Homer, Humanism, Holocaust: Jewish Responses to the Crisis of Enlightenment During World War II 3031114728, 9783031114724

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Homer, Humanism, Holocaust Jewish Responses to the Crisis of Enlightenment During World War II

Adam J. Goldwyn

Homer, Humanism, Holocaust

Adam J. Goldwyn

Homer, Humanism, Holocaust Jewish Responses to the Crisis of Enlightenment During World War II

Adam J. Goldwyn North Dakota State University Fargo, ND, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-11472-4    ISBN 978-3-031-11473-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11473-1 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Pattern © Harvey Loake This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

[…] the legends cannot be trusted— their source is the survivor, the one who has been abandoned. —Louise Glück, “Triumph of Achilles” (1985)

For Freya

Acknowledgments

The research for this book was begun when I was a Humboldt Fellow at the Institut für Byzantinistik und Neogräzistik at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster in 2019–2021. I am grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung for granting me the fellowship; to the American Friends of the AvH, which provided supplementary funding through the William M. Calder III Fellowship in 2019 and 2020; and to Professor Michael Grünbart for hosting me at the University of Münster. Thanks as well to Nikos Kontogiannis, who supported me with a spring fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks in 2022. James Nikopoulos and Elena Boeck provided essential feedback at the early stages of writing, and James I.  Porter and Seth Schein provided valuable feedback at the last stages. Over the past decade, I have been fortunate to have had the mentorship of Ingela Nilsson, to whom all thanks always seem inadequate.

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Contents

1 Homer,  Humanism, and the Jews on the Cusp of World War II  1 2 Nihilism,  Thoughtlessness, and the Bourgeois Odysseus: Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and the Failure of Enlightenment Humanism 25 3 Reflections  on a Damaged Life: Hermann Broch’s Mythical Method and Rachel Bespaloff’s On the Iliad 45 4 Odysseus’  (Memory) Scar: Geoffrey Hartman’s and Erich Auerbach’s Readings of Homer Through the Holocaust 71 5 Hélène  Cixous’ and Daniel Mendelsohn’s Postmemory Scars: The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century105  Appendix 1: Jean Wahl’s Preface to the First French Edition of Rachel Bespaloff’s On the Iliad (1942)131 Bibliography135 Index147 xi

CHAPTER 1

Homer, Humanism, and the Jews on the Cusp of World War II

Abstract  This chapter examines how Jewish writers during World War II wrestled with the crisis of Enlightenment represented by Nazi imperialism and Jewish genocide. These Jewish writers turned to foundational texts of the Enlightenment, the Homeric epics, to understand how the promise of Enlightenment rationalism and humanism had resulted in genocide, dislocation, and exile rather than assimilation and an end to antisemitism. Their experiences during the World War II shaped their readings of the epics about the Trojan War, which they came to see as the first literary representations of genocide. Instead of poems about the glory of heroic warriors, they reread them as poems of the grief, suffering, scars, and death experienced by war victims, then and now. Keywords  Homer • Pierre Vidal-Naquet • Arnaldo Momigliano • George Steiner • Holocaust • Enlightenment In 1827, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was commissioned by the French King Charles X to adorn a ceiling in the Louvre. The painting, “The Apotheosis of Homer,” modeled after that of the Hellenistic sculptor Archelaus of Priene (c. 300 BCE), features the great bard of classical antiquity enthroned in front of a temple bearing his name; the catalogue entry at the first exhibition of the painting read: “Homer receiving © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Goldwyn, Homer, Humanism, Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11473-1_1

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homage from all the great men of Greece, Rome and modern times. The Universe crowns him, Herodotus burns incense.”1 In the painting, Homer is depicted as a god, his epics the fountainhead and highest achievement of European arts—represented in the painting not just by the presence of his heirs in epic, Dante and Vergil, but also by dramatists such as Molière and Racine, by composers such as Mozart and Gluck, and painters and sculptors such as Poussin and Michelangelo. Homer, at the top of the pyramid of adoring great men (and one woman, Sappho), is, metaphorically and literally, simultaneously the source and apex of human achievement. Seated at his feet are two women, one holding a sword, the other an oar, allegorical embodiments of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two poems on which his fame rests. Over one hundred years later, Salvador Dalí offered his own “Apotheosis of Homer” (c.1944/1945); in place of a great temple, however, is a slab of marble with a disfigured horse’s head (perhaps the Trojan horse?) melting into the ground; a human face juts out through the marble (perhaps one of the Greeks hiding within?) or is perhaps about to be swallowed by it. The central image of the painting shows the moment of Phaethon’s fall: he has borrowed his father Helios’s chariot to draw the sun around the earth but has lost control, and Dalí’s painting freezes man, horses, and chariot at the moment of the fatal and chaotic plunge into the sea that threatened to incinerate the whole world.2 In place of the Homer-as-god in Ingres’ painting, Dalí has placed a failed apotheosis: Phaethon had tried to ride to the heavens, to make his own apotheosis, but had overestimated his abilities, and Dalí captures him at the moment he achieves his greatest height, also the moment at which he falls to his death. In the lower-right corner of the painting, darkened by shadow, lies a female nude, prostrate like a corpse or a woman overcome with grief. She covers her eyes, as though shielding herself from the nightmare of history playing out around her. This alternate vision of the poet and his place in history is a reflection of the time in which it was produced, “about the time the first atomic bombs exploded over Japan in 1945,”3 and the painting shows what it 1  Ingres (2020: n.p). For a detailed description of Ingres’ Apotheosis and its background, see Porter (2021: 44–56); for an analysis of the Apotheosis of Archelaus and its relation to Ingres’ painting, see Porter (2021: 99–103). 2  For which, see Ov. Met.2.90–110. 3  Shapiro (2020: 561); see also Von Solms (2020: 71).

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would be like had an atomic bomb—Phaethon falling from the sky with the full force of the sun—landed in the middle of Ingres’ templescape: fragments of stone, shrieking animals, strewn and charred corpses, emaciated human forms, dying, dead, or mourning. But it is no nightmare; the painting’s alternate title, “Diurnal Dream of Gala,” identifies the dreamer, the one who looks away from this reality, as Dalí’s wife, while the word “diurnal” suggests it was not a sleeping dream, but a waking one. Ingres shows European civilization in all its glory, but, Dalí suggests, the apotheosis of this Homeric way of being in the word can be found in the shattered cities and broken bodies of World War II, indeed, even the Holocaust itself: behind the female nude is an open tomb, and a disfigured body next to it is melting, while in front of her is a broken piece of stone with Hebrew letters inscribed on it. The apotheosis of Homer, Dalí suggests, is Auschwitz. Dalí’s vision of Homeric apotheosis offers a premonition of the “nuclear mysticism”—Dalí’s combination of his intense interest in science, math, and technology with his interest in Catholicism and spirituality—that would characterize his art after the War. Dalí’s (re)vision of Ingres’ apotheosis uses the image of Homer to visually dramatize the disillusionment of wartime intellectuals with the broader aims of the Enlightenment that had animated humanistic discourse for centuries—what the Jewish-born Catholic-convert Hermann Broch called “these one hundred and fifty years of disintegration”4—the very tradition charted by Ingres in an artistic genealogy that stretched from Homer to his own era. For Albert Boime, “the Apotheosis was consistent with Ingres’s love of authority and pretense to omniscience,”5 with the enthroned Homer surveying, both temporally (in terms of classical reception) and geographically (in terms of European culture) all that lies before him. It is a totalitarian vision in line with the imperial politics of his patron, the French Restoration King Charles X: one man, overseeing all; one gaze, imposing his hegemonic interpretation.6 Boime argues that “the work served the purpose of the royal patron creating a cultural analogue to his vision of hierarchical social and political stability […] with Homer’s dominion in the cultural realm  In his introduction to Bespaloff’s On the Iliad, 22.  Boime (2004: 227). 6  Boime argues that the painting “effectively portray[s] the exercise of omnipotent rule in which a single, all-powerful sovereign holds in submission all the creatures and artifacts subject to his reign” (2004: 230). 4 5

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equated with that of Charles X in the political.”7 Dalí’s Apotheosis rejects both visions; the gazer is an injured and grieving woman, her gaze is occluded. The humanistic tradition that began with Homer ends in holocaust (its literal definition or the burning of everything) and in the Holocaust, the genocide of the Jews during World War II. This book explores one aspect of the multifaceted responses of Jews to the Holocaust, examining how a certain class of largely European, largely secular Jewish intellectuals, steeped in the Classical tradition and scarred by their own personal and collective experiences of the War, were able to articulate a counternarrative to the prevailing hermeneutics of Homeric triumphalism. Despite growing up rooted in an Ingresian tradition of Homeric interpretation, many Jewish intellectuals found that the War had transformed a unifying vision of the past—one that now included the integration of Jews into secular history in ways that mirrored the assimilation of Jews into contemporary European society—into something more resembling Dalí’s fragments of shattered stone.8 Indeed, the painting could be said to have been made, as the Homerist and philosopher Rachel Bespaloff wrote about the poetry of her fellow Francophone-Jewish émigré friend and mentor Jean Wahl, “against the most shattered background of history.”9 Reflecting on the war years in 1990, George Steiner, the French-born son of Viennese Jews who emigrated to America in 1940 and who wrote frequently about Homer and his epics over the course of the next seven decades until his death in 2020, wrote that “with the Second World War, recognitions seem to alter. The shattered, burnt cities are still perennial Troy.”10 Along with cities and people, World War II also shattered the great political promise the Age of Enlightenment held for European Jews like Broch, Steiner, Bespaloff, and Wahl: citizenship in a multiethnic or  Boime (2004: 227–28).  Leah Flack notes this shift in Homeric interpretation in the modernist long poems written during the two world wars, arguing that “at the earlier moment [e.g. World War I], soldiers and citizens tended to see in the Iliad not the dehumanizing machinery of force” which, she writes, Simone Weil saw in its use during World War II, “but rather its valorization and justification. Early in World War I, the Iliad provided a heroic framework through which modern nations, soldiers, and writers projected cultural significance onto the war” (2015: 1). 9  Monique Jutrin used the phrase, “Sur le fond le plus déchiqueté de l’histoire,” for her edition of the collected letters of Bespaloff to Wahl. Jutrin writes about her choice to give the book that subtitle in Jutrin (2006: 260). 10  Steiner (1990) 7 8

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assimilated and thus deracinated polity, which, in their case, meant replacing Jewish exclusion with universalized citizen-participation in the life of the nation.11 In 1932, as political violence and antisemitism surged in Germany in parallel with Nazi political victories that would make Adolf Hitler Chancellor a year later, Broch’s friend, frequent correspondent, and fellow German-Jewish emigrée, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, published “The Enlightenment and the Jewish Question,” which summed up the attitude of many of her peers. In contrast to the Zionists, who saw their future in self-determination in a sovereign homeland elsewhere, Arendt still held out hope for the possibility of Enlightenment values to affirm the place of Jews in European society: “The modern Jewish question dates from the Enlightenment; it was the Enlightenment—that is, the non-­Jewish world—that posed it. Its formulations and its answers have defined the behavior and the assimilation of Jews.”12 For Arendt, what defines the connection between Jewishness, Enlightenment, and assimilation is reason. The early part of “The Enlightenment and the Jewish Question” is dedicated to an analysis of the friendship of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) and Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), the former the great German advocate of the Enlightenment and the latter the great Jewish exemplar of it. Arendt argues that “for Lessing, reason, which all humans share in common, is the foundation of humanity. It is the most human connection that binds Saladin with Nathan and the Templar. It alone is the genuine connection linking one person with another. The emphasis of humanness based on what is reasonable gives rise to the ideal of tolerance and to its

11  Steiner recognized in Broch this revisionist tendency; the quote above comes from a review of S.J. Harrison’s Oxford Readings in Vergil’s Aeneid, in which Steiner laments the absence of any mention of Broch or “Broch’s epic counterpoint,” his novel The Death of Vergil (about which, see below {000}, an omission which Steiner considers inexcusable in a book devoted to educating “anyone seeking to experience the Aeneid now,” with “now” referring to the postwar period. 12  Arendt (2007a: 3). Arendt expands on the tensions between assimilation and Zionism in a contemporaneous essay “Antisemitism,” e.g., in her discussion of the political situation in Germany at the time she wrote the essay, “Assimilationists were never able to explain how things could ever have turned out so badly, and for the Zionists there still remains the unresolved fact that things might have gone well” (2007c: 51).

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promulgation.”13 Reason, in this reading, is bound with humanism, since it alone can overcome the differences that otherwise separate people based on their specific histories, religions, geographies, or other identity markers. Indeed, for Arendt, “man becomes more important than the truth, which is relativized for the benefit of ‘human worth.’ This human worth is discovered in tolerance. The universal rule of reason is the universal rule of what is human and humane.”14 Whether Arendt is correct in her assessment of the position of assimilated Jews in Germany and Europe is only of secondary importance; from the perspective of intellectual history, what matters is that, against the context of the rise of ethnonationalist identity politics in Germany, a young secular German-Jewish intellectual (Arendt was twenty-six at the time) articulated a defense of reason as the Enlightenment virtue that could provide a potential rhetorical, philosophical, and ideological counterweight to it. That universal humanism under the aegis of reason could reverse the deteriorating position of Jews in a society in which they were increasingly marked by their alterity encapsulated the promise of the Enlightenment for her and her like-minded peers. That same year, however, Arendt also published “Original Assimilation: An Epilogue to the One Hundredth Anniversary of Rahel Varnhagen’s Death,” in which she declared that the Lessing-Mendelsohn model, however excellent as an ideal, had failed: “Today in Germany it seems Jewish assimilation must declare its bankruptcy.”15 “The Enlightenment,” she continues, “promised the Jews emancipation and above all provided them with arguments for demanding equal human rights, hence almost all of them became Enlightenment advocates.”16 By 1932, that promise had not only not been fulfilled, but it had already begun to produce its opposite: the Jewish exclusion laws that, taken to their extreme over the next decade, resulted in the Final Solution of Jewish genocide under the Third Reich and the collaborationist governments of the countries it occupied. The failure of the Enlightenment thus represented a multifaceted crisis for European Jews: of ideas, of identity, of teleological historical interpretation, of contemporary politics, and of individual and communal survival. 13  Arendt (2007a: 3). The friendship of the Jewish merchant Nathan, the unnamed Christian Crusader, and Saladin, the leader of the Arab armies in Jerusalem during the Third Crusade, was the subject of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (Nathan der Weise, 1779), which argued for religious tolerance. 14  Arendt (2007a: 4). 15  Arendt (2007b: 22). 16  Arendt (2007b: 22–23).

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The cascading crises caused by the failure of the Enlightenment unmoored the generation of Jewish intellectuals like Steiner, Broch, and Arendt from the secular culture that had anchored them. This was especially the case for many of their German-Jewish friends and colleagues, many of whom, like Arendt, were associated with the Frankfurt School— Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Eric Fromm, Herbert Marcuse—and those who worked in similar circles such as Eric Hobsbawm, Ernst Cassirer, Erich Auerbach, Rachel Bespaloff, and Jean Améry. Arendt writes in “Original Assimilation” that as a result of the “isolation imposed by the laws of exception […] all Jews, whether they liked or not, had to become aware of themselves as Jews.”17 In more personal terms, the Austrian-born Auschwitz survivor Améry articulated this loss, writing in his postwar essay, “How Much Home Does a Person Need?”, that the Jews of Europe “had not lost our country, but had to realize that it had never been ours. For us, whatever was linked with this land and its people was an existential misunderstanding. What we believed to have been our first love was, as they said there, racial disgrace. What we thought had constituted our nature—was it ever anything else but mimicry?”18 Such was his alienation that he changed his name: Améry was born Hanns Chaim Mayer in Vienna; after the war, he moved to Brussels and adopted the name Jean, the French version of Hanns, and Améry, a French-passing anagram for his German surname. Alan Itkin argues that, for Améry and other German Jews, “the expropriation of Jewish goods and the expulsion of Jewish people was supported by the claim that they never had a right to participate as members of the community to begin with, but, in a sense, the erasure of Europe’s Jewish and more broadly diverse past was an end in and of itself for the Nazis.”19 Jewish intellectuals realized that the Final Solution had its roots in the cultivation of Jewish alterity by Nazi intellectuals, an idea that lay deep and only illusorily dormant in Christian Europe. Adorno and Horkheimer are essentially explicit on this point: “The generality of the ideas developed by discursive logic, power in the sphere of the concept, is built on the foundation of power in reality.”20 The intellectual and political spheres are reinforcing loci of power, requiring responses suited to both.

 Arendt (2007b: 31).  Améry (1980: 2). 19  Itkin (2017: 152). 20  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 10). 17 18

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If the years leading up to the War challenged Jewish ideas about the Enlightenment, the War itself shattered them. The revelations of the concentration camps, which were known to the outside world by 1942, were a watershed moment, coinciding (or perhaps causing) the Enlightenment critique in a number of works begun that year—Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Auerbach’s Mimesis, Bespaloff’s On the Iliad, and others. As Jonathan Druker, in evaluating the Holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi’s humanism and humanistic values, writes: “Auschwitz— that single word calls the entire Enlightenment project into question.”21 The responses of this generation of Jewish intellectuals varied. At one extreme, for instance, Walter Benjamin and Stefan Zweig died by suicide during the War in the face of the twinned personal and political collapses it represented.22 The Francophone Jewish philosopher Simone Weil starved herself to death in England in 1943, three years after the publication of her anti-war essay The Iliad, or the Poem of Force. Just a few years after the War, in an evocation of the lasting horror of the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Rachel Bespaloff turned on the gas in the kitchen of her home near Mount Holyoke College and sealed all the windows, killing herself and her aged mother in the next room.23 Decades later, two Auschwitz survivors, Améry and Levi, committed suicide as well.24 Hermann Broch died of a heart attack in 1951, writing in his diary that “I am slowly, implacably killing myself. I have killed myself working […] I am killing myself over the very same conflicts that have defined my life.”25 At the other end of those whom despair and trauma drove to suicide were those like Auerbach and the Austrian Jew Leo Spitzer (like Auerbach,  Druker (2009: 6).  Though neither were specifically Homerists, they, too, engaged with questions about the relationship between the Homeric epics and its contemporary legacy. Benjamin briefly discusses the episode of Niobe, drawn from Book 24 of the Iliad, in Critique of Violence (1921), for which, see Benjamin (2021: 55–57). Zweig wrote a play, Tersites (1907), valorizing the much-abused figure in Book 2 of the Iliad. 23  Benfey (2005: xxiii). 24  Notably, of the Jewish intellectuals discussed here, only these two actually experienced life and death in a concentration camp; both were imprisoned at Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel famously said when he heard of the death of his fellow Auschwitz inmate that “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz, forty years later.” Though the circumstances surrounding Levi’s death remain unknown and perhaps, like so many suicides, unknowable, and though recent reconsiderations have argued both for and against suicide and accidental death, the consensus at the time was the former. 25  Pérez Gay (2007: 138). 21 22

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Spitzer lost his academic position in the wake of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which banned Jews from positions in government, academia, and elsewhere) whom the German Jewish child-­ refugee turned literary scholar Geoffrey Hartman calls two of “this trinity of restorative scholars.”26 These and other like-minded intellectuals, according to Avihu Zakai, “strove to rescue the European humanist tradition by reconstructing its literary history.”27 They did so, in part, by turning to Homer, whose epic poetry Adorno called “the basic text of European civilization.”28 Between the restorative humanists like Auerbach and Levi on the one hand and those who, like Bespaloff and Adorno, sought alternative to humanist ideals after the War on the other are a host of other Jewish writers for whom the relation of past and present remained more separate, of whom perhaps most representative is the Italian Jewish historian Arnaldo Momigliano. Though Momigliano wrote about Homer rarely and only in passing,29 his case illustrates a category of Jewish classicists, historians, philologists, and philosophers in whose voluminous work there are only oblique (if any) connections between the ancient and modern worlds, much less between Homer and the Holocaust. In the pre-War period, Momigliano, like Arendt, held assimilationist views in line with many secular educated Jews, rejecting Zionism30 and arguing “in a short review from 1933 that Italian Jews had integrated themselves into the new Italian state during the Risorgimento in a similar fashion to the way in which different regional identities such as those of Piedmont or Sicily had all flowed into a unique national identity.”31 In the inter-war period, Momigliano became a professor (of ancient history in Turin in 1936); like many of his Jewish peers across Europe, he lost that position to racial exclusion laws (in 1938) despite having sworn allegiance to the Fascist government, as all 26  Hartman (2007: 167). The third of the trinity is the German Lutheran Ernst Robert Curtius, whose European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948) argued for the panEuropean cultural and historical roots of the Continent and was particularly concerned with the French tradition. Both of these foundations put him in opposition to the prevailing German nationalist philologists of the 1940s. 27  Zakai (2018: 185). The same recuperation of postwar humanism has long been attributed to Levi but has been challenged by Druker (2009). 28  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 37). 29  See, for instance, Momigliano (1993: 25–28). 30  In a letter to the president of the Roman Jewish Community, for which, see Di Donate (1995: 225–26), as cited in Piovan (2018: 94). 31  Piovan (2018: 94).

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state employees were required to do.32 This is further complicated in Momigliano’s case, since the extent (if any) to which he held Fascist ideals or simply swore his oath as a matter of survival has been the subject of inconclusive and ongoing debate.33 Though he escaped to the United Kingdom,34 his parents did not; they died in Auschwitz in December of 1943. So profound was his connection to them, and so long-lasting the trauma of the Holocaust, that he inscribed their deaths on his own tombstone over a half century later: “Here lies Arnaldo Dante Momigliano. […] His faith was free thought without dogma and without hatred, but he loved with filial affection the Jewish tradition of his fathers. And here he wants to be joined together with him in memory his parents, Riccardo and Ilda Momigliano, killed in German land in November 1943 through insane racial hatred.”35 Despite Momigliano’s personal experience with the Holocaust, Moshe Idel argues that “modern Judaism is hardly the business of [Momigliano’s] discussions: neither the Holocaust nor the establishment of the State of Israel elicited special elaborations or treatments.”36 Idel argues that that “he did not have to discuss them, as his main academic fields were so remote.”37 But, almost by definition, this is true for all humanists dealing with the distant past, and yet so many of Momigliano’s peers brought interpretations shaped during and after the War to the study of events that occurred long before, while many others interested in understanding their own moment looked to Homer and the distant past to understand the historical valences and ideologies which shaped the contemporary world. Momigliano is representative of this group insofar as he was so deeply personally connected to the events of the Holocaust, but his scholarship never explicitly makes the connection between them, even as he wrote extensively about ancient Judaism and Christianity. For Idel, “His parents’  Grafton (2012: xi).  The contours of the debate are summarized in Piovan (2018: 94–96). 34  The Oxford Classicist Oswyn Murray describes the intellectual environment at Oxford during the 1940s when Momigliano lived there as “not in fact an English society” because the English faculty were all involved in the War effort; the university itself was so full of European refugee scholars, many of them Jewish, that Murray calls it “perhaps the greatest gathering of the humanist scholarship of Europe since the Council of Florence” (1991: 53). 35  Brown (1988: 433). Baumgarten later explains the discrepancy between the actual date of their death in December and Momigliano’s conclusion of their death in November (2010a: 196). 36  Idel (2007: 327). 37  Idel (2007: 327). 32 33

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death during the Holocaust and his visits to Israel were not, presumably, topics that invited his analysis.”38 Dino Piovan argues for at least an implicit connection between ancient and modern, writing about Momigliano’s pre-War research trajectory that “in focusing on the peaceful coexistence of different peoples, we cannot avoid noticing some moral and intellectual anxieties which it is not difficult to link to the rise of Nazism, which had come to power in Germany in 1933.”39 Whatever oblique allusions to the contemporary political situation or however that situation shaped Momigliano’s research interest, ancient and modern are entangled, if at all, in only tangential or implicit ways. This tendency toward oblique referentiality is perhaps most evident in a lecture Momigliano delivered in 1958, entitled “Some Observations on Causes of War in Ancient Historiography.”40 In it, Momigliano argues that the worst “category of books and papers [is] the category of the books that inspired wars and were themselves causes of wars.”41 Momigliano only offers two such works by name, and first among them is the Iliad, about which he says that “the Iliad create[d] the model of all those Achilleses and Agamemnons who have troubled the world ever since.”42 Momigliano alludes to the influence of Homer across time, leaving implicit any connection to the War which had concluded less than a decade before and in which both of his parents died. When he writes, therefore, that “war remains a sad necessity, the lot that gods have spun for miserable men that they should live in pain” and calls this “ab Homero principium,” he places Homer and the Iliad at the beginning of a culture of violence and death that continues to his own day—war “remains a sad necessity.”43 The unspoken referent of the claim haunts Momigliano’s work. The haunting presence of the Holocaust in Jewish wartime and postwar readings of Homer similarly permeates the work of George Steiner, who wrote extensively about both without making an overt connection between them. His work, too, elucidates in much more personal terms the questions that Arendt articulated in a theoretical way in “The Enlightenment and the Jewish Question” and “Original Assimilation.” His autobiography, Errata: An Examined Life (1997), begins with rain falling on his  Idel (2007: 327).  Piovan (2018: 94). 40  Momigliano (1984). 41  Momigliano (1984: 13). 42  Momigliano (1984: 14). 43  Momigliano (1984: 14). 38 39

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childhood home in the Tyrol mountains: “The summer was already ominous. […] In those mid-1930s, Jew-hatred and a lust for reunification hung in the Austrian air,” he writes, adding that his father “was convinced that catastrophe was imminent.”44 Later, he notes that “Hitler’s speeches, when broadcast, punctuated my childhood. […] My father would bend close to the wireless, straining to hear.”45 Steiner describes his father’s flight from “anti-semitic Vienna, the cradle of Nazism” in apocalyptic terms: “with grim clairvoyance, my father perceived the nearing disaster. A systematic, doctrinal Jew-hatred seethed and stank beneath the glittering liberalities of Viennese culture. The world of Freud, of Malheur, of Wittgenstein was also that of Mayor Lueger, Hitler’s exemplar.”46 Steiner names three important German Jewish intellectuals but notes that the same Enlightenment tradition of German humanism that produced them also produced the genocidal antisemitism of the Nazis. Of pre-War Jewish society, he writes that “the horrors which reduced this liberal humaneness and vision have distorted remembrance. […] The proud Judaism of my father was, like that of an Einstein or a Freud, one of messianic agnosticism. It breathed rationality, the promise of the Enlightenment and tolerance.”47 Steiner emphasizes the promise of secular European—and particularly German—culture as a means for personal fulfillment. The keywords humanism, rationalism, and Enlightenment held for his parents the paradoxical hope for freedom in political theory from antisemitism even as it surged in political practice. Steiner describes his own childhood as being strictly oriented around “a secular Talmud” of western Classics, what he calls “the investment of hope against hope.”48 Chief among these works was the Iliad, and Steiner recounts how his father “had kept the book itself out my impatient reach” until just before his sixth birthday, when they read it in translation. The passage he and his father read was about the death of the Trojan prince Lykaon, who begged Achilles for mercy but whom Achilles killed anyway.49 Father and son read it first in German; his father then begins to teach him Greek: “And he took my finger, placing it on the appropriate Greek words. […] My father read  Steiner (1997: 1).  Steiner (1997: 8). 46  Steiner (1997: 8). 47  Steiner (1997: 9). 48  Steiner (1997: 13). 49  This passage would become one of the touchstones for Bespaloff’s Homeric interpretation, for which, see {000}. 44 45

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the Greek several times over. He made me mouth the syllables after him. Dictionary and grammar flew open. Like the lineaments of a brightly colored mosaic lying under the sand, when you pour water on it, the words, the formulaic phrases, took on form and meaning for me. Word by sung word, verse by verse. I recall graphically the rush of wonder, of a child’s consciousness.”50 In this lyrical passage, reflecting on this dark time, he and his father reading Homer represents the kind of secular religious experience that lies at the heart of the western European Enlightenment and its promise to secularizing and assimilating Jews; even the very mechanics of reading are imbued with transcendent spiritual significance (Steiner’s recollection of his father taking his hand and tracing the words with his finger re-enacts the Jewish method of reading Torah, in which the reader holds a yad, a pointer in the shape of a hand with an extended index finger so as not to touch the holy text itself). So central was this originary moment of reading Homer in Steiner’s understanding of himself that he writes in his autobiography that “perhaps the rest [of his life] has been a foot-note to that hour. The Iliad and the Odyssey have been lifelong companions.”51 Even as he is reading Homer, however, the political background is never completely eclipsed: it is evident in the passage his father chooses to read, in which Achilles pitilessly slaughters an unarmed Trojan begging for mercy. His father proposes they learn the lines by heart “so that the serene inhumanity of Achilles’ message, its soft terror, would never leave us.”52 Steiner calls this conflict between his love of European literature and the antisemitic hatred of the contemporary European heirs of that tradition, “an unbearable paradox, this Judaism of secular hope looked to German philosophy, literature, scholarship, and music for its talismanic guarantees.”53 Not only would it not provide them the safety they thought it would, but it became, in the view of several Jewish intellectuals, the source of the ideology which ensured their destruction. According to Jay Parini, this problem would consume Steiner’s intellectual life: “The central question that [Steiner] has asked, in nearly a dozen books, is this: How was it possible for the Nazi killers to spend their days murdering innocent people while their evenings were spent reading Rilke and  Steiner (1997: 16).  Steiner (1997: 16). 52  Steiner (1997: 16). 53  Steiner (1997: 10). 50 51

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listening to Schubert? […] There is, of course, something hopeless about Steiner’s (and Tolstoy’s) approach to art. It leads, inevitably, to despair.”54 And yet, despite the significance of reading Homer with his father on the cusp of the Holocaust for his life, these two great themes remain separate in his work. For Edith Wyschogrod, however, even the absence of an explicit connection between Homer and the Holocaust is a kind of response; in “The Mind of a Critical Moralist: Steiner as Jew,” she argues broadly that “Jewish thinkers think about the Holocaust. They think about it all the time. When thought shifts its venue so that thinking centers on other issues, it still remains a thinking of the Holocaust in the manner of not thinking it.”55 Glimpses of the truth of this can be seen in what Albert Baumgarten argues was Momigliano’s turn, “especially towards the end of his life […] to studying ancient and modern Judaism.”56 Baumgarten cites in particular Momigliano’s published statements, including his claim in a 1984 article that “I am a Jew myself and I know from my own experience 54  Parini (1985: 496). Bryan Cheyette similarly refers to “the strand of cultural pessimism that has always pervaded his work” (1999: 70). For despair as a guiding philosophy of Jewish wartime writing about Homer, see {000}. 55  Wyschogrod (1993: 168). This is perhaps not always the case for Steiner himself; his introduction to Homer in English, an anthology of retellings of the Iliad from Chaucer to the end of the twentieth century, makes no such allusions, implicitly or explicitly. Indeed, when Steiner asks “Why, distinctively among other Western literatures, should those in the English language generate a perennial ubiquity of translations from Homer, or Homeric variants?” (1996: xxvii) He finds the answer not in the Holocaust (though he does mention Simone Weil: “Has Simone Weil not written one of the most challenging [though, to my mind, misguided,] commentaries on the Iliad?” (1996: xvii), but in British imperialism. “What public schoolboy (until recently), what young officer in the Western Desert did not thrill, more or less consciously, to the remembrance of Hector’s roar at the very edge of the Greek encampment, or to Achilles’ lament over Patroklos” (1996: xvix) he writes, that an identification with the Homeric heroes was “proclaimed by English subalterns and poets at Ypres or in that Homeric setting at the Dardanelles,” that “Hector remains the archetype of the ‘good loser’, a pivotal figure in English self-regard. Hector and Priam are the patron of Dunkirks” (1996: xix–xx). These are the Iliads of imperial triumphalism, associating the Homeric heroes with British soldiers during the two world wars. Steiner writes, however, that “the experience of the Second World War produces a counter-current. The proud cities set ablaze, the chivalric heroism of the fighter-pilot or commando, restore Hector and Troy to felt immediacy. The sufferings of civilians at the bloody hands of their captors make of Hecuba and Androamche emblems all too familiar” (1996: xxvii). Steiner thus acknowledges the “counter-current” in postwar revisions of Homer, but the connection to the specific context of the Jewish experience—of concentration camps and exile—is absent. 56  Baumgarten (2010b: 9).

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what price Jews have had to pay to be Jews. I am not collecting facts for academic purpose when I try to understand what moved Jews to refuse to assimilation to surrounding civilizations” throughout their long history, or a 1977 speech in which he said, “I must, however, admit that events have made my research literally a question of life and death, which I had not anticipated when I began to work on these problems about 1925.”57 In his own words, the legacy of the ancient world was on Momigliano’s mind as he produced his scholarship, but the entanglement of the two is not a feature of his scholarly output. In an obituary/biography written by the scholar of late antiquity Peter Brown a year after Momigliano’s death in 1987, Brown writes that Momigliano “had come to England, committed to writing an ambitious study, entitled Liberty and Peace in the Ancient World. The project gave him a sense of continuity at a time of cruel disruption. Yet the book was never written. What evaporated, in Momigliano’s first years in England, was the sense of an easy coherence of past and present, of ancient history and historiography. Matters were too complicated; essential differences had to be respected.”58 Brown thus locates another potential reason for why Momigliano kept past and present separate; as a historian aiming for a kind of Ingresian total history in a Dalían world of fragments, no world-­ historical or universal historical principles could be applied. Rather than seeing Momigliano’s refusal to engage in comparative analysis as an oversight or omission, Brown’s hypothesis opens up the possibility that it was something about which Momigliano had thought at length but about which he made a conscious decision not to discuss in print. Brown argues that Momigliano’s commitment to ancient history was not independent of a larger, if unarticulated, postwar politics; about Momigiliano’s move to University College London, he writes: “From a truly cosmopolitan city, he would contribute to Europe’s return to sanity after the paroxysm of Nazi and Fascist rule.”59 This is not to say that scholars like Momigliano and others had simply ignored these connections. The French Jewish classicist Pierre Vidal-­ Naquet (1930–2006), for instance, one of Momigliano’s most ardent admirers (until a falling out in 1983), also became, in his later years, one of France’s foremost voices against Holocaust denial and antisemitism.  Momigliano (1977: 432), as cited in Baumgarten (2010b: 10) and Weinberg (1991: 16).  Brown (1988: 416). 59  Brown (1988: 420). 57 58

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Like Steiner, Vidal-Naquet’s first experience of reading Homer was during the War; in 1940, his father was put in command of logistics for an artillery unit in the Ardennes; Pierre and his family meanwhile stayed in Beg-­ Meil in Brittany, where he recounts that his mother found for them a tutor, “Madamoiselle Bronnac. My mother deemed this person stupid, but this was not our opinion and, naturally, she kept it to herself. […] Of our tutor, I have only one memory: in history, she made me study for the program of sixth grade, the Orient and Greece. I familiarized myself anew with the gods of Homer and was introduced to those of ancient Egypt, about which I became passionate like all children.”60 Over the course of the War, the cause of Holocaust denial became deeply personal: born to an assimilated and highly educated Jewish family, both his father and mother were deported and died at Auschwitz in 1944, when he was 13,61 an experience which, in the words of Riccardo Di Donato, forged “una profonda amicizia” between Vidal-Naquet and Momigliano. In a letter of 1966, Vidal-Naquet wrote to Momigliano “You know, perhaps, that my parents were, like yours, ‘disappeared’ in Auschwitz.”62 Indeed, Vidal-Naquet refers to this period in his autobiography as La brisure et l’attente, “the fracture and the wait.” When Vidal-Naquet committed himself during his later years to combatting Holocaust denial, however, he did not do so by drawing on classical paradigms or his authority as a historian. He opens his 1980 essay, “A Paper Eichmann: The Anatomy of a Lie,” for instance, by noting that, when he was invited by Paul Thibaud, the editor of the journal Esprit, to respond to the claims of various French Holocaust deniers, he hesitated. This hesitation, he writes, stemmed from a variety of reasons differ[ing] in value. As a historian of antiquity, what was I to do in a period ‘not my own’? As a Jew, was I not too directly party to the issue, incapable of being objective? Would it not be preferable to relinquish the business of responding to historians less immediately concerned? And finally, was not

60  Vidal-Naquet (1995: 59). Translations from Vidal-Naquet 1995 are my own. The introduction to Homer is also reported in François Dosse’s monumental biography of VidalNaquet (2020: 42). 61  It is significant for the framing of Vidal-Naquet’s life that this episode opens Dosse’s biography (2020). 62  Di Donato (2009: 124). Translation my own.

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answering in itself tantamount to giving credit to the idea that there was indeed a debate, and thus giving publicity to a man all too eager for it?63

Though Vidal-Naquet finds that these “argument[s] do[] not impress me very much,” they reasonably point to some reasons—of perceived bias, of lack of academic expertise, of personal preference—why a scholar whose biography was deeply shaped by a traumatic event might yet not want to engage it directly.64 Later in the essay, for instance, having dispensed with the pseudo-historiographical claims of Holocaust deniers who find Jewish greed at the root of problems tracing back to the Roman Empire, Vidal-­ Naquet asks: “Is a historian of antiquity obliged to specify that all of this, in its entirety, is grotesque?”65 Though he did not explicitly write about Homer and the Holocaust, Vidal-Naquet wrote extensively about Greek and Jewish scholarly causes—most notably refuting Holocaust denial— and to opposing French colonialism, most notably during the Algerian War.66 The Holocaust did not infuse Vidal-Naquet’s thinking about classics in an explicit way; “A Paper Eichmann,” however, shows that this was not for a lack of awareness of the possibility of entangling the two but a conscious decision not to do so. Indeed, in the “provisional epilogue” to his autobiography, he discusses this tension: “Greece was and remains my field of research: Greek philosophy, Greek poetics and literature, Greek political institutions, the Greece of tragedy that I was beginning to discover in 1943, Greece of the historians. […] But if the Dreyfus affair played for me the role of a origin story, is it because it concerned a Jew? To speak frankly, in 1955, I had every reason in the world to be conscious of my Jewish condition.”67 From this, he wonders if it is possible “to connect the activist and the historian of Greece?”68 Every Jewish classicist during and after the War must have asked themselves the same question, and scholars like Momigliano, Vidal-Naquet, and their friend the  Vidal-Naquet (1992: 1).  Vidal-Naquet (1992: 1). 65  Vidal-Naquet (1992: 34). 66  In “A Paper Eichmann,” Vidal-Naquet marshals historiographical methods drawn from Classics and a single reference to Homer to point out the absurdity of contemporary Holocaust denial (1992: 4), but this is not the same as refracting the Holocaust through Homer. For Vidal-Naquet’s opposition to the Algerian War and the use of torture by the French government, see Dosse (2020: 95–119). 67  Vidal-Naquet (1995: 289). 68  Vidal-Naquet (1995: 289). 63 64

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Anglo-American Homerist M.I.  Finley would have answered differently than Adorno, Arendt, Broch, or others.69 For all of them, however, stripped of their identity, of their sense of their place in history, of the familiar places they inhabited in the world, many such Jewish Homerists and Hellenophiles—Auerbach’s assistant claimed he had a “wish-fulfillment passion for everything Greek”70 and Arendt’s niece recalled that “she quoted by heart in Greek, as if she was engaged in a perpetual inner dialogue with these texts”71—sought to explain the origins of the War and their philosophical vision for how to carry on in its wake through a reconsideration of the world they knew best and in the tradition of which they had invested their hope of political liberation. As Adriana Cavarera notes, “Homer and the ancient Greeks in general are, for Arendt, a resourceful topos of the Western imaginary, the ground for rethinking the human condition within a political framework after the horror of Auschwitz injured its ontological dignity.”72 Given the particular circumstances of European Jewish intellectuals during the War, who saw all around them an all-consuming war in which they lost their homes and homelands, were subject to mass death and physical trials of all kinds, were forced to adopt various disguises, and (if they were lucky) returned as impoverished refugees to the place they had once called home only to find their houses occupied by strangers and their wealth stolen, full of suspicion and doubt about their relations with those among whom they once lived at ease, and given Homer’s place as the apotheosis of European humanism, it is perhaps no surprise that many of them, in distinct but dialogic ways, turned to the narratives of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Indeed, Steiner calls his autobiography Errata: An Examined Life, a play surely not just on the many mistakes he made in life and letters but also, given the word’s etymology from the Latin errare, to wander, the most Odyssean of actions. Ernst Cassirer, another of the German-Jewish intellectuals who fled the Nazis, wrote in his posthumous 1946 work The Myth of the State that,

69  M.I. Finley (born Moses Israel Finkelstein) was an American-born British-based scholar whose World of Odysseus (1954), an influential work of postwar Homeric scholarship, was published just before he was driven from the United States for alleged Communist sympathies during the Red Scare. 70  As cited in Zakai (2018: 173) 71  Brocke (2007: 513). 72  Cavarero (2021: 609).

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despite the pretensions of rationality that undergirded modern political science, we have learned a new lesson, a lesson that is very humiliating to our human pride. We have learned that modern man, in spite of his restlessness, and perhaps precisely because of his restlessness, has not really surmounted the condition of savage life. […] Of all the sad experiences of these last twelve years, this is perhaps the most dreadful one. It may be compared to the experience of Odysseus on the island of Circe. But it is even worse. Circe had transformed the friends and companions of Odysseus into various animal shapes. But here are men, men of education and intelligence, honest and upright men who suddenly give up the highest human privilege. They have ceased to be free and personal agents.73

Cassirer and his peers were, in different ways, engaged with this same problem, and several of them used the Homeric epics as a primary locus for considering this “most dreadful” experience. These works are the wartime production of Jewish, contingently Jewish, or converted-from-­ Judaism scholars, many of whom were refugees or exiles, a fact too often overlooked in a scholarly tradition that seeks to separate the ideas from the contexts in which they were produced and the specific positionality of the authors. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, for instance, may begin with a study of Odysseus, but it ends with a study of antisemitism.74 Considering the authors’ views on the former without the context provided by the latter risks hermeneutic misprision at best and a form of Holocaust denial at worst. What united the philosophical and philological investigations of these scholars into the Homeric epics were these questions of agency and identity, of who they had been, their place in (Jewish, European, and global literary and cultural) history, who they were, what they were capable of,  Cassirer (1946: 285–86).  Even if that section was added later; Rolf Wiggershaus argues offers a timeline of the events of 1943 that resulted in the project being funded, in which he further argues that “it is doubtful whether the anti-Semitism project would have been carried out without outside finance, and even whether there would have been a section on ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’ in the Dialectic of Enlightenment” (1994: 356). Wiggershaus argues that Adorno and Horkheimer’s resistance to the inclusion of such a section was not only due to its size and scope but because “it would be extremely difficult to maintain their self-image as a small group of theoreticians living in ‘splendid isolation’, as strangers standing above the cultures concerned[. …] That self-image would have to give way to a more sober one: the admission that they belonged to a Jewish minority, whose Jewish identity had been forced upon it from outside” (356). 73 74

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and, perhaps most importantly, who, after the War, they might be. They were concerned with preventing another Holocaust—in After Auschwitz, written in 1966, Adorno asserted that “a new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen”75—and to understanding how stories about the past informed the present, creating the conditions for both the Holocaust and for articulating the costs and consequences of rebuilding the postwar world on its pre-War foundations. By the time he was writing Negative Dialectics twenty years after the end of the Holocaust, Adorno was looking to the future, to prevent another Holocaust from occurring. But in Dialectic of Enlightenment, begun some twenty-five years before Negative Dialectics as World War II raged around him, as the first inklings of the Holocaust began to spread beyond the confines of the camps themselves, as the outcome of the War itself remained agonizingly uncertain, Adorno did not look forward; rather, he looked backward, to try and find the source of the ideology that had caused the world to erupt in this orgy of violence, and he found it in Homer. Writing about Dialectic of Enlightenment, James Porter notes that the “inclusion of [an excursus on the Odyssey] is nothing short of astonishing. What could a reading of Homer possibly contribute to a critique of the contemporary scene, at a moment when the very walls of civilization were being burned to the ground? As it turns out, the answer is everything.”76 An exploration of that “everything” is, in some ways, what this book is about. Adorno and Horkheimer’s “Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment” and its connection to antisemitism is the principal subject of Chap. 2. Specifically, they connect their archaeology of the Enlightenment to a contemporary issue that, to them, was philosophical, personal, and political and deeply tied to their vision of humanism; they were, in their own words, aiming to “realize the idea which has been unrealized until now: that the Jew is a human being.”77 To realize this idea, however, required “the liberating of thought from power, the abolition of violence.”78 What emerged from their studies, then, was a  Adorno (1973: 365).  Porter (2018a: 108). 77  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 165); italics in original; for this passage, see also Zakai (2018: 15). 78  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 165); italics in original. 75 76

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fundamental revision of the pre-War ideology of Homeric triumphalism, which celebrated violence and the martial valor of heroes; they replaced it with an alternate, almost opposite hermeneutic of grief, trauma, and woundedness. Homer, in their reading, told the story of the genocide of the Trojan by the Greeks and the scars—physical and ontological—borne by the survivors. Their colleague the political philosopher Hannah Arendt picked up on their archaeology of the Homeric roots of the Nazis, searching in ancient Greek thought and Homeric poetry for the origins of the thought process, which she called “thoughtlessness” and whose principal Nazi exemplar was Adolf Eichmann, to explain how ordinary Nazis could overcome a natural moral revulsion towards atrocity. This theme is picked up in Chap. 3, which focuses on Rachel Bespaloff and Hermann Broch, two Jewish writers who fled Nazi-occupied Europe for the United States and, there, articulated philosophical and historical approaches to Homer that foregrounded the experiences of characters whose experiences matched their own: the non-combatant victims of the War, the refugees, survivors, and all the others who were killed or wounded in a war they did not start and could not end. Chapter 4 also looks at Jewish refugee scholars, the philologist Erich Auerbach and the child-­ refugee Geoffrey Hartman, who would subsequently become Auerbach’s student. Like Adorno and Arendt, Auerbach focused on the character of Odysseus and, like Bespaloff and Broch, viewed the Homeric epics from the perspective of those broken, in way or another, by war. The result was Auerbach’s wartime work Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, which shows Odysseus not as Adorno’s proto-fascist but as a wounded refugee returning home after a war, a situation that mirrored Auerbach’s own while he was writing it. Indeed, in representing reality through woundedness, Auerbach’s work can be seen as a theoretical or philological examination of perhaps the most important genre of postwar Jewish cultural production: Holocaust memoir. The question of how to represent in a realistic way unprecedented historical trauma haunted writers like Primo Levi, who grapples with the similarity of his situation in Auschwitz and that of Odysseus/Ulysses in Dante’s underworld. Auerbach’s poetics of a narratology from woundedness provides a contemporary parallel for Levi’s own attempt to capture the reality of his experience in Auschwitz in his memoir If This Is a Man. The ontology and poetics of woundedness, of the interrelationship of memory, narrative, and wounds, what Hartman would later call the

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“memory scar” of the Holocaust, is also the subject of Chap. 5. Chapter 1 examined Homer and the Jews before the War; Chaps. 2, 3, and 4 examined several writers who wrote during the War; Chap. 5 focuses on the legacy of these writers in Jewish Classicists writing after the War. George Steiner, Hélène Cixous, and Daniel Mendelsohn, each in their own way, can be seen as inheritors of the tradition of Holocaust-informed readings of the Homeric epics articulated by the wartime writers discussed in Chaps. 2, 3, and 4. Though they were children (Steiner and Cixous) or were born after the War (Mendelsohn), their interpretations of Homer offer insight into the persistence of anti-triumphalist readings of the epics that center the experiences of pain, woundedness, and grief among Jewish writers about Homer. In this way, the wartime responses of Adorno, Auerbach, and others was not just an ephemeral component of Homeric reception but show how the Holocaust has permanently changed how postwar readers understand the epics in a way that is all but antithetical to the nearly three-millennia history of Homeric interpretation that preceded it. Hannah Arendt seemed to conceive the permanence of this shift, writing in 1958 that: “History as a category of human existence is of course older than the written word, older than Herodotus, older even than Homer. Not historically but poetically speaking, its beginning lies rather in the moment when Ulysses, at the court of the king of the Phaeacians, listened to the story of his own deeds and sufferings, to the story of his life, now a thing outside himself, an ‘object’ for all to see and to hear.”79 The significance here is twofold: first, that Arendt places the originary moment of history in Homer and, second, that history began not with anything related to the triumph of the Greeks but with Odysseus’ “suffering.” This was a positionality to which all these authors, regardless of the specific contours of their own experience, could relate, as all were in some way victims of the Nazis. In his 1965 autobiographical essay “A Kind of Survivor,” George Steiner writes that “the humanism of the European Jew lies in literal ash. In the accent of survivors—Hannah Arendt, Ernst Bloch, T. W. Adorno, Erich Kahler, Levi-Strauss—whose interests and commitments are, of course, diverse, you will hear a common note as of desolation.”80 Alongside this desolation, however, was a determination, that if the world was in ruins, to find a way to build it back, either upon  Arendt (2006a: 44–45).  Steiner (1965: n.p.).

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new foundations entirely or, more often for Jewish Homerists, to find within the Iliad and the Odyssey new interpretative possibilities in which to ground a postwar humanism. Preceding Dalí’s Apotheosis of Homer by a few years, Bespaloff made a similar point in her 1942 work On the Iliad: “Nietzsche is wrong when he says that Homer is the poet of apotheoses. What he exalts is not the triumph of victorious force but man’s energy in misfortune, the dead warrior’s beauty, the glory of the sacrificed hero, the song of the poet in times to come—whatever defied fatality and rises superior to it, even in defeat.”81

 Bespaloff (2005: 69).

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CHAPTER 2

Nihilism, Thoughtlessness, and the Bourgeois Odysseus: Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and the Failure of Enlightenment Humanism

Abstract  This chapter examines how Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer depicted Odysseus in the Dialectic of Enlightenment as the “prototype of the bourgeois individual” whose amoral application of reason in service of self-preservation anticipated the Nazi justification for the genocide of the Jews. Their fellow German-Jewish émigrée Hannah Arendt followed a similar trajectory, arguing in Eichmann in Jerusalem and The Life of the Mind that the thought processes that led to the Holocaust had their origins in Homeric epic and ancient Greek philosophy. For them, the atrocities of the World War II were not historically anomalous, but the inevitable result of a society based on Homeric values. Keywords  Theodor Adorno • Hannah Arendt • Odysseus • Enlightenment • Homer • Holocaust Around the same time Salvador Dalí was painting his Apotheosis, the GermanJewish philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, having found refuge from the Third Reich in Los Angeles, were writing a critique of Western humanism that would come to be called Dialectic of Enlightenment (published in German in 1947 as Dialektik der Aufklärung), one section of which, according to Adorno, was to be “a historico-­ philosophical

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Goldwyn, Homer, Humanism, Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11473-1_2

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interpretation of Homer.”1 This section would be published as “Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment.” In it, Adorno, its primary author, wrote that “the venerable cosmos of the Homeric world, a world charged with meaning, reveals itself as an achievement of classifying reason.”2 Adorno means this as a critique; if the geometric precision of Ingres’ Apotheosis represents these Enlightenment systems of classification and reason, then they have failed. As Dana Villa writes, “as the image of the totalitarian collective—its essence, so to speak—Auschwitz confirmed Adorno’s fears about reason’s complicity with power (however irrational in the end, the extermination process was carried out in a highly rationalized manner).”3 Dialectic of Enlightenment is a foundational text on the demise and failure of the Enlightenment and the humanistic ideals it represented, principally that rationality “offered Enlightenment thinkers a schema for making the world calculable,”4 an idea represented in the geometric precision of Ingres’ Greek temple dedicated to Homer. Dalí’s vision shows straight lines giving way to spiraling explosions of centrifugal movement and the rough edges of broken stones, the real ceding to the surreal, a reflection of a postwar world that could not be grasped through reason alone. In this, Dalí’s painting is a visual manifestation of Adorno and Horkheimer’s claim that “the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.”5 For Dalí, the apotheosis of Homer, and of the classical Greek and Western European traditions that he embodied, was destruction on a scale never before witnessed in the history of the world; perhaps the real place mostly closely drawn in Dalí’s ruinous waking vision of the apotheosis of Homer is also the symbol of humanity’s “triumphant calamity,” the Nazi concentration camp. Adorno’s extended meditation on the Odyssey in Dialectic of Enlightenment, then, can be seen as a kind of literary articulation of the visual representation of Homeric apotheosis represented by Dalí; as Adorno and Horkheimer argue twice in their  Tiedemann (1998: 37), as cited in Muller-Doohm (2009: 282).  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 35–36). Similarly, he and Horkheimer write in “The Concept of Enlightenment”: “Nature, before and after quantum theory, is what can be registered mathematically; even what cannot be assimilated, the insoluble and irrational, is fenced in by mathematical theorems. In the preemptive identification of the thoroughly mathematized world with truth, enlightenment believes itself safe from the return of the mythical. It equates thought with mathematics” (2002: 18). 3  Villa (2007: 3). 4  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 4). 5  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 4). 1 2

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introduction, “Enlightenment is totalitarian,”6 a sentiment all the more ominous when considered in light of Steiner’s assertion that “the Jews are a people whom totalitarian barbarism must choose for its hatred.”7 Before World War II, Horkheimer and Adorno were two of the most prominent intellectuals in Germany, the former as the director of the Institute for Social Research, better known as the Frankfurt School, and the latter as one of its star researchers. Both lost their positions due to Nazi Jewish-exclusion laws8 and spent the war years in Los Angeles. While there, they edited the loose series of essays which they called Philosophical Fragments into what perhaps their most famous student Jürgen Habermas called “their blackest, most nihilistic book, in order to conceptualize the self-destructive process of Enlightenment.”9 The completed work, Dialectic of Enlightenment, was, in part, an attempt to trace the archaeology of the social, political, and cultural institutions and values that gave rise to the Third Reich. Dialectic of Enlightenment sets out to prove two related arguments, one an archaeology,10 the other a futurity.11 For Adorno and Horkheimer, the Holocaust was the inevitable result of the capitalist and bourgeois ideology embodied in an Enlightenment culture that had its roots in the classical Greek tradition: “The original myth itself contains the moment of mendacity which triumphs in the fraudulent myth of fascism and which the latter imputes to enlightenment.”12 Thus, any reconstruction of postwar civilization based on Enlightenment principles would be doomed to repeat its greatest atrocities. Dialectic of Enlightenment concludes with a section on contemporary antisemitism, but it begins with a definition of

 Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 4, 18).  Steiner (1965: n.p.), italics in original. 8  The background to these events is detailed in Muller-Doohm (2009: 175–79). 9  Habermas (1982: 13). 10  “Connections with reason, liberality, and middle-class qualities do indeed extend incomparably further back than is assumed by historians who date the concept of the burgher from the end of medieval feudalism” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002: 36). 11  “The alleged authenticity of the archaic, with its principle of blood and sacrifice, is already tainted by the devious bad conscience of power characteristic of the ‘national regeneration’ today, which uses primeval times for self-advertising” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002: 37). 12  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 37). 6 7

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Enlightenment followed by an archaeology drawn from antiquity, “Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment.”13 Adorno argues that Odysseus is the originary figure of the Enlightenment, and the dialectic he proposes is that Odysseus cannot become enlightened without using rational thinking to understand that mythological things do not exist. Thus, enlightenment requires myth, but only to gain the mental discipline to reject and dispel it. Because he is physically weaker than the primordial and monstrous forces against which he contends on his voyage home (Adorno describes Odysseus as “a self infinitely weak in comparison to the force of nature”),14 Odysseus must develop an alternate strategy for survival: “The faculty by which the self survives adventures, throwing itself away in order to preserve itself, is cunning. The seafarer Odysseus outwits the natural deities.”15 The elemental entities all want to kill him, but Odysseus uses reason to find for them other things that they want more than his death or uses cunning to trick them into taking alternate sources of satisfaction. As the prototypical bourgeois, as the archetypal capitalist, Odysseus becomes adept at offering alternate objects of equal value in exchange for his own life. This is the process by which sacrifice becomes capitalist: instead of dying, Odysseus offers a sacrifice, that is, he deceives or appeases the gods into taking a different thing than they had originally wanted. Through these actions, Odysseus is able to survive, but, perhaps more importantly for Adorno’s purposes, these actions change the relationship of the rational, Enlightenment, capitalist man to the natural world: “All sacrificial acts, deliberately planned by humans, deceive the god for whom they are 13  For the authorship and dating of various sections, see Porter (2018a: 108): “The first Excursus seems to have been chiefly authored by Adorno between 1941 and 1942 (discussions of this section began in 1939), and I will presume his authorship of this part of the work in what follows.” Anson Rabinbach suggests that “Dialectic of Enlightenment was a collaborative work undertaken with no strict division of labor, or any superordinate effort to conceal its authors’ distinctive sensibilities and voices. This makes any definitive mapping of their respective roles difficult, though the extant manuscripts do establish the rough main lines of responsibility for the book’s distinct sections. According to Schmid Noerr, drafts found in either Horkheimer’s or Adorno’s papers make it reasonably certain that the introduction, ‘The Concept of Enlightenment,’ ‘Excursus II,’ and ‘Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality’ were drafted by Horkheimer, while the Excursus I, ‘Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment,’ and the chapter ‘The Culture Industry’ were Adorno’s responsibility” (2001: 167). In the Shadow of Catastrophe. 14  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 38). 15  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 39).

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performed: by imposing on him the primacy of human purposes they dissolve away his power.”16 This also exemplifies the dialectic of Enlightenment: Odysseus needs the elemental powers associated with myth to cultivate this bourgeois cunning that separates him from it. In so doing, Adorno, according to Dana Villa, shows how “the forces behind the modern divestment of the moral, political, and even religious content traditionally associated with the concept of reason in the West,” a series of divestments that implicates “enlightened reason” in the ideologies of “blind domination” that led to the Holocaust.17 For Adorno, Odysseus represents “the prototype of the bourgeois individual, whose concept originates in the unwavering self-assertion of which the protagonist driven to wander the earth is the primeval model”18 and, later, “the lone voyager armed with cunning is already homo oeconomicus, whom all reasonable people will one day resemble.”19 Odysseus is bourgeois in that he is a landowner and an employer; this bourgeois professionalism produces a specific mindset, one of “unwavering self-assertion”; that is, Odysseus is a man without any broader social conscience, instead committed to an ideology in which he pursues his own personal, private, individual satisfactions regardless of the consequences to those around him and society at large. If, as Adorno’s biographer Stefan Muller-Doohm argues, “myth [is] the prototype of enlightenment,” then it follows that Adorno would see Odysseus as the original Enlightenment thinker, and thus the classical exemplar of a way of being that inevitably produced both Nazis and the silent and willfully ignorant Europeans who found it easier to pursue their own private aims than to speak out on behalf of the Jews and other victims of Nazi aggression.20 For Muller-Doohm, Odysseus represents to Adorno “a rationality in the service of absolute self-­ preservation.”21 If self-preservation is the only and ultimate good, then all  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 40).  Villa (2007: 5). Villa elsewhere argues that the book’s “most famous thesis [is that] scientific-Enlightenment rationality, as it dominates nature, inevitably dominates humanity, which is also nature” (2007: 5). James Schmidt argues that “the central theme of Dialectic of Enlightenment” is that “instrumental reason reduces truth to ‘success’ and, in the process, robs reason of all substantive content” (1998: 821). 18  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 35). 19  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 48). In a letter of March 1943, Horkheimer described “Odysseus as the great incarnation of Enlightenment in the making” (Schmidt 1998: 831 citing Horkheimer 1996). 20  Müller-Doohm (2009: 283). 21  Müller-Doohm (2009: 283). 16 17

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other moral considerations must be secondary, an open invitation to increasing atrocity, even genocide, justified in the name of individual or, in the case of the Nazis, national survival. Adorno expands on this amorality of bourgeois self-preservation in his analysis of the Odyssey, emphasizing how its protagonist is not an epic hero in the triumphal mode by which he was understood before the War, but an early example of the everyday middle-class man. For instance, Adorno notes how Odysseus is weaker than the primordial elements he encounters on his way home but is stronger than those he finds in Ithaca: “The fistfight with the beggar Irus” and “the drawing of the great bow are sporting in nature,” Adorno notes, thus allowing Odysseus to embody Adorno’s bourgeois archetype; his “athletic accomplishments are those of the gentleman who, free of practical cares, can train himself in lordly self-­mastery,” and that, as a result, “Odysseus inflicts on the stay-at-homes symbolically what organized landowning has long since done to them in reality, and legitimizes himself as a nobleman.”22 This is Odysseus as amateur sportsman and bourgeois exploiter—including or even principally through violence—of proletariat labor. A similar principle underlies Adorno’s reading of the scene with the Lotus Eaters. Odysseus’ men eat the lotus which, for Adorno, has no harmful effect: “The curse condemns them to nothing worse than a primal state exempt from labor and struggle in the ‘fertile land.’”23 For the men as forced laborers in need of rest, this is fine; it is only from the perspective of the bourgeois Odysseus as capitalist boss that it is intolerable: “Self-­ preserving reason cannot permit such an idyll—reminiscent of the bliss induced by narcotics, by which subordinate classes have been made capable of enduring the unendurable in ossified social orders—among its own people.”24 Adorno transforms the men into a version of Marx’s proletariat and Odysseus into their boss who sees in the leisurely happiness of the laborers an end to his ability to make them work for his profit. Adorno then quotes Odysseus’ own words: “I had to use force to bring them back to the ships, and they wept on the way, but once on board I dragged them under the benches and left them in irons.”25 Odysseus’ application of

 Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 44).  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 49). 24  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 49). 25  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 49), referencing Hom. Od.9.99. 22 23

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violence coerces and literally shackles the proletariat to hard manual labor, while the profit accrues to their boss, the bourgeois Odysseus. This characterization is also evident in Adorno’s reading of the recognition scene between Penelope and Odysseus. Penelope takes as proof of his identity only one secret, known only to the two of them, that he has built a bed of which one post is a still-rooted tree. Adorno writes that Penelope “proceeds to give a circumstantial account of his durable amateur handiwork: as a prototypical bourgeois he is smart enough to have a hobby.”26 One of Odysseus’ greatest and most clever achievements in the Odyssey is thus reinterpreted in ordinary terms, as a hobby. As a member of the bourgeoisie, Odysseus can have a hobby, because “his freedom to perform superfluous tasks confirms his power over those who have to do such work in order to live.”27 Woodworking as a hobby means that woodworking is not his profession, thus marking him as someone who lives removed from manual labor. Nancy Love notes that Adorno and Horkheimer’s “story of Odysseus’ homecoming excludes not only Argos [Odysseus’ loyal dog, who has become mangy and mistreated but who recognizes him immediately] and Eurykleia [the nurse-slave who raised him], but also Odysseus’ songs of victory. By reframing Homer’s narrative, they omit Odysseus as the triumphant narrator of his deeds.”28 Instead, of an epic hero whose deeds are superhuman, Odysseus becomes a recognizable figure of the early twentieth century: a business owner, a hobbyist, in a loveless but socially acceptable marriage.29 For Adorno, however, this hyper-rational, capitalist, self-­preservationist, and self-asserting mentality creates the conditions whereby atrocities can both occur and be justified: “At the moment when human beings cut themselves off from the consciousness of themselves as nature, all the purposes for which they keep themselves alive—social progress, the heightening of material and intellectual forces, indeed, consciousness itself—become void.”30 In this way, according to Habermas’ interpretation of the “Excursus,” “reason itself destroys the humanity which it had made possible in the first place—this far-reaching thesis is substantiated in the first  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 58).  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 58). 28  Love (2002: 117–18). 29  His meeting with Penelope inspires in her “no spontaneous upsurge of feeling” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002: 58). 30  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 42–43) 26 27

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excursus.”31 “Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment” is an archaeology of the failures of Enlightenment projected back in time: “The enthronement of the means as the end, which in late capitalism is taking on the character of overt madness, is already detectable in the earliest history of subjectivity.”32 Perhaps the most damning of these are the bourgeois notions of home and homeland, the former as the ultimate sphere of the bourgeois man and the latter of his national dream—a national dream also at the center of Nazi ideology. For Adorno, the concepts of home and homeland require the notion of property rights, and anything is justified in defense of individual property rights and its collective corollary, the national homeland. The example Adorno offers is “the punishment meted out by the son of the island’s king to the faithless maidservants who have sunk into harlotry.”33 Adorno describes the narration of this scene as possessing “an unmoved composure comparable in its inhumanity only to the impassibilité of the greatest narrative writers of the nineteenth century. […] The exactitude of the description […] already exhibits the coldness of anatomy and vivisection.”34 At the heart Adorno’s critique is a pair of lies that Homer and his audience tell one another to justify this otherwise unjustifiable act of cruelty: that there can be no immorality in the means of protection so long as the end result is the protection of property and property rights and, second, that the means are not cruel. For Adorno, this allows the justification of atrocity: “Homer comforts himself and his listeners, who are really readers, with the certified observation that the kicking [of the hanged maids] did not last long—a moment, and all was over.”35 But this is definitively a willful overlooking of the truth; focusing on the “did not last long,” Adorno notes that Homer “giv[es] the lie to his own composure” and “lays bare the unspeakably endless torment of the single second in which the maids fought against death.”36

31  Habermas (1982: 17). Habermas’ judgment has been borne out by subsequent scholars, as, for instance, Pierre-François Noppen, who argues that “the book, I take it, tirelessly asks this one question: what exactly in the prevailing picture of the enlightened self might be responsible for enlightenment’s self-destructive tendencies?” (2020: 209). 32  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 43). 33  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 61). 34  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 61). 35  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 62). 36  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 62).

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This archaeological critique of bourgeois culture in Dialectic of Enlightenment is placed in its contemporary context in another of Adorno’s wartime works, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben), which he began in 1944: “the immediate occasion for writing this book was Max Horkheimer’s fiftieth birthday, February 14, 1945.”37 Indeed, in the introduction, Adorno articulates the centrality of the wartime context of its composition: “The major part of the book was written during the war, under conditions enforcing contemplation.”38 Immediately following, he writes that he cannot fully understand the cultural changes in Europe and, particularly, the German-speaking countries, because “the violence that expelled me thereby denied me full knowledge of it.”39 And yet, through the philosophical contemplation imposed on him by the war, he comes to the central idea that animates the otherwise disparate aphorisms of the Minima Moralia: “I did not yet admit to myself the complicity that enfolds those who, in face of unspeakable collective events, speak of individual matters at all.”40 Adorno thus proposes that the seemingly values-neutral focus on the self is actually a deeply unethical act that allows one to, perhaps unwittingly, become complicit in the perpetration of atrocity. As with the work of many wartime and postwar scholars, Minima Moralia is in many ways a response to the pre-War Enlightenment philosophy of Hegel who, Adorno writes, “hypostasiz[ed] both bourgeois society and its fundamental category, the individual.”41 In a work otherwise marked by its digressive structure and opaque style, what unites the disparate aphorisms of the Minima Moralia is how bourgeois societies became totalitarian, that is to say, how they created the conditions by which the individual could morally justify ignoring the public catastrophe befalling others by prioritizing their own private affairs. Writing of the rise of “the Fascist regimes of the first half of the twentieth century,” Adorno claims that “with the strengthening of external authority the stuffy private order, particularism of interests, the long-­ outdated form of the family, the right of property and its reflection in  Adorno (2005: 18).  Adorno (2005: 18). 39  Adorno (2005: 18). 40  Adorno (2005: 18). 41  Adorno (2005: 17). 37 38

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character, have also reconsolidated themselves.”42 If, for Adorno, totalitarian political structures allowed people to retreat from the public square into their private lives, there was a moral cost; they could do so, “but with a bad conscience, a scarcely concealed awareness of untruth. Whatever was once good and decent in bourgeois values, independence, perseverance, forethought, circumspection, has been completely corrupted.”43 This is political retreat as a form of political denial. For Adorno, the bourgeoisie under totalitarianism is defined by its members’ conception of a self that has its own identity, aims, goals, motivations, desires, and agency (and thus, in his reading, abdicates a broader moral responsibility). In this, “the bourgeois have become impenitently malign.”44 In his Minima Moralia, Adorno offers a blunt but clear description of what he calls “the truly bourgeois principle, that of competition[. …] It is as old a component of bourgeois ideology that each individual in his particular interest, considers himself better than all others.”45 The pursuit of private interest, here as elsewhere in Adorno’s writing, precludes any responsibility to others and thus creates the moral conditions for genocide. In the introduction, Adorno argues that “in the period of his decay, the individual’s experience of himself and what he encounters contributes once more to knowledge, which he had merely obscured as long as he continued unshaken to construe himself positively as the dominant category. In face of the totalitarian unison with which the eradication of difference is proclaimed as a purpose in itself, even part of the social force of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the individual sphere.”46 Minima Moralia addresses the problem of the individual under totalitarianism in a theoretical and abstract way; the excursus on the Odyssey in Dialectic of Enlightenment, by contrast, articulates the origin of this

 Adorno (2005: 34).  Adorno (2005: 34). 44  And later, “by tracing the absolutely particular interests of each individual, the nature of the collective in a false society can be most accurately studied” (Adorno 2005: 34). 45  Adorno (2005: 27). 46  Adorno (2005: 16–17). 42 43

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modern ideology, that is, by analyzing “the prototype of the bourgeois individual, Odysseus.”47 The entangled nature of the seemingly oppositional binary between myth and reason is not merely a question for the history ideas or philosophy but rather one intricately tied to the problems Adorno and Horkheimer are addressing, namely the failure of Enlightenment and the transformation of persistent historical European antisemitism into Jewish genocide. Indeed, the last section of Dialectic of Enlightenment, “Elements of Anti-­ Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment,” deals with this exact problem. In the beginning of the excursus on the Odyssey, Adorno connects his subsequent discussion of sacrifice in the Odyssey with his own moment: The theory of sacrifice prevalent today relates it to the idea of a collective body, the tribe, into which the spilled blood of the tribe’s sacrificed member is supposed to flow back. While totemism was an ideology even in its own time, it nevertheless marks a real state in which the dominant reason required sacrificial victims. It is a state of archaic shortage, in which human sacrifice can hardly be distinguished from cannibalism. At some times the numerically increased collective can keep itself alive only by consuming human flesh; perhaps, in some ethnic and social groups, pleasure was linked in some way to cannibalism, a link to which only the aversion to human flesh now bears witness.48

In “Elements of Anti-Semitism,” Adorno and Horkheimer connect this theory of sacrifice to Nazi ideology: They [the Jews] are sacrificed by the dominant order when, through its increasing estrangement from nature, it has reverted to mere nature. The Jews as a whole are charged with practicing forbidden magic and bloody rituals. Disguised as an accusation, the subliminal craving of the indigenous 47  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 35). Rebecca Comay reads these as Adorno’s vision of pre-War bourgeois culture: Odysseus’ “voyage an extended business trip, his passions the usual affairs men fall into when they have a devoted wife at home” (2000: 21). Similarly, Malcolm Bull argues that “for Adorno and Horkheimer, Odysseus is the prototype of the capitalist who simultaneously deprives his employees of the promise of well-being that the aesthetic invariably offers to maintain the efficiency of his enterprise” (2002: 67). Andreas Huyssen follows this line of thought as well: “Thus we are not surprised to find Odysseus described as the first modern subject and the Jews as “die ersten Bürger,” the first modern citizens” (2002: 97). 48  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 41).

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population to revert to mimetic sacrificial practices is joyously readmitted to their consciousness. Once the horror of the primeval age, sent packing by civilization, has been rehabilitated as a rational interest through projection onto the Jews, there is no holding back. It can be acted out in reality, and the evil which is acted out surpasses even the evil content of the projection.49

Odysseus, as avatar of bourgeois society, must repress these natural desires in order to cultivate the rational faculty which preserve his life in the face of primordial danger; he does so through sacrifice. The Nazis repeat this process at the national level. Though Odysseus is able to restrain his natural desires and achieve his goal through reason, the natural desires do not go away; they are only repressed. So too, with the Nazis. The “subliminal craving” that has been repressed is transferred to the Jews, and the “rational capacity” justifies this elemental desire. The Jews are accused of practicing the very sacrifices that the Nazis have repressed, and thus, from this perspective, the rational thing to do is to kill them. Reason, the defining achievement of the Enlightenment, becomes the very irrationality it sought to conquer; as Adorno and Horkheimer argued in the “Concept of Enlightenment,” “the myth of the twentieth century and faith’s irrationality [turn] into rational organization in the hands of the utterly enlightened as they steer society toward barbarism.”50 James Porter has already elucidated in detail the counterintuitive method by which Adorno positions Homer and the Homeric epics as the keys for unlocking the entanglements of myth, nationalism, sacrifice, and the inevitable turn of reason under totalitarianism to atrocity; further, he notes how Adorno understood that the methodological tools by which ancient texts are read in contemporary cultures are the cultural superstructures which support actual atrocities.51 For Adorno, this means primarily the philological approaches to classical texts that veiled fascistic and violent readings. Adorno makes his criticism of the fascist tendency in German philology explicit.52 In particular, he critiques the famed German classicist Wilamowitz (who died in 1931). In a footnote to his reading of the dangling maids, Adorno writes that “Wilamowitz considers that the execution was ‘carried out with satisfaction by the poet’ […] But when the authoritarian scholar enthuses over the simile of the snares, which ‘conveys the dangling of the maids’ corpses  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 153).  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002:15). 51  Porter (2010a). 52  James Porter discusses the passage in Porter (2018a: 112). 49 50

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in an apt and modern way’ […] the satisfaction appears to  be largely his own. Wilamowitz’s writings are among the most striking documents of the German intermingling of barbarism and culture, which is fundamental to modern Philhellenism.”53 Porter argues that in order to “diagnos[e] the contortions of modern historical consciousness and its underlying political and cultural ideologies […] Adorno must also conduct a critique of  the philology  of his own era, which he views as the guilty handmaiden of enlightenment mentality.”54 For Adorno, Odysseus is the avatar of Western Enlightenment, “the prototypical subject,” according to Pierre-François Noppen, who “acknowledges the hold his passions have over him, but he does so in order to make himself into what isn’t controlled by his passions. That is, simply put: by renouncing his drives, impulses, and passions, he makes himself into a being that is no longer dominated by them, that is no longer defined by this domination. He makes himself into a being that is, instead, defined by the fact the he pursues his own goals—in this case, the return to Ithaca and the enjoyment of life as master.”55 This is Odysseus as the paradigm of the bourgeois society. Odysseus, in this reading, is the first human to use rational thought to suppress his passions and thus the first who could commit genocide.

Adorno’s Odysseus and Arendt’s Eichmann: Studies in Private Virtue If there was one contemporary figure whom Adorno’s critique of Odysseus most resembled, it was Adolf Eichmann, among the chief Nazi architects of the Final Solution. Among the key transformations in Homeric interpretation in Dialectic of Enlightenment is that of Odysseus from an epic hero of transcendent accomplishment into an ordinary member of the bourgeoisie whose pursuit of private advantage blinds him to (or, perhaps more accurately, encourages him not to see) his complicity in atrocity. The most famous explicator of this theory, however, was not Adorno but his contemporary, Hannah Arendt. Arendt was born in Germany in 1906 and suffered significant hardship during the rise of the Third Reich, including a brief period of imprisonment and a difficult escape from a French refugee camp to America in 1940. These formative experiences generated her  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 265, n.61).  Porter (2018a: 111). 55  Noppen (2020: 217). 53 54

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first major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), and spurred the New Yorker magazine, ten years later, to send her to Jerusalem to report on Eichmann’s trial for crimes against Jews and crimes against humanity. In 1963, she collected and expanded this reporting into Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Across Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt details how Eichmann’s self-conception was that of a petty bureaucrat seeking to move up the economic and political hierarchy established within the Third Reich. For instance, Arendt frequently returns to what she calls the “‘blood-for-wares’ negotiations” by which Eichmann sought to trade Jewish lives for military trucks toward the end of the War.56 Arendt explains that the way [Eichmann] explained his role in this matter, in Jerusalem, showed clearly how he had once justified it to himself: as a military necessity that would bring him the additional benefit of an important new role in the emigration business. What he probably never admitted to himself was that the mounting difficulties on all sides made it every day more likely that he would soon be without a job (indeed, this happened, a few months later) unless he succeeded in finding some foothold amid the new jockeying for power that was going on all around him.57

Arendt’s reading of Eichmann mirrors Adorno’s interpretation of the hanging of the maids: Eichmann was doing his job, and it might benefit him professionally. If morality was a factor, then pursuit of professional advancement was the highest ideal for which Eichmann strove. In Arendt’s analysis, Eichmann saw his actions in strictly private terms; there was no communal dimension to his behavior. He could get a new job, a promotion. She also demonstrates how Eichmann did not recognize any moral dimension to his behavior. Arendt notes, for instance, that Eichmann often claimed at his trial that he couldn’t remember many things and, given how easily and unreservedly Eichmann admitted to mass killing, his forgetting was not a feigned attempt to shield himself from accountability. Rather, for Arendt, “Eichmann remembered the turning points in his own career rather well, but that they did not necessarily coincide with the turning points in the story of Jewish extermination or, as a matter of fact, with

 Arendt (2006b: 144).  Arendt (2006b: 144).

56 57

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the turning points in history.”58 This is the modern example of the bourgeois mentality Adorno identified in Odysseus: a man consumed with his own personal advancement to the exclusion of the broader political or moral implications—or the impact of those decisions on other people. For Arendt, this capacity for narrow vision and moral blindness in Eichmann was the central overlooked insight her study elucidated: “That Eichmann had at all times done his best to make the Final Solution final was therefore not in dispute. The question was only whether this was indeed proof of his fanaticism, his boundless hatred of Jews[. …] No other explanation ever occurred to the judges.”59 For the judges and much of the viewership of the internationally televised trials, it was emotion that was central to their conception of Eichmann’s actions and thus those of individual Nazis on a national scale. Arendt, however, offers an explanation in which emotion is irrelevant: “For the sad and very uncomfortable truth of the matter probably was that it was not his fanaticism but his very conscience that prompted Eichmann to adopt his uncompromising attitude during the last year of the war.”60 Eichmann believed he was acting rationally; the broader moral context within which his adherence to reason was operating was irrelevant to him. Arendt dwells at length upon Eichmann’s conception of the legality of actions (the famous phrase “just following orders”) because the law was the path by which one could act simultaneously completely logically and completely immorally without internal contradiction. Arendt most clearly articulates this distinction in a passing reference to Arthur Greiser who, as the Nazi governor of much of Poland, was one of the principal architects of the Holocaust in that country. Arendt reports that, during his defense, Greiser argued that “only his ‘official soul’ had carried out the crimes for which he was hanged in 1946, his ‘private soul’ had always been against them.”61 Arendt’s arguments in Eichmann in Jerusalem were highly controversial, then as now, and in a postscript to the book, she defends herself against a variety of criticisms leveled at her reporting on the trial. Chief among these was her choice of subtitle, about which she concedes that she “can well imagine that an authentic controversy might have arisen.”62 She 58  Arendt (2006b: 53). Arendt says that it would have been too easy to have “declared him a clever, calculating liar—which he obviously was not” (2006b: 54). 59  Arendt (2006b: 146). 60  Arendt (2006b: 146). 61  Arendt (2006b: 127). 62  Arendt (2006b: 287).

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then elaborates further on its meaning and significance, clarifying that “when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level,” by which she means that Eichmann had no conception of himself as a villain (Arendt contrasts Eichmann’s banal evil with the seemingly unmotivated and self-congratulatory evil of Iago in Othello). Indeed, echoing Adorno’s critique of Odysseus, “except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all.”63 Arendt concludes that Eichmann “was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.”64 For Arendt, it was the very lack of the trappings of traditional villainy that made Eichmann as a person and the Eichmann trial as a historical event so confounding: “One cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann.”65 But, for Arendt, that was also what made it so important: “That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.”66 Arendt believed that she had recognized in Eichmann a specific kind of genocidal criminality that was not derived from and could not be explained by traditional conceptions of evil but that could nevertheless produce genocide.67 In the postscript, Arendt also rebuts critics who seemingly wanted her reporting to engage with broader issues: “the book itself dealt with a sadly limited subject. The report of a trial can discuss only the matters which were treated in the course of the trial,” and thus she could not discuss other, perhaps even more important issues: it is not a work of history, of political science, “nor is it, finally and least of all, a theoretical treatise on the nature of evil.”68 Writing such theoretical treatises on the nature of evil  Arendt (2006b: 287).  Arendt (2006b: 287). 65  Arendt (2006b: 288). Vlasta Jalušič argues that “In Eichmann, Arendt revealed a new type of perpetrator, one who committed a novel sort of crime, without traditional motives of hatred and without needing to be a monstrous fanatic” (2008: 152). 66  Arendt (2006b: 287–88). 67  Jalušič describes Arendt’s view as falling with “the structural-functionalist Holocaust interpretation camp, which insists on modern structures as the origin for crimes ‘without motives’” and contrasts it with “the ideological-intentionlist interpretation that insists on the power of indoctrination,” principally German ethno-nationalism and antisemitism (2008: 152). 68  Arendt (2006b: 285). 63 64

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would, however, become the defining element of her subsequent writing, and she returned to what she calls in the postscript to Eichmann in Jerusalem “the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil” in her final, posthumous, and incomplete last work, The Life of the Mind (1977/1978).69 In the introduction to The Life of the Mind, Arendt writes that “the immediate impulse” of her “preoccupation with mental activities […] came from my attending the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem.”70 She then clarifies again her thesis from Eichmann in Jerusalem that Eichmann’s evil was not “something demonic,” that he did not, like other “evil men […] act out of envy” or some other vice”; “the deeds were monstrous but the doer […] was quite ordinary, common-place, and neither demonic nor monstrous.”71 Rather, “there was no sign in him of firm ideological; convictions or of specific evil motives […] it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness.”72 This term, in Arendt’s discourse, had a very specific meaning; Stephan Kampowski provides three definitions contained in Arendt’s use of the term: “the inability to imagine the standpoint of someone else and the inability to realize what one is doing. […] we may add a third […] inability to realize what is being done to him.”73 The Life of the Mind, then, was Arendt’s archaeology of thought and thus thoughtlessness, as a means of explaining the relationship between thought(lessness)

 Arendt (2006b: 288).  This passage is discussed in Mahony (2018: 7), which is perhaps the most sustained study of “thoughtlessness” in Arendt’s philosophy. Arendt’s assertion of Eichmann’s “thoughtlessness” as the source of his evil has been among the more controversial and contested elements of the work and of her moral political philosophy in general. See, for instance, Kathryn Gines’ assertion that “the case can be made that for Arendt, thoughtlessness may be worse—or at least more disturbing—than intentional harm. […] When Arendt accuses Eichmann of thoughtlessness, she is criticizing his claim that he was merely doing his job and his failure to judge his actions as wrong” (2018: 48). Jalušič outlines the contours of this critique, noting that by attributing his actions to “thoughtlessness, [Arendt] had really absolved Eichmann of his deeds and, instead, blamed the victims (Jewish councils)” (2008: 152). For the origins of Arendt’s inquiry into thoughtlessness after Eichmann in Jerusalem, see Young-Bruehl (1994), who argues that “Arendt calls this man ‘thoughtless’ and spoke of thoughtless evildoing as ‘banal’” (336). “Thoughtlessness […] is the absence of internal dialogue. The thoughtless person who does evil is different, in Arendt’s terms, from the person who is wicked” (1994: 338). 71  Arendt (1981: 3–4). 72  Arendt (1981: 4). 73  Kampowski (2008: 82). Italics in original. 69 70

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and evil.74 Arendt is clear that this is not, for her, an abstract question (“I have neither claim nor ambition to be a ‘philosopher’”)75 but that her inquiry is explicitly connected to the politics of Holocaust prevention as embodied in figures like Eichmann: “Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually ‘condition’ them against it?”76 For an archaeology (and thus answer) to this pressing contemporary question, Arendt ranges across much of the Western philosophical tradition with particular attention to Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason had established the centrality of rational thought in the Enlightenment, to argue that there can be no reason, and thus no thought, without language. In this analysis, however, language is inadequate, since it cannot explain the immateriality of thought. A survey of the development of language, however, reveals that “speaking in analogies, in metaphorical language, according to Kant, is the only way through which speculative reason, which we here call thinking, can manifest itself.”77 She further elaborates that “metaphor, bridging the abyss between inward and invisible mental activities and the world of appearances, was certainly the greatest gift language could bestow on thinking and hence on philosophy, but the metaphor itself is poetic rather than philosophic in origin.”78 Given that Arendt locates the origins of metaphor in poetry, and given the cultural framework in which Homer and the Homeric epics were the apotheosis of Western culture, it comes as no surprise that, for her, “the discoverer of this originally poetic tool was Homer.”79 Within the context of what she calls “an embarras de richesse” of “metaphorical expressions” in Homer, she begins with “the passage in the Iliad where the poet likens the tearing onslaught of fear and grief on the hearts of men to the combined onslaught of winds from several directions on the water of the sea.”80 Arendt’s search for origins in Homer represents a  Arendt (1981: 3–4).  Arendt (1981: 3). 76  Arendt (1981: 6). 77  Arendt (1981: 99). 78  Arendt (1981: 105). 79  Arendt (1981: 106). 80  Arendt (1981: 106). 74 75

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belief that pre-War (i.e., humanist) readings of Homeric epic could be traced to the rise of fascism; postwar revisionist readings of Homer could also provide answers for a reconstituted postwar humanistic subjectivity unburdened from the worst elements of the poems’ reception history. Arendt uses Homeric grief for reconceptualizing humanistic subjectivity. Indeed, her subsequent discussion of what she calls “another, more complex kind of extended metaphor or simile which, though moving among visibles, points to a hidden story” also focuses on the literary representation of this same affective state.81 Her example is Penelope’s tears in lines 203–209 of Book 19, when a still-disguised Odysseus lies to Penelope, telling her he saw her husband on Crete: “her body was melted, as the snow melts along the high places of the mountains when the West Wind has piled it there, but the South Wind melts it, and as it melts the rivers run full flood It was even so that her beautiful cheeks were streaming tears, as Penelope wept for her man.”82 The explicit purpose of the example was to show the way in which metaphor can make invisible realities visible by comparing them to apprehensible external phenomena: sorrow to snowmelt: “The tears themselves had only expressed sorrow; their meaning— the thoughts that caused them—became manifest in the metaphor of the snow melting and softening the ground before spring.”83 But the selection of this particular passage points again to the broader context in which Life of the Mind was conceived, that is to say, Arendt’s concern with understanding the events of the Holocaust, the mentality of its perpetrators, and how Homer had represented these aspects of reality in the representational medium of words. Though she frames her discussion as how literature can convey emotion, both of the metaphors she chooses analyze feelings specific to the Jewish community during and after World War II: grief and suffering in the face of violence, grief and suffering at loved ones lost or missing. As with Adorno’s reading of Odysseus’ homecoming,84 these examples shape a new conception of Odysseus not as a hero but as a villain, not as a liberator of Ithaca but one who brings to it grief, suffering, and death. There are no shortage of similes in the Homeric epics, including those that take a more triumphal attitude to conquest and killing; Arendt’s selection of  Arendt (1981: 107).  Arendt (1981: 107). 83  Arendt (1981: 107–108). 84  For which, see above {000}. 81 82

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these specific ones, therefore, must be seen as part of the shift to foregrounding these elements within a postwar hermeneutics of the Homeric epics. Elsewhere in The Life of the Mind, Arendt writes that “all thought arises out of experience, but no experience yields any meaning or even coherence without undergoing the operations of imagining and thinking.”85 In this context, Arendt can be seen as trying to demonstrate how the Homeric inheritance on the thought process of the Western European post-­ Enlightenment subject can give meaning to the experience of suffering and grief, an urgent task given both the extreme amounts she had witnessed among the Jewish community during World War II and, as hauntingly, the thoughtlessness of the perpetrator she had studied most closely. For Arendt, these are unstable processes, and the postwar subjectivity is one in which the Enlightenment ideals have proven a failure. Indeed, she writes approvingly of a note written by Kant, the preeminent philosopher of reason and the Enlightenment thought, who saw the limits of the use of reason “In the privacy of his posthumously published notes.”86 Arendt adds to this that “not only is the quest for meaning absent from and good for nothing in the ordinary course of human affairs, while at the same time its results remain uncertain and unverifiable; thinking is also somehow self-destructive.”87 Her re-reading of the Odyssey in the wake of the Holocaust emphasizes the instability of reason, represented by literal narrative, to produce knowledge, instead arguing for the priority of experience and metaphor to articulate emotion, with particular emphasis on grief and suffering. For her, Homer authorizes this mode of reading; indeed, for Arendt, “the business of thinking is like Penelope’s web; it undoes every morning what it has finished the night before.”88

 Arendt (1981: 87).  Arendt (1981: 88). 87  Arendt (1981: 88). 88  Arendt (1981: 88). 85 86

CHAPTER 3

Reflections on a Damaged Life: Hermann Broch’s Mythical Method and Rachel Bespaloff’s On the Iliad

Abstract  This chapter examines Rachel Bespaloff’s On the Iliad and the introduction to it written by Hermann Broch. Bespaloff’s essay showed how the conquest of the Trojans by the Greeks affected war widows such as Andromache, the mothers of dead soldiers such as Thetis, and those who died defending their homes and families such as Hector. For Bespaloff, a student of existential philosophy, the Iliad was a poem of despair. Broch’s introduction contextualizes Bespaloff’s reading of the past as an allegory for the present, arguing that World War II, like the Trojan War, represented a society’s moral collapse into genocidal war. Keywords  Rachel Bespaloff • Hermann Broch • Homer • Holocaust • Despair • Existentialism Though usually referred to only by its title, Minima Moralia, the subtitle of Theodor Adorno’s wartime indictment of Enlightenment culture was Reflections on a Damaged Life, an acknowledgment of the central place that Adorno’s injured ontology held in a book written in exile during and immediately after the war (begun in 1944 and completed in 1949). The interiority and affective response of the author to the dramatic shift in circumstances brought about by the War—his damaged life—is the source of the insights he offers in the wide-ranging aphorisms that comprise the book. That is to say, his experience informed his interpretation of the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Goldwyn, Homer, Humanism, Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11473-1_3

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world around him, its culture, its history, and the underlying ideologies of its politics. But Adorno, of course, was not the only one who suffered during the War, and, indeed, this sense of injury, of woundedness, of vulnerability, lies at the core of several of the other most significant works by Jewish philosophers and philologists on the Homeric epics during and immediately after World War II. Among these was Hermann Broch, born in 1886 to a wealthy Jewish family. Broch converted to Catholicism in 1909, though he retained a deep sense of Jewish identity throughout his life, particularly during and after World War II, where he was deeply affected by his mother’s death in Theresienstadt, which he only learned about in 1944, two years after she died.1 Like Adorno and Hannah Arendt, his Jewishness (in Nazi race law if no longer in religious affiliation) made his situation in the years before the war in Austria increasingly untenable, and indeed he was arrested on March 13, 1938, the day after the Anschluss, the Nazi occupation of Austria. Though the arrest was ostensibly for his left-leaning politics, Broch had for some time been concerned about deportation on account of his Jewishness. Indeed, his biographer José María Pérez Gay reports that it was during his incarceration that “he began drafting, no less than ten times, the final chapter of his novel The Death of Vergil. He was convinced that his writing career was coming to a close and that would be shipped at any moment to a concentration camp.”2 After two weeks of 1  For the death of Broch’s mother, see Pérez Gay (2007: 105). Broch’s relationship to Judaism has been the subject of much scholarly investigation, for which, see Sandberg (1998). Broch’s mother died in the Holocaust, and in 1946, Broch, then living in the United States, is reported to have said to his friend Erich von Kahler, “It doesn’t bother me to be a man without a state. In this sense I am more Jewish than I ever imagined. I have identified all my life with the Diaspora” (Pérez Gay 2007: 119). 2  Pérez Gay (2007: 26). The scholarship on the evolution of The Death of Vergil and of Broch’s own biography during the late 1930s is well documented, and yet a persistent and insidious myth about the work’s composition persists. The back matter of the English edition of The Death of Vergil claims that the book was “begun while Broch was imprisoned in a German concentration camp,” and this claim is found elsewhere, as, for instance, in Marta Figlerowicz review “On ‘The Novel of Ferrera’,” in which she writes “Hermann Broch’s last novel, written while he was in a concentration camp, reimagined the death of the Roman poet Virgil and the tradition that he represented” (2019: n.p.), or Edwin Dekker’s The Viennese Students of Civilization, in which he writes that: “Broch started writing this novel in 1938 while imprisoned in a German concentration camp” (2016: 134). Not only did Broch read an early draft on the radio in 1936 or 1937 (Ziolkowski notes that “when Broch was arrested by the Nazis in March 1938, he was reworking his story for the third time” [1980: 7]), he was never in a concentration camp at all; he was arrested and held in a local jail (Pérez Gay 2007: 25–26).

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incarceration, however, Broch was released and, after a harrowing few months trying to get an exit visa, fled first to Britain and then to America, where he spent the remainder of his life.3 By the time of his arrest, Broch had already established himself as a leading figure in German modernist literature on the strength of The Sleepwalkers, a novel in three parts published in the early years of the 1930s.4 For Broch, like Arendt, the experience of incarceration and, like Arendt, Adorno, and Horkheimer, the experience of becoming an exile and a refugee were the constituent elements of the damaged life that informed his subsequent thinking. In large part due to the difficult economic situation in which he found himself during the War years in America and to deteriorating health (he died of a heart attack in 1951, a year after being nominated for the Nobel Prize), Broch was notorious during and after the War for rarely completing the ambitious projects on which he worked, such as his proposed three-volume history of mass psychosis. Two of the works he did complete, however, engage with the history of epic: The Death of Vergil, published in English translation in 1944 and in German in 1945, and “The Style of the Mythical Age: On Rachel Bespaloff,” which was ostensibly an introduction to the essay On the Iliad (1947) by the Ukrainian-Jewish French emigrée Rachel Bespaloff, but which Broch used to articulate his own vision of a future politics and poetics of the postwar period. In the words of his fellow European-Jewish emigré George Steiner, “His Death of Virgil, his philosophic essays, are an epilogue to humanism. They focus on the deed which should dominate our rational lives so far as we still conduct them, which should persistently bewilder our sense of self—the turn of civilization to mass murder.”5 The Death of Vergil was a slowly evolving project for Broch; as Theodore Ziolkowski notes, Broch’s engagement with Vergil had begun in 1936/1937, and the novel continued to expand during the period of his American exile across eight separate versions, transforming from the late 1930s from The Homecoming of Vergil (Die Heimkehr Des Vergil) to The Death of Vergil (Der Tod Des Vergil), a shift that resonates with the broader  For which, see Winkler (1982: 142).  For which, see Winkler (1982: 143–44). Hannah Arendt published a glowing review of The Sleepwalkers, the trilogy that made Broch’s name as a novelist (Arendt 1949). Years later, Arendt also offered a biographical reading of Broch’s The Death of Vergil and “The Style of the Mythical Age: On Rachel Bespaloff” in Men in Dark Times (Arendt 1968a). For a comparison of Arendt’s and Broch’s use of Vergil, see Hammer (2002: 143–44). 5  Steiner (1965: n.p.) 3 4

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idea of the end of Europe as a potential home to which Jews could return in light of the increasing reality of Europe as a Jewish graveyard.6 Ziolkowski notes that Vergil had not been a major figure in European letters, least of all in Germany, for some centuries, but that “the analogy between Vergil’s Rome and modern Europe was the principal topos that emerged from the festivities surrounding the millennial of Vergil’s birth celebrated all over Europe in 1940—and nowhere more enthusiastically than Germany.”7 This increasing affinity for the Roman poet, however, stemmed from more than simply a literary appreciation; Ziolkowski writes that “the experience of World War I had awakened German readers to the realization that the Bucolics, notwithstanding their familiar title, were the work of a poet who, some two thousand years earlier, had undergone startlingly similar experiences—civil war, the social turmoil of returning veterans, dispossession of property, the collapse of traditional rural values in the face of modernization, and the longing for peace and tranquility.”8 Broch’s choice to focus on a work about Vergil, then, was shaped by the broader contemporary cultural and political trends that emerged from the experience of war in Germany and Europe.9 But Ziolkowski notes that the work evolved during the course of the decade Broch worked on it, in particular that “Vergil’s wish to burn the Aeneid constitutes the central problem of the novel as we know it today, [although] that motif does not occur at all in the first version of the story.”10 It does, however, occur in Broch’s revisions beginning in 1937, when, Ziolkowski suggests, “he introduced the motif of Vergil’s wish to destroy the Aeneid as a gesture denying the legitimacy of art.”11 Ziolkowski’s analysis is largely philological rather than hermeneutic, that is, he is concerned with what Latin sources Broch knew and how and when he came to use them in his revisions rather than with interpreting the work as a literary document produced within the literary and aesthetic 6  For the work’s publication history, see Ziolkowski (1980), Winkler (1982: 144), and Komar (1985). 7  Ziolkowski (1980: 8). 8  Ziolkowski (1980: 8). 9  Austin Harrington makes a similar allegorical claim for Hannah Arendt’s reading of her close friend Broch’s Death of Vergil: “It seems impossible not to think that Arendt must have felt in these passages something of the calamity of Old Europe in the death factories of the world wars, spurring a yearning for redemption from evil and nothingness” (2008: 83). 10  Ziolkowski (1980: 8). 11  Ziolkowski (1980: 13).

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contexts of his affinity for experimental modernism and the political and cultural contexts of the rise of the Nazis and their occupation of Austria. From this philological study, however, comes a surprising result: he argues that “classical scholarship has had no reason to doubt the motivation given in the earliest versions of the legend: that Vergil was dissatisfied artistically with his epic,” and therefore wanted to burn it.12 Broch’s interpretation of the event, therefore, marks a substantive break in the attribution of the poet’s last wish. As “the threat of death at the hands of the Nazis assumed ever more imminent forms,” Broch’s novel transformed around “two major themes—the rejection of art and the obsession with death—[which] are themes utterly inconsistent with the image of Vergil prevalent in Europe during the period when Broch was writing his novel.”13 Thus, when Broch “attributes Vergil’s decision to burn the Aeneid to more metaphysical doubts involving the crisis of values and the illegitimacy of art, he is projecting upon an ancient author modern anxieties that have no basis in history or the extant texts.”14 Broch’s revision of the dominant European interpretation of the legend of Vergil’s dying wish, therefore, was in some significant way conditioned by the context in which Broch was writing.15 The rise of European fascists and Nazis, both of whom were deeply indebted to the Classics for their understanding of their place at the end of history, marked the Aeneid as a work which, like Adorno’s interpretation of the Odyssey, was proto-fascistic or at least gave fascists a pretext for a legitimizing claim for Roman-style inter-European colonialism and imperial conquest.16 The central moral dilemma of The Death Of Vergil— whether Augustus can convince the dying Vergil to reverse his decision to burn the Aeneid—thus reflects similar concerns as those of Adorno,  Ziolkowski (1980: 20).  Ziolkowski (1980: 20). 14  Ziolkowski (1980: 20). 15  Kathleen Komar writes that Broch “selected his historical material—the last day of Vergil’s life, Vergil’s desire to burn the Aeneid, his debates with Augustus—specifically to reflect the political climate and the political pressures on the poet of the 1930s and ‘40s” (1985: 52). 16  Komar argues that “Broch sees in Vergil a poet who becomes conscious of his relationship to the power structure and its implications. Vergil is, in fact, enlisted specifically in the support of Augustus’ dictatorship as a political and moral propagandist in the broadest sense” (1985: 53–54) and that “Broch’s Vergil” decides to burn his Aeneid because he “comes to see that even this pragmatic content for his literary work falls short of the task of real political and moral enlightenment” (1985: 54). 12 13

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Arendt, and Dalí. If Roman imperialism, re-embodied in the Italian fascists or the Nazis, is the inevitable result of the imperial ideologies embedded in the Aeneid, then perhaps it would have been better had Vergil burned it, lest his epic cause others to burn the world. As Ziolkowski notes elsewhere, “[Broch’s] attention was drawn to the Roman poet largely because his legendary wish to burn the Aeneid offered Broch an opportunity to project upon a writer with the alienating distance of antiquity […] his own modern anxiety of death and his doubts regarding the legitimacy of art after Auschwitz.”17 Indeed, Arendt seemed to think that The Death of Vergil reflected a similar sentiment as Adorno’s famous claim that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” writing in Men in Dark Times that “since the completion of the work coincided with the greatest shock of the age, revelation of massacres in the death camps, Broch henceforth forbade himself to continue creative writing.”18 If The Death of Vergil represents Broch’s engagement with these issues in novelistic form before and during the War, then “The Style of the Mythical Age” represents a more theoretical approach to the same problem after it. Running to nearly half the length of Rachel Bespaloff’s essay On the Iliad to which it purports to be an introduction, Broch largely avoids a discussion of Bespaloff’s arguments, opting instead to expound his own postwar vision of the crisis of Enlightenment not, this time, through Vergil but through Homer.19 As with the shattered fragments of the past that constitute Dalí’s postwar vision, or Dialectic of Enlightenment— Adorno and Horkheimer’s original title was Philosophical Fragments— Broch is also concerned with the idea of brokenness, a fitting metaphor for his own reflections from a damaged life, as his physical health deteriorated, and as he looked on a Europe in metaphysical and physical ruins—indeed, Ziolkowski counts The Death of Vergil as among “the most flagrantly fragmented texts” within the context of “the first decade after the Second World War [when] Europeans were confronted most brutally with the rupture of past traditions, including the Classical heritage.”20 For Broch, the “style of the mythical age” comes about as a result of “disintegration,” a key concept in his discussion of societies past and present (“it need not  Ziolkowski (2000: 558).  Arendt (1968a: 112). 19  One contemporary reviewer opines that “On the Iliad is furnished with an entertaining and largely irrelevant introduction by Hermann Broch” (Fitts 1948: 408). 20  Ziolkowski (2000: 562). 17 18

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be stressed again that […] the present world, at least of the West […] has entered a state of complete disintegration of values”).21 This is the case for the disintegration of “the Western structure of values” that were the result of the Protestant reformation, for “the closed values that were already being shattered” in the time of Beethoven and Goethe.22 It was this shattering or disintegration that compelled Beethoven and Goethe “towards a new style” and, Broch asserts, “there is a fair possibility that Homer, too, felt such a command from his times.”23 Broch situates Homer in the context of the disintegration of early Cretan civilization, noting that “Late Minoan art […] bears indubitable marks of a romantic period in which the beginning of the end shows its first symptoms. The realization of this tragic situation came with the onslaught of the Achaians.”24 For Broch, then, the Iliad was composed at a crucial hinge moment in Western history after the epochal change from the ordered, geometric society of the Late Minoan period to the new Hellenic period, a change caused by war and conquest. This shift had significant ideological implications as well, ones readily familiar to those in the intellectual circles frequented by Broch. A defining feature of the return to myth that characterizes War-time writing is the irrelevance of the kinds of problems that face Paris—“personal problems”—in the face of much graver society-wide ones.25 Like Adorno, Broch sees private concerns as insignificant to art, indeed, almost repugnant, in an era of mass trauma. Broch thus compares the Minoan Paris, the “playboy” and avatar of the old, with Hector, avatar of the new, a “patriot,” who is “subject to the apocalyptic mood of his time.”26 In Hector, Broch argues, “the personal problems fade away, and in the rising contours of the new myth the human element is reduced to sorrow and mourning.”27 Broch’s view of Homer’s genius, then, is the creation of a singular new myth reconstituted from the shattered fragments of the old: the “true artist” must be “willing to shatter the closed system into which he is born.”28  Broch (2005: 116–17).  Broch (2005: 114). 23  Broch (2005: 113). 24  Broch (2005: 115). 25  Broch (2005: 115). 26  Broch (2005: 115). 27  Broch (2005: 115). 28  Broch (2005: 113). 21 22

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This was the achievement of the Iliad: “Out of the broken fragments of the Cretan world was developed the poetic myth which became the religion and life of the Greek world.”29 Broch’s analysis of the “style of the mythical age,” then, reflected in Homer (and, to a lesser degree, Tolstoy), is premised on the recreation of a unified world—and worldview—within a single work of art arising from an era of fragmentation and destruction: “One cannot capture the universe by snaring its atoms one by one; one can only capture it by showing its basic and essential principles, its basic, and one might even say, its mathematical structure.”30 For Broch, “As long as the system of values is fully alive and its universe intact, man is able to solve his private and personal problems within the existing framework, while in times of disintegration such solution is achieved only when the universe is shaped anew for (and from) every particular place.”31 The recreation of this singular world from the shattered fragments of that which existed before the physical and metaphysical destruction of war is the role of art and the artist in periods of disintegration: “Every true artist […] should realize that revolution is not enough, that he must also build anew the essential framework of the world.”32 For Broch, this would solve the problem of “private and personal problems” that underpinned Arendt’s and Adorno’s diagnosis of the Enlightenment ideology that caused the War. Homer is, for Broch, an artistic model worth emulating, since the problems identified in an epoch-altering moment like the Trojan War are echoed in his own time. “It is somehow a blasphemy,” he writes, “to compare ours with that of the Homeric epics; it is blasphemy because it was the fantasy of the Nazis to become the new Achaians demolishing an old civilization. However, it is not necessary to compare Hitler with Achilles when we compare the Mycenean cultural crisis with our own.”33 Writing in the immediate aftermath of the War, Broch sought a new ethical footing for the construction of a postwar world based on new myths—“not a new myth,” he stresses, but “the new myth.”34 For Broch, this new myth is embodied in the works of Franz Kafka, and it does so in large part in terms similar to those which Adorno identified as the great vice of Odysseus; in Kafka “the personal problem no longer exists, and what seems personal  Broch (2005: 116).  Broch (2005: 106). 31  Broch (2005: 114). 32  Broch (2005: 114). 33  Broch (2005: 116). 34  Broch (2005: 119). 29 30

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still is, in the very moment it is uttered, dissolved in a super-personal atmosphere.”35 Considering, then, Kafka’s work as prophetic of the tragedies of World War II, Broch notes that like every true prophecy, it is ethical: for where now are the old problems of poetry, the problems of love, marriage, betrayal, and jealousy, when murder and rape and degradation are threatening the human being at every moment of his life, and nothing remains but sorrow and mourning? And what painter would still invite the spectator to rest under the idyllic trees of his landscape, when the landscapes of this earth have become exclusively roads of flight and persecution? […] with Kafka it has become apparent that they have lost their ethical validity as well: private problems have become as distasteful as sordid crimes.36

For Broch, then, personal problems lack sufficient vitality and relevance to justify art in an age of mass atrocity, a point he makes again in his conclusion: “Man as such is our time’s problem; the problems of men are fading away. The personal problems of the individual has become a subject of laughter for the gods, and they are right in their lack of pity.”37 In this way, humanism remains the central element of Broch’s vision of postwar society, but it is not the individual human, the concept which defined the Enlightenment, but man as a collective noun. For Broch, this was a rejection of Hitler’s “new myth,” which he calls a “pseudo-myth” that sought to “forbid[] the personal problems of men to exist” and a return to Catholic values: “Fate will again be humanized, and presumably it will not only be humane, […] insofar as it is in accord with Europe’s Christian tradition.”38 Broch’s “Style of the Mythical Age,” then, has seemingly more in common with Adorno and Arendt than it does with Rachel Bespaloff’s On the Iliad, which it was meant to introduce. Broch’s disgust for personal problems echoes the language of Adorno and Arendt and is one of the enduring themes of the essay. His meditation on the legacy of antiquity as the progenitor of fascist ideology and his search for a new postwar foundation based on a rejection of the classical past (embodied, for instance, in the work of the German-speaking Czech Jew Franz Kafka), too, mark his  Broch (2005: 119).  Broch (2005: 119). 37  Broch (2005: 120). 38  Broch (2005: 121). 35 36

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intellectual affinity for his fellow German-speaking philosophers rather than the Francophone Bespaloff; Hannah Arendt writes that in his reading of Kafka in “The Style of the Mythical Age,” Broch was “actually engaged in hidden self-interpretation.”39 What all these writers shared, however, was the experience of dislocation, of becoming an exile, and of wrestling with the legacy of the classical past in creating that world. In On the Iliad, then, Bespaloff reads the Homeric epics as a reflection of damaged life; that is, she reads the Iliad through her own life experiences, and “in so doing,” as Broch concludes, “endows the Homeric work with a new significance for our time—a significance rather Kierkegaardian than existentialist—and it is from here that her interpretation gains a large measure of its essential importance.”40 One of the few sentences from On the Iliad that Broch quotes points to just this interpretive reappraisal: “The heroes of the Iliad attain their highest lucidity at a point when justice has been utterly crushed and obliterated,” a statement which could apply to the acquisition of the hard-earned insights of Adorno, Arendt, Bespaloff, and Broch as to the Greeks and Trojans.41

Rachel Bespaloff’s Iliad of Resentment and Despair “The Style of the Mythical Age: On Rachel Bespaloff” was composed in English in 1949, when Broch was living in the United States. The essay it introduced, Bespaloff’s De l’Iliade (On the Iliad), was written in French in 1942/1943 under different geopolitical circumstances. Though both Bespaloff and Broch shared the experience of being refugees and exiles affiliated (if precariously) with elite academic institutions in the United States (Bespaloff taught at Mount Holyoke College and Broch had on-­ again-­ off-again funding from Princeton and Yale), “The Style of the Mythical Age” was written after the War, in a period when thinkers like Broch could turn to reconstituting the fragments of the shattered world. In 1942, however, the War’s outcome was uncertain, its travails new, its worst atrocities as yet unknown in the United States. Bespaloff traveled to  Arendt (1968a: 117).  Broch (2005: 121). 41  Broch (2005: 111). Arendt and Bespaloff met at the Pontigny-en-Amérique conference at Mount Holyoke College in 1944 and Arendt mentions Bespaloff in Men in Dark Times when referencing “The Style of the Mythical Age” (Arendt 1968a: 114). For the meeting at Mount Holyoke, see Benfey and Remmler (2006: 249). For a dinner party at which Bespaloff, Arendt, and Broch were all present, see Benfey (2005: xxiii). 39 40

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the United States with her mentor, the Sorbonne philosopher Jean Wahl (who would later facilitate the publication of On the Iliad and write the introduction to the original French edition); because he was Jewish, Wahl “had been tortured and interrogated by the Gestapo at the prison of La Santé before being interned at the French concentration camp at Drancy outside Paris,”42 from which he escaped. Bespaloff and Wahl were, according to Christopher Benfey, “among the refugees waiting for an exit visa in Marseille during the […] late spring of 1942”; it was “during these tense months” of waiting that she wrote On the Iliad.43 Bespaloff’s work contains none of the dormant optimism that suffuses Broch’s introduction to it; there is no looking ahead to a postwar period, since its outcome was still unknown; an end itself could scarcely be imagined in 1942 and, when it came, she could barely face it, committing suicide in 1949. Benfey reports that Bespaloff had begun reading Homer in the Spring of 1938 and that her reading and writing about the Iliad had continued through the earliest and, for her, most traumatic events of the War, including the French defeat and her escape to the United States. Like Adorno, Arendt, Broch, and others, for Bespaloff, too, the Homeric epics were the mirror onto which she could reflect her damaged life; Wahl notes as much in the opening sentence of his preface: “Rachel Bespaloff offers us an occasion to meditate on the great figures of the Iliad. In these trying times, it is natural that the thought of the West turns towards its origins, Hellenism and Judaism, and that one reflects on their oppositions and unions.”44 Indeed, the refugee philosopher opens and closes “Hector,” the opening essay in On the Iliad with a statement as much autobiographical as philological: “Suffering and loss have stripped Hector bare; he has

 Benfey (2005: xvii).  Benfey (2005: xvi–xvii). 44  Wahl (1943: 7). For a translation of Wahl’s introduction, see Appendix I. The volume I consulted was loaned from the library of St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN, and was signed with a handwritten note on the title page by Bespaloff to her friend Waldemar Gurian, a Jew born in 1902 in St. Petersburg who moved with his family to Germany in 1911 and subsequently converted to Catholicism. Gurian fled the Nazis in 1939 and took a position at Notre Dame University, where he taught for most of the rest of his life until his death in 1954. Gurian was a student and friend of Carl Schmitt in the 1920s, until the latter’s embrace of the Nazis. Gurian would derisively and enduringly call him “the crown jurist of the Third Reich” (Müller 2003: 40) and would go on to become a close friend of Hannah Arendt and other émigré intellectuals in the United States. Arendt wrote a chapter about Gurian in her book Men in Dark Times (Arendt 1968b), which also contained a biography of Broch. 42 43

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nothing left but himself,”45 she says at the beginning and, at the end, that distinctions between good and bad “do not exist. There are only men suffering, warriors fighting, some winning, some losing.”46 Bespaloff’s essay, then, turns the Homeric epics away from the triumphalism of imperial violence imposed by the Greeks on the Trojans, with Achilles as its glorious avatar, and instead focuses on the conquered, represented by Hector. Her Iliad is one of woundedness, grief, suffering, vulnerability, and death. Bespaloff’s prior training in academic philosophy had prepared her for the confluence of historical circumstance and Homeric investigation; in his preface, Wahl notes her familiarity with Nietzsche and one of her former teachers, Lev Shestov.47 In his discussion of her training in philosophy, Oliver Salazar-Ferrer calls her “a woman of great classical inheritance, both impulsive and fragile [who] gave in to misfortune and despair by committing suicide in exile. […] Her sense of decency prevented her from revealing her own personal hell, so she turned to the historical hell that reflected her own. The Jewish genocide amplified her own tragedy. She developed an even deeper form of despair.”48 Salazar-Ferrer establishes Bespaloff’s essay on Homer as a direct response to her personal situation and as the result of her formal training. In this regard, Salazar-Ferrer emphasizes the deep influence of Bespaloff’s mentor, the Kyiv-born Jewish philosopher Lev Shestov (born Yehuda Shvartsman in Kyiv in 1866, he died in Paris in 1938). Though she later split with Shestov on several of his most closely held philosophical positions, in a larger sense, his influence endured: he was one of the foremost pre-War scholars of despair. Indeed, the émigré Polish poet Czelsaw Milsoz wrote an appraisal of the philosopher entitled “Shestov, or the Purity of Despair” in which he connects Shestov not to his pupil Bespaloff but to her accidental comparator,49 Simone Weil, noting that “there is something else that authorizes us to speak of Shestov and Simone Weil in one breath. It is the central theme of their thought, the phenomenon of suffering and death.”50 Importantly, however, despair has a very specific meaning in Shestov’s thought: “it is obvious that this despair is not really a ‘crime’ for Shestov  Bespaloff (2005: 43).  Bespaloff (2005: 50). 47  Wahl (1943: 12). 48  Salazar-Ferrer (2006: 251). 49   For comparisons of Weil and Bespaloff, see Schein (2016), Burke (2019), and Benfey (2005). 50  Milosz (1977: 114). 45 46

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but rather the greatest virtue, it is the first step towards authentic existence. Shestov sees angst, or despair, as the most genuine human predicament and is overall hostile to tranquility.”51 In “Creation from the Void,” the opening essay from Penultimate Words and Other Essays (1916), Shestov analyzes the work of the great Russian writer Anton Chekhov (Tchekhov in its early-twentieth-century transliteration). Shestov argues that “to define his tendency in a word, I would say that Theckhov was the poet of hopelesness. Stubbornly, sadly, monotonously, during all the years of his literary activity, nearly a quarter of a century long, Tchekhov was doing one thing alone: by one means or another he was killing human hopes.”52 For Shestov, however, this was not an indictment, but praise: “Herein, I hold, lies the essence of his creation.”53 Discussing Chekhov’s A Tedious Story (1889), Shestov describes the heroism of the aging professor Nikolai Stepanovich as his death approaches: “Physical strength to struggle with the warders, executioners, attendants, moralists—the old professor has none; a child could knock him down. Persuasion and prayer, he knows well, will avail him nothing. So he strikes out in despair: he begins to cry over all the world in a terrible, wild, heartrending voice.”54 Shestov calls this “resistance of a particular kind”; though an aging Russian professor and the great hero of Troy are as seemingly different as any two people, for Bespaloff, this existential despair, this resistance in the face of inevitable death, is also the defining feature of Bespaloff’s Hector. For Shestov, as for Bespaloff later, despair is the true modern emotion, a rejection of what he calls in Penultimate Words “the conception that history is the unfolding of the idea in reality […] the idea of progress.”55 For Shestov, as for Bespaloff later, “one must admit, whether he will it or no, that progress so called—the development of mankind in time—is a fiction.”56 Shestov rejects the optimism of Hegelian progress—a core humanist and Enlightenment value—in favor of existentialism’s prioritizing of despair. In his work of the 1930s, Athens and Jerusalem, Shestov rejects these traditional Enlightenment values, which he locates in ancient Greek philosophy, in favor of the existentialism of Kierkegaard: “Kierkegaard in a way gathered and concentrated all his powers, all his  Evdokimova (2012: 225).  Shestov (1916: 4–5). 53  Shestov (1916: 5). 54  Shestov (1916: 17–18). 55  Shestov (1916: 85). 56  Shestov (1916: 85). 51 52

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capacities for despair—the beginning of philosophy, he said, is not wonder, as the Greeks taught, but despair—to obtain the right ‘to weep and curse’ and to oppose his tears and curses to the limitless demands of the reason which has enchained the human will through universal and necessary truths.”57 The Enlightenment virtue of reason, in this view, is anti-­ philosophical—it “enchain[s] the human will”; it does not free it.58 This, for Shestov, is the role of despair; unlike later (particularly French) Existentialists, however, Shestov’s vision of despair does not lead to nihilism or suicide but to authentic human experience: “But if one becomes intimate with death, if one passes through the needle’s eye of final and terrible solitude, of forsakenness and despair, then one may perhaps succeed in recovering the sacred[. …] We must overcome fear, summon up all our courage, go toward death and try our luck with her.”59 Bespaloff dedicated her first book Pathways and Crossroads (Cheminements et Carrefours) to Shestov; his influence is evident in the book’s engagement with Nietzsche,60 Kierkegaard, and the French Existentialists (such as Camus and Sartre). It also foreshadowed her approach to thinking about the Homeric epics during the War. The despair she felt reading the Iliad with her daughter under threat of occupation and writing about the Iliad as a refugee in Marseilles while waiting uncertainly for an exit visa to the United States after the fall of the free French government may have recalled to her Shestov’s vision of despair as the emotion that creates the conditions for perceiving authentic truth. This combination of lived experience and philosophical training allowed (or perhaps, compelled) her to see these elements within the Iliad. This revelation through suffering was indeed a core element shared by Nietzsche, Shestov, and the Existentialists and served in their epistemology as a counter-Enlightenment turn away from rational objectivity and toward the subjective and the transcendent. By contrast with the Enlightenment vision of human progress through reason, Bespaloff, following the Existentialists, adhered to a philosophy of meaning through subjective despair. These are the ideals she recognizes in the Iliad. Indeed, the universality and transportability of this suffering from Homeric epic  Shestov (1916: 206).  Shestov (1916: 206). 59  Shestov (1916: 48–49). 60  Homer was a significant author in Nietzsche’s thought; indeed, James Porter argues for Nietzsche’s central place in “modern disenchanted readings of Homer” (2021: 206). 57 58

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across time and place, even to her own time and place, is a central theme of the work; in the first pages of the opening essay “Hector,” she writes: “War devours differences and disparities, shows no respect for the unique. Call him Achilles or Hector, the conqueror is like all conquerors, and the conquered like all the conquered. Homer does not spare us this sight.”61 Hector, in her reading, is thus not only like her but like all (Jewish) war refugees and conquered peoples. Describing Hector as “the guardian of the perishable joys,” she writes about the scene in Book Six when Andromache begs Hector not to go to fight and, possibly, die. Bespaloff argues that Hector is not moved by abstract claims to patriotism nor is it the claims of his warrior father and brothers that Hector refuses, but his wife and young child: “Standing there on the threshold of war, Hector clasps with a last look the true goods of life, exposed suddenly to attack, naked as targets.”62 Bespaloff, too, must have had a similar experience, watching as the life she knew slipped away in the face of the Nazi conquest of both her native Ukraine and her adopted France. The contrast of Achilles and Hector serves as a mythological paradigm for her own life and times: “Death for Hector,” she writes, “means consigning everything he loves to a life of punishment and torture”; when he turns in flight from Achilles’ onslaught, she says “Homer wanted [Hector] to be a whole man and spared him neither the quaking of terror nor the shame of cowardice. […] And this flight, short as it is, has the eternity of a nightmare.”63 Seeing in Hector’s flight at the final test of his strength and courage the completion of the human experience—Hector had previously experienced courage and steadfastness in fighting adversaries—Bespaloff broadens the scope of what it means to be human to include not just the conqueror but the conquered, not just the one who attacks but the one who flees. In so doing, she makes the case for a consideration of the conquered as being more fully human than the conqueror, who is, in that same final test, proved an animal (“Achilles, at that moment, is aware of not being a man, and admits it” and compares himself to a lion). Indeed, for Bespaloff, Hector is superlatively human, a theme emphasized again and again (“neither superhuman, nor demigod, nor godlike, he is a man”;64 “Hector makes a last effort, which would have to be called superhuman, did it not  Bespaloff (2005: 47).  Bespaloff (2005: 43). 63  Bespaloff (2005: 44–45). 64  Bespaloff (2005: 43). 61 62

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precisely define the height and breadth of man’s powers”)65 in contrast to Achilles, who “drunk with cruelty […] at this moment [of killing Hector] is aware of not being a man, and admits it.”66 When Hector turns around to fight, therefore, Bespaloff sees a gesture familiar to her in light of a despair familiar to from within an Existentialist philosophy of Kierkegaard and Shestov: knowing the ultimate futility of the act and the inevitability of his own death but also at this moment finding transcendent meaning in despair. Elsewhere, Bespaloff had meditated upon the meaning of death in Auschwitz and thus of the meaning of a life that could end there. Monique Jutrin argues that “in her last writings, Bespaloff judges literature and their philosophy by their capacity to measure themselves against the experience of the Shoah and to face tragedy[. …] When the last choice disappears, in the gas chamber or under torture, does the human find a supreme resource that permits him to affirm his being beyond his own destruction?”67 This, too, is Hector’s choice as he faces down Achilles. For Bespaloff, the question is posed within the context of theodicy and World War II (Jutrin writes “she was also obsessed by the question of God, the silence or absence of God during those [war] years”),68 but her Hector finds not spiritual resources but deeply human ones: the perishable joys of family that enable the resistance hero to find his humanity in the moment between the last choice and death. In this, Bespaloff’s Hector is the opposite of Adorno’s Odysseus. Where the latter represents all that is wrong with bourgeois society, Hector represents the highest virtue of the resistance hero who never wanted to fight, but nevertheless will not surrender when called upon to fight. Catherine Burke argues that “Hector is the honourable warrior, the devoted family man. It is Hector that we see in the touching scene with his wife and child before he must return to the battlefield.”69 Whereas for Adorno, this bourgeois element is the sign of Odysseus’ fundamental moral hollowness or outright impetus to genocidal evil, these deep connections to bourgeois things—what Bespaloff calls “perishable joys”—of family, home, possessions, are those that make him a hero and a model of humanistic values.  Bespaloff (2005: 45).  Bespaloff (2005: 45). 67  Jutrin (2006: 261). The citation is from Bespaloff (1950: 65–107). 68  Jutrin (2006: 261). 69  Burke (2019: 64). 65 66

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The fulness of Hector’s becoming human in his last moments of despair before death stands in contrast to her interpretation of the one who kills him. Bespaloff’s investigation of Achilles’ cruel and violent nature and, importantly, how it “strip[s] him[] of the last thread of pity and humanity” continues in the next essay, “Thetis and Achilles,” and implicitly makes the connection between Achilles and the Nazis. For Bespaloff, the semi-divine semi-human Achilles loses the connection to his humanity as his anger and violence increase. As he comes to realize that no amount of killing can solve his anger, he paradoxically becomes more violent and more disassociated from his humanity: he envies the gods, on the one hand, for “their omnipotence,” which he can never possess, and, on the other, “the beasts their ferocity, and says he would like to tear his victims’ bodies to pieces and eat them raw.”70 Simultaneous with Achilles’ increased violence is his increased recognition of the futility of that violence in carrying out his objective, what Bespaloff calls “the limits of force in the very apotheosis of the force-hero.”71 Bespaloff’s study of Achilles as a unique individuated character, however, gives way to Achilles as universal principle: Through cruelty, force confesses its powerlessness to achieve omnipotence. When Achilles falls upon Lycaon, shouting ‘death to all,’ and makes fun of the child who is pleading with him, he lays bare the eternal resentment felt by the will to power when something gets in the way of its infinite expansion. Unable to admit that total destruction is impossible, the conqueror can only reply to the mute defiance of his defenseless adversaries with an ever-growing violence.72

Moving beyond the specific individual (i.e., Achilles), Bespaloff speaks instead of “the conqueror” as a recurring and generalizable figure; moving beyond Achilles’ anger over the death of his friend, she speaks in theoretical and abstract terms of “the eternal resentment of the will to power.”73

 Bespaloff (2005: 54).  Bespaloff (2005: 54). 72  Bespaloff (2005: 54). 73  Achilles is earlier described as having a “brooding resentment,” which fits in with the Nietzschean concept of ressentiment, but the French original uses a different (and, importantly, non-Nietzschean) expression: ruminement de sa rancune (Bespaloff 1943: 26). Thanks to James Porter and Seth Schein for the clarification on this passage. 70 71

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This shift from the specific to the universal enables Bespaloff to transfer her philosophical investigation of the genocidal impulse from the Trojan War to her own times. Indeed, the specific terminology by which Bespaloff characterizes Achilles reveals how she embeds a critique of Nazi ideology in a philosophical or literary analysis of the Iliad. Like Achilles, the Nazis are motivated by a genocidal rage, and Bespaloff’s lived experience and observational knowledge of the situation in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s would have made plain to her the increasingly extreme and novel forms of violence that the Nazis began to employ in their drive to genocide. Richard Schacht, for example, argues for the centrality of violence in understanding two key Nietzschean terms Bespaloff employs: “the phenomenon that [Nietzsche] calls by the French word ressentiment […] might be thought of as a particular kind of especially virulent and pathological form of resentment, amounting to a kind of hatred of others to whom one is in thrall.”74 Thus in describing Achilles as “the man of resentment” (“l’homme du ressentiment”), “the hero who can bend everything to his will,” Bespaloff establishes Achilles within the Nietzschean philosophy appropriated by the Nazis;75 indeed, for Nietzsche, this ressentiment was explicitly linked to antisemites’ view of Jews.76 Achilles’ “brooding resentment” and the conquerors’ “eternal resentment” reflect the ressentiment they feel when frustrated by the impossibility of their genocidal ambitions. “The will to power,” another key Nietzschean concept, is, according to Bernard Regnister, “an independent source of motivation in order to account for the human susceptibility to ressentiment,” which itself is a “response to suffering,” and that, finally “Nietzsche conceives of suffering as the experience of frustration.”77 Attributing these Nietzschean affects to Achilles, Bespaloff describes him as “the hero, the embodiment of force,” from whom comes, when comforted by his mother, “only a cry of frustration.”78 According to Regnister, Nietzsche believed “ressentiment […] is a response to suffering,” the central emotion of humans in war.79 In this case, the source of frustration, suffering, and ressentiment is 74  Schacht (2013: 329). See also Yirmiyahu Yovel’s definition of ressentiment as “that vengeful animosity toward the ‘other,’ usually a person of higher worth, which mediates the inferior person’s sense of selfhood and makes it possible” (1994: 227). 75  Bespaloff (2005: 44), Bespaloff (1943: 14). 76  For which, see GM III:14 (Nietzsche 2010: 124). 77  Regnister (2013: 707). 78  Bespaloff (2005: 53). 79  Reginster (2013: 707).

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“when something gets in the way of its indefinite expansion.” Bespaloff’s association of Achilles and Nazis through Nietschean discourse is further evident in the Nietzschean concept most famously appropriated by the Nazis, “the will to power,”80 coupled with her reference to Achilles’ desire for “infinite expansion,” the lebensraum and territorial expansion which paralleled the Nazi goal of racial purity within the existing borders of the Reich. Bespaloff’s description of Achilles thus uses Nietzschean philosophy as appropriated by the Nazis to position him as an ancient exemplar of the genocidal ideology of the Nazis; by analogy, “the mute defiance of his defenseless adversaries” is a fitting description of both Trojans and Jews. In The Genealogy of Morals (1887), Nietzsche explicitly asserts that ressentiment is a trait of antisemites, who “are all men of ressentiment, physiologically unfortunate and worm-eaten, a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable in outbursts against the fortunate and happy.”81 When Hector is recalled as “the embodiment of perishable joys,” Achilles as model antisemite and Nazi becomes clear; he is the one who causes these joys to perish. As much as Bespaloff focuses on the conflicts among warriors—Achilles as Nazi invader and Hector as resistance hero—On the Iliad is also committed to as detailed an analysis of the non-combatants who populate the epic. This analysis is largely gendered, insofar as most of the non-­ combatants in the poem are women—the wives, mothers, and captured female slaves of the men. Though they are not on the battlefield, as in the case of Andromache and Helen, indeed though they may not even be in Troy, as in the case of Thetis, their suffering, though different in the particulars of its manifestation, is nevertheless equal to if not greater than the men. Catherine Burke explains that “neither [Simone] Weil nor Bespaloff felt compelled to fashion an explicitly gendered response to Homer’s Iliad”; rather, they “allow[ed] the silenced voices to be heard, by accommodating the hitherto excluded, by welcoming the exile.”82 And yet, in so doing, Bespaloff’s work foregrounds the perspectives of various kinds of women, since many of the silenced, excluded, and marginalized 80  See, for instance, Jacob Golomb’s argument that “many Nazi readings of Nietzsche’s thought justify their acts of misappropriation by referring to his key notion of the will to power in terms of a violent, overpowering, and physical force which, if one uses it effectively and efficiently, will secure a military victory and material conquest” (2013: 525). 81  GM III:14 (Nietzsche 2010: 124). 82  Burke (2019: 71).

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perspectives are women’s. Bespaloff saw the war through the prism of her own experience, that experience was a woman’s, and thus she saw a reflection of her own experience in the women of the Iliad. For instance, she has this to say of the suffering of Achilles’ mother Thetis, a minor though crucial figure in the plot of the epic: “No writer has ever achieved such lucid tenderness and delicate precision as Homer when he speaks of the bond between Homer and Thetis.”83 She describes Thetis as possessing “the anxious love that has taught her the lesson of human distress,” a lesson which causes her to “despise her immortal status […] the better to suffer, the better to feel death’s threat.”84 If suffering through war and the struggle against losing the perishable things of life is what brings Hector to the fulness of his humanity, so too is Thetis’ suffering the catalyst for her rejection of her divinity and her Becoming fully human. For Bespaloff, the gods “have that want of seriousness […] that for Homer, as for Tolstoy, is the distinguishing mark of the subhuman.”85 In Bespaloff’s reading, then, human life is richer and more meaningful than the immortality of the gods, for whom there is no suffering, no despair, and thus no chance for self-realization. Thetis, then, half-human and half-divine, is changed by the events of the Iliad: as her son nears death, she rejects the divine part of herself and embraces her humanity. Thus, though Thetis is “forever lamenting her doomed son,” though she possesses “unforgettable grief,” she is also experiencing the despair that makes her Hector’s opposite.86 She, too, becomes most fully human through despair, though the cause of her despair is different than Hector’s. Another counterpoint to the suffering of Hector, the only named male character to have a chapter devoted to him, is that of Helen, the only female character to have a chapter devoted to her. If Achilles is a Nazi, and Hector a member of the Resistance, then Helen is the archetype of the oppressed. For Helen, “freedom does not exist”; she has nothing to hope for, “since it is the gods, not her fellow men, who have dared to put her in bondage. Her fate does not depend on the outcome of the war.”87 Like an Enlightenment Jew, Helen has “run away from home thinking that [she] could abolish the past and capture the future,” only to find that “the  Bespaloff (2005: 51).  Bespaloff (2005: 51). 85  Bespaloff (2005: 65). 86  Bespaloff (2005: 51). 87  Bespaloff (2005: 57). 83 84

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promise of freedom has been sloughed off in servitude.”88 Later, Helen is described in terms that echo the blood libel so popular among Nazis and other antisemites: “Innocent though she is, Helen feels the weight of these rebukes, she even seems to invite them, as though courting a just punishment for a crime she did not commit.”89 Helen thus becomes something of an avatar for Bespaloff as well; Bespaloff writes: “The exile’s lament is the last to echo over Hector’s remains,”90 an acknowledgement of both the depth of suffering she experiences at the death of her only supporter in the city but also a means of wedging Helen into a role that parallels Bespaloff’s own but which is not supported by the text of the poem itself. That is to say, Helen is not an exile at all—the Greeks would be happy to welcome her back—but the role of the exile is a contemporary one with which Bespaloff would have been familiar. “This is now the twentieth year from the time I came away and left my land,” Bespaloff quotes Helen as saying, noting that Helen “weep[s]” over Hector “with grief at heart.”91 Helen’s grief, moreover, “is the grief of a mortal at the mercy of the gods,” a distinction that suggests the affinity of Helen’s suffering with that of Thetis, despite the difference in their positionality.92 For Helen, like Thetis, is also half-divine: the daughter of the mortal Leda and the immortal Zeus. But Helen’s grief is that of a mortal; she, too, through her despair, sheds her divine aspect and becomes human. For Bespaloff, however, this is not a bad thing; the gods to her are figures of contempt: “The diffuse guilt” for Helen’s role in causing the war, Bespaloff writes, “pools into a single sin, the one sin condemned and explicitly stigmatized by Homer: the happy carelessness of the immortals.”93 The gods cannot find meaning in life, because they care for nothing, they can never suffer, can never experience the grief and despair that can lead to what Bespaloff calls “Becoming.”94 Indifference is a divine characteristic, but the gods are not figures to be admired, but scorned. Indeed, this is the lesson contained in her claim that “Nietzsche is wrong when he says that Homer is the poet of apotheoses. What he exalts is not the triumph of victorious force but man’s  Bespaloff (2005: 57).  Bespaloff (2005: 59). 90  Bespaloff (2005: 60). 91  Bespaloff (2005: 60). 92  Bespaloff (2005: 60). 93  Bespaloff (2005: 62). 94  Bespaloff (2005: 62). 88 89

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energy in misfortune.”95 Bespaloff opposes apotheosis as a diminishing of humanity; gods cannot become human, and the Becoming of demigods like Helen and Thetis can only be achieved through their rejection of the divine element through their embrace of the characteristic that separates humans from gods: suffering. “Man’s energy in misfortune,” then, is what enables mortals to realize themselves. Bespaloff’s interpretation of the Iliad thus reconfigures it as a poem of grief, sorrow, resentment, and despair. In her analysis, war destroys everything—both conquerors and conquered alike, combatant and non-­ combatant, men and women, young and old. Given the circumstances under which it was composed—by a refugee woman fleeing genocide with her own young child in tow—this analysis may spring from Bespaloff’s positionality during the period when she was writing it. But Bespaloff’s vision of the poem is not wholly pessimistic; rather, for her, the kind of holocaust depicted in the Iliad can lead to a different—and potentially, if its lessons are learned—better world. Hermann Broch saw this as well: imagining the epics as a result of “the Mycenian cultural crisis” that mirrors “our own,” that is, Europe in the postwar period, he writes that “out of the broken fragments of the Cretan world was developed the poetic myth which became the religion and life of the Greek world.”96 From grief, suffering, and destruction can come something new, something more durable. Bespaloff is clear that she is neither offering a justification for war nor asserting that the realization of a new world is worth the price of the destruction of the old one; she is, rather, only offering an impartial analysis of the role of war in human history and development: “The treasures of life and consciousness that have been stupidly sacrificed to the routines of power cannot thus be requited or revived.”97 That is, that which is destroyed remains destroyed; world war has no eschatological or salvific justification as it might in a Christological worldview; it simply is. And yet, she writes of “that Being whom Tolstoy calls God” and “which Homer, without naming it, gives an active solidarity with all perishable existence” as a passive agent of history that “only manifests itself in a ceaselessly changing Becoming, whose irregular progression, made up of advances

 Bespaloff (2005: 69).  Broch (2005: 116). 97  Bespaloff (2005: 75). 95 96

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and retreats, seems to hide a creative aim.”98 This passage is not written in the language of Homeric analysis but in Bespaloff’s own voice; here she propounds her own theory of historical change. “The text of the epic,” she writes, here considering Tolstoy’s War and Peace, is that “from which men to come will extract the power of transforming the world.”99 Thus, even though war is “stupid” and “not redemptive,” it nevertheless “awakes the creative will turned toward the future when the answer must come.”100 Reading epic, she proposes, can offer a new ethics for those who live both during and in the wake of world war. Bespaloff’s recognition of the elements of despair and grief in the Iliad, however, are not purely the result of her lived experience as a refugee from genocide. Rather, her intellectual commitment to existentialism and Shestov’s philosophy of despair predated the conflict. Bespaloff, following Shestov, believed that realizing the fulness of human achievement and one’s own humanity could only come from despair, and this to her was borne out, perhaps simultaneously, by her reading of the Iliad during the War. Like many of her peers, Bespaloff was deeply concerned not only with the breakdown of society and the failure of the Enlightenment not just to prevent genocide but perhaps even to have laid the intellectual foundations for it. Also like many of her peers, Bespaloff was also concerned with what would come after, how “men to come will extract the power of transforming the world” into something better. It was, however, unclear to them exactly what form this new world would take or what literatures or philosophies might underlie it. For Bespaloff, the elements on which she focused her analysis of the Iliad were not just philosophical or autobiographical; centering them was the essential ethical imperative for rebuilding the future from the shattered remains of the past: “If there is any authentic solidarity or living communion between isolated individuals, does it not lie in the hope of constructing a new reality upon the foundation of injustice and sorrow?”101 For Bespaloff, this reconstitution can be found in the encounter between Achilles and Priam in Book 24 of the Iliad, to which she devotes the chapter “Priam and Achilles Break Bread.” She calls this moment “an

 Bespaloff (2005: 75).  Bespaloff (2005: 75). 100  Bespaloff (2005: 76). 101  Bespaloff (2005: 76). 98 99

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exceptional deviation from the laws of the mechanism of violence,”102 a “strange pause […] on the extreme edge of suffering,”103 one in which the killer realizes all that he has lost of his own humanity: “Suddenly it becomes plain that Achilles is just as much Achilles’ victims as Priam’s sons were.”104 For Achilles, this realization comes at the sight of a man whose suffering exceeds that of all others: “At the sight of the old king, to whom he has left nothing but the royalty of misfortune, the conqueror is struck dumb.”105 Priam’s appeal works because he urges Achilles to recall his own suffering and the suffering of his father. From this, Bespaloff draws a larger, universal conclusion: “All men live in affliction: there is no other basis for true equality. Homer was anxious to have precisely the conqueror recall this fact to the conquered.”106 The recognition of mutual suffering, particularly the recognition by the conqueror that the suffering they inflict on the conquered, humanizes conqueror and conquered in each other’s eyes. For Bespaloff, mutual suffering is the central ethical tenet of the Iliad: “The two adversaries can exchange looks without seeing each other as targets, as objects which there is merit in destroying.”107 It is for this reason that Bespaloff sees this climactic scene in the Iliad as the one which, understood correctly, has the power “of constructing a new reality upon the foundation of injustice and sorrow.” Bespaloff writes that, at the epiphanic moment when Achilles pushes Priam’s hand away, they mutually recall the death of their loved ones; this recognition of mutual suffering is “the authentic solidarity […] between isolated individuals” which she believes can remake the world. Indeed, about this moment, she writes that “the Becoming of the universe hangs suspended in this impalpable element whose duration is an instant and forever.”108 For Bespaloff, then, war is a pointless and stupid activity for which no amount of postwar improvements is worth the cost. War, however, is inevitable among men and horrible as it is; it changes people. The mechanisms of this change are suffering and despair. Suffering and despair change  Bespaloff (2005: 79.  Bespaloff (2005: 81). 104  Bespaloff (2005: 79). 105  Bespaloff (2005: 79). 106  Bespaloff (2005: 82). 107  Bespaloff (2005: 81). 108  Bespaloff (2005: 80). 102 103

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people in different ways depending on who they are—man or woman, conqueror or conquered, old or young—making them more fully human in ways unique to their own circumstances. This Becoming that humanizes them also allows them to recognize the humanity of others through their suffering, and this recognition can be the foundation of a new, more just, more compassionate world. Such is her analysis of the Iliad and its lessons. Optimistic as this might be in considering its application to the circumstances under which she was writing, Bespaloff forecloses such a possibility: “If Priam today were to think of entreating Achilles, he would find Achilles no longer there.”109

 Bespaloff (2005: 80).

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CHAPTER 4

Odysseus’ (Memory) Scar: Geoffrey Hartman’s and Erich Auerbach’s Readings of Homer Through the Holocaust

Abstract  This chapter examines A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child, the autobiography of the German-born Jewish child refugee Geoffrey Hartmann, and the work of his teacher, the German-­Jewish scholar Erich Auerbach. In Mimesis, Auerbach had focused on Odysseus not at the height of his glory but as an aged and impoverished survivor returning home after the war’s end. By analyzing the scene of Odysseus’ homecoming and focusing on a wound Odysseus had received as a child, Auerbach created a historical literary genealogy and a theoretical framework for the new genre of Holocaust memoirs that appeared after the War. In so doing, Auerbach passed on to subsequent generations of Jews a framework for thinking about what Hartman would later call “memory scars.”  The chapter concludes with a comparison of Auerbach’s interpretation of Homeric style with Primo Levi’s first-person account of his own survival in Auschwitz, If This Is a Man. Keywords  Geoffrey Hartman • Erich Auerbach • Primo Levi • Mimesis • Auschwitz • Narratology In his final book, the autobiography A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe (2007), Geoffrey Hartman tells the story of how a German-Jewish teenage refugee became one of the late twentieth century’s leading scholars of comparative literature and Holocaust Studies. Even at a remove of seventy years, Hartman’s life, as indicated by its © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Goldwyn, Homer, Humanism, Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11473-1_4

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subtitular reference to “a displaced child,” is defined by the events of World War II, when he was evacuated from Frankfurt in March of 1939 on a “Kindertransport,” the British-run program of evacuating Jewish children from Nazi-occupied areas.1 Hartman was then ten years old and left behind his grandmother, who would die in Theresienstadt. He spent the war in a small village in England before moving to New York in 1945, where he was reunited with his mother, who had left Germany in 1938. In A Scholar’s Tale, Hartman describes how over the course of his education and long career (the autobiography was published when he was 80) he came to “totally disagree” with Nietzsche’s “attack on compassion,”2 outlining instead a postwar philosophy of history at odds with the Enlightenment vision that preceded the War, indeed, that caused it: “Theories of progress can no longer be based on Hegel’s thesis that ‘the wounds of the spirit leave no scars.’ A memory scar inevitably remains.”3 Hartman’s embrace of compassion as a moral virtue and rejection of Hegel’s vision of uninterrupted teleological progress place him within the scholarly tradition of the generation of wartime Jewish writers that includes Adorno, Broch, Arendt, and Bespaloff, who articulated the metaphor of the scar, the wound, the fragment, and the fracture in different ways. Indeed, Adorno gave to Minima Moralia (begun in 1946 and published in 1951), his critique of Hegel, the subtitle “reflections from a damaged life” and wrote in it that “every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated, and does well to acknowledge it to himself, if he wishes to avoid being cruelly apprised of it behind the tightly-closed doors of his self-esteem.”4 As an intellectual and emigré, Hartman shares with Adorno this sentiment. Unlike Adorno, however, Hartman does not reject the Hegelian thesis of progress; rather, he believes that the passage of time leaves scars, and that these scars shape how the past is understood and how the present and future are narrated. For Hartman, the postwar ontology 1  Indeed, Pieter Vermeulen argues that Hartman’s rescue from the Holocaust by the British and his passing of the war years in safety in the English countryside permeated his scholarly approach and led him to an unjustifiable blindness toward England’s own history of colonial atrocity: “What [Hartman’s work] fails to take into account is that, even if England has arguably to a large extent been spared the extreme violence that the European continent did inflict on itself, this has not prevented it from exporting violence and suffering in the name of imperialism and colonialism, or even of a war on terror. Hartman’s repeated mobilizations of the example of England in his cultural criticism fail to acknowledge that England’s spectacular avoidance of national trauma coincided with the massive exportation of trauma” (2010: 6). 2  Hartman (2007: 127). 3  Hartman (2007: 128). 4  Adorno (2005: 13).

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of injury and woundedness requires a revaluation of the past and its cultural production from this new perspective. If the destruction of cities was the visible marker of the invisible societal collapse of the War, then the wounded human body was the psychological equivalent for the individual. Hartman’s “memory scar” thus serves as a kind of governing metaphor for Jewish writing during and after the War, one that the generation of Jewish scholars who wrote during the War expressed in similar ways and influenced subsequent postwar critical discourses such as Holocaust studies, memory studies, and trauma studies. Indeed, one of Hartman’s students, the Cornell English professor Cathy Caruth, begins Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), one of the seminal works of contemporary trauma theory, with an analysis of a literalized memory scar from Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1581).5 The hero of the epic, Tancred, strikes a tree and hears the voice of the beloved whom he had accidentally killed some time prior. Caruth argues that what is “particularly striking in the example of Tasso is not just the unconscious act of the infliction of the injury and its inadvertent and unwished-for repetition, but the moving and sorrowful voice that cries out, a voice that is paradoxically released through the wound. […] trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on.”6 The memory scar exemplifies one of the foundational elements of contemporary literary trauma theory: that the ontological position of woundedness is also a narrative position, that wounds can speak, and that trauma is not located at the moment the wound is inflicted, but, later, realized through narrative story at the moment of narration. Hartman’s articulation of this ontology in A Scholar’s Tale is fitting, since the last section of the autobiography is actually not about him at all but is a fifteen-page appending entitled “Erich Auerbach at Yale,” about the Berlin-born Jewish philologist Erich Auerbach, who, like Hartman, fled Nazi Germany and eventually came to the United States and Yale University, where he became first Hartman’s teacher and subsequently his 5  Indeed, Hartman is the second person Caruth mentions in the book’s acknowledgments, in which Caruth thanks him for “a rich and complex dialogue on history and representation” (1996: ix). 6  Caruth (1996: 2). Italics in original.

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colleague. Seventy years before the publication of A Scholar’s Tale, Auerbach had instantiated the postwar tradition of reading Homer and, by extension, European literature, from an ontology of wounds. He did so in the opening passage of his most famous work, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Written nearly simultaneously with Bespaloff’s On the Iliad, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, and several other important Jewish reflections on the War between May of 1942 and April of 1945,7 Mimesis represents Auerbach’s thinking during  the harrowing end of the decade he spent in Istanbul beginning in 1935, when he was stripped of his position at the University of Marburg by Nazi race laws.8 “Readers of the Odyssey,” he begins, “will remember the well-prepared and touching scene in Book 19, when Odysseus has at last come home, the scene in which the old housekeeper Euryclea, who had been his nurse, recognizes him by a scar on his thigh.”9 Auerbach was adamant that this sentence and the chapter it introduces, entitled “Odysseus’ Scar,” remain the opening of Mimesis. In the “Epilegomena to Mimesis” published in 1953, Auerbach responds at length to the criticism of the first chapter and the lack of a proper introduction; acknowledging that “I myself am not entirely satisfied with my first chapter,” he nevertheless defends it: “I considered for a moment letting the Homer chapter fall entirely by the wayside, [… b]ut it proved not feasible to find an introduction that would have been able to measure up to the Homer chapter in clarity and effectiveness for presenting the problem, and so I let it stand.”10 Three years later, he refused even the request of the Viennese-born and Lvov-raised Jewish philosopher Martin Buber  Mimesis was published in German in 1946 and English in 1953.  Auerbach’s biographical experience is set against the larger historical and political context of Jewish scholars in Turkey during the War in Konuk (2010). 9  Auerbach (2003: 3). David Damrosch’s close reading of the opening sentence connects it to the “great modernist themes” of “reading, memory, the intimate linkage of form to emotion (well-prepared and touching),” but many of these are also the great themes of Jewish writing about Homer during World War 2: “the cautious homecoming from a long exile (a nostos without nostalgia), the crucial value of recognition, and the crystallization of all these themes in the reading of history in the message of the body, as figured in the scar on the hero’s thigh” (Damrosch 1995: 100). To this could be added Auerbach’s privileging of the female and subaltern gaze: “Odysseus may be the author of the scene of his homecoming, but the women are its interpreters,” he writes noting not only Penelope but, perhaps more importantly, Eurykleia (Damrosch 1995: 100). The sentenced is echoed in Mendelsohn (2020: 20–21). 10  Auerbach (2003: 560). 7 8

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to write an introduction to a Hebrew translation. Buber, like Auerbach, lost his professorship when the Nazis came to power (though Buber resigned in protest in 1933 rather than, like Auerbach, being stripped of it) and fled (to Jerusalem). 11 In declining, Auerbach wrote to Buber that “Mimesis is a book without an Introduction; the chapter on Genesis and Homer is conceived as an introduction; a theoretical polemic at the beginning of the book would have contradicted the intention of the book.”12 In refusing to write an introduction or to have an introduction written on his behalf, Auerbach emphasizes the significance of that chapter in general and its opening sentence in particular. Galili Shahar argues that what makes this opening sentence and chapter so important are that they stylistically enact the central concerns of both Mimesis and “the representation of reality in Western literature” writ large: “It is the structure of a cut and a stitch, the structure of a scar, that reflects the dialectics of representation in Auerbach’s project. The scar is the signature of Mimesis.”13 More broadly, she argues, the scar is a metaphor in miniature of the greater catastrophe of European culture: “The technique of the fragment, the concept of the broken form, and the aesthetics of ‘ruins’ [are] a signature of crisis and loss” which, specifically within “the modernist approach to literature” means “the abandonment of great syntheses.”14 That is to say, Mimesis is the philological parallel of the visualization of civilizational collapse in Dalí’s Apotheosis of Homer.15

11  Analyses of Auerbach’s decision differ; Hacohen sees it as further evidence of Auerbach’s disassociation from his Jewish identity (Hacohen 2019: 536). 12  Weinstein and Zakai (2017: 233), citing a letter of Auerbach to Buber, January 12, 1957, National Library of Israel, Martin Buber Archive, ARH Ms. 350. 13  Shahar (2021: 605). Kader Konuk similarly focuses on the specifics of the scar, though from a more psychoanalytic or biographical interpretation: “Auerbach’s use of Odysseus’s scar is indicative of his own method: he treats the scar like a fragment representing a greater reality, while the textual fragment of the Odyssey is, in turn, shown to be emblematic of the Homeric style generally. It is thus not incidental that the motifs of this first chapter characterize elements of Auerbach’s own life—rupture, sacrifice, exile, hospitality, and new beginnings” (Konuk 25–26). Indeed, like Odysseus, Auerbach returned wounded from World War I, an injury to the foot. The war injury to his foot is a minor but, for obvious reasons, highly symbolic part of his mythology as, for instance, Krystal (2016: 89) and Zakai (2018: 188–89), among others. 14  Shahar (2021: 616–17). A statement that could as easily apply to Dalí’s Apotheosis of Homer. 15  For which, see above {000}.

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In the scene Auerbach is describing, the old nurse-slave Eurykleia washes Odysseus’ feet as he returns home from Troy after twenty long years as a disguised refugee and sees the scar which he has borne since his youth and by which she is able to see through his disguise. The narrative space between when she lifts his foot and sees the scar to when she drops his foot is an external analepsis, an event from the past that lies outside the poem’s timeframe. Auerbach devotes the first half of “Odysseus’ Scar” to this “interruption, which comes just at the point when the housekeeper recognizes the scar—that is, at the moment of crisis—describes the origin of the scar, a hunting accident which occurred in Odysseus’ boyhood, at a boar hunt, during the time of his visit to his grandfather Autolycus.”16 The narrative Auerbach has chosen to analyze is a narrative about a scar, and its insertion into the middle of the linear narrative of Book 19 of the Odyssey scars the movement of the plot in the same way. Though Auerbach analyzes the passage in terms of the dialectic of foreground/background that animates his comparison of the Odyssey and Genesis (“Here is the scar, which comes up in the course of the narrative; and Homer’s feeling simply will not permit him to see it appear out of the darkness of an unilluminated past; it must be set in full light, and with it a portion of the hero’s boyhood”),17 the passage reorients the history of Western literature, and its Homeric roots, away from the triumphal and toward the everyday: the eponymous hero of the epic is not here in the full glory of his defeat of the Trojans but at his most abject, a beggar and refugee in his own home. In beginning Mimesis with an analysis of Odysseus’ scar, Auerbach locates trauma as the seminal narratable event in “Western literature,” the subtitle’s ostensible archive, and woundedness as the seminal ontological position for recollecting and reconstructing the past to make meaning in the present. The generous welcome and devoted hospitality to a refugee and stranger that Eurykleia offers marks the ethical architecture of Auerbach’s postwar philology and postwar humanism; as Kader Konuk remarks, “readers of the Odyssey will remember that xenos means foreigner;

 Auerbach (2003: 4).  Auerbach (2003: 6).

16 17

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it also means guest-friend.”18 In the Odyssey, the “recognition scene” (anagnorisis) is a recurring type scene, and Eurykleia’s recognition of Odysseus by his wounds (as the Phaiakians had recognized him through his tears) shows the priority of narrating suffering and woundedness as the markers of the new postwar subjectivity Auerbach proposes. As much as the suffering and wounded refugee Odysseus is the exemplary postwar narrator, Eurykleia, the aged woman slave who treats the refugee stranger with gentleness and kindness, the witness who recognizes his scarred ontology and thus is the catalyst of the memory narrative, is the ideal postwar reader. Indeed, Hartman explored the subject of woundedness and literature in his penultimate book, Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity, which uses Hegel’s assertion that “the wounds of the spirit leave no scars” as its epigraph and the starting point of its third chapter, “Remnants of Hegel.”19 Hartman argues “the context in which the wounds inflicted by the spirit are said to leave no scars” is “Hegel’s dialectical vision of the workings of the spirit,” by which interpersonal and national conflicts “result in defeat, impasse, religious and political strife. Yet Hegel’s dialectical vision of the workings of the spirit turns such collisions into a viable and ultimately seamless progress.”20 Hartman, following Adorno, disputes Hegel’s dialectical vision of human progress, arguing that the process is not seamless: “the spirit does leave scars, however, both evident and eloquent. Nor do the wounds beneath always heal. One is tempted to turn Hegel’s axiom on its head and identify those scars collectively with history’s uncertain moral progress or individually with works of art that dress, encompass, even draw strength from, traumatic encounters.”21 Though Hartman was not speaking about Auerbach at all, 18  Konuk (2010: 179). Isabella Bertoletti further notes in her discussion of Primo Levi that “in the culture represented in the Odyssey, hospitality is the essential social virtue of the world at peace, creating an atmosphere of reciprocal security for the occasion when strangers meet, a fundamental social experience among civilized human beings” (2005: 108). It is also perhaps symbolic in this context that, in his account of the Odyssey cruise he took with his father, Mendelsohn gives the cruise’s Ukrainian hospitality director the same word as a pseudonym: “Ksenia” (2017: 144). In the “Author’s Note,” Mendelsohn writes that for “the students in my Odyssey seminar and the passengers aboard the ‘Retracing the Odyssey’ cruise, names have been changed” (2017: n.p.), signifying that Mendelsohn could have chosen any name for the cruise director but chose one that alludes to the scene of the scar. 19  Hartman (2003: 41). 20  Hartman (2003: 41). 21  Hartman (2003: 41–42).

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the idea parallels Hartman’s reading of Mimesis, which begins with scars both external (Odysseus’ thigh) and internal (Abraham’s struggle with sacrificing Isaac).22 When Hartman speaks of the centrality of the memory scar as the guiding metaphor of his autobiography or of the practice of literary analysis, or when Caruth describes the capacity of wounds to speak or narrate in Renaissance epic, they are fulfilling Auerbach’s (and Adorno’s and Bespaloff’s) vision of postwar writing as emanating from the wound. This shift in perspective “to identify those scars collectively with history’s uncertain moral progress or individually with works of art” that address trauma and woundedness was on Auerbach’s mind during the period when he was writing Mimesis. In a lecture entitled “Literature and War,” dated 1941–1942 and thus during the first stages of the writing of Mimesis,23 Auerbach spoke of the literature produced during World War I: “Books pertaining to this war are again dominated by the concept of armed peoples, and dominated more powerfully than ever before. To be sure, the number of books dealing with individual heroes, whether they be generals, pilots, or submarine commanders, is many. But these types of books were not much in demand. The best-written and most-read books were those dealing with ordinary man, books about any ordinary individual in the trenches.”24 In this statement lies an implicit critique of, if not the Iliad and the Odyssey, at least their general approach to narrating war through heroes. Instead of this approach, Auerbach advocates for narrating from the perspective of the ordinary individual, a position that would become fully formed over the course of Mimesis. More compellingly, however, is the next part of the lecture, in which Auerbach notes that this shift in literary taste is not simply a matter of aesthetics, plot, or reader interest but the result of a foundational wartime shift in perspective: “But the mentality has changed. More than heroism and great ideals, it is the sufferings of war, the trenches, the mud, the hunger, that are spoken of.”25 In rejecting the idea of war narratives as being 22  Hartman concludes this section with his own Odyssean simile, arguing that “to excerpt Hegel is tricky. His prose is like Penelope’s web, in that it manages to reconstitute itself and defer interminably the final stage” (Hartman 2003: 42). 23  For the background to the lecture and its survival in a translation from an audio recording, see Konuk (2010: 267n.2). 24  Konuk (2010: 203). 25  Konuk (2010: 203).

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about heroes and instead focusing on war narratives as being about “suffering,” Auerbach aligns himself within the same line of thought as Bespaloff and others and opens up the possibility for the reframing of Odysseus as the archetypal sufferer that undergirds “Odyssseus’ Scar.”

“Western Literature” Like Bespaloff, moreover, Mimesis is, by its author’s own admission, a text grounded in his historical context and personal experience at the moment of its writing. In a letter to Traugot Fuchs in October of 1938, Auerbach perhaps had something like Mimesis in mind when he wrote that “the challenge is not to grasp and digest all the evil that’s happening, but much more to find a point of departure (Ausgangspunkt) for those historical forces that can be set against it. To seek them for myself, to track them down in the world, completely absorbs me.”26 In this context, Mimesis can be read alongside other Jewish archaeologies of the Enlightenment, such as Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Arendt’s Life of the Mind, both of which, like Mimesis, begin their inquiry with Homer. In the “Epilegomena to Mimesis,” published six years after the book’s initial publication, Auerbach writes that “in many learned writings one finds a kind of objectivity in which, entirely unbeknownst to the composer, modern judgments and prejudices […] cry out from every word, every rhetorical flourish, every phrase.”27 That is to say, many people write works that they consider non-political, non-autobiographical, or not attuned to or shaped by the moment they were written. Instead, these contemporary resonances come out subconsciously. He is emphatic that this unconscious connection between a writer and his times does not apply to Mimesis and to him. In his case, this connection was not unconscious at all; he specifically intended to rewrite the history of Western literature in light of his own times and in light of his own experience: “Mimesis is quite 26  Auerbach (2007: 752); cited widely as, for instance, Zakai (2018: 192–93), Krystal (2016: 104), and, with substantial discussion about Auerbach’s political evolution over the late 1930s and 1940s, Mali (2012: 139–40) 27  Auerbach (2003: 574), published originally as “Epilegomena zu Mimesis,” Romanische Forschungen 65 (1953): 1–18. The passage is discussed in Richards (2001: 63). David Damrosch elucidates the “double-bind between scholarly objectivity and personal commitment, fidelity to history versus the shaping force of the scholar’s own moment” (1995: 98).

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consciously a book that a particular person, in a particular situation, wrote at the beginning of the 1940s.”28 Despite their shared experience as Jewish wartime refugees and their shared time at Yale, Hartman acknowledges that he was slow at first to understand the contemporary critique that Auerbach embedded in Mimesis: “It is true, being young, that I was searching for a more than arbitrary discipline, a scientific rigor to persuade me of the value of my impressions. And it is also true that Auerbach’s opening chapter on Homer and the Bible, or rather the Book of Genesis, seduced me by something in addition to its precision: by its daring, as well as esprit de finesse. I did not immediately recognize that it was indebted to a polemical context.”29 The polemical context to which Hartman refers is the situation of German philology under the Nazis, one in which “only a so-called Aryan canon was acknowledged; Judaic sources—modern authors such as Heine as well as nearly two millennia of Jewish biblical exegesis—were exorcized.”30 This Aryan philology, according to Avihu Zakai, “was based on racism, anti-Semitism, narrow nationalism and sheer chauvinism. It strove to eliminate the Old Testament from the Christian canon, and, hence, from the very fabric of European culture and civilization.”31 As an example of the Jewish erasure that resulted from this Aryan philology, Hartman cites the case of the Belgian scholar Paul de Man, whose wartime antisemitic writings in a Nazi-aligned newspaper came to light only after De Man’s death in 1983, following a sterling academic career that concluded as a colleague and close friend of Hartman at Yale. De Man comes up frequently in A Scholar’s Tale, as Hartman wrestles with the problem of finding out that his deceased friend and colleague had propagandized on 28  Auerbach (2003: 574). James Porter argues that “this drastic location of his work in space and time, indeed within the historical matrix of the war, exile, Nazism, racism, and Judaism, sends a powerful signal to readers of Mimesis” (2010: 237). 29  Hartman (2003: 166). 30  Hartman (2003: 166–67). This broader historical context of the Nazi purge of Jewish culture from Germany and Mimesis as Auerbach’s response to it is detailed in Zakai (2018: 198–205). Zakai argues that Mimesis represents Auerbach’s “struggle against a twisted, fanatical Aryan philology that sought to eliminate the Old Testament from German Kultur and Volksgeist in particular and Western civilization in general and led him to develop a passionate apologia for Western Judeo-Christian humanist tradition at its gravest existential moment” (2018: 167). 31  Zakai and Weinstein (2012: 321).

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behalf of the Nazis a half a century earlier.32 Hartman does not excuse De Man, noting that de Man’s “worst compromise was to contribute an essay to a special (also especially vicious) page devoted to antisemitic propaganda in that paper. He denied that Jews had exerted a strong influence on European culture, stating that it was healthy enough to resist foreign intrusions including the ingérence sémite. Were the Jews, he wrote, to be sent to a ‘colony’ isolated from Europe it would make no difference to literature. It is not difficult to discern behind the suave language a coarse ideology.”33 This, then, was the background of Jewish erasure against which Auerbach was writing, and Hartman understands Auerbach’s choice to start his “western literary tradition” with Homer and the Bible as a rebuke to Nazi philology and a conscious re-integration of the Jewish tradition with European letters more broadly. James Porter argues that, for Auerbach, “Writing in the throes of a Nazi-led world war, it takes more than a little temerity for an exiled Jew to set up a comparison (even if it is one that eventuates in a contrast) between Homer, claimed long ago by German philology as the high priest of all classicism, and the older Bible, which Auerbach emphatically claims as a Jewish text and as the embodiment of Jewish spiritual tradition. The move would have been more than simply controversial at the time.”34 Indeed, it was more than simply controversial; as Arthur Krystal notes, the Akedah, “the binding of Isaac and Abraham’s reflexive anxiety” which is the comparator of the scene in the Odyssey in “Odysseus’ Scar” was “one of several Biblical scenes forbidden in schoolrooms across Germany” because it offered a figural reading that gave Old Testament, and thus Jewish, roots for the New Testament’s story of Jesus’ crucifixion. As such, Auerbach’s inclusion of this scene was a rejection of Jewish erasure from “western literature” that paralleled what the Nazis were attempting to carry out in reality through genocide. For Arthur Krystal, this scene was “Auerbach’s nod towards Jewish martyrdom,”35 while David Damrosch claim that 32  “The historical fact does not excuse de Man’s participation, even though it happened, nontrivially, only this one time. The pain is not lessened by pointing out that his cultural antisemitism in the Le Soir article reflected wide-spread assumptions that made Nazi policy toward the Jews acceptable also among intellectuals” Hartman (2003: 81). 33  Hartman (2003: 81). 34  Porter (2010b: 240). 35  Krystal (2016, 96–97).

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“Jews since antiquity have turned to the Akedah in times of persecution, finding in ever renewed interpretations of that enigmatic story ways to come to terms with God’s willingness to countenance his people’s destruction. Auerbach has a private hope, the hope of many Jews in many times of persecution: that like Isaac he and his beloved lost world may yet be snatched from destruction, free from the bondage of death.”36 Indeed, the Romanian-born Jew and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, Levi’s fellow prisoner at Auschwitz and the author of the Holocaust memoir Night, in re-­ entangling a Greco-Roman past with a Jewish one, Auerbach rejects Jewish erasure from the history of the West and thus rejects the fundamental ideological principle of Nazi ideology.37 In this, Auerbach is operating in a similar intellectual vein as Adorno, whose “Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment” also offered a revision of Nazi philologists’ interpretations of the Odyssey. Adorno, for instance, rejected the German philologist Wilamowitz’s approving reading of Odysseus’ hanging of the maids, arguing that his “enthuse[ing] over the similarities of the snares” is the product of a twisted mind—“the satisfaction appears to be largely his own”—that is also representative of the depravity of Nazi ideology as a whole: “Wilamowitz’s writings are among the most striking documents of the German intermingling of barbarism and culture, which is fundamental to modern Philhellenism.”38 Unlike Adorno, however, for whom Odysseus exemplifies the archetypal totalitarian, Auerbach seeks to recuperate Odysseus by focusing not on the murderer of maids and enforcer of nationalist, Enlightenment, and capitalist values but the victim of these same forces: the wounded refugee. For Porter, Auerbach is doing more than just rejecting this Aryan or Nazi philology; “[he] is in fact Judaizing philology; that is, he is constructing a

 Damrosch (1995: 114).  For an attempted refutation of this reading, see Malachi Hacohen, who writes: “Is Auerbach’s discussion of the binding of Isaac, the Aqedah—a Jewish martyrology topos emerging repeatedly in Holocaust discourse—not a gesture towards the Holocaust? Is the vindication of the Hebrew bible against classical epic, of bound Isaac against Odysseus, destroyer of Troy, not a claim to Jewish spiritual superiority—and survival—over German might? […] One could only wish!” (2019: 63). 38  Adorno and Horkheimer (2002: 265, n.61), for which also see above {000} and Porter (2018a: 111). 36 37

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new oppositional Jewish philology that departs dramatically from the conventions of classical philology and romance philology.”39 Porter further details the way in which proto-Nazi philologists crafted a vision of classical heroism that he calls “Homer’s Übermenschen.”40 If the Homeric hero is the avatar of the Übermensch, embodied by an ancient statuary tradition of heroic nudes with flawless bodies in the fulness of their martial valor, then Auerbach’s Odysseus, the wounded refugee, aged and with his body covered in rags, is the opposite. Auerbach’s focus on the wounded refugee, then, is not just a refutation of the glorification of Wilamowitz’s violent autocratic visions of Odysseus, but to Nazi ideology more broadly.41 Indeed, Porter connects Odysseus’ scar with Hitler’s obsession with flawless bodies and obsessions with cleanliness and athleticism. In his discussion of Mimesis as a reaction to Nazi philology and Classical values, he cites Hitler as writing that “a decayed body is not made the least more aesthetic [ästhetischer gemacht] by a brilliant mind.”42 For Porter, this is evidence of the connection between German visions of the Übermensch and the Homeric heroes as their earliest avatars. In this context, Auerbach’s choice not just of Odysseus as the character on whom to focus but on Odysseus’ scar reads even more deeply, since the Odysseus of Book 18, disguised as a beggar and hiding his scar, is the very embodiment of the decayed body and brilliant mind. As an archaeology, therefore, “Odysseus’ Scar” accomplishes three goals connected to the situation in 1942 when he began writing. It is a rejection of the intellectual foundations that were reified in Nazi political and military practice. Auerbach thus reinscribes a foundational  Jewish presence in the Western canon and thus rejecting the Jewish erasure from Europe that the Nazis were attempting to enact through the Holocaust. In replacing Wilamowitz’s and other German philologists’ vision of the 39  2010b: 235. In 2018b, Porter elaborated on his argument for Auerbach’s Jewish philology: “From start to finish Auerbach is practicing a kind of Jewish philology in the guise of Romance philology, that is, an inquiry into the specifically Jewish origins of Western historical consciousness. And because this philology is written largely in response to and against the prevailing ideologies of Weimar and Nazi Germany, Auerbach’s project has a further, essential dimension: It is a politically and culturally resistant philology that is aimed at undoing contemporary paradigms. Auerbach developed this method at the precise moment when Judaism and Jewishness were most endangered” (189). 40  Porter (2010b: 246). 41  Rebenich cites Momigliano’s argument that “[Wilamowitz’s] Plato anticipates that of Stefan George’s students […] in being a Führer” (2018: 193), citing Momigliano (1980: 348). 42  Porter (2010b: 244).

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heroic Odysseus (and by extension, all Homeric heroes) with the image of Odysseus as wounded refugee, Auerbach rejected Nazi claims to the Hellenic past as the source of German Übermenschen. Finally, Hartman called Auerbach one of the trinity of “restorative scholars” because, through these critiques of Nazi philology, he was part of a movement of scholars (the other two being Leo Spitzer and Ernst Robert Curtius) who sought to break the rising tide of a European hypernationalism that was most destructively embodied in Nazi Germany but was present across the Continent and, indeed, the globe during the 1930s and 1940s.43 By beginning Mimesis with a study of the Odyssey,44 Auerbach implicitly rejects a fundamentally nationalistic revision of that canon in favor of one that Hartman says “restored the larger integrity of the European canon by stressing ‘Romania,” that is, a transnational identity based in the cultural legacy of the Roman Empire.45

“The Representation of Reality” Mimesis, however, was more than an archaeology or articulation of past literary practice and an attempt to reconstitute a unified Western literary canon after the War. It was, as its author says, “a book that a particular person, in a particular situation, wrote at the beginning of the 1940s.” This was an epoch-defining time not just on the military battlefronts of World War II; it was also the period when the first definitive reports of the 43  Hartman (2007: 167). This idea also forms a major axis of Zakai’s argument for Mimesis as a critique of German philology: “Auerbach’s philological, historical, and philosophical enterprise in ‘Figure’ and Mimesis was directed against a well-defined crisis in Germany and the Europe of his time. […] the development of Aryan philology, based on racism, antiSemitism, narrow nationalism, and chauvinism, which strove to eliminate the Old Testament from the Christian canon and, hence, the very fabric of European culture and civilization” (Zakai 2018: 171). 44  Edward Said speaks of Mimesis in similar terms that Auerbach “affirms the recuperative and redemptive human project for which, in its patient philological unfolding, his book is the emblem” (2003: xxiii). 45  Hartman (2007: 167). Zakai argues that Auerbach, “spurned by the Nazis as a worthless human being of inferior race, […] exacted perfect revenge: rescuing the Western humanist tradition, based on its Judeo-Christian heritage and scriptures, in a text that has captured the imagination of readers for far longer than the blither of the ‘Thousand-Year Reich’” (Zakai 215–16). Krystal, by contrast, argues that Mimesis is “everything that the murders at Berlin’s Wilhelmplatz wished to eradicate. But let us be frank, it is, despite its subliminal opposition to barbarism and ignorance, a weak shot across the bow of National Socialism” (Krystal 2016: 89).

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existence of concentration camps were confirmed in the West.46 When these first reports came out, however, the general attitude was one of indifference at best or outright denial at worst. Reflecting on those times years later, the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi wrote that “vague yet concordant, the [reports] described a massacre of such vast proportions, such deliberate cruelty, and such tangled motivations that the public was inclined to reject them because of their very enormity” and that the “SS soldiers used to enjoy taunting the prisoners with a cynical warning: No matter how this war ends, we have won the war against you. No one will be left to testify, but even if one of you does survive, the world will not believe you. […] And even if some evidence should remain and some of you do manage to survive, people will say the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will call them exaggerations of Allied propaganda, and they will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you.”47 Nor, Levi claims, was this fear of not being believed limited to the perpetrators: “curiously, this same thought […] emerged from the despair of the prisoners” who, Levi says, all had a similar recurring dream: “They had returned home and were relating their past sufferings to a loved one with passion and a feeling of relief, and they were not believed, not even listened to.”48 From this, Levi concludes that “it is important to emphasize that both sides, victims and oppressors, had a vivid awareness of the enormity and thus the unbelievability of what happened in the camps.”49 When, immediately after his release from Auschwitz, Levi began writing 46  For a brief but detailed discussion of the timeline, see Rubinstein (2002: 85–88). For a book-length analysis of when reports of Nazi atrocities reached the West, see Lipstadt (1986). 47  Levi (2015: 2411). 48  Hélène Cixous, whose family fled from Germany to France to Algeria, where she was born, to avoid the War notes the feeling of survivor’s guilt that plagues many of those who escape death during genocidal or communal atrocities when they return home: “We know these returns. I’ve lived many of them. In If This is a Man Primo Levi speaks of the dream he has, which is, he says, a dream all the deportees had, the absolute nightmare, the dream of the impossible return. The deportee returns to his family, everyone is at the table, and he is not received, they don’t listen to him, they don’t believe him, they don’t understand him” (2013: 14–15). For Cixous, this understanding comes from shared experience (“I’ve lived many of them”). But Cixous also connects this to the great theme of postwar witness testimony; in not believing, not listening, not understanding, she writes, “they deprive him of his suffering” (2013: 15). She refers to Levi again in an interview in White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, in which she claims that in “If This is a Man Primo Levi studies the mystery of evil” but that after each atrocity “humanity drifts back off to sleep; nothing seems to work as an example, our collective memory is erased, and all is to begin again” (2014: 91). 49  Levi (2015: 2412).

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what would become his Holocaust memoir If This Is a Man, he, like all survivors who relate their stories, faced the challenge of representing a reality that seemed, by its very nature and through the committed efforts of the perpetrators, unbelievable. It is for this reason, no doubt, that Deborah Lipstadt’s study of the American press’s Holocaust denial in the years before and during the Holocaust is called Beyond Belief: “Since the onset of Nazi rule,” she writes, “Americans had greeted almost all the news of Nazi Germany’s persecution of the Jews skeptically. Inevitably, their first reaction was to question whether it was true. Before, during, and even after the war, many Americans, including those associated with the press, refused to believe the news they heard.”50 Though Lipstadt’s study is of the response of Americans and the American press, Holocaust denial was as much a fact of its wartime reception as it has remained ever since. The question of how to represent reality, then, of what in literature reveals and what hides, was, in 1942, not just a question of philology and aesthetics but of ethics, of history, of memory, of accounting for genocide. If, as Hartman claims in A Scholar’s Tale, “writers of any period are pervaded by contemporary pressures and expectations: their ‘irdisch’ character is made clear by Auerbach” and if “literary mimesis, then, is more than a pale Platonic copy of realities,”51 then Mimesis the book and Auerbach the author must be subject to these conditions as well, and “Odysseus’ Scar” can be seen as Auerbach’s support through philology of the seemingly impossible contemporary reports of the military and civilian atrocities of World War II in general and the Holocaust in particular.52 The problem that Holocaust survivors like Levi faced was how to write mimetically: how to represent reality in literature when the events they were writing about had never before been experienced by anyone else and were, therefore, fundamentally unbelievable. Auerbach makes this connection himself in what James Porter calls an “extraordinary parabasis,” a long passage on contemporary (to Auerbach) Nazi atrocities which marks “the sudden intrusion of the authorial present-day into the historical distance of the essay, which in every other respect represents a magisterial treatment of two canonical  Lipstadt (1986: 240).  Hartman (2007: 171). 52  Earl Jeffrey Richards argues that “Auerbach’s masterful history of the literary representation of reality revolves around the simultaneous impossibility of representing contemporary history” (Richards 2001: 63). 50 51

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traditions, Greek and biblical.”53 In “Odysseus’s Scar,” Auerbach analyzes two different models for mimetic representation, an analysis of a scene from the epics poems that narrate the genocide of the Trojans and an analysis of a scene produced by contemporary victims of genocide, the Jews. Auerbach foreshadows this intrusion, distinguishing the relative credibility associated with legend and history, two ancient modes of writing. The former, represented by Homer, does not employ a style that is adequate to represent the horrors of contemporary reality; for this, he argues, one must employ the latter style, exemplified by the Old Testament. In “Odysseus’ Scar,” Auerbach offers to teach his readers how to distinguish between these two styles: “Now the difference between legend and history is in most cases easily perceived by a reasonably experienced reader. It is a difficult matter, requiring careful historical and philological training, to distinguish the true from the synthetic or the biased in a historical presentation; but it is easy to separate the historical from the legendary in general.”54 Auerbach’s concern here is how to sift through the false and misleading (the “legendary”) in order to understand the truth about the past (the “historical”). This would prove crucial for any reader of the contemporary accounts of the atrocities of the War, who would perhaps be inclined toward denying the reality of what they read. Thus, Auerbach then lists a number of stylistic and aesthetic differences between legendary and historical writing to enable his readers to make such distinctions themselves, concluding that legendary material “runs far too smoothly” and that “all cross-currents, all friction, all that is casual, secondary to the main events and themes […] has disappeared” and, later, that “legend arranges its material in a simple and straightforward way; it detaches it from its contemporary historical context, […] it knows only clearly outlined men who act from few and simple motives and the continuity of whose feelings and actions remain uninterrupted.”55 His analysis of the passage of the Odyssey with which he opens Mimesis had indicated as much: Odysseus and Eurykleia are “clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated”; “wholly expressed, orderly even in their ardor—are the feelings and thoughts of the persons involved.”56 For Auerbach, these surfaces are deceptive, and this level of ontological  Porter (2010b: 238).  Auerbach (2003: 19). 55  Auerbach (2003: 19). 56  Auerbach (2003: 3). 53 54

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deception is central to his vision of mimesis: “The poor beggar Odysseus is only masquerading, but Adam is really cast down, Jacob really a refugee, Joseph really in the pit and then a slave to be bought and sold.”57 Surfaces, therefore, can deceive, but true suffering, which reveals itself only internally, cannot: “The reader clearly feels how the extent of the pendulum’s swing is connected with the intensity of the personal history—precisely the most extreme circumstances, in which we are immeasurably forsaken and in despair, or immeasurably joyous and exalted, give us, if we survive them, a personal stamp.”58 Odysseus’ scar may represent visible physical suffering, but Homeric narration is incapable of rendering the inner feeling of suffering; for that, one must turn to the Jews: Adam, Jacob, and Joseph. “The personal history,” moreover, would become the defining feature of Holocaust literature, which paradigmatically take the form of first-person narratives that describe “extreme circumstances” in which the narrator is “immeasurably forsaken and in despair.” These are marks of truth: the “personal stamp.” Auerbach contrasts this Homeric superficiality with the sense of ambiguity, doubt, contradiction, and confusion that is the defining element of biblical narrative as exemplified by the Akedah. Auerbach, citing Genesis 22:1, notes that “even this opening sentence startles us when we come to it from Homer. Where are the two speakers? We are not told.”59 From this, only more questions: “Whence does he come, whence does he call to Abraham?”60 And, analyzing the ambiguous placement of Abraham within his surroundings, Auerbach asks, “Where is he? We do not know.”61 Unlike the foregrounded Homer, the Akedah is “fraught with background”:62 “the journey is like a silent progress through the indeterminate and the contingent.”63 The difference between Homer’s account of Odysseus’ scar on the one hand and the Akedah on the other and the difference between a legendary narrativity that prioritizes surfaces and a  Auerbach (2003: 18).  Auerbach (2003: 18). Earl Jeffreys writes of these lines that “Auerbach stresses how the biblical stories preserve, even celebrate, the individuality of the suffering of the protagonists, provided—he quietly adds—that they survive” (2001: 75). 59  Auerbach (2003: 8). 60  Auerbach (2003: 8). 61  Auerbach (2003: 8). Daniel Mendelsohn analyzes this passage at length in Mendelsohn (2020: 39–41); for which see {000} below. 62  Auerbach (2003: 15). 63  Auerbach (2003: 10). 57 58

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historical or realistic narrative that shows depth through ambiguity, ineffability, darkness and shadow reflect his understanding of how to “represent reality” in the 1940s, when accounts of the concentration camps were widely dismissed as being not real. In terms of contemporary trauma theory, “trauma,” according to Caruth, “is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. The truth […] cannot be link only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and our language.”64 This is the narrative style of  the Elohist according to Auerbach, offers a narrative fraught with background and characterized by the unknown and unarticulated. It thus reveals a truth that the surface (though not synonymous with superficial) narrative style of Homer cannot plumb. Thus, when Auerbach contrasts the ancient Greek method of narration with the ancient Jewish method, he is also contrasting it (as exemplar of the legendary) with the contemporary, what he refers to as “witness” reports or “testimony from those who witnessed it.” Auerbach follows this with his “extraordinary parabasis,” a longer and more detailed meditation on the importance of understanding the representation of reality in literature for evaluating the veracity of the reports coming out about Nazi atrocities during the War: Let the reader think of the history which we are ourselves witnessing; anyone who, for example, evaluates the behavior of individual men and groups of men at the time of the rise of National Socialism in Germany, or the behavior of individual people and states before and during the last war, will feel how difficult it is to represent historical themes in general, and how unfit it is to represent historical themes in general, and how unfit they are for legend; the historical comprises a great number of contradictory motives in each individual, a hesitation and ambiguous groping on the part of groups; only seldom (as in the last war) does a more or less plain situation, comparatively simple to describe, arise, and even such a situation is subject to division below the surface, is indeed almost constantly in danger of losing its simplicity; and the motives of all the interested parties are so complex that the slogans of propaganda can be composed only through the crudest simplification—with the result that friend and foe alike can often employ the

 Caruth (1996: 4).

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same ones. To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend.65

Contained within what Hartman no doubt had in mind when he referred to Auerbach’s “wondrous long German sentences, unfolding by a method that never lost sight of the introductory and paradigmatic literary passage as it progressed to related excerpts and astonishingly large observations”66 is an exhortation for the reader to consider how difficult it is to use the representational medium of words to represent the real-life situation under the Nazis. On the one hand, the legendary, exemplified by Homer, with its focus on smoothness and surfaces, no longer suffices; on the other, to represent reality is exceedingly difficult, both in terms of literary representation and in terms of facing the true extent of the atrocities first coming to light in the early 1940s. It is easier to look away, for Holocaust deniers as for writers, and thus “are forced” by the horrors of otherwise facing reality to resort to “the technique of legend,” which simplifies and omits, thus offering a more palatable account of humanity’s worst crimes. Instead of this superficial representation, which represents a superficial reality that may yet not be the truth, Auerbach turns again to Jewish history: “the most essential” part of the Old Testament “consists in things which the narrators knew from their own experience or from firsthand testimony.”67 This witness testimony is conceived of by Auerbach as being in large part in opposition to the legendary style of Homer. Contemporary accounts of the War reflect this Jewish suffering and are narrated not in a Greek fashion but a Jewish one: “The historical event which we witness, or learn from the testimony of those who witnessed it, runs much more variously, contradictorily, and confusedly; not until it has produced results in a definite domain are we able, with their help, to classify it to a certain extent; and how often the order to which we think we have attained becomes doubtful again, how often we ask ourselves if the data before us have not led us to a far too simple classification of the original events!”68 Auerbach’s understanding of the representation of reality of accounts of 65  Auerbach (2003: 20). The passage is also discussed in detail by Djelal Kadir, who writes that “this overt grounding of Auerbach’s endeavor is rare enough on his part that it obliges to read it as a mirror, a speculum that deflects the countenance of the reader into a parallax” (2011: 31). 66  Hartman (2007: 165–66). 67  Auerbach (2003: 19). 68  Auerbach (2003: 19).

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“the historical event which we witness” runs parallel to that of the Akedah (and counter to that of Homer): it is determined by ambiguity, doubt, self-questioning. These would come to be the defining elements of the witness testimony that emerged in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Auerbach connects this again to the question of belief and disbelief: “One can perfectly well entertain historical doubts on the subject of the Trojan War of Odysseus’ wanderings,” he writes, while still being able to appreciate his literary style, “but without believing in Abraham’s sacrifice, it is impossible to put the narrative of it to the use for which it was written.” That is to say, one cannot understand the historical mode if one does not believe in it; one cannot understand the reports of witness testimony about the Holocaust if one is a Holocaust denier.

Ulysses’ Scar: Primo Levi’s Representation of Reality in Auschwitz While Auerbach was in Istanbul writing Mimesis, Odysseus was also on the mind of at least two of the 1.3 million men, women, and children who were imprisoned at Auschwitz, 1.1 million of whom died: the self-­ described “Italian citizen of the Jewish race”69 Primo Levi and a fellow prisoner, Jean Samuel, both of whom survived. Published in 1947, Levi’s memoir of his time in the camp, If This Is a Man,70 became one of the founding documents of witness literature. As Levi recounts, one day, he and five of other inmates “were scraping and cleaning the inside of an underground petrol tank” and hoping the swaying of the rope ladder that was the sole means of entry and exit from the tank did not indicate the coming of a Nazi officer or a Kapo.71 Levi and his comrades were relieved, then, when the man who came down the ladder into the vat turned out to be Jean Samuel, who held the unofficial position of pikolo, “the messenger-­ clerk, responsible for the cleaning of the hut, for the distribution of tools, for the washing of bowls, and for keeping record of the working hours of the Kommando.”72 Perhaps most significantly for Levi and the other starving prisoners in the tank was that Samuel, as pikolo, had “an absolute right  Levi (1959: 4).  Also translated in English as Survival in Auschwitz, though this translation elides the central humanist question from the title. 71  Levi (1959: 127). 72  Levi (1959: 127). 69 70

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to the remainder of the daily ration to be found on the bottom of the vat.”73 Indeed, Samuel had come to tell Levi that it was his turn to eat that leftover food. As they walked across the camp on their way to the kitchen, Levi began to think of the “Canto of Ulysses” from Dante’s Inferno (Canto 26), which had, perhaps coincidentally, been the subject of Auerbach’s earlier work, Dante, Poet of the Secular World. As they walked, Levi tried to recall the passages from the Canto in Italian and translate them into Samuel’s native French as they walked: “…The canto of Ulysses. Who knows how or why it comes to my mind. But we have no time to change, this hour is already less than an hour. If Jean is intelligent, he will understand. He will understand.”74 In terms of Auerbach’s articulation of mimesis, the narrative is already “fraught with background”: unlike the Homeric or legendary narrator, who “knows only clearly outlined men who act from few and simple motives and the continuity of whose feelings and actions remain uninterrupted everything is apparent on the surface, including thoughts and emotions,” Levi is already engaging in historical narrative: his questioning opens the biblical style that Auerbach describes as having “a great number of contradictory motives in each individual,” and the “more or less plain situation, comparatively simple to describe” of his walk with Samuel “is subject to division below the surface, is indeed almost constantly in danger of losing its simplicity.” Levi’s question, therefore, invites the reader to speculate: certainly the epic motif of katabasis would have deep resonance for a prisoner like Levi with a classical education and literary inclinations,75 and indeed Jonathan Druker has argued that “among the touchstones in the Western canon that served Levi over the course of many books, none is more important—except, perhaps, The Divine Comedy—than the Odyssey, whose protagonist journeys through mythic terrors to return home and sleep in his own bed, his identity intact.”76 In his own estimation, Druker “would go so far as to say that in the role of alter ego, Ulysses is the second most important character in Levi’s largely autobiographical  Levi (1959: 127).  Levi (1959: 130). 75  “His scientific competence was accompanied, as was often the case for young people of the affluent Italian bourgeoisie, by the classical education that during the secondary school years of the Liceo classico familiarized him with the great authors of the Italian canon, from Dante to Tasso, from Galileo to Manzoni, as well as non-Italians of the western tradition, from Homer and Vergil to Rabelais and Descartes, from Balzac to Tolstoy” (Biasin 2001: 3). 76  Druker (2009: 8). 73 74

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oeuvre”; Odysseus is “a venerable literary prototype of the survivor, his story—in its broad outlines—mirrors Levi’s.”77 But for Levi, Odysseus is more than simply an exemplum or paradigm of human suffering, endurance, and homecoming; in calling his autobiography Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man), Levi, ever the scientist, offers the first half of an unfinished “if-then” hypothesis: if this is a man, then … then what? Considered in this way, the significance of Levi’s meditation on Ulysses takes on new meaning, for that word, man, is also the first word of the Odyssey: Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὅς μάλα πολλὰ.78 The work’s title thus asks the reader to compare Odysseus and Levi, to ask, if Odysseus is a man, is Levi the concentration camp prisoner one as well? If Odysseus is a man, then are the kapos, SS guards, and other prisoners men as well? And, if those who reside in Auschwitz are men, is Odysseus too? The unspoken comparison of the world of Homer and l’univers concentrationnaire comprises the fraught background; indeed, Levi invites his reader to consider these questions as well, asking in the Canto of Ulysses “… Who is Dante? What is the Comedy?”79 Levi begins reciting from the Inferno in what Auerbach would identify as the “legendary” mode: “Jean pays great attention, and I begin slowly and accurately,” he recalls, reciting six lines from the poem. Quickly, however, his “accurately” rendered recitation begins to come undone: “Here I stop and try to translate. Disastrous—poor Dante and poor French. […] And after ‘When I came?’ Nothing. A hole in my memory. Another hole. 77  Druker (2009: 8). Ulysses as the symbol of the Holocaust survivor was not Levi’s alone; Paul Rassinier, widely considered the “father of Holocaust denial” (see, for instance, Jacobs Antisemitism: Exploring the Issues 2020: 118), called his account of his time in Buchenwald as a political prisoner, which formed the eyewitness basis of his claim that there was no genocide of the Jews in the concentration camps, The Lie of Ulysses (1950) and a second, later volume, Ulysses Betrayed by His Own (1961). Though there has been (as far as I can tell) no attempt to connect Rassinier’s choice of Ulysses as an allusion to Levi’s use of the Homeric hero as his alter ego, it is possible as the publication of Se questo è un uomo preceded by several years Les mensonges d’Ulysse. 78  Though Levi, as a student at the prestigious classical liceo, would have almost certainly read the Odyssey in Greek, published Italian translations also use uomo, the same word for “man” as in the title of Levi’s work; see, for instance, the opening lines of Ettore Romagnoli’s 1926 translation of the Odyssey, which would have been in use when Levi was in school: Narrami l’uomo d’ingegno molteplice (1.1). 79  Levi (1959: 131). L’univers Concentrationaire was the title of the Neuengamme and Buchenwald survivor David Rousset’s 1946 work, one of the first to describe concentration camps.

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A fragment floats into my mind, no relevant: ‘…nor piety to my old father, nor the wedded love That should have comforted Penelope…,’ is it correct?”80 Levi can no longer recall the passage, can no longer narrate in the legendary style. Levi’s forgetting offers another parallel to Levi’s narrative of the recitation of the Canto of Ulysses. Auerbach notes that in Homer, no speech is so filled with anger or scorn that the particles which express logical and grammatical connections are lacking or out of place. […] The separate elements of a phenomenon are most clearly placed in relation to one another; a large number of conjunctions, adverbs, particles, and other syntactical tools, all clearly circumscribed and delicately differentiated in meaning, delimit persons, things, and portions of incidents, in respect to one another, and at the same time bring them together in a continuous and ever flexible connection.81

Levi’s narration does not follow this model; the breakdown in grammar and the syntactical instability increase with the agitation of both Levi the prisoner speaking to Samuel and Levi the survivor-author writing after the War trying to represent mimetically the reality of that agitation he felt in Auschwitz. His narration of the Canto of Ulysses contains numerous instances of “logical and grammatical connections” out of place: ellipses, authorial interruptions in the form of questions, a toggling between the character’s direct speech to Samuel and the narrator’s representation of his earlier self’s internal monologue that accompanies and parallels the external recitation. As Levi’s attempt to narrate the Canto of Ulysses progresses, his capacity to remember the poem becomes more confused; lines are recited out of order, or so Levi thinks, he has forgotten the order entirely and so can’t be sure (“‘Open sea,’ open sea.’ I know it rhymes with ‘left with me’: ‘and that small band of comrades that had never left me,’ but I cannot remember if it comes before or after”).82 For other sections, Levi remembers the scene but not the versification (“the foolhardy journey beyond the Pillars of Hercules, how sad, I have to tell it in prose—a sacrelegi”).83 This increasing confusion and its increasingly chaotic rendering on the page create the background that is the defining feature of  Levi (1959: 131).  Auerbach (2003: 6). 82  Levi (1959: 132). 83  Levi (1959: 132). 80 81

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Auerbach’s Jewish style and antithetical to Homeric style: “The human beings in the Biblical stories have greater depths of time, fate, and consciousness than do the human beings in Homer; although they are nearly always caught up in an event engaging all of their faculties, they are not so entirely immersed in its present that they do not remain continually consciously aware of what has happened to them earlier and elsewhere; their thoughts and feelings have more layers, are more entangled.”84 The Canto of Ulysses offers this depth: Levi the character is “caught up in an event engaging all of [his] faculties”—trying to recite Dante, but he is also “not so entirely immersed in the present that [he does] not remain continually consciously aware of what has happened to him earlier and elsewhere”— he knows that there was a time and place that once he knew these lines, and this sense of time gives him the context for understanding the failure in his ability to recite them in Auschwitz. Thus are the feelings and thoughts of Levi the recollected character in Auschwitz entangled among themselves but also entangled with Levi the survivor who narrates the events after they occurred. The result demonstrates in practice the style of witness testimony that Auerbach proposed defined the narration of the Akedah and which would serve as a model for contemporary narration of trauma: “the confused, contradictory multiplicity of events, the psychological and faculty cross-­ purposes, which true history reveals have not disappeared in the representation but still remain clearly perceptible.”85 Like a wound, the text is disfigured; like a scar, that disfigurement will always “remain clearly perceptible.” Auerbach concludes that all elements of the Homeric narrative “are brought to light in a perfect fullness […] and never is there a form left fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depth.”86 The Homeric author could have created a background, “it would have been perfectly easy to do; the story of the scar had only to be inserted two verses earlier,” but, he argues, “any such subjectivistic-perspectivistic procedure, creating foreground and background, resulting in the present lying open to the depths of the past, is entirely foreign to the Homeric style; the Homeric style knows only

 Levi (1959: 12).  Auerbach (2003: 20). 86  Auerbach (2003: 6–7). 84 85

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foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present.”87 As Auerbach notes, this method is fundamentally at odds with narrating the modern experience: narrating “the behavior of individual men and groups of men at the time of the rise of National Socialism in Germany,” including If This Is a Man, cannot be done in Homer’s static present since the genre of witness literature or testimony is defined by the temporal subjectivity: the survivor in a hard to understand present informed by trauma trying to make sense of imperfectly recalled events from their own dark past. His recollection of the Canto of Ulysses in Auschwitz exemplifies the difficulty of legendary narration that Auerbach identified while writing Istanbul; the passage is a memory scar: fragmented narratives, stitched, gapped, grafted, filled with lacunae, and damaged. The narrative style Levi employs in the Canto of Ulysses reflects concerns about narrative and realism that remained at the heart of Levi’s investigation into the relationship between aesthetics or narrative style on the one hand and memory and reality on the other. In his last work, published in 1986, a year before his death, Levi offers a series of essays that address many of the themes from If This Is a Man. In the opening essay, “The Memory of the Offense,” Levi argues that “the whole history of the brief ‘Thousand Year Reich’ could be reinterpreted as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of memory, a falsification of reality, a denial of reality, ending in the final flight from reality itself. Hitler’s biographers, who disagree on how to interpret the life of this elusive man, all agree that his last years were characterized by a flight from reality.”88 As Auerbach had realized forty years earlier, representing reality was not just a matter of literary style; it had a pressing ethical necessity: writing as a means of convincing people that what was written could also be true, no matter how seemingly incredible. Levi’s experience during the War taught him that, like the murderous Odysseus disguised as a hapless beggar, surfaces can be deceptive, even fatal. In “The Drowned and the Saved,” Levi discusses how “the well-­ known euphemisms (‘final solution,’ special treatment’, even ‘Einsatzkommando,’ which literally means ‘Ready Deployment Unit’ but which disguised an atrocious reality) served not only to deceive the victims and prevent them from defending themselves; they also served, within the realm of the possible, to prevent public opinion, and even the armed forces  Auerbach (2003: 7).  Levi (2015: 2426).

87 88

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not directly involved, from finding out what was happening throughout the territories occupied by the Third Reich.”89 The Homeric style, with its commitment to illuminating the surface at the expense of what lies beneath, is incapable of representing reality, since the Nazi commitment to universal lexical mendacity means that a word’s surface meaning is deceptive, hiding something far more sinister in the silence beneath. The deceptiveness of surfaces provides more difficulty than just writing; it also makes rendering moral judgment—a necessity for Levi—a difficult task. In another essay from The Drowned and the Saved, entitled “The Gray Zone,” Levi gives us perhaps a paradigmatic example, the story of three Kapos who headed prison blocks at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen. On the surface, they were the Jewish enforcers of the rules of the concentration camp and thus active participants in the most heinous crimes committed in them. But, Levi notes, they also “in many concrete ways” alleviated the suffering of the prisoners when and where they could. Levi thus concludes that they “were not collaborators in the least, or were so only in appearance. In fact, they were opponents in disguise.”90 Again, the surface is deceptive; only in knowing the interiority of these men could the truth of their actions—reality—be discerned. Both Auerbach and Levi, then, were concerned with mimesis, with the representation of reality, and with trying to find a style that could represent a reality that seemed unreal to its initial audience, since nothing like the Holocaust had ever been conceived, much less executed on an industrial scale. Where Auerbach used Odysseus (via Homer) to lay a theoretical foundation for the articulation of this contemporary style by finding its origins in the Jewish bible, Levi used Ulysses (via Dante) to demonstrate it in practice. Indeed, later in his career, when Levi wrote about the impossibility of writing fiction as opposed to memoir in the essay “Other People’s Trades,” he starts there: The first impossibility is demonstrated by millennia of literature. The return on a written portrait is invariably low, even in the finest of works: the entire Odyssey is not sufficient to give us a picture of Ulysses, but not even in a ­full-­scale, classical novel, or an openly avowed biography, in which the author strives to bring you a description of his subject’s stature, the color of  Levi (2015: 2426).  Levi (2015: 2437).

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his eyes, and complexion, his physique, the way he talks, laughs, and gesticulates. Even here, one never attains the level of mimesis, and the reason lies in the basic inadequacy of our means of expression.91

Levi is writing here in the same terms as Auerbach, examining the Odyssey from the perspective of “mimesis.” Like Auerbach, Levi finds Homer’s narrative style incompatible with what Auerbach would call “the representation of reality.” Levi’s reasons, moreover, also echo Auerbach’s: each of the examples he gives of the insufficiency of words to create a full reality pertain to surfaces, to visible exteriorities such as physical appearance and mannerisms. Instead, Levi writes, “a character who is too consistent becomes predictable, that is, boring; […] he should be inconsistent the way we all are, have shifting moods, make mistakes lose his way, grow from page to page, or decline or pass away.”92 These examples reflect a character’s interiority, focusing on emotions and contradiction, as in the mode Auerbach claims for the Akedah in Genesis. If, however, for Auerbach, Hartmann, and others, scars are metaphors for thinking through problems of postwar ontology and memory, If This Is a Man also demonstrates that they are also real; whatever else a man may be in If This Is a Man, his body is often wounded. Indeed, If This Is a Man can be read as a catalogue of wounds: Flesch has “a large scar on his face from a wound received fighting the Italians on the Piave”;93 Otto shows Levi “the scars on his shins,”94 and a wound on Levi’s own foot, not fatal in and of itself, but only insofar as it threatens his utility in the camp, is a recurrent theme of the work.95 Both the deep physical pain of his time in the camp and the deep existential pain that lingered the rest of his life carve out for Levi a unique place in Jewish writers who used the Homeric epics to think through the Trojan War. For Levi, as with the others, the great theme was suffering, and Levi, having survived the worst place in human history, understood this in a way that was as much embodied as  Levi (2015: 2170).  Levi (2015: 2170). 93  Levi (1959: 18). 94  Levi (1959: 115). 95  See, for instance, where the wound causes his shoe to be “full of blood, by now congealed and kneaded into the mud and rags of the cloth I found a month ago” (1959: 47) and, later, where Chaim “rejoices with me” because Levi has “a good wound, it does not seem dangerous, but it should be enough to guarantee me a discreet period of rest” (1959: 49). 91 92

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theoretical. Indeed, it was not just something he felt in the camp, but even at the moment he left: “In most cases, the hour of liberation was neither joyous nor exhilarating. It usually struck against a tragic backdrop of destruction, slaughter, and suffering. […] suffering is the child of suffering.” For Levi, physical scars and memory scars are inseparable. And yet, despite these scars, it is significant that at this very nadir of his existence, Auerbach still believes that the Classical legacy, and Ulysses in particular, have something still to tell him about his own experience. In At the Mind’s Limits, originally published in 1966, Primo Levi’s barracks mate Jean Améry came to a startlingly different conclusion. In the book’s titular essay, Améry declares at the outset that the aim of the essay is “to speak on the intellectual in Auschwitz,” whom he defines as “a person who lives within what is a spiritual frame of reference in the widest sense. His realm of thought is an essentially humanistic one, that of the liberal arts.”96 Though he is speaking of himself, quasi-autobiographical investigation includes others, such as Levi and Viktor Frankl, both of whom he mentions by name,97 and, indeed in referring to the intellectual as “a man who can recite great poetry by the stanza,” he may be obliquely referencing Levi, both through the way he refers to his subject, the “man” made famous in Levi’s title and the famous canto of Ulysses scene in which Levi recites great poetry.98 Améry moves to answer the questions at the heart of the essay: “Did intellectual background and an intellectual disposition help a camp prisoner in the decisive moments? Did they make survival easier?”99 Améry finds his answer in a book “called Goethe in Dachau,” by the Dutch writer Nico Rost. Améry cites several passages in which Rost writes about how writers such as Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Herder helped him get through those hard times, just as they had for Levi; indeed, Améry cites Rost’s statement of “Classical literature as a substitute for Red Cross packages.”100 Améry disputes that he ever felt similarly: “During an air raid warning I certainly would have made no attempt to ponder on Herder. And more despairingly than scornfully I would have rejected the unreasonable demand that I accept classical literature as a substitute for a food package.”101 The difference, for Améry, is  Améry (1980: 2).  Améry (1980: 3). 98  Améry (1980: 3). 99  Améry (1980: 5). 100  Améry (1980: 5). 101  Améry (1980: 5–6). 96 97

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the difference between the treatment of a Jew in the death camp of Auschwitz and a Christian Jewish sympathizer in the hard labor camp of Dachau (“In Dachau the political element predominated among the inmates; in Auschwitz, however, by far the great majority consisted of totally unpolitical Jews and politically very inconstant Poles”).102 Indeed, Améry recalls a moment much like that when Levi recited Dante, repeating a line from Hölderlin’s “Hälfte des Lebens.” His experience, however, is radically different than Levi’s: “I muttered [the poem] to myself in mechanical association. Then I repeated the stanza somewhat louder, listened to the words sound, tried to track the rhythm, and expected that the emotional and mental response that for years this Hölderlin poem had awakened in me would emerge. But nothing happened.”103 Améry distinguishes his own positionality with regard to the cultural background by noting that “a special set of problems in connection with the social function or nonfunction of the intellect arose for the Jewish intellectual of German educational and cultural background,” a component that separates him for the Italian Levi: “No matter to what he turned, [German culture] did not belong to him, but to the enemy.”104 For Améry, in short, being an intellectual, a humanist, was not just of no benefit, it was actively a liability, preventing one from fully grasping the horrors of the situation one faced, even as the time spent studying in the humanist tradition precluded one from developing those practical skills like carpentry or the sheer physical strength that would allow one to survive in Auschwitz. It is perhaps an irony left unrecognized by Levi, when read in comparison to Améry, that it was not Levi’s ability to recite Dante that saved him but the efforts of Lorenzo Perrone, a bricklayer who supplied Levi with extra rations of food and warm clothes. In If This Is a Man, it was, ultimately, not Dante or Ulysses who saved Levi’s humanism but a bricklayer: “Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo I happened not to forget I was myself a man.”105 Scholars have long commented on the  Améry (1980: 6).  Améry (1980: 7). Améry remarks in perhaps another allusion to Levi and Jean Samuel the pikolo that “perhaps the Hölderlin feeling […] would have surfaced if a comrade had been present whose mood would have been somewhat similar and to whom I could have recited the stanza” (Améry 1980: 7). 104  Améry (1980: 8). 105  Levi (1969: 142). 102 103

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unlikely survival, even expansion, of Levi’s commitment to the humanist tradition.106 Améry, by contrast, sees in the Classical past (though without reference to Homer) a much darker tradition in which the Holocaust is not a rupture but continuity with the past: A Germany existed that drove Jews and political opponents to their death, since it believed that only in this way could it become a full reality. And what of it? Greek civilization was built on slavery and an Athenian army had run wild on the Island of Melos as had the SS in Ukraine. Countless people had been sacrificed as far back as the light of history reaches, and mankind’s eternal progress was only a naïve belief of the nineteenth century anyhow. […] The Via Appia had been lined with crucified slaves and over in Birkenau the stench of cremated human bodies was spreading.107

At the Mind’s Limits, then, represents a forceful and total rejection of the Classical tradition and the Enlightenment vision of progress that informed the reading of civilizational progress that undergirded the humanist understanding of the teleology of history: “That is the way history was nad that is the way history is.”108 To think otherwise is a cognitive error made by those for whom the betrayal of liberal culture was only partial due to one’s privileged position, such as Nico Rost, who was not a Jew, or Levi, who was an Italian and not a German. Levi and Améry, then, form two poles of Jewish humanist responses to the experience of slavery in Auschwitz and thus constitute different and potentially irreconcilable audiences for the kind of realist narration to which Auerbach both gave an archaeology and envisioned a future. In the final paragraph of the epilogue of Mimesis, having traced the history of Western literature over the course of two and a half millennia from Homer and Genesis to Virginia Woolf, Auerbach offers a hope for a future that must have looked ever more bleak over the course of his writing: “With this I have said all that I thought the reader would wish me to explain. Now nothing remains but to find him—to find the reader, that is. I hope that my study will reach its readers—both my friends of former years, if 106  See, for instance, Druker (2009: 5–9), who uses this history of scholarship to question it, showing how “the Muselmanner—the hollow shells of men who made up the vast majority of the inmates in the camp—stand in haunting opposition to Levi’s identification with Ulysses as the embodiment of human nobility and resolute self-preservation” (9). 107  Améry (1980: 11). 108  Améry (1980: 11–12).

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they are still alive, as well as the others for whom it was intended.”109 In the context of the reconstruction of a Western literary canon, Mimesis can be seen as a culture safe or time capsule (Auerbach’s friend and hagiographer Harry Levin called it “an imaginary museum”)110: when the war ends, despite all the destruction, one could find Mimesis and reconstruct a new culture from it, with the Jewish and Greek contributions at the origins of a reconstituted Western humanism; David Damrosch calls it “not an alien world, but our own world made new,”111 while Edward Said calls it “an alternative history for Europe.”112 And indeed, in correcting what Said calls “the failure of German literature to confront modern reality” by “perceive[ing Europe] through the means of stylistic analysis” and “rescu[ing] sense and meanings from the fragments of modernity,”113 Auerbach creates a new vision of a postwar “Western literature.” Such a reading may have been available to Auerbach who, his own trials notwithstanding, was never incarcerated within the Nazi system of industrial death. If Améry was immune to Auerbach’s restorative humanism, the latter’s goals were also, in a sense, Primo Levi’s as well. In 1981, Levi published The Search for Roots: A Personal Anthology which comprises selections from thirty texts preceded by brief selections in which he comments on their influence on his work. Like Auerbach, he begins with Homer and the Bible. The first essay, “‘The Just Man Oppressed by Injustice’: ‘The Book of Job,’ the Bible,” filters Levi’s experience in Auschwitz through the figura of that paradigm of biblical suffering. The second essay, “‘A Man of No Account’: ‘Homer, New Coasts and Poseidon’s Son, The Odyssey” filters his long journey home from Auschwitz, recorded in his second book, The Truce, through the Homeric hero. In his introduction to the selection from the Odyssey, Levi writes: “I find reading the Iliad almost intolerable: that orgy of battles, wounds and death, that stupid and endless war, the puerile anger of Achilles. The Odyssey, however, has a human dimension, its poetry grows from a reasonable hope: the end of the war and exile, the world rebuilt on the foundation of a peace gained through justice.”114 The envoi of Mimesis reveals Auerbach entertaining such hopes as well.  Auerbach (2003: 557).  Levi (1969: 466). 111  Damrosch (1995: 99). 112  Said (2003: xxxi). 113  Said (2003: xxxi). 114  Levi (1981: 22). Levi begins with “The Just Man Oppressed by Justice,” the story of the Book of Job. 109 110

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But there was perhaps another reader Auerbach wished to find, in addition to or instead even of other philologists; Auerbach’s “friends of former years” would have included a number of Jews, and at the time when he wrote, Auerbach would have no idea of the fates of most of them, even as a fuller picture of the Holocaust began to emerge. These survivors of the Holocaust and the other atrocities of World War II could be the others “for whom this work was intended.” When Auerbach speaks of finding his readers, if they have survived, he is not just inviting a recreation of postwar humanism and philology, but he is also speaking specifically to survivors, showing them how to represent their experience of atrocity and the ontology of woundedness by showing them exemplary passages from their own literary tradition. Indeed, for the Romanian-born Jew and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, Levi’s fellow prisoner at Auschwitz and the author of the Holocaust memoir Night, Isaac is “the exemplum of the survivor” and the biblical figure with whom most strongly identifies: “His identification with the second patriarch is woven throughout his writings.”115 Wiesel himself claimed that “In my own way, I speak of Isaac constantly, in all my writings. In fact, I speak of almost nothing else.”116 If Auerbach intended to offer the Akedah as the exemplar of narrating witness testimony, Wiesel’s oeuvre reflects either Auerbach’s influence or, perhaps more likely, their shared set of biblical hermeneutics. For Wiesel, as for Auerbach, the Akedah is the paradigm of Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. The parallel is made clear in the title of a short essay of Wiesel’s about the Akedah: “The Sacrifice of Isaac: A Survivor’s Tale.”117 In it, he writes that God decided to test Abraham: “Take your son and bring him to Me as an offering. The term used is ola, which means an offering that has been totally consumed, a holocaust.”118 Wiesel glosses the term “holocaust,” noting that he is using it in its etymological or denotative sense and with a lower-case h: “an offering that has been totally consumed,” but for any writer, and perhaps for Wiesel above all, the choice of the term holocaust would have been significantly marked by its capital-H widespread use in 2013, when he was writing it. And, indeed, Wiesel makes the parallel experiences of the biblical patriarchs and Jews during the Holocaust  Ames (2006: 93).  Wiesel and de Saint Cheron (2008: 172); cited in Bussie (2006: 135). 117  Wiesel (2013). 118  Wiesel (2013: 71) and again, at 74: “Take your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and bring him to me in holocaust.” 115 116

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explicit: “We have known Jews who, like Abraham, witnessed the death of their children; who, like Isaac, lived the Akeda in their flesh; and some who went mad when they saw their father disappear on the altar, with the altar, in a blazing fire whose flames reached into the highest of heavens.”119 Here, Wiesel uses the first-person plural, “we,” to indicate that he is speaking of his experience and those with whom he identifies: the others who experienced the Holocaust and saw its horrors. For Wiesel, moreover, Isaac offers a lesson to Wiesel and the other survivors: “As the first survivor, he had to teach us, the future survivors of Jewish history, that it is possible to suffer and despair an entire lifetime and still not give up the art of laughter. Isaac, of course, never freed himself from the traumatizing scenes that violented his youth; the holocaust had marked and continued to haunt him forever. Yet he remained capable of laughter.”120 The biographical parallels between Wiesel and Wiesel’s Isaac are clear: young men, witnesses to horror, trying to find a way to find joy after their experience. Again, Wiesel calls Isaac’s experience a “holocaust,” with lowercase h to distinguish it from the Holocaust of World War II. And Wiesel also connects the experience of Isaac and the experience of the Jews during the War to the central Jewish themes of writers like Bespaloff: “suffering and despair.” In “The Holocaust as Literary Invention,” Wiesel famously declared: “If the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle, and the Renaissance the sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony.”121 If Wiesel’s statement is true, then Auerbach, Levi, and Wiesel were among its first exemplars, with Auerbach providing the historical, stylistic, and philological contexts that allowed works of survivor testimony like Levi’s If This Is a Man and Wiesel’s Night to be considered believable, to be considered literary depictions of reality. That is to say, mimetically.

 Wiesel (2013: 95).  Wiesel (2013: 97). 121  Wiesel (1990: 3). Cited widely in, for instance, Eaglestone (2004: 15), Engdahl (2003: 3), and Goldwyn (2021: 10). 119 120

CHAPTER 5

Hélène Cixous’ and Daniel Mendelsohn’s Postmemory Scars: The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract  This chapter examines Homeric intertextuality in the post-War memoirs of Hélène Cixous and Daniel Mendelsohn. As works of postmemory, Cixous’ Mother Homer Is Dead and Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic explore the grief of losing a parent through the dual frames of the deaths of Greeks and Trojans in the Homeric epics and the deaths of ancestors during the Holocaust. The focus on the victims of war and genocide by Jewish writers during World War II is thus transposed to the postgeneration, creating a place for the Homeric epics within a postwar humanism as texts that articulate the grief and despair of World War II for postwar generations of humanists. Keywords  Hélène Cixous • Daniel Mendelsohn • Postmemory • Postgeneration • Homer • Holocaust In A Kind of Survivor, an autobiographical sketch written in 1965 for Commentary, a monthly magazine on issues of Jewish history, politics, and culture, George Steiner recalls how “due to my father’s foresight” in the run-up to the War, first moving the family from Vienna to Paris, then from Paris to the United States, “I happened not to be there when the names were called out. I did not stand in the public square with the other © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Goldwyn, Homer, Humanism, Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11473-1_5

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children, those I had grown up with. Or see my father and mother disappear when the train doors were torn open. But in another sense, I am a survivor, and not intact.”1 Steiner describes survivor’s guilt, the feeling of personal grief, of cultural loss, and of geographic dislocation, that animates the great theme of his writing, “the black mystery of what happened in Europe,” the reasons behind the Holocaust.2 Steiner’s position with regard to the Holocaust is ambivalent—he escaped the worst of it, so he does not share with those children who were in the public square that day the same kind of experience. But he is, as the title of the piece suggests, a kind of survivor: he feels what Adorno calls the exile’s “mutilated” sense of self: he is “not intact.”3 He describes how the memory of the Holocaust “haunts me and controls my habits of feeling” and notes that it is “indivisible from my own identity.”4 Like many survivors, Steiner lives with the traumatic knowledge of the horrors inflicted on Jews in other ways just like him and of the serendipities that spared him from them. In A Kind of Survivor, however, Steiner notes that the traumatic legacies of the Holocaust are not only borne by those who lived through it but that its consequences, through their parents’ fears, guilt, and even their very way of being, are transferred to the next generation. This, too, is a kind of experience of the Holocaust: “So, at moments when I see my children in the room, or imagine that I hear them breathing in the still of the house, I grow afraid. Because I have put on their backs a burden of ancient loathing and set savagery at their heels. […] To have been a European Jew in the first half of the twentieth century was to pass sentence on one’s own children, to force upon them a condition almost beyond rational understanding. […] try as they may, they cannot leap out of our shadow.”5 Steiner describes the feeling not just of having indirectly experienced the Holocaust himself as a child in ways he could not then and, to a large  Steiner (1965: n.p.).  Steiner (1965: n.p.). 3  Steiner (1965: n.p.). 4  Steiner (1965: n.p.). 5  Steiner (1965: n.p.). The Jewish-American novelist and grandchild of Holocaust refugees Nicole Krauss speaks frequently of the legacy of the Holocaust as a “burden,” for which, see the chapter “Nicole Krauss: Inheriting the Burden of Holocaust Trauma” in Aarons and Berger. Krauss begins with an epigram from The Imaginary Jew (1983) by Alain Finkelkraut, a French Jewish philosopher born in 1949, to Auschwitz survivors, which summarizes the feeling of Holocaust postmemory: “I inherited a suffering to which I had not been subjected” (1997: 7, widely cited in the study of second-generation Holocaust studies, e.g., Grimwood 2007: 19). 1 2

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extent, cannot now, understand, but also the way in which that legacy has shaped his children; being a Holocaust survival becomes an intergenerational ontology. For Steiner, the Holocaust burdens those who were not yet born when the events occurred. They, too, are survivors, but in a different way than he is and in a different way than those who survived a more direct encounter with the genocide industry of the Third Reich. As a child whose family escaped the Holocaust before the war, Steiner is “a kind of survivor,” though a different kind of survivor than Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel, who endured concentration camps, and also a different kind of survivor than other refugees like Hannah Arendt or Rachel Bespaloff, even than other child refugees like Geoffrey Hartman. That singular event, the Holocaust, affected everyone differently—even children born after the War are a kind of survivor, too. Steiner, notoriously theory-averse, did not probe this ontology of intergenerational survivorhood much more deeply. In the 1990s, however, the Romanian-born American-Jewish scholar and daughter of Holocaust survivors Marianne Hirsch “propose[d] the concept of postmemory with some hesitation,” defining it as being “distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection.”6 Postmemory, for Hirsch, articulates a concept that she herself felt and which Steiner fears his children will: that her parents’ memories and traumas had been passed down to her as though they were her own. In subsequent works, she came to describe postmemory as “a generational structure of transmission embedded in multiple forms of mediation. Family life, even in its most intimate moments, is entrenched in a collective imaginary shaped by public, generational structures of fantasy and projection and by a shared archive of stories and images that inflect the broader transfer and availability of individual and familial remembrance.”7 Echoing Steiner’s fears for his own children, Hirsch focuses postmemory on the family; Hirsch’s “intimate moments” can be found in the quiet moments in Steiner’s house, when all he can hear is his children’s breathing in the next room. Steiner’s children constitute what Hirsch, following

 Hirsch (1997: 22).  Hirsch (2012: 35). Italics in original; she also affiliates this term with “Geoffrey Hartman’s notion of ‘witnesses by adoption’” (2012: 35). 6 7

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Eva Hoffman, calls the “postgeneration.”8 For Hirsch, “‘postmemory’ describes the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before; it is a structure of inter- and transgenerational return of traumatic knowledge and embodied experience. It is a consequence of traumatic recall but (unlike posttraumatic stress disorder) at a generational remove.”9 Hirsch thus puts in more theoretical terms the experiences that those like Steiner already understood intuitively, that “children of those directly affected by collective trauma inherit a horrific, unknown, and unknowable past that their parents were not meant to survive. Second-generation fiction, art, memoir, and testimony are shaped by the attempt to represent the long-term effects of living in close proximity to the pain, depression, and dissociation of persons who have witnessed and survived massive historical trauma. […] Loss of family, home, of a sense of belonging and safety in the world ‘bleed’ from one generation to the next.”10 Hirsch proposes two types of postmemory. The first is “familial,” that is, “vertical identification of child and parent occurring within the family, and the intragenerational horizontal identification that makes that child’s position more broadly available to contemporaries.”11 The second kind she calls “affiliative postmemory,” and she defines it as “no more than an extension of the loosened familial structures occasioned by war and persecution. It is the result of contemporary and generational connectedness within the literal second generation, combined with a set of structures of mediation that would be broadly available, appropriable, and, indeed, compelling enough to encompass a larger collective in an organic web of transmission.”12 For Hirsch, these two forms of postmemory represent two different modes of transmission, but postwar Jewish Classicists are, in some sense, enmeshed in both. Hélène Cixous, born in 1937 in Oran, Algeria, to Jews displaced first from Germany, then from France, and Daniel Mendelsohn, born to a Jewish family in New York City in 1960, both lost numerous family members in the Holocaust; the resulting intergenerational silence about these dead family members and the diaspora of those who survived 8  Hoffman (2004). Hoffman was born in 1946  in Krakow to Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivors. 9  Hirsch (2012: 5–6). 10  Hirsch (2012: 34). 11  Hirsch (2012: 36). 12  Hirsch (2012: 36).

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are central to Cixous’ and Mendelsohn’s sense of identity. In Cixous’ “second-generation”13 Holocaust memoir Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem: A Memoir (2020), for instance, Cixous returns to Osnabrück, Germany, the city of her mother’s birth, three years after her mother’s death. There, she searches for information about the extended family she lost in the Holocaust while also trying to get a fuller picture of the city about which she had only heard in fragmentary and fantastical stories from her mother. In her introduction, Hoffman identifies Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem (2020) as “belong[ing] to the genre of second-generation ‘return’ memoirs, recounting journeys by descendants of Holocaust victims to places where family members had lived before the cataclysm.”14 A similar quest animates Mendelsohn’s “third-generation”15 Holocaust memoir: The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006), in which the author travels to the hometowns of those of his ancestors who did not emigrate to the United States before the War and thus died in the Holocaust. Unlike Cixous, herself a kind of survivor in that she was alive during the Holocaust, Mendelsohn was not: this third generation is defined by the knowledge that, not only were they not alive during the Holocaust, they will also be the last generation to know a Holocaust survivor personally. As “secondgeneration” and “third-­generation” responses to the Holocaust, the works of Cixous and Mendelsohn are representative exemplars of Jewish cultural production legible within the context of familial postmemory of the Holocaust. What distinguishes them, however, is that, as scholars trained and working within the tradition of classical philology and comparative literature, both Mendelsohn and Cixous are deeply engaged with scholarly discourses in Greek antiquity in general and Homer in particular and are thus self-­conscious inheritors of the wartime Jewish scholars whose work influenced their own. In an interview with Mireille Calle-Gruber in 1997, for instance, Cixous claimed that “We are Western beings. All Western human beings have common ancestors, even if they don’t know it. We descend from a certain number of ancestors who are a mixture of Biblical characters and 13   For second-generation Holocaust narratives, see Berger and Berger (2001) and Grimwood (2007). 14  Hoffman (2020: ix). 15  For third-generation Holocaust narratives, see Aarons (2016) and Aarons and Berger (2017). Both volumes feature articles about Mendelsohn’s The Lost: Lévy 2016 and “Third-­ Generation Memoirs: Metonymy and Representation in Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost,” 67–106 in Aarons and Berger (2017).

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characters belonging to the Homeric tradition.”16 In this way, Cixous sees herself as belonging to a cultural and scholarly tradition of those who, like Auerbach, Adorno, Bespaloff, Broch, and others, saw themselves as having a shared origin in Homer and the Bible. Indeed, like Steiner, who read the Iliad as a young child with his father, or Vidal-Naquet, who as a child read the epics with his tutor in German-occupied France, Cixous recounts how she “did not distinguish the Bible from the myths and legends that have transported me since I was small. The sources were a mixture of children’s books, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which I read very early on, stories by my German grandmother, Omi, who bore in our fatherless family the Jewish tradition.”17 The Homeric epics and the Bible become a twin family inheritance, placing her in an affiliative relationship with the European Jewish scholars who preceded her. Mendelsohn’s affiliative relationship to those Jewish Homerists who wrote during and after the Holocaust is perhaps as keenly felt. In An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic (2017) and Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative and Fate (2020), Mendelsohn identifies his two mentors as Jenny Strauss Clay and Froma Zeitlin. Clay’s father, the pioneering professor of Islam Paul Eliezer Kraus, had, like so many Jewish academics, been driven out of Germany by the Nazis; he committed suicide in Cairo in 1944, leaving behind an infant daughter, Jenny, who was adopted and brought to the United States by her maternal uncle (her mother having died in childbirth), the political scientist Leo Strauss (who was, himself, friends with Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and others of that generation of German Jews who would go into exile abroad or die in Europe).18 Though principally a political philosopher, Strauss shared with his fellow GermanJewish expatriates an acknowledgement of the originary place of Homer in European history. In a letter dated November 15, 1957, to his student, the future Classics professor and Jew Seth Bernadete, for instance, Strauss wrote: “Some day my belief that Homer started it all and that there was a continuous tradition from Homer until the end of the eighteenth century will be vindicated.”19 For Strauss, Homer lies at the origins of “it all” but, like so many of his peers, sees a cultural rupture, even if he places it much earlier than the War. When Clay became a professor of Classics at the  Cixous (2008: 40).  Cixous (2008: 40). 18  For a biographical sketch of Kraus, see Kramer (1999). 19  As cited in Lampert (2013: 156). 16 17

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University of Virginia, she was thus bringing with her this tradition of Jewish Wartime philology to her scholarship20 and to her mentoring of Daniel Mendelsohn when he was an undergraduate. His other great mentor was another Jewish Classicist, Froma Zeitlin, born in New  York in 1933. In addition to her work on ancient drama, Zeitlin also founded Princeton’s Jewish Studies program and published on topics related to the Holocaust; she was also Mendelsohn’s PhD supervisor in Classics there. While neither Clay nor Zeitlin wrote explicitly about the connection between Homer and Holocaust, Clay, by circumstance of birth, is a member of the postgeneration, while Zeitlin, born before the War, has a more affiliative relationship to postmemory insofar as she was born in the United States. In an interview with Perspectives: The Magazine of the Association for Jewish Studies, Zeitlin was asked why she went into Jewish Studies, to which she replied, “Growing up in the years of World War II, I was haunted by what might have been in my own life.”21 Indeed, her article, “The Vicarious Witness: Belated Memory and Authorial Presence in Recent Holocaust Literature,” begins with an (albeit unacknowledged) articulation of many of the same themes explored by Auerbach in “Odysseus’ Scar”; she writes: “Whatever form Holocaust testimonies may assume […] all of them inhabit a haunted terrain of traumatized memory. […] This terrain remains the one on which we ourselves continue to record, recall, re-vision and reenact a wide range of responses to the cataclysmic event which […] challenged our established forms of discourse and our certainties about the legitimacy of aesthetic claims to sufficiently representational and emotive powers.”22 Here are the central concerns of mimesis the literary technique—how to represent reality in literature—and Mimesis the book—how to do so under and in the wake of the Holocaust. Exemplifying the interconnectedness of the affiliative scholarship of postmemory, Zeitlin thanks Mendelsohn and cites both Hirsch and Hartman within the first four notes. For Mendelsohn, these bonds are almost like a family; in An Odyssey, he recalls a remark Clay made to him as an undergraduate while she was 20  Among her major Homeric works are The Politics of Olympus: Form and Meaning in the Major Homeric Hymns (1989), The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey (1996), and Homer’s Trojan Theater: Space, Vision, and Memory in the Iliad (2011). 21  Zeitlin, http://perspectives.ajsnet.org/why-did-you-go-into-jewish-studies-zeitlin/ 22  Zeitlin (1998: 5).

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studying the Odyssey with her: “You can’t write anything until you’ve read everything.”23 For Mendelsohn “that sentence betrayed a certain intellectual inheritance” and was “the expression of genes passed on from generation to generation.”24 Mendelsohn then continues, writing himself into Clay’s entangled familial and scholarly ancestry: The intellectual DNA in this case […] was an inheritance from Jenny’s father, who at one point had also been her teacher, a man called Strauss, a Classics scholar and political philosopher who had grown up in Germany and was a product of the particularly rigorous classical training for which that country was famous; and beyond that to Strauss’ teacher and his teacher before him, back to Friedrich August Wolf himself, the German founder of classical philology. These chains of relationship between students and their professors—the Germans, with their combination of sentimentality and reverence for intellectual authority, rightly call such mentors Doktorväter, ‘doctor-­fathers”—snake back in time as purposefully as the ever-narrowing limbs of a family tree, a lineage of study and scholarship. […] in my case, from Jenny to her father to his teachers and then to Wolf.25

In addition to his family of birth, Mendelsohn creates a second family of classical scholars—“not all genealogies,” he concludes, “are genetic.”26 His birth family traces its ancestry to those scarred by the Holocaust, just as his scholarly family traces its ancestry to those who first wrote about the ontology and aesthetics of the scar. Mendelsohn’s engagement with Homer is thus entangled with the Holocaust, as much as his engagement with the Holocaust is entangled with Homer. For Hirsch, affiliative postmemory has three criteria, each of which the Homeric epics would meet: the Homeric epics were “broadly available” as physical objects to be read and studied; as Jewish writing about Homer during the War had proven, they were also “broadly appropriable” as paradigms for a variety of forms of wartime suffering; and they were “compelling”: Jewish Classicists in the postwar period saw themselves as operating in a discursive tradition whose origins were rooted in wartime writing  Mendelsohn (2017: 84).  Mendelsohn (2017: 84). 25  Mendelsohn (2017: 84–85). 26  Mendelsohn (2017: 86). The death of Jenny Strauss Clay’s birth parents during the War is easily and publicly available knowledge; it is curious that Mendelsohn doesn’t reference them and instead refers to Leo Strauss (her biological maternal uncle) as her father. 23 24

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about Homer. Thus, Cixous’ and Mendelsohn’s search for familial origins is entangled with Homer. Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic refracts his father’s death and Mendelsohn’s recollection of his own youth through the filter of a course he taught on the Odyssey at Bard College and a “retracing the Odyssey” cruise he and his father took through the Eastern Mediterranean. In parallel, Cixous’ Mother Homer is Dead (Homère est morte…) incorporates Cixous’ memories of her and her mother’s pasts with the immediacy of her mother’s long illness and death, all refracted through the Homeric epics. In this way, both Cixous and Mendelsohn entangle the deaths of their parents27—a traumatic memory that recalls yet another traumatic postmemory, the Holocaust—with the Homeric epics.28 In so doing, they are heirs to the scholarly discourse of Jewish wartime writing about Homer that entangles the epics with suffering, grief, woundedness, and death. It also connects their own scholarly identities with the genealogy of Jewish scholars who reoriented Homeric scholarship toward those themes during and immediately after the War. Indeed, An Odyssey offers the chance to see this legacy in action. In the opening of the book, Mendelsohn provides a philological close reading of the opening words of the Odyssey interspersed with his own personal reflections on his and his family’s past. Mendelsohn’s reading of Od.1.1–2, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη, which he translates as the title of the section “who wandered widely” gives an explanation of the etymology of Odysseus’ 27  Fiona Cox argues that the poet “[Helen] Dunmore’s invocation of Homer as a response to dying represents part of a new and growing trend in classical reception—namely, a turn towards classical authors as a response to serious illness or death,” listing, among others, how “Gwyneth Lewis forges her own odyssey through the hospital where her husband is being treated for cancer […], Jo Shapcott’s meditations on Ovid in the volume Of Mutability (2010) where she charts her experience of breast canter, Josephine Balmer’s grief at the deaths of her mother and her niece articulate in her responses to classical literature published as Chasing Catullus (2004) and Letting Go (2017), and Anne Carson’s elegy to her lost brother, Nox (2010)” (2019: 266). For Cox, “It is unsurprising to find Hélène Cixous at the forefront of such a trend, since she has a long history of pioneering significant shifts in cultural attitudes via her responses to classical texts” (2019: 266). Cox includes Mendelsohn in this group as well (2019: 267). 28  Marc Amfreville notes that “The Lost resurfaces in An Odyssey, or to put the same in another way, that the latter echoes the former in more ways than meet the eye. This bi-­ directionality smacks of Freudian Nachträglichkeit (a given trauma facilitates a second one, and at the same time creates the possibility of retrieving the buried conscious of the original one” (2022: 82).

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name: “the word odynê. […] This is the root of Odysseus’ name, and of his poem’s name, too. The hero of this vast epic of voyaging, journeying, and travel is, literally, ‘the man of pain.’ He is the one who travels; he is the one who suffers.”29

Hélène Cixous and Auerbach’s Biblical Style In her book Rootprints, the feminist philosopher, dramatist, and self-­ described “juifemme” Hélène Cixous writes: “I like the scar, the story.”30 For Cixous, like Auerbach, a scar is not just a physical marker but a narrative position. Like Hartman, the impetus of Cixous’ writing career is the memory scar. For Cixous, writing and suffering are inseparable, and woundedness, disability, decay, and death are the source of her creative impulse.31 Indeed, Cixous devoted an entire book, Stigmata: Escaping Texts, to the ontology of woundedness and writing through scars. In the Foreword to Stigmata, her great friend and fellow francophone Algerian-Jewish scholar Jacques Derrida writes that Stigmata is “a blessing of the blessure, a great poetic treatise on the scar at the origin of literary writing—and no doubt of all writing.”32 Derrida argues that Stigmata “overflows our language, the ‘French language’ in every way” and that it does so “in a rare and incomparably new fashion.” This new fashion is its emphasis on wounds: “In order to speak of the wound, all wounds, some would say ‘traumatisms,’ to name the scar in general, at the original of Hélène Cixous’ writing and in her ‘primal scenes’, it overflows and scarifies the French language without sacrificing it.”33 Derrida’s Foreword thus suggests that Cixous is bringing Auerbach’s vision of mimesis into French: Cixous “scarifies the French language,” an allusion to Odysseus’ scar, yet she does so “without sacrificing it,” as Abraham did not sacrifice Isaac. 29  Mendelsohn (2017: 22). The significance of Mendelsohn’s translation and its connection with Auerbach is discussed in Viviès (2022: 97). 30  Cixous and Calle-Gruber (1997: 16). 31  For which, see Robson (2004: 65), with reference to previous scholarship. In another example of their shared classical discourses, Hartman’s first book Unmediated Vision concludes with a long chapter on the myth of Perseus, arguing that poets of the postwar period should look directly at Medusa (unmediated vision) rather than, like Perseus, looking at her through the mirrored shield. Cixous’ most famous essay, The Laugh of the Medusa, focuses on the importance of women’s writing but through the same mythological paradigm. 32  Derrida (2005: ix). 33  Derrida (2005: ix).

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Like Auerbach, Derrida locates Cixous’ originary moment of writing as from a scar, a position that evolved out of Jewish writing about Homer during the Holocaust. Cixous elaborates on this theme in her introduction: “The texts collected and stitched and sewn and resewn in this volume share the trace of a wound. They were caused by a blow, they are the transfiguration of a spilling blood, be it real or translated into a haemorrhage of the soul.”34 For Cixous, moreover, writing and woundedness are inextricably linked to traumatic memory; the scarred figures about whom she writes in Stigmata, she argues “flee: to maintain the horror unforgettable—the horror we would not live in the present although we want to keep its awful treasure, its testimony, its transfiguration.”35 As in Auerbach’s reading of the Odyssey, wounds are the wellspring of narrative, of memory, and of the preservation of origin stories of still-visible scars in the face of the erasure or forgetting of those stories. For Cixous, moreover, these memory scars are explicitly connected to her experience as a young Jew during the War. In Stigmata, she writes that “I received my first stigmata at the age of three exactly in the Garden. Here is the scene. It takes place in my native town, Oran in Algeria, in 1940 during the war.”36 Cixous, then three years old, wants to enter a garden reserved for military officers and their children (Cixous’ father was in the Resistance during the War). The other children, however, prevent her entry, so she decides to give the other children stamps as a kind of currency so they would let her in: “My house is full of stamps. Do we not have an immense family that Hitler is disseminating across the earth and the airs? Those who have managed to escape Germany write from the four corners of the universe. I have all sorts of stamps.”37 One other child, however, does not believe her: “From high in the little sky a big six-year-­ old girl spits on my head: Liar! The word is sharpened, it falls on my brow and makes a gash. I vacillate. Liar! says the voice of flint. You have no stamps. Because: all Jews are liars. The crust that stands for the earth retracts from beneath my feet and I grab onto the cord of a swing, pierced by all these unknown words. Jew? Liar?”38 Cixous’ first stigma, then, her  Cixous (2005: xi).  Cixous (2005: xi). 36  Cixous (2005: xi). 37  Cixous (2005: xi). 38  Cixous (2005: xv). 34 35

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first wound which would become her first scar, was caused by wartime antisemitism. Indeed, the event “which was too big for me has engendered all my literature” and left her with a crisis of identity: “Everything is of a blinding clarity: if I bring the stamps to obtain my visa, I grovel to the pack, I dishonour myself and my people. I obtain an abominable permit. If I do not bring the stamps I am the proof that all Jews are liars, I dishonour my people and myself.”39 In the essay that concludes Stigmata (“Mon Algériance” in French and “To Depart Not to Arrive from Algeria” in English), Cixous reflects on the indeterminacy, instability, and insufficiency of national identity that she experienced as child: “My way of thinking was born with the thought that I could have been born elsewhere, in one of the twenty countries where a living fragment of my maternal family had landed after it blew up on the Nazi minefield.”40 The initial stigma, the source of her subsequent writing, is intimately connected with her feeling of not belonging: “Neither France, nor Germany nor Algeria,” she writes of her sense of place and self.41 Cixous, in this context, is, like Steiner, a kind of survivor. Circumstance saved her from the concentration camps, but she remains scarred by the experience of antisemitism, exile, and memory and, fifty-­ eight years later, the experiences of being called a liar because she was also a Jew and of growing up in a family fragmented by exile, death and diaspora, continues to shape her experience. As an adult, Cixous became one of the most prominent French academics of the postwar period. Her literary output includes plays, essays, works of more traditional academic scholarship, fiction, and memoir, among other genres. Among these, however, the classical legacy remained an important, if underexamined,42 part of her oeuvre: in plays such as The Name of Oedipus and books such as The Book of Promethea, in the chapter “Sorties” from The Newly Born Woman (in which Cixous compares herself to Achilles),43 and, most famously, in “The Laugh of the Medusa” (in which Cixous modeled deconstructive literary analysis and what she called écriture feminine, a form of embodied writing by women and for women). Alongside her roles as scholar and writer, Cixous also maintained a close  Cixous (2005: xvi).  Cixous (2005: 126). 41  Cixous (2005: 204). 42  See, for instance, Leonard (2000). 43  “In Homeric times,” she writes, “I was Achilles” (1986: 73). For the classical intertext in The Newly Born Woman, see Staley (2006) and Zajko (2006). 39 40

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relationship with her mother, Ève, born in Osnabrück, Germany, in 1910. For Cixous, for whom the boundaries between past and present, myth and reality, and scholarship and memoir were always already blurred, the classical and the personal become fully dissolved in Mother Homer is Dead, which recounts the last year of her 102-year-old mother’s life with the Iliad and the Odyssey as intertexts. In so doing, Cixous draws together the central ideas of Jewish writing about Homer during the War: the centrality of wounds and illness as memory scars for narrating the traumatic past in the present and the centrality of suffering and grief as the defining themes of the Homeric epics. In the chapter “The Anger of the Scamander”—a reference to the river who almost chokes on the corpses of Trojans Achilles has killed—of Mother Homer is Dead, Cixous recounts how “in February 2013 I begin rereading the Iliad. I’m looking to encounter Ajax, the one who loses his immense glory a certain evening.”44 Ajax, here, is a paradigm for her mother, who will also die one night. But Cixous’ Ajax doesn’t just die; he “loses his immense glory”; her Iliad is one of woe. For Cixous, “the Iliad was waiting for me. Its atrocious delights. Everyone is going to die. Everyone is expecting to die. One cannot live without dying. One avoids dying only by suspending life beneath one’s tent.”45 Like Bespaloff, the main theme of the Iliad for Cixous is death and the end of what Bespaloff called “the perishable joys of life.” As her mother lies dying, the Iliad and its narration of death draw her in: “I can no longer stop reading the Iliad: it’s the same scenario chant after chant, they fight, they kill, they die, they are going to die they present themselves at the contest, they state their names, genealogies, what beautiful characters they will have been, they kill each other in song, I wish that it would never end, the song, the blood, the flood of bodies, the anger of the Scamander who has had E-nough E-nough of being full of cadavers I feel it personally, what is this story of overdying, this agony whose end is known and whose length in time and space is unknown.”46 Reading the Iliad transports Cixous to her lived present: the Iliad is a story about stories of death and memory. As each character dies, they “state their names and genealogies,” linking themselves to a narratable past at the moment of their death. In this reading, moreover, Cixous,

 Cixous (2018: 46). The passage is analyzed in detail in Cox (2019: 272–74).  Cixous (2018: 46). 46  Cixous (2018: 46). 44 45

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thinking of all that death, becomes like the Scamander choking on all those Achilles has killed. Like the river, moreover, Cixous’ language begins to flow on, wending and winding in an increasingly meandering run-on sentence, with the constraints of grammar and syntax giving way to a stream of words. Unlike the Iliad, of which Auerbach noted, “no speech is so filled with anger or scorn that the particles which express logical and grammatical connections are lacking or out of place,” Cixous, like Levi, stylistically enacts the breakdown of “logical and grammatical connection” as her anger rises: “I feel it personally.” Immediately, this meditation on death in the Iliad turns to her mother: “My mother has been ready for the last act since the year 2000 and all armour-plated with bandages for a year, no one is ignorant of who is going to win what who is going to lose what.”47 For Cixous considering the Iliad, “categories of modern suffering take shape, rise up before our thoughts” in Homeric terms: “in a haze their anxious silhouettes are the Nearby Shades, those representing Maman and Mandela as alreadydead and stillliving.”48 Thus, Cixous considers her mother’s death in Homeric terms, as a Homeric hero like Ajax in the Iliad and as an underworld shade like Ajax in the Odyssey. But these Homeric terms are not those of pre-War scholarship of heroism but wartime and postwar Homeric hermeneutics of wounds, suffering, and death. Indeed, Mother Homer is Dead is an odyssey of her mother’s death; the first chapter, “The Very Long Journey: “Notebooks 10–12” opens the narrative of Ève’s declining health in Homeric terms: “The Long, very long Journey. The goal is known, but not how long the voyage is going to last, whether years, or years and years, disarmed years, it’s an odyssey that will terminate not with a nostos, but with a descent in the subterranean cavern; or else, no, perhaps the end will be reunion? No one knows how many stops, sojourns, turnarounds await us.”49 Ève’s illness is thus another kind of odyssey, but one of suffering whose end is death. Like Odysseus’ journey, “the goal is known,” that is, she will die, “but not how long the  Cixous (2018: 46).  Cixous (2018: 46). In Manna: For the Mandelstams and Mandelas (2000), Cixous had played with the phonetic similarities in their names to consider the Mandelas and the Mandelstams in terms of their revolutionary politics and imprisonment; Russian-Jewish dissidents, Osip died on his way to a Siberian gulag in a transit camp in Vladivostok in 1938, while his wife Nadezhda, an author in her own right, lived until 1980 and preserved his poetic legacy. 49  Cixous (2018: 7). The passage is discussed in Cox (2019: 274). 47 48

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voyage will last,” that is, how long it will take. Like the polytropos Odysseus, Ève will have many “turnarounds.” Ève will not have a nostos; she will not return home, but will go, like the dead in the Odyssey, to the underworld. “Every month,” Cixous continues, “we reached another island,” with each of the new challenges of Ève’s illness mirroring those of Odysseus.50 Instead of the challenges faced by the heroic Odysseus, however, Ève’s challenges are those of a centenarian in decline. Cixous, for instance, describes the great care she took in tending her mother’s ailing body: “One takes her beneath the arms while passing her two arms that I raise and secure around Roro’s large neck, and at the same moment I take her feet at the ankles and we pivot her into a sitting position there a third of a turn, I push the toilet-chair toward her bottom, in a second I lower the special pants. […] During the exercise Ève moans very loud tobedtobedtobedtobed. We hurt her to avoid the worst, an extension of the bedsores.”51 The mundane task of taking care of her mother’s incontinence becomes, for Cixous, the equivalent of Odysseus’ most famous exploit: “The bedsore, I can’t get used to it, is the eye of the one-eyed Cyclops, that great purplish hole that foams while saying: you are warned, I will kill you. The monsters arrive quickly.”52 Later, Cixous writes that “I want to lie down with her and take her in my arms as when I was little, taking her she took me. But I cannot, one cannot touch her, Ève cannot. Like the shade of Anticlea, the mother of Ulysses. One can no longer touch her.”53 Her mother’s wounded body becomes the text of the Odyssey, full of wounds, and the ancient example of the son who meets the

50  Cox examines this passage as well, arguing that “Cixous invokes Homer to depict the perils and novelties of this last, long journey, where the rocks and islands obstructing Odysseus metamorphose into the various trials and challenges of her mother’s final decline […]. Though Ève’s plight was not, at first sight, Homeric or even epic, by mapping her journey towards death onto one of the earliest texts in the Western tradition Cixous offers us the most recent instance of a French woman expanding both thematic and generic boundaries in the connections that they are establishing with Homer” (2019: 268). 51  Cixous (2018: 24). 52  Cixous (2018: 24). 53  Cixous (2018: 103–104). Other examples are provided in Cox (2019: 270–71). The passage is important to Mendelsohn’s conception of the Odyssey as a poem of grief; writing about his discussion of the passage with his students at Bard College, “I wondered how many of them could know grief well enough, so early in their lives, to appreciate the devastating aptness of the symbol Homer contrived for the gulf between the living and the dead: the armful of air, the impossible embrace” (2017: 170).

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immaterial ghost of his dead mother becomes for Hélène the paradigm of her relationship with her mother. Fiona Cox argues that Cixous’ “attempting to find her parent” places her within “the long lineage of those who enter the world of ancient epic in order to do so. She treads in the footsteps of Odysseus seeking Anticleia, of Telemachus seeking Odysseus, of Aeneas seeking Anchises.”54 Cox thus argues that, with Mother Homer is Dead, Cixous “pioneers a new trend in classical reception—the invocation of classical works in the articulation of women’s private griefs and experiences.”55 This is true, though it only accounts for one aspect of Cixous’ polysemous reception of the Iliad and the Odyssey; indeed, Cox never refers to Cixous’ Jewishness or her mother’s displacement from Osnabrück by the Nazis or the rising tide of antisemitism that displaced Ève and Hélène back to France after the Algerian War, despite Cixous’ remark that her mother “didn’t take two days to leave Germany at the first speeches of Hitler, and who took the first plane Algiers-France in 1972 as soon as the police cast an invitation her way.”56 Mother Homer is Dead is a work of écriture feminine: it embodies women’s experiences, in this case her mother’s dying, but it is also a work of Jewish postmemory: the decaying body contains within it the last memories of the world before the Holocaust, and Hélène fears that the loss of her mother’s body is also the loss of her mother’s memory. The title itself refers, in the way of Cixous’ ceaseless deconstructive punning, to the conjoinment of the distant past of epic and the nearer (temporally and emotionally) past of her mother’s last year: “Homère” contains the name of the ancient poet, the French word for mother (mère) and for Cixous’ maternal grandmother (nicknamed Omi)57 and her maternal aunt, Éri, the word for the sea (mer), is a homophone for “homme-­ mère, man-mother,”58 and the great theme of both the Odyssey and Ève’s decline: home. In making Homère feminine (also in the feminine form of “morte”), Cixous claims the ancient poet as an avatar of écriture feminine. And this epic poet is her mother. These points converge in the book’s  Cox (2019: 277).  Cox (2019: 277). 56  Cixous (2018: 92). 57  In Rootprints, Cixous writes that “Omi traversed my whole life. She is a bit m, o, i,” thus conjoining herself (“moi”) with the anagram of her grandmother’s nickname (1997: 183). 58  Hanrahan (2017: 137). 54 55

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opening sentence: “This book has already been written by my mother”59 and, later, “this is not the book I wanted to write. I do not write it. It is my mother who dictated it this last year (2013), without wishing to, ­without her wanting to, without my wanting to.”60 Throughout the work, Cixous returns to the idea of her mother as both the author of Mother Homer is Dead and the Homeric epics. She describes the notebooks in which she recorded her mother’s last year as “like subchapters in the Odyssey.”61 Her mother’s death, then, is not only the death of her physical body but also of her memories and, thus, of Hélène’s postmemory. Indeed, her maternal grandmother’s death had occasioned a similar loss: “Just as Omi is nothing any longer,” all that is preserved is “one elegant image [in which] are concentrated the rich volumes of a life, with its dramas, its journeys, its Europes and its Africas, its odysseys of the German woman in French, there is in the launch force of the gaze something like a monumental warning of an Omissey,” a play not just on the title of the epic and her grandmother’s name but also a play on what an epic of omissions would look like: “A poet would suffice to give text to this fragment.”62 The cause of this journeying, left unsaid, was the rise of the Nazis and the scattering of her family around the globe, the original memory scar she identified in Stigmata. The death of her grandmother, then, is tied to the memory of the Holocaust and, so too, is her memory of her mother’s life: “Little by little the city of Osnabrück, in which I have lived, in a borrowed reality called up by the many stories protected by the warm voice of my mother from the attacks of time, a busy life, whether sometimes at Omi’s home sometimes at the home of her friends, always with a pleasure sharpened by curiosity regarding as many characters are there are in the Iliad.”63 Cixous thus articulates postmemory (“a borrowed reality” of memories not her own) and compares this to an Iliad. These warm memories of her mother’s childhood “all having at first a prosperous, industrious, optimistic existence,” but quickly turn as the Holocaust approaches: “then brutally e-lim-i-na-ted from Osnabrück, at short intervals, kicked out,  Cixous (2018: 1).  Cixous (2018: 1). 61  Cixous (2018: 23). 62  Cixous (2018: 73). 63  Cixous (2018: 73). 59 60

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dispossessed, gone astray, terrified, massacred, separated, turned into miserable wretches of cruel novels, bitter, abandoned, forgotten persons banished from the realm of memory, poor people, spiritual beggars, atrophied ones, badly adopted ones who no longer even think of Osnabrück.”64 The memories of her mother’s childhood before the war will die with her: “the city of Osnabrück would cease to resuscitate, little by little I will not be able to return there with delight, mother Homer is dead.”65 If the text is by her mother, Homère, then its themes are Homeric in a very modern sense; indeed, this Homer is a Holocaust survivor. The conceit of the text is the comparison of Cixous’ mother’s slow death over the course of years to the Iliad and the Odyssey. But this is not Homeric epic in the pre-War mode of triumphalism but of wartime and postwar Jewish hermeneutics. In the book’s closing pages, Cixous writes that “I come back to the writing, that is to say, to the notebook with Ève Sunday, 30 June, at 6 o’clock in the morning, it’s because the level of double suffering is so high that my whole being cries out for the remedy. Until 30 June this notebook was a handkerchief. I was wiping my tears. I was soaking up the blood.”66 Cixous’ epic is a work of écriture feminine, a form of writing deeply connected to the body: tears and blood. This embodied writing has a specific affect: the same suffering that Bespaloff and others saw as the defining element of the Homeric epics. As a work of postmemory, this suffering is specifically connected to the intergenerational transfer of Holocaust memories: “Forces and mysteries of the white notebook: it presents itself as a storehouse of memory external to me while I am full of forgetting. I have forgotten everything. Already I am remaking bandage-­ versions in which I believe, substitute ‘memories,’ already I am beginning to bear false witness.”67 Cixous’ epic is, in her words, “the collection of wounds,” with each wound containing a memory and each bandage an attempt to remember in the face of forgetfulness.

 Cixous (2018: 73).  Cixous (2018: 74). After her mother’s death, Cixous went herself to Osnabrück, an experience she wrote about in Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem: A Memoir. She describes her journey as like an odyssey, writing, for instance, that “I went there like the nostalgia for Ithaca long after the Odyssey when no one is left alive” (2020: 66). Here, too, Cixous compares her mother to the epic poet: “In Osnabrück takes her source my mother Ève, this Homer ho didn’t do it on purpose to dare” (2020: 4). 66  Cixous (2018: 119). 67  Cixous (2018: 119–120). 64 65

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Daniel Mendelsohn and Auerbach’s Homeric Style In the opening chapter of Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate (2020), Daniel Mendelsohn describes the personal consequences— psychological, emotional, physical—of the previous book he had written, The Lost: The Search for Six of the Six Million (2006), a work of third-­ generation Holocaust postmemory in which Mendelsohn travels to Bolekhiv, Ukraine (then Bolechów, Poland), where much of his family lived before the Holocaust and where many of them died. The Lost also takes him around the world as he tracks down the various survivors who had been thrown into a global diaspora by the Holocaust. The emotional toll this work took on him was severe and debilitating: “When I was finished writing the story,” he writes, “I found myself unable to move. At the time, I told myself that I was merely tired; but now the distance of a decade and a half permits me to see that I had experienced a crisis of some kind, even a kind of breakdown. For some months I found it hard to leave my apartment, let alone do any traveling.”68 Tracing the journeys of those of his ancestors who died in the Holocaust and seeking out the stories of the descendants of those who survived leaves him in “this strange state [that] persisted for some time after I returned from my final research trip” when he visited the Belzec death camp, where some of his ancestors had died.69 Three years later, on the advice of Froma Zeitlin, Mendelsohn “began to entertain the idea of writing something about the Greek classics” as a way to avoid the difficult subject of the Holocaust and its legacy which had consumed him both during and after writing The Lost: “Wherever else it might lead, I thought, this Greek, this literary subject would at least allow me to leave behind the anguishing stories that had haunted me for so long and, in time, immobilized me; the tales of political collapse and religious intolerance, of escapes both successful and failed, of displacement and refugees, Germans and Jews.”70 Indeed, after completing the manuscript for what would become An Odyssey, Mendelsohn comes to understand something about his interior state upon completing The Lost: “I was suffering from what the Greeks call aporia: a helpless, immobilized confusion, a lack of resources to find one’s way out of a problem” and that this aporia was a result of the “creative and  Mendelsohn (2020: 4).  Mendelsohn (2020: 8). 70  Mendelsohn (2020: 10). 68 69

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spiritual crisis I had undergone after finishing my previous book.”71 But the crisis, for Mendelsohn, is not the same as that which afflicted him while writing The Lost: “The problems I was having with the Greek book were not at all like those I had experienced while writing the Holocaust book. The emotional despair that had characterized my relation to that book had yielded, in the new project, to what I can only call narrative despair.”72 In a moment of epiphany, Mendelsohn traces this personal aporia with the etymology of the Greek word, which means “‘a lack of path’ or ‘no way.’”73 From a narratological perspective, Mendelsohn realizes that what would become An Odyssey cannot be told in linear fashion but must be told through the use of ring composition, the Homeric technique of embedding one narrative inside another.74 Indeed, Mendelsohn recalls that he had first learned about the technique from his mentor at the University of Virginia, the Classics professor Jenny Strauss Clay, both of whose parents died during World War II. Mendelsohn writes: “I have known about [ring composition] since at least my junior year in college, when I attended a seminar on the Odyssey, since this device is famously used to great effect by Homer.”75 This meditation on ring composition leads him to another Holocaust refugee scholar, Erich Auerbach, for Mendelsohn writes that “the best known example of ring composition in Western literature is the carefully prepared and touching passage in Book 19 of the Odyssey in which the hero is recognized by his old nurse Eurycleia.”76 Mendelsohn effectively quotes the opening line of Mimesis, placing himself within it as one of the “readers of the Odyssey” who “will remember” the recognition scene.77 Auerbach and Mimesis thus become significant subjects in Three Rings, for Mendelsohn realizes that this Homeric strategy, which Homer had used to describe Odysseus’ childhood scar that has revealed his identity in the present, can be used when interviewing Holocaust survivors for The Lost, since they too are recounting scars in the distant past that shaped and revealed who they are. During these interviews, he had noted the difficulty  Mendelsohn (2020: 12).  Mendelsohn (2020: 10). 73  Mendelsohn (2020: 12). 74  Mendelsohn describes ring composition in An Odyssey as well (2017: 31–33). 75  Mendelsohn (2020: 13). 76  Mendelsohn (2020: 20–21). 77  For Auerbach’s opening sentence “Readers of the Odyssey will remember the well prepared and touching scene,” see {000}. 71 72

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survivors had had in finding the right narrative mode for telling their stories, and he now understands that this narrative problem is the same he himself had had when thinking about how to tie together the story of his father’s last year and death in An Odyssey: ring composition, he writes, has “been difficult for me to avoid since the period some fifteen years ago in which I was researching my book about the Holocaust, during which time, I well recall, one of the survivors whom I was interviewing shook his head in frustration over his inability to adequately convey to me the ‘feeling,’ as he put it, of being the object of German persecution.”78 Auerbach’s articulation of ring composition, and his contrast of Homeric style and biblical style in “Odysseus’ Scar,” then, serves as a template for writing about the traumas of the Holocaust and, subsequently, the trauma of his own father’s death in the twenty-first century. In both cases, Auerbach’s reading of the Odyssey in “Odysseus’ Scar” had provided the model, just as he understood Auerbach hoped it would.79 For Cixous, Homeric style was inadequate for narrating her postmemory scars; as the daughter of a survivor and a kind of survivor herself and as an intellectual leader in deconstruction and psychoanalytic approaches to literature, she relied heavily on the kind of narration that Auerbach attributed to the Bible: opaque, fraught with background, and full of unknowable interiority. Mendelsohn acknowledges what he calls “Auerbach’s distrust of the Greek technique,” connecting, like Auerbach, the difficulty of realistic representation with the Holocaust; ring composition, he writes, raises a larger question about the problems of representation in literature, about the means by which writers make their subjects seem ‘realistic.’ Naturally this question has plagued all kinds of artists as they have struggled with difficult subjects, one of the greatest and most difficult of these being, in our own time, the event that landed Auerbach in Istanbul: the German plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe during World War II.80

 Mendelsohn (2020: 47).  Though this is perhaps a misprision on Mendelsohn’s part; as Porter has argued, “while the majority of scholars today read Auerbach as an exponent of Homeric classicism,” a category into which Mendelsohn would fall here, “The superiority of the Bible to Homer in ‘Odysseus’ Scar’ is clear in every respect, as is Homer’s alignment with the characteristics of Nazi propaganda and falsehood (legend, surface, and simplicity)” (2010a: 241). 80  Mendelsohn (2020: 86). 78 79

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Nevertheless, Mendelsohn does not reject the Homeric mode of narration: “it is hard for me to give up my confidence in the Greek way—in the perhaps superstitious belief that behind the apparent fragmentation and chaos of the world (and what better example of that than the history of classical scholarship?) it is possible to perceive a shape; perhaps even a plan.”81 Mendelsohn’s ambivalence, between fragmentation and shape, between chaos and a plan, places him within the wartime and postwar crisis of Enlightenment and critique of reason, one that was also at the center of Jewish writing about Homer and the Holocaust. This tension plays out in An Odyssey between Mendelsohn and his father, Jay. Jay “was trained as a mathematician,” and his Apollonian sensibility, contrasted with that of his son, provides the oedipal tension between them.82 Daniel, the Dionysian, “[had] always been made nervous by arithmetic and geometries and quadratics, unforgiving systems that allow for no shading or an embellishments, no evasions or lies, I have always had an aversion to math.”83 Unlike his father, the mathematician and engineer, Daniel is wary of such claims. Indeed, the epistemological debate continues; since Daniel had failed calculus, “my father would occasionally remark that it was too bad, because it’s impossible to see the world clearly if you don’t know calculus,” to which Daniel “would invariably reply by saying you couldn’t really see the world clearly without having read the Aeneid in Latin.”84 This theme is illustrated by an anecdote about Daniel and his father’s trip to visit the University of Virginia. His father tries to convince him to attend: “Look at the architecture, everything you love—classical, Tuscan, Doric, that’s what he wanted it to be about! The Age of Reason!”85 Daniel’s father still adheres to an Enlightenment worldview, one in which reason is the defining aspect of humanity and the best way for objectively understanding the outside world.86 Daniel, by contrast, a member of the postgeneration, is  Mendelsohn (2020: 42–43).  Mendelsohn (2017: 16). 83  Mendelsohn (2017: 16). 84  Mendelsohn (2017: 27–28). 85  Mendelsohn (2017: 113). 86  And his mother too; Mendelsohn recalls that “we’d come home from school in the afternoon and on the kitchen table there’d be a single rose in a bud vase or a carefully halved orange or green pepper, and she’d gather us around and say, Children, look how wonderful nature is, see how the petals, the sections, the seedpods, are perfectly geometric?” (2017: 77). 81 82

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skeptical of such claims: “But the truth was that the brick-and-stucco neoclassical pavilions, grouped around a central building inspired by the Pantheon on Rome, left me cold.”87 The debate between unity and fragmentation, between reason and emotion that animated Dalí’s critique of Ingres or Broch’s critique of the Mycenaean art finds similar expression in the differing attitudes of father and son, the one born before the War, the other born after. This generational difference is played out in the classroom as well. The discussion turns to the frequency with which Odysseus cries. Jay objects to this, saying, “Well, I was in the army, and I knew some guys who were real heroes. And I can tell you, nobody cried,” Mendelsohn takes the opportunity to contrast the Iliad and the Odyssey. “One of the Odyssey’s agendas,” he tells his students, is to redefine what a hero is.”88 Heroes in the Iliad may not cry, but the Odyssey is a story of suffering, of grief, and so they do. Mendelsohn tells the class: “But the Odyssey, I went on, is a poem about a postwar world. It’s set in the aftermath of war, and one of the things it explores is what a hero might look like once there are no more wars to fight. Achilles is renowned for his physical prowess, his speed and strength. Odysseus, although he’s a distinguished warrior, is renowned above all for his stratagems, his intellectual brilliance. Achilles dies, Odysseus survives. One question posed by the Odyssey is, What might a heroism of survival look like?”89 Without saying so, Mendelsohn ties the Odyssey with the central concerns of the wartime scholars who are his intellectual ancestors, a post-Enlightenment, postwar postgeneration for whom the Odyssey is a narrative of grief, of finding new ways to find meaning in a world after catacylsmic war.90  Mendelsohn (2017: 113).  Mendelsohn (2017: 121). 89  121. 90  Mendelsohn makes the same claim for the Aeneid, when he recounts in his New Yorker essay “Epic Fail: Reading the Aeneid in the Twenty-First Century” from 2018 how “one day fifteen years ago […] I finally began to understand the Aeneid. At the time, I was working on a book about the Holocaust, and had spent several years interviewing the few remaining survivors of a small Polish town whose Jewish population had been obliterated by what you could legitimately call an exercise of imperium. […] Months later it occurred to me that the difficulties we have with Aeneas and his epic cease to be difficulties once you think of him not as a hero but as a type we’re all too familiar with: a survivor, a person so fractured by the horrors of the past that he can hold himself together only by an unnatural effort of will. It would be hard to think of a more modern figure” (Mendelsohn 2019: 118). Mendelsohn’s Aeneas, like his Odysseus, is the ancient prototype of the Holocaust survivor. 87 88

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In this, Mendelsohn, like Cixous, associates the events of the epics with his parents’ generation. Cixous and Mendelsohn also embody the legacy of the generational turn in Jewish Homeric writing that happened during the War, a turn grounded in disability, woundedness, grief, and death. Within the context of their works, then, Mendelsohn and Cixous both create deeply personal odysseys that are both inheritors of the Jewish tradition of wartime and postwar writing on Homer that links the Homeric epics and the Holocaust but also point to a future Jewish philology that maintains the same themes. No longer on the grand scale of Homer, both Cixous and Mendelsohn reframe their epics on the intimate scale of parent-­child relationships. At the same time, however, these texts, through their exploration of the wounded, decaying, and dying bodies of their parents, also summon the greatest scar in modern Jewish history, one from which narratives keep issuing but which is at ever greater risk of falling silent with every passing generation. This fear of the silent wound, of the wound falling silent, of not talking about the Holocaust as a precursor to forgetting the Holocaust, is one of the animating themes of global Jewish life since World War II. The great fear of Holocaust survivors like Primo Levi was that their experience—narratives spoken from the wound—would not be believed, and the great concern of writers like Erich Auerbach was to articulate a poetics of woundedness that would ensure that experiences of the Holocaust could be represented in a realistic and believable way. In their own lifetimes, they succeeded: few in the global mainstream doubt the reality of If This Is a Man or, more generally, of the reality of the Holocaust. History and memory, however, are ephemeral, and if being believed was the goal of the Holocaust generation, ensuring the persistence of Holocaust memory across time, generations, and the pressures of cultural forgetfulness and erasure is the complementary goal of postwar Jewish writers. As postgeneration memoirists, Cixous and Mendelsohn thus continually perform their familial archaeologies to find and preserve those parts of their individual and communal pasts that have not yet been brought to light or have been forgotten. In this way, their work is the logical successor of the wartime generation of Bespaloff, Adorno, Arendt, and the other authors discussed in this book. Jewish writers during World War II fundamentally revised Enlightenment humanist readings that centered on the glories of war and the imperial triumphalism of colonial conquest, instead

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foregrounding those characters whose experiences in the Homeric epics mirrored their own during World War II: slaves, refugees, exiles, widows, orphans, casualties of war, and others whose lives took on new forms of precarity. In the overlapping but distinct ways by which Mendelsohn, Cixous, and other postwar Jewish writers continue this tradition, they also ensure the continuation of a hermeneutics of Homeric interpretation that resists the fleeting glories of war in favor of its persistent griefs. In this way, Homer, the author of the first work about a Holocaust, can be made to prevent the recurrence of another one.



Appendix 1: Jean Wahl’s Preface to the First French Edition of Rachel Bespaloff’s On the Iliad (1942)

Rachel Bespaloff offers us an occasion to meditate on the great figures of the Iliad. In these trying times, it is natural that the thought of the West turns toward its origins, Hellenism and Judaism, and that one reflects on their oppositions and unions. The Homeric world: this is the world of force. It is undoubtedly not a coincidence, and it is not an error, that the Heracliteans claim to be descended from Homer. Combat is the father of all things. But in its duality, Combat is itself undoubtedly the son of Dynamis [Power], of eternal Physis [Nature]. These forces are opposed; these antagonistic energies are the products of the same force. For Heraclitus, there is a reason that dominates these combats, a unique logos [reason], a single spoken word beneath all the contradictory ones. Hector and Achilles—Hector, the force that preserves, the force that has so much to lose, and Achilles, the force that destroys and destroys itself and loves to lose itself in a melancholy furor— have a solidarity, one with the other. Force is antinomic not only in its manifestations but in its ambiguous essence. There is a beauty in war, in force, and a bad necessity in its beauty, a bad necessity from its beauty, as good as the beauty of Helen. There is a fatality in force and Greek wisdom when she says: “nothing in excess,” the expression acknowledging that “enough” is never enough when it’s about beauty and force. Here, there are neither good absolutes nor terrible absolutes. And force itself escapes such qualifications. There is © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Goldwyn, Homer, Humanism, Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11473-1

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neither condemnation nor absolution of force. Beyond all such qualifications, it is. Life is. “Virile love, a virile horror of war”: The heroes of Homer are neither belligerents nor pacifists. They are violence itself and those who suffer from violence. In the world of Homer as in that of Plato, one can only impose or endure injustice. Achilles’ choice is not that of Socrates. But each knows well the terms between which he must choose. “Nothing is terrible in life because everything is terrible.” There is in this a bitterness that finishes in sweetness, whereas sweetness usually finishes in bitterness.1 Shall we say, with Rachel Bespaloff, that there is in Homer a guilt in becoming? Must we not return to Nietzschean thought: there is an innocence in becoming? Both cruel and devastating, becoming is innocent. As opposed to Nietzsche, Rachel Bespaloff holds that Homer, rather than the poet of triumphs and apotheoses, is the poet of misfortune, the poet who speaks the beauty of deaths in war, the glory of sacrificing heroes, of “all that, vanquished by fate, defies it again and overcomes.” However, “through the suffering of excess, an equilibrium is found.” Deep forces renew themselves. Force is eternal; forces are precarious. We are very far from the world of Descartes, with his creative construction, undoubtedly very far also from the world of Creative Evolution. We are in a world of creative destruction and of constructive destruction. Achilles and Hector are one: in Zeus’s indifferent gaze, in Priam’s sorrowful gaze, in Homer’s gaze. They are one before these three

1  Emile Novis (a pseudonym of Simone Weil) in his commentary on the Iliad which appeared in Cahiers du Sud in 1940-41, said the opposite: “It is because of this that the Iliad is a unique thing, for this bitterness which precedes from tenderness… The tone never ceases to be pregnant with bitterness.” We note the agreement of this remarkable comment with the pages of Rachel Bespaloff: “Conqueror and conquered are equally close, are the likeness of the poet, and the listener.” And again: “The sentiment of human misery is a condition of just and of love.” A description of “excess without excess”, says Rachel Bespaloff, “an exact expression of misfortune,” says Simone Weil. “Sorrowful love” for that which is menaced by force, says Simone Weil; “tenderness for perishable things,” says Rachel Bespaloff. But it is for Simone Weil an absolute condemnation of force, while for Rachel Bespaloff, force is an absolute, an absolute movement which condemns itself rather than being condemned. From oppressed Europe is raised the voices of these two Homeridae, in this moment; both those leaving the Old World had wanted to see one of the two greatest books; and each turned their thoughts at the same time to the other Book, which is completes it.

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133

contemplators, the playful god, the tragic old man, the aged singer. They are one for these three philosophers. It is always necessary, according to the disciples of Aristotle, that one have a philosophy for contemplating the world. In one sense, the gaze of Zeus, the gaze of Priam, the gaze of Homer, are the justification for all these battles. Or rather no, there is no justification. There is only the making eternal, preservation by thought. The penetration of Priam’s gaze preserves everything and increases the treasure of the race of Hector. Compassion knows. This is, says Rachel Bespaloff, one of the moments which overflows all words. Achilles is no more. Priam is no more. There is nothing more than these gazes which make nothing more than a gaze and which make themselves one with the life of all, life united in life. Therefore, men know their equality in their misfortune, in their misfortune both merited and unmerited. The order of action is dissolved in the order of contemplation, which is not the platonic order of the spirit, not the Pascalian order of the heart, but the order, which we call Tolstoyan, or Hegelian or Nietzschean, of life. The Greeks, Nietzsche said, live in a somber world. But in this obscurity, they see surging the flowers of light. Youth is a flower. Pleasure is a flower. Thought is a light. Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, after Homer, were conscious of the soil of becoming and the flowering of forms. Plato lived without doubt, and more and more, this experience, the forms live more and more as “essences becoming,” as products of “generation towards being.” Homer is a poet of the individual. These are the forms, sharp and defined—Hector, Achilles, Helen—that he places beneath destiny and, by his art, above it. “That emerges from Becoming for a single instant and forever.”2 And he is the pet of these moments, monumental moments, monuments, momentous, that are the highest instants of the individual. But man is not separate from nature. The Scamander is a god, and the gods are men (sometimes a bit less, sometimes a bit more, than men), and men are among the forces of nature. Thus, to play this immense game among these things, men and gods whom each pass among the other. And man is not separate from “the multitude of tender and sweet things.” Homer restores everything to its golden fulness. The hero, Rachel Bespaloff tells us, has an infinite tenderness before these perishable things, 2

 Bespaloff (2005: 95–96)

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before everything that transforms in the presence of death. The gods lack this finitude that man achieves, that is to say, at the same time that he destroys it he perfects it. Kierkegaard opposed aesthetics and ethics; Nietzsche, for whom the aesthetic is the only true ethics, opposed the Dionysian and the Apollonian; Shestov opposed Hellenism, whether Dionysian or Apollonian, with something else, which he called Jerusalem. But the most profound Zion, Rachel Bespaloff saw as in union with the Greek spirit, as she saw in Homer the union of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, the union of the aesthetic and the ethical. There, where her masters were divided, she learned from them, and from Tolstoy, to reconcile and to unify. For to recall the title of her book published on the eve of the war, Pathways and Crossroads, she had followed the path to where there are no more crossroads.

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Index1

A Achilles, 12, 13, 14n55, 52, 56, 59–64, 61n74, 67–69, 102, 116–118, 127, 131–133 Adorno, Theodor, 7–9, 18–22, 19n74, 25–47, 49–55, 60, 72, 74, 77–79, 82, 106, 110, 128 Aeneid, 5n11, 48–50, 49n15, 49n16, 126, 127n90 Améry, Jean, 7, 8, 99–102, 100n103 Antisemitism, 19, 35 Apotheosis of Homer, 1–3, 23, 26, 75, 75n14 Archelaus of Priene, 1 Arendt, Hannah, 5–7, 5n12, 9, 11, 18, 21, 22, 25–44, 46, 47, 47n4, 48n9, 50, 52–55, 54n42, 55n45, 72, 79, 107, 110, 128 Auerbach, Erich, 7–9, 18, 21, 22, 71–104, 110, 111, 114–122

Auschwitz, 3, 7, 8, 8n24, 10, 16, 18, 20, 21, 26, 50, 60, 82, 85, 91–104, 106n5 B Benjamin, Walter, 8, 8n22, 110 Bespaloff, Rachel, 4, 4n9, 7–9, 12n49, 21, 23, 45–69, 72, 74, 78, 79, 104, 107, 110, 117, 122, 128, 131–134 Broch, Hermann, 3–5, 5n11, 7, 8, 18, 21, 45–69, 72, 110, 127 Buber, Martin, 74, 75 C Cassirer, Ernst, 7, 18, 19 Charles X, King of France, 1, 3, 4 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 14n55

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Goldwyn, Homer, Humanism, Holocaust, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11473-1

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INDEX

Circe, 19 Cixous, Ève, 117–120, 119n50, 122n65 Cixous, Hélène, 22, 85n48, 105–129 Clay, Jenny Strauss, 110–112, 112n26, 124 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 9n26, 84 D Dachau, 100 Dalí, Salvador, 2–4, 23, 25, 26, 50, 75, 75n14, 127 Dante, 2, 21, 92, 92n75, 93, 95, 97, 100 De Man, Paul, 80, 81, 81n32 Dreyfus affair, 17 E Écriture feminine, 116, 120, 122 Eichmann, Adolf, 21, 37–44 Enlightenment, 3, 5–8, 11, 12, 20, 25–45, 49n16, 50, 52, 53, 57, 58, 67, 72, 79, 82, 101, 126, 128 Eurykleia, 31, 76, 77, 87 F Finley, M.I., 18, 18n69 Frankl, Viktor, 99 Fromm, Eric, 7 G Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 2 H Habermas, Jürgen, 27, 31, 32n31 Hartman, Geoffrey, 9, 21, 71–104, 107, 107n7, 111, 114, 114n31

Hector, 14n55, 51, 55–57, 59–61, 63–65, 131–133 Hegel, Georg, 33, 72, 77, 78n22 Helen, 63–66, 131, 133 Herodotus, 2, 22 Hirsch, Marianne, 107, 108, 111, 112 Hitler, Adolf, 5, 12, 20, 52, 53, 83, 96, 115, 120 Hobsbawm, Eric, 7 Holocaust, 3, 4, 8–11, 14–17, 14n55, 17n66, 19–22, 27, 29, 39, 40n67, 42–44, 46n1, 66, 71–129 Homer, 1–23, 26, 31, 32, 36, 42–44, 50–52, 55, 56, 58n61, 59, 63–66, 68, 71–104, 109–113, 113n27, 115, 117, 119n50, 119n53, 122, 122n65, 124, 125n79, 126, 128, 129, 131–134 Horkheimer, Max, 7, 8, 19, 19n74, 20, 25–27, 26n2, 27n10, 27n11, 28n13, 29n19, 31, 31n29, 33, 35, 35n47, 36, 47, 50, 74, 79 I Iliad, 2, 4n8, 8n22, 11–13, 14n55, 18, 23, 42, 51, 52, 54, 63, 78, 102, 105–129 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 1–3, 2n1, 26, 127 K Kafka, Franz, 52–54 Kant, Immanuel, 42, 44 Kierkegaard, Soren, 57, 58, 60, 134

 INDEX 

149

L Lessing, Ephraim, 5, 6n13 Levi, Primo, 8, 8n24, 9, 9n27, 21, 77n18, 82, 85, 85n48, 86, 91–104, 107, 118, 128 Louvre, 1 Lycaon, 61

P Penelope, 31, 31n29, 43, 44, 74n9, 78n22, 94 Phaethon, 2, 3 Postgeneration, 108, 111, 126–128 Postmemory, 105–129 Poussin, Nicolas, 2 Priam, 14n55, 67–69, 132, 133

M Maimonides, 99 Marcuse, Herbert, 7 Mendelsohn, Daniel, 22, 77n18, 88n61, 105–129 Mendelsohn, Jay, 126, 127 Mendelssohn, Moses, 5 Michelangelo, 2 Molière, 2 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 9–11, 10n34, 10n35, 14–17, 83n41 Mozart, Wolfgang, 2

R Racine, Jean, 2

N Nietzsche, Friedrich, 23, 56, 58, 58n61, 62, 63, 63n81, 65, 72, 132–134 O Odysseus, 19, 21, 22, 25–44, 52, 60, 71–104, 101n106, 111, 113, 114, 118–120, 119n50, 124, 125, 125n79, 127, 127n90 Odyssey, 2, 13, 18, 20, 23, 26, 30, 31, 34, 35, 44, 49, 74, 75n13, 76–78, 77n18, 81, 82, 84, 87, 92, 93n78, 97, 102, 105–129

S Said, Edward, 84n44, 102 Sappho, 2 Scamander, 117, 118, 133 Shestov, Lev, 56–58, 60, 67, 134 Spitzer, Leo, 8, 9, 84 Steiner, George, 4, 5n11, 7, 11–14, 14n55, 16, 18, 22, 27, 47, 105–108, 110, 116 Strauss, Leo, 110, 112, 112n26 T Tasso, Torquato, 73, 92n75 Thetis, 63–66 Tolstoy, Leo, 14, 52, 64, 66, 67, 134 Torah, 13 U Ulysses, see Odysseus V Vergil, 2, 47–50, 49n15, 49n16, 92n75 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 15–17, 16n60, 16n61, 17n66, 110

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INDEX

W Wahl, Jean, 4, 4n9, 55, 55n45, 56, 131–134 Weil, Simone, 4n8, 8, 14n55, 56, 63 Wiesel, Elie, 8n24, 82, 103, 104, 107 Wilamowitz, 36, 37, 82, 83, 83n41

Z Zeitlin, Froma, 110, 111, 123 Zeus, 65, 132, 133 Zweig, Stefan, 8, 8n22