University of Szeged Faculty of Arts Doctoral Dissertation The German Exile Literature and the Early Novels of Iris Mur- doch Dávid Sándor Szőke Supervisors: Dr. Zoltán Kelemen Dr. Anna Kérchy 2021 Acknowledgements I have a great number of people to thank for their support throughout this thesis, whether this support has been academic, financial, or spiritual. First of all, I would like to thank my supervisors, Dr Zoltán Kelemen and Dr Anna Kérchy for their unending help, encouragement and faith in me during my research. Their knowledge about the Holocaust, 20th century English woman writers and minorities has given exceptional depth to my understanding of Murdoch, Steiner, Canetti and Adler. The eye-opening essays and lectures by Dr Peter Weber about the Romanian painter and Holocaust survivor Arnold Daghani’s time in England provided a genesis for this thesis. Had it not for him, I would not have thought about putting Murdoch’s thinking in the context of Cen- tral European refugee literature and culture during and after the Second World War. This thesis owes much to the 2017 Holocaust Conference in Szeged (19 October) and the 2019 International Holocaust Conference in Halle (14-16 November). I would like to express my gratitude to the March of the Living Hungary, the Holocaust Memorial Centre Budapest, the Memory Point of Hódmezővásárhely, the synagogues of Szeged and Hódmezővásárhely, Professor Werner Nell (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg), Professor Thomas Bremer (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg), Professor Sue Vice (University of Shef- field), and Dr Zoltán Kelemen for making these events possible. During my PhD, as part of the Erasmus ++ programme I spent an entire year at Martin- Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, where I made a great deal of research about the German coming to terms with the past. I would like to thank Professor Ute Eichler for enhancing my knowledge about Hannah Arendt’s views on the banality of evil and reconciliation, and Dr Robert Forkel for drawing my attention to the German memory culture and remembrance in the families through some wonderful documentaries and written material. I would like to thank the members of the Iris Murdoch Society, especially Dr Miles Leeson, Professor Anne Rowe, Dr Frances White, Dr Pamela Osborn, Dr Lucy Bolton and Christopher Boddington, for the unending conversations about moral issues in Murdoch’s work. I took great inspiration from the Postgraduate events at the University of Chichester as well as from the Iris Murdoch Centenary Conference at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford (13-15 July 2019), where I gave talks about Murdoch’s intellectual encounters with refugees and her moral en- gagement with the German guilt. I want to thank Dayna N. Miller (Iris Murdoch Archive, King- ston University) for providing me the transcription of Iris Murdoch’s journals along with Franz Steiner’s diary. 2 Special thanks go to Jeremy Adler for his invaluable recollections of his father, Steiner and Canetti, and for giving me the booklet of his talk “The Great Transformation: The Contribution of German-Jewish Exiles to British Culture”, held in the Research Centre for German & Aus- trian Exile Studies, Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, Uni- versity of London in 2019, and to Dr Miklós Péti and Dr Katalin G. Kállay for inviting me to give a lecture about the issues raised by Adler (October 3, 2019). The staff of the Department of Comparative Literature and Culture gave astute criticism and inspiring ideas to my work. Here, I would like to thank Professor György Fogarasi for his con- stant attention to the progress of the research done by me and my fellow PhD-students, Profes- sor Katalin Kürtösi for the publication of my article “Displacement and exile identity in Iris Murdoch’s The Flight from the Enchanter (1956)” (2020), and Vera Kérchy for her careful and encouraging reading of my thesis. The insightful comments by Professor Anne Rowe and Professor Sue Vice on the fourth and fifth chapter have greatly motivated me to “dig deeper”, for which I am very thankful to them. There are two people, whose friendship gave me immeasurable strength to carry on my ac- ademic life, and whose wisdom will always stay with me. Beside having given immeasurable encouragement for our conference in Szeged, Dr Sándor Besenyi was my spiritual mentor in my academic and personal life, a great father and grandfather and a highly prominent intellec- tual. While I had been making research about Murdoch for the National Students’ Competition in 2012, I came across Miklós Vető’s study on Simone Weil, in which he expressed his gratitude first and foremost to his supervisor Iris Murdoch. I would not have dreamed about stumbling upon him one day, which many happened years later on the corridors of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Szeged. This accidental happening was followed by a great number of email exchanges, personal meetings in Budapest, his “re-discovery” by the Iris Murdoch society as the last student of Murdoch, him being invited as a keynote speaker to the centenary conference at Oxford, and him asking me to make a collection of and write an introduction to Murdoch’s letters to him, published in 2018 in the Iris Murdoch Review. Both of them passed away last year, yet their memories will be here with me. Finally, I would like to thank my mum, my partner, and my friends for their immense emo- tional support at times when I lost track, and at times when we had great joys. Their constant presence in my life is something for which I feel incredibly fortunate. 3 To the loving memories of Professor Miklós Vető (1936-2020) and Dr Sándor Besenyi (1942- 2020) 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction A Reflection on the Past ........................................................................................................ 4 Chapter One Exile in England: Elias Canetti, Franz Baermann Steiner, and H.G. Adler in London……..23 Chapter Two Uprootedness and the Search for Identity in Under the Net and A Severed Head…………..68 Chapter Three Displacement and Exile Identity in The Flight from the Enchanter ……………...……… 105 Chapter Four The Two Kind of Jews in The Italian Girl …………..…………………………………. 124 Chapter Five Reconciliation and Forgiveness in The Nice and the Good …………………...……….… 145 Conclusion…………………………...…….…………………………………………….166 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………. 170 5 Introduction A Reflection on the Past Murdoch and her Jewish Teachers In the present dissertation, I will provide a comparative analysis of the impact of the German exile literature on Iris Murdoch’s early novels. In this work, I will explain how the issues of trauma, memory, displacement and power in Murdoch’s fiction were informed by her intellec- tual encounters with three German-speaking exiled authors, Elias Canetti, Franz Baermann Steiner and H.G. Adler. Concentrating on five novels from Murdoch’s early period, Under the Net (1954), The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), A Severed Head (1961), The Italian Girl (1964), The Nice and the Good (1968), I will explore how the post-war trauma and the questions of displacement, power and making sense of the past had become central to her. What makes these works curious to discuss is that, in them, she sets up the diagnosis of post-war societies, which are suffering between two totalitarian powers, where exile is a symbol of the modern state of being that is characterized by rootlessness and alienation. Considering the theoretical aspects where the memories of the war, the trauma of the Holocaust and the problem of exile are represented by her refugee characters, many of whom were inspired by Canetti, Steiner and Adler, I will explain how the sense of rootlessness and identity search depicted in these novels can be compared with the theories and the lived experiences of the three authors discussed. Iris Murdoch was one of the most prolific and significant English writers and philosophers in the 20th century. She was born in Dublin in 1919 of Anglo-Irish parents. From 1932 to 1938, she was a boarding student at Badminton School in Bristol. From 1938 to 1942, she studied philosophy at Somerville College, Oxford. During the war she went to work as an Assistant Principal at HM Treasury, and then worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (U.N.R.R.A.) in the refugee camps in the refugee camps in Brussels and Inns- bruck between 1945 and 1946. From 1947 to 1948, she had a postgraduate studentship in phi- losophy at Newnham College, Cambridge. In 1948, she returned to Oxford, where she became a fellow of St Anne’s College. She lived with her husband, the professor and literary critic John Bayley, from 1956 until her death in 1999. From her debut with Under the Net, Iris Murdoch was regarded as one of the most remark- able post-war women writers starting their careers in the mid-twentieth century, now called 6 intermodernism, whose vivid description of sexuality and morals has influenced such novelists of the later generation as Margaret Drabble, A.S. Byatt, Alan Hollinghurst, or Sarah Waters. In her career as a novelist, spanning for more than four decades, she wrote 26 twenty-six novels, a short story (Something Special, 1957), six plays, two volumes of poetry, and four books on philosophy, including two Platonic dialogues. Her novels enjoyed a wide readership and were hailed by her contemporaries, winning several literary awards, among the Booker Prize for The Sea, the Sea (1978), the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince (1973) and the Whitbread Prize for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974). Murdoch’s fiction is filled with philosophical ideas on the nature of good and evil, love, suffering, the mysterious forces of the human psyche, and the various manifestations of power in human relationships.