Paul Steinbergs Speak You Also - Essay Example

Paul Steinberg's Speak You Also against Primo Levi's rendition of Henri in Survival in Auschwitz. Perhaps there is no other word that carries with it such a plenitude of prevarications as the term 'Holocaust'. Even though the term now signifies the mass murder of the Jews by Hitler in what was euphemistically called die Endlosing or the Final Solution, the Hebrew word shoah was also in currency for some time. 'Holocaust' has biblical roots. In the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew word olah is translated as holokauston. In context, olah means that which is offered up. It refers to a sacrifice, often specifically to an offering made by fire to the Lord. Such connotations make 'Holocaust' a problematic term for the devastation it names. The word's religious implications seem inappropriate, even repulsive, to many people, including many Jews. It is quite surprising that Holocaust still remains the most widely used term for the horrendous crimes committed on a race in an attempt to uproot it from the face of the earth. The philosopher Emile Fackenheim has pointed out that the Holocaust offers a unique challenge of comprehensibility. He says that the Holocaust was not a war because the victims had no power and were a threat to the Third Reich only in the Nazi mind. It was a war not directed by passions but conceived by a plan and executed with methodical care and stripped of all passion. The Holocaust was not a war crime because it was not based on any ideology but the 'ideal' of punishing the Jews for their crime, the 'crime of existence'. The punishment was for 'being' and not for 'doing'. Fackenheim says that the "Holocaust is not a parochial event. It is world-historical." There were many countries which welcomed, at least clandestinely, the policies of Hitler towards immigrants. Thus the philosopher in his foreword to Yehuda Bauer's The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness (Toronto, University Press, 1979) lists how this eminently forgettable event continues to haunt a diffident mankind. How did the Holocaust happen and why Such questions are both historical and ethical and have a whole spectrum of significations. Elie Wiesel, one of the rare Jewish survivors of Auschwitz and winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, has rightly said of Birkenau, one of the major killing ares of Auschwitz: "Traditional ideas and acquired values, philosophical systems and social theories - all must be revised in the shadow of Birkenau." This observation is startlingly true. Holocaust was a state-sponsored program of population elimination made possible by modern technology and political will. As Nazi Germany became a genocidal state, its anti-Semitic racism required a destructive process that needed and got the cooperation of every sector of the German society. In a brief but telling note of the ramifications of racism in the then German society, John K.Roth who has edited International Encyclopedia of Ethics writes: Government and church personnel provided birth records to document who was Jewish and who was not. University administrators curtailed admission for Jewish students and dismissed Jewish faculty members. Bureaucrats in the Finance Ministry confiscated Jewish wealth and property. Postal officials delivered mail about definition and expropriation, denaturalization and deportation. Driven by their biomedical vision, physicians were mong the first to experiment with the gassing of 'lives unmorthy of life'. Business executives found that the Nazi concentration camps could provide cheap labour; they worked people to death, turning the Nazi motto. Stockholders made profits from firms that supplied Zyklon B to gas people and from companies that built crematoria to bury the corpses(388). Thus the name and nature of Holocaust created a cataclysmic shift and displacement of sensibility that seldom occurred in the history of mankind, let alone in art and literature. One of the most vivid descriptions of this scenario comes from George Steiner. "(The Germa language) makes noise. It even communicates, but creates no sense of communion" (117). The Holocaust had rendered post war German language sterile. But this atrophy was not exclusive to the language of Hitler, for writers everywhere spoke of the death of the so-called Gentility Principle. Writers wondered whether it would be possible to formalize the content of ultimate perversity. Adorno even declared that mankind had lost its qualification to write poetry. It was out of this sense of futility that a few writers who would be called the Holocaust survivor writers gathered to sigh up their experiences. Their aim was not to achieve literary glory, but to convey to the future generations the tangible despair of the past. Their work was to be an alarm signal. An invocation to empathy. Of the many writers who belonged to this unfortunate school, there are only a few who are 'known'. Milton Meltzer, Primo Levi, Viktor B. Frankl, Elie Wiesel and Tadeusz Borowski are some of them. Primo Levi (1919-1987) was a chemist who turned to writing. His experiences in Auschwitz, where he spent ten months after he was betrayed by a member of his own secret organization fighting against Germans, form the core of his oeuvre. His Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity and If This Is A Man are both translations of the Italian original Se questo un uomo. Written in precise prose and avoiding theory and metaphysics, Levi's work portrays not only the mundane life of the camp but also the character of inmates. He sets out to confess his experiences with a modest yet appalling tone of cold documentation. Even the number 174517 tattooed on his arm--which functioned as an impromptu meal ticket--is registered as merely one more fact of life. Survival in Auschwitz was written during the days of uneasy tranquility that Levi had after he secured liberation from Auschwitz. Levi says that the "need to tell (our) story to 'the rest', to make 'the rest' participate in it, had taken for us, before our liberation and after, the character of an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing with our other elementary needs". He admits that Survival in Auschwitz was written to satisfy that need. In the book Levi talks of a class of inmates who 'fight merely with their own strength to survive'. He says: One has to fight against the current; to battle every day and every hour against exhaustion, hunger, cold and the resulting inertia Many were the ways devised and put into effect by us in order not to die: as many as there are different human characters. Survival without renunciation of any pat of one's moral world - apart from powerful and direct intervention by fortune - was conceded only to a few superior individuals, made of the stuff of martyrs and saints (98). Levi then proceeds to describe how four inmates managed to procure salvation. One of them was Henri. Henri has built his armor on the philosophy of pity. He believed that being a primary and instinctive sentiment it grew well if ably cultivated, particularly in the primitive minds of the unscrupulous brutes. The practical importance of this discovery lent his armor especial safety. Levi's description of the modus operandi of Henri should not be missed. As the ichneumon paralyses the great hairy caterpillar, wounding it in its only vulnerable ganglion, so Henri at a glance sizes up the object, 'son type'; he speaks to him briefly, to each with the appropriate language, and the 'type' is conquered: he listens with increasing sympathy, he is moved by the fate of this unfortunate young man, and not much time is needed before he begins to yield returns (105). Levi writes that Henri was capable of breaching the hardest of hearts and he could garner the support of numerous people including English soldiers, civilian workers of various nationalities, German 'politicals' and even an SS man. Henri is intriguing in more than one sense. He represents not only man's instinct for survival but also his potential to betray. In fact, Henri raises many questions: How do ethics become relevant in the face of death Could self- defense be an act of betrayal Can a human be delineated Levi's clinical observations make the point clear. To speak with Henri is useful and pleasant: one sometimes also feels him warm And near; communication, even affection seems possible. One seems to glimpse, behind his uncommon personality, a human soul, sorrowful and aware of itself. But the next moment his sad smile freezes into a cold grimace which seems studied at the mirror; Henri politely excuses himself and here he is again, intent on his hunt and his struggle; hard and distant, enclosed in armour, the enemy of all, inhumanly cunning and incomprehensible like the Serpent in Genesis (106). The character is not a mere fictionalization of Paul Steinberg whom Levi actually met in Lager, it is a portrayal of the subtleties of being human. Lawrence Langer in Art from Ashes rightly observes that 'Holocaust fact' and 'Holocaust fiction' are like Siamese twins and can be severed only at their peril. It may be said that Levi's Henri combines the factual and fictional elements, the beast and the human , perhaps, in an attempt to suggest the co-presence of both in our lives. Speak You also by Paul Steinberg borrows Paul Celan's line 'Speak, you also,/Speak as the last/Have your say' from the poem 'Speak, you also'. The Auschwitz autobiography which came out in 2000 is a kind of response to Levi's characterization of him as Henri in Survival in Auschwitz. If Levi pictures Henri as an example of how human nature could be corrupted in the face of conflict and crisis, Henri responds by asking the question, "Is it wrong to survive" Steinberg, unlike Levi, was not inclined to recapture the bizarre moments he had at Lager or the death camp. But the book of the latter prompted him to adduce his case before the public. Steinberg's argument is clothed in cold logic. He is unapologetic for how he survived. In fact, with a rare sense of candor, and terrifying introspection, Steinberg compels us to examine what is the role of morality in the face of extreme danger. Under conditions like those prevalent in Auschwitz, the only responsibility of man was to survive according to Steinberg. When he was gathered up in Paris, he was only 16 and as a tough teenager, his first resolve was to salvage himself come what may. Steinberg admits that all his vital energy was mobilized for his own survival; that he economized on everything by getting rid of moral suffering, emotions, memories and even regrets It is this wisdom of experience that he pours into the book. He does not belong to the second generation of Holocaust writers whose only raw material is the report of the survivor or reconstruction of what has been recorded. Steinberg is a survivor now mellowed with age. Speak You Also thus becomes a first hand account of a man who did not believe in wasting his affection on 'ghosts on reprieve' but on self-preservation and who, after fifty years of war with memory, decides to retrace the past through strokes of new logic. This logic finds its top moment when Steinberg asks," I'll never know whether I have the right to ask clemency of the jury. Can one be so guilty for having survived" The cold logic of Steinberg is perhaps best explained by Langer. "Painful as it may seem, we must begin from the unembellished truth, stripping of our civilized "lendings" just as Lear shed his garments on the heath. Only after that can the process of clothing ourselves with more suitable apparel begin" (12). This is exactly what Steinberg does. Speak You Also is an invitation to partake in the bloody feast of celebration of man's bestiality. The Holocaust is also, in one sense, a challenge to understanding. When one reads a book on it, one tries to understand it and this is tantamount to bringing sense into a senseless event. Steinberg's objective is to write without morals, to leave the lovers to their own destiny at the end of the story. Besides the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, there were nearly six million others including gypsies, Poles, gays and others who were singled out to be hated. Steinberg observes that the number of survivors also quite varied in character. But he pricks the banality of this statement with "The sole common denominator of the survivors seems to be an inordinate appetite for life - and the flexibility of a contortionist" (48). Holocaust defies perception. Steinberg's work merely tracks the nature of incomprehension. Steinberg asks the survivors whether it is sane to pass on the gene of hatred to the future generations. After all, one cannot hate till infinity. "I have no gift for hatred. I know what it is like to be hated. I concluded that it would be profoundly degrading to play that same game and perpetuate the cycle"(174). It might augur well for the average reader but, the fact is what Levi explains in his Preface to Survival in Auschwitz. (The book) has not been written in order to formulate new accusations; it should be able, rather, to furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind. Many people - many nations - can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that 'every stranger is an enemy'. For the most part of this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premiss in a syllogism, then at the end of the chain, there is the Lager. Here is the product of a conception of the world carried rigorously to its logical conclusion; so long as the conception subsists, the conclusion remains to threaten us. The story of the death camps should be understood by everyone as a sinister alarm-signal (15). Steinberg's book also is an alarm-signal. Both Primo Levi and Paul Steinberg have crafted out of their memories two unique books that cannot be called 'works of art' in the conventional sense of the term. Actually, they are not intended to be. They assume such status, however, through their objective of informing and warning. Levi admits that in describing Auschwitz he has "assumed the calm, sober language of the witness, neither the lamenting tones of the victim nor the irate voice of someone who seeks revenge" (382). Paul Steinberg is a shade different. His book is not only on the name and nature of the Holocaust but also on how it transforms people. Steinberg book is like a survival kit for those trapped in the worst of circumstances. Perhaps his greatest gift to the readers is a new sense of morality - one in which survival matters the most. Works cited Primary Sources 1. Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz, London: Vintage, 1996. 2. Steinberg, Paul and Linda Coverdale. Speak You Also: A Survivor's Reckoning, New York: Picador, 2001. Secondary Sources 1. Langer, Lawrence, L. Art from Ashes, London: OUP, 1995. 2. Roth, John. K, International Encyclopaedia of Ethics, New Delhi: S Chand, 2000. 3. Steiner, George. Language and Silence, London: Faber and Faber, 1967. 4. Stephens, Elaine, C. Images from the Holocaust: A Literature Anthology, Illinois: NTC Publishing House, 1997. 5. Rees, Laurence. Auschwitz: The Nazis and the 'Final Solution', London: BBC Books, 2005. 6. Landau, Ronnie, S. Studying the Holocaust: Issues, Readings and Documents, London: Routledge, 1998. Read More