Peter Szondi in Jerusalem

Thomas Sparr

On January 24, 1968, Peter Szondi arrived in Israel on a Swiss Air flight from Zurich. Tuvia Shlonsky, very likely together with Gershom Scholem, picked him up at Lod Airport. He had been invited to teach for a trimester of the academic year 1967-68. The visit had been pre- pared well in advance. We know what he taught and we know where he lived in Jerusalem. He was, as far as it is known, one of the first profes- sors from Post-War Germany officially invited to Israel. On that day in January 1968, Szondi entered a world that no longer exists except in memoirs, letters, books, oral witnesses: the town dis- trict Rechavia. Located in the center of Jerusalem, Rechavia was founded by Richard Kauffmann and Lotte Cohn in the early twenties. It is difficult to find descriptions of that lost world of German and Austrian Jews who emigrated during the thirties and forties. Rechavia was a German-Jewish colony, an academic colony. It was in this neighborhood that Szondi found a temporary home at Pension Wolff, next door to Gershom and Fania Scholem’s home on Abarbanel Street. It was just the right neighborhood, since it was Scholem himself who had encouraged him to come to Israel. It was Szondi’s first visit; a short one, yet involving a long process of reflection and deliberation. It is difficult to reconstruct his ten weeks in Israel, but it might be possible to show, in outline, a constellation of the times. The main obstacle in reconstructing the visit is Szondi himself. As far as we know, Szondi did not write any letters or other documents during his stay. His days were taken up with trips inside the country, invi- tations in the evenings, encounters. On his trips—for example, to the Dead Sea—Szondi took a lot of pictures. Hundreds of negatives are kept in the Szondi archive. It is a visual memory, not a written one. While the base of exploration is small, it is necessary to show at least some conditions, prevailing conditions that pertained to his visit to Jerusalem in 1968. At the time, Rechavia was a “geistige Lebensform,” an intellectual form of life, of behavior, thought and feeling. Most of the German- Austrian-Jewish intellectuals during the twenties and thirties, the time of the Fourth and Fifth Aliyah to Eretz Israel, settled in the same neighborhood. Werner Kraft, Lea Goldberg, Shmuel Hugo Bergman—all

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lived around Aza Street, Ben Maimon Avenue, Rechov Ibn Ezra, Us- sishkin or Rechov Radaq. Martin Buber lived in Talbieh. Shai Agnon, who had received the Nobel Prize for literature with Nelly Sachs just thirteen months prior to Szondi’s arrival, lived not far from there in Talpiot. Rechavia was a German quarter, with Bauhaus apartments containing libraries full of classical volumes, pianos, and paintings. Aaron Goldfinger evokes these sentiments in his recent film The Flat (2011). Szondi entered into a familiar world here. Rechavia was called the “oriental Grunewald” and in Berlin, Szondi lived in the original Grunewald. There are two outstanding literary works about the world of Rechavia: Shai Agnon’s Schira and Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness. In his novel, Agnon shows, with a lot of irony, the so-called Jeckes-Jerusalem of the 1930s, and Amos Oz describes it during the 1940s and early 1950s. Traces of that earlier world gone by were still present, vividly present, in 1968. Szondi left an agitated, restless West-Berlin in January 1968. Freie Universität was going through a period of student riots, demonstra- tions, and was discussing controversial concepts for a new, “Freie,” or “free” university. Szondi took part in these conflicts and argued for a reformed, more modern institution. In Jerusalem he joined Givat Ram, a small department in a—by way of comparison—rather quiet university. The Hebrew University was mainly founded by German-Jewish intellectuals like Gershom Scholem, Werner Senator, Jehuda Magnes, Ernst Simon. It was built on the An- glo-Saxon/American model, offering the Bachelor of Arts (BA), and Master of Arts (MA) degrees, divided into trimesters. The Comparative Literature department was small, limited to the master’s degree, and with a tiny staff. Tuvia Schlonsky was chairman and lectured on literary critique and on literary fiction. Ada Steinberg was also teaching there, as well as the late Heda Stein. Back then, the department at the He- brew University was called Comparative Literature; today it is known as the Department for General and Comparative Literature, like Szon- di’s institute in Berlin, founded in 1965. The students at that time were either born in Eretz Israel in the forties or had emigrated from Poland, Czechoslovakia or other East-European countries, and Germany. Rus- sian literature was a main subject within the department; but the French department also claimed a leading position within it. Lea Goldberg held the Department Chair. In Israel she was a well- known writer and translator from Russian into Hebrew (i.e. Tolstoy’s War and Peace), but in Germany, she was almost unknown. She was born in Königsberg in 1911 and grew up in Kovno. In the 1930s, she

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studied Semitic languages in Bonn. She came to Eretz Israel in 1935, worked for the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv, for the publishing house Sifriat Poalim, and for various newspapers. In 1954, shortly after the death of Ludwig Strauß, Goldberg became lecturer at the Hebrew Uni- versity. In 1963, she was elected head of the Department of Compara- tive Literature. She wrote to Peter Szondi in March 1967: Sehr verehrter Herr Professor, mein College (!) Professor Scholem hat mir (telephonisch) den mich betreffenden Teil Ihres Briefs vorgelesen. Haben Sie schönen Dank! Wir haben die Trimester Einteilung, und das zweite Trimester fällt gerade in die Zeit Ihrer Ferien. Das würde also ge- nau das Gewünschte sein, besonders da ich persönlich nächstes Jahr Ur- laub habe [“sabbatical year”] und bis Dezember in Europa bleibe. Wenn Sie im Januar kommen sollten, könnte ich Sie schon hier empfangen was mir sehr lieb wäre, obwohl ich in jeder anderen Hinsicht es fest vor- habe mich während meiner Ferien der Universität fernzuhalten, da ich ein Buch, an dem ich seit 10 Jahren arbeite, endlich fertig schreiben will.1 During his stay at the Hebrew University, Szondi gave a seminar on bourgeois tragedy in English and a lecture in French about the lyric drama of the Fin de Siècle. He taught in English and French, but not at all in German (which I am almost certain of, in spite of false claims by other sources). He quoted Hofmannsthal’s Der Tor und der Tod in the original, although German was not an officially accepted language in Israel at that time. Max Frisch gave the first public speech in German when he received the Jerusalem Prize in 1965. A department of Ger- man was founded ten years later, in 1978. Even today, German is still not a common language in the curriculum of Israeli high schools. Gershom Scholem was Peter Szondi’s host. He had met him in Oc- tober 1960. In November of that year he wrote to Ernst Schoen: By the way, I hear that a young Hungarian Jew who is now Swiss, whom I met six weeks ago in Zurich, plans to write his Habilitation/habilitation [“treatise”] in literary studies at Berlin’s Universität des Westens with a work or lecture on Walter Benjamin. His name is Peter Szondi, and he doesn’t seem unintelligent. But what irony! A Jew qualifies at a German university after Hitler with a work about someone who himself could not qualify himself with any work at a German university.2

1 Lea Goldberg to Peter Szondi, [n.l.] March 12, 1967, in: Nachlass Peter Szondi (Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach am Neckar, unpublished). 2 Scholem to Ernst Schoen, [Jerusalem] November 28, 1960, in: Gershom Scholem, Briefe, ed. by Itta Shedletzky and Thomas Sparr (München: Beck, 1995), 73.

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Indeed, Peter Szondi’s inaugural lecture for his Habilitation was “Die Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit bei Walter Benjamin.” In the following years, Scholem and Szondi met each summer in Sils Maria, Zurich, or Berlin. One of the main subjects in their correspondence was Walter Benjamin’s biography, the edition of his letters, the publication of his collected works, and the project of letting Benjamin immigrate to Jeru- salem in the late thirties. Benjamin did get a scholarship from the He- brew University, but as is well known, Benjamin never came to Jerusa- lem. Szondi’s time in Jerusalem is situated in a larger historical context, not only related to Walter Benjamin but to Szondi’s biography. A short letter written by Peter’s father, Leopold Szondi, dated 1968, is pre- served in the Scholem Archive at the National Library: Peter had always been a good Jew (“Peter war schon immer ein guter Jude”), coming to Jerusalem made him a better one. Peter Szondi had a great awareness of himself as a Hungarian Jew living in post-war Germany, though his work merely addresses Judaism or Jewishness. Only in “Lecture de Strette,” his last essay about Celan’s Engführung, Szondi adressed these matters. There is one other significant exception. In Oc- tober 1967, some months before departing for Jerusalem, Szondi spoke in a broadcasted critique about a volume, Deutsche und Juden, a collec- tion of five lectures published by Suhrkamp for the Jewish World Con- gress in Brussels the year before. It is a sharp critique of Eugen Gersten- maier’s political arguments and his speech in Brussels. The former president of the German Bundestag tried to play down Gerstenmaier’s assertions of latent and continuing anti-Semitism in Germany: Gerstenmaier had little luck with another of his polemical corrections. He countered a remark by Döblin from 1948, quoted by Scholem, that the word ‘Jew’ had remained an insult in Germany, by saying that this may apply for the ‘remnants of rotten Nazism’, but that it didn’t otherwise mean much. The vocabulary of Berlin policemen and citizens used this summer [1967] in front of demonstrating students before the Deutsche Oper and in Neukölln has confirmed Döblin’s remark 20 years later.3

3 Peter Szondi to Gershom Scholem, [n.l.] October, 1967, in: Peter Szondi, Briefe, ed. by Christoph König and Thomas Sparr (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1993), 241. Cf. Eugen Gerstenmaier … Cf. Eugen Gerstenmaier, in: Nahum Goldmann et. al., Deutsche und Juden. Beiträge von Nahum Goldmann,Gershom Scholem, Golo Mann, Salo W. Baron, Eugen Gerstenmaier und Karl Jaspers (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), 103: “Zu Döblins Bemerkung von 1948, dass das Wort Jude in Deutschland noch immer ein Schimpfwort sei, kann ich nur Ähnliches sagen. Die

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Szondi’s journey to Jerusalem was a journey into his own inner geography. On February 29, 1968, during Szondi’s visit, Scholem wrote to Theodor W. Adorno about rumours Adorno had been hearing: I passed on your regards to Szondi. I don’t think there is anything to the rumours that he’s negotiating a professorship in Jerusalem. I would have known about that. People are interested in him here, but I don’t think it is reciprocated. He came here out of some dark drive, in a positive up- swing that is wholly unusual for him. But he is surrounded by an air of such loneliness and not wanting to come out of himself, a tendency to- wards depression and a lack of direct participation in things that we, who spend a great deal of time with him, find depressing, and others have noticed it too. This seems to be the expression of a terrible, deep- rooted sense of guilt, especially when in contact with a Jewish society; he feels guilty because he was saved in the famous Kastner train in 1944, to his mind at the cost of others. This matter occupies him more than one would think. He finds it difficult to share and communicate. He speaks with passion here almost only when he talks about the concerns of the students in Berlin. Next week, I will go with him to Tiberias and show him the sacred sites of the Kabbalists. Something of that will sink in somewhere. One could hardly formulate this more vaguely. In short, a highly gifted and complicated and very unhappy man. This just between you and me.4 In his correspondence with Hilde Domin about their shared Jewish- ness and their common experience of being persecuted, Peter Szondi wrote, “We are all survivors, and each of us tries in his own way to deal with this shame. The loyalty you are trying to talk me out of is perhaps one way.” Szondi arrived from a restless place into an agitated, restless country—but Israel had been always restless. The Six-Day War was over, Jerusalem unified, the Jewish quarter of the old city under recon- struction. The situation of the occupied territories was not yet the permanent political challenge it is today; nor the social crisis that it is today in both countries, Israel and Palestine. The conflict did not have its

Reste des verfaulten Nazismus werden es als Schimpfwort gebrauchen. Aber was besagt das? Für die überwältigende Mehrheit in Deutschland gilt Döblins Be- merkung sicher nicht. Sie ist der entgegengesetzten Gefahr der Tabuisierung alles Jüdischen weit mehr ausgeliefert. Reue, Einsicht, Erkenntnis des schrecklichen Um- fangs der brutalen Vernichtung—das alles gibt es. Auch den Willen zur Wiedergut- machung—soweit das überhaupt möglich ist. Was aber fehlt, noch immer fehlt, ist jenes innere Gleichgewicht zwischen Deutschen und Juden, das in der Regel eben normaler menschlicher Beziehungen bedarf. […]” 4 Scholem to Theodor W. Adorno, [Jerusalem] February 29, 1968. Gershom Scholem, Briefe, 207.

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current global political dimension. Only very a few episodes of Szondi’s time in Jerusalem are known. We—or, I—know of a “Swiss evening” with Friedrich Dürrenmatt at Kitty and Karl Steinschneider’s house in Jerusalem; and that Szondi met Amos Oz and David Rokeah, who wrote a poem about Szondi’s “gebeugte Gestalt.” We know that Szondi saw Fania and Gershom Scholem almost every day. It is certain that Szondi met Werner Kraft at his home on Alfasi Street to talk about Walter Benjamin and Kraft’s disappointed friendship with him. In contrast to what is known, we may imagine that Szondi talked to Ger- shon Shaked or to Jakob Katz, the outstanding historian from Hun- gary. There are no letters or other traces to document their encounters. Szondi’s time in Jerusalem was for him a time of reflection about the past and the future, while being sheltered, if you will, from the present, from his everyday Berlin life. In May 1969, more than a year after his journey, Szondi wrote to Scholem: Over the last months, I have thought a lot about my stay in Israel; only now did everything I saw and experienced there become once quite alive once again. It was, even though I was often quite unwell, a lot, enough to make Israel a fixed point in my inner geography—without any Zion- ism (if I may say that)—that will play an important role in all my future thinking as a self-displaced person [Szondis uses the English term]. Homesickness is a strange thing. One can find one’s Heimat in three months without realizing it, and without accepting it. But that is no subject for a letter. With every good wish and kindest regards to both of you, Your little Szondi.5 On January 15, 1970, Lea Goldberg died in Jerusalem at the age of fifty-eight. Nine days later Scholem asked Szondi if he would come to Jerusalem to take her chair. Szondi replied four weeks later: Dear Mr. Scholem,

it isn’t easy for me to write this letter; this is why it has been such a long time coming. By now you already know already that I was unable to de- cide to come “forever” to you and take on the university chair. I would ask you and your wife for your understanding if I didn’t know that you know only too well what has been going on inside me since my stay in Jerusalem two years ago, and that you also “understand” that I won’t come, probably without you being able to excuse that, or endorse it. But not just because I know that I can’t say anything new about this, I won’t even try to give you my “reasons” that have “led” me to this decision.

5 Szondi to Gershom Scholem, [Berlin] May 1969, in: Peter Szondi, Briefe, 241.

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The reasons are, at least in this question, merely “reasons;” none of them is perhaps implausible, but none are convincing or imperative either neither for me nor for the two of you. You, and indeed I, could argue against every single one of them, and yet the certainty remains that I cannot—and to be honest—do not want to make that transition (of environment, language, work), even though I would like to. About the latter I wrote you a letter to which you wanted to return during your last visit to Berlin; unfortunately I was not in the right frame of mind to speak to you about it, and it probably makes little sense to make up for that now in a letter. When I said above that you and your wife know ex- actly what goes on inside someone in my position, I did not mean that just in a general sense. Once you said something about why I live in Germany and will probably stay here that was not surprising in its clear- sightedness, but unforgettable: because I forgot how to be at home (I wasn’t at home during my Budapest childhood or in Zurich, and strictly speaking also not in another sense with my parents). That is a disease that perhaps could be healed with the drastic treatment [“Roßkur”] of an emigration that might be necessary for whatever reason; but out of my free will, I cannot summon the strength to take such a step, especially in view of the fact that I not only just felt in Jerusalem two years ago that I am at home there, but also that this is precisely what I cannot bear. That this could and should change, I know, but this knowledge isn’t strong enough to break the resistance in me right now—that means: as long as I can stand it in Germany. With what kind of feelings I write this last sentence, one week after the Munich arson, I surely need not tell you either.—As for things concerning not me, but Comparative Litera- ture in Jerusalem: While I was there I thought about certain things: about the possibility of an in the European-American sense, comparative study of literature, about the function of a general literary scholarship as part of philological training. From the one, certain conclusions would have to be drawn with regard to the appointment to the chair as well as to the curriculum, the other concerning the position of the field vis-à-vis the national philologies and the point of time when one can commence the study of the subject (currently, it is only after the BA). I did not talk about this aloud because I didn’t want to give the impres- sion that I was criticizing the good Lea Goldberg, whose deep humanity and almost shy determination had greatly impressed me. But if you are considering a new structure for the department, I might possibly be able to write some kind of report for the faculty or the president. Since I already know pretty much what I would say, I could write this within 8-10 days, you only need to let me know whether it would be welcome. About the question of the visiting professorship: in 1970-71 I would certainly be unavailable. I have a chair here. Not only can I not go on leave just any time, (the earliest date would be winter 71-72, and even then for just one semester), the work with my students is so intensive and continuous that I could only really justify such an interruption (for

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more than one semester) if I knew that it would already mean the end of my work here. I would therefore suggest you ask Professor Geoffrey Hartman (Yale University), a friend of Tuvia Shlonsky, who—i.e. Hart- man—is (or was) in Jerusalem right now. Apart from him, there are two literary scholars who could also be considered (also for a permanent position), whose names and addresses I will add in a postscript; I don’t have the exact information at my fingertips right now. One is a German literature scholar in Brazil, the other worked as an assistant professor in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv (also with Lea Goldberg) for a couple of years, he is a very good student of Wellek and at the time wrote to me how happy he was about his experience in Israel.6 Although Szondi gave some helpful pointers, he himself never went back to Jerusalem.

6 Szondi to Gershom Scholem, [Berlin] February 26, 1970, in: Peter Szondi, Briefe, 301-304.

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