for whom it was meant as a penance, his thesis became another of what Robert Neumann poignantly called the war’s ‘silent books’ (Wiemann 1998: 127). It is difficult to fully trace the progress Steiner made in the first English years because of the loss of the materials for his thesis and the lack of a recorded dialogue with other Oxford anthropologists during the war. It needs to be stressed that besides his isolation as a refugee, he was also isolated because of the absence of other colleagues. There was no chance to collaborate further with RadcliffeBrown, who we have seen was away from Oxford in Brazil for the academic years 1942–43 and 1943–44 on what Stocking calls a ‘cultural mission for the British Council’ (Stocking [1995] 1996: 427), although based on correspondence with Lloyd Warner, David Mills suggests that he may have been establishing a department there with backing from the Rockefeller Foundation and in the hope of returning to the USA (2007: 99). We have found no evidence for close collaboration between Steiner and Daryll Forde during the period he stood in for Radcliffe-Brown. Lecture schedules suggest that Radcliffe-Brown did not resume lecturing until Hilary (the second) term in the academic year 1944–45. There was no opportunity for contact with Evans-Pritchard either, since E-P, who had been employed at Oxford as a Research Lecturer in African Sociology since

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1935, upon the outbreak of war cancelled his plans to take up a Chair at Yale and immediately joined the Welsh Guards. He did not return to Oxford until Radcliffe-Brown’s enforced retirement on grounds of age from the Oxford Chair in 1946. In 1946, according to Daryll Forde’s letter of 15 May 1950, Steiner began work for the International African Institute on Radcliffe-Brown’s recommendation. We know that Steiner’s grant from the Czechoslovak government in exile was no longer paid towards the end of the war (Fleischli 1970: 24); presumably, on returning from Brazil, Radcliffe-Brown found Steiner unable to continue his research for want of funding. The International African Institute with Colonial Office money employed Steiner to work on two interrelated projects involving translation, research and writing. According to Forde’s letter of 5 November 1948, Steiner was given the commission as ‘a research worker capable of supplementing Paulitschke’ and ‘making a concurrent analysis of the Somali, Danakil and Galla peoples for the Ethnographic Survey’, but the work dragged on – as Forde laments in several letters – and remained unfinished until 1950, as Forde noted on 5 May that year. Philipp Paulitschke had written a number of books on this area in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, including Ethnographie Nordostafrikas (two volumes bound as one, 1893). Steiner was supposed to revise a draft translation of this volume by a Miss Cory. Additionally, Steiner was engaged to contribute to the International African Institute’s Ethnographic Survey of Africa’s coverage of North-Eastern Africa. We know that Steiner had been hard at work on bibliographical research because on 7 August 1946 Christopher Cookson wrote him a reference to Sir Hubert Sams at Cambridge: … the bearer of this, Dr Franz Steiner, has been living with me for the last seven years. He is a very learned anthropologist and is a candidate for the D.Phil. degree, he is also for this term employed by the Colonial Office to bring up to date some papers about Somaliland. He has exhausted all the material for his subject in the British Museum and in the Bodley and other Oxford Libraries and is now anxious to get admission to … books in your University library …

Although Steiner never completed either the volumes or the revision of the Paulitschke translation, we know from Ioan Lewis, who inherited it, that Steiner’s bibliography was ‘splendid’. Lewis was supervised by Steiner at Oxford and recalls that Steiner ‘felt guilty’ about not completing the book (Lewis: PC), which does not appear to have advanced much beyond the initial stages. This became something of a joke at Oxford, and Mary Douglas recalls that if Steiner’s

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colleagues at the Institute wanted to play a practical joke on him, they would announce that Daryll Forde was ‘just round the corner’, and Franz Steiner would scurry out of sight (Douglas MS 1994: 3). The Paulitschke volume was among Steiner’s anthropological books when he died and, like the rest of this library, following his last will, was donated to the Library of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (Book List Ms ?1953: 25). The volumes in the area that Steiner was engaged to research did eventually begin to appear in 1955: North-Eastern Africa Part I, I.M. Lewis’s Peoples of the Horn of Africa: Somali, Afar and Saho; Part II, G.W.B. Huntingford’s The Galla of Ethiopia, The Kingdoms of Kafa and Janjero. In the foreword to Part I, Daryll Forde writes ‘The author [i.e. Lewis] wishes to acknowledge a specific debt to the late Dr. R.B. [sic] Steiner under whose supervision he carried out his first Somali studies.’ The wrong initials – was R.B. a motivated error linking Steiner with the man who had recommended him? – were corrected in the 1964 reprint. In Part II, the author acknowledges the use of an unpublished version of Paulitschke’s Ethnographie Nordostafrikas prepared by Miss Cory. Steiner’s own efforts bore some slight fruit in his articles published on ‘Amharic Language’, ‘Danakil’, ‘Galla’ and ‘Somalis’ in Chambers Encyclopaedia (1950a–d). Though the years between 1942 (when Steiner lost his thesis and Radcliffe-Brown left Oxford) and 1946 (by which time RadcliffeBrown’s return had been followed by Evans-Pritchard’s elevation to the Oxford Chair) were crucial to Steiner’s development, they were not wholly centred on the Institute. The best evidence that we have of Steiner’s developing anthropological views in these years is contained in a paper written in 1944, ‘How to Define Superstition?’ (1999a: 223–29). This confirms his turn away from ‘culture circles’ ethnology of the 1930s and early 1940s. Steiner’s presentation had four parts, only the first three stages of which can be reconstructed fully from his notes. His account began – as would the thesis on slavery and the lectures on ‘Tabu’ – with an examination of the etymology and uses of the term that concerned him (via a mixture of nineteenth-century philology and twentieth-century ordinary language philosophy). Steiner noted both that the term ‘superstition’ had changed its sense and that it filled a gap between the practices of the observer and observed. Yet anthropologists (observers par excellence of such gaps) abjured the term. Next, he distinguished two senses of belief: as faith or trust in particular authorities, and as an alternative reality (citing Old Testament Judaism and Buddhism as contrasted examples). Without using the terms ‘great’ and ‘little’

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traditions, Steiner then contrasted belief and superstition at different institutional levels of Catholicism and Judaism, basically to demonstrate that things counted as one or the other depending upon the social context that was treated as relevant. The next, and most crucial, section is clearly related to Steiner’s analysis in the contemporary German-language extended aphorism, ‘On the Process of Civilization’ – a work whose key position in Steiner’s oeuvre we shall elaborate upon later. Briefly, in his lecture on ‘Superstition’, Steiner distinguishes two extreme types of religion. In one type, the relation between the whole society and the universe is pre-eminent. Dangers are thought to lie outside society and must be contained there (but not at the cost of becoming too involved with whatever it is that makes those very forces so dangerous). Rituals are designed to put the whole society right with the universe; social concerns coordinate with cosmic concerns. At the other extreme are religions in which the individual soul is pre-eminent, and the wellbeing of society depends on dealing with dangers that lie within, especially the right behaviour of individuals. However, the more important this notion of spiritual welfare, the more unknowably diffuse becomes the nature of the soul that is crucial to it. The first type of religion seeks to perfect society by addressing its cosmic pattern; the second seeks to perfect society by perfecting the individuals who comprise that society. It is the second, we learn from ‘On the Process of Civilization’, that is typical of Western individualism and implicated in its consequences. The examples Steiner gave to illustrate his thesis are noted cryptically and might be reconstructed with intensive research. But even without going so far, the importance of this large fragment of a lecture in tracing his intellectual trajectory is considerable. Any vestiges of ‘culture circles’ thinking are extremely minor; but his earlier training remains important in the philological and philosophical stance he adopts when, as it were, ‘shaping up’ to an idea he means to tackle. However, the backbone of his theoretical apparatus now derives from the ‘Oxford School’, which he cites by that name. The insistence on social context would certainly have gained RadcliffeBrown’s approval. But there are also influences that derive neither from Viennese ethnology nor British social anthropology: we catch references in the text to Weber on charisma and to Gershom Scholem’s term the Jewish ‘masses’ (1941: 302); he cites Wittgenstein by name and invokes the theory of relativity generally. Most important, there are clear intimations of Steiner’s developing theory of the relations between social formations and regimes of danger – the constellation

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of ideas that was to allow a cathexis between his political and anthropological thought. Ironically, when Steiner invoked the ‘Oxford School’ in his lecture on ‘Superstition’ in 1944, he almost was that School. Yet it is clear that with this paper and his contemporaneous essay ‘On the Process of Civilization’, Steiner’s work had reached a turning point and henceforth displays a new intellectual maturity. It seems unlikely that he was assiduously recuperating his dissertation between 1942 and 1946. Esther Frank’s comments on his problems of concentration probably relate to this period: Attempt to reconstitute his material. He lost himself in his sources, could never limit himself. He was hard-working in his way. But he dissipated his energies, suddenly started to write poetry … . (Frank: Ms 1964: 2)

H.G. Adler’s testimony after 1947 (corroborated by EvansPritchard 1956b: 11) is that Steiner completed writing up his D.Phil. at great speed, culminating in several months’ work in 1949, this being Steiner’s normal working method (H.G. Adler Ms 1953: 10v, 2006: 37). Although Steiner complained that his work suffered because some sources for the first version were destroyed by bombs, there are references and ideas in the later work could not have been available to him in 1942. Franz Baermann Steiner emerged from the war years a thinker transformed.

Note Every effort was made to contact the literary executor of David Wright whose copyright is acknowledged.

Chapter 5

THE EXILE

The lonely man closed his heart to hope. … The lonely man is the guardian of home, the guardian of time. —Conquests, V, ‘The Lonely Man’

As a refugee, Steiner belonged to the large group of European academics who found a new home in Britain in the twentieth century and impacted upon academic life. Perry Anderson has argued that twentieth-century British scholarship, notably in the social sciences and the humanities, was decisively influenced by such immigrants. His examples include philosophy (Ludwig Wittgenstein), history (Lewis Namier), social theory (Karl Popper), political theory (Isaiah Berlin), psychology (Hans Eysenck), psychoanalysis (Melanie Klein) as well as anthropology (Bronislaw Malinowski): The wave of emigrants who came to England in this century were by and large fleeing the permanent instability of their own societies – that is, their proneness to violent, fundamental change. England [or rather the United Kingdom] epitomised the opposite of all this: tradition, continuity, and orderly empire. Its culture was consonant with its special history. A process of natural selection occurred, in which those intellectuals with an elective affinity to English modes of thought and political outlook gravitated here. (Anderson 1968: 17)

However, as Gerhard Hirschfeld points out in an essay that corrects some of Anderson’s assumptions, in spite of the British academic community’s spontaneous expressions of solidarity towards Hitler’s victims, the immigrants in the 1930s fleeing central Europe had extreme difficulty in finding academic employment in the UK. Britain proved intellectually to be a more hostile environment than the United States (Hirschfeld 1996: 61). For example, as Hirschfeld remarks, Adorno spent almost four years as an ‘honorary guest’ Research

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Student at Merton College, Oxford, before removing to Princeton in 1938, and Karl Popper, having first spent almost seven years in New Zealand, only advanced to a Readership at the LSE in 1946 (1996: 61). The different organization of British academic life, the different school systems and the deep-rooted differences in social structure, political culture and cultural life all posed severe problems for the immigrant community. Typical of these differences was the reaction of a headmaster at a Yorkshire grammar school on being faced with a job application from the historian Hans Liebeschütz, who enquired: ‘Has he any experience of coaching Cricket or Rugby Football … ?’ (Hirschfeld 1996: 62). This cultural divide was also the reason that Steiner, already possessed of a Prague D.Phil., was obliged to begin work on a second doctorate at Oxford. The long wait for an academic appointment until that degree was completed was not unusual among the scholars who shared Steiner’s fate. Yet if integration into British life proved difficult (the poem ‘Kafka in England’ testifies to this, see Chapter 15), Steiner shared the benefits of acculturation with many of his fellow exiles. As Marion Berghahn has pointed out, it was not uncommon for German Jewish scholars of a theoretical disposition to acquire more concrete, pragmatic methods from the host community (Berghahn [1984] 1988: 81), and to some extent, this was also Steiner’s case. Nor was he cut off from human contact. Although he does not appear to have belonged to any of the better-known exile literary clubs, he was a member of the Association of Jewish Refugees (Berghahn [1984] 1988: 150–72) and belonged to other organizations, too. Moving regularly between Oxford and London from 1939 to 1945, Steiner built up a complex life that was to provide the basis for his mature achievement after the war, both as poet and as anthropologist. Although more research is needed on his Oxford friendships, the impression we have is not that of a recluse but of a man who entered fully into social life, availing himself of all the possibilities for contact and intellectual stimulus available. If he was lonely, this was the loneliness of the solitary, cut off from home, family and long-standing friends and the spiritual nourishment that all these would bring. He moved in very different circles. There was a circle of Jews and Zionists at Oxford among whom one should mention his close friend and supporter Esther Frank, whom he met in 1939; keeping up his political activities in this group, in 1943 he became a founder member of the Oxford Branch of Poale Zion – the Jewish Socialist Labour Party (affiliated to the British Labour Party); there were other German-speaking exiles, like Eva Erdély, with whom he could share his literary interests;

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there were various student circles in which Steiner appears to have been active: for example, in 1941 he was the Czech representative on the Committee of the International Students’ Club; in 1942 he addressed the Oxford University Slavonic Club on ‘Karamazin: The Russian Discovery of England’; on 6 May 1943, he addressed the Oxford University Russian Club on ‘The Carpathians’ – other speakers that term included C.M. Bowra, Lord David Cecil and Eugen Wellesz; on 1 November that year he addressed the German Literature Society on ‘Rilkes Weg zur Beschwörung’ (Rilke’s Path to Conjuration) – one wonders what the students made of these turgid reflections that would have taken about three hours to read in full (Steiner 2000: 91–146); and in the same year, on 10 June, he was advertised as addressing the Graduate Society on ‘How to Define Superstition?’, albeit the surviving typescript of the paper is dated 1944. If some talks, like that on the Carpathians, enabled him to go over old ground, the majority provided him with an opportunity to develop fundamental insights in his thinking; away from the university, there was the circle of Indian, Malayan, Chinese and Arab friends whom Steiner met and went dancing with at the Student Movement House in London (Canetti 1995: 207); there were the more private Indian friends among whom Steiner could relax, proudly addressing them with the words ‘we Orientals’ (Chandavarkar 1994: 15); there were meetings and walking trips in the Lake District and Scotland with his cousin Lise Seligmann and her husband, on one of which the three of them spent the night together in the open, huddled under a single winter coat (L. Seligmann: PC); there was a circle of young émigré writers that included the poet and future publisher of the Liverpool poets, Georg Rapp; and there was a connected circle of English poets, notably Steiner’s friend David Wright, whom he met no later than 1942 and through whom he contacted the legendary Tamil poet and London literary editor Tambimuttu – or ‘Tambi-what’s-’is-name’ as Steiner jokingly says in a letter to Edward Wright, playing on the abbreviation by which Tambi was usually known: this led to Steiner’s debut in Tambimuttu’s celebrated Poetry London (1944), an appearance rewarded with recognition by Stephen Spender (1944) and plans for a volume, which, however, came to nothing. All the while, we must imagine him in his truest home in those years – in the world of books – writing new poems, revising old ones, correcting endless drafts for his closest friends to read and admire, and losing himself in libraries, whether at Christopher Cookson’s house ‘eating his way through a wall of books’ (Fleischli 1970: 22) or at the Bodleian Library or in the Reading Room of the British Museum. It was in this period that

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he acquired his knowledge of English literature, encompassing all the major poets – Donne, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Hopkins and Eliot were special favourites – as well as a host of more minor figures, such as Gray, Collins or even Shenstone. He was particularly fond of lesser-known writers like Christopher Smart, John Clare and Richard Jeffries. And at night from early in 1941 onwards – according to a letter of Cookson’s dated 11 January 1941 – he will also have been assisting the Oxford Air Raid Wardens as a Watcher. Steiner’s war, then, was a time of intense intellectual and cultural activity. Apart from his meeting with Radcliffe-Brown, the renewed encounter that probably had the most impact on Steiner’s work during these years was his friendship with Elias Canetti. A fortnight after reaching England in 1939, Canetti contacted Steiner, and they began a close collaboration that – with one severe interruption – was to last until Steiner’s death in 1952. Until about twenty-five years ago, Steiner was awarded only a walk-on part in Canetti’s biography as a source for the anthropology in Crowds and Power (Barnouw 1979: 47), but when we were beginning our work on locating Steiner (J. Adler 1994a: 141), Canetti wrote a memoir on him, published after his own death (Canetti 1995: 205–9), and this at last provides more insight into Canetti’s relation to Steiner. Since then, the relationship has been presented in the Marbach exhibition ‘“Ortlose Botschaft”. Der Freundeskreis H.G. Adler, Elias Canetti und Franz Baermann Steiner im englischen Exil’ (“Placeless Message”. The Circle of Friends H.G. Adler, Elias Canetti and Franz Baermann Steiner in English Exile, Atze 1998: 29–48). Subsequently the relationship was further explored in the biographies of the three friends (Hanuschek 2005: 330–34; Van Loyen 2011: 423–61; Filkins 2019: 213–15). Because of Steiner’s early death and Canetti’s rise to fame, insofar as the friendship has been noted at all, Steiner has come to stand somewhat in the shadow of his famous friend, and there is a need, as Iris Murdoch stressed, ‘to set things right between Franz and Canetti’ (PC). This problem is exaggerated by Canetti scholarship, which tends to see him in isolation, without reference to some of his closest friends, albeit it is now recognized that Steiner was Canetti’s closest intellectual soulmate in Britain (Göbel 2005: 106). As research has advanced, Steiner has come to be recognized as one of Canetti’s most significant intellectual friends, albeit their friendship may have been based less in commonality than in ‘productive polarization’ (Arnason 2019: 409). If in literary matters Steiner regarded Canetti – who was some years older and had already published his first novel – as his senior, intellectually the two men were equals, and in matters

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anthropological, to which Canetti now turned (1966: 7), the literary relationship was reversed; with this in mind, two interesting parallels can be noted. First, just as Steiner took it upon himself to write on ‘slavery’ as a sacrifice in 1939, at the outbreak of war Canetti abjured all creative writing and devoted himself exclusively to his studies on Crowds and Power. This sacrifice indicates a link between the projects, which are in some ways complementary, notwithstanding the methodological gulf that separates the professional anthropologist from the student of crowd phenomena. Interestingly, the two also began writing-up at about the same time, in 1948–49. The second parallel developed around 1942. Early in that year, to create a counterweight to the pressure of work on Crowds and Power, Canetti began to write his aphorisms, first collected as Aufzeichnungen 1942–1948 (1966: 7f.). Steiner started work on a similar project at about the same time, the aphorisms that, following the renaissance tradition of such collections as Ben Jonson’s Timber or Discoveries, he called Feststellungen und Versuche (Essays and Discoveries), a large number of which have now been published, most recently under their original title (Steiner 1988, 1995, 1999b, 2009; J. Adler 1994b: 283–85). Hitherto, it has been accepted that Steiner began writing his aphorisms in summer 1943 at Canetti’s prompting, a view put forward by Canetti himself and other friends (Fleischli 1970: 58; 116). However, against this, one needs to place Esther Frank’s account, which includes more circumstantial evidence: It was about 1942 that Franz began to recount aperçus and so on about literary criticism (Kafka, Rilke), and sociology as well. He just said the things freely in conversation. Whole theories. I thought it was a pity that he told these things to someone who might forget them. I suggested that he write them down. At first he was reluctant: everyone knew what he had to say, it was self-evident. I pressed him more and more and one day I bought him a black notebook. He was angry that I was pressing him and went away in annoyance. After a few days he came back and had already written something down. At first they were clumsy, longer pieces. I soon copied the things out. Then he got used to it. Later he enjoyed writing many of them. He had so many ideas himself. Before my departure Canetti told me that Franz had ‘stolen’ many things from him, especially on the division of labour. I say: Franz had so many ideas that he had no need to borrow any. Canetti: during the war there was a temporary break. (Frank Ms 1964: 9)

In the somewhat incestuous world of exile, Canetti was clearly jealous of his ideas and had an interest in demonstrating both his independence from Steiner and the latter’s intellectual dependence on him. Their disagreement seems to have affected even their friends,

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as both H.G. Adler and Iris Murdoch commented on it. The former observed that Steiner and Canetti often noted down their ideas after a conversation and subsequently each accused the other of having appropriated his ideas (PC). In her journal, writing some months after Steiner’s death, Iris Murdoch explains that the argument was in fact prompted by one of Canetti’s mistresses, Friedl Benedikt (1916–53), who wrote three novels in English as Anna Sebastian and entered into a ménage à trois with Canetti and Veza and then à quatre with Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (Hanuschek 2005: 363–71). An idea of the friends’ pastimes is afforded by a series of photographic portraits of Veza and Marie-Louise, who met in 1939. Seated on the floor in the foreground of one of these photographs (Figure 5.1; Schlenker 2009: 156), Marie-Louise is flanked by two portraits she had painted in 1938 and 1940, in front of her ‘Selfportrait in a red hat’ of 1938, the year she left Austria (Schlenker 2009: catalogue numbers 46, 47 and 51). In the background, Veza, with hands hidden in what appears to be a muff, is seated before a painting in Marie-Louise’s collection that the artist jokingly referred to as ‘The Spanish Lady’ and which the friends thought bore a striking resemblance to Veza, recalling her Sephardic origins (PC to Jeremy Adler). The two friends look away from one another, perhaps to suggest their rivalry, Veza turned in profile towards ‘The Spanish Lady’, and Marie-Louise, both in person and in her self-portrait, looking into the camera. The whole skein of resemblances and oppositions evokes a mise en abyme reminiscent of Velasquez. That this was probably intentional is confirmed by the same two paintings, stacked together, occupying the foreground of another photograph of the two friends, on the same occasion to judge by their dress, behind which they are seated on a sofa, gaze averted again, in Marie-Louise’s library (Schlenker 2009: 140). Yet another photograph, now in the archives of the Tate [TGA 20129/6/5/14/2], confirms Elias Canetti’s presence during the installation – perhaps as master of ceremonies and probably the photographer of two of this series that captured the cultural and sexual complexities of life in exile. Marie-Louise went on to paint a shrewd portrait of Canetti and Steiner, titled ‘Conversation in the Library’, the library being her own, which is both an act of homage and a caricature (reproduced as frontispiece to this volume, Schlenker 2009: 213–15), and almost ‘anthropological’ in character (Lloyd 2007: 143). She much admired Steiner’s poetry, which she called ‘very, very beautiful’ (Lloyd 2007: 142). To judge by the little folder of poems he gave her, Marie-Louise belonged to his circle of literary admirers who stood in

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for the audience that, under more favourable circumstances, publication as a book would have afforded him. Friedl was an altogether trickier friend. She mischievously reported to Canetti that Steiner had represented Canetti’s ideas as his own. Murdoch records the scene about a decade later, on 4 February 1953, basing herself on Canetti’s account given to her on the previous day: I saw C. yesterday in London. I left the first notebook of my novel with him (small & dry as a walnut, it seemed). C. told me at length the story of his quarrel with Franz. The scene in the garden, when Friedl accused F. of stealing C’s ideas. … C. and F. then quarrelled violently about the ‘stolen’ ideas. F., at last – now I suppose I have lost your friendship. (How every vista into F.’s past is one of pain.) After that, C. was brutal to Friedl, and punished her by not seeing her for a fortnight. (‘She had to write twenty letters’) But he didn’t see F. for two years. He says he now thinks F. was a bit in love with Friedl, & wanted to impress her by showing her how ideas of C’s were to be found everywhere in literature. The scene was vivid to me, the hot garden, Friedl very desirable (‘She is a summer person’) and full of her triumph over the two men both of whom were wanting her. (Murdoch Ms 1952–53: fol.4f.)

Figure 5.1 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky in her living room-cum-studio in Amersham with Veza Canetti, 1940 or shortly after. © Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust 2021.

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Murdoch’s vivid journal entry wonderfully evokes the mixture of sexual and intellectual rivalries that seems to have coloured relations between Steiner and Canetti, though the accuracy of Canetti’s account – which conveniently exculpates both the quarrelling males whilst finding a female culprit – may be open to question. More research will be needed in both Canetti’s and Steiner’s papers to resolve the issue. In the light of Steiner’s other work, such as the study on labour (1999b), his ideas on labour cited by Frank as the cause of the problem seems a curious subject for them to have disagreed about, especially since there are a number of aphorisms in which Steiner is much more obviously reflecting Canetti’s concerns – for example, in thoughts on death and power (J. Adler 1995a: 229–30) – whilst elsewhere it is demonstrable that Canetti explores more typical concepts of Steiner’s: Canetti’s treatment of the ‘slave’ as ‘isolated’ in Crowds and Power (Canetti 1960: 440f.) recalls Steiner’s definition of slavery as the exclusion from kinship relations; and Canetti’s much-quoted definition of the poet in ‘Der Beruf des Dichters’ (The Writer’s Profession) as ‘Hüter der Verwandlung’ (The Guardian of Transformation; 1978: 262) rehearses Steiner’s own stronger and much earlier formulation that the poet is ‘the only guardian of the myths of every people’ (Steiner 1964: 125). This idea of intellectual stewardship goes to the heart of Steiner’s thinking around 1942, as when in the Conquests he calls ‘the lonely man’ ‘the guardian of time’: whereas Canetti’s terminology ties the idea of poetic stewardship to his concept of ‘transformation’, Steiner’s notion is embedded sociologically, in that particular roles (the poet, the homo religiosus) perform specific functions. Yet even here there is convergence. Both Steiner and Canetti are thinking in a context of danger behaviour: Canetti emphasizes the dangers wrought by modernity (1978: 258f.) against which the poet as transformer should act; whilst elsewhere Steiner, in ‘Superstition’ and ‘On the Process of Civilization’ (1999b: 123–28), locates modern danger in a related manner, and himself as a poet sets out to counter danger by acting as a ‘guardian of metamorphoses’ in his Variations – a cycle of poems that ‘transforms’ into modern verse the ethnic folk songs of several peoples, selected because they took no active part in the war (Steiner 2000: 141–55). Both Canetti and Steiner positively reactivate Shelley’s idea of poets as ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. An uncanny connection bound them together even at the time of Steiner’s death. Canetti records a premonition he had the day before Steiner died, when he was writing a dialogue for his play The Numbered. This has echoes of Steiner’s fate (Hanuschek 2005: 402):

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She: So brief! He: But we will meet again. She: Will we meet again? He: Yes. We love each other. She: But will we meet again? He: Weren’t you happy? She: Happy–oh–happy! He: Then you will come again. She: I don’t know.

She does not return, because she dies the very next day. Two months later Canetti noted the parallel to Franz and Iris: ‘This scene was written on the day before Franz Steiner died. Iris, who loved him, was with him on the night before his death – whilst I was writing this scene.’ Canetti alters the chronology to fit his story, since we know from Iris that she was with Franz on the night that he died. The mixture of intellectual bravado and sexual jealousy that united this group in a kind of incestuous romance was truly explosive. These tensions come to light in a letter from Canetti to Steiner, in which inter alia he berates Veza for her ‘pathetic self-righteousness’ (Canetti 2018: 33–34): Please don’t tell Veza about these things in your letters. Veza makes my life Hell; for some time now she tears open my letters ‘by mistake’, I bless the day, when she will live somewhere else. I want to live alone at last.

In a formulation that anticipates John Bayley’s famous description of Canetti as ‘the god-monster of Hampstead’ (Bayley 1998: 108), Canetti describes himself as ‘a twelve-fold apocalyptic monster’ (Canetti 2018: 42). Canetti’s wife Veza was an essential part of this circle. A few feisty letters from Veza to Steiner that have only recently been published testify to her admiration for his poetry and her jealousy of his relationship with Canetti (Sievers 2018: 436–38). Yet Veza, despite this grudge (Van Loyen 2011: 452), appears to have been genuinely fond of Steiner. Of his poetry, writing in a mixture of German and English with a reminiscence of the last words of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, she wrote: ‘I belong to the “happy few” who can understand your poetry and I thank you greatly’ (Sievers 2018: 436). In light of his many tragedies, at the beginning of his last year, she communicated her misplaced faith that finally life would bring him ‘luck’ (Atze 1998: 114). Her mixture of cattiness and an anguished yearning for affection, which was intensified by her philandering husband’s serial betrayals, would have bonded well with Steiner’s wounded inner life.

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Figure 5.2 Elias Canetti, Grinzing, Vienna, 1936. © Johanna Canetti.

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What makes the dialogue between Steiner and Elias Canetti so fascinating is not the issue of priorities but the extraordinary convergence of related but different standpoints; to juxtapose their writings is to recognize a seminal wartime debate, endlessly stimulating in its implications for the area that links poetry, theology, sociology and anthropology. Yet Canetti could be a duplicitous friend. In his private jottings on Steiner, he savagely betrayed their friendship: ‘It is impossible to love him. How, then, can he be helped?’ (Van Loyen 2011: 449). To some extent, this kind of back-biting can be ascribed to the anguish of exile, whereby the émigré internalizes the destruction imposed by his political fate. For this extreme situation, the darts and barbs of the aphorism provide the perfect intellectual weapon. But whereas Canetti used the medium to sneer, Steiner upheld the opposite standpoint: ‘I am prepared to believe the worst of everyone – and to refute it’ (2009: 369). If Canetti used the form to snipe at his chum, Steiner instrumentalized it as an objective tool, to locate Canetti in literary history. There was an efflorescence of Jewish writers in the Weimar Republic, including figures such as Stefan Zweig and Ernst Toller, Arnold Döblin and Else Lasker-Schüler (Heuer 1992–2013; Gidal 1997: 390–93), but Steiner seems to have been the first to note that in the whole of German literary history, there were only three Sephardic Jews: Johann Michael Moscherosch, Julius Mosen and Canetti (Steiner 2009: 268). How little Canetti understood his religion, however, can be seen from the fact that he refused to become ‘a devout Jew’ and believed that the Jews were inspired by an act of ‘grace’, thereby demonstrating that he wrongly believed Judaism to be, like Christianity, a matter of faith (Bollacher 1997: 37–47). In an early aphorism Canetti launched a frontal assault on prayer that may have been an indirect attack on Steiner’s religiosity: ‘The infantilism of prayer: one prays for that, which one will receive in any case, the unattainable’ (Canetti 1965: 15). It is actually Canetti’s point that is dubious because he treats prayer as a mere request and lacks any sense that it involves an immersion in God. Prayer as a path to holiness eludes him, a fact that would presumably have annoyed Steiner. To these three Sephardim we would now add Veza (Silvermann 2005: 74–90), who does not feature in Steiner’s aphorisms. Veza, too, mastered the pugnacious clinch. In a comment typical for this circle, she observed: ‘I collected chains. I was given chains. And they have stayed with me …’ (Spörk 2005: 74). As regards Steiner’s own development, discovery of the aphoristic form was crucial. For one thing, it enabled him to tap into a German tradition of aphoristic writing, which, originating with Lichtenberg, combined elements of the Baconian scientific aphorism

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with the French moral maxim, making it highly suitable for anthropological thought; indeed the inversion of values that typifies Steiner’s mature work is inscribed in the very genre he now alighted on, as is exemplified in Lichtenberg’s scathing remark: ‘The American who first discovered Columbus made a ghastly discovery’ (Lichtenberg 1968–92: II 166). From Lichtenberg to Novalis, Nietzsche, Kraus, Wittgenstein, and Adorno, the German aphorism has enjoyed a privileged place as a countercultural tool, occupying a territory between social critique, anthropological discovery, and philosophical analysis. The form of the aphorism cannot be uncoupled from the method, and the method from the meaning. Devices like Lichtenberg’s perspectival reversals – employed in the Columbus aphorism (see also 1968–92 I: 301, 756) or Novalis’s use of the ars combinatoria (Neubauer 1978) – provide stylish aphoristic techniques for effecting surprising connections between apparently remote topics. For Steiner, the form provided the crucial bridge from the divided genres of his 1930s writing (poetry, politics, ethnology) to the critical anthropology of his mature Oxford phase, which, to some extent, synthesized aspects of all these. Canetti had privileged access to Steiner’s work and remained loyal to his talent in later years, long after his death, when his Conquests were finally accorded ‘justice’ by virtue of being published in Germany (Canetti 2018: 246). He also had similar access to Steiner’s thoughts and recognized clearly what we would today call the deconstructive tenor of his method. He notes that the question was one of Steiner’s two main ‘constants’, his ‘question’ being posed ‘so moderately that it did not require the certainty of an answer. You had to know your way around his thought a little to see that he was only concerned with colossal answers. These are so rare that a reasonable person doesn’t even expect them’ (Canetti 1995: 204). Deconstructive questioning informs Steiner’s aphorisms. It was to become a mainstay of his anthropology and is one of the features that he singles out in his appraisal of Simmel. We can see it at work in the following piece, which, characteristically, hovers between poetry, religion, philosophy and social satire. The piece shows Steiner in his most mature and witty manner, deploying a genre he perfected – the dialogic aphorism: What becomes of a presentiment? It becomes certainty. And if it was wrong? It still becomes certainty. And if nothing occurs that the presentiment predicted, and nothing is true that it assumed? It still becomes certainty. (Steiner 1988: 12)

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Read in one way, this aphorism is satirical: it mocks the posturings of self-assertive belief, which, all evidence to the contrary, is grounded in nothing more than a hunch, a presentiment or an intuition – the auratic sensation that German untranslatably calls Ahnung. The dialogic form of Steiner’s statement reflects on itself and demonstrates the gulf that separates question and answer: the gap between the query and its response is non-negotiable. An answer may respond to a question but does not end the questioning. Indeed, the answer notwithstanding, the question itself remains valid. Questions are a form of statement sui generis, temporally antecedent to their answers but logically equal or even superior in value: whilst the answer remains unique, the anterior question entails a multiple and is capable of generating innumerable other answers that have not been given. Steiner shows that the formal symmetry and the pseudo-symmetry of question-and-answer – the latter valuing the answer more than the question – both belie a more fundamental logical and semantic asymmetry, by which the question retains the force of a determining subject whereas the answer can only be a contingent predicate. Hence the continued existence of even a weak question can gnaw away inexorably at the strongest answer. Read within a social context, this aphorism works as a satire on the false belief in certainties; read within a philosophical context, it provides an early example of deconstruction. Yet treated in a religious framework, it could be read – against our exegesis hitherto – as a justification of faith. What does this mean? Steiner has adapted the Talmudic questioning method perfected by the Rabbis into a modern intellectual device, operating in a mythical mode. This requires some elaboration. Myth was central to Steiner’s thought. Canetti recognized that he ‘was free in myth’ and adds: ‘He was the only person I knew with whom I could talk about myths.’ Given the central role of myth in Crowds and Power, this is a revealing claim: It was not only that he knew many myths … he did not touch them, did not interpret them, did not order them according to scholarly principles, he left them alone. They never became a means to an end for him. For him, too, they were the greatest and most precious things which humanity had produced. We could talk together about myths for days on end, each of us discovered new ones which we presented to the other, and these myths had always been the essential feature in a particular human group, they had always counted and had a decisive effect. … They were myths … according to which people had arranged their lives. … The trust between us was grounded on our respect for myths. (Canetti 1995: 205)

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In his acceptance of myth, Steiner entered into a highly active German debate that has no exact equivalent in Anglo-Saxon philosophy. A central issue here, harking back to the first moment of German Romanticism, is the character of modernity. From Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and Hoffmann to Nietzsche and Buber, writers and thinkers in the German tradition have emphasized the significance of myth as a way of moving beyond Enlightenment rationalism and as a means to create a new spiritual centre. A key text in this line, of which Steiner owned the first edition, is the so-called Ältestes Systemprogramm des Deutschen Idealismus (Oldest SystemProgramme of German Idealism), a two-page fragment in Hegel’s hand reflecting the ideas of Schelling and Hölderlin (Jamme and Schneider 1984; Anon 1988). The central idea here is for a ‘mythology of reason’ – that is, an intellectual mode that goes beyond both myth and reason by creating a new synthesis of the rational and the non-rational. Significantly, it was after editing this text that Franz Rosenzweig turned his attention from German philosophy to Jewish religion; for him, the possession of a living national myth was a distinguishing feature of the Jewish nation. The earliest figure in Steiner’s ambit who accentuated myth and reinterpreted it in a manner that anticipated his own methodology was the philosopher Erich Unger, who presided over a philosophical circle in Berlin between about 1925 and 1931 and like Steiner spent the war years at Oxford. Steiner knew Unger, and at least two of Steiner’s friends – Joseph Marcus and H.G. Adler – belonged to his Berlin circle. Unger’s first major work, Wirklichkeit Mythos Erkenntnis (Reality Myth Epistemology, 1930), provides a critique of major theories of myth (Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl, Spengler, Cassirer, Freud) and – echoing the ‘Oldest System-Programme’ – defines myth as the true paradigm of philosophical understanding (1930: 188ff.). But it is in his slightly earlier essay on Mythos und Wirklichkeit (Myth and Reality [1928] 1992) that Unger presents in purest form the methodology that Steiner was to make his own. Unger claims that the study of myth occupies a special place among the sciences: In myth the scholar for the first time faces an object of investigation equal in value (ebenbürtig) to himself and his entire world: neither an extra-personal natural world nor an individual human spirit – but a human being itself, and as a totality, a cultural world with an alien structure, confronts the observer in myth, who together with his own world also represents the human being as a totality – our own culture with its known structure. Everywhere else the researcher is the conduit for the world’s enquiry into subordinate things. But in the case of myth

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one world is enquiring into another (equality develops between the enquirer and his object), and here the extremely curious thing happens that the world into which we are enquiring asks back: that is to say, working back, the mythic world casts doubt upon our own – the firm outlines, the apparently eternal contours of our own reality are made uncertain and shatter: our sense of reality, the final ground which remains untouched by all other objects which we research into, is attacked. (Unger [1928] 1992: 90; emphases original)

What Unger regards as specific to research on myths themselves Steiner generalizes into an anthropological method for examining societies that live according to myth, whereby the particular object of enquiry – for example, native danger behaviour – ‘works back’ by casting doubt on the value system of the anthropologist’s own world. In a reflection dating to early 1943 that belongs in the context of the unwritten eleventh poem of his Conquests, ‘At the time of the Flood’, Steiner elaborates his view on the conflict between myth and philosophy, lodging his critique at the post-Kantian moment, in the intellectual niche occupied by the ‘Oldest System-Programme’. He attacks idealism, which for him originates in a ‘fear of the mythic world picture’, and he pours scorn on philosophical ersatz-mythologies; these latter are ‘individualistic’ whereas the true myths which the poet engages with are ‘collective’ (Steiner 1964: 124f.). In focusing on the post-Kantian moment, Steiner’s trajectory daringly recoups the philosophical line that reaches back to Schelling, Hölderlin, Hegel and ‘The Oldest System-Programme’ and unpicks their idealism from the new mythic project they inaugurated; in place of their Western individualism, he envisages a sociologically grounded ‘forgotten’ Oriental collectivism; and in the place of philosophical non-belief, he envisages a poetically supported, socially integrated faith (Jamme and Schneider 1984: 124f.): this is precisely the place that he most fruitfully connects with Hölderlin, with whom he identifies as another ‘wanderer’ in the Conquests (Steiner 1964: 114f.). Yet, crucially, linking him to all the authors of the ‘System-Programme’ is the focus on the poet as the pivotal figure in generating myth: ‘Poesey will become … what she was at the start – the teacher of mankind’; ‘we need a new mythology … a mythology of reason’ (Jamme and Schneider 1984: 13). We can recognize, in what Steiner extracts from this text and the debate with Canetti, a dynamic vortex in Steiner’s thinking in the darkest years of the war, which is only glimpsed in the lecture on ‘Superstition’; while Oxford anthropology was in a wartime slumber, and he was beginning to gather material for the second version of his thesis, his intellectual development made an enormous leap forward, as his poetry,

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aphorisms and anthropological thinking converged in a personal vortex that mirrored the European maelstrom into which the rest of the world was being hurled. This also goes some way to explaining the convergence of his critique of the Enlightenment in his aphorisms and the major essay ‘On the Process of Civilization’ ([1944] 1999b), with that of the Frankfurt School. At the same time that Steiner was developing his attack on idealism in wartime Oxford and criticizing fundamental Enlightenment concepts such as that of a universally common humanity, Adorno and Horkheimer were developing their convergent assault in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944): parallels include such strong similarities as the focus on myth, culture, power, materialism, anti-Semitism, the anti-rational aphoristic form and even the fact that both Steiner and Adorno’s work had a theological ground. After the war, Adorno himself remarked on the similarity apropos of Steiner’s reading of Kafka. For Steiner, implicitly arguing against Scholem’s reading of him as a mystic, Kafka was a ‘mythical thinker’, and he demonstrates his view by analysing Kafka’s mythic procedures (J. Adler 1992: 153); on reading Steiner’s aphorisms on Kafka, Adorno was struck by the deep similarity between his own Kafka interpretation and Steiner’s. Writing to H.G. Adler in January 1954, he comments on Steiner’s posthumously published work: The impression that I had of it was quite extraordinary. First because of his writing itself, which has a quality that one very rarely finds … and then for an even more important reason to me: his Kafka interpretations appear to coincide with my own thinking in an almost disconcerting way – in contrast to almost everything else that was ever written about Kafka. … My concept of Kafka’s antinomistic theology coincides right down to the very core with Steiner’s thesis … and the mythical god of which I speak is nothing other than the gnostic demiurge mentioned by Steiner. (Adorno quoted by Hermann-Röttgen 1988: 132)

In the same letter, Adorno explains that he would offer his services in the project of publishing Steiner’s work were he not already fully occupied – as is now well documented but could hardly have been known at that time – in securing the publication of Walter Benjamin’s writings: ‘Of course everything must be done to ensure that Steiner’s work is published’ ([1944] 1988: 132). That Adorno could be taken at his word in these matters can be seen from his assistance in assuring the publication of H.G. Adler’s Theresienstadt book (Atze 1998: 138). He promised Adler to write to Scholem about the matter, and he did so in the strongest terms in a letter to Scholem dated January 1954 (Adorno 1992: 178). However, Scholem pointed out that Steiner’s work was unavailable to him in Israel and added

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pointedly: ‘You are probably not completely clear about the degree of almost complete estrangement between everything that happens’ in Israel and Germany (Scholem in Adorno 1992: 179). One of the defining moments of modern German-Jewish intellectual engagement failed to occur: at the very point that the paths of Walter Benjamin and Franz Steiner crossed during their post-war publication history, instead of promoting a fruitful dialogue between their surviving friends, the non-meeting meant that – in all innocence – the plans to publish the former choked those to bring out the latter. Ironically, Steiner the Jewish thinker was a closed book to Scholem just because his work had appeared in Germany, and Steiner’s thought was excluded from its place in a dialogue with scholars who shared the interests of the Frankfurt School. This omission rehearsed another that had taken place before the war. Although Steiner and Adorno must have arrived at their views on Kafka independently, Adorno wonders whether Steiner knew any of his work, and the answer is possibly ‘yes’; in a diary entry of 2 January 1937, Steiner records having had ‘an important meeting about an article’ with the editor of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, who was just over for ten days from New York (Diary II Ms 1936– 37: 2v). Nothing appears to have come of this, but had Steiner written his piece, he might have entered the ambit of the Frankfurt School and enjoyed a very different career. Even so, the convergence between one aspect of Steiner’s work and a central motif in Adorno – subsequently recapitulated in the dialogue between Adorno and Canetti – does help to locate Steiner’s place on the intellectual map of the mid-twentieth century. According to Habermas, the root point at which we argue Steiner and Adorno meet – that is, the post-Kantian ‘Oldest System-Programme’– is in fact the defining moment of postmodernity (1985: 85f.); if Habermas is right, this would help explain the strong contiguity yet complete independence between Steiner’s thinking and Derrida’s deconstruction, Said’s Orientalism, post-historicism and Habermas’s own notion of the public sphere. The central event of the war years was also the one that finally determined Steiner’s thought, as indeed it changed his life and ultimately hastened his death. The atavistic renewal of the ancient pogroms that are the inheritance of his people struck him with its full force. He responded by internalizing the persecutions. To a greater extent than anyone else of whom we are aware of those who did not themselves experience the camps, Steiner spiritually assumed responsibility for the pain that his fellows were forced to suffer physically. The centre that his thought now found lay in the

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equation between suffering and value. He explains this in his ‘Letter to Georg Rapp’ of 1943 (1999b: 115–22): If we seriously consider whatever could be called ‘value’, it must be this: everything that contributes to the alleviation of suffering, everything which gives us the strength to overcome suffering, everything which can make suffering cease. A life without suffering is valueless. A world without suffering is valueless. What the religions of mankind have to offer – and when I say religions, I mean religions, not myths, not mystical absorption, not rituals, but the symbolic systems which result from all of these and are accepted as religion, which is binding – what the religions of mankind have to offer, then, is in the end nothing other than the ground upon which, and the language in which, people can communicate about the possibility of ending their various sufferings and our own, common age of suffering.

The experience of suffering, as Steiner reflected on it in the years 1942 to 1944, came to form a new centre for his work as poet, thinker and anthropologist: in our view, it provided a new ground for his poetry as religious activity; it located his thought on society within the core of human experience; and it gave the necessary impetus to the turn in his anthropology from the ethnological description of cultural tools towards a politicized grasp of beliefs, values, practices and institutions. In all probability, this thinking in terms of value contributed to the general increase in value thinking in British culture after the Second World War (J. Adler 2019: 32). Steiner’s internalization of the Shoah did not end with the war. If anything, it deepened after 1945, when the knowledge of his parents’ death in Treblinka become a certainty, the first pictures from the camps were published, and he resumed contact with his oldest friend, H.G. Adler. When the latter returned alive from the camps in 1945 and emigrated to England in February 1947, Steiner and Canetti heard at first hand the experiences of a man who had been in Auschwitz. The old triumvirate, who had never before lived in close proximity, was briefly established in person, and to the dual project inaugurated by Canetti and Steiner on power and slavery came a third, Adler’s Theresienstadt monograph (H.G. Adler 1955). The closeness between these projects can be seen from the fact that after surviving the initial shock of his internment in Theresienstadt, Adler adopted a form of anthropological method as a survival strategy. Having found unexpected strength in his decision to write a detailed study of the camp, if he survived, he developed what he calls ‘the will to know and bear the whole truth’:

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Figure 5.3 H.G. Adler after his return from the camps, 1945. © The Estate of H.G. Adler.

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This will had to mature and I had to look around for an example, which I found in the fieldwork of the anthropologists. I always had to tell myself: you have to judge the life in this society as coldly and be as free from prejudice as a scholar who wishes to research an almost unknown tribe … (H.G. Adler 1998: 116)

At the time when Franz Steiner was applying his anthropological method to a comparative study of slavery as a ‘penance’, his best friend adopted Malinowski’s fieldwork technique in order to study that self-same slavery at first hand. We infer that Adler owed his introduction to this method from Steiner and that the similarities between Malinowski’s encyclopaedic studies of the Trobriand Islanders and Adler’s own monumental depiction of a single camp in his Theresienstadt monograph derive from this mediation. From this, we may perhaps also infer that Steiner was more deeply impressed by Malinowski in the years 1936 to 1938 than his diaries or published statements admit – an inference further supported by Steiner’s removal to London in the first place. Whether Adler’s arrival in London in 1947 impacted on Steiner’s anthropology it is hard to say, although it clearly affected aspects of his thought just as, conversely, the renewal of friendship led to Adler’s reflecting on Steiner’s view of slavery in his own work (H.G. Adler 1960: 638). When Adler’s plane touched down at Croydon Airport on 11 February for him to greet his welcoming party of Steiner, Canetti and Bettina Gross – his fiancée – it was the first time all three friends had met together (Filkins 2019: 213), which surely spurred all three to greater creativity. It is perhaps not coincidental that Steiner’s dread-filled poem, ‘Capturing Elephants’, which dates from 1947 – not 1942 (pace Steiner 1992) – transfers a central insight of Adler’s Theresienstadt monograph to the animal kingdom: Capturing Elephants The tame beasts threatened silently, Heads lowered against the grey-black sea That milled within the palisade, Trumpeted, snorted. But when the wild ones, wholly overcome By hungry days and a tightened world, Found no more strength, gripped by ancient terror, The tame ones were admitted. With trunk and tusk the tame attacked. Merciless the well-fed hatred thrust

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Against the jungle smell, the distant kind: Punished with relish. So they slaughter their own, petty wildness Scar by scar in their brothers’ bodies, But the bleeding beasts, almost broken into tameness, Did not complain. (After Steiner 1992: 30f.) The poem compresses several strands of Steiner’s concerns: its subject is all that came of his pre-war project to write a sociology of the elephant; it may recall Orwell’s celebrated colonial allegory ‘Shooting an Elephant’, first published in 1936 and republished in 1940 (Orwell 1970); and it may also embody the tragic insight that under the pressure of the Nazi terror, Jews were forced into complicity with their oppressors’ crimes (H.G. Adler 1960). The poem’s human analogies lead us back to Steiner’s anthropology.

Chapter 6

THE OXFORD ANTHROPOLOGIST

The sun’s leave-taking is slow, Still slower his going down. When the sun is down, the bat streaks And there’s nothing more. —‘Variations on a Song of the Papago Indians’

The rebirth of the Institute of Social Anthropology after the war must have encouraged Steiner to develop his thinking on anthropology, which had been maturing over the previous years. Lecture schedules suggest Radcliffe-Brown resumed teaching at Oxford in Hilary (second) term of the 1945–46 academic year and was joined in Trinity (third) term 1946 by Meyer Fortes. There followed a procession of students returning from the armed services, civil service or prisoner-of-war camps – Jack Goody, David Brokensha and Louis Dumont had been PoWs – all anxious to make good their lost years. Evans-Pritchard began his lectures, having taken up the chair, in January 1946. Max Gluckman joined Fortes and Evans-Pritchard for the academic years 1947–48 and 1948–49, so that the post-war professors of Social Anthropology at Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester were briefly an Oxford triumvirate. Godfrey Lienhardt and M.N. Srinivas make first appearances as lecturers in the schedules for 1948–49 (Evans-Pritchard, however, dates Lienhardt’s permanent appointment to 1949 (1970: 105)), while J.G. Peristiany joined the Institute from UCL in 1949–50 on the departure of Gluckman to Manchester. It was Peristiany who acted as external examiner for Steiner’s dissertation during Trinity (third) term 1949; Evans-Pritchard being the internal examiner. Although he had retired in 1946, Steiner’s doctoral registration continued to be in Radcliffe-Brown’s name. Apparently, Steiner consented to examination only because he was bound to supplicate ten years after his first registration, and his time

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was up at the end of 1948–49. So it was that in Trinity term 1948–49 Franz Steiner, by then in his fortieth year, was ‘given leave to supplicate’ having satisfied his examiners that his thesis ‘A Comparative Study of the Forms of Slavery’ should be awarded a D.Phil., with the degree formally awarded in July 1950. On Fortes’ departure for the Cambridge chair, Evans-Pritchard was able to appoint Dr Franz Steiner to a lectureship from 1950–51 – the year in which Mary Tew (Douglas) also joined his staff. It seemed that at long last Franz Steiner’s years in the wilderness had come to an end, but nothing in his life proved so simple. For a period just after the second European war as – in common with Steiner – he preferred to call it, there can be few grounds on which to dispute Evans-Pritchard’s belief that Oxford was ‘the best, and best-known, postgraduate school in the world’ (1970: 106; see also 1951a, 1959). This was particularly true of Steiner’s time, when Oxford – with a staff of varied backgrounds and singular talents – became a clearing house (of both personnel and ideas) for much of the post-war establishment in the discipline of social anthropology. During 1951–52, Steiner’s last full academic year at Oxford, John Barnes, Emrys Peters, Laura Bohannan, Paul Bohannan, Godfrey Lienhardt and Paul Stirling completed their doctorates. Additionally, Paul Baxter, John Beattie, Audrey Butt, Jack Goody, John Middleton, Rodney Needham, Julian Pitt-Rivers and David Pocock are listed as students engaged in fieldwork that same year. Among the anthropologists, apart from Evans-Pritchard himself, Steiner’s particularly close friends appear to have been Laura and Paul Bohannan, Godfrey Lienhardt, M.N. Srinivas and Mary Tew (Douglas). There is evidence of Steiner’s advice to several of these on a variety of topics. Long letters from the field written by both Laura and Paul Bohannan and by Mary Douglas survive among his papers. Apart from the personal affection they evince, they are also evidence of Steiner’s ability to advise on subjects as diverse as warfare and markets (among the Tiv where the Bohannans were working) and classification of the natural world (among Douglas’s Lele). From his unpublished calendar entries, we can see that Steiner appears to have thoroughly discussed Lienhardt’s dissertation on the Dinka before its submission, which lends further support to Mary Douglas’s belief ([1975] 1978: 128) that Lienhardt’s views in Divinity and Experience (1961) show the mark of Steiner’s thought. When Srinivas left Oxford in 1951, his replacement Louis Dumont also became a friend. Thus, it was that on completion of his doctorate Steiner found himself a valued member of what, to slightly later arrivals, seemed to be an Oxford

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inner circle (Paul Baxter: PC and David Pocock: PC). The stage looked set for Steiner to play a leading part in the development of social anthropology at Oxford. Steiner, however, was a sick man. He suffered a fainting fit in 1946 and was diagnosed as suffering from a nervous breakdown (Fleischli 1970: 25); in 1948, he suffered chest pains and was found to have hypertension. Then, in 1949, he was hospitalized with a heart attack. Later ones followed, and such life-threatening events occasioned some typical Steiner tales. Laura Bohannan records how Steiner told her that he lay immobile in hospital, just able to take out his watch; using the second hand to time his spasms, he restored his heart to its normal rhythm (PC). In 1949, having no kin of his own, Steiner had nominated Meyer Fortes as his next of kin, as we know from the incident described by Julian Pitt-Rivers, who became Steiner’s doctoral student and close friend on Meyer Fortes’ departure. With typically wry self-mockery, he described his condition to H.G. Adler late in 1949: ‘I would already be able to dance a slow foxtrot with a not very attractive young girl’ (Atze 1998: 113). A young friend of his records a typically grotesque occurrence in the hospital: Despite the fact that his heart was weak [Steiner] was determined to do field work and was preparing to do it in Africa among the pygmies. As he explained to me: ‘All my life I have been a little man, I want to know what it feels like, just for once, to be a big man.’ Alas! he was never to know. He had already had an attack of heart failure which landed him in the Radcliffe Hospital for a few weeks. In fact his heart beat fainter and fainter and the authorities of the Hospital had secretly given him up for lost and told the truth only to his official next of kin. … Franz gave me an account of how Meyer saved his life: while he lay there, expiring, Meyer, informed of his unlikely survival and knowing his religious faith, started to recite to him appropriate words of Judaic script. To hear this old atheist spouting holy text which he did not believe in to an apparently dying man appeared to Franz idiotic hypocrisy and made him so angry that his heart took strength from his fury and started to beat at twice the pace – and he was saved! (Pitt-Rivers Ms 1997: 38)

An uncanny echo of this story can be found in the writing, some forty years later, of one of his closest friends, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919–99), whom Steiner met in 1951. After years of ultimately unsatisfactory relations with a series of more or less suitable partners, it seemed to Steiner that he had now found a woman whom he could marry, a possibility also entertained by Iris Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley, in his memoir (Bayley 1998: 54). A poem Steiner wrote for Iris Murdoch on her birthday celebrates their fragile love:

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I give you this wine-glass, Drink from it, drink from me. Preserve the beautiful balance And don’t break either of us. (Summers 1988: 20) The poem gains a tragic poignancy in view of the custom of breaking a wine glass at Jewish weddings to bring good luck. Having read ‘Greats’ (ancient history, classics and philosophy) at Oxford, Iris Murdoch was able both to share many of Steiner’s intellectual interests and meet his emotional needs. Ten years his junior, she had spent the early war years as a civil servant in the Treasury before joining the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Belgium and then Austria between 1944 and 1946 (Conradi 1989: 11). As Peter Conradi relates, this period both brought Murdoch into contact with existentialism and saw her witness a ‘total breakdown of human society’. What excited her about [existentialism] was the primary place it gave to the consideration and depiction of experience, a subject then absent from Anglo-Saxon philosophy, and its willingness to tackle problems of value and morality. (Conradi 1989: 11)

In 1948, Iris Murdoch became a fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. As her journal records, she first met Franz Steiner briefly in 1941, but their friendship only began in the summer of 1951. The tragically brief refractions of Steiner’s personality in Iris Murdoch’s journal sketch out one of the richest, most insightful portraits we have of the man. The picture is remarkable not least for the many sides of Steiner’s personality that Murdoch records: his family, his closest friends, his faith, his anthropology, his interest in the Orient and his poetry all find a sympathetic home in her understanding of him. At their first recorded meeting on 3 March 1952, her notes on their conversation rehearse his ideas on time, which reflect ideas we know from Conquests (1999b: 249–66), as well as his ideas on the untranslatability of cultural experience and on ‘value’; on 22 October, she records his views on God: ‘On Saturday I talked of religion with F. He said, in answer to my asking if he believed in God, that he loved God. In him, it seemed no affectation’; and on 26 December – after Steiner’s death – she recalls reading Rilke with him: ‘I told F. that asking him to read Rilke with me was like asking Baudelaire to read Rimbaud’ (Murdoch Ms 1952–3: fol.1ff.). Clearly, Iris Murdoch will not only have been able to satisfy Steiner’s intellectual and emotional needs but, most significantly, will have been able to bring him that recognition as a poet

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that he so desperately craved to achieve through the publication of his selected verse, In Babylons Nischen (In the Niches of Babylon). Murdoch’s close friendship with both Elias Canetti and Franz Steiner helps explain Conradi’s sense that ‘it is no accident that the plot of her novels … often concerns the disruption of a court of settled, rooted English Grands Bourgeois by displaced persons and refugees’ (1989: 12). Elsewhere he wonders, ‘Is it impertinent to find something owed to Franz Steiner in the gentle, scholarly and dying Peter Saward’ of Murdoch’s early novel The Flight from the Enchanter (1956 but written at least three years earlier), whose book-crammed study and patterns of taxing work are affectionately and meticulously described (Murdoch 1956, chapter 3; Conradi 1997: xx). Like Saward, Steiner lost a beloved younger sister in her teens; and like Saward also, the knowledge of his impending death has made him ‘strangely gay’ (1956: 23), an adjective Iris Murdoch was later to use of Steiner. The novel employs Murdoch’s characteristic redistributive justice in depicting elements of the three Central European Jews (Canetti appears in Misha Fox; Steiner in Peter Saward; and H.G. Adler is partly refracted in John Rainborough) and in the process mixes in other characteristics, some of them derived from English sources. In pursuing this creative alchemy, she affectionately transfers Adler’s height and full head of hair to the short and balding Steiner. It is noticeable that Murdoch adopts Steiner’s term ‘Oriental’ to describe both Misha Fox and Peter Saward – the characters who recall Canetti and Steiner – in the novel. Murdoch’s friendship with Steiner, common knowledge among their friends, did not become public until 1988, when she spoke to Sue Summers: Franz was certainly one of Hitler’s victims. But, though so terribly sad and wounded, he was one of the wittiest, merriest, sweetest people I ever met, with a remarkable capacity for enjoyment. He was gentle and good and full of spirit and imagination. (Summers 1988: 20)

Iris’s assessment is borne out by Steiner’s complicated relationship to the poems his friend had written in the camps. He writes: The experience [captured in Adler’s poems] does not appeal to me, for I have never entirely conquered the despair that I felt during the war in regards to the suffering and death endured of my people while I was abroad. Such guilt is real, and I have to admit that it makes a normal judgement of my friend’s poems impossible. (Filkins 2019: 219)

The typically neurotic response by which Steiner intensifies his guilt rather than resolves it suggests how profoundly shame and anxiety over the Shoah had come to dominate his psyche.

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In her later years, Iris Murdoch returned intellectually to some of her earliest concerns, too. One of her last novels, published when she was seventy in 1989, seems to revisit the likely preoccupations of the days when she, Steiner and Canetti were younger friends attempting to make sense of the senseless destruction that overshadowed their lives. The Message to the Planet tells the story of Alfred Ludens’ pursuit of Marcus Vallar, in the conviction that he is capable of realizing a philosophical project of the greatest significance to humankind. Both scholars are Jewish, and their concerns exist in the light of the attempt to annihilate European Jewry. Moreover, the plot of the book opens, in a scene with plausible relation to Steiner’s own tale of his rescue from near death, when Marcus Vallar apparently raises from the dead, or from near death, the Irish poet Patrick Fenman. No easy identification between Murdoch’s fictional characters and friends can be suggested; however, the interests of real friends do appear once again to have been distributed around her characters, who, in different ways, seek to give meaning to their lives through intellectual activity, direct experience, artistic expression or emotional fulfilment. Aspects of Steiner’s complex personality may be refracted through these concerns: in the course of the novel Ludens is forced to recognize Vallar’s inability to commit his experience of suffering to paper in a philosophical tract. As the psychiatrist Marzillian – a character who possibly recalls the psychiatrist Paul Senft, a friend of Steiner’s at Oxford who later collaborated with R.D. Laing and Michel Foucault – explains: Great pain, the pain of others taken on in the imagination, may seem like a punishment, but then where there is a punishment there is a crime. This can be one of the dialectical games which is played by the soul, it can be a very destructive game, it can be a source of energy for good or bad. It concerns too the mystery of how the suffering of expiation can be transformed into the suffering of redemption. (Murdoch 1989: 499)

The acceptance of suffering, as Steiner explained in his ‘Letter to Georg Rapp’ (1999b: 115–22), was central to his experience of exile and loss. It also provides the nub of his ‘Gebet im Garten’ (Prayer in the Garden), which is also the central theme of Murdoch’s novel. The poem’s speaker addresses his dead parents and recalls ‘The sufferings you went through’: My light and grief are that you were. What you have been in me was horribly perverted, Darkness more than grief extinguishing I must bear

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Because from you, so pale already and so frail, The monster’s clutches could not be averted. For your sake I recover from your death, And now this darkness, now this light And other light: At the time of my ripeness Together merged into my inwardness. Witnesses, witnesses, Join me in what I speak, be near me now. Let me speak truthfully. … On pain I stand and firmly plant my feet, It is my rock, a rock I did not form. (Steiner 1992: 83, 85) Steiner’s poem, using a meditative form that he had developed from his reading of T.S. Eliot and had first employed in his own Conquests, locates the mystical centre of his work in a union with his destroyed people. His meditations on himself as a mere ‘part’ of this ‘whole’ – ‘One part alone has survived’ (1992: 79, 82) – provide an uncanny spiritual correlative to the fragmentary character of his life’s work: if perfectionism prevented him completing the Conquests and dictated that even the completed portion of his dissertation remained fragmentary, on a spiritual level this accorded with his religious self-understanding, by which he recognized himself and his experiences as a mere fragment of a greater whole. Franz Steiner’s failure – or unwillingness – to bring his ideas to a final synthesis seems principled as well as explicable by his early death. Whatever the comforts of insiderhood (Steiner finally became a British citizen in 1950), friendship and love during his final years – according to Evans-Pritchard he was ‘at least happier and more secure’ (1956b: 11) – these existed against a background of the suffering of his people and family that Steiner experienced simultaneously with bodily suffering and the certainty he was near death. Regardless, he set himself to work unrelentingly, writing in whole or part at least six lecture series on very different subjects. Simply listing them gives an impression of his range and the intensity of his work in his final years. The details we print are those advertised in Lecture Lists of the Faculty of Anthropology and Geography as published in the Oxford University Gazette. We have supplemented the details contained in these sources with what we can infer from Steiner’s papers in Marbach. We have also consulted another source: in the Library of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Oxford University is a

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volume indexed as ‘Franz Steiner, Lectures and Papers at Oxford 1949–52, bound typescript’, which contains copies of Steiner’s lectures on ‘Theories of Tabu’ and ‘The Division and Organisation of Labour’, as well as Steiner’s versions of the papers published posthumously as ‘Notes on Comparative Economics’ and ‘Chagga Truth’. There must be a very strong presumption that these scripts are typed fair copies of his own notes made for, and subsequently edited for publication by Laura and Paul Bohannan. In Steiner’s Nachlaß, there is additionally a lecture on ‘Aristotle’s Sociology’ given to the Oxford Classical society that may also have formed an early part of a series of introductions to anthropological thinkers delivered during this period. Steiner’s lectures are as follows: 1. ‘Theories of Tabu’, twelve lectures first given during the Michaelmas and Hilary terms 1950–51 and repeated during Hilary and Trinity 1951–52 (Steiner 1956a, 1999a: 103–219). 2. ‘The Division and Organisation of Labour’, eight lectures. Seven of these survive in Steiner’s note form and an eighth as an excerpt of his dissertation (1949a: 88–104). First delivered during Hilary term 1950–51 and repeated during Michaelmas terms 1951–52 and 1952–53 (1999b: 174–90). 3. ‘The Study of Kinship’, delivered together with Evans-Pritchard and Lienhardt during Hilary 1950–51 and with ‘others’ during the same term 1951–52. Notes for two lectures survive in the Nachlaß (1999b: 197–201). 4. ‘Some Forms of Servile Symbiosis’, delivered during Trinity term 1950–51. According to Paul Bohannan’s note (in Part III of his unpublished abridgement of Steiner’s doctoral dissertation), this series was based on Steiner’s recently completed dissertation. 5. ‘Social Anthropology and Language/Language and Society’, a seminar run fortnightly under slightly different titles with J.G. Peristiany during Michaelmas 1950–51 and with Louis Dumont during Hilary 1951–52. A brief position paper on this subject exists in the Nachlaß and probably derives from this series (1999b: 193–96). 6. ‘Some Problems in Simmel’, a scheduled series of four lectures during Michaelmas 1952–53, three of which survive in the Nachlaß (1999b: 208–26). Even this was not the sum of Steiner’s anthropological endeavours: while completing his dissertation, in 1948 he had delivered to the

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International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Brussels the paper published posthumously as ‘Enslavement and the Early Hebrew Lineage System’ (1954a); in 1949, he gave a paper at Oxford ‘On Gutmann’s Das Recht der Dschagga’ (1999a: 230–34, 235–50); and at the time of his death he apparently had in mind three books: a revision of his dissertation, a book on economics (a fragment of which survives as Steiner 1954b) and a book on Aristotle – some indications of which survive as a lecture and a thesis chapter. Allowing that there were connections among elements of his projects, the sheer range, let alone quantity, of work involved for a man as seriously ill as Steiner is staggering. Indeed, Steiner was sufficiently disabled to have difficulty reaching the first-floor lecture room of the building in which he taught so that a chair was placed on the half-landing for him to rest and catch his breath, from which he liked to speak to students (Paul Baxter: PC). His enormous investment of energy in his anthropological writings notwithstanding, Franz Steiner still found the time to continue writing his aphorisms and to develop his poetry, which now entered its major phase. He willed himself to work by day and night in an almost superhuman way, observing – tragically – in an aphorism that he is ‘burning too slowly’ (1988: 13). The wartime project of the Conquests lay abandoned. Exactly why Steiner left this central work unfinished is not clear. It is apparent, however, that his aesthetic changed, moving on from the meditative cycle represented by Conquests to the short, more concrete ‘exemplary poems’ of his last period. He now wrote some of his best pieces, such as ‘Kafka in England’, which mixes irony with pathos and mysticism in a brilliant display of artistry (see Chapter 15), and ‘Leda’ in which he re-examines a classical artistic theme in terms of his ideas on danger, purity and pollution (J. Adler 1994a: 144f., see, Chapter 16); interestingly, too, this poem – which comes to terms with others on the same theme by Spenser, Rilke and Yeats – not only embeds the Leda story into an ethnically conceived context that recalls his field trip to the Carpathians, it takes a sociological view of Leda by presenting her within the family unit. We believe that Steiner’s poetry, as it became increasingly imbued with anthropological insights, reached new heights of expression in the years between 1945 and 1947. However, the tragedy that touched Steiner’s family life also affected his life as a poet. Although he was the much-admired intellectual centre of a group of exile poets in London (see J. Adler 1995b; Ritchie 1998: 270-71) that included Erich Fried among their number, and although he also began to register an impressive series of magazine

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publications in Germany, the collection of poems that he set his heart on, In Babylons Nischen (In the Niches of Babylon), never got beyond proof stage. Whereas the publishers Willi Weismann Verlag in Munich produced a new edition of Canetti’s Die Blendung (Auto-da-fé), financial problems prevented the scheduled appearance of Steiner’s volume. In the publisher’s catalogue for 1949, it is announced on the same page as Canetti’s novel as containing ‘among the purest poems in the German language’. Only a handful of proof copies bearing the date 1950 on the title page survive, two of them bound in red cloth at Iris Murdoch’s expense. What he perceived as the outward failure of his verse together with the energy he devoted to anthropology led to a decline in literary output in his last years, though he continued to write an astonishing number of aphorisms. It remained for a younger generation to confirm the quality of his poetry: the Austrian poet Ilse Aichinger (PC); and the East German poets Johannes Bobrowski (1985) and Günter Kunert (2001). However, the overwhelming success of Paul Celan – another admirer (Steiner 2000: 433) – and his own brand of hermetic verse overshadowed Steiner’s reputation as a poet of the Shoah. Steiner had more success as a literary mediator, in spite of his small critical output. His slight essay on Musil was the first piece of criticism in the English language on Musil’s The Man without Qualities ([1948] 2008: 143–44). It was written to introduce a selection of passages from the novel translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. This was Musil’s entrée into the Anglophone world; a first that Canetti later called his own without a shred of evidence. For Steiner, Musil’s novel represents both the high point and the epitaph of the German Bildungsroman tradition. Not a view that would be accepted today, perhaps, but nonetheless a helpful introduction to Musil’s ironic universe. Neither his work, misfortune nor sickness made Steiner inaccessible to students. Evans-Pritchard – who wrote of him as ‘a teacher of rare ability … beloved both by students and colleagues’ (1956b: 11; 1981: 196), and elsewhere that ‘he was greatly loved and respected by all his colleagues and students at Oxford’ (1952: 181) – had a particularly soft spot for Steiner. For instance, while his own student Paul Baxter undertook fieldwork, Evans-Pritchard transferred his registration so that Franz Steiner could get the supervision fee without his health being put under any extra burden (Paul Baxter: PC). And, when Steiner needed to be hospitalized, apparently it was Evans-Pritchard who paid for him to have a private room (Ian Cunnison: PC). On Steiner’s side, however, as Anand Chandavarkar recalls, the affection was also tempered by a ‘sadness’ at what he

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took to be E- P’s typically British ‘unthinking Arabophilia and philIslamism’; in a conversation in Steiner’s presence, Evans-Pritchard dismissed Zionism with the words ‘I have nothing against Jews or Judaism but I have always regarded Palestine as an Arab country’ (Chandavarkar Ms 1996: 1). Steiner’s attraction to his Oxford contemporaries had various sources: he was the very figure of the middle-European Jewish intellectual. E-P characterized him to Rodney Needham as ‘the most scholarly’ of them all (Rodney Needham: PC). Slight, short-sighted, described on one occasion by Ian Cunnison as ‘slightly distrait, slightly disorganized, slightly unshaven’ (PC), he was the source of numerous anecdotes, some told by himself (such as his being raised from the dead by Meyer Fortes), others told about him. Godfrey Lienhardt, in his obituary of Evans-Pritchard, tells that Evans-Pritchard ‘thought it a duty to adorn a tale before handing it on … I believed for years on his authority that Franz Steiner had been in such straits when he first came to Britain as a refugee that he had been forced to earn a living as a table-tennis player in Scotland, and I thought I should not recall those humiliating days in the life of an intellectual of intellectuals by referring to them in Franz’s company’ (1974: 300, emphasis added). Anyone familiar with British (male) middle-class humour will recognize this as a piece of familiarly, affectionate leg-pulling. Another tale, recorded by Laura Bohannan, concerns her viva, at which Steiner was an examiner. She was seated opposite Steiner, Daryll Forde and the third examiner; when Forde asked her a question of which Steiner took a dim view, he would wiggle his ear, making it difficult for her to keep a straight face and look at her examiners (Laura Bohannan: PC). Yet if Steiner enjoyed acceptance and esteem at Oxford, and even friendships with his Oxford colleagues, writing to his central European friends, he stressed his loneliness. To his friend Isabella von Miller-Aichholz, he wrote on 11 February 1951: There is only work here. If I otherwise meet with people, they fall into another one of those endless conversations about the war. It’s usually just waffle. People only want to be calmed down and comforted. Unfortunately, I can’t do that. I prefer not to go into company at all. No, I can’t give anyone the feeling of calm and protection, nobody can do that any more.

The social and cultural gulf that had separated Steiner from his British colleagues before and during the war was now compounded by the existential division brought about by his knowledge of the extent to which the Second World War had changed the world – a lesson, it seems, only belatedly acquired in England. The failure of

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his volume of selected poems, In Babylons Nischen, to see the light of day – negotiations dragged on interminably and the book was finally aborted at proof stage in 1950 – only heightened his sense of isolation. Loneliness is also a theme of Steiner’s letter of 4 November 1951 to the editor of the projected volume, Rudolf Hartung, who had by now become Steiner’s friend; there, Steiner paints a characteristically ironic picture of his multicultural allegiances: And here I sit night after night with a picture of Buddha, a Jewish prayer book, a few English thrillers, a few unpublished poems and a bundle of work. And at the same time there are shining lands, loveable peoples, people who cheer me up and share their vitality with me … (Fleischli 1970: 36)

Even towards the end, something of Steiner’s naïve childhood love of distant lands and exotic peoples seems to have sustained him in spirit, contrasting with his Oxford exile. At this time, around 1950, he practically gave up poetry and started a new career as an artist. Writing to Canetti on 14 August 1952, he comments: ‘Drawing gives me a lot of pleasure. I have also used coloured pastels. Human groups interest me most of all.’ But there was a deeper reason for his sense of isolation. Writing to Canetti on Institute notepaper on 2 December 1951, he stressed his inner loneliness: ‘Nothing has changed in Oxford. I still live in enforced, degrading solitude. You will have noticed how inaccessible I am in conversations about important matters, how inattentive I am, how I always direct the conversation to my personal problems.’ The point at issue is his inability to form a lasting attachment. One lady who seriously wished to marry Steiner around this time, the eminently suitable but over-motherly Zionist friend Esther Frank, he rejected (Canetti: PC), whereas the young belle on whom he had just set his heart turned him down; as Steiner says in the same letter to Canetti: ‘… and so I’ve lost everything once again …’. Here was the inner void that the recent and growing attachment to Iris Murdoch was on the point of filling out with new hope. In the final years of his life, Steiner was able twice to visit Spain, in the hope of seeing the cities where Jewish intellectuals of the Spanish Middle-Ages had lived before their expulsion (Pitt-Rivers: PC). Spanish culture had already had a major impact on his poetry – his ‘Gebet im Garten’ (Prayer in the Garden) of 1947, in being dedicated to the memory of his father, recalls Jorge Manrique’s Coplas a la muerte de su padre. Julian Pitt-Rivers, who became his doctoral student when Fortes left for Cambridge, was pioneering the social anthropology of the Mediterranean at this time. In 1951, Steiner took his first holiday

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in Galicia (north-western Spain) to escape the heat and experienced it as a release from English life. As he wrote to Isabella von MillerAichholz – when he was at the coast in Cangas de Morrazo (now Cangas do Morrazo) on 5 August 1951: Only a few days have passed since I landed, but a long time seems to have passed, I’ve seen so much and am reeling with enthusiasm. … The fourteen years in England have just fallen away like a sickness or an old skin; and people say: you are young, Usted joven! Enjoy yourself! And to tell the truth I still haven’t touched a drop of water, and danced through the night until 4.00 a.m. without the slightest problem …

Everything enchanted Steiner in Spain: the landscape, the architecture, the language, the manners and the women. To Hartung, he wrote that he made more friends in Spain in ten weeks than in fourteen years in England (Fleischli 1970: 36). His enthused, long letters from Spain – full of vivid perceptions and details about his own private life – present a happy, carefree Steiner, though not a Steiner who has renounced his own fundamental interests in civilization or his sympathies with the oppressed. Writing to Isabella on 2 September 1951, he observes: And now to Oviedo: What a sad land is Asturias! The wild mountain landscapes, the poor inhabitants of the mountain villages, the poverty and oppression. It is a conquered land that is still held down by every means at the disposal of power. The Moroccan troops are still here, whom the Fascist agitators had to bring across from North Africa, in order – as they say now – to defend Christian culture. However, these defenders of Christianity have to make do with the ordinary local brothels, and are no longer offered every woman in the defeated villages … .

Steiner’s second trip the following year was south to Andalusia, where he visited Cadiz before being met by Pitt-Rivers and visiting his research site in Grazalema. Steiner himself lived for some time in the red-light district, and Pitt-Rivers reports that it was thanks to discussions with Steiner that he was able to analyse why the sons of prostitutes, literally hijos de putas, so often became priests, thus rendering their own paternity irrelevant at the same moment as they became ‘Fathers’ (Pitt-Rivers Ms 1997: 40). We assume that he read Lorca, who shared with Steiner an anthropological gaze and an exquisite empathy for other souls (Lorca 1987: 73): Under the orange tree, she Washes cotton diapers, Her eyes are green And violet, her voice.

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The precisely observed social situation of the scene, in which the girl is defined as a mother by her baby’s nappies, reflects an aesthetic close to Steiner’s own: ‘If I could write a poem about a mother washing her baby,’ Steiner once said, ‘I would have achieved perfection’ (H.G. Adler: PC). The grotesque imagery he will have encountered in Spain will have appealed to Steiner’s own sense of the absurd. The poems called ‘Lines from Cadiz’ he wrote in October 1952 include the following quaint quatrain (Steiner 2000: 328): Show me your short false teeth, Death, and guard my home! Let me bark for you If you will wag my angst. As well as his own early paper on dog sacrifice, the imagery of the dog and the theme of death may perhaps recall the Black Legend of Spain; but they also show Steiner dicing with mortality, which he mocks as a ridiculous antagonist. Even in extremis he never lost his quirky, typically Prague German-Jewish humour, which is as self-deprecatory as it is grotesque. He returned from his Spanish holiday, just days after writing this poem, on 8 October 1952, arriving in Oxford the following day. Iris Murdoch met him from the train, and his journals record the shame he felt when she carried his suitcase upstairs. The journal Steiner began after his return from Spain records his developing relationship with Iris in tragically intimate detail. On 18 October, he writes: The lights of Oxford. Saw them with love, probably for the first time in fifteen years. And Iris was at the station, dressed in trousers and a grey duffle-jacket, serious and smiling, sweet and lovely, holding a little bunch of gentians in her hand for me. (MS 1952a: 1)

The intellectual and emotional closeness that united Franz and Iris appears, inter alia, from the way he reads poetry with her and from a metaphor for their relationship, which speaks of them ‘opening and closing each other like the pages of a book’ – ‘it almost feels like being married’ (MS 1952a: 9). Their humour, likewise, emerges: How Iris is endlessly surprised about me, as if I were the sole example of a species, a little dog with feathers, or a bird with six legs instead of wings. I probably am, but I never thought of such a creature as loveable before now. (MS 1952a: 12)

The entire relationship is fraught with pain and tensions. Lest one over-romanticize their affair, it should be recalled that, whilst thinking about settling down with Iris, in the spring of 1952 Steiner was

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Figure 6.1 Franz Steiner and Iris Murdoch, Trafalgar Square, autumn 1952, unknown photographer. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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also weighing up the prospects of his relationship with Isabella, whom he also considered as a candidate for marriage, and with whom he travelled to Spain that summer; and for her part, Iris was at this very time entangled with the classical historian, Arnoldo Momigliano, with whom she holidayed in Italy – evidently as a lover – in August 1952 (van Loyen 2011: 585–87). Knowing Steiner’s earlier anger when his friend George Rapp contemplated marriage with a Christian (‘Every mixed marriage is a tragedy in this age. In this epoch of the destruction of Jewish life it is simply a monstrosity’ [1943] 1999b: 121), we are left to imagine the additional tensions that the religious Jew experienced in his liaison with the young Oxford philosopher, whom his contemporaries regarded as ‘quite a catch’ (Mary Douglas: PC). For all the sometimes grotesque circumstantial details in their physical relationships that Steiner commits to paper, when it comes to religion, he remains silent, as if circumventing a spiritual taboo, instead dwelling on the pain caused by his sick heart and the danger to which this exposes him, or on the embarrassment (and, later, tenderness) that he feels when his lover must assume the role of nurse. Their first night together, 25 October, is fully analysed: What torture! Did two people who love each other so much and who were so experienced ever fear each other more than we do? Her marvellous passion evaporated, her coldness infected me. In the end, I was afraid that this was happening because she had decided to surrender just to comfort me, and her feelings would not obey her. Then I talked myself out of this desperate view, and in the end it happened. But I was too fearful because of my heart, neither of us could manage to be really spontaneous, and we disappointed each other. (MS 1952a: 18)

Steiner then ‘showed her Walther von der Vogelweide’s poem ‘Under der Linden’, that charming medieval poem of innocently consummated love. With an irony that brings out another parallel to his great Prague model, the same journal entry also notes the forthcoming appearance of Kafka’s Letters to Milena: ‘I’m a little afraid of this Milena who reminds me too much of my problem at the moment’ (MS 1952a: 19). Having not yet seen the correspondence, which he bought some days later, Steiner is presumably thinking of Kafka’s entanglement with a non-Jew – a rare intimation of his own, unarticulated guilt. Eventually, on 10 November, after a happy evening with Iris, the diary cites Faust’s last, ominously contented words, Verweile doch … (‘Stay awhile …’, MS 1952a: 57). The sense of doom culminates in the final entry, that for 18 November: ‘Paul Eluard, that noble poet is also now dead …’ (MS 1952a: 76).

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According to Iris Murdoch’s diaries, apart from visits to friends, he was preoccupied with writing his lectures on Simmel. Among his younger Oxford colleagues, Simmel may have been becoming a vogue. He was read in German by Laura Bohannan, and in the Preface to the second edition of the monograph based on his doctorate PittRivers notes that the book that became his ‘Bible’ in the field was Kurt Wolff ’s 1950 edition of The Sociology of Georg Simmel ([1954] 1971: xvi). Steiner and Louis Dumont were almost neighbours in Oxford, and they spent evenings together with Dumont’s wife and Iris Murdoch after Steiner’s return, apparently reinvigorated, from Spain (Dumont: PC). During the past year, Steiner had lamented to friends about his relations with Iris Murdoch: ‘Now at last I have found the woman I wish to marry, she does not wish to marry me.’ On that fateful night, according to Canetti, Iris Murdoch did agree to marry him (PC) – the proposal is recorded in the final pages of Murdoch’s The Flight from the Enchanter in which Rosa, a recognizable projection of aspects of Iris, proposes to Peter Saward: She knelt before him and her black hair fell about her almost to the ground. She put a hand on his arm. ‘Peter,’ she said, ‘what would you think of the idea of marrying me?’ He looked at her calmly and a little sadly. ‘You can imagine, my darling,’ he said, ‘how much it moves me to hear you say this, but you don’t really want it. Ah, if only you did! But you don’t.’ (Murdoch 1956: 315)

With a typical reversal, Murdoch has transformed her blonde hair into black locks, but the characteristic posture on the floor, recorded in both their journals and in Steiner’s photographs of his young lover, lends the episode a ring of authenticity. In the novel, Peter Saward distracts himself with photographs of a city we recognize as Prague. In reality, Steiner died that night. He was buried on 28 November 1952 in the Jewish burial ground at Oxford. I remember his funeral – the weather was bleak and cold: in my memory there is even some snow on the ground. But the only person that I remember there was Iris Murdoch standing somewhat apart from the rest and near the grave, dressed unconventionally for a funeral in those days, that is to say in her usual day-to-day clothes, and looking utterly desolate. (Pocock: PC)

John Middleton stood alongside Godfrey Lienhardt to throw earth onto the coffin, but Lienhardt held him back to allow Iris Murdoch ‘to go before us to do so – then she walked away, with Evans-Pritchard’

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(Middleton: PC). An acquaintance of Iris Murdoch’s at the time reports how she regretted not having ‘the consolation of widowhood’ (Donovan: PC). At the time of his death, Steiner was revising a poem, ‘Über dem Tod’ (‘Above Death’). Iris Murdoch’s journal records how Franz impressed upon her that the definite article in the title was in the dative (dem) and not the accusative (den), so making the poem not ‘On Death’ but ‘Above Death’. Steiner’s keynote poem does not reflect on his individual suffering but represents the bereavement of a woman with her children. For Steiner, the lyric is a social form. That sets his verse apart from its tradition and positions it in the sphere of the ballad (Steiner 1992: 105):

Figure 6.2 Iris Murdoch, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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The arc of welcome, dance that soon whirls away, Free on a rounded hillock a young woman stands Next to her children who out of fine bark pieces For their drowned father make a ship and headstone. Steiner presents death as a power that destroys the family and ascribes to the tragic scene the quality of a ritual. He fictionalizes the family that he was never to have; the offspring he never produced, the comfort of a wife he was never to enjoy, and he fantasizes his own death as a sailor – a variant on the traveller or exile he represented in his actual life. Even in death he envisages his projection as an outsider. The poem became closely entwined with his own death. Louis Dumont, who was unable to attend the funeral, recalled, ‘I went to his room to say him adieu. I was left alone with him a short while. He was lying in bed and on the nearby table a manuscript book of poems was open on the page he had last read. It was a beautiful text … I only remember that it was clearly related to the event’ (Dumont: PC). This may well have been the poem ‘Über dem Tod’. A nurse who had looked after Steiner earlier at Freelands Hospital provides the following epitaph in a letter of 20 June 1953: The other patients in his ward called him the Professor. They were all working-class men, except for one young coxcomb aged about fifteen. F.B. was simply marvellous with them. When he was better he used to get up for a few hours each day, and I nearly wept to see him shuffling about in his bedroom slippers doing little services for the other men. They thought the world of him and always spoke of him with great affection – ‘a real gentleman’, said one of them (an ex-bus driver) and coming from him it couldn’t have been higher praise. When I was on night duty we often used to have little talks. Going round, I would see him, propped high in bed, sitting quietly and peacefully in the darkness, not clattering round and ringing bells to disturb the long silence, as the other patients did. And when he was asleep, I used to stand and think – ‘there lies a frail body, but he has the spirit of an eagle.’ I shall always remember him as an example of great courage and a proof that a person can remain whole or integrated in spite of so much. And people don’t believe in miracles! (Diana Buchanan Ms 1953)

Many of his colleagues and students have subsequently recorded their intellectual indebtedness to Franz Steiner. Mary Douglas attended Steiner’s ‘Tabu’ lectures and acknowledges her inspiration for Purity and Danger in the ideas on classification and danger he first expressed publicly in these lectures (1964, 1966); subsequently, she has said that Steiner ‘invented’ the concept of ‘purity’ that she

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used (Douglas Ms: 2). The debt to Taboo was noticed by two fellow Oxonians: Rodney Needham in his Times Literary Supplement review of the book (anon. 1967: 131), and T.O. Beidelman in a review for Anthropos (1966: 907). Via Paul Bohannan, Steiner’s ideas directly impacted on the ‘substantivist’ school of economic anthropology, which sought institutional grounds to make comparisons between market and non-market economies. The application of his interests in classification, values and social organization pioneered an analysis of slavery as the antithesis of kinship that was later to become one of the major contributions of anthropology to historical scholarship. Godfrey Lienhardt’s phenomenological study, Divinity and Experience among the Dinka, was directly influenced by discussions with Steiner and by Steiner’s paper on ‘Chagga Truth’. The three general accounts of social anthropology written by Oxford-trained scholars in the first half of the 1960s each drew upon his writings and did so in different ways: Lienhardt draws on Steiner for a discussion of values (1964: 88, 90); Beattie in the context of exchange (1964: 199–200); Paul Bohannan during a review of forms of inequality (1963: 166). Steiner’s direct and acknowledged influence on his friends and contemporaries is demonstrable; however, as significant to a retrospective appreciation of his ideas are the concerns developed to a greater and lesser extent during his lifetime, which now appear, almost three quarters of a century later, to foreshadow later anthropological concerns. Just to itemize a few of these: we find in Steiner anticipations of later debates that will link the politics and epistemology of anthropology, linking representation to power and making the positionality, objectivity and commitments of the writer central concerns. Questions about written genres and how these related to disciplinarity, interand transdisciplinarity became crucial elements of these discussions. The relation between ethnographic writing and comparative anthropology was frequently contentious, involving as it must the cross-cultural study of institutionalized regimes of value that are difficult to commensurate. It is to these questions of theory that we turn in the second part of this book.

PART II

Orientpolitik, Value and Civilization The Social Thought

Chapter 7

BEYOND ‘CULTURE CIRCLES’ THE FIELD TRIP REVISITED

Hammering cymbals, the dusk of brown violins, Frugal beauty of the wood’s strong edge, Controlling breath on the acrid hill And the sheen of birches around the teeming mayhem of the streams, Windy prospect and rattling caravans On a rough road, Pictures and sounds, molten into pure metal … . —Draft for Conquests, IX, ‘The Bear in the Coat of Arms’

By the standards of mid-twentieth century anthropological enquiry, which required the modern scholar to engage in fieldwork, Franz Steiner might be thought a literary anthropologist. To the extent that he never visited Africa, Asia or the Amazon, there would be some truth to this view. However, it would be wrong to conclude that Steiner was not fully acquainted with the methodology of fieldwork, or that he had not absorbed this into his thinking. Like so many of his contemporaries, it was through Malinowski that Steiner came to know about participant research. To judge by his journal entry (see Chapter 4) and his aphorism on Conrad and Malinowski (1999b: 239–40), Steiner was from the outset – at least privately and in some respects – intellectually condescending towards the master of Trobriand ethnography. But against this must be set both Steiner’s admiration for Malinowski’s views on language (reiterated in his lectures on ‘Tabu’ and ‘Language, Society, and Social Anthropology’) and the indirect evidence that suggests another picture. First, we need to consider the fact that Steiner was drawn to study in London not just by the Library of the British Museum but by Malinowski’s presence at the LSE. Second, as we may deduce from H.G. Adler’s detailed description of the anthropological method he used to survive the death camps (see Chapter 5) and from Steiner’s own reference

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to the practice of the Trobriand Islanders in an unpublished short story that predates the war, Steiner transmitted an enthusiasm for Malinowski to his closest pre-war friend: it is most likely that Adler’s knowledge of Malinowski was mediated via Steiner, and that if he read Malinowski, as seems probable, it was at Steiner’s prompting. Third, Steiner’s choice of an area in which to try out his fieldwork technique for the first time, the Carpathian Mountains, is a territory that belongs to the common Central European heritage from which both he and Malinowski emerged – that is, a region on the eastern border of what, before its demise at the end of the First World War, had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and by then lay at the intersection between Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Russia. The Carpathian trip may have been a surrogate for Steiner’s original plan, which had been to study Siberian ethnology and to learn Russian for this purpose. An anthropological field trip to Stalinist Siberia seems a somewhat unlikely project by this time; but a visit to Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia (on the westerly borders of the Russian domain) would at least have allowed Steiner to extend his knowledge of a region of eastern-most Czechoslovakia. Ruthenians and Gypsies were members of the same political entity as the cosmopolitan citizens of Prague, so the field trip could not but have impacted on Steiner’s sense of the culture and politics of his own Central European home; and thus, indirectly, on his own identity. Nonetheless, the differences between Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia and Prague (economic, cultural and linguistic) were sufficient for it to qualify as a fieldwork site, in the sense usual in the British anthropological tradition that Steiner was to endorse in his later lectures. The journey would have given Steiner his first opportunity to compare how Malinowski’s ideas and the ‘culture circle’ theory he had studied in Vienna fared in practice. Our discussion, in the context of Steiner’s biography, of the single, brief article of 1938 predominantly concerned with gypsy education (see Chapter 3) strongly suggested that, so far as contemporary societies were concerned, Steiner accepted a – modified – Malinowskian approach. Moreover, the field trip will have added a further perspective to Steiner’s growing familiarity with scenarios involving co-residential and co-modernizing peoples: after Prague and Palestine, Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia will have confronted him with a third multi-ethnic community. In 1936 to 1938, the evidence is that Steiner still held out hope for an ‘emancipation’ that allowed co-modernizers to recognize common interests and thus exist compatibly. Education remained crucial to his thinking in this regard. However, this optimism did not survive the early war years, and so his poems on the

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Ruthenian experience – written during the personal deepening and suffering of the middle years of the war that transformed his thought – cannot be interpreted as direct evidence of how he might have understood his fieldwork had it been written up contemporaneously. In fact, we know very little about Steiner’s experience as a fieldworker in Ruthenia. It is not even clear whether he was primarily concerned to study the Gypsies, or Ruthenians, or the wider society. We suspect the Gypsies, but it may have been the wider society, which he envisaged as a modernizing, plural social and cultural formation, integrated – insofar as it was – through the market for commodities, including labour. However, there is good reason to believe that Steiner did not need intensive, long-term fieldwork in some distant spot in order to think like an ethnographic researcher. Perhaps the Ruthenian experience reinforced in him that habit of observation by which anthropologists both meld with their surroundings – in order to absorb local practices and beliefs as if they were their own – and at the same time learn to distance themselves, in order to analyse, interpret and represent local phenomena within the terms of their own discipline. But this way of relating ethnographically to the world seems already to have been habitual for Steiner and was increasingly to become his second nature, affecting the way he saw himself and his friends. It may be a legacy of an upbringing as a Germanspeaking Jewish Czech between the wars, for Ernest Gellner seems to have shared it in large measure (D. Gellner 1997). We meet it in his aphorisms on the English (Steiner 1988: 64–66), in the poetry he wrote on English life such as ‘Kafka in England’ (Chapter 15), and it may not be going too far to say that his own characteristic method of interrogating the ethnographic record, the reciprocal subordination of opposite values, may be connected to his experience of the multi-ethnic societies of Prague, Palestine and Ruthenia before the war. In weaving between self and other, the fieldworker practises a methodology that Steiner made part of his theory; but Steiner’s self was such a complex amalgam of cultures, histories, languages and places that he really had no need of an exterior other with which to enter an ethnographic dialogue. As his poetic cycle Conquests both demonstrated and exploited, these resources of strangerhood existed in abundance within himself. In his wartime Conquests, Steiner planned to present his experience of Ruthenia, including his memories of Romany life, but little more than the fragment describing the Romanies that we used as an epigraph for this section was written. The unwritten poem was to have been called ‘The Bear in the Coat of Arms’; the punning

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reference to his middle name (Baermann) would have placed himself within Ruthenia. The plan reads as follows: 1. ‘Anticipation’, evocations of the land, simultaneous memory of its occupation by the Magyar hordes. 2. General description of the landscape, campsites, the peoples of the land: Ukrainians, Jews, Gypsies. 3. Whirling together of the two songs: the Wallachian and the Yiddish (Esther the Green). 4. Gypsies – travelling people – eternal movement – poverty. Knowledge of the future no contradiction. 5. Conversation with a Gypsy. The future is foretold: travelling, travelling, travelling … no home anywhere. No manual work. Insight, but no happiness. (Steiner 1964: 102). The plan indicates an ethnographic poem – about twenty-five years before Jerome Rothenberg defined his ‘ethnopoetics’ ([1968] 1985; Schiffer 1979), which were formulated systematically by A.T. Hatto (1995). Steiner’s poem is centred on an evocation of Ruthenia’s multi-ethnic society, into which he inserts a description of his own fate, a fate that proves to be essentially cognate with that of the Gypsies – and of the country as a whole, which had successively belonged to different nations, without achieving autonomy. Another poem, entitled ‘Ruthenian Village’, which Steiner did complete between 1941 and 1942, also looks back to his Ruthenian experience. This time Steiner addresses the rootedness of the peasantry rather than the Gypsies’ motion: The inn’s lust-reddened eyes have been extinguished, The flute of the lonely hill-shepherd is silent, Wind and his lullaby’s softness, Gently have led him dreamward, flocks are asleep at his side. The faces of the houses were locked by their thatches From moon to the floor, and beneath every gable Girls’ voices surging in their singing. Slowly each tree in turn entwines with clouds and the night. The sows have been dismissed to their meal all in darkness And wheezing they root up the daytime’s remainders, Mightily roll in the ditches. Puddles all milky splash their bodies, the stones and the path.

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Figure 7.1 Ruthenian shepherd, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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Across the mossy centre the stars are in transit, The walls and small gardens are merged in one blackness; Slavering mongrels are turning Spotted wry heads and, howling, mount their guard against night. (Steiner 1992: 27) Steiner effectively rewrites Western European pastoral poetry by extending it to a peasant village on the eastern margins of Central Europe: the familiar trope of the flute-playing shepherd, derived from the Greek pastoral poets and transmitted via countless Arcadias, gains a new meaning in Steiner’s poem because of his lived experience. Compare his photographs of a Ruthenian shepherd (Figure 7.1) and a pipe player (Figure 7.2). Steiner reinvents the empty shadow of the arcadian shepherd by placing him into a recognizable environment – a village with an inn. This essential requisite of village life has no place in ancient Greek poetry and its renaissance imitations. Yet its presence lends facticity to Steiner’s poem. Or take the reference to the straw roofs of the village houses. Again, Steiner is recording the material culture of a Ruthenian village (Figures 3.1 and 3.2, Chapter 3), just as his evocation of the Gypsies began (as had his brief descriptive article) with their tinkering and musicianship. As the wind fills his gypsy poem, so do the sows and the mongrels in his Ruthenian poem fill out the scene with the sounds and smells of village life. The German poems explore the (recalled) sensuous aspects of Steiner’s Ruthenian experience, which are so markedly absent from his English-language journalism of 1938 (Chapter 3). Reflection on the Ruthenian field trip may have enriched Steiner’s conception of the polarities of East and West, which came increasingly to structure his applied and critical social thought. Ruthenian peasants might be regarded as Eastern Europeans by people whose existence was centred in the cosmopolitan capitals of Prague, Vienna and Budapest; and the same people might regard Gypsies as Orientals in relation to Eastern Europeans. However, Steiner’s poems, factual report and photographs present a complementary picture of the local relations between these categories, as well as Jews. Steiner’s field photographs seem to document two tendencies in Ruthenian local society: disjuncture and conjuncture. If they were intended to do so, then such an antinomy would be characteristic of his thought generally. In the first tendency, characteristic ethnic ‘types’ are suggested through divergent material cultures (such as

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Figure 7.2 Ruthenian pipe player, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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basketry and house types, Chapter 3, Figures 3.1, 3.2, and 3.4), ritual acts (such as a Uniate wedding and processions – the church preserved Greek rites, Figure 7.3, but acknowledged the supremacy of the Pope; see Krejcˇí and Machonin 1996: 40) and ethnic dress (both formal and everyday, the latter including the working dress of shepherds (Figure 7.1)), or of young women (Figures 7.4 and 7.5), and the distinctive attire of Orthodox Jews (Figure 7.6, and Figure 3.2 in Chapter 3). In the second tendency, the town marketplace is represented as the single location – at least that we see in Steiner’s depictions – upon which these different strands of Ruthenian local society converge. An Orthodox Jew probably bargains with a peasant woman; a shop sign in the background appears to bear a German name (Guttman) (Figure 3.2 in Chapter 3). Barefoot women carry wicker baskets, which they also sold, and tend a little flock of geese (Figure 7.7). The market, in both its concrete and abstract senses, is the locus of collaboration between these readily distinguished ethnic elements. A shared economic setting demands collaboration between very different ethnic elements. Steiner’s 1938 factual report (see Chapter 3) is largely preoccupied with a description of the successes and failures of the segregated education of gypsy children, photographed apparently at play (Chapter 3, Figure 3.4).

Figure 7.3 Uniate religious procession in Ruthenia, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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Figure 7.4 Gypsy girl in Ruthenia, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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Figure 7.5 Ruthenian girl, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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Figure 7.6 Orthodox Jewish youth, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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Figure 7.7 Ruthenian women at market, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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While not using the terms, Steiner presents Ruthenia as a socially and culturally plural society, loosely integrated only by the reliance of its different components on the marketplace and market principle. Together the poems, the photographs and the factual report project a nuanced picture of the themes that interested the young Franz Steiner as an emerging ethnographer. In terms of his anthropological development, we seem to witness Steiner combining the Viennese interest in material culture with a Malinowskian attention to synchronic functional connections. Moreover, he does so with particular attention to ethnic pluralism and its visual cues. Whilst we would make no grand claim for Steiner’s photographic record, it is perhaps worth remarking as an aside that the pictures of Uniate processions prefigure the work of the Czech photographer Markéta Luskacˇová, who began her career in the 1960s with a series of pictures that recorded the religious processions in neighbouring Slovakia.

Chapter 8

ZIONISM, POLITICAL AND CULTURAL CRITIQUE

No non-European power has ever built a colonial empire. —‘Letter to Mr Gandhi’

The attempt to re-evaluate Steiner’s anthropology must also reassess his Judaism: his Jewish identity, the galut (Jewish exile and diaspora), and the sufferings of the Shoah form the experiential and intellectual centre of his work. They are the fulcrum around which his other interests turn. Although these issues do not explicitly intrude on his anthropology (Steiner is too self-aware an epistemologist for that), they do inform his writings in countless ways, whether in the choice of the Romanies as a subject for study (as fellow Orientals), his thesis subject (which recalls the Jewish fate in Egypt), his grasp of taboo behaviour (which correlates to Jewish law) or his use of biblical exegesis. Arguably, his critical method of weighing the value of opposing critical voices has a Talmudic streak; his handling of pithy statements as moral traps is exemplified in the following Talmudic maxim: ‘Be cautious in the study of Torah, for inadvertent errors in study are treated as wilful transgressions’ (Pirkei Avot: 4.16). Sayings such as this, in the central ethical text of Judaism, would have been second nature to Steiner, albeit we do not know exactly how far his familiarity with Hebrew wisdom literature stretched. A late maxim confirms how consistently Steiner developed Jewish lore: ‘By virtue of the fact that I know myself better, I also know my father better’ (2009: 456). This gives a decidedly Judaic twist to the Socratic maxim ‘Know thyself ’, which is a mainstay of Western philosophy. In later life, we have noted that Steiner recited the Jewish prayers on the Sabbath and High Holidays (H.G. Adler [1953] 2006: 20). Yet he was not uncritical:

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All Jews love justice and desire it more than anything else. But this intensity of their longing would be impossible if all, indeed if many Jews were just. (Steiner 2009: 408)

Steiner’s love of paradox encouraged him to see the contradictions in what he loved best. He was also active in the Zionist movement, cofounded a left-wing Zionist group in Oxford, and involved himself in Zionist politics before, during and after the war. This side of Steiner’s activities has yet to be studied intensively, and at the present state of research, the available evidence is scanty. Yet even so, it must be considered because Steiner’s political writings, notably the essay on ‘Orientpolitik’, the ‘Memorandum’ and the ‘Letter to Mr Gandhi’, are intellectually inseparable, though methodologically distinct, from his anthropology. Indeed, the connections fall further into place when one considers Steiner in the Oxford context. Steiner’s ‘Letter to Mr Gandhi’, as a political text, comes into biographical and intellectual focus when one recalls Steiner’s close friendship with another student of Radcliffe-Brown, M.N. Srinivas. Srinivas’s Religion and Society among the Coorgs of Southern India (1952), like Steiner’s thesis on slavery, derived from a Radcliffe-Brown-supervised dissertation. In his argument in the ‘Letter’, Steiner appears to foreshadow elements of Louis Dumont’s contrast between Homo Hierarchicus (in India) and Homo Aequalis (in Europe). Whether or not a direct link can be made between Steiner’s thought and Dumont’s theory remains open. Although Steiner and Dumont were Oxford colleagues and friends in the final year of Steiner’s life, Dumont informed us that the brevity of their time together precluded serious intellectual influence (PC). Steiner’s ‘Letter to Mr Gandhi’ gains additional interest when we recognize that as an anthropologist he was situated between Srinivas and Dumont, two foundational figures in the sociology of the subcontinent. An untitled, undated and unsigned proclamation in German, beginning ‘We, the Oxford group of the “Association of Jewish Refugees”’, which survives in Steiner’s Nachlaß, offers us a moment from which to survey Steiner’s Zionism. Judging by the typeface, the document appears to have been produced on Steiner’s typewriter; further context is largely surmised. Judging from its content, the proclamation belongs to the middle years of the war: presumably later than the publication of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s The Jewish War Front, which appeared in February 1940, and earlier than the formation of frontline Jewish Brigade Groups in 1944 (Gilbert 1998: 109–10, 117); around 1943 seems likely, the year in which Steiner became a founder-member of the Oxford Branch of Poale Zion (the Jewish

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Socialist Labour Party). The proclamation was probably produced for Poale Zion and is the closest account we possess to a public statement of Steiner’s political views during the war. However, just because this document has come down to us as an anonymous joint proclamation, its views may well represent a compromise. The proclamation invokes its signatories’ ‘individual’ relation to ‘political’ Judaism by defining the Jews as a ‘community of fate’ or Schicksalsgemeinschaft – a term that has since gained some currency in Holocaust studies. As a consequence of this ‘fate’, the text asserts that ‘political collective measures’ (politische Kollektivmaßnahmen) are required. The link to Steiner’s writings appears in the stress on ‘suffering’, central to the contemporaneous ‘Letter to Georg Rapp’ (1999b: 115–22), which here provides the rationale for collective political action. The document makes three key points that were typical demands of the period: (1) The extremity of the suffering that the Jews are currently experiencing as a community; (2) That the attacks causing this suffering are directed at the community as a whole; (3) That the relevant non-Jewish authorities in Britain have recognized the nature of their attackers and the collective nature of the Jewish plight. These assertions are then followed by three key demands: (1) That the post-war ‘rehabilitation’ of the Jews be effected by coordinated relocation of Jewish refugees in Palestine; (2) That Jews be permitted to fight during the war with ‘human dignity’ ‘as Jews in Jewish fighting units’ and be permitted to participate in Civil Defence and the Home Guard; (3) That the group will fully assist in, and wishes full consideration of, what in English are called ‘Training schemes for post-war relief for Jewish refugees’. Several points stand out: the rejection of outright opposition to fighting of any kind, contrary to the anti-war posture Steiner endorses when speaking as a poet in Conquests (Steiner 1964: 47); the identification of the individual with a suffering collective; the dual wartime perspective directed at both the host nation and the enemy; and the long-term Zionist goal. We have already referred to the impact made on the youthful Steiner by his study of Arabic at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Chapter 2). The School of Oriental Studies, which he attended, had been founded in 1926, and its Acting Director at the time of Steiner’s studentship was Professor L.A. Meyer – a specialist in the art and archaeology of the Near East (Spiegel 1950). Franz Steiner’s host in Jerusalem, Shmuel Hugo Bergman, was a member of Brit Shalom (Brit-Shalom, Covenant of Peace), and Steiner may even have been present when meetings were held at Bergman’s home. It is noticeable that Steiner’s own views seem broadly to have accorded with

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the views of this organization, and it is, therefore, to Brit Shalom that we turn first as the context for Steiner’s political writings. Brit Shalom had been founded in 1925 by Arthur Ruppin and proposed binationalism with equal rights as a solution to the conflicting aspirations of Arabs and Jews in Palestine. While recognizing that ‘the significance of Brit Shalom lies in its failure’, in his history of Zionist thought David Goldberg adds that ‘it represented the one brief, genuine attempt to bridge the chasm between Zionism’s aims and recognition of the indigenous population’s rights’ (1996: 164). Among other notable spokesmen for Brit Shalom were Martin Buber and Judah Magnes (Goldberg 1996: 165), who, like Steiner, were to address corrective letters to Mahatma Gandhi protesting his statements about the rights of Jews in Palestine (Shimoni 1977: 40–46). Although Brit Shalom petered out in the mid-1930s, several of its members – including Buber, Gershom Scholem and Magnes – continued to advocate rapprochement between Jews and Arabs during the following years. These may be the specific strands of Zionism hinted at in Michael Hamburger’s general account: It seems that ever since his stay in Palestine in 1930 and 1931 Steiner had been a Zionist of a sort, believing or feeling himself to be an ‘Oriental’ on grounds of descent, though he had grown up in a largely assimilated family and, as a writer in German or English, could not have been more indebted culturally to precedents and traditions that were not Jewish. [However,] his Zionism differed from the prevalent one in positing the integration and partnership of the Arabs in any Jewish nation established in the common homeland of these ethnically related ‘oriental’ peoples. … The Palestine in which he had felt more at home than anywhere else was that of the pioneer settlers and the ‘kibbutz’ movement. (Hamburger 1992: 13)

Although Hamburger’s view seems valid, it tends to conflate Steiner’s pre- and post-war ideas. The question of Steiner’s Jewish and Oriental identities also needs to be addressed with a little more precision, not least since these were the grounds of his identification with the objects of anthropological investigation. Notwithstanding a consistency of his concerns, the more than two decades between Steiner’s Palestinian sojourn and his death could not, indeed did not, pass without effect upon his Jewish identity, his Zionism or his notion of Orientalism. Clearly something more than ‘descent’ is at issue here. In his post-war ‘Letter to Mr Gandhi’, Steiner approvingly cites the vision of Asher Ginsberg or Ahad Ha-am (‘One of the people’), an advocate of Jewish cultural regeneration and critic of Jewish nationalism modelled on the West. Ahad Ha-am was

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disturbed by the attitude of Jewish settlers towards Arabs, which he thought resulted from the prejudices of European-assimilated Jews. The particular target of his opposition was Theodor Herzl – founder of political Zionism – to whom, he believed, the Jewishness of a Palestinian state was less important than its statehood. One implication of Ahad Ha-am’s views was to make European cultures appear alien to Jews, although many of them had lived within and contributed to European cultures for centuries. His supporters on some of these issues included Martin Buber, hence a link with Brit Shalom (Goldberg 1996: Chapter 2). Integration in some kind of ‘Semitic symbiosis’ seemed a logical implication of these views and was explicit in the views of Dr Nissim Malul, a Palestinian-born Sephardi Jew, who maintained that immersion in Arab culture was a prerequisite to the revival of Hebrew culture (Goldberg 1996: 163). Steiner’s advocacy of the idea of Jews as an Oriental people, as well as his decision to study Arabic at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, seems very much at home in this intellectual company. But the modernizing programme of his pre-war writing about Palestine looks somewhat at odds with his later championing of a theocratic state. Between 1933, at Hitler’s accession to power, and 1936, an influx of more than 164,000 Jews into Palestine had almost doubled the Jewish population. The Arab response was a six-month general strike, an economic boycott, demonstrations and what came to be known as the ‘Arab-revolt’ in which hundreds of Arabs, Britons and Jews were killed or wounded (Goldberg 1996: 201). Jewish opinion was sharply divided over an appropriate reaction. The article published under the title ‘Orientpolitik’ in 1936 (1999b: 107–11) first appeared in the periodical Selbstwehr (Self Defence), which had been founded in 1907 to propagate a new, Jewish assertiveness, albeit without proposing a single fixed ideology (Kieval 1988: 119–23). This provides a local context for Steiner’s reflections: we find him in his mid-twenties reacting to British policy towards the Palestine Mandate and Nazi propaganda in Europe by advocating a policy of Jewish cultural propaganda to appeal to modernizing elements in the Arab world, especially Egypt. His analysis falls into line with the prevailing mood of the times: ‘The Yishuv, the Jewish community [in Palestine], prided itself on the modernity of its life and culture’ (Gilbert 1998: 78). Steiner argues that Jewish scholarship, learning and science should be directed towards the solution of Oriental agrarian problems; Egyptian culture should be represented by an Egyptian Institute in Tel Aviv. The acceptance by Jews in Palestine both of their Oriental environment and their shared cause with modernizing, nationalist

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Arabs was superior to violent action against either Arabs or British. In short, in ‘Orientpolitik’ Steiner advocates a search for solidarity with Arabs as fellow colonized peoples aspiring to modernity, and in this he envisages a special scientific and cultural role for the Hebrew University. Steiner advocated a realpolitik of Arab-Jewish rapprochement, apparently as co-modernizing, colonized peoples, rather than as fellow Orientals. Thanks to his Palestinian sojourn, Steiner was aware of current, and practical, considerations. As in his paper on Ruthenian Gypsies two years later, education is crucial to this modernizing vision. The University on Mount Scopus is central to his argument – no doubt on the basis of his experience in Hugo Bergman’s company as well as in the university itself; and in this connection, he advocates agrarian studies at a University level as a prerequisite of the rapprochement between Arabs and Jews, with the Academy as a meeting place. In terms of then current concerns, intensive farming for Palestinian Arabs would also have removed one of the arguments in favour of restricting Jewish immigration: land shortage. In 1940, the University School of Agriculture was indeed founded (Reifenberg [1950] 1955); however, in contrast to Steiner’s goal, the School does not appear to have set much store by cooperation with the Arabs in setting its agenda. Between ‘Orientpolitik’ and the ‘Letter to Mr Gandhi’ lie the war years: the experience of the attempted annihilation of the Jews in Europe and the murder of Steiner’s own family. The darkest years of his life, as we saw earlier, wrought a transformation in the optimistic, confident young scholar and eventually hastened his death. Without an anthropological mentor after 1942, and upon the loss of his dissertation and research that same year, Steiner gave himself over to intensive recasting of his identity in the process of writing his Conquests and a torrent of aphoristic – often scathing – observations on art, life and science. His intense and taxing friendship with Elias Canetti provided him with an intellectual partner who in many ways shared his fate as the full horror of the Shoah became apparent. Canetti abjured creative writing during the war, while Steiner internalized the suffering of his people. His views were to emerge more profound but also more extreme. This is the background to Steiner’s letter of 1946 to Gandhi. The immediate political context of Steiner’s letter to the Indian leader concerned comments published in Gandhi’s English-language journal Harijan for 21 July 1946 (p. 229) on the day before the bombing in Jerusalem by Irgun of the south wing of the King David Hotel in which ninety-one people (Arab, British and Jewish) died

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(Gilbert 1998: 134–35). These comments were reprinted elsewhere, and the London Jewish Chronicle for 26 July 1946 carried an abridged version of Gandhi’s comments on a frontpage dominated by negative reaction to the bombing. Although the action occurred after Gandhi’s comments had been written, it could hardly have failed to be part of the context of Steiner’s own ‘Letter’. Gandhi’s 1946 pronouncement in Harijan was to be the last of his published contributions devoted specifically to the debate on the Jews and Palestine. However, it was far from being the first, nor – as we have noted above – was Steiner the first Jewish intellectual provoked to address a response. Although Gandhi’s views are not our central concern here, a few words about them may be in order. Gandhi’s first public statement on Zionism was made as early as 1921 after the abolition of the Caliphate in the wake of Turkey’s defeat in the First World War. He was concerned that Muslim sovereignty of the Holy Land should not be ceded as a result of the war, a stance that Gideon Shimoni suggests cannot be dissociated from Gandhi’s desire to demonstrate solidarity with fellow Indian Muslims (1977: 22–23). In terms of its fundamental morality, Gandhi’s opposition to Jewish violence was part of his uncompromising opposition to all violence (Brown 1989: 321). From his experience of British colonialism (in both South Africa and India), Gandhi proposed satyagraha ‘the active non-violent resistance of the strong’ as a means to overcome domination. The principled and the pragmatic met in Gandhi’s belief that non-violence would work only if practised as ‘an article of faith’ (Dalton 1993: 137). It is difficult not to believe that in matters of fact Gandhi knew less than he believed. Consider for instance his statement of 20 November 1938 printed in Harijan of 26 November (ten days after Kristallnacht) that ‘The Jews of Germany can offer Satyagraha under infinitely better auspices than the Indians of South Africa’ (quoted extensively in Chadha 1997: 366; full text in Bartolf 1998: 14f.). This suggests that the British Empire and the German Third Reich would react similarly to non-violent resistance. Martin Buber and J.L. Magnes responded from Jerusalem to Gandhi’s ideas in February 1939 (Bartolf 1998: 16–40). It now seems established that Gandhi received neither of their letters (Dalton 1993: 229–30, fn 172), but given that the letters were published in the same year as a single volume in Jerusalem and in the context of his strong Zionist links, it is probable that Steiner knew, or at least knew about, these initiatives (Shimoni 1977: 40, fn 88). Following the breakup of Brit Shalom, Buber and Magnes became members of a ‘small nonconformist circle of Zionist intellectuals in

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Palestine who called themselves Ha’ol (the Yoke). … They were untiringly devoted to Jewish-Arab rapprochement and peaceful co-existence, some of them had long admired Gandhi’ (Shimoni 1977: 40–41). On many grounds, they seem conducive intellectual and moral company for the exiled Steiner in England. Buber and Magnes raised a variety of points with Gandhi, including the Jewish claim to land in Palestine, the unviability of non-violent resistance to Nazism, the incomparability of the Indian and South African situations with that in Germany, and the lack of even-handedness with which the Mahatma treated Jewish and Arab interests (Shimoni 1977: 41–46). A further effort at dialogue made by the American Hayim Greenberg, pointing out – among other arguments – that ‘a Jewish Gandhi in Germany’ would function for about five minutes before being murdered, elicited a principled reply from Gandhi that the truth of his position was unaffected by this (Shimoni 1977: 47–49). Numerous further personal contacts were organized subsequently to try to effect a change of heart on the part of the Indian leader, but without success. Steiner’s letter is therefore a late contribution – one written in 1946 after the unequivocal revelation of facts concerning the virtual annihilation of Jewry in Europe – to a tradition of persuasion in which Jewish intellectuals sought to influence a major and admired figure in public life who, they felt, ought to have been more understanding of the Jewish plight. It is a contribution, moreover, completely unremarked in the literature. We do not know whether, like the letters from Buber and Magnes, it failed to reach its intended recipient. Steiner had no doubt that it did arrive, relying on an Indian intermediary, though our attempts to identify him have so far failed. Steiner, as we have seen, was an admirer not only of Gandhi but of Indian civilization, and not just as a subject of his academic curiosity but also because Indians enjoyed a kinship with Jews under Steiner’s very broad definition of Oriental peoples. In contemporary terms, Steiner’s critique of Gandhi might seem to come from a perspective identifiable in certain respects as ‘subaltern’ or ‘Orientalist’; but his position is complex, as is that of Zionism within such a politics. Steiner’s argument – which is noticeably more philosophical than that of Gandhi’s previous correspondents – has two main strands. One might be considered the more fundamental, since it rejoins Steiner’s understanding of the particularities of the growth of Western civilization: a civilization that he sees as fundamentally predatory, in terms both territorial and epistemic, upon civilizations that differ from it. His other arguments might be termed contingent

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in that they relate to twentieth-century political tactics involving Europeans, Arabs and Jews: or more broadly Europeans and non-Europeans. The link is made when the contingent issues are seen as symptomatic of the long process. Steiner’s argument rests on his proposition that the Jews are an Oriental people. In treating them instead as a European people, Gandhi accepts by default the position of the West, and sees them through Western Christian (specifically English Protestant) eyes. This proposition asks us to accept a series of essentializations that later scholarship finds intensely problematic. Steiner, however, draws upon an argument we shall find at greater length in the earlier extended aphorism ‘On the Process of Civilization’: the Jews as a collectivity constitute an alterity internalized by the West in the course of its expansion. Like Adorno and Horkheimer, Steiner claims that anti-Semitism is a feature of modernity, and here there is a signal convergence between his work and the near-contemporary thinking of the Frankfurt school; but whereas Horkheimer and Adorno – to single out only one possible connection – locate the origins of what they call ‘bourgeois’ anti-Semitism – Marxist fashion – in a ‘specific economic cause’ ([1944] 1988: 182), Steiner treats antiSemitism generally as a function of European imperialism. Steiner goes on to argue that a long process of European, latterly Christian and Western, expansion (imperialism and colonialism) is the unifying thread from the growth of the Roman Empire (described as its first brutal shape: ‘European might is built up on the ruins of our temple’, 1999b: 144), to later Christendom (including the Crusades) and Western Imperialism. Territorial aggression and civilizational domination have gone hand in hand both externally and internally. Gandhi’s sense of the Jews as a European-sponsored people in conflict with an Asiatic (Arab) people derives from a misrecognition of this process in its longue durée. Aside from this fundamental argument, Steiner’s contingent arguments concern the Balfour Declaration, legality, military capacity, the attitude of particular Arab statesmen and so on that, albeit historically interesting, are of less intrinsic complexity as sociological ideas. It is in terms of his fundamental argument that Steiner counters Gandhi’s assessment of the viability of non-violence as a tactic for the Jews. In order to adopt non-violence, one would need to be assured of the commitment on the part of the dominant – who were to be resisted – to the continued existence of those they oppressed. Only under such a circumstance can non-violence be an effective expression of the moral coherence and fortitude of a collectivity. But

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the West has no such commitment to the cultural or physical persistence of the Jews within its domain. Christianity depends intrinsically on a superior understanding of Jewish tradition; cultural and epistemic violence is the foundation of the relation between the two traditions. Furthermore, Christians do not wish to use Jews to their own ends but to eject and eradicate them. Thus, the conditions under which passive resistance strengthens the moral will of the community (while the use of violence necessarily weakens it) cannot hold (as they did in India or might have done had the English employed passive resistance against the Germans during the Second European War). Victorious martyrdom is no option. Steiner’s friend, Anand Chandavarkar, was struck that: Steiner was a great admirer of general Yigael Yadin, Commander of the Haganah and valiant defender of Israel whom he regarded as a splendid exemplar of the Zionist ideal of the life of thought (archaeology and biblical studies) allied to the life of action … (Chandavarkar Ms 1996: 2)

How could Franz Steiner maintain that the Jews in Europe are an Asiatic people? Steiner introduces an original perspective onto the question of Jewish identity by examining the issue in sociological terms, focusing on the issue of ‘value’ and comparing Indian and Jewish society. The Jews’ ‘Asiatic’ character, Steiner argues, is not a matter of race but a matter of ‘the observable relations between individuals and the value attached to them, as differing from the value attached to the achievements of the individuals’ (original emphasis). Steiner’s invocation of ‘values’ here indicates a convergence between his religious, anthropological and political views. Jewish custom, he claims, was ‘disgusting’ to the European: the Jews did not distinguish between the political and religious, they strictly maintained their dietary laws to prevent inter-dining, they severely forbade intermarriage. In India, this would have been unremarkable, since Jews would have been treated as another caste. According to Steiner, it is the nature of the process by which alterity is encompassed, dominated and rejected that constitutes the specificity of Western civilization. Increasing individualism, technological capacity and expansionism are intrinsic processual characteristics of this civilization, as also are its human and cultural consequences. Power and domination are defining features of Western civilization. The next step in Steiner’s argument follows logically from his having derived contrary civilizational forms – European and Asian – and argued that the former tended to encompass and dominate the latter: Jewish ‘emancipation’ has to be conceived as a mistaken

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assimilation of alien, European values. Now, ‘emancipation’ had been the very term Steiner used with taken-for-granted, positive, connotations when discussing the plans for the emancipation of Gypsies in Ruthenia a decade earlier; the critique of modernization on which Steiner now launches is also a critique of his own earlier views: With the Ghettos we left a world that ‘belonged to the past’ – as many of us imagined. Such delusions we shared with many of our brethren of the other Oriental nations, in Turkey, in Syria, in Egypt, and in your own country. Like they did (though later) we thought of loosening the burden of our tradition, of opening up to ‘modern’ life; but while they, with the new misconceptions stood after all on their own ground, and in their own social reality which sooner or later must call them to order and to a creative compromise – we stood naked, unprotected in foreign, in European societies which we tried to imitate. (1999b: 142)

From this followed another mistake: the attempt to achieve a European-style state in Palestine, which amounted to no less than the adoption of an ‘alien fanaticism’. Comparing Theodor Herzl’s desire to imitate the European state (even if in East Africa) with Ahad Ha-am’s project of cultural revivalism, Steiner argues that the outcome to this fundamental struggle between emulation and withdrawal will depend on struggles between East and West in a triple sense: between Eastern and Western Jewry, the Jews and Europe, and between solidarity with other Asian nations ‘against the European ideology in us’. Steiner’s analysis now seems innocent of the many problems entailed by the assertion that the contemporary authenticity of cultures can be secured by reference to their historical differences, and correlatively that their contemporary ‘inauthenticity’ can be derived counter-factually from the way an authentic tradition should have developed were it not dominated by or imitative of alien influences. Nonetheless, his analysis proceeds powerfully to foresee the decline of European civilization and to explain European fear of the revival of Hebrew voices in terms of this decline. His conclusion – the ‘new village communities … and non-competitive economic units’ hailed as Asiatic achievements of both India and Palestine (1999b: 145) – seems to hark back to ‘Orientpolitik’ a decade earlier; but there the reference to collectives and cooperatives had been made within a wider framework of Jewish (socialist or social democratic) modernization; here the appeal is to Oriental collectivism. The ‘Letter to Mr. Gandhi’ represents a considerable radicalization of Steiner’s ideas. A positive theory of Orientalism now occupies the argumentative space previously filled by endorsement of Arab

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modernizers. As we know from another source, by the 1950s Steiner believed in the necessity of a theocratic state in Israel: Kenelm Burridge records that on this point, ‘Franz was adamant, surprisingly sweeping and firmly assertive: “Israel must be a theocracy,” he declared very forcibly. “Not a secular state: a theocracy” or it was “doomed, would founder”’ (Burridge: PC). Looking ahead to our discussion of Steiner’s lectures on ‘Tabu’, it will be difficult in the light of this evidence for future readers again to imagine that his motivation in exploring the investment of boundaries with dangers was exclusively scholarly. Scholarly it may have been, but Taboo was also one of Steiner’s most considered statements in critique of Western modernism and in defence of non-Western values. The theory of civilizational growth that undergirds Steiner’s ‘Letter’ as well as Taboo find its fullest expression in what is by far the longest and, judging by the fact that Steiner placed it among the first in his own selection of aphorisms, among the most considered of his short essays, ‘On the Process of Civilization’. This essay offers a sweeping view of the development of Western civilization that further clarifies the broad intellectual context in which Steiner conceived the posthumously published Oxford lectures on ‘Tabu’. Our account of Steiner’s developing Zionist views must be considered provisional, since it depends on only a few explicitly political writings that can be connected with a background knowledge of his anthropology: a published 1936 appeal to fellow European Jews, a wartime proclamation apparently addressed to British authorities (was it read or even sent?), and a letter to Mr Gandhi (did he receive it?). A final view derives from an undated ‘Memorandum’, which can be placed by the reference to its having been written ‘two months’ before the Asian Relations Conference, which took place from 23 March to 2 April 1947 (Gopal 1975: 344–45). Steiner refers to ‘invitations’ to attend this conference being sent to the Yishuv (Jewish settlers in Palestine) in September 1946. To what audience Steiner submitted this hitherto unrecorded document we do not know; presumably an Oxford- or London-based Zionist organization. It bears all the signs of Steiner’s authorship: the Orientalism, the cultural Zionism, the appeal to India – all this is familiar. What is new is the added dimension of the Chinese connection, which brings yet another of Steiner’s long-standing cultural enthusiasms into precise political play but also reflects the appointment of the Chinese to the United Nations’ Trusteeship Commission (which had responsibility for Palestine). Steiner has reverted to the enthusiasm for educational plans that he evinced in 1936; however, this time the plan is not for

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initiatives involving Muslim Arabs but rather a programme that is targeted globally towards the major (non-Muslim) Asian nations (India and China) and locally towards the non-Muslim minorities in the Middle East: the Chinese are to be informed about ‘our post-biblical moral teachings’; India is to be enlightened by ‘a book “Jewish Women of Palestine”’ and so on. For an ‘Asiatic Monroe Doctrine’ to work to the advantage of the Jewish community in Palestine, the Jews had to be accepted as an Oriental people. Steiner’s views on civilizational development now converged with his realpolitik. The State of Israel was not to be founded until the following year, but by comparison with the 1936 ‘Orientpolitik’, the 1947 ‘Memorandum’ makes little positive reference to Muslim Arabs in general, or to Palestinian Arabs in particular. Something of the distinction between modernizing and fundamentalist Arab states may survive in Steiner’s reference to the ‘surprise’ of immediate success in negotiations with Egypt, but the tone of the document derives more from the pervasive threats associated with Pan-Arabism and Islam. If, as seems attested by our contemporary witness, Steiner’s advocacy of a modernizing state in Israel had yielded to promotion of a ‘theocratic state’, then it is not difficult to understand why he has little to say about Arab-Jewish cooperation. On the other hand, it needs to be considered that the ‘Memorandum’ singles out the work of the socialist A.D. Gordon to be spread among the Arabs. Gordon’s belief in a cosmopolitanism that encompassed individual nationalisms, what he called ad-adam (‘people humanity’ or ‘people incarnating humanity’), was the basis for an inclusive approach to Arab-Jewish relations (Bergman 1961: 114–17). In practical terms, Gordon believed that ‘wherever settlements are founded, a specific share of the land must be assigned to the Arabs from the outset’. This rapprochement, in Gordon’s view, rested on universal foundations: the cosmic integration of man within nature represents the universal order within which individual nations should cooperate. Perhaps one here glimpses an intimation of Steiner’s own, never formulated linking of his political beliefs within a wider religious context. Yet, Steiner never wholly turns his back on the modernist project: his scholarly work remains wedded to methods of rational argument, to logic and scientific standards. Even his pan-Asianism becomes grounds for another educational programme. Steiner never visited the State of Israel, founded in 1948, despite invitations to do so. His attitude towards it remains a closed book to us, although we must infer his support from the fact that the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was left his collection of scientific books under the terms of his will. We

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cannot say for certain whether Steiner’s advice, either before or after the war, made much impact, but there is no evidence it did. Where, especially before the war, he advocated rapprochement with the Palestinians, the rifts then deepened; and where, particularly after the war, he advocated an alignment of Israel with the Asian world, and a recognition by Jews of their Oriental identity, the State has remained tied to the West. In these regards, his politics have remained as unfulfilled as all the other projects he left incomplete.

Chapter 9

ON SLAVERY

Everything grows silent. —Conquests, X, ‘The Wheels’

Lost in the early years and resurrected after the peace, one project spans Steiner’s war years. Perhaps it was not his central concern during the war, but there are indications he continued to work towards its recuperation. The Oxford doctoral thesis, ‘A Comparative Study of the Forms of Slavery’, begun in 1939 and submitted in 1949, was the chief object of Steiner’s anthropological labours for a decade and had the widest ramifications for his mature social anthropology. It would be fascinating to be able to follow the tortuous path from its genesis to what is more accurately called its ‘submission’ than its ‘completion’. The dissertation is a turning point in his anthropological studies and branches out into numerous areas that occupy his mature thought: topics like method and comparison, kinship relations and the problem of labour all find a recognizable treatment here, not to mention Steiner’s preoccupation with the history of his discipline or Aristotle as a sociologist. The preparatory papers on slavery comprise four large files (DLA, S 24) containing a great number of notes, which are certainly enough for a major book. Besides this collection, there are two more convolutes (DLA, S 25 and S27) containing several numbered folders on servile institutions. Among these we find the following: Folder I: Asia, including Mongolia, Tibet, China, Korea and Japan. Folder II: Africa: North Africa to West Africa (subdivided by people). Folder III: Africa: West Bantu (subdivided geographically), Nilotic, Nilo-Hamitic, non-Bantu Lacustrine and sub-Lacustrine area. Folder IV: Africa: South Bantu (sub-divided geographically and by people). Folder V: Aboriginal North America. Folder VI: Terminology of servility (including derivation of ‘slave’).

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Folder VII:  General Sociological Problems bearing on Inequality (including definition of labour; division of labour; division of labour by gender; artisanship; class, exchange, wealth, luxury, capitalism, etc.) Folder VIII: Servile symbiosis, extra-tribal patronage and similar relationships. (S 25)

This is a major body of systematically organized notes and excerpts. The approach indicates a detailed scientific method – effectively an eighteenth-century taxonomy, enriched by a Goethean understanding of life forms as displaying a living morphology. If this pattern of arranging materials follows that of the lost draft, we may infer that Steiner will not only have read widely for the first version but will also have developed some form of analytic. The structure of the folders stands in close relation to the thesis that Steiner submitted: folders I–V are organized by geographical region. Folder VI corresponds to the opening discussion of slavery (see Steiner 1999b: 155–60), folder VIII corresponds to the closing section of the dissertation on this subject, and folder VII indicates material relevant not only to the dissertation but also to several lecture series (notably that on labour), where institutions of slavery are set within broader considerations of inequality, changing forms of servility and the regimes of values in which these appear. Overall, an historical morphology, culminating in the form that is Western commodity slavery, is to be delineated by virtue of the close examination of formal resemblances between ethnographic cases. While we may discern the principles at work, there does not here seem to be much evidence of the ‘missing’ five sections of a magnum opus on slavery that Steiner planned (see below). To judge by the working method apparent here and elsewhere, it seems that the manner of Steiner’s systematic, reading, excerpting, organizing and classifying material itself implicated an analysis, which laid the foundation for the discursive representation. There is practically never any evidence of drafting, writing, rewriting, etc. All the emphasis therefore falls on a quasi-scientific collection of materials. On this point, at least, Steiner will have been with Radcliffe-Brown regarding the ‘scientific’ method and comparative character of anthropology as a discipline. From the evidence concerning Steiner’s working method, we can also understand how Radcliffe-Brown could be so confident that the thesis was almost finished at the time when it was lost, even though there is no evidence of actual writing. Writing-up will have been a relatively simple procedure for one as versed in writing as Franz Steiner, and indeed it is attested by H.G. Adler that Steiner penned

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the final version extremely quickly (H.G. Adler Ms 1953: 10v, 2006: 37). Yet if the organization of material seems a throwback to the comparative ethnology of an earlier age, inspection of the thesis itself shows how far the study departed from Steiner’s previous ethnological mode. What we appear to have lost is the encyclopaedic account of slavery, since some topics mentioned in terms of his ‘loss’ are missing from the 1949 dissertation; yet other points are probably new, including the focus on Africa, the concern with the anthropological investigation of systems of inequality and servility, and with formal sociology – specifically, with the treatment of attachment/ detachment of subjects from their social anchorages. The content of Steiner’s submitted thesis scarcely matches its title – or the range of material in his notes. For his abridgement of Steiner’s work, Paul Bohannan added the words ‘A prolegomena to …’ to the original title. And this is just, since, as both Bohannan and Steiner note, the thesis never actually gets as far as ‘a comparative study’ at all! The sheer variety and extent of theories and materials about slavery, writes Steiner, were so considerable that he eventually submitted only the first three introductory sections of a planned eight-part comparative survey. We doubt the others were ever written. The Nachlaß, which contains so very complete a collection of materials, contains no evidence of further passages. Of the projected eight parts, then, only three survive. Part I involves a discussion of: the meaning of the word slave and the way contemporary conditions had impressed themselves on the various definitions attempted; then the object of inquiry is as far as possible narrowed down and the question is asked, and to some extent answered, how institutions could be, for the purpose of formal sociology, fitted into a system of the institutions of social inequality. … As labour functions matter very much in servile institutions, a short survey is made of theories about labour, and the organisation of labour is analysed in reference to servility. (Steiner Ms 1949a: ii; underline original italics added)

Steiner offers a lucid explanation of the relation between the ethnographic and anthropological uses of the term ‘slavery’ (1999b: 155–60). This echoes his earlier account of ‘superstition’ (1999a: 223–29) and anticipates his later method in treating ‘taboo’. In contemporary parlance, he notes what might be called the ‘partial connexions’ between different phenomena identified as ‘slavery’ when viewed from a particular starting point – namely the Western concept. What remains interesting about Steiner’s treatment is his ability to recognize the historical, perspectival and thus interested

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character of his starting point – the term ‘slave’ – without embracing an entirely deconstructive logic that would dissolve the category as a focus of investigation. Instead, he situates his concern with slavery within the scholarly discourse more broadly concerned with forms of social inequality. The succeeding sections aim to classify some of the characteristic ways in which ‘labour’ may be organized, and so draw attention to the more common features of slave labour. Many of these ideas have become more widely known than the thesis itself, thanks to being included in the Oxford lectures from which Paul Bohannan edited the article ‘Towards a Classification of Labour’ ([1957] 1999b: 174–90, and discussed below). The two remaining sections of the thesis (II and III) do not deal with slavery at all. They are about institutions that are easily confused with slavery because they have ‘some elements in common with servile institutions’. It may be unhelpful that Steiner, contrary to his own insights, persists in calling these institutions ‘pre-servile’ – presumably thinking of the German prefix ‘vor-’ and using his term in a typological, not a genetic sense accordingly – while vigorously denying any necessary developmental link between them and servile institutions themselves. Two pages of Steiner’s short introduction outline the remaining, unwritten (or perhaps lost) parts of the intended eight-section work. Comparing this organization of materials with Steiner’s arrangement of reading notes in files, readers will recognize a more advanced stage of composition in that Steiner’s presentation has moved on from a purely geographical taxonomy into a systematic representation in terms of specific social institutions: IV.  Institutions outside class and caste structures (African, Indonesian, slave laws of the Pentateuch, early Mesopotamia). V. Slavery conditioned by rank systems (Ashanti, Dahomey, NW American); pawning and debtor slavery of West Africa and Indonesia. VI. Slave concubinage, as complementary marital institution and as institution of luxury; ‘racialism’ to be discussed, especially in the context of societies where dual descent means that ‘emancipated slaves continue to be a different kind of human being and offspring by slave concubines are regarded as inferior’. VII.  Caste and slavery: Nepalese, Ancient Indian, Somali and Mauretanian institutions. VIII. Complex class societies and their kinds of slavery: Ancient East, Roman slavery, the Aztec laws, and modern European plantation slavery.

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A discourse will deal with the relation between the system of punishment existing in a society and its servile institutions, while another will indicate the social structures incompatible with slavery, comparing chiefly Southern Bantu cattle economy with the money economy of later capitalist society. (Steiner Ms 1949a: iii)

Comparing the files in Steiner’s Nachlaß with the finished project, one senses a fault line running through this work that may separate the lost dissertation’s comparative ambition to include every available culture – a kind of ethnographic monumentalism, possibly conceived competitively as a counterpart to both Malinowski’s intensive encyclopaedism and Radcliffe-Brown’s partial comparativism, but also exhibiting a thoroughly scientific ambition towards completeness – from what his anthropology later became: a more sociological enterprise, focused less on empirically verifiable data than on conceptually graspable categories. Even so, the outline is encyclopaedic and goes far beyond what might reasonably be contemplated for inclusion in a doctoral dissertation. Steiner intended to show through a typological analysis how forms of social inequality, including whatever it might make sense to call slavery in such different contexts, differed according to the most fundamental institutions of social inequality within a given society: rank, status, caste and class. The three completed sections constitute only a preamble to this – investigating forms of social inequality that fell short of slavery. But they resume the argumentative thread of both ‘On the Process of Civilization’ and ‘The Letter to Mr Gandhi’. By investigating ‘pre-servile’ institutions, Steiner develops his analysis of the social conditions under which enduringly servile relations might, or might not, be institutionalized. In so doing, he seeks to comprehend the West and (at least some of) its Others dialectically. In purely typological terms, ‘pre-servile’ institutions are anterior because the inequalities on which they rest are routinely overturned; servile institutions surmount these subversions with the effect that inequalities are permanently entrenched. The transition from pre-servile to servile is momentous because social inequalities in these terms are made durable. Drawing on his training in comparative philology and his expertise in ethnographic regions including those of Slav speakers, Steiner opens with the term ‘slave’ itself (Ms 1949a: 9ff; 1999b: 155). He notes that ‘slave’ and ‘slavery’ entered various European languages during the Middle Ages and derive from the ethnic term Slav. They came to be applied to lawless, or ‘a-legal’, institutions that differed from then dominant servile institutions of serfdom, which

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were closely regulated in terms of rights and duties. Thus, the term ‘slavery’ was used to label diverse historical phenomena with reference to an already existing field of values and differences. As the field of meanings changed, so did the sense attributed to slavery: for instance, the campaign for the abolition of slavery occurred in the context of a general espousal of the contractual establishment of rights and duties – of which slavery seemed the antithesis. The development of the modern concept of ‘slavery’ thus appears as a dialectical correlative to the emergence of ‘rights’. As Steiner shows, the highly contextual character of the term made it very difficult to attribute to it an essentialized sense. It seemed thus intensely problematic to theorists naïvely trying to devise evolutionary accounts of the origins of slavery or of its original form. This opening is reflexive in the most valuable sense: it examines the shifting situatedness of the ordinary language term from which the comparative study both begins and departs. The following pages (Ms 1949a: 29–34; 1999b: 156–59) argue that the ambiguity of words like ‘slavery’ is a logical aspect of their very function. The same terms are used with a wider or narrower range of allusions. Moreover, this is affected by whether we know the term from our immediate social contexts (as we know ‘marriage’) or only from instances remote in time or space (as ‘slavery’). We ought to realize that we cannot define the essence of marriage; we can ask only what our term ‘marriage’ signifies when we follow a skein of resemblances that lead from our initial word to a term in another social and cultural context. Because we know ‘slavery’ less immediately, Steiner claims, it is easier to fall into the trap of believing that it has some essential meaning. Steiner’s linguistic analysis deftly homes in on a fundamental problem in sociological discourse that his contemporaries at Oxford had yet to realize. In the context of 1940s British social anthropology, the assurance of his analysis and its methodological sophistication are remarkable. Steiner prefers to begin from a typology, or formal sociology, of power and social inequality and then to describe general patterns of association and the structural principles, such as rank, caste, class and servile institutions, which may be found jointly, and even conflictually, in specific societies. There are various affinities here. Focusing on ‘power’ may recall Steiner’s shared concerns with Canetti, but quite unlike Canetti, and in a manner reminiscent of Weber, Steiner proceeds from one definition to the next in order to narrow the range of phenomena necessary for study; yet, despite the logical, deductive character of his analysis of concepts, Steiner actually proceeds in the

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body of his thesis by substantive (and it must be admitted wearyingly detailed) presentation of cases. His definition of ‘slavery’, like his method, was innovative in its time and context, though contemporary readers may find the originality more difficult to recognize. Definitionally, Steiner maintains that servile institutions are found wherever there are relations between two or more people in which one person exercises rights over the other that are not derived from kinship obligations and where these rights ‘are maintained to the exclusion of similar rights of other people’. Such rights may concern only particular activities or they may approximate to whatever is the prevailing notion of ownership in the society: ‘The only feature[s] common to all the institutions is that the relationship … between the two people in question, establish[es] the social status of the servile person’ (Ms 1949a: 74), that this status has ‘total social range’ (i.e. is recognized throughout the society in question) and that it refers primarily to the relationship to a master (Ms 1949a: 74). The servile institutions that fall within such a definition are much too varied to fit into a simple dichotomy between ‘slavery’ and ‘serfdom’. However, and crucially for what follows, it can be generalized that a slave is a kinless person: someone who has been detached from a kinship grouping and attached, on different terms, to another grouping, hence the need to look initially at those societies where such processes were normal and occurred without supplies of slaves from outside that society. The degrees both of inequality and its institutionalization are variable (Ms 1949a: 77). In order to speak of servile institutions, inequalities must apply throughout a ‘total social range’; it is not enough if they are limited to subgroupings as, for instance, when the status of a junior sibling is relevant only among family members. By ‘institutional’, Steiner seems to mean what we would describe as ‘a necessary feature entailed by the structure of a social unit’. This can be explained by his own example: declassed women may become servile, but it is not obligatory for a family unit to have one such servile woman attached to it; there is no institutional requisite for family units to include a declassed, servile woman member. More generally, Steiner says that the rank-scale within the domestic unit is extended at both extremes of its range to attach both servile people and honoured guests without, however, incorporating them as members of the unit. In addition to a typological account of social inequality, Steiner’s analysis requires a ‘typology of labour’ as ‘an activity, interdependent with other activities of other people’ (Ms 1949a: 86), that has a

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‘socially patterned associative character’ (Ms 1949a: 103). Following Malinowski’s distinction between the organized co-performance of differentiated tasks and communal labour (i.e identical common tasks performed by people together), Steiner generalizes that servile labour is strongly but not wholly associated with the latter; as it is with a lack of control over the process of labouring, and with an abrogation of the normal gendered division of tasks such that servile men may find themselves performing tasks otherwise gendered as women’s work. The relationship between servility as a social status, on the one hand, and the economic functions of kinds of labour, on the other, is not simple. As with the origin of slavery itself, Steiner argues that there exists a range of phenomena and relations requiring study rather than a set of a priori propositions to be illustrated. To open Part II, Steiner observes that there exist ‘a number of institutions which have among themselves very little in common, while they have particular affinities to kinship organisation on the one hand, to servile institutions on the other’ (Ms 1949a: 141) – that is, the ‘pre-servile relationships and institutions’. These differ from servile institutions most importantly in that ‘they lack certain other structural elements that would make the potestas exercised, the rights enjoyed, a permanent institution of social inequality which is inherent in a social system’ (Ms 1949a: 141). Steiner’s completed account consists almost solely of such pre-servile institutions (although, as noted above, he makes no assumption that servile institutions necessarily develop from them). What transpires is a survey of mechanisms related to kinship that underwrite forms of social inequality. Paul Bohannan’s abridgement of the work (Ms 1957) organized Part II into four sections, the first three of which give a good sense of the content covered by Steiner: VI. Detached persons: orphans and widows. VII. Detached persons: captives. VIII. Detached persons: outcasts and the problem of asylum. In this formal delineation of social types and exploration of their entailments, Steiner’s approach is highly reminiscent of Simmel. A familiar feature (e.g. widowhood) is shown to belong to a broader recognizable form of sociation (detachment and reattachment) that also includes familiar forms that we might otherwise have thought dissimilar (e.g. outcasts). The analysis here (as, for instance, in Simmel’s excursus on ‘The Stranger’) reveals similarity at the level of a sociology of forms and shows that the form described exists in a

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tension of opposites (for ‘The Stranger’, the conjunction of closeness and distance; for the widow, the conjunction of detachment and attachment) (see Green 1988: 133). Chapters proceed by ethnographic illustrations rather than abstractly: we learn about the sacrificial status of the captive among Tupinamba, and the regulations concerning orphans in ancient Athens, the laws governing concubinage with prisoners in Deuteronomy, etc., as much as anything to demonstrate the different ways that the processes of detachment and attachment may be institutionalized without involving slavery. Steiner draws upon a vocabulary about to be introduced to a wider anthropological readership by Laura Bohannan to distinguish different sorts of rights in women (L. Bohannan 1949). Laura Bohannan’s analysis had been presented to considerable acclaim at a seminar – probably one run by Meyer Fortes in 1948 (Mary Douglas: PC). We know that she and Franz Steiner enjoyed an especially close intellectual relation, not least because she spoke German, shared his wider reading in German and read Simmel and other sociological texts in the original (Laura Bohannan: PC). Steiner may have been present at her seminar presentation, and his thesis (submitted in the same year as Bohannan’s article was published) acknowledges her permission to use the unpublished manuscript. Bohannan herself termed control over the sexual, domestic and labour functions of a woman rights in uxorem, the filiation of a woman’s children she distinguished as a right in genetricem. This distinction was a significant step towards the more general recognition of the partibility of the social person into elements – a point that both Steiner and Bohannan could have developed from Simmel’s Soziologie – and therefore of the ways in which such elements could be transacted separately. This is what Steiner calls the ‘apportionment of detached persons’ (Ms 1949a: 251). In the case of a female captive who is made kinless, all rights accrue to her husband; the case of a free wife differs because she is not rendered kinless by the transferral of all rights in her. However, as Steiner rightly notes, there is a close relation between the mechanisms of kinship and servility in such cases; both belong to the regime of the circulation of values – in this case, valued rights in people within the society. A similar relation might be noted between the transference of male slaves and palace servants in those chiefly societies in Africa where boys were transferred to the potestas of the chief. The way in which Steiner generalized Laura Bohannan’s distinction between rights transferred in marriage in Africa was of a piece with his view of the person as a complex entity (in itself akin to a small society diverse in origin

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and complex in structure). We revert to this aspect of his thought, which recalls Goethe’s morphology and Mach’s psychology, when we discuss Steiner’s Conquests. Steiner’s ‘Discourse on Aristotle’s “theory of slavery”’, one of the several somewhat loosely integrated, long ‘discourses’ – that is, excursions – in his dissertation, considers Aristotle’s theory of powers and its relation to the types of authority a person could exercise over others (Ms 1949a: 304ff.): serving legionaries were thus allowed to exercise rights in uxorem but not in genetricem in their consorts. This situation is the obverse of wealthy African women exercising rights in genetricem over other women while not themselves enjoying all rights in uxorem. Such partibility of the person, and classification of jural rights subject to apportionment, occupies a typological position on the very margins of regulation through the idiom of kinship. The concluding chapter of Part II (Slavery and Kinship) subsumes all the foregoing examples under the category of ‘domestic slavery’ – which also exists in class-based societies but is ‘nevertheless not part of the class structure’ (Ms 1949a: 279). Where domestic slavery exists in the absence of a rank system, Steiner argues there is no reason to anticipate the development of full slavery, for: we can see, how close the institutions under discussion still are to the life of kinship groups and their jural idiom. There is no doubt, we have been describing kinship mechanism[s] acting on a higher level of social organisation. (Ms 1949a: 262–63; emphasis added)

Detached from his clan, a man may be attached to another clan, otherwise: As soon as the man finds himself severed from his clan, he is situated in a social no-man’s-land, a space which is not structured by clan life and clan spheres. This space is the domain of the other social force, the chief. Thus his expulsion from his clan is tantamount to a transfer into the charge of the chief. (Ms 1949a: 263)

Steiner’s style of thought is particularly clear here: he envisages a structuring of social spaces by institutional forces. Kinship and clanship are mechanisms that, among other things, classify people and determine their mutual rights and responsibilities. An extension of this idiom can be made to attach and eventually assimilate non-kin. Unlike Western civilizations, which on Steiner’s account use differences as pretexts for domination or expulsion, or Eastern civilizations, which make difference the enduring basis of association, here are societies in which status differences tend to be transitory and devoid of enduring and general social significance.

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Part III of Steiner’s thesis deals with the ‘Servile Symbiosis’ (also described as extra-tribal patronage), which may occur when societies of differing complexity are in contact (Ms 1949a: 327–70). Their significance to him can be explained relatively quickly. Steiner is thinking, for instance, of the sort of relations that existed between pygmy gatherer-hunters and Bantu farmers in Central Africa. Such relations are examples of social asymmetry because of the different degree of involvement of the two social structures in the arrangement, and the differing scale of the groups directly involved in the relations between the two social structures (in Steiner’s example: a single Bantu and numerous pygmies). A similar situation exists in the symbiosis of the Negritos of Northern Luzon with the Malay neighbours who supply them with rice in exchange for jungle products. Employing a model of the plural economy, Steiner argues that the groups belong to two essentially separate economies. Their importance lies in the contrast between them and stratified arrangements, notably those based on class. The crucial nexus for analytic understanding, as this negative case urges us to recognize, lies in the dialectical relationship between slavery and wider institutions and discourses of inequality. At this point, Steiner’s thesis simply breaks off; Paul Bohannan’s abridged version supplies a conclusion by the expedient of turning the ‘Introduction’ into a concluding chapter. But if his dissertation is one of histories’ longer fragments – albeit a somewhat shorter fragment than one of the novels he much admired, Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities – then his intention is clear: to document a gradation of forms of increasingly radical detachment from kinship relations and enduringly servile attachment in terms of inequalities of broadening social scope. In the course of his investigation, he would broach questions of the disposition of labour and the creation of value. The significance of kinship is clarified in one of the shortest of Steiner’s fragments, an introduction to kinship studies in which he refers to kinship as the most social of our possessions. By implication, alienation from our possession of kinship (rather than, say, our labour) is what makes us slaves. A poignant conclusion for someone whose life had been scarred so deeply by the confiscation of his kin. Steiner’s surviving fragment works in a dialectical mode. By a strong contrast to the (only relatively) more benign instances of servile institution – the outcast, the widow, the domestic slave – Steiner is leading us towards an understanding of the most malignant institutions of captivity. This is why he could describe his study as a sympathetic act of suffering in the context of Jewish captivity in

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Europe. The thesis’s governing and related antitheses explore kinship and kinlessness, attachment and detachment, community and exile, those who belonged and those who remained strangers, and by implication those who would be allowed to live and those who would be allowed to die. Erhart Schüttpelz has rightly pointed to the direct correlation between Steiner’s theory of slavery and H.G. Adler’s analysis of the Shoah. According to Schüttpelz, Adler’s entire project revolves around a critique of what he calls ‘Staatssklaverei’ (‘state slavery’, Schüttpelz 2014: 160) as found both in the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. Schüttpelz underlines that Steiner, in his thesis as well as his aphorisms, identifies continuities in Western slavery from ancient to modern times, a perspective that Adler shares (2014: 163). We can go much further. Adler follows the logic of Steiner’s widest argument not just about state slavery but in its relations to labour, taboo, value and myth, and he does so with explicit reference to Steiner: When all values – including life itself – of an immaterial nature were transformed into material values, this was a devaluation. … If life was a nonvalue (Unwert), it could be thrown away like a rotten thing … Before this ‘liquidation’ (note the mercantile expression, which conceals a ‘mythic’ function), the thing ‘human being’ could be marketed as a slave. ([1955] 2017: 564–65, parenthetic comments original)

While slavery was not the purpose of the camps, following Steiner’s definition, it was their outcome, and the slave owners were the SS, a secret order of the state, making this a ‘crypto-slavery’ lacking the overt and explicit support of the state. ‘In this system, statistics played the role of mysticism’ (H.G. Adler [1955] 2017: 565), labour was exhaustively tabulated, bodies themselves were commodified as work and then as parts once their labour function was exhausted. Notice the analogy to a ‘rotten thing’. The collapse of value and of taboo are simultaneous with this ‘unnatural’ outcome. Contemporary studies of the Shoah – such as the book by Wolfgang Sofsky, which silently borrows Steiner’s definition of slavery but displaces the concept by the inaccurate idea of ‘forced labour’ – do a disservice to the breadth of this analysis; for this new school robs the debate of pivotal conceptual tools that enable the historical and sociological contextualization of the Holocaust (Sofsky 2008: 198–99). Unlike slavery, ‘forced labour’ does not imply complete ‘ownership’ and cannot therefore accurately represent the condition of a prisoner in the SS State. Sofsky’s assertion that the Jews were not slaves because slaves are never killed, because that would rob them of their

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value, is a fanciful notion, clearly refuted both by prehistoric findings in Europe (Green 2016: 160) and the evidence of more recent history. Although little acknowledged until recently, Steiner’s thesis on slavery had a foundational impact both on anthropological theories of slavery and on modern slavery studies, notably in relation to its African and African-American forms. The conduit here was Paul Bohannan, who edited Steiner’s doctoral thesis into a publishable text for which he was sadly unable to find a publisher. Steiner’s conception of slavery, although not referenced as such, appeared in Bohannan’s widely used introduction to Social Anthropology (Bohannan 1963: 171–72; 180–82), where Bohannan repeats Steiner’s insight that ‘slaves are essentially kinless people; kinlessness is an essential of slavery wherever it is found’, going further to characterize slavery, more reductively than Steiner, as ‘anti-kinship’ (Bohannan 1963: 180). This notion of kinship as the antithesis of slavery, far cruder than Steiner’s own handling of the difference, was reformulated as a status continuum between kinship and slavery in Susanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff ’s editors’ introduction to their seminal collection of essays on Slavery in Africa from 1977. And Steiner’s conception subsequently gained major currency in Claude Meillassoux’s Marxist theorization in Anthropologie de l’esclave, where Bohannan is credited with being among the first, if not the first, to have treated kinlessness as a defining characteristic of slavery: ‘Paul Bohannan … est parmi les premiers, sinon le premier, à avoir mis en évidence ce trait essential de l’esclavage, “l’anti-parenté”’ (Meillassoux 1986: 35, note 7; an attribution disseminated by both German and English translations, Meillassoux 1989: 328, note 6; Meillassoux 1991: 346, note 6). Orlando Patterson, in his Slavery and Social Death, pursued the logic of this conception further to argue that not simply kinless, ‘the slave is desocialized and depersonalized’ and is condemned to non-being (Patterson 2018: 38). This description would apply literally to the Jews of Central Europe, whose fate had sent Steiner on his course. And it is remarkable that a project designed to reveal how Western societies had created non-persons began from so subtle a transition as that to pre-servile institutions. David Graeber and David Wengrow recently revived Steiner’s insights into pre-servile institutions within a comparative and historical sweep as wide as his own. In the conclusion to their book, The Dawn of Everything (2021), they turn to Steiner’s ‘pioneering attempt to understand how the most painful loss of human freedoms begins at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups,

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and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy, and the deepest forms of structural violence’ (Wengrow: PC). In essence, the story told by Steiner appears to be precisely about the collapse of what we would term the first basic freedom (to move away, or relocate), and how this paved the way for the loss of the second (the freedom to disobey). It also leads … to a point … about the progressive division of the human social universe into smaller and smaller units, beginning with the appearance of ‘culture areas’ (a fascination of ethnologists in the central European tradition, in which Steiner was first trained).   What happens, Steiner asked, when expectations that make freedom of movement possible – the norms of hospitality and asylum, civility and shelter – erode? Why does this so often appear to be a catalyst, for creating the kind of situations where some people can exert arbitrary power over others? (Graeber and Wengrow 2021: 520)

Counter-intuitively, perhaps ‘it all goes back to charity’ and the process by which the giving of refuge in courts and temples to those unmoored from their kinship attachments gave way to the exercise of potestas over them as they lost the ability to move away or to disobey. The fact that this insight has been developed from only the prolegomena to Steiner’s intended analysis of servility suggests it is high time for the original to be studied widely in its entirety, something now possible following digitization of the thesis by Oxford University Library.

Chapter 10

RADCLIFFE-BROWN AND EVANS-PRITCHARD

A society no more consists of individuals than a net consists of knots. The net is made with the help of knots. But no knot is a piece or a unit of anything that in any sense could be called a ‘net’. —Essays and Discoveries, Ms 1948

Franz Steiner brought formidable experience and qualifications to the close circle of men and women who were about to reshape the nature of the discipline of social anthropology in the immediate postwar years. His anthropological thought had passed through various stages – and two doctorates – in Central Europe (via studies in Prague and Vienna, and research in Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia) and in Britain (as a familiar of both Malinowski’s and Radcliffe-Brown’s seminars). He had sojourned in Jerusalem, and he had a command of a striking variety of languages and their literatures matched by an encyclopaedic knowledge of global cultures from his ethnological training. In Radcliffe-Brown’s absence during the Second World War, we caught sight of him briefly as virtually the sole representative of the ‘Oxford School’ of social anthropology in his public lecture on ‘Superstition’ (1999a: 223–29). But such forthrightly anthropological subject matter was not typical of his wartime writing, devoted in greater part to his aphorisms, poetry, letters and political thought. The war years had, as we have emphasized, been the crucible in which the later intellect was forged. Often passed over as an interruption to the development of the discipline of social anthropology, in Steiner’s case particularly – but this goes for the Oxford Institute generally – the direction that anthropological thought was about to take is inconceivable outside its post-war setting. In addition to their anthropological interests, the Oxford scholars with whom Steiner now associated appear to have shared with

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him a temperament attuned to both his literary and his religious forms of expression. According to Paul Bohannan, Evans-Pritchard had a great regard for poetry and admired Steiner for being a poet (Paul Bohannan: PC). Many Oxford anthropologists were practising members of the world religions, and the strong affinity between Roman Catholicism and the broadly philosophical anthropology of several post-war members of the Institute is well known (Fardon 1999: 244–46). Steiner’s position differed from other members of the Institute in the extreme degree to which his religion had been not a private matter but a public, and physically as well as spiritually existential, matter during the war years (Fardon 2003; Evans-Pritchard 1962b, 1973). We also know from several witnesses that EvansPritchard considered Steiner the ‘most scholarly’ of the members of the Institute; he told Rodney Needham so in these words (Needham: PC). However, on the evidence of the same Oxford contemporaries’ testimonies, Steiner the polymath was not just at the intellectual heart of the Institute but embodied its moral soul. Although one of the few who had not been a combatant in the war, more than the others Steiner was the war’s survivor: damaged in body but apparently indomitable in spirit. The experiences of the war, and of the holocaust, were the broader context in which we feel it necessary to situate the questioning of the status and purpose of anthropology that ensued at the Institute (see also James 2007). And this questioning provided some of the grounds for twentieth-century anthropology’s subsequent bouts of intensive self-questioning – first, in the close aftermath of decolonization and then again as the relation of exteriority between the West and its Others lost credibility in the light of postcolonial globalization. The status of social anthropology as a ‘natural science of society’ was key not only to the discipline’s epistemological standing but, at least for many of those involved, also to its moral standing. It is well documented, at least in general terms, that once Evans-Pritchard succeeded Radcliffe-Brown in the Oxford chair relations between the two men deteriorated from the collaboration they had enjoyed at the time of their co-sponsorship, with Meyer Fortes, of the seminal collection African Political Systems (1940). The exact date of EvansPritchard’s epistemological falling out with Radcliffe-Brown has remained contentious, and we would not revisit the issue did it not have such an obvious and immediate bearing on Steiner’s Oxford lectures. Such facts as there are about the disagreement between RadcliffeBrown and Evans-Pritchard have been reported elsewhere (Stocking

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[1995] 1996: 435fn; Kuper [1973] 1996: 124–25; Mills 2008: 39–47). In 1948, Evans-Pritchard’s Inaugural Lecture at Oxford had been, in Adam Kuper’s words, ‘an orthodox Radcliffe-Brownian performance’ ([1973] 1996: 124). Yet as Kuper goes on to note, quoting in extenso from a letter Evans-Pritchard wrote to the journal Man, he later called this lecture a dutiful restatement of Radcliffe-Brown’s position – an expression of his ‘personal regard, though less intellectual sympathy or appreciation’ for his predecessor (Kuper [1973] 1996: 125). In the light of what happened in the following three years, this motivation seems strange indeed. Only two years later, in his Marett Lecture of 1950 (1962a), Evans-Pritchard strongly repudiated Radcliffe-Brown’s entire epistemology of anthropology (James 2007: 106). These views were repeated in a series of broadcast lectures for the BBC Third Programme that year (published as Social Anthropology 1951b). Radcliffe-Brown took the public opportunity of his own 1951 Huxley Lecture to restate his conviction that social anthropology was a natural science of society; and he addressed narrower criticism to Evans-Pritchard in a review of Social Anthropology (Radcliffe-Brown 1951a, 1951b). Such a public falling out between professors past and present cannot but have set the tone for debate in the Institute. Steiner must have been alive to this situation: he had worked closely with both men and owned Evans-Pritchard’s Social Anthropology (1951b) ex dono autoris as he noted in his copy, which is dated May 1951. Steiner was one of the few colleagues with whom Evans-Pritchard might have discussed the changes his views underwent between 1948 and 1950; and it is notable that Steiner’s earliest Oxford lectures address the same issues that Evans-Pritchard was to contest with Radcliffe-Brown. In repudiating Radcliffe-Brown’s natural science of society, EvansPritchard accelerated that complex (and by no means clear-cut) process in British anthropology that David Pocock epitomized as a move from ‘function’ to ‘meaning’. An identification of anthropology with the humanities, particularly history, and an emphasis on the translation of comparative religious sensibilities are well-known elements of this movement. Steiner’s diary for 21 October 1952 finds him having read a belatedly published 1951 issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, a copy of which survives in his library; here, Evans-Pritchard’s ‘excellent’ RAI presidential address (‘Some features of Nuer religion’ – a disquisition on the complexities of translating Nuer conceptions of God that later became chapter 1 of Nuer Religion) was followed by Radcliffe-Brown’s ‘ridiculous’ 1951 Huxley Lecture (a depiction of classificatory logic later feted by

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Lévi-Strauss (1962a: 158; also 1962b passim) as a genuinely structuralist analysis!). That Steiner’s thought concurs with Evans-Pritchard in so many respects is unsurprising given that the two men worked closely together and respected one another. For example, Evans-Pritchard argued that because societies were not natural systems they did not undergo necessary developments, and therefore these could not be stated as general principles or laws. While it might be possible to find logical consistencies in the analysis of societies or cultures, these were neither real nor necessary connections (Evans-Pritchard 1951b: 17). This idea closely matches Steiner’s remark (of October 1948) in which he characterizes chronological and morphological series as different ‘logical structures’ and defines culture, in the ‘ethnological sense’, as an outcome of the exercise of comparison, without significance outside that procedure (1999b: 241). Evans-Pritchard proposed three levels of analysis: the translation of overt cultural features, the detection of the underlying form in a society or culture, and the comparison of these forms (1951b: 24–25). Steiner’s analysis of units of comparison in his aphorism locks into this debate, and like Evans-Pritchard, he stresses that the analytical categories of the investigation must be understood in relation to the act of comparison. However, we shall note later that this is not the only sense that Steiner attributed to culture, a concept too fertile to be confined to a single type of discourse. Radcliffe-Brown’s vigorously critical review of the lectures Evans-Pritchard published as Social Anthropology argued that Evans-Pritchard’s ideas were confused and ill-formed. RadcliffeBrown accepted that historical and ethnographic studies were both ‘socio-graphic’, but he denied that social anthropology (or for that matter history) consisted entirely of such studies. What RadcliffeBrown understood by ‘laws’ and Evans-Pritchard by ‘patterns’ was no more than a matter of ‘verbal quibbling’. Sociography, on RadcliffeBrown’s understanding, provided: the data for systematic comparative studies, which can give classifications of the various features of social life and typological classifications of societies, and can also reveal the existence of regularities in social phenomena, thus enabling us to begin building up a general body of theoretical knowledge about human societies. (Radcliffe-Brown 1951a: 365–66)

While Steiner’s explicit statements on this professorial wrangle leave no doubt that his sympathies lie with Evans-Pritchard, some of his interests (notably in Simmel’s formal sociology) have a hue

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that may reasonably be considered Radcliffe-Brownian. Personalities aside, Steiner’s views may have been less dogmatic; an aphorism he wrote at the time appears to undercut any grounds for a comparison of social forms and translational understanding in which the two exclude one another. It simply runs that ‘“Meaning and structure” seems to me about the best translation of Tao te King (Steiner 1988: 25). And while his close associates argued whether anthropology was ‘science’ or ‘art’, what H.G. Adler called Steiner’s ‘universal mathesis’ sought integral relations between practices of knowledge and forms of writing that in the West might be classified as religion, poetry and philosophy. In short, this Oxford wrangle between science and art might not be worth the ink spilled over it. One of Steiner’s closest friends in the Oxford group, M.N. Srinivas (himself an admirer of Evans-Pritchard) feels in retrospect that Evans-Pritchard did anthropology a ‘service’ by arguing it to be a ‘moral not natural science’; however, Srinivas regretted certain ‘side-effects’ of the polarization: a downgrading of the achievements of modern social anthropology and of the fieldwork tradition (correlating with an overemphasis on the fieldworker), and a ‘denigration of Radcliffe-Brown as thinker and man’ that ignored his historical contribution to the discipline (1973: 143; see also Mills 2007: 96). Had he lived as long as Srinivas, Steiner might also have concluded that personal antagonisms had removed the nuance from their scholarly disagreement. The arguments between Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard had a well-established history in German social thought, which Steiner controlled with a native’s grasp. For him, presumably, the conflict between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften was not an issue. Steiner’s ‘universal mathesis’ involved the search for procedures to express knowledge transformatively rather than by adherence to a singular systematic method, let alone a ‘system’. In this commitment to stand on the shifting grounds on which knowledge is transformed, Steiner seems very much our contemporary. Committed to a translational approach to ethnography, to the formal study of types of sociation, and to comparative anthropology, Steiner nonetheless considered the outcomes of all of these activities to be provisional and problematic. These three angles to approach the subject – translation, sociation and comparison – provided the means to examine pressing problems; but the problems felt pressing because investigators were themselves situated in specific historical and political circumstances. The interests that propelled curiosity about social phenomena were themselves just as much social phenomena.

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This might be illustrated by Steiner’s retention, at least in some thought experiments, of an evaluative notion of culture remote in this regard to that he defined to be no more than an outcome in comparative analysis. Take this meditation from 1947 on the collapse of shared culture or public life (similar to what Habermas would later call the ‘public sphere’), which is far closer to German critical theory than it is to the anthropology of symbolism. The decline of a culture may come about sooner or later than the decline of its society, which may function unchanged: trade unionists may show solidarity, judges may be fair and actors lively, yet the culture may simply have dissolved … How will you notice this? By the longing for a shared public sphere (or public life, Öffentlichkeit): because culture is ultimately a system of symbols, valued in their entirety and on account of common commitment to them. It is in the nature of symbols to belong to two spheres, one secret and one public, the one in which they are conceived and the other in which they connect. And one sphere cannot exist without the other. In the public sphere, justice, works of art and adventure come to the fore. This public sphere just happens; it is not sought after but is given with society and its symbols. How clearly one sees in the Italian Renaissance, or in Elizabethan England, what it means for a culture suddenly to be there: it means maturity, a public sphere that is surprisingly, suddenly, really, there: a shared sphere that creates an identity between being and validity, with the assurance to be able to say when something is just nothing because it doesn’t belong there. The dissolution of a single culture reveals itself in the longing for a public sphere, how it is sought, and sought outside society. … ([June 1947] 2009: 162)

This is common culture recognized by its absence and in the individual longing to seek it, even outside society, whereas Steiner suggests a culture worthy of the name simply announces itself by one day just being there. This sense of culture as a vital consideration in the moral and aesthetic evaluation of societies is not absent from what we know about Steiner’s teaching, even if the more objectivizing, morally neutral anthropological senses necessarily predominate. The recent experiences of the Second World War, of Fascism and Nazism, had made it impossible for even the most dispassionate analysis to treat cultures non-evaluatively. For all these reasons, our reading in their entirety of what can be reconstructed of the lectures Steiner delivered in Oxford (listed in Chapter 6) suggests he would have been uncomfortable with the crudity of the terms on which the argument between the Oxford professors past and present was developing. Steiner strongly advocated empirical sociographic studies but unlike Radcliffe-Brown saw these as theoretically as well as experientially informed rather than as ‘data’ to be submitted

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to inductive analysis. He concurred with Evans-Pritchard that social anthropology was unlike natural science by virtue of the questions it posed. However, he was more strongly attracted to formal sociological comparison (à la Simmel) than the later Evans-Pritchard. For Steiner, the most pressing problems concerned the possibility of translation between sociographic idioms, a translation that could only derive from intensive study across ethnical or historical distance and that could only be conducted by means of comparative analyses. This in itself entailed exploring the epistemological limits of the concepts and language that made such studies possible. Likewise, it entailed continuously analysing the comparability of social phenomena and negotiating differing standards of truth and different concepts of value. Binary distinctions between the ‘sciences’ and ‘humanities’ were of no use in thinking through the situated nature of knowledge, whether sociographic or comparative, and in evaluating the ideas of those who had sought such knowledge. How to achieve sociographic knowledge, how to use such knowledge in comparative analyses, and what transformations are involved are the recurrent themes of Steiner’s Oxford lectures. Throughout, he argues against any stable or simple solution to the dilemmas such disciplinary ambitions posed. Although EvansPritchard returned to questions of comparison in anthropology and of the relation between anthropology and history in lectures long after Steiner’s death ([1961] 1962c, [1963] 1965a), his later statements only draw out some of the implications of his 1950 lecture, leaving the fundamental questions unanswered – indeed, even unposed. It is, therefore, to Steiner that we must turn for the most subtle probing of these issues in Oxford anthropology around 1950–52. For Steiner, the relationship between sociographic and comparative study was as problematic to history as it was to anthropology. Declaring anthropology to be like history pointed to a shared dilemma rather than to its solution. Although his training in Central European ethnology and philology, an influential source of American cultural anthropology, predated the sociological insights he gained in Britain, Steiner added sociological perspectives to these earlier approaches while yet retaining the comparative and historical commitment of ethnological scholarship. And to both Schools – as we have argued – he added an appreciation of the politics of anthropology that derived from his identification with Oriental civilization and his solidarity with the colonized. Many of the lectures that Steiner left in fragmentary form begin with fully formed paragraphs that are evidently considered and almost complete. As the lecture outlines go on, it seems as if Steiner

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ran out of time, interest or both. And time and again, these wellformed paragraphs are devoted to attempts to delineate the nature and purpose of anthropology. Take the lecture we published for the first time as ‘Language, Society, and Social Anthropology’, which probably dates from 1950 (1999b: 193–96). Rather than worrying over the definitions of language or society, Steiner homes in on ‘social anthropology’, which he defines by repeatedly splitting the idea of interest in social phenomena, as if by whittling away what was not anthropology he might be left with something that was. Thus, our interest in social phenomena is less constant than that in natural phenomena; it occurs in ‘fits and starts’ – no ‘body of secure knowledge of social phenomena’ grows over the centuries. We become interested in social phenomena when we are challenged in some way: either by ‘social change’ or by ‘confrontations’. Taking now confrontations, these are of two types: internal to the social formation (and here by way of example Steiner derives American anthropological interest in ‘culture and personality’ directly from the nature of American society) and external, when the lone ethnographer intrudes upon an entire and different form of life. From a position of unfamiliarity, the ethnographer goes on to learn linguistic and social forms together and to make his experience more predictable (both in terms of language and social behaviour). All language is socially embedded (and here, as in Taboo, Steiner pays generous tribute to Malinowski). Ethnography, then, is the translation of this experience and fundamentally to do with meanings. Turning to the roughly contemporaneous lectures on kinship (also fragmentary), we find again that the most developed paragraphs are those concerned with the standing and particularity of anthropology (1999b: 197–201). He begins, ‘Our problems are shaped by the situations which gave rise to our enquiries. …’, and he again distinguishes ‘social change’ from ‘confrontation’. But then he develops the same line of thought with a slight difference: both kinds of situation can give rise to either abstract theorising or empirical investigation … in both … detachment and involvement [are] possible. And both situations are profound: the one [social change] can make one realise the basic insecurity of social existence, the other is apt to infuse all observation of social phenomena with that questioning bewilderment, taumazein as the Greeks called it who believed it to be the mainspring of all our more important knowledge. Thus both kinds of situation are ‘existential’ … (1999b: 197–98)

‘Insecurity’ and ‘bewilderment’ are the reasons for our curiosity and the grounds for our existential situation being questionable. This is

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a far cry from any ideal of objectivity as disinterest. One recalls that Iris Murdoch was writing on Sartre at this time and that Steiner here refers problems that were pressing in the past to the ‘fascinans’ or taumazein of those who were concerned passionately by them. Does this mean that the ensuing analyses reflect only the local grounds for a thinker’s fascination? Sometimes yes, as in the case of thinkers who could find nothing but their own prejudices in the other. But Steiner, adhering to relativity of a kind informed by both Mach and Einstein, sees difference as prerequisite to knowledge. As he puts it in his second lecture on Simmel: the conundrum – what objectivity can there be in an enquiry where subject and object are identical: socially conditioned man and the social conditions of man? – that conundrum is solved by us as far as it can be resolved at all: we are investigating kinds of social life quite different from the one which conditioned us. (1999b: 216)

Some of the implications of this for comparison in anthropology are explored in a scathing review of George Murdock’s Social Structure, a work Steiner found unscholarly and thoroughly erroneous, ‘a streamlined self-service buffet of culture items’ (1951: 367). The review opens with a broad statement of the state of the art that points yet again to a problematic absence: It does not serve a reasonable purpose, nor has it ever been attempted with any measure of success and accuracy, to distinguish sociology from social anthropology, and particularly the more general research of ‘pure’ sociology from ‘the’ comparative method which at any time is being given a free hand in the anthropological realm. One of the features in the relationship between these partly overlapping fields of knowledge, and perhaps not the least irritating one, is that social anthropology, which has given rise to new methods of analysis and discoveries, but has left its comparative functions awkwardly undeveloped (the more so where a structural outlook prevails), still bears the burden of comparative research and exposition without receiving (since the days of Durkheim) contributions from ‘pure’ or general sociology. Instead of talking of Social Anthropology, a simple distinction could be made between analytical and descriptive sociology on the one hand and comparative and general sociology on the other, subdividing analytical sociology into research with a necessary ethnological bias, and without it. (1951: 366)

The problematic posed here will be taken up in the lectures on ‘tabu’: individual instances of ethnographic description are written up in ways that are not commensurate with their comparison. This seems to argue an initial distinction between description and comparison that must later be bridged. However, Steiner – his circumspection

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recalls both Kafka and T.S. Eliot’s prose as literary models – immediately and typically qualifies his own distinction: Unfortunately, this is not possible, because the necessary ethnological bias involves the sociologist in some of the complexities of ethnology – viz. the configuration of spatially distinct types and the historical character of the features defining the types, or else the ethnological bias becomes confused with social history, or with the genuine sociological problems of the analysis of small-scale communities, or again the latter with the fascinans of otherness and with ethnical distance as a condition of research. (1951: 366–67)

If it is not possible to separate description from comparison, then this is because the criteria for distinguishing types of social phenomenon are themselves historically produced and depend upon the particular situation of the analyst. To ask Steiner for a general resolution to this problem is to mistake his argument; rather than an invitation to resolution, the tension between ethnographic description and comparison is an essential and permanent condition of the comparative sociologist’s calling. Anthropology requires a methodology, a way of going on. To face this tension simply is to be a comparative sociologist. Later, in this otherwise entirely critical review, he speaks of the Durkheimian heritage emphasized by Radcliffe-Brown; the need for a ‘social Linneanism’ in ‘systematic sociology’ based on features such as segmentation. Descriptive and comparative sociology are engaged in the same quest for features that will permit comparison. Methodologically, it is essential to distinguish, as Steiner claims Murdock has failed to do, between: cultural elements – which are not necessarily sociological isolates and which are used for the identification in space and time of a culture aggregate – and social institutions – which by their nature are parts of systems and interdependent with other social phenomena. … (1951: 367)

Like Radcliffe-Brown, Steiner believes that comparison needs to occur in terms of social rather than cultural aggregates; and his last writings explore two axes of comparison – economy and cosmology – which are interrelated through notions of value and danger, and it is to these we next turn.

Chapter 11

LABOUR AND VALUE

My greatest ambition is to write a comparative economics of primitive peoples. I have completely new theories of value formation in noneconomizing [nichtwirtschaftenden] societies, especially about the formation of value in the procedure of sacrifice-exchange. —Franz Steiner to Paul Bruell, 13 April 1947

Steiner’s thesis opened the phase of his mature anthropology, taking him into the areas of economics, labour and value where his work was to leave a more immediate and direct mark on the discipline than it did in the study of slavery. Paul Bohannan’s best efforts failed to find a publisher for his carefully prepared, shortened version of Steiner’s dissertation, and, understandably, Bohannan did not attempt to truncate the text still further into article form, albeit some of its main ideas were filtered through his own writings. But other immediate products of the thesis fared better, although here also we are left with fragments of larger projects, the relations between which are not entirely clear. We learn from Evans-Pritchard of Steiner’s proposed book on ‘the sociology of labour’ that it ‘would have been his thesis rewritten for publication’ (1956b: 12); but Paul Bohannan also mentions ‘a book on the economics of primitive peoples’ (in Steiner 1954b: 118 fn.1): it is not clear whether these references apply to the same or to different works, and in either case, one is left to speculate what would have happened to the ideas on ‘slavery’. ‘Towards a Classification of Labour’ derives from the notes Steiner made for a lecture series under the title ‘Division and Organisation of Labour’. It both continues the concern in Steiner’s thesis to classify forms of labour and adds intriguing comments about the nature of economics. It is the only one of his articles to have been reprinted in English after its journal publication, having been recognized by its subsequent editor as ‘one of the more definitive studies of its topic’,

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and therefore suitable to introduce a collection of essays on The Social Dimension of Work (Bryant 1972: 3). We have already noted the essential reflexivity of Steiner’s address to a new problem: a stocktaking of the terminological and conceptual resources defining the subject of study, followed by interrogating both the origins and interestedness of these resources, and analysing how they structure questions askable within that domain. This was his approach to ‘slavery’, and it will be repeated for ‘taboo’. Likewise for Steiner, economics is a way of looking: following Bohannan’s edition, ‘economics stands for an approach and a terminology, not for facts’ (1999b: 174). In his own draft, Steiner formulates this more radically than in the published version: ‘There is no such thing as an economic fact’ (MS 1951b: fol.1). He immediately moves – in both versions – to add some more substantive content to his definition: ‘We can define economic relations as those relationships existing between human individuals and groups which can best be described in terms of values and non-human quantities’ (1999b: 174). Although economics is an approach to analysing some aspects of social life, those aspects yield themselves up to being understood in this way. Thus economics, while a point of view, is nonetheless to some degree answerable independently to the way the world is. Casting around for a specifically sociological definition of labour produces a similar argument. Steiner rejects any attempt to distinguish particular sorts of activity as labour: any activity may be labour at one time and something different at another. Labour is any socially integrative activity concerned with human subsistence; adding that, ‘By “integrating activity” is meant a sanctioned activity which thus presupposes, creates and recreates social relationships’ (1999b: 188). On this definition, for Steiner as for Durkheim, labour comes to mean virtually ‘all social activities’ (1999b: 180). Labour, like economics – although Steiner does not put it this way – refers both to a way of looking at the world and to those aspects of the world that yield best to this way of being seen. The remainder of his essay (before it peters out) proposes the promised ‘classification of labour’ using such criteria as the sexual division of labour (which may gender tasks by reference to places or tools), and the organization of collective labour (according to the degree of authoritative direction of allotted tasks, the differentiation or not of tasks, and so on). Although Steiner’s account contains valuable insights – for instance, into the relations between servile and gendered labour tasks, as noted in the doctoral thesis, or the persistence of uniform labour as a sphere of activity after an economy has become monetized – the fragment gains greater interest when

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read in conjunction with Steiner’s notes for the proposed book on economics, on which he was working at the time of his death. While also fragmentary, Steiner’s ideas on value, published as ‘Notes on Comparative Economics’ by Paul Bohannan, offer more substantial indications of the ambitious work he planned. Peter Bumke, introducing the German printing of Steiner’s paper (1983), argues for its importance in drawing ‘the most radical’ of all conclusions from overturning the distinctions between economic and non-economic values (1983: 50). Neither Durkheim nor Mauss are cited in the surviving article, but Steiner’s friend Godfrey Lienhardt, who drew on this article to conclude the chapter concerned with ‘Economics and Social Relations’ in his survey Social Anthropology, helpfully notes two resemblances with the French masters: in Steiner’s proceeding from ‘concrete example’ and in his interest in ‘the link between notions of economic and of religious value’ (1964: 88, 90). In a broad sense, Steiner’s speculations concern the link between the values of things and people’s other values, and we have already seen what dangers follow when this link is unhinged, as it was in the extremity of SS slavery and the death camps of the Second World War (Chapter 9). As usual, Steiner’s specific concern with relatively undifferentiated societies is contextualized within a broader concern with cultural criticism; it draws implicitly on his readings of Marx and Simmel before concluding explicitly with the analyses that Weber and Tawney made of the relation between the ideals of Protestantism and capitalism, and the collapse of this value relation in the disaster of the Weimar Republic. Steiner’s argument is condensed, and some exegesis is warranted. ‘By an economy’, Steiner tells us, he means ‘a system of production and distribution of units of value’. Although Paul Bohannan speculates (in a footnote) ‘value’ should probably read ‘utility’, to us the original seems more plausible, not least since Steiner contrasts value and utility (1999b: 173 fn. 2). To analyse a society economically is, therefore, to look at social actions from a particular perspective: the investigator examines the making and circulating of values. Steiner goes on to distinguish two common configurations of values in non-capitalist economies. First, Steiner presents Type A. Three groups of goods are here distinguished: 1. Foodstuffs and raw materials; 2. tools and clothing; 3. personal treasures.

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Personal treasures, in Steiner’s neat formulation, are valued by their owners ‘because of their rarity or because of the memorably intensive attention given to them during their production’ (1999b: 161, emphasis added). Eskimo carvings are cited as an example – and some of these survive in his estate. The argument that follows may be the first to introduce the distinction of ‘spheres of exchange’ later commonly made by anthropologists, notably Paul Bohannan in relation to the Tiv of West Africa. In non-capitalist economies of Type A, personal treasures have no universal value and do not circulate; only raw materials circulate, and ‘members of the society respond to the distribution by actions of solidarity enabling further production’. The effect of adding labour to raw material is to remove the object from the primary economic cycle; its further circulation can only be as a gift in alliance or booty in war. Steiner’s choice of words carefully distinguishes this circumstance from the Marxist assumption that value derives from labour. Rather, value depends upon people’s classification of things. One senses here the substantive importance that Steiner attaches to the apparently purely analytic concept of ‘classification’ in his work; in a related aphorism, Steiner suggests that, despite strictly being unsustainable, the ‘form’ versus ‘content’ distinction nonetheless remains necessary (1999b: 240). Turning next implicitly to liberal economics, Steiner notes that the laws of supply and demand do operate but only within the sphere concerned with foodstuffs. Such societies have no accumulation and no markets. Put another way, the regime under which value is created in such societies is particular to their type. Secondly, Steiner considers Type B. A second type of non-capitalist economy is distinguished from the first in that there are no ‘personal treasures’ standing entirely apart from the primary economic cycle. Treasures have general value that derives from their importance in ritual or from their exchangeability. These are subdivided according to ‘the various modes by which people integrate, classify and interrelate the different groups or categories of objects’ (1999b: 162). Such economies may be analysed in terms of a distinction between goods whose value derives from use and those whose value is non-utilitarian. Some utilitarian objects may also be used as means of exchange if their supply is limited in some way. Implicitly, Steiner’s definition of two forms of non-capitalist systems of value creation contrasts with the capitalist system, in which a general standard of value is recognized. Thus, he rejoins the problem central to Simmel’s Philosophie des Geldes (Philosophy of Money, 1900): that of the relation between general-purpose money

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and the expansion in range of general standards of value. It is the collapse of monetary values within this nexus that precipitates the disastrous progression from Weimar to the Third Reich (as Lienhardt noted of Steiner’s analysis above). If economic systems are concerned with the creation and distribution of economic values, when they collapse they bring down entire shared systems of value more generally. The comparison between economics and religion as systems of ultimate values is pursued via an analogy that borders on theories of sacrifice. The collapse that marked the transition from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich – to indicate Steiner’s own situatedness – may have been as significant for his understanding of the rise of Nazism as it was central to Canetti’s analysis of crowd phenomena (1960: 207–12). Steiner next elaborates a symbolic terminology to distinguish the usefulness, exchangeability and value of objects that refines the crude conventional distinction between use and exchange values. He then runs through the possible types of exchange his terminology permits. 1. Useful objects can be bartered directly. 2. A useful object can be traded for a useful object that is gained only because it is exchangeable for another useful object. This is trade through an intermediary useful object. 3. A useful object can be traded for a non-utilitarian object (a treasure or a ritual object) on account of its exchangeability against other useful objects. This is trade through an intermediary non-utilitarian object. 4. An exchangeable object (treasure or ritual value) can be exchanged for another exchangeable object. This is a financial transaction akin to trade. Running systematically through the various combinatory possibilities of his analytical terms (to yield barter, trade and exchange of various types), which itself is a characteristic Steinerian device to transform knowledge, his attention comes to rest on the remaining forms: the translation of all or any useful properties of objects into ritual objects. 5. Negative translation occurs when all the useful, Steiner says empirical, qualities of objects (both their actual use and the usefulness of their exchangeability) are relinquished so that the giver retains their ritual value which henceforth attaches to his status. Negative translation may or may not involve splitting the value of the original object. If the value can be split, it follows that

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object(s) are given, but the owner relinquishes only their empirical value while retaining their ritual value. Alternatively, the object may be destroyed so that its ritual value is all that remains (as in the reported final stages of American Northwest Coast people’s potlatch). 6. Positive translation differs from the previous type in that value from exchangeability is classified together with ritual value. Things are specially valued because they retain their ritual value when exchanged. Under these circumstances, the different spheres of exchange (of useful and treasure objects) are not entirely disjoined, but there is no common standard of value between them. Terms of trade can change in one sphere without necessarily affecting the other. Steiner’s notion of ‘translation’ perhaps needs to be located somewhere between a strictly scientific concept on the one hand, and Canetti’s affective concept of ‘transformation’ or ‘metamorphosis’ on the other, namely his key idea of Verwandlung – a German word Steiner also uses in similar contexts (e.g. 1999b: 240). Translations of value have economic, aesthetic and moral aspects and occur in definite social formations. Each of the above forms of exchange has different consequences for sociality, and several forms often occur together in a single society seen from the perspective of its economy. Steiner notes in correction of his own distinction between empirical and ritual values that there are cases in which the sheer quantity of utilitarian objects confers on them a value qualitatively different from the aggregate value of the individual objects that make up the whole. This he calls assembly value and notes it may involve abstention from consumption (as in the case of Trobriand yams used for display). As empirical values are rejected, the economic model of value may approximate the model of sacrifice. The contrary peculiarity of the West, which accounts for the tragedy of Weimar, was the ‘conquest of Western civilisation by a total money economy [, which] meant the bestowing of transcending values on money’ (1999b: 171). On the one hand we find an ‘ascetic rejection of the uses of goods’, whether in relation to the Protestant ethic or the accumulation of yams in the Trobriand Islands that Malinowski reported; on the other hand, the loss of property of the German middle classes under the Weimar Republic, which led to the disintegration of their work ethic and the ‘ideals and codes of the middle classes. No short-lived hardship, however severe, can account for a loss of confidence on such a scale’ (1999b: 172). The collapse of Weimar was evidence of the fragility of

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a regime of social values founded on the economics of possessive individualism. Or, following Simmel, it might be in the spirit of Steiner to attribute the calamitous consequences of the general collapse in value to the secular process through which money became concrete and goods abstract. As these observations indicate, Steiner’s German ethnological and philosophical training, the political background and his religious commitments together provide an essential context for understanding his social anthropology. Specific ideas on ‘economics’, ‘labour’, ‘value’ and ‘taboo’ impinge directly on large complexes like ‘culture’, ‘politics’, ‘society’ and ‘civilization’, but because Steiner’s personal and political writings remained unpublished for fifty years, and he does not elaborate the wider consequences of his specific arguments in his scholarly work, it has been hard for readers to grasp the way in which quite detailed, as it were ‘abstract’, arguments, like that on economics and value, impact directly on the wider, substantive debates on issues like the rise of Nazism.

Chapter 12

CIVILIZATION AND TABOO

The process of civilization is the conquest of man by the natural forces, the demons. —‘On the Process of Civilization’

The reception of Taboo (1956), the longest of Steiner’s works published immediately following his death in a version, as she notes, lightly edited by Laura Bohannan from his Oxford University lecture series on ‘Tabu’ has particularly suffered for want of placement in the larger context of Steiner’s social thought. Evans-Pritchard, in his well-intentioned Preface to the original edition, understated the book’s concerns and achievement in the eyes of its potential readers by presenting the work as a critical examination and close scrutiny of previous theories: ‘useful’ to teachers and ‘of great value’ to anyone interested in taboo. Most damaging was the insistence that the author ‘does not reach any positive conclusions himself ’ (1956b: 12–13). Reviewers largely followed Evans-Pritchard’s assessment of his late colleague’s work. The anonymous reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement praises Steiner’s critical insight but, like EvansPritchard, regrets that ‘his [lecture] notes seem to have come to an end before his positive contribution to this very complex subject had been adequately developed’ (1956: 38). The state of the manuscript does not support such a contention: Steiner’s final lecture is not fragmentary and ends with a strong conclusion, which is sufficiently stated in Laura Bohannan’s edition (Tabu, Lecture L, fol.3). The anonymous reviewer for The Listener, while noting that the book was almost ‘entirely critical’ did, however, add that as ‘a pious practising Jew for whom the Mosaic prohibitions were a living part of a living religion [, Steiner] avoids the condescension which is a feature of the writing of his predecessors’ (1956: 281). Cohn (1957) concludes his own review by lengthy quotation from Evans-Pritchard; and Raglan (1957), Lanternari (1957) and Branden (1958) also echo

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Evans-Pritchard’s assessment. Only Cora Dubois (1957) is more appreciative of Steiner’s positive contribution in linking together the institutional localization of danger, classification, value and behaviour. It took a second wave of reception to recognize the significance of Steiner’s text. Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger makes full acknowledgement of Steiner’s ideas, though the link has rarely been commented on: exceptions include Needham’s early review of Douglas’s book (anon TLS 1967) and J.C. Winter’s perceptive comments (1979: 26). The conclusion that Steiner reaches at the end of his lectures is as follows in the version edited by Laura Bohannan: it is a major fact of human existence that we are not able, and never were able, to express our relation to values in other terms than those of danger behaviour. Social relations are describable in terms of danger; through contagion there is social participation in danger. (1956a: 147; 1999a: 214)

In Steiner’s own words, the first version of his key sentence runs, more inclusively, as follows: we human beings are not able and never were able to express our relations to values in other terms than danger behaviour. (Tabu, Lecture L, fol.3)

Taboos (or rules of avoidance) classify and localize dangers and transgressions. Instead of being bizarre or exotic, taboos are one of the forms taken by a universal propensity to express the value of classification by imbuing the world of social relations with inherent and contagious, and hence potentially shared, dangers. The social anthropologist needs to investigate how generally recognized dangers are distributed in different sorts of human society, and to ask what social pressures are brought to bear in order to fix a shared scheme of dangers. Societies differ according to the ways in which dangers are identified and classified. The significance of the broadest terms of this contrast is made explicit in Steiner’s essay ‘On the Process of Civilization’. ‘On the Process of Civilization’, to which we have already had occasion to allude, belongs to a line of German-speaking thought that engages specific social criticism with a wider cultural critique: Lichtenberg’s Sudelbücher (Waste-Books), Nietzsche’s Zur Genealogie der Moral, Karl Kraus’s social satire and Freud’s Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and its Discontents/Unease), to name a heterogeneous but not unconnected set, each belong to a very specific cultural and historical context – Enlightenment Germany, fin de siècle Europe, modern Vienna – and share a critical attitude towards

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Western civilization that moves from opposing (and often satirizing) specific institutions and beliefs into a more fundamental critique of the culture itself. However, though sharing ideas with Nietzsche and Freud, Steiner lacks Nietzsche’s iconoclasm and stringently avoids Freud’s psychology. In this respect, his critique is more closely linked to Mach’s cool analysis of global categories into their smaller parts and would have been at home among practitioners of Oxford’s linguistic philosophy. Steiner’s style, as elsewhere, lies in accepting a conventional starting point but developing from it an analysis that subverts the conventional narrative. What is conventional about his essay on civilization is the category ‘civilization’ itself, which Steiner seems to invite the reader to accept in its nineteenth-century self-evidence. Steiner is not using the term in the way Norbert Elias’s similarly entitled work was to do (with reference to a specific European culture of civility). However, the questioning of the very idea of ‘civilization’ takes place in both their cases against the backdrop of the holocaust. Although first written in 1938 (as Über den prozeß der Zivilisation), when the first part of Elias’s The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations was published in 1968 in English, its dedication was to his parents, who had both perished in concentration camps. Steiner likewise invites us to reflect on modern man’s inhumanity. Like Elias, he does not make his reader examine the concept of civilization definitionally. Rather, he puts the ideological character of the concept in question by following an alternative logic that discloses the nature of civilization in process; ‘civilization’s’ positive connotations are shown to hide a more ominous will to domination. However, as Arnason argues, Steiner’s account effectively deconstructs the world view contained in Elias’s central thesis, the idea of a ‘triad of basic controls’ over the natural, social and mental worlds (2019: 418). What sort of intensifying process differentiates the uncivilized and civilized states? Steiner rejects the obvious notion that civilization grows in direct proportion to man’s power over nature. Pre-modern societies were capable of technological control over the relevant aspects of their environments. What changes among ‘civilized’ people is that power is predominantly power over other people. Concurrent with this change, the location of dangers changes: cultures differ in the way that danger is localized. Steiner takes two contrasting instances. By the application of detailed practical knowledge and a tried technology, Eskimos (we recall Steiner took a specialist’s interest in Arctic ethnography and retain his use of the superseded ethnic term) master a perilous environment

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entirely surrounding their world. The dangers exist, and remain, outside Eskimo society. Christian-European or modern society, however, has been engaged from the time of the Romans through the Crusades and up to modern science in extending the boundaries of society in several senses. Dangers outside human society are increasingly few and inchoate. The greater dangers now lie within the society in the form of uncontrollable economic crises, catastrophic wars, massive means of destruction, and the attack on difference (as in the concentration camps). All this, according to Steiner’s argument, is not accidental. Human society has overwhelmed and thus absorbed the demonic sphere, and this progressive expansion of boundaries is the form taken by ‘the process of civilization’. The external demons are now internal and can only be repressed by organizational achievements. Even then, they may continue their inward migration to the divided self. Steiner – along with contemporaries like Kraus, Wittgenstein and Canetti – strenuously resists psychologization of the problem in Freud’s terms. His ‘demons’ are not to be translated into the symbolic projections of psychoanalysis. Like Weber, he notes that the ancient gods or powers have reappeared as impersonal forces ([1919] 1951: 589), and like Weber he sticks firmly to a sociological grasp of the human subject, which in his case is not at variance with a religious view. His conclusion states that only a society in the image of God acting according to the covenant may be able to arrest these demons, or (to formulate this less strongly) a society within which boundaries are clearly marked and patrolled by dangers. The grounds for his espousal of a theocratic Jewish state are immediately clarified. Likewise, the lectures on ‘Tabu’, it can now be seen, belong to a long-standing, deeply unsettling preoccupation with danger and with its avoidance, creation and resolution by different forms of society. Like Elias’s, Steiner’s is a sociogenetic investigation. Analysing ‘danger’ behaviour as an institution involves understanding the society it occurs in, contrasting it with different types of danger behaviour, and comparing similar practices in other societies. ‘On the Process of Civilization’ and Taboo thus belong to a wider concern with danger and with the correlation between danger behaviour and particular social forms. As both the essay and the lectures make clear, comparison is central to his analysis of danger behaviour: whether Eskimos and the West, or the Orient and the West, Steiner always has at least two possible types of practice in view. This is important in Taboo: to enquire about ‘taboo’ is also to ask about the functioning of societies that – despite the fact all societies must localize danger to agree on values – do not demonize and destroy sections

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of humanity; by implication, we are being invited to look at alternative social models in which ‘dangers’ are not treated as they are in the West. The critique of the West emerges clearly from Steiner’s analysis of its signal failure to understand ‘otherness’ as represented by the Polynesian concept of ‘tabu’. Altogether, Taboo seems to encompass many of the themes in which we have seen Steiner to be interested. Specifically: how is agreement to regimes of value stabilized? How do relatively undifferentiated societies deal with alterity? How do they value difference? Why did ‘taboo’ become a ‘problem’ for Western scholarship? What are the different ways values are maintained under different forms of society? Methodologically, can one compare taboos across cultures? Apparently, it was Evans-Pritchard who suggested the subject of taboo to Steiner at a time when the latter had intended to deliver a series of lectures on Marx. One wonders whether there is anything to the timing: Steiner’s lectures on taboo were delivered against a background of deteriorating relations between Evans-Pritchard and Radcliffe-Brown, and the critical momentum of Steiner’s account peaks in his destructive analysis of Radcliffe-Brown’s pre-war lecture on ‘Taboo’ (1939). Steiner’s account also opens with RadcliffeBrown: a recollection of his teaching, at the Institute in 1938, that social anthropology and comparative sociology were ‘the same thing’. ‘Comparative sociology referred to a body of theories and concepts concerning the social life of human beings’ that were based on the ‘observation’ of various, predominantly simpler, societies. As such, it differed from the type of sociology that derived from philosophical concerns. On the other hand, ‘Social anthropology was an empirical pursuit. It was represented by field monographs, written chiefly by contemporary British students.’ For the present-day reader, it may clarify the argument if what Steiner calls comparative sociology is translated as ‘social anthropology’, while we understand as ‘ethnography’ what he calls ‘social anthropology’. By comparative sociologists (read social anthropologists), Steiner meant theorists like Durkheim, who ‘took over whole vistas of foreign societies’ rather than plundering such accounts for apt illustrations. ‘In those days it seemed as though field data had to undergo two scrutinies, that of the collector and that of the theorist, and the second could not dispense with the first’ (1956a: 15; 1999a: 103). He goes on to argue that as theorists became ethnographers, so comparative studies became rare. With an increasingly detailed descriptive inventory of foreign societies, comparison of ‘whole societies’ as Radcliffe-Brown had proposed had to contend with ‘such a wealth of detail, such a complexity

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of abstractions, that comparison becomes an impossibility’. This is why, Steiner concludes, no recent comparative studies had been made. Here we approach that recurrent theme at which all Steiner’s lectures worry: how the accumulating ethnographic record can be put to the service of a comparative social anthropology. Following the same approach he adopted for slavery, Steiner’s argument continues by examining the origins and serviceability of the terminology available to analysts of taboo. The broad concepts and categories used currently by anthropologists, he argues, are left over from an earlier period of comparative sociology, so when ethnographers try to employ these categories for description they are found wanting. The ethnographer reacts to this situation by redefining the comparative concept to fit the ethnographic context. But in the process, the term becomes too specialized to serve any longer as a tool of comparison. The specific example he chooses to illustrate his point anticipates Lévi-Strauss’s later argument in his celebrated Le totémisme aujourd’hui (1962). Totemism as a general category was meant to cover a plethora of cases; totemism as a term of ethnographic description must be tailored to fit a particular society. If we dismantle a general category by reference to its inadequacies in particular ethnographic descriptions – however virtuous a task in some ways – we also abrogate the attempt to explain totemism as a stage in human evolution or as a ‘solid block of “otherness”’ (1999a: 105). But the question remains: How far can we, for our purposes today, use terms developed for such [comparative] purposes? And if we strip our vocabulary of these significant terms of the comparative period, what are we going to put in their place, not only as labels for pigeon-holes, but also as expressions indicating the direction of our interest? We do retain them and, sooner or later, each of us in his own way makes the unpleasant discovery that he is talking in two different languages at the same time and, like all bilinguals, finds translation almost impossible. (1999a: 105–6)

This problem has become no less perplexing since Steiner spoke, and his own treatment of ‘taboo’ is all too readily treated as a demolition of earlier theories. However, his painstaking deconstruction of earlier views exposes the West’s inability to grasp the otherness of the Polynesian concept. By implication, the Western scholar’s inability to understand Polynesian danger behaviour lays bare the inadequacies of the West’s own institutions for dealing with the problem: it has no satisfactory way for treating ‘otherness’ as Polynesian, Jewish and Indian civilizations (in their different ways) have or had. The consistency at this point with Steiner’s argument about the effects

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of different accommodations to human differences in the thesis on slavery, is striking here, and in both cases the process of Western civilization reveals its deficiencies. As Steiner promises, his lectures first deal with the ethnographic usage of the term ‘taboo’ – initially in relation to Polynesia and then more widely – before proceeding to ‘find a basis for a general criticism’ of the ‘diverse theories perpetrated in the name of taboo’ (1999a: 107). Having grouped existing definitions of taboo, Steiner generalizes – ‘tentatively’ – that ‘taboo is an element of all those situations in which attitudes to values are expressed in terms of danger behaviour’ (1999a: 108). Values, and the situations in which they are expressed, vary widely between societies, so there is neither sociological nor psychological unity that might allow a solution to a problem of taboo. Instead, Steiner is suggesting that there is a valid viewpoint from which values and the attribution of dangers prevalent in a society can be seen to intermesh, and this tells us important things about that society and its difference from others. This is the specific debt Mary Douglas acknowledges in the opening pages of Purity and Danger. Whatever his reservations about the difficulties that have beset those who have previously attempted to define it, Steiner does not abjure the idea that a general concept of taboo is required for his comparative sociology. He immediately rejects what might seem an obvious strategy for anthropologists faced by a term that threatened to become too broad: to narrow its meaning by reference to particular cases. Doing so would fall back into the trap against which Steiner already warned: deriving social anthropological concepts from ethnographic instances. Generalizing a rebuke to Margaret Mead, Steiner writes: one cannot expect much success of such an attempt [to restrict the sense of a term]; the world accepts an extension of meaning much more readily than it allows any loss of connotation. (1999a: 109)

As Lévi-Strauss was later to dissolve ‘totemic thought’ by subsuming it as an instance of a style of thought in general, so Steiner intends to dissolve ‘taboo’ within a broader analytic category of relations between socially shared conceptions of value and danger. The fact that this opening discussion appears as a preamble to a first chapter entitled ‘The Discovery of Taboo’ – after which follows a discussion of the historical circumstances of Cook’s report of the term from Polynesia – means its importance as a framing device can easily be lost. The next thirty pages are devoted to historical scholarship and a close textual analysis of the early reports.

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That ‘taboo’ struck Cook as odd but passed unremarked by Spanish visitors might, Steiner speculates, be accounted for by the former’s northern European Protestantism. As Europeans began to speculate why eating should be considered an intimate activity by people who went largely unclad, he begins to detect ‘that … irritated indulgence which some people have for others who cannot think clearly’ (1999a: 112). With Steiner, the strangeness of the representing Western subject is never far from view. From the writings on Polynesia, as he relates, the word rapidly gained general currency in English in the sense of ‘sacred prohibition’ or the ‘forbidden’. The idea of ‘taboo’ as a ‘problem’ emerged from this Western appropriation of an exotic term. Two following chapters attempt to recontextualize the specifically Polynesian senses of the term. Speculating from etymological accounts and usage, Steiner supposes that ‘taboo’ most likely derived from ‘marked off ’ and was used for things, circumstances and characteristics that were indivisibly ‘holy’ and ‘forbidden’, the two senses not being separable as they are in modern European languages. Put the other way, no European term was available to translate the undivided sense of the Polynesian original. Referring to Malinowski’s ‘brilliant essay’ of 1923, Steiner notes that the meaning of the term can be found only situationally ‘in the manifold simultaneous overlapping and divergent usages of the word’ (1999a: 119). The particularities of the Polynesian concept were related to Polynesia’s political organization and notions of power, mana. Power was measured by the recognized capacity to restrict, and chiefs of greater power could delegate some specific ability for interdiction to their inferiors. Mana and tabu classified and energized what was otherwise inchoate, indeterminate or of no significance, noa, and did so by imputing to the Polynesian world dangers that were of a piece with Polynesian political ideas and practices. The breach of taboos was strongly sanctioned. Taboo, in its Polynesian context, thus exemplifies the broad thesis already presented in ‘On the Process of Civilization’. From this ethnographic and close textual analysis, Steiner moves to the second part of his promised account – a survey of existing theories of taboo – via the observation that taboo was a ‘Protestant discovery’ and a ‘Victorian problem’; clear indication that it is the category, and its use to construct a ‘problem’, rather than the Polynesian ethnography that is to be deemed exotic and in need of explanation. To this end, Steiner proceeds directly to discussion of Victorian ethnography. The very rationalism of Victorian thought

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made the remaining ‘little islands’ of ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’, dubbed magic and religion, problematic (1999a: 133). Yet Victorian society was itself intensely, and from a mid-twentieth century perspective, amusingly taboo-ridden; a phenomenon Steiner relates to a middle class simultaneously threatened by industrialization and swollen by new wealth. When he turns to consider the Scots, Robertson Smith and Frazer, it is apparent that one task to be pursued by Steiner’s – on the surface highly digressive – disquisition will be an ethnography of Western intellectuals. Ironically, Steiner feels that he needs to make the exotic taboo theories of the Western intellectuals comprehensible to later readers. But he has at least two other irons in the fire. Robertson Smith and Frazer’s preoccupations with ‘taboo’ have to be understood in terms of their interests in evolutionism: the former concerned to trace the path of revelation to true religion; the latter interested in the advent of science and the modern aspects of his own society. Both wanted to place Hebrew religion within their whiggish schemes. Steiner is preoccupied with both the what and the how of their doing this; and sides on both issues, as did his Oxford contemporaries, in broad terms with Robertson Smith against Frazer. Robertson Smith is interestingly wrong, but Frazer is ridiculously muddle-headed. Robertson Smith takes religion seriously, but Frazer treats it dismissively. Robertson Smith thinks, as far as one could expect of his generation, sociologically; Frazer’s thought is marked by specious psychologism, faulty logic and unacknowledged free association. Steiner might feel this less keenly if he did not find himself to belong as much on the subject’s as on the analyst’s side of a discussion of the ideas of the Hebrew Bible. ‘The name [of God] is, in the framework of the doctrinal logic of the Pentateuch, always qodesh because it establishes a relationship; it has, so we primitives think, to be pronounced in order to exist’ (1999a: 163, emphasis added). Steiner deftly changes masks to produce a perspectival reversal – an ironic phrase that captures Western prejudice against the Jews – they are ‘the primitives’: in his extended analysis of Biblical tradition, Steiner occupies the place of the native. For Steiner, the Pentateuch evidences a ‘universe of values’ that can be interrogated in two main ways: in terms of its relationship to the society that conceives it and in terms of its own conceptual ordering (1999a: 148). The Pentateuch’s values should not be teased apart to distinguish progressive from primitive strands (whether in the religiously musical manner of a Robertson Smith or in the fashion of a secular progressive like Frazer), rather it should be granted its own conceptual richness and functional relationship to a form of

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society. Thus, for instance, the scapegoat of the Pentateuch needs to be analysed not just as a mechanism for the external transmission of impurity but in terms of its specific expulsion into the desert where the forebears of those taking part in the rite had undergone a collective exodus until the desert had absorbed their sins and a fresh generation taken their place (1999a: 142–43). A sympathetic portrait of Robertson Smith’s intellectual environment may explain why he sought to distinguish between what was crude and what sublime in the Old Testament. However, Robertson Smith’s (1999a: 145–46) attempt to distinguish between the holy and the superstitious was not only doomed but inexplicable outside his Protestant religious concerns. Moreover, it was demeaning to other religions that their elements be morally evaluated according only to the degree they contributed, or failed to contribute, to the ideas of a later religion. Frazer is portrayed without redeeming features. Most notably, he lacked the sociological sense to realize that things become meaningful in determinate social contexts. When Frazer tries to argue some positive sense to taboo: that it supported rights in property and marriage, thus providing the stem to which ‘were grafted the golden fruits of law and morality’, Steiner’s impatience is clear, this is: a justification, to a point, of what he regards as the most horrible superstitions, because they produced, according to his belief, a law of property and sexual propriety. All that fear and self-inflicted torture, all that pondering about life and death, all those proud and humble and desperate patterns of obedience in order to produce the summum bonum of the late nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. (1999a: 170)

Behind its donnish irony, this is a passage of real anger and passion. The remaining survey chapters change tone markedly, as if Steiner could not become as agitated by mere argument as by questions of ethnographic representation. R.R. Marett’s criticisms of Frazer are presented favourably, but of his positive contributions to taboo ‘the more we read … the less we tend to be impressed’. Marett had died only in 1943, but hardly a decade later, his influence on Oxford anthropology was recalled as institutional rather than intellectual. At least Frazer offered some insight into the ‘working of magic’, whereas Steiner finds ‘nothing meaningful or significant’ in Marett’s theory of ‘negative mana’ (1999a: 184). Radcliffe-Brown’s analysis is shown to chase after the most vicious of tautologies, and his notion of ritual value is ridiculed in the process; having toyed with the notion of being unable to comment on Freud because he had not undergone psychoanalysis, Steiner concludes that it would be ungrateful to expect cogent sociological theorizing from him. All is set for the

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denouement. Yet, as we have indicated, the conclusion withholds its theory. Fundamentally, we have seen, Steiner concludes that tabu is not the basis upon which to generalize about ‘taboo’, rather it is an instance of something far wider. ‘Instead of explaining danger behaviour in terms of negative values, we may – and should – explain value behaviour in terms of positive danger’ (1999a: 196). This reversal is particularly apparent from the full draft of the lecture’s concluding paragraph: I feel that the institutional localisation of danger can be studied apart from that function of taboo which is the classification and identification of transgressions; and this again can be separated quite well from a major fact of human existence: that we as human beings are not able and never were able to express our relations to value in other terms than danger behaviour. These things are more or less connected in various societies. To study these various problems connected as taboo means to go into the social structure quite thoroughly, while the isolated problems may be studied as general rules of social grammar, basic social attitudes. (Tabu, Lecture L, fol.3)

Laura Bohannan’s sensitively edited version (1999a: 214) is clearly the more elegant, but Steiner himself orders the ideas slightly differently. He emphasizes the potential distinctness between three considerations: the way that danger is localized institutionally, the function of identifying and classifying transgressions, and the fact about our collective lives that value is expressed in danger behaviour. Steiner invites a comparative sociology attentive to the way danger and transgression interact in differently structured forms of human existence and, in doing so, create value. Steiner’s use of the phrase ‘human existence’ in the context of taboo behaviour may be significant since – as we have noted – his friend Iris Murdoch was at the same time engaged in writing on existentialism. But if so, it would also be significant that Steiner’s approach pluralizes the ‘fact’ of an existential situation by reference to the differing institutional contexts within which values are created: as ever, Steiner’s ideas are sociologically grounded. ‘Taboo’ classifies and localizes danger and transgression; the task of the social anthropologist is to question how this is done institutionally and what social pressures are brought to bear through this process. Even in isolation, the text of Taboo tells a richer story than its first critics allowed: as the conclusion makes clear, it is a book concerned with human existence and should be read as a treatise on classification and value understood as aspects of all human societies. Steiner’s monograph might be seen to lack a theory relating different regimes

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of danger to different types of society, and, true, for the broadest terms of such a correlation we need to go back to ‘On the Process of Civilization’ and its account of Western civilization as an internalization of dangers. But Taboo itself sets up some important markers for a comparative account of the localization of dangers – for instance, in the comparison of Polynesian cases, and in the comparisons between (particularly) Polynesian, Indian and Jewish ideas of sacrality and transgression. Taboo’s epistemological critique of the misappropriation of indigenous values by European scholars is inseparable from its comparative, descriptive ambition. Steiner asks his readers (originally listeners) to grasp the Polynesian and Western conceptions of taboo relationally; so it is precisely through the history of Western failure to comprehend tabu, and via the different category of ‘taboo’, devised by Westerners from their misunderstandings, that a sense of the relational standing of these differently situated practices becomes present to the reader. The literary anthropologist thus conveys his own sense of ‘being there’ as meanings are made. This is also the sense that Steiner seemed himself to experience in reading – and lecturing on – two of his own favourite social thinkers to whom we turn next.

Chapter 13

SIMMEL AND ARISTOTLE

To Simmel River of representation Without footnotes, delight Nourished from its own sources That travels far Yet flows into no foreign seas: Much have I enjoyed exploring you… Your lack of footnotes Will trouble only professors, But I sometimes ask myself, How to imagine or picture A river flowing like yours Yet well-annotated and subject to one’s wish. Academic language is a very curious beast. —January 1952

The very idea of stable theoretical synthesis is foreign to Steiner’s method; and problems of method – what it means to think anthropologically – allied to a sense of what deserves to be thought about – the proper discovery of a subject matter for social anthropology – are the object of his enquiries. He constantly confronts these issues in dialogue with scholars past and present. Steiner’s lectures on Aristotle and Simmel deserve our close attention, since these two thinkers epitomize for him the processes by which sociological problems are posed and addressed; his sense of identification with both is strong. Aristotle was a recurrent point of reference for Steiner. Evans-Pritchard noted that one of the three books on which Steiner was working at the time of his death concerned Aristotle’s sociology. Apart from his ‘Discourse on Aristotle’ (Ms 1949a: 304–26), only a draft lecture on Aristotle survives (1999b: 202–7). In this paper, Aristotle is presented as the founder of formal sociology, someone whom it has again become possible to appreciate. Between the Renaissance and the First World War, social thought was held in thrall by the interests of the European

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middle classes, for whom the individual was taken for granted as a locus of needs to be satisfied within society. Aristotle’s brilliance was really something quite simple: he saw the social phenomenon in terms of the relations between relationships and institutions, and the combination of these relationships. Steiner continues that ‘it is possible to grade European sociologists of later times according to their similarities in interests, outlook and approach with the master’. What is the most characteristic feature of this approach? Like all things of genius it is something very simple. It is the refusal to regard the human being and human society as two separable things, or, in the philosophical idiom, they are not ‘given’ separately: they may belong to different levels of reality, but within every human being, society is given. The human individual himself is a social phenomenon, and human beings cannot be abstracted from society, just as for us it is nonsensical to separate word-language from thought, as if there was something in our thought that is not words but can be thought and eventually expressed in words. Aristotle refuses to regard man as anything but a societal creature, a zoon politikon. (1999b: 203)

Since man is a societal creature, it is part of his being to belong to associations, such as the polis, which themselves are social activities. Associations exist for a purpose, although their growth is not of necessity a function of this purpose. Steiner’s lecture ends peremptorily by noting Aristotle’s achievement as the source of the distinguishing features of different social forms. Steiner’s lectures on Simmel – his final lecture course – follow seamlessly from his reading of Aristotle. They are of particular interest for the light they throw on Steiner’s thought in the last phase of his life – when he was already a dying man: he died before the final lecture could be written – and not, we must stress, as an introduction to Simmel’s work. Students who wish to acquaint themselves with Simmel would be advised to consult other more recent literature. However, as a reflection on Steiner’s thought and the position of anthropology at Oxford in 1952, we believe they are an essential part of the story we wish to tell. The fact of composing a poem to Simmel indicates the spiritual kinship Steiner felt for that least summable of sociologists. Steiner’s work probably represents the first lecture course devoted to Simmel held within a British department of social anthropology. We know that Steiner worked at Oxford and at the British Museum Library in preparing the lectures and assume that he had bibliographical problems. This may have caused some of the difficulties in his lectures. Others may be the result of the colossal pressure under which Steiner was working. Many issues would all be treated

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differently today, some of which we list here. Plain errors appear to include Steiner’s comments on Simmel’s attitude to his family and to the First World War. His relation to Judaism also deserves more attention (Liebersohn 1988: 152). Simmel supported the war and was widely associated with Jewish thought, even on occasion being the object of anti-Semitic criticism. The observation of Simmel’s reliance on eighteenth-century ideas of reification and objectification, though interesting, would need further analysis, and the section on the German Kant revival is sketchy. Steiner’s comment ‘never lectured on Hegel’ would need to be set against Simmel’s knowledge of Hegel and the critique of Hegel’s teleology that informs so much of his work. The relation to Nietzsche needs clarification, as does that to Weber. Regarding Simmel’s ideas, it can be argued that Steiner appears to neglect that the ‘form’/‘content’ distinction grounds many aspects of Simmel’s thought; and it may also be objected that Simmel’s theory of value needs greater attention in the concluding lecture, where the links need to be drawn between value formation and Simmel’s theory of structure and system – ‘value’ might well have formed a topic for the unwritten, final lecture. Against all these shortcomings, one needs to set Steiner’s originality in presenting Simmel at Oxford in 1952. The earlier interest of the Oxford School in Simmel is apparent from Radcliffe-Brown’s attention to him as well as from the fact that Laura Bohannan gave a talk on him to one of the Oxford Friday seminars attended by Mary Douglas and others around 1948 (Mary Douglas: PC). Also, one is struck by the personal identification Steiner seems to evoke with many elements of Simmel: the polymath, the unclassifiable scholar, the Jewish outsider – above all, Simmel’s sense of the ‘problem’: Not that the problems Simmel saw were more important than the answers he found to them – but the problem is the thing that remains in the mind of Simmel’s readers, it is carefully constructed, grows, diminishes, disappears, to make place for a hydra of other problems. The problems are the lumps in a slowly moving river of arguing. We watch them dissolving. (1999b: 200)

Steiner appears to be treating Simmel as his ancestor when recalling the German-Jewish scholar’s career; and what Steiner says of the problem in Simmel will be echoed after his death by Canetti’s comments on the ‘question’ in Steiner (see Chapter 5). Uncannily, Steiner even appears to foresee his own end, juxtaposing the death of the sociologist with the end of an earlier European war; Simmel moved from Berlin to the University of Strasbourg in late middle age, ‘this appointment, and life in the war-overshadowed and war-congested

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city, was a painful anti-climax to his active teaching life, and he was a sick man already. He died a month before the end of the war which had destroyed all he stood for’ (1999b: 209). There are other respects, however, in which Simmel seems less admirable, which may mean only that there are aspects of Simmel with which Steiner could not (or did not want to) identify. Simmel, according to Steiner, was of a ‘typical Berlin Jewish bourgeois family’, ‘steeped in German middle-class culture’; this Steiner might let pass, but Simmel’s family ‘had gone as far as accepting the Lutheran creed’, and Simmel himself ‘was brought up a Protestant’. As we know from Steiner’s letter to Georg Rapp, constancy in religious affiliation was not something negotiable (at least for others) so far as the post-war Steiner was concerned. Simmel, in Steiner’s view, was a stranger to religious insight. However, philosophically it is this resistance to transcendence that Steiner admires: as, for instance, in Simmel’s refusal to find an ‘underneathness of the true meaning’ of historical facts. Whether the following comment is addressed to Evans-Pritchard one can only wonder: The historical fact is its own true nature, nothing factual can be abstracted from it. We can conceive it as a configuration of events and split this to obtain component parts, which, however, have no more true nature than the whole. The abstractions are due to our categories of thought and to value judgements. (1999a: 213)

Like Radcliffe-Brown, on Steiner’s account, Simmel could fall into the trap of distinguishing between historical (chronologically causal) and scientific accounts of a phenomenon. But the givenness of the historical sequence is illusory. Radcliffe-Brown’s favoured example (why did a girl drop the glass; in chronological terms because she was startled, in scientific terms because the law of gravity dictates that unsupported objects fall) simply plays on a confusion of different senses of the term ‘why?’. Better known examples (for this one with a derogatory reference to a ‘blackman’ as the cause of the girl’s alarm presumably derives from R-B’s lectures) are R-B’s assertions that the contemporary racehorse can be understood aside from its evolution, as can the contemporary political constitution of the United States. The distinction R-B seeks to make, wrongly for Steiner, is between historical and functional understandings (1952: 3; [1935] 1952: 185). To his credit, Simmel was to abandon this search for laws similar to those that (erroneously) sociologists tend to believe sanctify the results achieved by scientists.

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Again, similarly to Radcliffe-Brown in his distinction between observable social structure and structural form, Simmel believes: society as a concept has two meanings which we must distinguish carefully: one meaning is that of the whole complex of associated individuals, the ‘human material societally formed’; the other meaning is the sum total of all those forms of relationship with the help of which the individuals become (or we would say: are) the society in the first sense. … He uses the analogy of geometry, saying that a sphere too has two meanings: a part of matter shaped in a certain way – spherically – but also the shape itself, the mathematical concept which we abstract (or as Simmel, the idealistic philosopher says: through which mere matter becomes the sphere in the first sense). And Simmel maintains that legitimate enquiries are related to both these concepts of society, hence there are two different social pursuits. The first, attending to the ‘human material societally formed’ must yield a multiplicity of contiguous but otherwise independent disciplines, following the diversified nature of the subject matter, the social content. Here we find the cluster of social sciences again, ranging from economics to the sociology of religion. General sociology, however attends to forms only, it is formal, could not be general without being exclusively formal. (1999b: 217)

Simmel, therefore, would appear to be the source of Steiner’s distinction between general and specific sociology (albeit he does not believe the distinction to be watertight, as we saw earlier). Like Durkheim, Simmel eschews the psychological explanation of social forms but, with Steiner’s apparent endorsement, his reasoning is different. Whereas Durkheim argued that social facts were qualitatively different from, therefore not reducible to, psychological facts, Simmel argues that all social forms are part of the whole society but that statements cannot be made about society in a formal sense. Claiming that what Simmel conflates as ‘forms’ would be what anthropologists are accustomed to distinguishing as either ‘patterns of behaviour or structural principles’, Steiner resolves an apparent contradiction: we can better appreciate now the peculiar accident which creates an affinity between our empirical endeavours and this most abstract of all sociologists: we confront whole social entities and our analysis brings out the overall features of their institutional life. … For any fact, any attitude, any principle we try to find all the social contexts in which they are operative, Simmel comes to a similar method as a result of abstraction. (1999b: 218–19)

Essentially, Steiner seems to be using Simmel as a source in the German sociological tradition from which to create a genealogy for the ‘Oxford School’ to supplant that via Radcliffe-Brown and Durkheim while retaining the primacy of the social. The following

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observation is critical to Steiner’s approach to the social phenomenon and marks a crucial departure from Durkheim: This leads to the central sentence, which is most difficult to translate: ‘Nowhere does “society” exist as such; that is to say: in such a way that it could form the premises under which special (discrete) phenomena of relationship could be formed. This is because mutual influence does not exist as such, but only special kinds of it; when they occur, there is society; they are neither cause nor effect of society – they immediately are society.’ What does this mean? It means the avoidance of insecure tautologies, such as those with which every reader of Durkheim is familiar. When it is said that the function of an institution or social activity is to create social solidarity – and the implication of ‘solidarity’ is the cohesiveness of society – and when the cohesiveness of a social system cannot be imagined without social activities: what else is Durkheim then saying than ‘Society is society’? (1999b: 220)

Steiner’s third lecture on Simmel proceeds, after some consideration of the social forms identified by Simmel, to disavow Simmel’s attempt to produce a conjectural history of the evolution of such forms but notes that it is possible to use his terms comparatively, as when one compares the depth and normative character of various authorities in one society. Unfortunately, Steiner’s fourth lecture – if, as seems unlikely, it was ever written – does not survive. The third ends abruptly. Two quotations from its closing pages may suggest, however, a sense of a summation: Behaviour is socially formed; behaviour enacts social relationships; and what we call society, social structure, social system, etc. are different types of abstractions made from the observed behaviour. There is nowhere (neither for Simmel nor for any twentieth-century sociology) a private individual that can be seen apart from society; there is nowhere the glove of social convention fitting the live and different and private flesh of a hand. (1999b: 223–24) The question [for sociology] is: how is what appears to be, able, how does it manage to appear? Thus, the question: ‘How is it possible that subordination and submission constitute, on the one hand, a form of objective organisation of society, on the other hand, the expression of personal qualities among men?’ is a specific manner of asking the Simmelian question: ‘How is society possible?’ We know a group of data, and the proof of our knowledge is our ability to frame in terms of that group of data the basic question concerning the societal phenomenon. That is really Simmel’s way of discussing sociology. And, as we cannot ask in the same way (as ‘How is society possible?’), how the physical is possible, sociology is not a natural science. (1999b: 224)

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Steiner’s final synthesis of his concerns suggests an analytic interdependence of the general sociology of (abstracted) social forms, an ethnological investigation of cultural complexes, and an empirical sociography (indebted to both the foregoing) as the privileged means to investigate what appear as pressing problems to an investigator necessarily situated in specific historical and political circumstances. In Steiner’s hands, they also constituted tools of political and personal engagement. However, these tools constitute a methodology for examining values, not a set of ultimate values in themselves. Steiner was acutely aware that his presentation of Simmel failed to do him justice (1995b: 225, note 1). None the less, these were probably the first lectures on Simmel delivered at any British university, certainly in a department of anthropology. Even in their unfinished state, because interrupted by his death, Steiner’s surviving lectures must have offered a radical conception of elementary social forms to Oxford social anthropologists already attuned to thinking about abstracted social structures.

PART III

The Poet Anthropologist

Chapter 14

CONQUESTS

On some nights, the mountains lie quite naked beneath the sky, A conquered height, no longer belonging to earth … —Conquests, I When you get lost in yourself, you don’t go round in circles – oh dear, no: you go round in circles when you are on the right track. —Essays and Discoveries

Franz Steiner pursued his poetry and his anthropology as two separate enterprises, conforming strictly to the rules of genre, style and aesthetics in the former, whilst adhering to the laws of evidence, logic and the specifics of his discipline in the latter. Yet his work in each area was from the very beginning deeply enmeshed with the adjoining field, such that his poetry became ever more deeply informed by his scholarship, and his mature anthropology came to display numerous markers of his poetic avocation. Although he never went so far as Evans-Pritchard to regard anthropology as an ‘art’, his most finished productions, notably the lectures on tabu, even in their unedited form, display a remarkable command of English idiom and voice. For the published version, Laura Bohannan ironed out some stylistic infelicities, yet the printed voice is recognizably Steiner’s own, with its modulations and ironies, its facticity, its equivocations, its appeals to the reader, its rhetoric: Steiner the alien enjoys nothing better than the chance to go native among the British. We see him, the incorrigible exile, gleefully donning the skin of a senior common room speaker. It pleases him to play the role of a donnish tutor while going about his business as a head-hunter who proudly displays the lifeless heads of earlier scholars, from Frazer and Malinowski to Freud and Radcliffe-Brown, among his collection. He is, then, an intimate of the poetic method, of empathies and transformations, even when engaging in the most rigorous discourse. Indeed, as we shall suggest, even at the terminological,

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conceptual and methodological levels of his discourse, recognizably ‘literary’ elements assume a pivotal role, to the extent that they enter the substance of his thinking. We do not here wish to explore all the ramifications of the dialogue between poetry and anthropology in Steiner’s work or to compare him to other figures who were active in both fields, notably Michel Leiris. That would lead too far. But some understanding of the way in which anthropology enriches his verse is helpful and, we believe, essential for an understanding of his scholarship (not to mention the ways in which ‘literary’ ideas entered his theories). Whether in the adoption of ethnic materials in the poetic Variations, of anthropological subject matter in poems like ‘Capturing Elephants’, or of anthropological notions like ‘purity’ in ‘Leda’, we are faced by a consistent deepening of the lyric by scholarly insight. Twentieth-century poetry, from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to Jerome Rothenberg’s ethnopoetics and the work of Nathanael Tarn, has been rich in such dialogues, which hark back to Vico and Herder (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983). Steiner stands out, however, as being one of the few practitioners in both fields. From 1942 to 1943 onwards, the aphoristic form enters into dialogue both with Steiner’s poetry and with his anthropology, on the one hand anticipating and reacting to his scholarship, and on the other overlapping with his verse, to the extent that some aphorisms read like short scholarly disquisitions whilst others read like lyrical texts. In some, as ‘Conrad and Malinowski’, we find a surprising prefiguration of later disciplinary concerns (Clifford 1988: 92–115; Fardon 1990). Steiner’s preoccupation with ‘margins’ also entails extending the boundaries of genre, discipline and thought. His margins – like Prague, like Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia – are also, crucially, unexplored centres, areas of overlap, points of intersection. When, in Taboo, he briefly adopts the voice of a ‘primitive’, he permits his religious viewpoint to intersect with his scholarly discourse; and when, in Conquests, he introduces the myth of Robinson Crusoe, he foregrounds himself as a child first reading the myth, as a literary man recalling the myth, then as an intellectual explorer revalidating the myth; correlatively, echoing Marx in Das Kapital, he also refers to Robinson Crusoe at the end of ‘Towards a Classification of Labour’: the literary reference fits to the pursuit of scholarly learning. A key contribution of Steiner’s lies in probing such intersections, margins, borders and boundaries – whether thematically, as in examining the rules governing danger behaviour, or generically.

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Two or three leading ideas from German Romanticism appear to have left their mark on this aspect of Steiner’s method. One is Friedrich Schlegel’s notion of a ‘progressive universal poetry’ (Eichner 1970: 57ff.) as a mode that encompasses poetry and prose, literature and philosophy, rhetoric and criticism. ‘Progressive universal poetry’, according to Schlegel, was to unite all forms of expression into a single whole. Another idea is Novalis’s connected fragmentary ‘encyclopaedism’ (Neubauer 1980: 51ff.), in which a totality is invoked by fragmentary aphoristic texts (O’Brien 1995: 145), each of which chemically (Schlegel’s notion) connects diverse ideas. Yet another related idea is Friedrich Schlegel’s call for a ‘new mythology’, so close to the demand for a ‘mythology of reason’ in The Oldest System Programme of German Idealism (Jamme and Schneider 1984; anon 1988; discussed in Chapter 5). Steiner’s aphorisms, to some extent, recall this romantic idealism, but by and large his work exhibits a generic stringency informed by, but wholly at variance with, this romantic ‘mixture’ (to use another Schlegel term): linking the fields of scholarship, poetry, personal communication and aphorism never means merging the forms, let alone confusing them; for Franz Steiner, each utterance follows its own rhetoric, which links the statement to its own realm of discourse. In looking to see how some of these different areas interconnected, we do not, therefore, propose to collapse their differences but simply to consider how the sundry parts of Steiner’s oeuvre hang together in a concern with religion, truth and myth. We begin with the poetry. From the outset, a close link can be observed between poetry and anthropology in Steiner’s work. To each poem he attaches the exact date and place of composition. As a result, his typescript ‘Collected Poems’, with its careful chronology and geography, takes on the appearance of a notebook from the field, in which the observer chronicles his own spiritual development against the parameters of a constantly changing scenery. The staging posts in this quest include Bohemia, Palestine, Austria, Dalmatia, the Carpathians, England, Wales, Scotland and Spain. The starting point that Steiner sets is Palestine. This is where the earliest pieces in his ‘Collected Poems’ originated. By treating Palestine in this way, it functions for him as origin in more sense than one. Palestine, with its melons and sands reappears in the Conquests, too, the central autobiographical poem that is his magnum opus and that preoccupied Steiner during the war years, when he was engaged in writing his thesis on slavery (1999b: 247–66 for the opening seven sections in translation; for the complete German language original, see Steiner 2000: 345–82).

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Steiner’s Conquests are conceived in the tradition of Wordsworth’s Prelude as an extended autobiographical poem and are equally set against the background of the great poetic cycles of the twentieth century, Rilke’s Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies) and Eliot’s Four Quartets. Steiner began the cycle at Oxford in 1940 (Parts I, II, IV, XIII), continued it over the next two years until mid-1942 (Parts III, V, VII, VIII) and added a further section in 1943 (X), concluding with a final piece in 1945 (XII). By then, he had settled on the poem’s definitive structure of thirteen parts. However, IX and XI remain unwritten. Steiner explicitly rejected a ten-part poem. ‘That must be avoided on every account because of the [ten] commandments. After all, that would also be bad because of the [Duino] Elegies’ (J. Adler 1994a: 148). As Wordsworth called the Prelude ‘a long poem on the formation of my own mind’, Steiner describes his text as ‘a metaphysical autobiographical poem’ (1994a: 148). Elsewhere, he expands on his plan and underplays the autobiographical content: The Conquests are an extended, and in a sense autobiographical poem, which introduces and repeatedly seeks to reanimate a sequence of memories from childhood into adulthood with the aim of self-examination and with a generalizing purpose. By repeating and varying combinations of the elements, different configurations emerge, which are intended to explore the remembering self and the nature of memory. The actual content: the affirmation of ‘repetition’ in life and the demand that memory be sacrificed. (After Fleischli 1970: 42)

The term ‘conquests’ in the poem is used for the ‘memories’ that the subject constructs of the world and ironically intimates the violent colonialism that understanding the world entails. For memories, which are the ‘heaped-up stacks of past experience’, are ultimately no more than ‘worn-out remnants from the past’, ‘the debris of formerly collected bliss’ (I, l.16ff.). In deconstructing memory, Steiner also deconstructs the Western subject, who is ‘master of so little’. ‘How far’, the poem asks, does a human being’s ‘dominion extend?’ (IV, I, l.21ff.). The reply to this rhetorical question implies the vacuity of all human ‘conquests’ and ‘dominion’. By adopting the word ‘conquests’ for his own experience, Steiner draws an extreme consequence from his critique by internalizing the very idea of Western colonialism that he abhors. He is thus able to take it apart in a consistently non-violent manner, since it is only his own putatively dominating subjectivity that he destructs. The device of ‘repetition’ that he uses in his explorations is a key idea in his work. The notion also has a strong deconstructive force in that it points to the underlying feature of memory in a simple, formalistic and therefore

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non-prejudicial manner. A ‘memory’ is a priori nothing other than a certain form of ‘repetition’. The beauty of the concept is that it contains none of the auratic overtones that the term ‘memory’ normally entails. It begs no questions about ‘mind’, and none about ‘time’. Nor does it possess the law-like quality of a ‘regularity’. In Steiner’s thinking, life itself consists in a series of such repetitions, just as rituals and customs are also simply ‘repetitions’. The apparent dullness of the idea hides its radical power. The apparent lack of insight it offers is the very insight that it permits. For ‘repetition’ clearly denotes a simple category anterior to notions such as ‘ritual’. As a constitutive factor in natural and human life, the notion links very diverse areas of experience ranging from mental phenomena (‘memory’) to social ones (‘customs’) as comparable entities, entirely avoiding issues such as causality, mentalism, intention and so on. ‘Repetition’ is, then, one of Steiner’s modestly deconstructive terms by which he excavates to reach a less elusive if apparently trivial layer underlying human behaviour. It is also a less loaded term for ‘law’. Finally, the ‘sacrifice’ of ‘memory’ and ‘conquest’ at the conclusion of the Conquests brings about the end of ‘repetition’: life ends, and the subject renounces its ‘conquests’. This final renunciation recalls the Jewish loss of self in God after death but is no less indebted to the spirit of the Gita and the Hindu nirvana. The architecture of Steiner’s cycle is conceived on the grand scale. It may therefore be helpful to summarize the main features of each of its poems: I. ‘The Step Swings Away’ forms a prelude that introduces the speaker in a landscape and reflects that all that remains with a person are memories or ‘conquests’, the individual’s exclusive possessions; II. ‘Memories’ recalls the speaker’s childhood and his reading of Robinson Crusoe – that key text for Steiner’s persona as traveller and anthropologist – and finally reaches an aporia, the inexplicable ‘closing of the heart’; III. ‘The Heart’ defines the organ of human life and understanding, questions its governance, yet fails to resolve the aporia; IV. ‘To Retain a Little’ examines a sequence of memories or conquests associated with the landscapes of Dalmatia and Palestine, raising the question of memory’s governance; V. ‘The Lonely Man’ reaches the nub of the argument: questioning the earlier aporia, it constructs a myth of time, the soul and the ‘lonely figure’ in order to account for the heart’s closure; VI. ‘With a Sleeping Woman at his Back’ presents the speaker after a sexual encounter, confronted by the Way, ‘the writing on the wall’ and death; VII. ‘The Leaf of the Ash’ is a turning point that meditates on the black and deadly bud of hope; VIII. ‘The Dying Man’

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establishes a countertype to the ‘lonely one’ and quests for certainty (‘exactness’), which is ultimately found, hesitantly, in memories, and more positively in hope; IX. the unwritten ‘The Bear in the Coat of Arms’ (punning on ‘Baermann’ Steiner) was planned to describe the Carpathians and the various peoples there – Ukrainians, Gypsies, Jews; X. The unfinished ‘The Wheels’ locates the speaker in exile in London, understood as Babylon, and develops the theme of exile, of which Hölderlin as wanderer is understood as an exemplar; XI. the unwritten ‘At the Time of the Flood’ was planned as a meditation on a flooded meadow at Oxford; completing the cycle’s mythic staging posts, it was to introduce the myth of Noah and possibly justify the superiority of myth over speculation; XII. ‘The Spider and the Moon’ treats the figure of the exile and the act of prayer; XIII. ‘The Step Ceases’ recapitulates the central themes and reaches a resolution in the end of the human subject: the ultimate telos of the ‘conquests’ is to disintegrate. This poetic aspiration can be compared to Steiner’s hyper-reflexivity as a social theorist, which subordinates the analyst’s situated subjectivity in the process of reciprocal encounters with other cultural orders and, doing so, transforms it. The Conquests evoke a multiplicity of cultural references to map their spiritual quest, welding them into Steiner’s own new mythology of the self. The writer as ‘guardian of myths’ works both with and upon myths in Steiner and Canetti’s senses (see, Chapter 5 and below) in that he transforms diverse materials from different cultures into a new whole. If Rilke’s Duino Elegies provide a major locus in modern German poetry, the cycle also looks back to Hölderlin, whom Steiner celebrates in an early version of X, ii. as the ‘wanderer’ – an epithet Hölderlin here shares with Simmel’s ‘stranger’. Steiner’s vatic persona recalls the priestly voice in Hölderlin’s oracular late hymns, just as his attempt to splice together various religions recalls Hölderlin’s grand scheme to unite monotheism and polytheism in a new synthesis of Greek and Christian thought. Indeed, Hölderlin’s continual play on the interrelations between West and East provide a significant poetic reference for Steiner’s own concerns. Steiner’s ode ‘To Hölderlin’ bridges the gap between Hölderlin’s odes and his Conquests. Steiner brings his brother poet up to date by envisaging the industrial revolution with its urbanization as a setting for the lyrical theme: The cities Began to talk to converse, and through the spacious time Rang out the hammers and bells,

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Rang out the sparse and iron delights, Leaner laments, confusedly rustling folk. A moon turned white, When the nights arrived, With the iron innocence Of living houses And buried alive by the shadows The meeting of hearts, Quietly bleeding fortune. Steiner’s Hölderlin is seen through the eyes of the Expressionist poet Georg Trakl, and like him Steiner envisages the end of civilization. The clash of purity and the modern world make for an agonized vision. In a coded reference to the contemporary situation, the Third Reich and the realm of exile make an appearance. Steiner, like his Enlightenment antecedents, politicizes the ode. The Gita, as mentioned, provides a key to the philosophy of renunciation that the Conquests invoke, but other religious texts are equally implicated: the use of parallelism recalls the Hebrew Bible and the Psalms, and the calmly distanced, apparently objective style is also much indebted to Lao Tse. Steiner had known the Tao Te Ching in Wilhem’s celebrated translation since his youth in Prague and heavily annotated his copy later, possibly when writing the Conquests. In 1942 he also bought the translation into English by Ch’u Tao-Kao, and Arthur Waley’s The Way and its Power, both of which appeared in London that same year. Besides the gnomic impersonality of the Tao Te Ching, some of Lao Tse’s leading ideas will be found again in Conquests. In literary modernism, Eliot’s The Waste Land provides an exemplar of a poem linking Western and Eastern cultural materials, though Steiner is perhaps more intimate with Eastern religion than Eliot, and for the verse form, too, Steiner is indebted to the Eliot of ‘Ash Wednesday’ and after. Eliot’s English verse provided a model for a style that could seamlessly accommodate the most diverse cultural materials. The relation between Steiner’s Conquests and Eliot’s Four Quartets is not as simple as it first appears. Steiner’s poem looks like an amplification of the Quartets, but this is not the case. Steiner’s admiration for Eliot is implicit in his fine German translation of ‘Marina’, and Eliot clearly provided a significant inspiration for him as a modern poeta doctus: a learned poet in the Renaissance style. However, the work of Eliot’s that the Conquests most obviously resemble, Four Quartets, was not yet published, let alone completed, at the time

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Steiner began his magnum opus. The first poem, ‘East Coker’, only appeared as a pamphlet in September 1940, about a month after Steiner had begun work on the Conquests, though he may not in fact have encountered the poem before November 1941, which is when he bought a copy of the fifth impression, which had been published in February. He marked several passages of the poem in pencil in his personal copy. Also in 1941, Steiner acquired ‘Brunt Norton’ which had appeared that same year. Here too he marked several passages in pencil and began work on a translation of the poem, producing versions of its sections I and III. It seems likely that around this time he began to take issue with Eliot’s ideas. He counters Eliot’s memorable reflections on ‘Time past and time present’ in his own notions of the time (or seasons) of the soul in Conquests, V: ‘The Lonely Man’ (1942). Intriguingly, the vocabulary of Eliot’s reflection – that ‘only through time time is conquered’ – seems to be echoed in Steiner’s single word title; but Steiner depersonalizes Eliot’s notion: time is the object of the ‘lonely man’ and his ‘conquests’, ‘debris’ of ‘formerly perfected bliss’ are the memories he must relinquish to attain nirvana. After this linguistic convergence, the Conquests and the Quartets diverged. ‘The Dry Salvages’ appeared in 1941, ‘Little Gidding’ in 1942, and in each case Steiner bought his copy after a year’s delay. The publication of Four Quartets as a single volume followed in 1944, confirming the work as a major new poetic cycle. The similarities between Eliot’s work and Steiner’s are not, then, to be explained in terms of a direct reception of the completed Quartets in the Conquests as might at first appear. The intertextuality is more complex. Steiner, like Eliot himself, began with the verse line and the style of meditative poetry that Eliot had pioneered in ‘Ash Wednesday’ and, independently of Eliot, recognized its suitability for a grand meditative poem. He began his poem almost simultaneously with Eliot, reacted to Eliot’s composition and continued work for about a year after Eliot’s poem had appeared in print. Because of his failure to complete this grand project, Steiner’s dialogue with Eliot remained tantalizingly open-ended, unless we count ‘Prayer in the Garden’ as a late rejoinder to Eliot’s religiosity. In the absence of any material from the first draft of Steiner’s dissertation, the Conquests are among the most important records we possess of Steiner’s intellectual development during the war years, when he was moving beyond his first assimilation of structural functional anthropology (largely owed to Radcliffe-Brown) and forging a more personal methodology and epistemology through his political and poetic writings, as well as his aphorisms. The Conquests

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are probably the closest that Steiner came to a grand synthesis of his thought during this period. Interpreting them is tricky partly because of their hermetic style, partly because they are unfinished, yet it may not be going too far to recognize in them certain characteristic features of Steiner’s social anthropology. The Robinson Crusoe myth of Steiner’s youth is firmly embedded in the second poem as a starting point for his intellectual life (1999b: 250): Lashed to the mast, the captain Stood with a pale, bleeding forehead, And helplessly they brought before him the man, dethroned The foundling from the lonely shore. He had a lot to tell: How, many long years ago, he had been hurled By black storms onto a land he feared That then became his own. How he grew together with the wilderness. ‘that feathered tree, for example, Is a proven friend, We both love the raging monkey in the branches.’ And he sighed the sufferer: ‘I did not sail in vain. You make me pious.’ Steiner reverts to the Robinson Crusoe myth in the final poem, in which he adopts Crusoe’s persona for the poem’s ‘I’ (X, l.26ff.; 1964: 47–48). But he rewrites the myth and the geography of the original voyage. The ‘feathered tree’, which recurs at key points in the poem, does not appear in Defoe’s novel and serves Steiner as a powerful if deeply enigmatic symbol, variously conveying both the biblical tree of life and the tree of knowledge, and also Rilke’s more concrete ‘tree’ in the first of the Duino Elegies. Steiner’s ‘tree’ may recall the shape of the palm-tree, and it may also be a reference to the plant iberis semperflorens, which is at home throughout the Mediterranean region and as far as the coast of Palestine and is in German called Federbaum or ‘feathered tree’ (Ziegler Ms 1996). Its habitat may therefore here connect the biblical land with the South Seas and the West as a mythic culture circle. The captain ‘lashed to the mast’ and with his ‘bleeding forehead’ recalls Christ. A strong set of parallels seems to connect the natural botanical life (‘feathered tree’) with Western material culture and religion (‘mast’). A sense of sacrifice pervades this scene: the captain as ‘sufferer’ seems mysteriously to be re-enacting the Passion, and the ‘foundling’ on the distant isle

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appears to have merged with the ‘wilderness’ and to return as a renewer of Western culture and religion. Steiner’s thought is here utterly concrete and lacking in the normal auratic quality one associates with poetic symbolism. In this instance, the concrete symbol evokes the mutually exclusive worlds of civilization and savagery. It is interesting to note that the only violence in the scene is introduced by the ship’s crew and is perpetrated by Westerners on one of their number, the captain, whereas the Westerner-turned-‘savage’, Robinson, is at one with his environment. The new myth tells of the meeting between primitivism and civilization in an act of renewal. This bears directly on Steiner’s fate. Robinson Crusoe’s sojourn on the island, as a moment of isolation and exile, in renewing ‘piety’, recalls other ‘memories’ in the poem, and specifically those in the incomplete section, ‘The Wheels’, namely: the historical exile of the Jewish people in Babylon, which itself rehearses their wanderings in the desert, and the speaker’s own exile in London, the poem’s modern Babylon. Just as the Jewish people emerged purified from the desert, so Robinson Crusoe comes from the island to restore faith. Steiner’s handling of myth here differs considerably from that in earlier twentieth-century German poets like Rilke and Trakl: whereas they tend to witness a quasi-timeless mythical moment – for example, in the Egyptian landscape of Rilke’s tenth Duino Elegy – Steiner envisages a quite distinct diachronic sequence, each involving particular moments; but instead of observing a historical process, time consists in a sequence of mythic re-enactments. His notions of ‘time’ and ‘selfhood’ signally abjure the all-pervasive language of ‘growth’ introduced into German literature and the human sciences by Herder and Goethe: ‘growth’, ‘process’, ‘development’ – these biological metaphors, from the poem’s standpoint, prove to be just another construct. The poem’s persona builds onto the Robinson myth a further dimension by representing Steiner’s own experiences in terms of culture circles ethnology and marrying this with the more structural sociology of ‘circles’ developed by Simmel. Echoing out from Steiner’s Bohemian homeland in the opening poem, the Conquests evoke various regions as if they could be understood as a single whole, one culture circle. Dalmatia and Palestine feature in the fourth poem, connected by the Mediterranean habitat of vines and olives. The specifics of the culture circle are denoted by distinct botanical species; for example, ‘the blue-eyed herb’ in Bohemia (II, l.

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63) and the biblical ‘spikenards’ in Palestine (IV, 4, l. 40), yet the regions are brought together by the experience of the subject. It is into this synchronically conceived geography that the poem maps its diachronic schema, by which it links the speaker to biblical time: This hurrying man in an evening mood And with a heaving breast believes: That long ago he stood before the Holy City: That he paced around the walls And saw in the shade of the olive trees The Kidron … (IV, 4, l.1ff.) The imagery recalls the past via detailed associations that accrue to this biblical landscape in modern German poetry: Trakl, in his own cyclical poem Helian similarly imagines himself looking back to the River Kidron outside Jerusalem (Lindenberger 1971: 79), allowing his lyrical persona to merge its identity with Rimbaud, Hölderlin and Christ (Sharp 1981: 89). In contrast to Trakl’s Helian, however, Steiner’s persona seems to envisage a reincarnation – though less endemic in Judaism, the doctrine is as familiar in the teachings of the Kabbalah as it is in Hinduism (Scholem 1956). By such small ambiguities, Steiner’s poem merges Jewish doctrines with other Eastern religions. The cited passage has about it such a ring of truth that we may well imagine that it captures Steiner’s self-discovery in Jerusalem. The mythical quality gains resonance both from the poem’s facticity and from the conceptual grounding given to myth. Notions like ‘ritual’ and ‘sacrifice’ inform the whole discourse, even when the terms themselves are not uttered. Besides the culture circles ethnology, therefore, there appears to be a new dimension to Steiner’s thought here that cannot be explained in terms of myth and Central European ethnology alone. This is most apparent in his treatment of the human subject. Goethe and Wordsworth bequeathed to modern poetry its sense of the subjective self, which is celebrated in Romantic music and verse as the individual’s defining feature. Modernism has rent this subjectivity asunder, and in particular German poetry since the turn of the century increasingly contended with Ernst Mach’s dictum that ‘the subject cannot be saved’ – das Ich ist unrettbar (Mach 1900: 17); Gottfried Benn, who in an early poem writes of the decaying subject in terms of Ich-Zerfall (self-dissolution) and the Zersprengtes Ich (exploded self; Benn 1966: 52), recalls Mach’s unrettbares Ich in his ‘lost I’, the verlorenes Ich (lost self; 1966: 215); and Malinowski, too,

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wrestles with this problem in his diary, posthumously published as A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (1967), which in the place of a coherent ‘subject’ represents the ‘self ’ as a fluid bundle of seemingly unconnected impulses. When Steiner deconstructs traditional notions of the ‘subject’, he develops Mach’s ideas, which, in their anti-subjectivism, fit extremely well with Steiner’s Eastern sources. Not even the body in the Conquests is regarded as a single coherent whole. This is clear from the start: The step swings away, The body hurries through the evening, The stretched breast does not heed the arms, The arms are loosely attached and helpless. … (I, l.1ff.) Likewise, the inner self seems to consist of compartmentalized elements overseen by the ‘heart’ as the poem’s unifying organ: The heart, the created interior being In a body, that hurried through evenings (the breast never heeded The arms, lightly and helplessly attached). Which preserves the fleeting person. … (III, l.1ff) Bodily detachment, as an extension of Mach’s loss of the ‘subject’, provides a concrete correlative to the psychological compartmentalization that the poem enacts. One recalls Mach’s dictum that the distinction between ‘I’ and ‘body’ is arbitrary (1900: 15) and that ‘It is not the “I” which is primary, but its elements (feelings). The elements form the “I”’. Along with Mach’s concept of the ‘I’, Steiner’s understanding also shares Mach’s concomitant anti-subjectivity, his collectivism, his respect for otherness and his stoic acceptance of death as a mere rearrangement of elements (1900: 66ff.). Steiner’s divisible self may be localized intellectually between Mach and Simmel. In Conquests, Steiner’s ‘self ’ is seen in various roles. Typically, distinguished expressions of selfhood include the lover, ‘the lonely man’ and ‘the dying man’ – these last being introduced as two of the Conquests’ key types in the second poem. The view that becomes apparent here is no longer internalist, lyrical or subjective but is, we believe, cognate with Steiner’s growing sociological awareness. We sense that the poem’s ‘self ’ is a social being as understood by Simmel in his Soziologie and is perhaps indebted to Simmel’s notions

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of ‘concentric’ and ‘overlapping’ circles, which meet in any given subject. As Simmel writes: ‘The number of the different circles in which an individual is situated is the measure of a culture. …’; the greater the number of ‘circles’ a given individual occupies, the more unique his individuality will be, as the point of intersection of several quite distinct circles (1923: 311–13). As in Simmel, the circles in which the Conquests’ subject participates are not just cultural but social. This can be seen, for instance, in the sixth poem. In ‘With a Sleeping Woman at His Back’, the speaker as lover remains in a bedroom on a Sunday morning whilst others go to church. His mistress still lies asleep in bed after their night of abandon. While she sleeps, he assumes the role of homo religiosus and glimpses the ‘Way’ that passes through the bedroom. In looking at the woman’s body as ‘neatly sculpted’ (VI, l.39), he betrays his familiarity with Goethe’s celebrated fifth Roman Elegy, in which Goethe compares his mistress to a classical sculpture, and in commenting on the girl’s ‘stockings’ and ‘gown with silken fringes, rosy tinsel’ (VI, l.23ff.), he alludes to modern luxury goods and modern forms of entertainment – this is a dancer’s dress – and indeed to the whole modern Kulturindustrie typified by fashionwear, consumption and display. His self is thus intersected by several distinct social circles in Simmel’s sense: he belongs to modern industrial society characterized by a conspicuous display of consumer goods that also define the female body; within this frame, we see him as a (possibly dissolute) lover; and he is also marked by being a non-churchgoer. He is, therefore, a social outsider. Yet at the same time, he is intimate with German literary culture (Goethe) and scientific thought (Mach) as well as with Eastern teachings, both Hebrew and Taoist. And finally – though the list could be extended – he is the upholder of a personal myth of Robinson Crusoe (note the reference to the ‘feathered tree’, VI, l.91) – that is, a mental voyager, an anthropologist of the spirit. The poetic subject at this moment in the poem is therefore the point of intersection between the divergent and indeed conflicting social circles represented by primitivism, Eastern teaching, the Christian Church and modern Western manners. The view of the self that here emerges is, then, only in part to be associated with Ernst Mach’s unrettbares Ich. It is also a sociologically informed, early structuralist view: the subject is defined by his social roles, by his participation in different institutionalized fields of activity. We are close here to Simmel’s notion that the subject encompasses conflicting circles and is actually enriched and strengthened by the dualisms it has to bear: ‘the more manifold the

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group interests that meet and issue within us, the more decisively the I becomes aware of its unity’ (1923: 313). Crucially, Steiner’s ‘I’ in the poem thinks together the very circles that, according to Simmel, have created the greatest conflicts in the past – different religions (1923: 322). The constructed ‘I’ of the poem, by syncretizing Judaism and the Tao in the context of an adjoining Christian ‘circle’, exercises a harmonizing, ecumenical function. In distinction to the normal lyrical self of romantic poetry still propagated by Rilke, there is nothing remotely ‘private’ or ‘inward’ about Steiner’s notion of self. There is also another oddity about it. His ‘self ’ appears to have no kinship ties: it is a kindred spirit of his enslaved people and of the subject of his dissertation. His ‘self ’ is defined by its partibility, its ethnographic reach and its capacity to encompass alterity. Here we return to the observation made at the outset of this book: Steiner was not a fieldworker – in the accepted sense of anthropologists of his time – but the range of his interests, cultural capacities (both in language and knowledge) and the range and emotional depth of his experience allowed him to internalize the ethnographic attitude. Steiner discovered within himself the wonder, the terror and puzzlement that he sees as the source of ethnographic curiosity. The definition of the ‘I’ in sociological terms is inseparable from both the religious and the mythic tenor of the Conquests. This can be seen from the definition the poem lends to the ‘lonely man’, who is ‘the firmament’ and the ‘guardian’ of ‘home’ and of ‘time’ (V, l.142 and 182). As a figure, the ‘lonely man’ recalls the Jewish Zaddik, one of the thirty-six just souls whose existence guarantees the continued maintenance of the universe (Scholem 1963: 216ff.). As a ‘guardian’ of time, he also acts as the steward of human memory. Paradoxically, therefore, Steiner’s ‘lonely man’ is a fully integrated human being – the ambiguity being suggested by the German der Einsame (etymologically: ‘one-same’, as in English ‘alone’ or ‘allone’); integrated by virtue both of his social function towards other people and towards the cosmos itself. As ‘steward’, though, the ‘lonely man’ also approximates closely to the figure of the poet in Steiner and Canetti (discussed in Chapter 5), who is – depending on whose formulation one chooses – ‘the guardian of metamorphoses’ (Canetti) or ‘the guardian of the myths of every people’ (Steiner). Poetry, religion, myth, sociology and psychology meet as an amalgam in the ‘self ’ of the Conquests. This distinguishes the poem from its English and German parallels, and places it, perhaps, in the ambit of Chinese philosophy.

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How Steiner sees a religion of this kind emerges in the following remark: ‘The maximum in religion: to be order and way’ (Steiner 1988: 315). The categorical, structuring role in religion, as Steiner asserts it, provides the conceptual basis for the linkage between religion as teaching (‘way’) and sociology (‘order’). It is ironic that the interpreter is left to unpack the poem’s densely allusive texture by means of such cross-cultural excursions, whereas its very success depends on its melding of diversity. The Conquests sternly rejects any kind of colonialism, whether military, cultural or epistemological; and, in doing so, it adds surprising urgency to the ancient doctrine of nirvana. Ideas to which we shall return in conclusion.

Chapter 15

KAFKA IN ENGLAND

The greatest literature today is written about the oppressed and the excluded … —Feststellungen und Versuche: Aufzeichnungen 1943–1952

Steiner’s most recent biographer, Ulrich van Loyen, has rightly drawn attention to the importance of the poet and literary editor Rudolf Hartung for his poetic development. Hartung was in touch with the whole German scene and so was well placed to help Steiner find an audience – though that promise was never fulfilled. In their reciprocal relationship, Steiner appears to have had an impact on Hartung’s style, while for his part, Hartung encouraged or even prompted Franz’s turn to shorter, more lyrical poems, possibly in the hope of a wider audience than could be achieved with a complex cycle such as Conquests (van Loyen 2011: 488–90). Certainly, their unpublished correspondence provides one of the best guides to Steiner’s poetics; it deserves to be read alongside the poems and serves as a guide to his intentions. This lyric development of Steiner’s last period was pre-empted by another poetic project that has a strong link to his anthropology. This is his translation of what would in an earlier age have been called folksongs, his Variations of the 1940s. Collections of folksongs have had a foundational role in modern German poetry (Gillies 1945: 39–52; von Bormann 1983: 245f.; Kaiser 1996: 73–78). Herder’s great eighteenth-century collection, Stimmen der Völker, went beyond Bishop Percey’s Reliques (1765) in gathering materials from all over the world, and in so doing gave a major impulse to the comparative study of folksong. In the Romantic age, Arnim and Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn did a similar service for German song in gathering a garland of national verse. The Grimm’s collection of fairy tales, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, also needs to be seen in this connection (Tully 1997: 136–69). A problem with these anthologies is their

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emphasis on nationhood. Herder, at the outset of this tradition, sees the Volkslied as a focal point for the Volk. Steiner’s much smaller collection of Variations sets itself in Herder’s tradition but overtly dissociates itself from this and other traditional features. Steiner’s Variations may be understood as both linked and as opposed to Herder’s ideas. Like Herder, Steiner introduces alien cultures to his reader, and like Herder, he does so as a comparativist. However, whereas Herder and his successors aimed to heighten national – for example, German – self-consciousness, Steiner opposed the roots and consequences of nationalism by including only poems by non-combatant nations or peoples in his wartime collection. When he heard that a people had entered the war, he removed their poems from the Variations (H.G. Adler: PC). A further way in which Steiner’s Variations take issue with the Herderian tradition is in its rejection of the notion that folk poetry is a ‘natural’, ‘spontaneous’, ‘healthy’ and immediate expression of the best qualities in a Volk: for Steiner, folk materials are capable of expressing the very ‘dissonances’ typical of modernism (J. Adler 1994a: 143). This can be clearly seen in his ‘Lied von der Ruhe und sonst nichts mehr’, which varies a song of the Papago Indians. Song about rest and nothing more (Variation on a Song of the Papago Indians) Much time passes when the sun takes his leave. But the bat streaks; otherwise nothing more. The souls underneath: how nimble their play in the fluff. Play in the fluff and nothing more. The sun’s leave-taking is slow, Still slower his going down. When the sun is down, the bat streaks And there’s nothing more. The soul infants are underneath. They move to and fro, Drop in the fluff of white eagle down And otherwise nothing more. Long the leave-taking was, the going down seemed endless. Long the bat streaks, eagle’s flight seems endless. When the sun is gone, only the bat streaks. Souls play in the white eagle down; Underneath are the souls … and nothing more. (Steiner 1992: 58 f.)

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This haunting poem captures, presumably, both the alterity of the original, with its mythology of the soul, and evokes the spiritual emptiness typical of the modern sensibility. The statements and repetitions could seamlessly be accommodated into the stanza forms and refrains that typify English and German folksongs, but Steiner resists this Westernization of the material, instead using a controlled freeverse form that recalls Malinowski’s rendition of Trobriand charms and spells. Nonetheless, the repetition of ‘nothing more’ at the end of each stanza sufficiently recalls such folksong refrains as the German nimmermehr and Poe’s ‘Never more’ in ‘The Raven’ to evoke an affinity between the Papago song and European counterparts. Yet against the auratic aestheticization so typical of the first wave of post-Herderian folk-worship that was, at the time Steiner was writing, experiencing its direst consequence in Nazi völkisch ideology, Steiner sets an anti-auratic abruptness that enshrines a wholly non-Western view of soul, death, afterlife and nothingness. Steiner’s attitude to myth in his poetry does not preclude rationality or mortgage his thought to an irrational, inchoate realm but, rather, enables him to place ideas derived from apparently contradictory localities – from science, religion or anthropology – into a single conceptual space, and thereby create a new cosmos (to use his word). He is quite clear that ‘myth’ and ‘the book’ represent different epistemes (1988: 530); it follows that using myths in books cannot reinstate a mythological age. Correlatively, he knows that the very notion of a ‘public’ that defines modernity is inimical to myth (1999b: 236). This distinguishes his approach from Romanticism and its ‘new mythology’. Yet Steiner’s poetry provides him with a place where he can harmonize the distanced, sociological perspective of an anthropologist with an acceptance of mythic reality. This can be observed in his poem ‘Kafka in England’, one of what he called his ‘exemplary poems’ – a mode that became his aesthetic ideal after he abandoned Conquests. Kafka in England Neither via Belsen, nor as a maid of all work The stranger came, by no means a refugee. And yet the case was a sad one: His nationality was in doubt, His religion occasioned lisping embarrassment. ‘Have you read Kafka?’ asks Mrs Brittle at breakfast. ‘He’s rather inescapable and quite fundamental, I feel.’

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‘Have you read Kafka?’ asks Mr Tooslick at tea, ‘Then you’ll understand the world much better – Though nothing in him is real.’ Miss Diggs says: ‘Is that so? I thought that was reactionary. Don’t you?’ Only little Geoffrey Piltzman Dreams ‘Who?’ ‘I mean, who does well out of this, They must be dead, after all, I mean those people in Prague – well, no matter what name …’ Yet the glory of him shines through the gateway all the same. (Steiner 1992: 61) The poem delightfully and plangently builds on the GermanJewish refugees’ characteristic irritation with English ‘small-talk and sherry’ (Berghahn [1984] 1988: 179) and recalls the social satire of Heine and T.S. Eliot; yet it differs from both in its handling of multiple viewpoints – the English natives’, the foreigner’s, Kafka’s – which, in line with the complex ethnicities here observed, are treated as intersecting observational systems. The poem has several distinct strands, presented in terms of different, societal circles: it telescopes the fate of Kafka’s work upon its reception in Britain with that of an unnamed, anonymous figure also arriving there – the ‘stranger’, who is ‘by no means a refugee’, who also evokes Steiner himself; it then juxtaposes these two figures with the annihilation of their brethren (‘they must be dead, after all’). At the same time, the poem satirically represents Kafka’s cultural appropriation by the uncomprehending English characters, Mrs Brittle, Mr Tooslick and Miss Diggs, whose titles (Mr, Mrs and Miss) stand in for the social range of the English middle class; it simultaneously ironizes the Jewish assimilation of local values (the German Jewish boy Piltzman has the English forename Geoffrey, which is fairly common among British Jewry); and yet, at the end, it concludes by reasserting the value system that might be detected in Kafka’s work. For the English, the name ‘Kafka’ has become a formula to be invoked during their daily, self-defining rituals (breakfast and tea being the specifically English meals that distinguished the island race from continentals). The triteness of the English views ironizes the speakers – and does so all the more strongly, paradoxically, because of their statements’ strong truth content: ‘inescapable’, ‘fundamental’, ‘you’ll understand the world much better’ are all apposite if shallow

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responses to Kafka’s texts; and yet the comical names (Brittle, Tooslick) imbue the irony with a genuine (if slightly condescending) warmth. By contrast, the German Jewish boy Geoffrey Piltzman appears to deserve our sympathy, and he, at least, ponders the fate of the Jews in Prague: his connectedness to a group linked to Kafka presumably gives him the insight to associate the Prague writer with the death camps – a horrific but accurate link (members of Kafka’s surviving family in Prague were in fact deported and slain). This validates Kafka’s terrible authenticity but is wholly lost on the members of the English host nation. Yet irony enters our sympathy for Geoffrey Piltzman, too. He has assimilated into English society and conforms to the stereotype of the Jew: when he reflects on Prague and the dead, he thinks of the royalties for Kafka’s works (‘I mean, who does well out of this …’). For the English, Kafka has become a commodity for exchange in conversation, the boy treats him as a genuine commodity. His sadness is that he has lost the religious horizon to formulate an adequate response to the fate of his own people and remains trapped within the host nation’s institutions, manners and speech acts. Neither the English nor the Jews are capable of absorbing contemporary reality. Each group is tied to its own observational frame, which in its turn is anchored in a specific social universe. No one establishes a translational frame by which genuine communication could occur. Finally, the poem’s speaker recalls the conclusion to Kafka’s highly ambiguous parable ‘Before the Law’ in Der Prozeß (The Trial). Notwithstanding the ambiguities of the novel, the tragedy of the Jewish people and the sordidness of England and exile, the poem implies – offering only one of the possible views on the novel – that an obscure metaphysical realm remains intact. The poem’s ironies and cultural relativism (the heirs of Steiner’s anthropological method) serve to demonstrate the inadequacies and limitations of the individual human perspectives against the absolute horizon of a divinity via a negative theology; the unnamed power appears in the very inability of humankind to glimpse the transcendental world. Thus, Steiner’s poem both represents the differing value systems of his subjects, based respectively on ritual exchange, circulating money and suffering; the poem thereby intimates the values of the Nazis as destroyers (anti-values might be a better term) and also validates an authentic religious experience discernible in Kafka’s text, framing knowledge (‘light’) as a quotation. The conclusion, accordingly, embeds a mythical dimension – religious truth – into modern social reality. An aphorism of Steiner’s on Kafka also sums up the procedure in Steiner’s poem. Kafka, Steiner writes:

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constantly shifted from a mythical to a historical level, because in the end, notwithstanding all the mystical elements and notwithstanding everything that is said about him, he was not a mystic (and hence not even a ‘disguised kabbalist’), but a Jewish mythical thinker. (J. Adler 1992: 153)

Steiner, as he claims Kafka does, includes both a historical and a mystical level in his text: this linkage, on Steiner’s reading, anchors the statement in the natural (as against the transcendental) world, and therefore handles reality as ‘myth’, not as metaphysical. Intriguingly, Steiner is here arguing against the kind of Kafka interpretation proposed by Gershom Scholem, which evolved in dialogue with Walter Benjamin beginning in 1931 (Moses and Wiskind-Elper 1999: 153) and continued until well after the war. A central facet of Scholem’s reading, as touched on above, is that Kafka should be seen as a Kabbalist (Scholem 2019: 620). Steiner, however, focuses on the shifting, metamorphic reality in Kafka. Kafka’s world is a manifold. Thus only myth – not mysticism – can do justice to such variety. Compare Scholem’s understanding of the mystical light that pierces the disintegrating world of history and glints into the present, as described in his striking poem written in 1933, which he sent to Benjamin (Scholem 2003: 103–4): The sheer illusion of the world Is now consummated to the full. Lord, grant that he may awake, Whom your absence has erased. This is the sole ray of revelation In an age that disavowed you, Entitled only to experience you In the shape of your negation. Memory can now only retain A teaching that breaks semblance In twain: the surest legacy Of the secret judgement. Steiner takes a diametrically opposed view. In an incisive piece of criticism, he asserts the complete absence of historicity in Kafka’s world. Historical memory is not possible on Steiner’s reading, hence Scholem’s interpretation is illusory (Steiner 2009: 413): It is quite extraordinary how much we can know about a human group without knowing its history – but how little profound empathy is really possible if we limit ourselves to the present. That which is obvious for

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every Jew, that we are our own past and that the meaning of every rite and hence of every important action lies in the past, is only intensified by Kafka’s individualistic mythical thought. … The dimension of the past is more lacking in his prose than in any other writer we know … As a mythical thinker he knows that the secret resides in the past, and the great task of his mode of writing is to divest the past of its secret, inasmuch as it becomes the present.

Steiner embeds Kafka in a sociological frame. His literary criticism is thus informed by a grasp of social practice. The resulting view of Kafka’s world is diametrically opposed to Scholem’s; for whereas the historian of Jewish mysticism interprets Kafka in terms of the Kabbalah, the anthropologist, as we have noted, views him through the eyes of myth and rite. It is not our intention to arbitrate. But what we would stress is that Steiner’s differentiated position needs to be incorporated into our grasp of the debate about Kafka’s role in modernity that was conducted so very eloquently by leading Jewish intellectuals, above all Scholem, Benjamin, and particularly Adorno, who was the first to recognize Steiner’s place in this school (discussed in Chapter 5). As can be seen, furthermore, Kafka is a touchstone for Steiner’s reality, and the intersections between his reflections on his literary antecedent – in aphoristic and poetic form – and his own writing mark out his hermeneutic as intellectually incisive and new but also furnish a vital guide to his own thought processes. The Joseph story provides Steiner with another seminal point of intersection, linking poetry, aphorisms and scholarship. His paper ‘Enslavement and the Early Hebrew Lineage System’ grew out of his thesis and applies anthropological categories to a biblical story. The relation between the Hebrew Bible and sociology mattered to Steiner. He has no time for ‘the sociology of religion’, which he calls ‘the oddest product of our age’ (1988: 62) – it is little more than evidence of the fact that modern society has lost contact with its ‘inner life’ and ‘rootedness in cult’ (p. 62f.). Conversely, ‘sociology’ is the discipline that can be learned ‘most immediately from the Pentateuch’ (1988: 74). The figure of Joseph, on whom the article centres, earlier appears in Conquests V, which treats him as the ‘Increaser’, ‘the first one among us, who lost his home’ (V, l.152ff.). Joseph is the mythical antecedent for the later Hebrew people, even anticipating Jesus in that he is ‘sold and betrayed’: ‘we still mirror ourselves’ in him – that is, he is the founder by virtue of whose sacrifice life continues. An aphorism on Joseph elsewhere provides Steiner with the opportunity to demarcate modernity and myth, in the following scathing remark relating to psychoanalysis: ‘It’s good that Pharaoh told his dream

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about the seven fat cows and the seven lean cows to Joseph and not to a psychiatrist, who would have interpreted the dream as a symbol of a manic-depressive cycle’ (Steiner 1988: 90): modern introjection by symbols displaces the physical world with mental constructs, destroying the basis for an act, whereas myth and sacrifice operate at the level of action, as appears in this remark: ‘We are still living from Abraham’s preparedness to sacrifice his son’ (Steiner 1988: 85). What counts for Steiner is not introjecting action as symbol but externalizing the mind in a deed: the reality of Abraham’s psychological preparedness frees later generations; talking to an analyst leads nowhere. Sacrifice provides a pivot of change, and the Bible provides a model of such change. ‘Relation and being are not different or opposed in sacrifice’ (1988: 89); hence in sacrifice there can be no difference between ‘meaning’ and ‘being’ (no symbolization), and the sacrifice can be at once both wholly existential and relational. Where the Conquests re-enact the Joseph myth, and an aphorism can provide an incisive light on it, the learned paper on ‘Enslavement and the Early Hebrew Lineage System’ establishes a conceptual frame within which to relocate and reinterpret the Joseph story. The interlocking, overlapping modes of utterance provide alternative but interconnected heuristic tools for approaching a single set of events. The article, in the view of Bernhard Lang, had a foundational role in the anthropology of the Bible. Alongside Schapera’s ‘The Sin of Cain’ (1955), Lang claims that the ‘Enslavement’ paper marked the turn away from Frazer (1984: 163f.) towards later work such as that by Lienhardt and Mary Douglas. Steiner brings to the Bible an anthropologist’s understanding of African kinship systems (particularly that which he derived from Laura Bohannan’s analysis of partible rights in persons and applied to his thesis on slavery, see Chapter 9). We may recall that Steiner defined kinship as the most social of human possessions and slavery as its antithesis. Despite being father/ genitor and son, Jacob and Joseph cease to have the kin relation father/pater and son once Joseph has been sold into slavery. Freed in Egypt, Joseph’s new status derives from his position at court: it does not restore his earlier kin ties. Steiner looks to the indigenous peoples of the north-west coast of America for an even more striking example of a severance of kinship ties. He closes by suggesting that in focusing on family units, previous commentators have overlooked the existence of a lineage system among Semites, which sub-Saharan African parallels make highly plausible. The Joseph story suggests evidence of transition from one type of slave law to another in the biblical sources. Steiner’s article uses the comparative method to examine

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two contexts in which we know him to have been interested: the interrelations between kinship and slavery (the predominant subject of his thesis) and the practices that accompany oaths (treated in the paper on the Chagga). It is thanks to Steiner’s formal, sociological framing of the situation that he is able to elucidate the Israelite situation in terms of then contemporary sub-Saharan African analyses. In the parlance of the lectures on taboo, classification is related to social institutions. Steiner also recalls Joseph in his poem ‘The Overseer’. This hermetic text poses several problems of interpretation. It begins by introducing the Hebrews’ bitter life in slavery: ‘Joyless are the awakening and the brittle bread. …’ (Steiner 1992: 37), and slavery provides a constant theme: ‘Joyless are the forced labour and sleep. …’; but towards the end, the speaker appears to focus on Moses’s killing of the Egyptian overseer (Exodus 2, 11ff.), after which he fled to Midian, the place repeatedly invoked in positive imagery in the poem: ‘O Midian. / Midian, there the waters sing and women sing by the water’. The slaying of the Egyptian is introduced in the final stanza: Two voices cut into each other: O master and slave. O master and slave. Hard loam bursts under the prince’s rod; Dominion’s painstaking drudgery falls apart, into the master’s  vault The blood of life trickles. O Midian! The dun rears up; sparks welcome: to Midian, Midian Where without effort the wellsprings sing Sweet water. (Steiner 1992: 37) There was no argument between Moses and the Egyptian in the Bible, but perhaps the debate between Moses and the slave on the day after the slaying (Exodus, 2, 14) is here being projected back into an altercation between Moses and the overseer. Steiner adopts a series of different perspectives on the biblical materials to crystallize the meaning of the episode. This becomes clear from an explanatory note to the text that he wrote and was included in the German printing but not published with the translation (Steiner 1954d: 106). In this note, Steiner showed how the poem adds an understanding of Egyptian mythology to the biblical perspective. He comments that the poem treats the overseer ‘as Ushapti, as part of the order of the dead, so that Moses’s blow does not just kill the overseer but the whole order of the kingdom of the dead, from which the people is then led forth

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into life’. This appears to be glossing the words ‘Hard loam bursts under the prince’s rod’, which, the note informs us, refers to the ‘clay images’ of Pharaoh’s ‘servants and soldiers’ buried with the dead king (Steiner 1954d: 106). Thus, Steiner appears to locate the end of the Egyptian domination over the Israelites at the moment of the killing, long before their exodus, which allows the killing to be seen as a kind of sacrifice. The poem pointedly refers to the relation between Moses and the Egyptian in terms of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, indicating the role reversal that Moses’s act brings about. This is also suggested by the title, ‘Overseer’, which is ambiguous in referring explicitly to the Egyptian but also to Moses’s role among the Hebrews. Indeed, the use of the term ‘overseer’ in the poem may itself recall the episode when Joseph became an ‘overseer’ in Egypt (Genesis 39, 40). The use of the biblical term for Joseph thus sets up a typological chain linking Genesis and Exodus: Joseph – Pharaoh – Moses. The poem, highly allusively, appears to invite the reader to interpret the changing power relations between the Hebrews and the Egyptians in terms of a master-slave dialectic revolving around focal episodes. Just as the oath forms a focal point in the learned paper on the lineage system, the killing forms another in the poem. And even in the poem, historical change appears to be interpreted in terms of institutional change – the Egyptian’s death means not just the end of a person, a myth and a set of power relations but of the institution associated with that myth and with those relations. In his poetry as in his anthropology, Steiner absorbs contemporary issues – the killing of the Egyptian may be reworking Steiner’s views on the inevitability of violence as expressed, for instance, in the ‘Letter to Mr Gandhi’ – and places them into a different contextual frame. Just as he brings social thought to bear on the Bible in his scholarship, so he includes an awareness of social thinking in his most hermetic representations of biblical themes.

Chapter 16

THE CHIEF SOCIOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE

To arrange the past, That is the great method. But to arrange the future, That is true victory. —Am stürzenden Pfad: Gesammelte Gedichte

We are now prepared to turn again to the notion of a ‘mathesis’ lying at the centre of Steiner’s work, which we can begin to demarcate with greater clarity. When he attributed to Steiner a mathesis universalis, H.G. Adler was presumably thinking of the method proposed by Ramon Lull, Descartes, Leibniz and others. For Descartes, it represents the core of his method. It is essentially a comparative tool, as he explains in Rule VI of the Rules for the Direction of the Mind (ca. 1628), for his procedure does not treat facts as isolated entities but as connected bodies that must be understood in terms of their relation to one another. Presumably, the relevance of this to Steiner in H.G. Adler’s appreciation lies both in the comparative approach enunciated here and in the intimation of a hidden ‘secret’, ‘universal’ method to relate together all things (Descartes 1969: 51–52). Additionally, H.G. Adler will have had in mind the origins of Descartes’ method in the influential medieval theories of Ramon Lull. It was Lull’s ambition ‘to investigate and find out new ways through which men may have knowledge of many natural secrets …’ (Yates 1982: 13). By means of the ars combinatoria he originated, Lull hoped to uncover the interconnected secrets of the universe. Lullism had a tremendous impact. It was adopted in the Renaissance by Pico della Mirandola and was certainly known to Descartes (Yates 1982: 67) and Leibniz. In the Baroque era, it was developed by Athanasius Kircher (Leinkauf 1993: 157–58). Steiner’s method, which builds on these cognate approaches, had both a rationalist and a mystical dimension: strict logic

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and personal intuition come together to uncover both knowledge and wisdom. For science and literature, philosophy and linguistics, anthropology and economics, ethnology, sociology and philology jointly encircle the hidden core of knowledge that Steiner – as he called Kafka: the magus of Prague (2009: 215) – on H.G. Adler’s authority will have hoped one day to unify. How far did he achieve this grand ambition? In his poetry, Steiner developed an aesthetic of the palimpsest, by which he embedded allusions, references and quotations into his verse. He does this in methodological terms, too, and some of his most remarkable aphorisms simultaneously allude to a whole cluster of different ideas. This is the case in the following, late remark, which reintroduces a recurrent motif in Steiner’s method that we have isolated in different contexts, namely the ‘circle’, whether in the ‘culture circles’ ethnology of Central Europe, or in the formal sense that the term has in Simmel. This late remark on method reintroduces the concept of a ‘circle’ as a heuristic tool and may perhaps be an attempt to figure what was involved in the ‘circles’ of Simmel’s sociology:1 The chief sociological principle is probably this: that no individual can occupy a position without identifying themselves with something, and that there is no identification without transformation. The need for identification is primary. This is the chief difference between human and animal forms of association. The ‘I’ of human association is at the apex of a triangle, the other points of which are called ‘communication’ and ‘identification’. The sides adjacent to the angle at the I-point are called ‘language’ and ‘transformation’. The circle described around the triangle is a point in another triangle, whose other points are called communication and transformation. The circle which describes this is ‘society’ – in a metaphysical sense. (1999b: 240)

Steiner’s reflection, which appears to direct us towards what H.G. Adler dubbed his mathesis universalis, conducts a dialogue with several thinkers – both living and dead – simultaneously. If the ‘circle’ of society recalls Simmel, Steiner’s concern with what is ‘primary’ in sociology continues his debate with Malinowski, and his critique of Malinowski’s functional theory that social institutions meet ‘needs’ (1999b: 238–39); focusing on ‘transformation’ introduces Canetti’s key category of Verwandlung (Steiner uses the same German term), which Canetti treats as primary in Masse und Macht (1960: 385ff.); Steiner’s own category, ‘identification’ – from his perspective – goes to a more important layer than either Malinowski or Canetti by mediating the individual sociologically. Unlike Malinowski’s ‘needs’ and Canetti’s ‘transformation’, Steiner’s

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‘identification’ is a specifically human category – that is, it differentiates human from animal society: the individual can only occupy a ‘position’ in society – that is, be a human, social being by ‘identifying’ with something outside him- or herself. From this notion, Steiner advances to an understanding of a primary, human social mechanism, distinct from categories like sexuality and the family. To do this, he introduces the ‘circles’ model, which seems to recall several earlier layers of methodology. First, his image of the individual in a circle that parallels society turns the traditional imagery of macrocosm and microcosm into a sociological model; secondly, the triangulated man in the circle, whose ‘limbs’ – Steiner’s German word Schenkel means both ‘the sides of a triangle’ and ‘thighs’ – suggest superimposition of his analysis onto Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, the proportions of a male figure inscribed within a circle and a square (as reconstructed in Fardon 2005: 77), or such kabbalistic symbols as were used by the hermetic philosopher Robert Fludd (Godwin 1979: 68–72): Steiner’s model reactivates the mystical imagery as a scientific tool. And thirdly, the actual use of the model as a heuristic device recalls, as we noted above, Ramon Lull’s ars combinatoria, which operates with concentric circles that the investigator rotates in order to create new knowledge (Yates 1982: 9–77). Steiner’s acquaintance with this influential system seems beyond doubt – in his Prague days, he began a play with Ramon Lull as the somewhat unlikely hero, the first act of which was presented at a public reading (Fleischli 1970: 16). It is conceivable that the play was to stand in the German tradition marked by Goethe’s Torquato Tasso and Hölderlin’s Empedokles – dramas that represent their central figures in terms of their own philosophy. Steiner presumably knew the principles of Lull’s ‘art’, upon which his own reflections vary in a highly fruitful manner. One can observe him engaging almost formalistically with the ars combinatoria in aphorisms like that on ‘Education and Illusion’ (1999b: 234), which produce their deductions by means of a series of permutations. ‘Cityscapes’ similarly has a distinctly permutational quality to its argument (1999b: 232–33), as does ‘Last Things but One’ (1999b: 233–34), which treats the ‘combination’ of ‘dream, service’ and ‘adventure’. The humorous, playful side to Steiner’s nature also finds expression in this method, as in the following combinatorial reflection – a typically exile squib – on the English weather: The English climate is characterized by the fact every season has its spring and autumn days, summer days are most common in spring and autumn, and winter is distinguished from summer above all by the fact

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that it has more spring days and fewer autumn days than the latter … (Sundry Essays and Discoveries Ms 1947a: II,80)

Such playfulness is an essential feature of the ars combinatoria, as Novalis – among others – recognized. Writing of the art, he commented: ‘Language is a musical instrument of ideas. The poet, the rhetor, and the philosopher play with ideas’ (cited by Neubauer 1978: 9). Steiner’s playfulness – attested in Iris Murdoch transforming him into the figure of Ludens in her novel The Message to the Planet (1989) – appears to find a serious outlet in this method, echoes of which can perhaps be heard in such diverse procedures as his systematically questioning the whole chorus of existing scholarship in Taboo and in the cyclical repetition and variation of key lines in Conquests. Yet Steiner does not simply rehearse Lull’s method in aphorisms like that on the ‘circle’. Whereas Lull works with a model of concentric circles, Steiner’s triangulation also envisages overlapping ones: the ‘circle’ that he imagines becoming the ‘point’ in another circle is not necessarily the centre; and the new ‘circle’, ‘society’, will link other individuals and connect to other societies in the same way. Steiner’s earlier reflection on social units in terms of ‘culture circles’ and Simmel’s ‘circles’ now correlate directly to Steiner’s method; and his preoccupation with overlapping geographical borders appears to match a concern with a new variant of the ars combinatoria: Steiner’s method privileges overlapping areas as a means for generating and structuring knowledge. The shift from Lull’s centred circle to a multicentred universe follows directly from two principles: Mach’s observational relativity; and Simmel’s formal sociology, which enabled Steiner to embed Mach’s theoretical insight into a social context. One of the most remarkable fruits of Steiner’s epistemology is ‘Chagga Law and Chagga Truth’, in which the method for discovering knowledge is reapplied to the problem of structuring truth, whereby Steiner is able to demonstrate the social viability (and, indeed, equal validity) of different truth concepts. This far-reaching analysis has since been taken up by Godfrey Lienhardt and Mary Douglas (Douglas [1975] 1978: 128) but warrants rereading in the interpretative context provided by Steiner’s other work. Notwithstanding the paper’s own concern with ‘truth’, it must be said that Steiner’s own handling of his source in this instance is open to question. Basing his comments on the then unpublished complete version of Steiner’s seminar presentation on Gutmann, J.C. Winter – one of the few commentators to recognize Steiner’s importance in the Oxford School

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(Winter 1979: 27; Steiner 1999a: 235–50) – commends Steiner’s explication of Gutmann’s ideas while cautioning that his use of examples from Chagga ethnography may be ‘careless, to say the least’ (1979: 25–27 and footnote 80). Winter’s detailed study helpfully shows how Steiner’s Gutmann reception – not only in his paper on ‘Chagga Law and Chagga Truth’ but also in ‘Towards a Classification of Labour’ – played a part in the development of early structuralism (1979: 25f.). We have traced Steiner’s views on Western and Eastern values to several sources: to literary precedents in books like Robinson Crusoe and Moby Dick, in which the observer’s values are confronted with an alternative, ‘native’ position and to Steiner’s own experience of multi-ethnic communities in Prague, Ruthenia and Jerusalem; and we can infer his awareness of different currents in modern thought that overturned established notions of truth: Nietzsche’s ‘perspectivism’, Ernst Mach’s variety of relativity and Einstein’s special and general theories – we know of his friend Canetti’s interest in Einstein in the 1950s (PC). We have also followed the early working-out of his ideas on linked concepts in the paper on ‘Superstition’. If Steiner’s paper on ‘Chagga Law and Chagga Truth’ is in some way the culmination of his own thinking on these various currents, we may add to them a personal experience that he reports in one of his few autobiographically styled aphorisms, ‘Memory of a Turning Point’ (Erinnerung an einen Wendepunkt). The title may echo Rilke’s poem ‘Wendung’ (Turning Point), which signals the major ‘turn’ between his middle phase and his late poetry. Steiner’s aphorism purports to record an epiphany in which he recognized the identity of separate spheres: intelligence (Klugheit), piety (Frömmigkeit) and scepticism (Skeptizismus). The insight strikes him after watching a quarrel in the street in an unnamed town – presumably Prague or Jerusalem. Two men argue so fiercely that they attract a crowd of onlookers, which Steiner joins, eager to know who is in the right: Suddenly I said to myself: why are you entering into this [quarrel] so deeply? Are there so many people who are ‘in the right’ in any way whatever? You know that there are only very few. And if you wished to seek them out, you would not be looking for them among these angry disputants. How could either of these men screaming in the street be ‘in the right’ in any way at all? (Ms [?1947a]: fol.1, 1947c)

He then describes his own insight apropos of this event: People often speak of collapsing illusions. It was not an illusion that collapsed, it was an entire piece of reality which had collapsed by the evening. … I felt like someone who had always carefully avoided an

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abyss and suddenly discovered that it had been filled in without doing anything about it himself, and that there was a path where before there had only been detours. On this day, a new life began for me insofar as I was no longer able to distinguish between [three previously distinct] abilities: being deeply moved, exactitude in thinking and the strength of doubt could no longer be regarded separately. The separation had lost its meaning. … (Ms [1947a]: fol.1–2, 1947c)

The experience reverses Steiner’s attitude to truth. From implicitly presupposing a positive quest for truth via assertions in the outside world, where others commonly seek it (the quarrellers in the street here assume a wider, symbolic function), Steiner reverts to an alternative position. He redefines the subject and the faculties engaged in the search for truth: aspects of the self commonly regarded as mutually exclusive, notably ‘being moved’ or ‘faith’ – Steiner, using his Kombinatorik, now substitutes Ergriffenheit for ‘piety’ – and ‘doubt’ – Steiner now calls this die Stärke des Zweifels (the strength of doubt) – come together in a new combination. In linking these qualities, Steiner aligns the modern West’s chief opposed universes, religious experience (Ergriffenheit) and science (Zweifel), conjoining them with the capacity to ‘think exactly’ (Denkgenauigkeit). The epiphany entails, on the one hand, holism in Steiner’s grasp of the subject, here understood as integrating the opposite qualities of intellect and emotion; and, on the other, correlatively produces an integral notion of ‘truth’, which now encompasses both science and religion in a single vision. Steiner’s aphorism reconstitutes the subject as a being with two valences, a negative and a positive – doubt and faith – the latter contributing an addition in value (Ergriffenheit), the former a parallel subtraction (Stärke des Zweifels), the two poles being mediated by exactitude of thought (Denkgenauigkeit). Steiner thus exhibits a preparedness to entertain a complex ‘truth’ that may be at odds with conventional method. His aphorism is also a parable about truth. It attacks the notion of a supposedly objective epistemology – dialectics, symbolized by the arguing men – and its putative findings, putting under severe strain the notion of a pure ‘method’ that can be used in a quasi-objective form to arrive at a truth independently of its users: ‘dialectic method’ in itself may be objective (the men are watched by the crowd) and yet totally useless (both men may be wrong). We will encounter a similar juxtaposition of two truthworlds in the ‘Chagga’ paper. The strength in Steiner’s position is that whilst attacking a central tool of rationality (we can read the parable as an attack on Socratic method in the wake of Nietzsche’s

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assault on ‘theoretical man’), it refuses to countenance irrationalism as an alternative. Mary Douglas has drawn attention to the fact that EvansPritchard develops a framework similar to Wittgenstein’s idea of ‘language games’ (Douglas 1980: 36). Writing on the ‘Chagga’, Steiner comes to related conclusions. Douglas finds it extraordinary that E-P wrote in terms so reminiscent of Wittgenstein while having not read him by the early 1930s; for his part, Steiner had read the early Wittgenstein and could conceivably have encountered the later idea of ‘language games’ through The Blue and Brown Books (1933–34; 1934–35; in [1958] 1969: 17; 172). However, both Evans-Pritchard and Steiner may have reached this convergence with Wittgenstein via Malinowski’s contribution to Ogden and Richards’s The Meaning of Meaning (1923), in which Malinowski stresses the importance of what he calls ‘the context of situation’ for determining the meaning of linguistic statements. In the ‘Chagga’ paper, Steiner thinks on this further by way of his analysis of Gutmann. He argues somewhat tantalizingly that ‘Gutmann … leads us a long way towards an analysis of truth concepts and their relation to structural situations’ but that he ‘stops at the threshold’ (1999a: 248). Ironically, Steiner, like Gutmann, does not fully develop his thoughts here, but his idea of finding truth in the external world (as opposed to his holistic take on the subject) is much contained in this phrase: he entertains different ‘truth concepts’, which may be so thoroughly divergent in constitution as to be contradictory in logic, and wishes to relate these to ‘structural situations’. One notes the echo of Malinowski’s ‘context of situation’, but Steiner’s ‘structural situation’ replaces Malinowski’s pleonastic phrase by a more sociological term: Steiner’s ‘structural situation’ to which the ‘truth concept’ relates presupposes not just a general situation or social relations but a framework of kinship, legality and other institutions (the ‘context’) within which a specific form of ‘truth’ assumes meaning. In the convergence between Wittgenstein and the anthropologists, the movement was not entirely one-way. In his posthumously published remarks on Frazer’s The Golden Bough dating to 1930, Wittgenstein brings a central European critique to bear on Frazer that often coincides with Steiner, which indicates how anthropological materials had fed into Wittgenstein’s own understanding of truth. As Steiner sees in Frazer’s views of his subjects no more than a narrowly English perspective, Wittgenstein finds Frazer’s limitations are his ‘narrowness’ and that of the England of his day (1967: 241); as Steiner adopts the mask of a ‘primitive’ in

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Taboo, Wittgenstein – here using the English word ‘savage’ in his German remarks – turns the tables on Frazer and calls him and his explanations more ‘savage’ than most of his ‘savages’ (1967: 241). Wittgenstein criticizes Frazer’s treatment of ‘magical and religious views’ as ‘errors’ (Irrtümer), observing that one should preserve the ‘depth’ of magical thought (‘Von der Magie müßte die Tiefe behalten werden’) (1967: 234), indicating that an explanation of magic should not lose its essential truth – a view compatible with Steiner’s ‘Memory of a Turning Point’. On one occasion, Wittgenstein also notes how where Frazer discerns ‘superstition’ (Aberglaube) we are probably dealing with ‘truth’ (Wahrheit) (1967: 253). However, by this Wittgenstein means a truth that can be grounded within our own values (here illustrated by The Brothers Karamazov). Steiner’s reading of Gutmann goes beyond Wittgenstein’s 1930 Frazer analysis to the extent that he reconstitutes differing ‘truth concepts’ on their own terms within their own ‘structural situations’; more radically than Wittgenstein’s accepting stance towards otherness, this strategy avoids weighing up or balancing Western and non-Western models. We can now approach the arguments in ‘Chagga Law and Chagga Truth’ in ways that illuminate the paper’s long preamble, which Laura Bohannan wisely excised from the first printing, since they would have been regarded as ‘digressive’ within their first printed context, a scholarly journal devoted to Africa, whereas within the context of Steiner’s research and his Oxford seminar they provided an essential ‘structural situation’. Steiner begins by addressing the subject of the Oxford seminar series and then singles out Gutmann’s Das Recht der Dschagga as ‘the only major contribution in German to descriptive social anthropology’ – not absolutely but, ‘as we understand it, in its classical stage’. It is a ‘classic’, by which Steiner means a book ‘which, even when outdated, would set standards for knowledge, research and its presentation’ (1999a: 235). In making this judgement, Steiner is following the British view of this book, which variously regarded it as ‘the best monograph … on an East African tribe’ and as ‘Gutmann’s magnum opus’ (Winter 1979: 10). Gutmann’s account is serving Steiner as the prime, indeed the only, successful example of German social anthropology, and he embeds it precisely into the German social and intellectual context. According to Steiner, Gutmann’s book takes ‘a rational, scientific approach’; this Steiner contrasts with both the philosophical approach to society, which produced Simmel and Von Wiese, and ‘another approach … more typical of the German situation’, for which the ‘chaos of

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mysterious society’ – that is, irrationalism – provided the parameters for social enquiry (1999a: 236). Scholars focused on ‘nuclei and clusters of consistent behaviour’ based on ‘religious movements of the past’ – a method that became fruitful only thanks to ‘the genius of Max Weber’. Steiner presumably has in mind thinkers like Ferdinand Tönnies, with his fundamental distinction between a mystical ‘Gemeinschaft’ and modern ‘Gesellschaft’ (1963; see Liebersohn 1988: 11–38); Werner Sombart (1902); Ernst Troeltsch on The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches (1912; Liebersohn 1988: 40–77); Lujo Brentano, Alfred Weber and others. Common to this line of thought was a belief in a romanticized ideal of a pre-capitalist community based on barter we have seen Steiner to reject. Having thus distinguished two traditions in German social thought, Steiner launches an assault on the entire German intellectual class: ‘the actual structure of his own society remained mysterious for the German intellectual … his awareness of his own society lacked important rational elements. Nothing can be explained by reference to mysteries’ (1999a: 236). One need only compare the worlds portrayed in George Eliot’s Middlemarch with that in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) to understand the drift of Steiner’s contrast. The mindset that Steiner attributes to German-speaking intellectuals also conditioned the method of historical ethnology. German-speaking scholars engaged in ‘busily and skilfully collecting those observable items which seemed to need least contextual reference’. The critique also seems to apply to Steiner’s own early foray into ‘culture circles’ ethnology, which produced a paper on dog sacrifice bristling with data but wholly lacking in a sense of social context (Ms 1938). ‘Standards of relevance and significance were destroyed’ and scholarship created an ‘all-embracing jigsaw puzzle’ (1999a: 236). According to Steiner, the approach represents a form of ‘escape’, an irrational avoidance of social reality. The result was epistemic meltdown – and ultimately (though Steiner does not say so here, but see our comments on translation and value, Chapter 11) social breakdown. Scholars whose society ‘remained mysterious’ to them were unable to arrange their ‘experiences’ in what Steiner calls a ‘translation pattern’ (1999a: 236), and hence lacked the basis for understanding a different society. One recalls the problems German society faced with ‘otherness’ in the 1930s. The implication is that such a society lives under an illusion, incapable of recognizing ‘truth’ in any form. Steiner then comes close to naming the actual context for his paper – he is writing in 1949, four years after the end of a European war that marked a climax in the ‘irrationalist’ tendency

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of the German school – but makes the point with extreme restraint, demarcating the moment at which he crosses from a scholarly to an ethical argument: Thus the fiction was preserved that people who had the whole equipment of modern thought and science at their beck and call, were facing the multiform social universe with all the active interest that befits civilised man. This I feel to be a moral issue and I wish it to be regarded as something apart from the scholarly merit and faults of diffusionist schools. (1999a: 236)

Steiner then contrasts Gutmann’s position as a missionary with that of the ethnologists, without further elaborating why this provided him with special access to a better method but does stress how Gutmann’s interest in legal systems enables him to focus productively on ‘social mechanisms’ (1999a: 237). Steiner continues by delineating further contextual factors for Gutmann’s account: his book’s place in a series on developmental psychology, the book’s epilogue, Gutmann’s twenty years among the Chagga, his other works, his curious translations of Chagga words, his attitude to women, and Kierkegaard’s influence on him, which led Gutmann to understand the Chagga not as ‘superstitious’ but actually as existentialist, ‘afraid of the nothingness of his isolation’ (1999a: 239). Balancing both positive and negative judgements in his assessment, Steiner re-creates Gutmann’s ‘structural situation’ as a starting point for his own analysis and sufficiently reveals his own methodological presuppositions to locate his argument within the Oxford School: its hallmarks include the sociological approach, rationality in method, self-reflexivity with respect to social mechanisms and an acceptance of both alterity and the profundity of non-Western thought styles. Steiner’s exegesis, and his knowledge of existentialism, may have fallen on fruitful ground. According to Mary Douglas, he may have been ‘influential in opening paths to European currents of philosophy’ at Oxford (Ms 1994: 3), and his remark on Gutmann’s use of existentialism has an echo in Purity and Danger when she refers to the Lele meditating on the inner rites of the pangolin cult being most like ‘primitive existentialists’ ([1966] 1984: 170). Having set up the contextual frame for the Gutmann analysis, Steiner presents his own critical analysis of Gutmann’s Chagga society – which establishes the social structure of the Chagga; not essential to our point here – before turning to his account of Chagga ‘truth’. Here, too, Steiner introduces the argument by explaining his own premises (1999a: 244), developing an analysis of Western truth concepts before advancing to a synthesis of Chagga ideas. He

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carefully distinguishes ‘the logician’s concept of truth’ from ‘any concept of truth to which observable behaviour relates’: he thereby severs the observer’s logical frame from the social applications of truth that can be made the ‘object’ of sociological study. He is rigorous on this point: ‘I do not mean by this that the Westerner, holding the logician’s concept of truth, finds among the Chagga another and incompatible sort’ (1999a: 244). Western logic does not constitute the observer’s structural frame. The reason is contained in Steiner’s next point, which continues the analytic heralded by the earlier claim: logic is not the sole arbiter of ‘truth’ in any society. Steiner then proceeds to distinguish different ideas of truth that operate in Western society, ranging from the (then) contemporary modern logical positivist’s account back to Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Celtic and Teutonic ideas: the historical line merges in the early modern idea of a timeless, ‘Absolute Truth’ (1999a: 246), to which the logical positivism of Steiner’s day is the response. In the course of this survey, Steiner makes several seminal distinctions, notably that between ‘witnessing’ and ‘oaths’, which correspond to what he calls ‘two groups of truth concepts: the one relating to a change in the social reality of a statement, the other to the degree of applicability of a myth to one or more situations of life’ (1999a: 245). Having outlined this binary opposition and established the plural contexts for ‘truth concepts’, he turns to the Chagga. Steiner characteristically begins with the Chagga language and then relates this to ‘certain signals or signs … certain ejaculations and to the use of the Dracaena leaf ’ (1999a: 217). By treating language within practice, he approaches Wittgenstein’s parallel development from his earlier position: ‘I suggest … that the use of this leaf is complementary to the lohi words and that one cannot be discussed without the other’ (1999a: 248). This closely corresponds to the proposal at the outset of the Philosophical Investigations to call ‘the language and the activity with which it is interwoven’ a ‘language game’ (Wittgenstein 1960: 292f.). In making his case about the Chagga language game, Steiner can thus separate out the Chagga from Western procedures, and from Gutmann’s psychological interpretation, thereby demonstrating how the Chagga may validly call ‘truth’ what a Westerner would call ‘lying’ (1999a: 248). Where the later Wittgenstein focuses on ‘rules’, Steiner’s analysis enumerates each aspect of the ‘structural situations’ pertaining to Chagga truth: social structure, lineage system, language, ejaculations, signals, the Dracaena leaf, the clan copses containing the ancestor shrines, the rules pertaining to clan members’ activities there, the procedure

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engaged in by an aggrieved man, the acts of a man with a grudge, the court action, and the role of witness and eyewitness. He thereby attempts to re-create in their entirety the ‘structural situations’ of Chagga truth and analyse the manner in which different principles may be placed into a ‘structural arrangement’ (1999a: 248) by which the internal coherence of Chagga concepts becomes apparent. The structuralism here envisaged does not mean mapping transcultural patterns – quite the opposite: it entails grasping the internal organization of ‘truth’ within a particular culture. Accepting variant frames of reference with respect to ‘structural situations’ is crucial to Steiner’s methodology. In the spirit of a ‘universal mathesis’, we draw attention to the similarity of the method adopted in some of his poetry, notably when he revises classical mythology. His poem on ‘Leda’ of 1947–1952 contradicts the treatment of the myth by three poets he admired: Spencer, Rilke and Yeats (J. Adler 1994a: 144–46). In each successive version, the tensions and problems of the myth move progressively into the foreground. Spenser deftly resolves the problem by treating Leda ambiguously as a creature equally free of blame and pain. The description is contained in ‘The Masque of Cupid’. Steiner marked his copy of the text using a blade of flowering grass as a bookmark (Peacock 1939: 187): She slept, yet twixt her eyelids closely spyde, How towards her he rusht, and smiled at his pryde. Spencer has it both ways: he preserves Leda’s innocence by letting her sleep and upholds Zeus’s masculinity by having her wake and enjoy him. In Rilke, greater tensions arise. In the Neue Gedichte (New Poems), his Leda serves mainly as an instrument for Zeus, to relieve his suffering (‘Not’); she is seen as confused but is not grasped as a victim: Rilke’s aesthetics effectively anaesthetize the rape. For Rilke, it is Zeus, not Leda, who suffers. In Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’, however, there is a recognition of Leda’s dilemma. Steiner owned a copy of Yeats’s Collected Poems, which includes this poem (1950: 241) How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? Nonetheless, despite recognizing Leda’s plight, Yeats celebrates a male victory: Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

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Steiner, whilst including reminiscences of the painterly frisson that charges each of these poems, fundamentally alters the perspective. He foregrounds the tensions at the heart of the myth by treating it as real. His Leda has the distinct personality of a young girl: A stern child in a mantle of damp hair. Steiner’s vision transplants the myth into a recognizable village setting, where the rape, for the villagers, assumes a ritual, religious function. However, his speaker adopts the view of the child as victim: … many villagers saw the sacred act By which the power abused the girl. Steiner focuses on the contiguity of sanctity and pollution that he treats in Taboo, and which Mary Douglas further explores in Purity and Danger. Pollution and purity are the twinned tensions Steiner excavates from the myth (2000: 257): There were her parents, who took her measure at the door: ‘Wheresoever thou were’st, thou hast not seen, Dream-befouled girl, the white splendour of the gods.’ Then she called out: ‘i was in darkness, yes! i, wounded by darkness, oh take the slime from me, What i did not see, should never be repeated, My only ones, Oh wash me clean again!’ Steiner’s lived ethnology combines analytic clarity with a profound compassion for human suffering. His poem combines several frames: the myth, the human dimension and its ethnology. It is this situatedness of each unit of observation that also permits Steiner both to accept different accounts in an essay like ‘Chagga Truth’ and to subscribe to a religious idea of ‘truth’ in a poem such as ‘Gebet im Garten’ (Prayer in the Garden). And both of these concerns bear upon the tense relations between differing standards of value and their significance to suffering, which is the concern of our next chapter.

Note   1. Our text follows H.G. Adler’s reading of Steiner’s aphorism; but see now (Schüttpelz 2001: 85–86).

Chapter 17

SUFFERING AND VALUE

The Truth To stand before waterfalls … ––Am stürzenden Pfad: Gesammelte Gedichte

Steiner’s deeply moving – Hugo Bergman calls it ergreifend (Ms 1952) – meditation on the Shoah, ‘Prayer in the Garden’, was begun on the birthday of Steiner’s father in 1947 and bears this date in the subtitle (1992: 75). As a long elegy on the death of a father, the poem also distantly recalls the Spanish world of Steiner’s forebears by echoing Jorge Manrique’s fifteenth-century Coplas a la muerte de su padre. Written in the cyclical free verse form developed in his Conquests, ‘Prayer in the Garden’, represents the summa of Steiner’s poetic and religious thought, completing the spiritual journey left unended in the earlier work. In contrast to Paul Celan’s better-known Todesfuge (Death Fugue), his poem removes the catastrophe from its historical frame by avoiding the words ‘Germans’ and ‘Jews’. It similarly avoids the imagery of the camps. Terms of national and religious difference could merely perpetuate the original sense of difference that led to disaster. Instead, Steiner’s poem centres on a shipwreck. As in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland of 1875–6, the sinking serves as the terrible object for spiritual analysis. This imagery recalls an earlier poem that Steiner wrote in the depth of the war during his crucial middle years, ‘In den Werften’ (In the Wharfs), which is dated November 1943. In this poem, the speaker imagines himself reading the names of ill-fated vessels that contained Jewish refugees, listing the names: ‘Dumera, Struma, Arandora Star’ (see Steiner 2000: 89–90). The sea imagery translates the cataclysm into a timeless frame and points beyond a specific national guilt towards shared human responsibility, as can be seen by considering one example. The Struma sank on 24 February 1942, carrying 767 Jewish refugees fleeing from Romania (Wasserstein 1994: 4; Ziegler Ms 1994).

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Responsibility for this loss lay not just with the German persecutors but with the British and Turkish governments too (the latter would not admit the Jews) as well as with Russia (it was probably a Russian submarine that torpedoed the vessel). The sinking was widely reported and caused public outrage in Britain. There were other, similarly ugly episodes. In November 1940, the Patria was blown up by Haganah to prevent the deportation of immigrants, but the plan backfired causing the boat to sink and 250 refugees to drown (Gilbert 1998: 105). It seems probable that these earlier losses came to mind again in 1947 with the wave of ‘illegal’ migrants aboard ships like the Galata, Trade Winds, Orletta and Anal, which brought several thousand persons to Palestine between midApril and the end of May 1947 (Gilbert 1998: 145). This was the time of the notorious case of the Exodus, which reached the coast of Palestine from Genoa with German and Polish camp survivors on board: the ship was ordered back to Europe again by Bevin and eventually landed in Hamburg (Gilbert 1998: 145, 209). Steiner’s poem condenses such events into a single, mythical shipwreck that serves as a symbol for the Shoah. The speaker hears the voices of the survivors at sea – we may imagine the migrants on the Exodus, who are a ‘part’ of the ‘part’ that has survived the war – and seems to recall the earlier drowned voices: One part alone has survived, And what a part: That mercy might have mercy; And has lived to see the hour, O what an hour: And now there is this crying out at sea, Once more distress and anyone’s sport at sea. In the mythical mode we can now recognize as habitual for Steiner’s thought, at the point of the sinking, recounted later in the poem, the allusive imagery connects key moments in Jewish history, including the fall of the tower of Babel, the flood and the Babylonian exile, with contemporary events, a single word, ‘gas’, once used when recounting the wreck, serving to evoke the recent horror: Seven thrusts of the ram into splintering wood: Beaks made of steel, the pride of Babel. Broken the clasp and the plank, the chair and the table, Burst the reservoir, dried up the flood. Beaks made of steel, the pride of Babel:

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Seven thrusts of the ram into splintering wood. Not a drop with which to cool the eyes, The eyes of children which gases cauterize, Eyes of the mothers, hard in the midst of horror. (Steiner 1992: 85) The speaker finds a way of relating to the events by mediating between the whole Jewish people, the suffering of the dead and his own fellow-feeling, somewhat unusually – in a poem – incorporating the idea of the limited perspective suggested by Mach’s term, ‘the part’ (Teil), for the human subject in relation to the ‘whole’ (Steiner 1992: 79): ‘I am only one part’, and extending the same term to all life: ‘Whatever lives is only a part’ and ‘Whatever died is a part’, as are all the survivors: ‘One part only has survived’ (1992: 79–83). Indeed, in true Machian terms, even the inner self, the ‘inwardness’ of the speaker, is also understood as a ‘part’. Steiner’s poem manages to utter the unspeakable by negating the will and the identity of the speaker. The end of the self, envisioned as a nirvana with which life concludes at the end of Conquests, is here internalized to the point of complete self-abasement – the only posture from which the poet can utter the dead: The prayer of the will is not fitting for me For the words I utter turn against myself … The prayer of wishing is not fitting for me, The prayer of the will I am not able to say, For the will is only a part And it prays for only a part: But what the will destroyed Became the cornerstone of peaceful glory, And what the will has wounded Turned to the glow of inwardness within me. (1992: 75–77) The meditation leads the speaker to turn what has been ‘wounded’ into his own ‘inwardness’: meditation also involves a mythic transformation of value, whereby pain assumes a positive value as an inward ‘glow’. In a manner that perhaps echoes Steiner’s stress on biblical witness in ‘Chagga Law and Chagga Truth’, the speaker invokes his parents as witnesses to truth. The poem’s ‘now’ encapsulates the fruits of Steiner’s religious thinking since the middle years of the war, when, as we have seen, his life and work began their spiritual deepening. He offers a heart-rending picture of his mother and father:

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O both of you The sufferings you went through. My light and grief are that you were What you have been in me was horribly perverted Darkness more than grief extinguishing I must bear Because from you, so pale already and so frail, The monster’s clutches could not be averted. For your sake I recovered from your death, And now this darkness, now this light And other light At the time of my ripeness Together merged into my inwardness. Witnesses, witnesses, Join me in what I speak, be near me now. Let me speak truthfully. (Steiner 1992: 83) ‘My light and grief … the truth let me speak. …’ (1992: 83) he affirms. The ‘truth’ that the poet here wishes to utter is that of those who have perished, the ‘creatures out at sea’. The term serves to denote the absolute of honesty, but the ‘truth’ is also ‘God’ – this is the only occurrence of the word in all Steiner’s poetry. The concept of truth here gains such intensity because the poem reverts to the ancient biblical sense of ‘witnessing’ as defined in ‘Chagga Truth’,

Figure 17.1 Heinrich and Marta Steiner, Prague, 1938. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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yet implants the witness into a modern, subjective sensibility, a person who must also testify to the most terrible defilement of the sacred. Thus, the speaker introjects the external ‘truth’ into the inner subject, where it affords a revelation. As a witness, he recognizes both the divine presence (‘light’) and also His absence in the form of ‘darkness’. Nor is it only the ‘truth’ of God before man to which he testifies but the ‘truth’ of man – the creatures at sea become ‘true’ (1992: 83) – before God (1992: 85). In these paradoxes, one senses the speaker’s anguish as he wrests meaning from suffering: For all the suffering out at sea Is a pain for glory’s sake, Itself into glory turning, Transforming everything. (1992: 85) These words, which echo the idea from the Kaddish that the souls of the righteous are written in the Book of Life, and which might here conceivably be regarded as blasphemous, become sayable because the poet denies himself and in witnessing the transformation of pain accepts his own spiritual death as a consequence of his witness: ‘A great, a mighty frost has entered my heart. / In the dark I stand alone, see nothing any more’ (1992: 87). The Conquests’ ‘lonely man’ who acted as the world’s ‘guardian’ here becomes a martyr, taking upon himself the world’s pain in order that God’s glory may be seen. Read as autobiography, the lines indicate that Steiner’s early death should be read not just as a consequence of the war but as the result of self-imposed penance. His poem displays an idea of a truth that is grounded in loss and pain: ‘On pain I stand and firmly plant my feet, / It is my rock, a rock I did not form’ (1992: 85). Whereas the poet ‘stands on pain’, those at sea ‘suffer’ (1992: 87). And so, the ‘Prayer in the Garden’ reverts to the theme of Steiner’s much earlier ‘Letter to Georg Rapp’ (1999b: 115–22), which elaborates on the role of pain and suffering in his thought. Suffering, Steiner here argues, differs from pain in that pain has a definite relation to time. Suffering, on the other hand, is the medium of time. He continues: A life without suffering is valueless. A world without suffering is valueless. What the religions of mankind have to offer – and when I say religions, I mean religions, not myths, not mystical absorption, not rituals, but the symbolic systems which result from all of these and are accepted as religion, which is binding – what the religions of mankind have to offer, then, is in the end nothing other than the ground upon

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which, and the language in which, people can communicate about the possibility of ending their various sufferings and our own, common age of suffering. (1999b: 116)

For Franz Steiner, suffering provided a ground for value, and religions as social institutions created the means for communicating about such suffering. At this point, where all his concerns and forms of writing meet, Steiner locks into a debate central to modern German thought, to which Nietzsche gave his characteristically deconstructive stamp in ‘Die Geburt der Tragödie’ (The Birth of Tragedy), where he first unmasks the ‘Untergrund des Leidens’ (ground of suffering) that lies beneath the Apolline – that is, also Socratic, modern, theoretical worldview ([1873] 1954: 34). Nietzsche hereby discovers what he calls ‘die Weisheit des Leidens’ (the wisdom of suffering; [1873] 1954: 32). In Nietzsche’s wake, Steiner’s own poetic model, Rainer Maria Rilke, returns to the same original ground in his own poetic testimony, the Duino Elegies. Using a characteristically Nietzschean term formed with Ur-, Rilke speaks of Ur-Leid, the original suffering that lies behind and validates all existence, in the grand, concluding Elegy (1955: 733). In this poem, as later with Steiner, suffering provides the genuine measure of value, which is contrasted with modernity’s pleasure-seeking economy represented by the so-called Leid-Stadt – the city of suffering (1955: 721) in which pleasure masks pain. Steiner echoes this contrast between existence and inauthenticity in Conquests (1999b: 263–65). Elsewhere, he takes the question concerning the place of suffering to a characteristic extreme. In an unpublished aphorism, headed Der Mensch und das Leid (Man and Suffering), he develops the ideas about suffering that may date back to the time of the letter to Georg Rapp. Drawing a new corollary from Lessing’s famous Enlightenment definition of the morally best human being – ‘Der mitleidigste Mensch ist der beste Mensch’ (The human being who feels the most sympathy is the best human being) (Lessing [1756] 1973: 163) – Steiner asserts: ‘Der leidende Mensch ist das wichtigste Geschöpf der Welt’ (The suffering human being is the most important creature in the world). Upon this characteristic perspectival reversal, Steiner continues by arguing that suffering is that which makes man human: What distinguishes man from the animals? What more does he have? What more does he know? Many say he is cleverer, more intelligent. Others say that we have no criteria and means of measuring a comparison like this. We certainly do not. Nor for the question of whether the animal is happier. But who has enquired about the criteria of suffering? There just are no criteria here because the sufferings of

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all creatures appear to be the most real thing that we are capable of perceiving. It is the intensity of our pains and sufferings and feelings of happiness, not our thoughts and decisions which distinguishes dream and reality. …

Having combinatorially slipped from the man/beast contrast into the dream/reality divide, Steiner turns to ‘reason’ as another defining trait for disposal, before reaching a conclusion that takes Lessing’s statement of human value to a new logical conclusion: ‘Der Mensch leidet, weil er Mensch ist. Je mehr er leidet, umsomehr ist er Mensch’ (The human being suffers because he is a human being. The more he suffers, the more human he is). By this route, Steiner sets himself against the whole line in Western thought that sees ‘happiness’ as the goal and regards value as grounded in the pursuit of happiness, a view also widespread in the human sciences running up through Bentham and still held by Freud, for whom it appears certain that ‘human value judgements are categorically guided by their wishes for happiness’ (Freud 1930: 135). According to the letter to Georg Rapp, two possibilities present themselves: either to seek the opposite of pain in timelessness, which renders suffering an illusion, the option embraced in some Eastern religions, or: to live boundlessly in suffering, to allow oneself to be filled with suffering, trusting in the strength that comes only from suffering. There is no other human deepening. We weigh only the weight of our sufferings, we can never be found too light, but at the same time we have to know that all of this is so, so that we become lighter, like feather-down. (1999b: 117)

From this stem attitudes towards one’s own suffering and towards others as fellow sufferers whose time also passes irrevocably. In Steiner’s own case, Judaism offered him the ‘riches’ to transvalue his suffering – a distinctly Talmudic idea, stated, for instance, in Rabbi Joshua’s words that ‘suffering redeems the world’ (Mayer 1963: 533: Taanit 8a), which feeds into both the rationalist strain in Judaism, represented by Maimonides, and the mystical Kabbalah. The other-than-personal ramifications of Steiner’s philosophy inform the delicacy of his anthropology through a recognition that all religion seeks to transvalue human suffering. In this, Steiner clearly shared the religious aesthetic of many of the Oxford School of anthropology, notably the Evans-Pritchard of Nuer Religion, Godfrey Lienhardt of Divinity and Experience or Mary Douglas in her celebratory final chapter of Purity and Danger. Here we rejoin the lectures on ‘Tabu’, for each social system in Steiner’s terms is established in relation

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to regimes of classification defined and supported by an allocation of danger. These both mediate human suffering and transvalue that suffering in order to establish the ultimate truth and values of the society. Moreover, as Michael Mack points out, ‘The Prayer in the Garden’ reveals the Jewish Schechina, the dwelling place of the divinity (Mack 2004: 302). Thus, Steiner affords a vision at once sociological, aesthetic and religious. Certainly not an anthropological theory but a set of grounds to which such theories may be held accountable.

Chapter 18

IN SEARCH OF THE UNIVERSAL MATHESIS

Art and science: I have two irons in my own hellfire: instruments of torture. —Essays and Discoveries All the possibilities that make my life impossible … —Essays and Discoveries

A conclusion compels us towards some resolution of the strands of Steiner’s writings that, given his suspicion of the ambitions of stable syntheses, he would surely have disowned. We offer such only to suggest a (almost mnemonic) device to make the diversity of his work thinkable. Steiner’s writings – to adopt a model he himself introduced – are triangulated by the three disciplines to which he submitted them: anthropology, poetry and political activism. Each of these corresponded to a genre: his anthropology was represented by the academic papers and lectures he composed, and the medium of his expression changed from German to English almost as soon as he relocated from the German- to the English-speaking world; his poetry continued to be written in German throughout his life; while his political writings were composed in both languages almost from the outset but increasingly in English as time wore on. Steiner’s aphorisms sit in the middle of these triangulated disciplines and genres: composed in German to the last (Steiner translated none of them into English) and with complex generic relations to his anthropological, poetic and political writings. Arriving late on the scene of his intellectual production, the aphorisms were located as three-way mediators of his diverse projects and even began to displace poetry as one of them. We might hold on to the image of this disciplinary and discursive space as the locus where he sought a universal mathesis.

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Figure 18.1 Franz Steiner, circa 1952, photographer H.G. Adler. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

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Steiner’s submission to three disciplines of thought each had a temporal trajectory. The anthropological is the most explicit: over time, the dominance of his ethnological interests in ‘culture circles’ theory began to yield (without ever being entirely submerged) to the force of structural analysis in terms of institutions and formal, first Radcliffe-Brownian then Simmelian sociology. His sense of Jewish identity, which informed his political writings, transformed from self-discovery and self-exploration as a young man in Jerusalem – as an ‘Oriental in the West’ – through his later poetic evocation of the hostility of the West to alien presence, and his last depiction of his poetic ‘I’ in terms of the repetitions through recollection of the aspects of himself and of his previous experiences. Politically, the same trajectory leads from the validation of a modernizing Jewish community to the need for a theocratic state in Israel that would recuperate all that was Oriental (in several senses) within the communities in exile. All this suggests formal similarities between the trajectories of Steiner’s three disciplines: from the charting of diffusion to an appreciation of the simultaneous co-presence of the diverse aspects of complex individual and collective entities. Person and society come to be figured in similar ways as the structured (to some degree compartmentalized) expressions of diverse parts mediated through the practice of institutionalized social life. The ways in which complex entities are structured are many, but in reading Conquests we drew particular attention to the idea of repetition. Each repetition establishes the occasion of its recollection as the grounds for further repetition. What goes for individual recollection also applies to social recollection; memory is the result of repetition and recollection. In his aphorisms, Steiner remarked the slippage by which theorists accept that remembering is culturally diverse but assume that forgetting is a common human process (1999b: 233). Societies and individuals forget differently; in their relation to repetition and recollection, myths are carriers of a particular order of not-to-be-forgotten truth (a lesson both for individual and collective subjects). Each of the poles of his disciplinary imagination bordered on danger. For anthropologists, the danger lay in erecting upon the logical groundings of knowledge edifices of prejudice that fed directly into domination. In the history of the West and its others, this tendency nourished a secular drive to expel or destroy alterity, driving it deeper within the individual person (as evidenced by the appeal of psychoanalysis) or into the systematic character of social connections (as in economic collapses, like that of the Weimar Republic,

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which presaged the collapse of values more generally). To this, Steiner contrasted the society, with strong classifications undergirding collectively held values, which held danger at bay outside the social body or incorporated it within through respecting the essential character not just of common humanity but of human difference. On these grounds, the Jewish people were, historically and properly, an Oriental people, and their State should cherish the collective values of a theocratic order. Like Mary Douglas after him, Steiner found himself defending a hierarchical conception of society in terms of social theories devised within a Western individualist setting. Applied to the person (especially his own person through the medium of poetry), the same intellectual trajectory and concern for danger resulted in a depiction of what we might describe, in more contemporary parlance, as a multiple subjectivity conditioned by recollection of the past in current practices and by the need to occupy multiple subject positions in the structured social life of the present. Eventually, the conquests represented by individual striving and achievement must yield to the renunciation of the individual’s will to domination, and to the recognition (at least by a person of faith) of the certainties of death and of a higher power. In the close-to-inexpressible space, as it were, between these syntheses of religious, political and sociological ideas lay the intimation of what H.G. Adler called Steiner’s ‘universal mathesis’, only partly coterminous with Lull’s ‘art’ because it is itself a shifting promise of what his complete immersion in so many forms of knowledge (both of himself and others) and of expression boded. We are not suggesting that a longer life would have rendered this space more lucid, such was not its nature, but through his early death we were denied Steiner’s further triangulation of what he intimated. In the decades following his death, some of Steiner’s Oxford teaching entered mainstream British social anthropology through the writings of a brilliant generation who had been students at the Institute. These were the elements that were easiest to accommodate within the social structural anthropology then dominant. More recent disciplinary attention has enlarged to questions of writing and genre, inter- and transdisciplinarity, power and postcoloniality, the essentially situated quality of knowledge of ourselves, the plight of dislocation, and others … a list that could be extended easily. In doing so, a reinvigorated European anthropology has recuperated philosophical traditions and re-evaluated anthropological paradigms once discarded along the way. Steiner’s life and thought return us to an earlier instance of the ambition to hold ways of knowing

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simultaneously and to consider how to write the outcomes of doing so. In these regards, Steiner’s anthropological outlook is again contemporary, not as the provider of ready-made answers but because, as we noted earlier, of his sense that the question was always more powerful, of greater value and stronger determination, than its answer (Fardon 2014). It seems appropriate to end, but not conclude, by emending Steiner’s judgement of Simmel (Chapter 13) to apply to himself: Not that the problems [Steiner] saw were more important than the answers he found to them – but the problem is the thing that remains in the mind of [Steiner’s] readers, it is carefully constructed, grows, diminishes, disappears, to make place for a hydra of other problems. The problems are the lumps in a slowly moving river of arguing. We watch them dissolving.

REFERENCES

F.B.S.’s Nachlaß is kept at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar. A selection of duplicate manuscripts is also kept at the Archives, King’s College London. Items can be identified by their original box numbers (S1, etc). A bibliography of F.B.S.’s published writings to 1993 will be found in ‘Special Bibliography: The Writings of Franz Baermann Steiner (1909–1952)’, Comparative Criticism 16(1994): 281–92. A selection is listed here. Our bibliography includes Ms drafts and all completed anthropological writings by F.B.S. and a checklist of the typescripts of his aphorisms, as well as selected letters by and to F.B.S., listed – according to the state of his papers – either individually by date, or globally as datable correspondences. The listings do not include notebooks, folders, excerpts and notes. Items in our bibliography can now be researched via the online catalogue of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Schiller-Nationalmuseum Marbach am Neckar at https://www.dla-marbach.de/katalog/ handschriften/ under the signature A:Adler, Hans Günther°Steiner, Franz Baermann. This contains 928 records. Steiner’s professional correspondence has been retained in its original order and can be accessed via A:Adler, Hans Günther°Steiner, Franz Baermann/ Geschäftskorrespondenz. This convolute contains 77 individual records. The majority of the items we quote can be found with ease. A small number cannot be traced by title, only by a keyword. For example ‘Some Remarks on Slavery. Notes for a Lecture’ is catalogued under ‘Notes for Lectures on Slavery’. This is because we usually list separate items, whereas Marbach includes drafts under the same heading. References in the main text preceded by ‘Ms’ and a date are in the first section of the bibliography (‘Manuscript Sources’); all others are in the second section (‘Published Sources’).

References253

Abbreviations H.G.A. = H.G. Adler. F.B.S. = Franz Baermann Steiner. Ms = manuscript. PC = Personal Communication. * = reprinted in Steiner 1999a. ** = reprinted in Steiner 1999b. ? = likeliest date in our judgement.

Manuscript Sources F.B.S.’s Unpublished Writings in the SchillerNationalmuseum, Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar 1934 1936 1936–37 1937a

?1937b 1937–38 1938

1939a 1939b ?1942

**1943 *1944a ?1944b *1946 1947a

**1947b

‘Studien zur arabischen Wurzelgeschichte’. Typescript. 1 + 33pp. Diary I. Quarto exercise book. Blue cover. 56pp. Diary II. English quarto exercise book. Grey-green cover. 48pp. ‘Einführung in die Kunstgeschichte der Naturvölker’ (Introduction to the History of Art of Primitive Peoples). Three lectures. Delivered in Prague. Typescript. 30pp. ‘Völkerkunde für Jugendliche’ (Ethnology for Young People). Draft for a book. Typescript. 21pp. Diary III. Quarto exercise book. Without cover. 48pp. (‘Hundeopfer und Wehengeständnis, ihre Beziehungen zum Nordeurasischen Wiedergeburtsglauben’ [Dog Sacrifice and Parturition Confession, their Relations to North-Eurasian Beliefs in Reincarnation]). Paper delivered to the Congrès International des Sciences Anthropologiques et Ethnologiques, Deuxième Session, Copenhagen 1938. Typescript. 4pp. Diary IV. English quarto exercise book. Red cover. 48pp. ‘Curriculum vitae’. Prepared by F.B.S. Typescript. 5pp. ‘Wir, die in der Oxforder Ortsgruppe der “Association of Jewish Refugees” …’. (We, the Oxford Group of the ‘Association of Jewish Refugees’ …). Undated memoir. 2pp. ‘Brief an Georg Rapp’ (Letter to Georg Rapp). October. Typescript by H.G.A. 13pp. ‘How to Define Superstition? Draft of a Lecture’. Being an Address to the Oxford Graduate Society. Typescript. 7pp. ‘Der Mensch und das Leid’ (Man and Suffering). Typescript. Prepared by H.G.A. 2pp. ‘A Letter to Mr Gandhi’. Typescript. 25pp. ‘Allerlei Feststellungen und Versuche. 1944–47’ (Sundry Essays and Discoveries. 1944–47). 3 vols. Typescript edited under F.B.S’s direction by Esther Frank. ‘Malinowski und Conrad’. Oxford. April. In 1947a.

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?1947c

?1947d

1947e **?1947f **?1948a ?1948b

1948c

1948d

1948e

1949a

*1949b 1949c 1949d 1950a 1950b

References

‘Erinnerung an einen Wendepunkt’ (Memory of a Turning Point). Cycle of aphorisms, preceded by title aphorism, based on 1947a. Pasted Typescript. F.B.S (ed.). 8pp. ‘Feststellungen und Versuche’. Cycle of aphorisms, arranged in 20 sections, mostly titled, based on 1947a. Pasted Typescript. F.B.S. (ed.). 143pp. Includes 3: **‘An dem Rand der Gesellschaftswissenschaften’ (On the Margins of the Social Sciences). 1 + 10pp. Letter to Paul Bruell. 13 April. Typescript. Prepared by Paul Bruell. ‘Memorandum’. Typescript. 7pp. ‘Language, Society, and Social Anthropology’. Typescript. 5pp. Curriculum vitae. Prepared by F.B.S. Request for stipend to study social structure of Jewish villages in the Atlas Mountains. 1pp. ‘Feststellungen und Versuche’. January–June. A Selection. H.G.A. (ed.). Typescript. 26 pp. Contains ** ‘All the possibilities’, ‘More human effort …’, ‘The body is the time …’. ‘Feststellungen und Versuche’. July–October. A Selection. H.G.A. (ed.), 12pp. Contains ** ‘Art and science …’, ‘A lie can slough off the truth …’, ‘The concept of history …’. ‘In ideal terms …’, ‘The chief sociological principle…’, ‘The relation between chronological and morphological series’, ‘The socalled “culture element”…’. ‘Feststellungen und Versuche’. November–December. A Selection. H.G.A. (ed.), 15pp. Contains ** ‘Tacitus is the first …’, ‘It is strange that Simmel …’, ‘A society no more consists …’. ‘A Comparative Study of the Forms of Slavery’, D.Phil. Thesis, Magdalen College, University of Oxford. Typescript. 379pp. The thesis is available in digital form online at the Oxford University Research Archive: https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ ora. ‘On Gutmann’s Das Recht der Dschagga. Seminar Paper’. Oxford. February. Typescript. 1 + 23pp. ‘Some Remarks on Slavery. Notes for a Lecture’. Seminar. Oxford. 9 March. Typescript. 1 + 6pp. ‘Caste Outside India. Notes [for] a Lecture’. Dr Srinivas’s Seminar. Oxford. 6 June 1949. Typescript. 1 + 4pp. ‘Feststellungen und Versuche’. January–February. A Selection. H.G.A (ed.). Typescript. 14pp. Contains **‘Time is power …’. ‘Feststellungen und Versuche’. March–April. A Selection. H.G.A (ed.). Typescript. 29pp. Contains **‘Aristotle …’, ‘The words “structure” and “system” …’, ‘It is misleading to treat herds …’, ‘For the French …’, ‘Descriptive sociology’, ‘Social structure …’, ‘A category …’, ‘The formation of spatial concepts …’,

References255

‘Someone asked the spider …’, ‘When Rasmussen …’, ‘People have two …’, ‘The secret of biology …’, ‘The foundations of sociology …’. 1950c ‘Feststellungen und Versuche’. June. A Selection. H.G.A (ed.). Typescript. 34pp. Contains **‘The sociology of children …’. 1950d ‘Feststellungen und Versuche’. June (1). A Selection. H.G.A (ed.). Typescript. 10pp. 1950e ‘Feststellungen und Versuche’. June (2). A Selection. H.G.A (ed.). Typescript. 10pp. 1950–52a ‘Tabu’. Typescript. 12 Lectures. 1 + 44 + 1pp. **1950–52b Aristotle’s Sociology’. A Lecture at Oxford University. Typescript. 2 + 1pp. ?1951a Theory of Classification. Fragmentary chapter headed ‘Introduction to the Problem and the Terminology Used’. Typescript and handwritten notes. 10 + 11pp. 1951b ‘Lectures on the Division and Organisation of Labour’. Oxford. Hilary. Lectures A–F + 1949a pp. 88–104 with handwritten annotations. Lecture G. Typescript. 38pp. **1951–52 ‘Two lectures on Kinship’. Delivered at the Institute of Social Anthropology, Oxford University. Typescript. 3pp. 1952a Diary V. Bound quarto volume. **1952b ‘Some Problems in Simmel’. Three Lectures delivered at the Institute of Social Anthropology, Oxford University. Typescript. 12pp. ?1953 Anon. ‘Book List. Franz Steiner’. Systematic catalogue of Steiner’s books on Anthropology, Archaeology, Psychology, Social Theory, Sociology, etc. Over 600 items. Typescript. 38pp. 1957 A Prolegomena to a Comparative Study of the Forms of Slavery. Prepared for publication by Paul Bohannan. Edited version of 1949a. Typescript. 198pp.

Unpublished Letters to and about F.B.S. and Memoirs Concerning Him at the Schiller-Nationalmuseum, Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar Adler, H.G. 1953 ‘Brief an Dr [Chaim] Rabin’. (Letter to Dr [Chaim] Rabin). 21 March. 18 double-sided pp. Bergman, Shmuel Hugo 1952 Letters to F.B.S. 22 February and 4 June. Bohannan, Laura and Paul 1949–51 Four letters from the field to F.B.S. Bruell, Paul Letters to H.G.A 11 November, 28 December 1955; 28 March, 4. April 1958. With Transcripts of F.B.S’s letters to Bruell 3 February, 9 August, 9 November 1936; 22 December 1937. *Buchanan, Diana 1953 Letter to H.G.A. 20 June. Canetti, Elias 26 Letters to F.B.S. 18 February 1939–5 July 1952.

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References

Canetti, Veza 23 Letters to F.B.S. ca. 14 August 1939–ca. 14 March 1952. Douglas [Tew], Mary Five letters to F.B.S. ca. 1950–51. Frank, Esther 1964 ‘Erinnerungen an F.B. Steiner’. (Memories of F.B. Steiner). Typescript. Prepared by H.G.A. 4–8 May. 9pp. Forde, Daryll, Seven Letters to F.B.S. written between 25 June 1947 and 15 May 1950. Marcus, Joseph, Four letters to F.B.S., 28 January 1942, 29 June 1942, 26 December 1945, 29 March 1946. Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1942 Testimonial for F.B.S. to the Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior. 6 January.

F.B.S.’s Unpublished Writings and Other Sources in the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford Faculty of Anthropology and Geography Lecture Lists: 1943–4 to 1952–3. Oxford University Gazette. Franz Baermann Steiner ‘Lectures and Papers. Oxford 1949–1952’. Bound Volume. Typescript. Contains ‘Lectures on Tabu’ (229pp.), ‘Division and Organisation of Labour’ (102pp.), ‘On Gutmann’s Das Recht der Dschagga’ (40pp.), ‘Notes on Comparative Economics’ (20pp.). Typescript prepared for publication by Laura and Paul Bohannan.

F.B.S.’s Letters to Veza and Elias Canetti, Private Collection, Zürich Ca. 115 letters written between ca. 11 July 1940 and ca. 14 August 1952. Private Collection, Vienna 20 letters written between 11 February 1951 and 2 June 1952. Manuscripts and typescripts.

Letters and Other Written Communications to the Authors The names of all sources who provided personal communications to us verbally and by fax, e-mail or letter are given in our acknowledgements. We here list additional writings, memoirs etc. Copies of these sources are on deposit in the Archive, King’s College London. Chandavarkar, Anand 1996 ‘Remembering Franz Steiner. Some Random Notes’. Typescript. 3pp. Douglas, Mary 1994 Conversation. 14 January. Typescript. 4pp. Murdoch, Iris 1952–3 References to F.B.S. in Journals. Edited and transcribed by Peter Conradi. 1997 Typescript. 5pp. Pitt-Rivers, Julian 1997 Memoirs. Typescript. Extract. 4pp. Numbered 36–40.

References257

Wright, David 1993 Letter to the authors of 10 July. With copies of three undated letters from F.B.S. Ziegler, Nicolas 1994 ‘Die Versenkung des Flüchtlingstransporters Struma’ (On the Sinking of the Refugee Vessel Struma). Typescript with chart. 8pp.  , 1996 ‘Zu Federbaum iberis semperflorens’ (On the Feathered Tree Iberis Semperflorens). Typescript with drawing and xerox. 3pp.

Published Sources A Selection of F.B.S.’s Published Writings 1935 **1936 **1938 1939a 1939b

1941 1950a 1950b 1950c 1950d 1951 1952 *1954a

**1954b *1954c

Lešehrad, Emanuel Die Planeten, translated from the Czech by Franz B. Steiner, Prague: Orbis. ‘Orientpolitik’, Selbstwehr. Jüdisches Volsksblatt 30(41), Prague, 1 October: 6–7. ‘Gipsies in Carpathian Russia’, Central European Observer 16(5), Prague, 4 March: 70–71. ‘Skinboats and the Yakut “xayik”’, Ethnos 4(3–4): 177–83. ‘Hundeopfer und Wehengeständnis, ihre Beziehungen zum Nordeurasischen Wiedergeburtsglauben’ (Dog Sacrifice and Parturition-confession, their Relations to North-Eurasian Beliefs in Reincarnation). Abstract of a paper delivered to the Congrès International des Sciences Anthropologiques et Ethnologiques, Deuxième Session, Copenhagen 1938. ‘Some Parallel Developments of the Semilunar Knife’, Man 41, January/February, Article No. 3: 10–13. ‘Amharic Language’, Chamber’s Encyclopaedia, London, I, 371. ‘Danakil’, Chamber’s Encyclopaedia, London, IV, 359. ‘Galla’, Chamber’s Encyclopaedia, London, VI, 371. ‘Somalis’, Chamber’s Encyclopaedia, London, XII, 705. Review of J.P. Murdock Social Structure, British Journal of Sociology 2(4): 366–68. Review of Sylvia Pankhurst Ex-Italian Somaliland, British Journal of Sociology 3(3): 280–81. ‘Enslavement and the Early Hebrew Lineage System: An Explanation of Genesis 47: 29–31, 48: 1–16’, Man 54(102): 73–75. ‘Notes on Comparative Economics’, British Journal of Sociology 5(2): 118–29. ‘Chagga Truth: A Note on Gutmann’s Account of the Chagga Concept of Truth in Das Recht der Dschagga’, Africa 24(4): 364–69.

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*1956a 1956b **1957 1964

1967 1983

1988 1992

1995

*1999a

**1999b

2000 2008

2009

References

Unruhe ohne Uhr: Ausgewählte Gedichte, H.G. Adler (ed.), Veröffentlichungen der Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung 3, Darmstadt: Lambert Schneider. Taboo, with a Preface by E.E. Evans-Pritchard, London: Cohen and West. ‘Sätze und Fragen’ (a selection of aphorisms), Neue Deutsche Hefte 29, September, pp. 356–58. ‘Towards a Classification of Labour’, Sociologus NS 7(2): 112–30. Eroberungen: Ein lyrischer Zyklus, H.G. Adler (ed.), Veröffentlichungen Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung 33, Darmstadt: Lambert Schneider. Taboo, with a Preface by E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Harmondsworth: Pelican. ‘Notiz zur vergleichenden Ökonomie’, translation of 1954b by Peter Bumke, in Kramer, Fritz and Sigrist, Christian (eds), Gesellschaft ohne Staat: Gleichheit und Gegenseitigkeit, Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, pp. 85–100. Fluchtvergnüglichkeit: Feststellungen und Versuche, Marion Hermann (ed.), Frankfurt: Flugasche. Modern Poetry in Translation: Franz Baermann Steiner, New Series No. 2, with translations and an introduction by Michael Hamburger, London: King’s College. ‘Feststellungen und Versuche: Aufzeichnungen über Gesellschaft, Macht, Geschichte und verwandte Themen’, Jeremy Adler (ed.), Akzente 42(3): 213–27. Includes ‘Über den Prozess der Zivilisierung’ (On the Process of Civilisation).** Taboo, Truth, and Religion: Franz Baermann Steiner Selected Writings Volume 1, Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon (eds), Oxford: Berghahn. Orientpolitik, Value, and Civilisation: Franz Baermann Steiner Selected Writings Volume 2, Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon (eds), Oxford: Berghahn. Am stürzenden Pfad: Gesammelte Gedichte, Jeremy Adler (ed.), Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Zivilisation und Gefahr: Wissenschaftliche Schriften, Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon (eds), translations from English by Brigitte Luchesi, Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Feststellungen und Versuche: Aufzeichnungen 1943–1952, Ulrich van Loyen and Erhard Schüttpelz (eds), Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag.

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INDEX OF NAMES

Adler, Emil, 26 Adler, H.G., xii, 2, 4, 6, 9, 11–12, 15–16, 19, 23–27, 29, 31, 35–37, 39–40, 43–46, 61–63, 66, 72, 77, 81–83, 85, 91, 93, 95–98, 101, 103, 107, 112, 121–122, 134, 149–150, 159, 166, 204, 217, 221, 226–227, 237–238, 248, 250 Adorno, Theodor W., 5–6, 78, 89, 93–94, 142, 222 Ahad Ha-Am, 36, 137–138, 144 Anderson, Perry, 78 Ankermann, Bernard, 50 Aristotle, 45, 106–107, 148, 157, 191–193, 195, 197 Arnason, Johann P., 18, 25, 81, 181 Arnim, Achim von, 216 Banse, Ewald, 54 Barnes, John, 100 Bastian, Adolph, 47–49 Baudelaire, Charles, 102 Baum, Fritz, 38–39 Baum, Oskar, 38–39 Baxter, Paul, 100–101, 107–108 Bayley, John, 86, 101 Beattie, John, 100, 118 Beidelman, T.O., 118

Benjamin, Walter, 5, 93–94, 221–222 Berghahn, Marion, 79, 219 Bergman, Michael, 31–34, 136, 139, 146, 239 Bergman, Shmuel Hugo, 31–34, 136, 139, 146, 239 Berlin, Sir Isaiah, 78, 91, 193–194 Bismarck, Otto von, 12 Blake, William, 44, 81 Bohannan, Laura, xii, 4, 100–101, 106, 109, 115, 155–156, 179–180, 189, 193, 201, 223, 233 Bohannan, Paul, xii, 100, 106, 118, 150–151, 158, 160, 163, 172–175 Böhme, Jacob, 25–26 Bolzano, Bernard, 14,15 Bowra, Sir Cecil Maurice, 80 Branden, S.G.F., 179 Brecht, Bertolt, 13 Brentano, Clemens, 216 Brentano, Franz, 30-31 Brentano, Lujo, 234 Breton, André, 12, 38 Brod, Max, 13, 23, 38–39 Brokensha, David, 99 Bruell, Paul, 20, 43–44, 62, 72–73, 172

276

Buber, Martin, 19, 26, 31–32, 34–36, 91, 137–138, 140–141 Buddha, 110 Bukharin, Nikolai Ivanovich, 25 Bumke, Peter, 174 Burridge, Kenelm, 145 Buschan, Georg, 48 Butt, Audrey, 100 Canetti, Elias, 2, 5–6, 43–44, 46–47, 80–90, 92, 94–95, 97, 103–104, 108, 110, 115, 139, 153, 176–177, 182, 193, 206, 214, 227, 230 Cˇapek, Josef and Karel, 12 Cassirer, Ernst, 91 Cecil, Lord David, 80 Celan, Paul, 108, 239 Ch’u Tao-Kao, 207 Chandavarkar, Anand, 80, 108–109, 143 Chekhov, Anton, 36 Cohn, Werner, 179 Conrad, Joseph, 67, 121, 202 Conradi, Peter, 102–103 Cook, Captain James, 185–186 Cookson, Christopher, 63–64, 67, 74, 80–81 Cunnison, Ian, 24, 108–109 da Vinci, Leonardo, 228 Dalton, George, 140 Defoe, Daniel, 21–22, 209 Demetz, Peter, 12, 14–15, 18, 38 Derrida, Jacques, 94 Donne, John, 81 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 26–27 Douglas, Mary, 3–4, 22, 61, 64, 69, 74–75, 100, 114, 117–118, 156, 180, 185, 193, 223, 229, 232, 235, 238, 245, 250 Drtikol, František, 19, 39–41 Dubois, Cora, 180 Dumont, Louis, 4, 99–100, 106, 115, 117, 135

Index of Names

Duras, Mary, 39 Durkheim, Emile, 64, 68, 91, 170, 173–174, 183, 195–196 Eichmann, Adolf, 63 Einstein, Albert, 32, 170, 230 Elias, Norbert, 2, 5, 43, 81, 83, 87–88, 103, 139, 181–182 Eliot, George, 234 Eliot, T.S., 81, 105, 171, 202, 204, 207–208, 219 Engelmann, Paul, 9 Erdély, Eva, 79 Evans-Pritchard, Sir E.E. (E.-P.), 1, 3–5, 25, 65–66, 69, 71, 73, 75, 99–100, 105–106, 108–109, 115, 162–166, 168, 172, 179–180, 183, 191, 194, 201, 232, 245 Eysenck, Hans, 78 Filkins, Peter, 2, 16, 81, 97, 103 Firth, Sir Raymond, 5, 66 Fleischli, Alfons, 20, 23–26, 29, 31, 34, 36, 43–44, 62–63, 70, 72, 74, 80, 82, 101, 110–111, 204, 228 Fludd, Robert, 228 Forde, Daryll, 72–75, 109 Fortes, Meyer, 4, 66, 68, 99–101, 109–110, 156, 163 Foucault, Michel, 104 Frank, Esther, 26, 64, 67, 70, 72–73, 77, 79, 82, 85, 110 Frazer, Sir James, 187–188, 201, 223, 232–233 Freud, Sigmund, 91, 180–182, 188, 201, 245 Freund, Gerta, 39 Frobenius, Leo, 50 Gandhi, Mahatma, 35, 134–135, 137, 139–142, 144–145, 152, 225 Gellner, Ernest, 69, 123 Ginsberg, Asher. See Ahad Ha-Am, 137

Index of Names277

Glanc, Tomáš, 30 Gluckman, Max, 99 Göbel, Helmut, 81 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 40, 157, 210–211, 213, 228 Goldberg, David, 137–138 Gombrich, Sir Ernst, 4 Goody, Sir Jack, 66, 99–100 Gordon, A.D.146 Graeber, David, 160–161 Graebner, Fritz, 50 Green, Miranda, 23, 65, 111, 124, 156, 160 Greenberg, Hayim, 141 Grimm, Jakob, 216 Grimm, Wilhelm, 216 Grohmann, Adolf, 36 Gross, Lise and Lotte (F.B.S.’s cousins) 9, 97 Gutmann, Bruno, 107, 229–230, 232–233, 235–236 Habermas, Jurgen, 94, 167 Haddon, Alfred, 48 Hamburger, Michael, 137 Hanuschek, Sven, 2, 44, 81, 83, 85 Hašek, Jaroslav, 12 Hartung, Rudolf, 24–25, 62, 110–111, 216 Harvalík, Záboj, 9 Hatto, A.T., 124 Hegel, G.W.F., 47, 91–92, 193, 225 Heine, Heinrich, 42, 48, 65, 219 Heine-Geldern, Robert, 42, 48, 65 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 47, 202, 210, 216–217 Herzl, Theodor, 138, 144 Hirschfeld, Gerhard, 78–79 Hitler, Adolf, 14, 78, 103, 138 Hobhouse, Kae Faeron, 63 Hocheneder, Franz, 44 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 13, 26–27, 38, 44, 91 Hölderlin, Friedrich x, 91–92, 206–207, 211, 228 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 81, 239

Horkheimer, Max, 6, 93, 142 Huemer, Wolfgang, 31 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 47, 49, 69 Jabotinsky, Vladimir, 135 James, Wendy, 48, 163–164 Janácˇek, Leos, 12 Jonson, Ben, 82 Joseph II, Emperor, 17 Joyce, James, 10 Kafka, Franz, 9–10, 15–16, 23, 26–27, 31–32, 37–39, 79, 82, 93–94, 107, 114, 123, 171, 216–223, 225, 227 Kant, Immanuel, 193 Keats, John, 81 Kesten, Hermann, 13 Kierkegaard, Søren, 235 Kieval, Hill J., 10, 15, 17, 19, 32–33, 37, 138 Klein, Melanie, 78 Kolmar, Gertrud, 34 Koppers, P.W., 42 Kopytoff, Igor, 160 Kornfeld, Paul, 10 Kraus, Karl, 5, 44, 89, 180, 182 Kunert, Günter, 108 Kung, Futse, 26 Kuper, Adam, 4, 46, 67, 69–71, 164 Kuper, Hilda, 66–67 Laing, R.D., 104 Lang, Bernhard, 223 Lanternari, V., 179 Lao Tse, 26, 207 Leibniz, Gottfried, 47, 226 Lenin, Vladimir, 25 Leppin, Paul, 38 Lešehrad (Lešeticky), Emanuel, 39–40 Lessing, G.E., 244–245 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 165, 184–185 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 91 Lewis, loan, 74–75, 78

278

Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 47, 88–89, 180 Liebeschütz, Hans, 79 Lienhardt, Godfrey, 3–4, 99–100, 106, 109, 115, 118, 174, 176, 223, 229, 245 Lips, Julius, 49–50 Lloyd, Jill, 73, 83 Löw, Rabbi, 16 Lowie, Robert, 48, 51 Lull, Ramon, 41, 226, 228–229, 250 Luskácˇová, Markéta, 133 Mach, Ernst, 67, 157, 170, 181, 211–213, 229–230, 241 Mack, Michael, 246 Magnes, J.L., 32, 137, 140–141 Magocsi, Paul Robert, 54, 57 Maimonides, 245 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 3, 5, 29–30, 42, 48–50, 53, 56, 64–67, 69–71, 78, 97, 121–122, 152, 155, 162, 169, 177, 186, 201–202, 211, 218, 227, 232 Malul, Nissim, 138 Mann, Heinrich, 13, 234 Mann, Thomas, 13, 234 Manrique, Jorge, 110, 239 Marcus, Joseph, 9, 44, 69, 91, 104 Marett, R.R., 164, 188 Maria Theresa, Empress, 17 Marx, Karl, 24–25, 174, 183, 202 Masaryk, Tomáš, 12–13, 15, 30 Mauss, Marcel, 174 Mead, Margaret, 185 Meillassoux, Claude, 160 Melville, Herman, 22 Mendelssohn, Moses, 18 Meyer, L.A., 4, 99, 101, 109, 136, 156, 163 Meyrink, Gustav, 17 Middleton, John, 100, 115–116 Miers, Suzanne, 160 Miller-Aichholz, Isabella von, 109

Index of Names

Mills, David, xi, 67, 69, 73, 164, 166 Milton, John, 81 Mombert, Alfred, 26–27, 40 Moses, Stéphanie, 18, 221, 224–225 Murdoch, Iris, 4, 19, 44, 46, 81, 83–85, 101–104, 108, 110, 112–113, 115–116, 170, 189, 229 Murdock, George Peter, 51, 170–171 Namier, Lewis, 78 Needham, Rodney, 100, 109, 118, 163, 180 Neumann, Robert, 73 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 47, 89, 91, 180–181, 193, 230–231, 244 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freinherr von Hardenberg), 89, 91, 203, 229 Ogden, C.K., 69, 232 Orwell, George, 98 Patterson, Orlando, 160 Paudler, Fritz, 29, 36–37 Paulitschke, Philipp, 74–75 Pejša, Robert, 56 Percey, Bishop, 216 Perckhammer, Heinz, 54 Peristiany, J.G., 99, 106 Peters, Emrys, 100, 173 Pina-Cabral, João de, xi, 68 Pitt-Rivers, Julian, 100–101, 110–111 Pocock, David, 100–101, 115, 164 Poe, Edgar Allan, 218 Popper, Karl, 78–79 Rabin, Chaim, 24 Radcliffe-Brown, A.R., 3, 5, 46, 48, 65–75, 81, 99, 135, 149, 152, 162–167, 169, 171, 183, 188, 193–195, 201, 208

Index of Names279

Raglan, Lord, 179 Rapp, Georg, 80, 95, 104, 114, 136, 194, 243–245 Ratzel, Friedrich, 48–49 Richards, I.A., 69, 232 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 10, 23, 26–27, 80, 82, 102, 107, 204, 206, 209–210, 214, 230, 237, 244 Rimbaud, Arthur, 102, 211 Robertson Smith, W., 187–188 Rosenzweig, Franz, 91 Rothenberg, Jerome, 124, 202 Ryding, James, 48 Rypka, Jan, 29 Said, Edward, 12–13, 16, 37, 82, 94, 102, 112, 115, 117, 196, 221, 229–230 Salus, Hugo, 23, 38 Salus, Wolf, 23, 38 Sams, Sir Hubert, 74 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 170 Schapera, Isaac, 5, 223 Schelling, F.W.J., 91–92 Schlegel, Friedrich, 91, 203 Schlenker, Ines, 83 Schmidt, Father, 26, 42 Scholem, Gershom, 32, 36, 76, 93–94, 137, 211, 214, 221–222 Schüttpelz, Erhart, xiv-xv, 159 Seligman, C.G., 71 Seligmann, Lise, 80 Senft, Paul, 104 Serke, Jürgen, 10, 12–13 S.evi, Sabbatai 18 Shimoni, Gideon, 137, 140–141 Sievers, Evelyn Patz, 44, 86 Silesius, Angelus, 25 Silvermann, Lisa, 88 Simmel, Georg, 45, 68, 70–71, 89, 106, 115, 155–156, 165, 168, 170, 174–175, 177, 191–197, 206, 210, 212–214, 227, 229, 233, 251 Slotty, Friedrich, 36 Smith, Adam, 187–188

Sofsky, Wolfgang, 159 Sombart, Werner, 34, 234 Spencer, Dr John, 237 Spender, Stephen, 80 Spengler, Oswald, 91 Spörk, Ingrid, 88 Srinivas, M.N., 4, 68, 72, 99–100, 135, 166 Stadler, Ernst, 64 Steiner, Heinrich (F.B.S.’s father), 18-20, 62-63, 110, 239, 241-42 Steiner, Marta (F.B.S.’s mother), 18-20, 63, 241-41 Steiner, P., 30 Steiner, Suse (F.B.S.’s sister), 11, 19, 39-40 Stifter, Adalbert, 27 Stirling, Paul, 100 Stocking, George W., Jr.4, 39, 68, 73, 163 Styrský, Jindrˇ ich, 41 Summers, Sue, 27, 102–103 Tambimuttu, 80 Tarn, Nathanael, 202 Tawney, R.H., 174 Tew, Mary. See Mary Douglas Tönnies, Ferdinand, 234 Trakl, Georg, 207, 210–211 Troeltsch, Ernst, 234 Trotsky, Leon, 24–25 Tully, Carol, 2, 216 Tylor, Sir E.B., 4, 49 Unger, Erich, 91–92 Van Loyen, Ulrich, 2, 23, 39, 44, 56, 81, 86, 88, 114, 216 Vašicˇek, Zdenék, 37 Vico, Gianbattista, 202 Vogelweide, Walther von der, 114 Voltaire, François, 4 Waley, Arthur, 207 Weber, Alfred, 234

280

Weber, Max, 45, 76, 153, 174, 182, 193, 234 Weißbach, Gerta, 9 Wellesz, Eugen, 80 Werfel, Franz, 23, 38 Whitman, James, 47–48 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 69 Wiemann, Dirk, 73 Wiener, Oskar, 11–12, 14 Wiese, Leopold von, 233 Wilhelm, Richard, 42

Index of Names

Winter, J.C., 80, 180, 228–230, 233 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 5, 9, 69, 76, 78, 89, 182, 232–233, 236 Wordsworth, William, 81, 204, 211 Wright, David, xiii, 61–62, 73, 77, 80 Wright, Edward, 80 Yadin, Yigael, 143

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Note: Franz Baermann Steiner is referred to throughout the index as F.B.S. ad-adam (‘people humanity’), 146. See also A.D. Gordon Africa, 3, 50, 71, 74–75, 101, 111, 121, 140, 144, 148, 150–151, 156, 158, 160, 175, 233 African Political Systems (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard), 163 alterity. See otherness Année sociologique, 68 anti-Semitism, 93, 142 anthropology, x–xi, xiv, xvi, 1–5, 21, 24–25, 27, 29–30, 32, 46–52, 64–67, 70, 72, 76, 78, 81, 88–89, 92, 95, 97–102, 105–106, 108, 110, 118, 121, 134–135, 145, 148–149, 152–153, 160, 162–172, 174, 178, 183–184, 188, 191–192, 197, 201–203, 208–209, 216, 218, 223, 225, 227, 233, 245, 247, 250. See also ethnology; F.B.S., Oxford aphorisms. See under F.B.S. apportionment of detached persons, 156 Arabic, 30–31, 36, 136–139, 142, 146 Arabs, 32, 35, 137, ars combinatoria, 89, 226, 228–229 Ash Wednesday (Eliot), 207–8 Asian Relations Conference, 145 Association of Jewish Refugees, 79, 135 Austria, 12, 17–18, 83, 102, 203

Austro-Hungarian Empire, 2, 12, 67, 122 Balfour Declaration, 142 Bantu, 148, 152, 158 Bar Kochbar, 33 beliefs, 43, 45, 95, 123, 146, 181 Berlin, xiii–xiv, 78, 91, 193–194 Bhagavad Gita, 26, 44, 205, 207 biology, 9, 22–23, 71 Blue and the Brown Books, The (Wittgenstein), 232 Bohemia/Bohemian, 10, 12–15, 17–19, 25, 40, 43, 70, 203, 210 botany, 22–23 Brit Shalom, 32–33, 136–138, 140 British Museum Library, 4, 42, 62, 65, 72, 74, 80, 121, 192 Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoyevsky), 233 Buddhism, 75 capitalism, 149, 174 Carpathians, Carpathian Russia. See Ruthenia caste, 68, 72, 143, 151–153 Castle, The (Das Schloss) (Kafka), 26 Central Europe, 9, 12, 78, 126, 160, 162, 227 Central European Observer, 53–54 Chambers Encyclopaedia, 75 Charles University of Prague, 29 China, 25, 54, 146, 148

282

Chinese, 25–26, 30, 47, 54, 66, 68, 80, 145–146, 214 Christianity, 33, 38, 88, 111, 143 civilization xv, 18, 21, 35, 42, 45, 48, 76–77, 85, 93, 111, 119, 141–145, 152, 157, 168, 178–187, 189–190, 207, 210 Civilizing Process, The (Elias), 181 collectivism, 92, 144, 212 colonialism, 10, 25, 140, 142, 204, 215 comparative, xii, xvi, 3–4, 14, 29, 31, 33, 47, 49, 51–52, 64, 70–71, 97, 100, 106, 118, 148–150, 152–153, 160, 164–168, 170–172, 174, 183–185, 189–190, 216, 223, 226 comparative philology, 29, 31, 152 comparative sociology, 171, 183–185, 189 concentration camps, 181–182 contagion, 180 Copenhagen, 43, 65 cosmology, 171 cosmos, 214, 218 crowds, 6, 81–82, 85, 90 Crusades, 142, 182 ‘culture circles’, 3, 37, 50–52, 57, 65, 69, 75–76, 121, 211, 227, 229, 234, 249 customs, 205 Czechoslovak Government in exile, 64, 71, 74 Czechoslovakia, 12–14, 37, 53–57, 122 Dalmatia, 203, 205, 210 danger, 41, 76, 85, 92, 107, 114, 117, 145, 171, 174, 180–186, 189–190, 202, 235, 238, 245–246, 249–250 deconstruction, 1, 90, 94, 184 Der Golem (Meyrink), 17 Deutsche Dichter aus Prag (Wiener), 12 dialectics, 225, 231

Index of Subjects

Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklärung) (Adorno and Horkheimer), 6, 93, Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, A (Malinowski), 211 diffusionism, 46, 51 Divinity and Experience (Lienhardt), 100, 118, 245 Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies) (Rilke), 204, 206, 209–210, 244 economics, xii, 3–4, 106–107, 172–178, 195, 227 education, 20, 35–36, 45, 54, 57, 59, 122, 128, 139, 228 Egypt, 31, 134, 138, 144, 146, 223, 225 elephants, 65, 97, 202 Empedokles (Hölderlin), 228 England and English, ix, xiv–xv, 2, 5–6, 10, 24, 30–31, 43–44, 46, 48, 52–54, 61–67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77–78, 80–81, 83, 86, 103, 108, 110–111, 123, 126, 136–137, 139, 142–143, 160, 172, 181, 186, 201, 207, 214, 218–220, 228, 232–233, 247 Enlightenment, 1, 6, 17–19, 47, 91, 93, 180, 207, 244 Eskimos, 52, 65, 175, 181–182 ethnography, 1, 30, 49, 71, 121, 166, 169, 181, 183, 186–187, 230 ethnology, 1, 3, 29, 36–37, 42–43, 45–49, 54, 65–66, 69–71, 75–76, 89, 122, 150, 168, 171, 210–211, 227, 234, 238 ethnopoetics, xiv, 124, 202 etymology, 31, 69, 75 evolutionism, 49, 70, 187 exile, 5, 10, 13, 20, 59, 62, 64, 70–72, 74, 78–79, 81–83, 85, 87–89, 91, 93, 95, 97, 104, 107, 110, 117, 134, 159, 201, 206–207, 210, 220, 228, 240, 249

Index of Subjects283

existentialism, 102, 189, 235 Exodus, 18, 188, 224–225, 240 faith, 16, 21, 75, 86, 88, 90, 92, 101–102, 140, 210, 231, 250 family unit, 107, 154, 223 Faust (Goethe), 40 fieldwork, 42, 45, 52–53, 57, 59, 97, 100, 108, 121–123, 166 Final Solution, 63. See also pogroms, Shoah First World War, 2, 12, 19, 37, 56, 122, 140, 191, 193 folksong, 216, 218 Four Quartets (Eliot), 204, 207–208 F.B.S. anthropological lectures and writings, xiv, 1, 42–43, 45–46, 54, 68–69, 71, 75, 99, 106, 115, 117, 121–122, 145, 151, 163–165, 167–170, 180, 182–185, 191–192, 194, 197, 201, 224, 245, 247 ‘Chagga Law and Chagga Truth’, 229–230, 233, 241 ‘Comparative Study of the Forms of Slavery, xii, 70, 100, 148 ‘Discourse on Aristotle’s “theory of slavery”’, 157 ‘Enslavement and the Early Hebrew Lineage System’, xii, 107, 222–223 ‘How to Define Superstition?’, 75–80 ‘Introduction to Ethnology for Young People’, 43 ‘Language, Society, and Social Anthropology’, 121, 169 ‘Notes on Comparative Economics’, xii, 106, 174 Taboo, 118, 145, 169, 179, 182–183, 189–190, 202, 229, 233, 238 ‘Towards a Classification of Labour’, xii, 151, 172, 202, 230

aphorisms, xii–xiii, 2, 5–6, 17, 21, 28, 33, 45, 70, 82, 85, 88–89, 93, 107–108, 123, 145, 159, 162, 202–203, 208, 222, 227–230, 247, 249 ‘All the possibilities ...’, 247 ‘Cityscapes’, 228 ‘Conrad and Malinowski’, 67, 202 ‘Education and Illusion’, 228 ‘On the Process of Civilization’, xv, 35, 42, 76–77, 85, 93, 142, 145, 152, 180, 182, 186, 190 appearance, 10, 50, 54, 80, 99, 108, 114, 161, 203, 207 career, 3, 20, 22–23, 39, 41, 43, 45, 69–70, 94, 110, 133, 193 character, 5, 10, 27, 34–35, 50, 63, 69–70, 83, 91, 103–105, 143, 149, 151, 153, 155, 171, 181, 196, 219, 249–250 curriculum vitae, 47, 54, 71 death, xv, 1, 4, 19, 21–22, 24, 43, 61, 64, 81, 83, 85–86, 89, 94–95, 102–105, 107, 112, 116–117, 121, 137, 139, 160, 168, 174, 179, 188, 191, 193, 197, 205, 212, 218, 220, 225, 239, 242–243, 250 detachment, xii, 150, 155–156, 158–159, 169, 212 dissertation, xii, xiv, 26, 65, 67, 77, 99–100, 105–107, 135, 139, 148–150, 152, 157–158, 172, 208, 214 D.Phil., 49, 72, 74, 77, 79, 100 family. See Friedrich, Martha and Suse Steiner (Name Index) friendships, 41–42, 79, 109. See H.G. Adler, Canetti, Cookson, Murdoch (Name Index) intellectual development, 92, 208 isolation, 3, 10, 73, 81, 110, 189, 210, 235

284

letters, xiii, xv, 38, 43–44, 69, 74, 84, 86, 100, 111, 114, 137, 140–141, 162 to Bruell, 62, 73 personal mythology, 20–21, 206 poems, xi, 24, 44, 80, 83, 85, 103, 107–108, 110, 112, 117, 122, 126, 133, 202–203, 205, 216–218, 237–238 ‘Above Death’ (‘Über dem Tod’), 116–117 ‘Capturing Elephants’ (‘Elefantenfang’), 65, 97, 202 Collected Poems, 203, 237 Conquests (Eroberungen), xv, 20–23, 26, 33, 37, 53, 85, 89, 92, 102, 105, 107, 123, 136, 139, 157, 201–215, 218, 222–223, 229, 241, 243–244, 249 ‘Farewell to Jerusalem’ (‘Abschied von Jerusalem’), 29 In the Niches of Babylon (In Babylons Nischen), 103, 108 ‘In the Wharfs’ (‘In den Werften’), 239 ‘Kafka in England’, 10, 79, 107, 123, 218 ‘Leda’, 107, 202, 237 ‘Song of rest ...’ (‘Lied von der Ruhe...’), 217 ‘Memory of a Turning Point’, 230, 233 ‘Prayer in the Garden’ (‘Gebet im Garten’), 32, 104, 110, 238 ‘Ruthenian Village’ (‘Ruthenisches Dorf’), 53, 134 Variations, 67, 85, 202, 216–217 poetry, xi, xv, 2, 5, 9, 13, 23, 26–28, 32–33, 39, 41, 43–44, 53, 65, 77, 80, 83, 86, 88–89,

Index of Subjects

92, 95, 102, 107–108, 110, 112, 123, 126, 162–163, 166, 201–203, 206, 208, 211, 214, 216–218, 222, 225, 227, 230, 237, 242, 247, 250 political activities, 79 scholarship, xi, xiii, xv, 2, 6, 16–17, 21, 26, 31, 33, 36, 44, 52, 62, 67, 78, 81, 118, 138, 142, 168, 183, 185, 201–203, 222, 225, 229, 234 student days, 29, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41 Frankfurt School, 5, 93–94, 142 ‘Franz Steiner Remembered’ (Wright), 61 Freie Gruppe Prag, 39 Functionalism, 50, 68–69, 71 Geist, 47 genealogy, xi, 195 German ethnology, 48 German School, 235 German State Gymnasium, 23 Gesellschaft und Gemeinschaft (Tönnies). 234 Gita. See Bhagavad Gita God, xi, 13, 22, 34–35, 86, 88, 93, 102, 164, 182, 187, 205, 238, 242–243 gypsies, 53–55, 57–59, 122–124, 126, 139, 144, 206 Hebrew/Hebrews, xii, xiv, 3, 16, 20, 24, 30–34, 75, 107, 134, 136, 138–139, 144, 146, 187, 207, 213, 222–225, 236 Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 31, 136, 138, 146 Helian (Trakl), 211 Hinduism, 211 holocaust. See Final Solution, Shoah Hungary, 12, 17–18, 53, 56, 122 idealism, 25, 46, 91–93, 203 impurity, 188 International African Institute, 74

Index of Subjects285

International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, Brussels (1948), Copenhagen 1938), 43, 107 Internment camps. See concentration camps Islam, 33, 35, 146 Israel, 59, 93–94, 143, 145–147, 249 Jerusalem, x, xiv, 9, 24, 29, 31–35, 46, 56, 61, 75, 136, 138–140, 146, 162, 211, 230, 249 Jewish Brigade Groups, 135 Jewish Chronicle, xiv, 140 Jews, 13–19, 32–37, 44, 53, 57, 59, 63, 70, 79, 88, 98, 103, 109, 124, 126, 128, 135–147, 159–160, 187, 206, 220, 239–240, Jews as, 34, 59, 136, 138, 142 joking relationships, 69 Judaism, xi, 15–16, 18–19, 32–33, 36, 75–76, 88, 109, 134, 136, 193, 211, 214, 245 Kabbalah, 211, 222, 245 Kaddish, 243 Kapital, Das (Marx), 202 kinship, 69, 85, 106, 118, 141, 148, 154–161, 169, 192, 214, 223–224, 232 Knaben Wunderhorn, Des (The Youth’s Magic Horn) (Arnim/ Brentano), 216 Kombinatorik. See ars combinatoria Kommunistische Jugend (Communist Youth Organization), 24 Kristallnacht, 140 Kulturindustrie, 213 Kultur Kreis. See ‘culture circles’ labour, xii, 51, 59, 68, 73, 79, 82, 85, 106, 123, 136, 148–151, 154–156, 158–159, 172–173, 175, 177–178, 202, 224, 230

language, ix, xiv, xvi, 5, 13, 18–19, 29, 34, 40, 46–48, 51, 54, 59, 62, 67, 69, 75–76, 95, 106, 108, 111, 121, 126, 139, 153, 168–169, 191–192, 203, 210, 214, 227, 229, 232, 236, 244 language games, 69, 232 languages, 16, 20, 29–30, 47, 56, 69, 123, 152, 162, 184, 186, 247 linguistic philosophy, 181 linguistics, 3, 29–31, 46–47, 227 London, xii, xiv–xvi, xviii, 2–3, 10, 42–44, 48, 61–62, 64–66, 72, 79–80, 84, 97, 107, 121, 140, 145, 206–207, 210 London School of Economics, 3 magic, 67, 71, 187–188, 233–234 Man without Qualities, The (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) (Musil), 44, 108, 158 ‘Marina’ (Eliot), 207 marriage, 18, 63, 114, 153, 156, 188 Marxism, 1, 3, 5, 22, 25, 27 Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power), 6, 81–82, 85, 90, 227. See also Canetti (Name Index) master-slave dialectic, 225 ‘mathesis, universal’, 27–28, 46, 165–166, 226–227, 237, 247, 250 Meaning of Meaning, The (Ogden and Richards), 69, 232 memory, xiii, 9, 20–21, 23, 52, 70, 110, 115, 123–124, 204–206, 208, 210, 214, 221, 230, 233, 249 methodology, 1, 91, 121, 123, 171, 197, 208, 228, 237 Middlemarch (Eliot), 234 Moby Dick (Melville), 22, 230 modernism, 12, 39, 145, 207, 211, 217 modernity, 16–17, 85, 91, 138– 139, 142, 218, 222, 244

286

modernization, 12, 16, 18, 35, 54, 144 Moravia, 14, 17, 19 multi–ethnicity, 14 Munich Agreement, 14 mysticism, 25, 27–28, 39, 107, 159, 221–222 myth/mythology, 15, 26–27, 90–93, 203, 205–206, 209–214, 218, 221–223, 225, 231, 236–238, 241 mythology of reason, 91–92, 203 nationalism, 23, 137, 146, 217 Nazis/Nazism, 3, 13, 18, 54, 62, 73, 98, 138, 218, 220 Nirvana, 205, 208, 215, 241 non-violence, 140, 142 Old Testament, xiv, 75, 188 Oldest System-Programme of German Idealism (Ältestes Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus) (Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling), 91 Orbis, 40, 54 Oriental collectivism, 92, 144 Orientalism, 34, 94, 137, 144–145 otherness, xi, 171, 183–184, 212, 233–234 Oxford, x, xii, xiv, 1–6, 24–26, 30, 36, 45–46, 48, 51–53, 61, 63–65, 67–69, 71–77, 79–81, 89, 91–93, 99–115, 117–118, 135, 145, 148, 151, 153, 161–164, 166–168, 179, 181, 187–188, 192–193, 195, 197, 204, 206, 229, 233, 235, 245, 250 Oxford anthropology, 92, 168, 188 Oxford School, 45, 71, 76–77, 162, 193, 195, 229, 235, 245 Palestine, 3, 31–33, 35–36, 41, 46, 54, 109, 122–123, 136–138, 140–141, 144–146, 203, 205, 209–210, 240

Index of Subjects

Paris, 42 participant research, 121 Patria, 240 Pentateuch, 151, 187–188, 222 perspectivism, 230 philology, 29, 31, 36, 46–47, 75, 152, 168, 227 Philosophical Investigations, The (Wittgenstein), 236 Planeten, Die (Lešehrad/F.B.S. translator), 39 pogroms, 14, 16, 94 polis, 192 Polynesia, 185–186 power, 4, 6, 12–13, 33, 36, 45, 81–82, 85, 90, 93, 95, 111, 117–118, 134, 138, 143, 153, 157, 161, 181–182, 186, 205, 207, 220, 225, 237–238, 250 Prague, viii, x, xiii, 2–3, 9–20, 23, 27, 29–33, 36–39, 41–43, 49, 52, 54, 56–57, 61–63, 79, 112, 114–115, 122–123, 126, 162, 202, 207, 219–220, 227–228, 230, 242 Praga magica, 10 Prozeß, Der (The Trial) (Kafka), 20 Psalms, 207 psychoanalysis, 78, 182, 188, 222, 249 psychology, 38, 45, 47–48, 78, 157, 181, 214, 235 punishment, 104, 152 purity, 107, 117, 180, 185, 202, 207, 235, 238, 245 Purity and Danger (Douglas), 117, 180, 185, 235, 238, 245 Pygmies, 53, 101, 158 rationalism, 18, 67, 91, 186 ‘Raven, The’ (Poe), 218 reason, 29, 39, 52, 70, 79, 91–93, 110, 123, 157, 167, 169, 203, 236, 245 reciprocal subordination, 22, 123 recollection, 183, 249–250 reflexivity, 173, 206, 235

Index of Subjects287

refugees, 79, 103, 135–136, 219, 239–240 relativity, 76, 170, 229–230 religion, xii, 3, 26–27, 32–35, 76, 88–89, 91, 95, 102, 114, 135, 163–164, 166, 176, 179, 187–188, 195, 203, 206–207, 209–211, 214–215, 218, 222, 231, 243–245 Religion and Society among the Coorgs (Srinivas), 135 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 20–22, 46, 202, 205, 209–210, 213, 230 Roman Catholicism, 163 Roman Elegy, Fifth (Römische Elegie, V) (Goethe), 213 Roman Empire, 412 Romanticism, 47, 91, 203, 218 Romany, 55–56, 59, 123, 134 Roter Studentenbund (Red Student Union), 24 Russia, 53–54, 58, 122, 240 Ruthenia, viii, xv, 42–43, 52–58, 122–124, 128–129, 133, 144, 162, 202, 230 sacrifice, 43, 51, 70, 82, 172, 176–177, 205, 209, 211, 222–223, 225, 234 satyagraha, 140. See non-violence Schicksalsgemeinschaft, 136 Scotland, 80, 109, 203 serfdom, 17, 152, 154 servile, 106, 148–155, 158, 160, 173 Shoah, 44, 95, 103, 108, 134, 139, 159, 239–240 ‘Sin of Cain, The’ (Shapera), 223 slavery, xii, 3–4, 30, 69–72, 75, 82, 85, 95, 97, 100, 118, 135, 148–161, 172–174, 184–185, 203, 223–224 social inequality, 150–155 social Linneanism, 171 Social Structure (Murdock), 170 Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, The (Troeltsch), 234

sociography, 165, 197 Soziologie (Simmel), 68, 156, 212 Spain, 110–112, 114–115, 203 spheres of exchange, 175, 177 Steiner, Franz Baermann (1909– 52). See under F.B.S. Stimmen der Völker (Voices of the Peoples) (Herder), 26, 216 ‘Stranger, The’ (Simmel), 155–156 structural situations, 232–233, 236–237 structuralism, 1, 69, 230, 237 Struma, 239 Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia. See Ruthenia suffering, 3, 26, 61, 63, 70, 95, 101, 103–105, 116, 123, 136, 139, 158, 220, 237–239, 241, 243–246 sufferings, 63, 95, 104, 134, 242, 244–245 superstition, 75–77, 80, 85, 92, 150, 162, 188, 230, 233 sympathy, 14, 25, 111, 164–165, 220, 244 syncretism, 3, 26 taboo, xii, 1, 4, 22, 25, 69–70, 114, 118, 134, 145, 150, 159, 169, 173, 178–190, 202, 224, 229, 233, 238 tabu, xvi, 69–70, 75, 106, 117, 121, 145, 170, 179–180, 182–183, 186, 189–190, 201, 245 Tao te King, 166 terminology, 52, 69, 85, 148, 173, 176, 184 theocracy, 145 Theresienstadt 1941–1945: Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft (H.G. Adler), 93, 95, 97 Third Reich, 140, 159, 176, 207 Todesfuge (Death Fugue) (Celan), 239 Torquato Tasso (Goethe), 228 Totemism (Le totemisme aujourd’hui) (Lévi-Strauss), 70, 184, 187

288

transformation (Verwandlung), xii, 85, 177, 227, 241, 243 transgression, 134, 180, 189–190 translation, xiii, xv, 53, 72, 74, 160, 164–166, 168–169, 176–177, 184, 203, 207–208, 216, 224, 234–235 Turkey, 140, 144 Unbehagen an der Kultur, Das (Freud) 180 United States, 3, 9, 43, 62, 67, 78, 194 values, 1–3, 15, 17, 21–22, 27, 54, 89, 95, 118, 123, 143–145, 149, 153, 156, 159, 173–174, 176–177, 180, 182–183, 185, 187, 189–190, 197, 219–220, 230, 233, 246, 250 Victorian, 186–187 Vienna, xiii, 3, 9, 31, 42–44, 61–62, 87, 122, 126, 162, 180

Index of Subjects

Viennese, 44, 46, 64–65, 71–72, 76, 133 Volk, xi, 47, 217 Volksgeist, 47 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 202, 207 Weimar Republic, 88, 174, 176–177, 249 ‘Wendung’ (Rilke), 230 Western and non-Western models, 233 witnessing, 236, 242–243 Zaddik, 214 Zauberberg, Der (The Magic Mountain) (Mann), 234 Zionism/Zionists, xiv, 3, 5, 19, 32–34, 36, 46, 79, 109, 134–135, 137–141, 143, 145, 147 Zur Genealogie der Moral (Nietzsche), 180