Anthropology as Memory: Elias Canetti’s and Franz Baermann Steiner’s Responses to the Shoah

240 Pages·2001·45.15 MB·English

by  Michael Mack

Conditio Judaica 34
Studien und Quellen zur deutsch-jüdischen Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte
Herausgegeben von Hans Otto Horch
in Verbindung mit Alfred Bodenheimer, Mark H. Gelber und Jakob Hessing

Michael Mack
Anthropology as Memory
Elias Canetti's and
Franz Baermann Steiner's
Responses to the Shoah
Max Niemeyer Verlag
Tübingen 2001
Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme
Mack, Michael:
Anthropology as Memory: Elias Canetti's and Franz Baermann Steiner's Responses to the Shoah /
Michael Mack. -Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001
(Conditio Judaica; 34)
Zugl.: Oxford, Univ., Diss.
ISBN 3-484-65134-2 ISSN 0941-5866
© Max Niemeyer Verlag GmbH, Tübingen 2001
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Content
Acknowledgements VII
Introduction: The Holocaust, Literature, Anthropology and History 1
Part I: Elias Canetti - Anthropology as Literature 9
1 Science, Power, Literature and the Holocaust 9
1.1 The Lack of an Intellectual and a Historical Context:
The Holocaust and the Symbolic Exertion of Power 9
1.2 Canetti - A Ruler? 23
1.3 Canetti - A Scholar or a Writer? 29
2 Auto Da Fe as a Negative Poetics 32
3 Canetti's Literary Devices for the Exertion of Power 46
3.1 Canetti's Thinking in Images 46
3.2 Canetti's Use of Philosophical and Anthropological Literature ... 60
3.3 Metamorphosis and Totemism 67
3.4 Death 74
3.5 Authority and Power 79
Part II: Franz Baermann Steiner - Anthropology and Totalitarian Terror ... 81
4 Anthropology and the Perception of Non-Western Peoples 83
4.1 The German Background 83
4.2 The Influence of Marcel Mauss's Conceptual Approach 85
4.3 The Context of British Anthropology 88
4.4 Steiner's Relationship to British Anthropology 90
5 An Oriental Undermines Orientalism 105
5.1 Steiner's »A Comparative Study of the Forms of Slavery« and
Said's Orientalism 106
5.2 Taboo 118
5.3 Civilization 135
Part III: Style, Law and Danger 149
6 Elias Canetti's and Franz Baermann Steiner's Notion of
Literature as Scholarship 149
7 Coincidences Between Steiner's Anthropology and Poetry 157
8 Law, Myth and Danger 178
VI Content
Conclusion: Steiner's and Canetti's Contribution to Debates About
Postmodemity 191
Bibliography 205
Index 227
Acknowledgements
This study has been made possible by the assistance of many kind and helpful
individuals - more than I can possibly list: I am most grateful to John Milbank
and Catherine Pickstock for their careful and detailed supervision of this pro-
ject. I am also grateful to Jeremy Adler for his help and support. Mary Douglas
and Ritchie Robertson contributed a close and critical reading of the penulti-
mate version of this study. I thank them for all of their help and encourage-
ment. - I also thank Aleida and Jan Assmann, Gillian and John Beer, Ingrid
Belke, Rüssel A. Berman, James Bowman, Richard Pardon, Michael Fishbane,
Sander L. Oilman, Michael Hamburger, Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, Jakob Köll-
hofer, David Levin, Donald N. Levine, Francoise Meltzer, Michael Minden,
Sivan and Daniel B. Monterescu, Arno Reinfrank, Eric Santner, Oded Schlech-
ter, Jonathan Steinberg, Rudolf Siihnel, Guy G. Stroumsa, Andrew Webber,
Philip Ward, Liliane Weissberg, Harry Zohn and my parents for their generous
encouragement and help.
This book also has benefited from much institutional support: I thank the
British Academy and the Divinity School of the University of Cambridge, that
gave me a grant from the Burney trust. The German literary archive at Mar-
bach a. N. awarded me a »Marbach Stipendium«, l am most grateful to the
staff of this wonderful archive for all of their help, encouragement and hospi-
tality.
Parts of some of the chapters in this book have appeared in earlier versions
in other forums: a much earlier and shorter version of chapter 2 has appeared
in Orbis Litterarum (No. 2, 1999), some of the material in chapter 3.3, 3.4 and
3.5 in the Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrift (No. 3, 1998); an earlier
version of 5.2 appeared in the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Ox-
ford (No. 3, 1996). I thank the editors for their input and patience.
Last but not least, I am most grateful to Hans Otto Horch and his co-editors
of Conditio Judaica for all of their support and encouragement. I also thank
Kerstin Rückwald for her help preparing the book for print.

Introduction: The Holocaust, Literature, Anthropology
and History
There was a conspiracy against the sac-
redness of life. Banality is the adopted dis-
guise of a very powerful will to abolish
conscience.'
Can a literary depiction be more truthful than an historical account? This que-
stion has often been asked in relation to the representation of the Holocaust.
Geoffrey Hartman has recently argued that there is »a link between epistemol-
ogy and morality, between how we get to know what we know [...] and the
moral life we aspire to lead«.2 Hartman refers to Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's
differentiation between Jewish historiography from the Bible up to the modern
Enlightenment after Spinoza and the modern discipline of history which
emerged from an Enlightenment critique. As Yerushalmi has shown, premod-
ern Jewish historiography passed historical knowledge on through the channels
of ritual and liturgy.3 The literary character of such transmission does, how-
ever, mean »that its poetic or legendary elements are not >fictions< in the mod-
ern sense [,..]«.4 The debate about literature, history and theology has recently
resurfaced in discussions about the concept of memory. Andreas Huyssen has
argued that the move from history to memory must not be confused with rela-
tivism and an espousal of the non-factual: »Without facts, there is no real
memory.«5 These reflections about the truth of scholarship and literature have
been anticipated by the Victorian interrelationship between literature and an-
thropology. As Gillian Beer has recently pointed out:
1 Saul Bellow: Mr. Sammler's Planet. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1972, p. 18.
2 Geoffrey Hartman: The Longest Shadow. In the Aftermath of the Holocaust. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press 1996 (The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in
Jewish Studies; 1994), p. 102.
3 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi: Zakhor. Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Seattle: Uni-
versity of Washington Press 1982 (The Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jew-
ish Studies), p. 40.
4 Ibid., p. 13.
5 Andreas Huyssen: Twilight Memories. Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New
York: Routledge 1995, p. 256.
2 Introduction
Within the mid-Victorian period there was already an active interplay between an-
thropological writing and literature, even while anthropology was attempting to de-
termine its own independence and its own limits.6
Against this background it is not surprising that Elias Canetti (1905-1994) and
his friend Franz Baermann Steiner (1909-1952) turn away from purely literary
writing and engage in the literary-scientific discourse of social anthropology.
As I will argue throughout this essay, as a response to the Nazi genocide, both
Steiner and Canetti employ an empirical discourse in order to have the maxi-
mum ethical impact on the social behavior of their readership.
First, however, it is necessary to introduce Steiner and his relationship to
Canetti.7 Steiner was a poet and an anthropologist.8 Unfortunately, he is now
quite forgotten. Most of his work is still unpublished: his important correspon-
dence with the literary critic Rudolf Härtung, his thesis on slavery, many poems,
and twenty volumes of aphorisms on the Hebrew Bible, on civilization, psy-
chology and world literature, have been awaiting publication for forty-five
years.9 Steiner and Canetti were both born within the Habsburg empire. Child-
hood in such a multi-cultural society probably stimulated in the two writers an
interest in ethnological studies.10 Steiner as well as Canetti pursued scientific
6 Gillian Beer: Open Fields. Science in Cultural Encounters. Oxford: Clarendon Press
1996, p. 76.
7 For a more detailed account of Franz Baermann Steiner's biography see my article
»Franz Baermann Steiners Auseinandersetzung mit dem Nationalsozialismus«. In: Mit
der Ziehharmonka. Literatur, Widerstand, Exil 14 (1997), p. 17-21. There are two
short biographical monographs on Steiner without any detailed examination of his im-
portance to the work of Elias Canetti: one by Alfons Fleischli, the other by Jürgen
Serke. See: Jürgen Serke: Böhmische Dörfer. Wanderungen durch eine verlassene lite-
rarische Landschaft. Wien: Zsolnay 1987 and: Alfons Fleischli: Franz Baermann Stei-
ner. Leben und Werk. Hochdorf: Buchdruckerei Hochdorf 1970. Fleischli's examina-
tion has three parts. Part one traces Steiner's life, part two introduces the reader to
Steiner's prose-writings, and part three gives a formalistic analysis of Steiner's poetry.
Neither Fleischli nor Serke ground Steiner in modem intellectual history, nor do they
analyse Steiner's anthropology. Marcel Atze's examination has an excellent biographi-
cal account of the friendship between Steiner and Canetti. See: Ortlose Botschaft. Der
Freundeskreis H. G. Adler, Elias Canetti und Franz Baermann Steiner im englischen
Exil. Bearbeitet von Marcel Atze. Mit Beiträgen von Jeremy Adler und Gerhard
Hirschfeld. In Zusammenarbeit mit der Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte Stuttgart. Mar-
bach a. N.: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft 1998 (Marbacher Magazin; 84). Space does
not permit an examination of H. G. Adler's important work in this book.
8 I am most grateful to Mary Douglas who gave me a lively account of Steiner's person-
ality and of his position in Oxford anthropology. Unfortunately, space does not permit
a biographical discussion of Steiner's situation in exile.
9 Steiner's Nachlaß was acquired by the Deutsche Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar
in 1996.
10 Hana Arie-Gaifman emphasizes the openness of Prague intellectuals to multi-cultural
influences as follows: »Ich möchte behaupten, daß die Fremdheit oder, besser gesagt,
die Außenseiterrolle der Prager Intellektuellen nicht auf ihrer Abgeschlossenheit be-