by Tony Judt
Sperber’s memoirs, which were published in German in the 1970s and have now appeared in English, have little to say about all that.3 They take us from his birth in Austrian Galicia in 1905 to the end of World War II and his decision to settle in Paris, where he stayed until his death in 1984. Even for the period they cover, the memoirs are sketchy and selective. Sperber was an enthusiastic practitioner of Adlerian psychology between the wars, and wrote two books about its founder; but we learn little of this, and nothing at all of his reasons for breaking with Adler and his ideas. This is a pity, since Sperber was deeply and permanently influenced by Adler’s categories: His book is full of sometimes heavy-handed psychological “insights,” describing men whose lives were framed by a commitment to Communism as “suffering from the superpersonal reference compulsion,” digressing into a clinical consideration upon “disactualized memory,” and so on. Sperber even admits to some community of ideas with Wilhelm Reich (another Galician Jew who went to Berlin by way of Vienna); and he concedes that the rabbinical emphasis upon interpretation makes psychology a Jewish science par excellence.
The memoirs suffer a little, too, from Sperber’s need to write them from memory. His early life, as we shall see, hardly lent itself to the peaceful accumulation of a private archive. Sometimes, when at a loss, he recycles material from his novel as though it were a primary source— quoting Doino Faber, his fictional alter ego, as evidence for a contemporary event or attitude. But none of this matters once he gets down to his story, a narrative of the first half of his life told as a tale of five cities.
The first of those cities was Zablotow, an undistinguished shtetl in Galicia on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Here Sperber, raised among impoverished luftmenschen who had no visible means of support and lived for the coming of the Messiah, learned to be a Jew. Not only did he study Hebrew and Jewish texts, but he imbibed also the historical essence of Jewish identity, becoming aware of Christian hostility by the time he was four, partaking in and observing the rituals of remembrance and celebration that conflated past and present, distance and proximity. He learned the word Yerushalayim, or Jerusalem, before being told the name of his own village; and “I knew the name of Captain Dreyfus before I knew my own.” The pogrom in Kishinev in 1903 and the pogrom in Blois in 1171 formed, from his earliest days, an undifferentiated element in his own sense of identity and vulnerability. A good student, Sperber was expected by his learned father and grandfather to follow in their ways.
World War I tore up Sperber’s world—quite literally, since the Austrian-Russian battles took place in the region of Zablotow—and deposited him, a solitary, frightened adolescent, already rootless, in Vienna. He stayed in Vienna for nine years, forging the love-hate relationship with the place that was so common in his generation. It was during this time that Sperber lost his faith, though not his sense of identity. Like many Jewish adolescents, then and since, he turned for a while to a radical left-wing Zionist movement, Hashomer Hatzair, or the Young Guard, as a sort of halfway house between Judaism and assimilation. In the process, he acquired that curious anticonventional moral fervor borrowed by some of the Zionist youth movements from the pre-1914 German Wandervogel clubs: from the echoes of which, Sperber says, he never rid himself completely.
It was in Vienna that he discovered and embraced Alfred Adler and his ideas, but in other ways the Vienna years were for Sperber a time of frustration, a period of “antitheses,” when he was caught between faith and skepticism, community and individual, bond and fracture. Like others, he blamed Vienna for these dilemmas, though he confesses to having embraced the place all the more with each disappointment. In contrast to the novelist Joseph Roth, another Galician Jew, Sperber kept his distance from Austria, the reality and the myth. Roth went further in his search for assimilation, attributing to the defunct monarchy a supercosmopolitanism that would compensate for his own and others’ lost Jewishness, making of Austria-Hungary a place for people without a place. As Roth would observe in The Emperor’s Tomb, the true Austria was not the Austro-Germans in Graz or Salzburg; it was the Slavs, the Muslims, and the Jews at the imperial peripheries: Only they bore true allegiance to the crown. And he was right. For the shtetl Jews especially, as Sperber notes, the Emperor Franz Josef I meant more than he did for anyone else. He was the guarantor of their civil rights, their only shield against the coming of hatred and despotism. As Sperber’s own father lamented in 1916, upon hearing of the old emperor’s death, “Austria has died with him. He was a good emperor for us. Now everything will be uncertain! It is a great misfortune for us Jews.” It was.
Sperber’s solution to Roth’s dilemma was not to reinvent Vienna, but to leave it. In 1927 he went to Berlin, where he became a member of the German Communist Party. This was characteristic of many Eastern European Jewish radicals, who joined the party in the 1920s and left it in disgust a few years later (in contrast to Western European intellectuals, Jewish and non-Jewish, who joined later but stayed through the mid- 1950s and beyond). Sperber did not so much abandon radical Zionism as transpose its goals. He overcame his feeling of failure at not joining the pioneers in Palestine by reasoning that the fate of Jews would be decided by the coming victory of socialism.
His descriptions of the years between his arrival in Berlin and the rise of Hitler are among the best in his memoirs, full of acute observation of the Communist world and powerful first-person accounts of encounters with Nazis. Like Arthur Koestler, Hans Sahl, and other contemporaries, Sperber was immunized against later ideological illusion by firsthand experience of the disastrous mistakes of the German Communists in the face of Nazism—although he also claims that observation of courageous German working-class demonstrators in January 1933, misled and then abandoned by their party leaders, kept him committed to the cause of working people for the rest of his life, despite the glaring unreality of Communist paeans to proletarian strength and unity.
In 1933, at twenty-eight already politically experienced and ideologically disabused, Sperber nearly took his insights with him to the grave. He was arrested and interrogated by the SS during a sweep in March and spent some weeks in prison, a Jewish Communist awaiting either death or transfer to a camp. For reasons that he was unable to explain, he was instead released back into the streets of Berlin, whence he immediately escaped, after some adventures, to Paris. Here, as in Vienna and Berlin, he settled in and made a life for himself. Reflecting on his relationship to all these cities, he asks, “Am I not like a fatherless child who says ‘Papa’ to every friendly man?”
His main contacts in Paris, a city full of émigrés and refugees from Nazism, were still the German-speaking Communists and ex-Communists. He would not formally leave the party until 1937, and much of the third volume of his memoirs is taken up with asking why he waited so long. “No man in his right mind,” after all, could believe the Moscow Trials. According to Sperber, his doubts about the Radiant Future had begun as early as 1931, after a revealing journey to Moscow and subsequent insights into the daily life of “Socialist Man.” His answer to his question is familiarly jesuitical (talmudic?). He felt entitled to remain silent, not for the sake of opportunism, but “if my contradiction was bound to be useless.” Moreover, he did not want to know uncomfortable things, and thus managed to avoid them as long as possible: “I certainly did not want to be burdened with useless secrets, but beyond this I shrank from knowledge that would cause me both political and emotional difficulties.”
In the thirties mood of anti-Fascist unity this was enough to keep Sperber at odds with his own instincts for much of the decade. In his own memoirs, Hans Sahl, another German-speaking Jewish émigré, remembers Sperber, a little unflatteringly, as a man who at the time did not hesitate to “politically neutralize” critics of Stalin even among his own friends. The truth is probably that Sperber, like many others, was halfway out of Communism when the rise of Hitler stopped him in his path, trapping him between his loathing for Nazism and his disillusion with Communism
and pushing him into a silence that only a few (Arthur Koestler and Boris Souvarine were among them) had the moral courage to break.
In other respects, though, the early Paris years brought some relief. “The radical indifference of Parisians, and their decided disinclination to be drawn into the lives of foreigners or let such persons into their lives guarantees every individual a personal freedom that is hardly known elsewhere.” By 1939, Sperber was ready to be alone, even lonely. His joining years were behind him, and his various identities had all been sloughed off. Psychology was set aside for a life of writing. With the outbreak of war, however, the French ceased to be indifferent to the foreigners in their midst (if they ever really were), and Sperber’s progress out of his past was stopped dead in its tracks.
The fifth town in Sperber’s European odyssey is one he never visited. By good fortune, he avoided falling into the hands of the Vichy police and so, unlike the majority of Central European Jewish refugees caught in France after the German victory, he was not interned for later dispatch to Auschwitz. But Auschwitz is the key to the rest of his life. It sets the tone for his recollection in tranquillity of all that went before.
Sperber divides human history into what came before the Shoah and what remains. Before 1933, and in some ways even until 1943 (when he first learned of the death camps), he had shared some of the illusions of his Marxist contemporaries: “Like almost all leftists, I was led astray by my belief that no matter what the Nazis professed and whatever promises they made as social demagogues, they would never act against the interests of capitalism and question its principle of the inviolability of private property.” What the Nazis (and their collaborators in the Ukraine and in Croatia especially) subsequently did to Jews, “to my people,” haunted him evermore, casting a film of pain across his memory.
When he returned to Germany and to Vienna after the war, nothing remained. It was as though all the links in the chain of his life had been snapped. The significance of this realization, for the reader of these memoirs, is considerable. The memoirs themselves do not directly discuss the impact of Auschwitz, which is the theme of a number of postwar essays by Sperber collected in a volume called Être Juif. But if one reads Sperber’s “recovered” awareness of Jewishness back into his story of the years 1905-46, the narrative acquires a forceful new dimension. In what looks like just another twentieth-century European life, we find a distinctively Jewish story.
That story is told in a variety of keys. In the first place, Sperber’s various institutional and ideological affiliations and defections conflate into a single, repeated experience: his loss of certainty at the moment of breaking with the religion of his forefathers. Thenceforth he is constantly tempted by “knowledge,” only to shrink away from it, wary of its illusory quality, skeptical about its philosophical and historical adequacy. And always his father and grandfather are there at his shoulder—a reminder that if you must believe in just one truth, then let it be the first. There is an image somewhere in his novel of a rabbi’s son hiding Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind inside a Hebrew Bible. It is an image that accounts for Sperber’s own trajectory at more than one level.
As with the loss of faith, so with the decision to “engage.” Sperber makes the point that secularized Jews readily transfer the religious imperative to make a better world—and the belief that this can be done, and therefore must be done—into some form of secular millenarianism. This is a rather familiar idea. But his more telling observation derives from his gloss on a comment made by Karl Kraus, that Jews in Western and Central Europe had, “in their unsuccessful flight from their Jewishness, sought a refuge in self-hatred.” Sperber seems to have believed that whereas Western European Jews not only threw themselves into the secular fray as a substitute for faith, but also set aside the internal Jewish constraints upon extremism—the distaste for the inauthentic, the obsession with justice, and so forth—it was his Eastern European Jewish roots that provided him with the anchor that kept him from drifting into revolutionary amoralism, opportunism, and the like. This is hardly a testable proposition. Indeed, one could just as well reverse the theme, and understand Sperber’s failure to criticize Stalin publicly as an echo of his ancestors’ refusal to transgress their own taboos. What matters, however, is that this is how Sperber came to see the dilemmas of engagement and duty. We are very far from Sartre.
Sperber’s emphasis upon specifically Jewish forms of engagement casts light upon another recurring theme in his writings, the theme of messianism. Sperber asks, “Why should a very young Jew from the Eastern Galician shtetl Zablotow have concerned himself with the struggle of the German proletariat?” Why, indeed. Well, like Leninism, Judaism has its intuitively absurd side: If it seems odd to claim that a tiny political faction in Russia had the authority of history to speak for the workers of the world, how much odder to suppose that a universal God should have attached himself for eternity to one tiny itinerant people. The only thing that could possibly satisfy both claims was vindication in the future: world revolution in the one case, the coming of the Messiah in the other.
Sperber remarks upon this similarity, and admits that when he turned away from Judaism to Hegel and Marx, “I knew myself to be in the lineageof my messianic great-grandfather.” But he goes further. There is also a difference between these worldviews, and the difference is this: The messiah of his great-grandfather did not come (and therefore, one might add, was real); but Sperber’s messiah came, and proved false. In later essays Sperber wrote about Sabbatai Zevi, the false messiah of the seventeenth century, and his misguided Jewish followers. This, surely, was no casual interest. Sperber and his fellow Communists, whether they knew it or not, sat squarely in a tradition of Jewish error. They were benighted adherents to false idols and mistaken messiahs, wanderers from the path of truth. In the end, he suggests, it is wiser to abandon all heartwarming certainties in favor of a lonely skepticism.
The pain of Auschwitz, for Sperber, had an extra sharpness owing to his relation to things German, especially the German language. American, British, French, Russian, and Sephardic Jews cannot enter into this pain—which Sperber shared with Walter Benjamin, Stefan Zweig, Paul Celan, Hannah Arendt, and many others—because the love of German language and literature was a peculiarity of assimilated or near-assimilated Central European Jews. What Sperber says of his own refusal to see all the way into Nazism, before and after Hitler’s seizure of power, is true of many others: “I was resisting a break with Germany.” Once the damage was done, however, these same German-speaking Jews had, for this very reason, a special understanding of the true havoc wreaked by Hitler—a deeper understanding, indeed, than many Germans themselves.
But Sperber, unlike Arendt or Zweig, was also a shtetl Jew from Galicia. Thus he lived in many languages, growing up amid Hebrew, Yiddish, German, Polish, and Ukrainian. He is insistent that the Jews of Eastern Europe, in contrast with their Western cousins, never lived in ghettos. They lived in towns of their own; they were not homeless, but rooted in an authentic autonomous culture of their own. Living athwart the frontier of Eastern European and Central European Jewry, Sperber understood the cosmopolitan centrality of Germanness but also the power—familial, linguistic, ceremonial—of an original, local culture. Writ larger, this meant that Sperber was in an unusually good position to understand the Europe of our time, past and present.
Whatever insights Jewishness affords into recent history, however, Jews were always marginal to that history. The specific forms of Jewish marginality—prejudice, exile, persecution—fit Jews well enough for twentieth-century life, just as the twentieth century could be made to fit all too easily into the shape of Jewish memory. As Sperber observes, he was taught to think of Egypt, Babylon, the Diaspora, the Crusades, the expulsion from Spain, and the pogroms of the seventeenth-century Ukraine as a single moment in time, or rather out of time, a simultaneity of suffering which it was incumbent upon Jews to remember. When he left Zablotow, he thought to leave all that: “If Jewish sht
etls still existed today they would belong, for me, only to a remote past.” Owing to Hitler, however, Zablotow is joined to the present and to the past, and bound to the roll of horrors by Sperber’s reawakened duty to bear witness.
It is this belated return to an abandoned ancestral duty—to the obligation to remember, drilled into him in early childhood in three languages: Gedenk! Errinere dich! Tizkor!—that drives Sperber, shapes his memoirs, justifies them; and it is this same particularism that lifts his memoirs, paradoxically, beyond their Jewish frame of reference. Sperber’s achievement was partly the fulfillment of a personal responsibility “we are become the walking cemeteries of our murdered friends”—but it was something more general, too. Like Koestler, Zweig, and so many others, Sperber put his best work into his memoirs, offering testimony to a lost world: “I must speak of it as though I am the last to have known it. And in effect I am one of the last, one of the walking coffins of an exterminated world.” The extermination of the past—by design, by neglect, by good intention—is what characterizes the history of our time. That is why the ahistorical memory of a marginal community that found itself in the whirlwind may yet be the best guide to our era. You don’t have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the twentieth century, but it helps.
