The Portage To San Cristobal of A . H . (A Review)

Whitfield, Steve

THE PORTAGE JO SAN CRISTOBAL OF A.H. A REVIEW STEVE WHITFIELD Before fathomless evil, words—even indignant words—may be indecent. The Viennese satirist Karl Kraus responded to the birth of the...

...Perhaps it would not be too simple to respond that the faults and virtues of Christianity should be ascribed not to Jewry but to Christians, and that responsibility for the theory and practice of Marxism be borne not by Jewry but by Marxists...
...The third point that the fictional Hitler mentions cannot be refuted, because it is true...
...he mentions in After Babel, his major work of criticism, that not even hypnosis has informed him whether German, French or English is his native tongue...
...The Viennese satirist Karl Kraus responded to the birth of the Third Reich by leaving the last page of his bristling journal, Die Fackel, virtually blank, because "mirfallt zu Hitler nichts eiri" ("about Hitler I can think of nothing to say...
...The death toll in the Belgian Congo at the turn of the century, or in Russia and Eastern Europe during the Stalinist terror, exceeded the scope of the Final Solution...
...He cannot be criticized for evading portentous questions, however unsatisfactory his own answers...
...To scour that land of its inhabitants or place them in servitude...
...Your arrogance...
...Insofar as any religious idiom shaped Hitler's world view, it was—as might be expected—that of Christianity...
...Steiner was born to Viennese parents in Paris in 1929, and was educated mostly in the United States (Chicago and Harvard...
...In other books Steiner has specialized in reaching for the apocalyptic note as well...
...Your beliefs...
...But this is in fact an apologia that the historical Hitler would never and could never have uttered...
...One hunter, for instance, conjectures that Hitler must have been Jewish to have anticipated mass passivity in the face of extermination...
...Unfortunately, in chapters that are more like tableaux, Steiner leaves these characters dangling instead of sweeping them into the narrative to whose resolution they will presumably contribute...
...The final point is entangled in the same problem: An historical conclusion that might be plausible is distinct from the assessment of guilt or innocence...
...As an explanation for the intractable problem of evil, this notion is perhaps no more preposterous than any other...
...A mistake in one word or even one syllable may therefore account for the diabolical force that seeps—and sometimes flows—through divine creation...
...In Portage, implausibilities abound...
...Our camps covered absurd acres," the fictional Hitler reminds the Israelis, whereas Stalin "had strung wire and earth pits around a continent...
...Other novelists have tried to fulfill that hope in recent years, but for Steiner the theme was irresistible, and he claims that his novel wrote itself...
...Hitler himself mumbles only a few words until the final chapter when, before a helicopter arrives (occupants unidentified), he rises to his own historical defense by unwinding a spool of rhetoric...
...Quite apart from the issue of distortion in Steiner's rendition of "the Judaic claim," no mention is made of the decisive influence of 19th-century racism upon Nazism...
...Even Adolf Eich-mann, on trial in Jerusalem in 1961, denied any hostility toward the Jews and any blame for their deaths...
...How many Jews did Stalin kill—your savior, your ally Stalin...
...zenship but dividing his teaching time between Switzerland and England, Steiner epitomizes the displacement that T. S. Eliot mocked in the figure of Bleistein—"Chicago Semite Viennese...
...Moreover, Hitler's claim in Portage that he was satisfying some of the subterranean impulses of Western civilization amounts in context to a disclaimer of any personal responsibility whatsoever, to a denial of the possibility of moral agency...
...By planning and starting the Second World War, Hitler was primarily to blame for the cruelties and disasters that followed...
...Only Albert Speer accepted moral responsibility for his own role in the savageries of the regime...
...His article, "The Other Diamond Business," appeared in these pages in October 1981...
...Also lurking about is the KGB, which re-interrogates a Soviet physician who survived the Stalinist labor camps, where he had been sent for suspecting in 1945 that Hitler had escaped from his Berlin bunker...
...the West German government, which may seek Hitler's extradition (as might Austria, where the Fuehrer was bom...
...In the vocabulary of Nazism there were elements of a vengeful parody on the Judaic claim...
...Moreover, the Brazilian Indian who also heard that speech, who leaps up at its conclusion, is deliberately named Teku—the Talmudic acronym for disputes that the rabbis could not resolve, for questions that transcend human understanding and therefore await for their resolution the coming of the Messiah...
...The self-vindication that marks the climax of Portage is a cruder version of Steiner's own pronouncements as critic...
...That task the novelist shifts to the readers...
...This plea for absolution, made in a jungle clearing before four silent Israelis and one Amazon native, is not refuted...
...1889) has been found living deep in the Brazilian jungle...
...John announced, was the Word...
...It is about justice, and is distinctly Jewish, because it is about how crimes beyond measure or belief, beyond remedy and forgiveness, might somehow be punished...
...Sinai, the Christian ethos of compassionate self-sacrifice, and the messianic Utopia of Marxism...
...What he thought he knew about the Jews was not their acceptance of the Covenant but their flair for conspiracy, which the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders ofZion supposedly revealed...
...Charlie Chaplin tried to ridicule him in The Great Dictator (1940), but later admitted that he would not have made the film had he foreseen the death camps...
...Although Hitler is supposed to have hidden in an impossibly remote spot on the upper Amazon, he is sufficiently au courant to have read Solzhenitsyn (or at least the reviews of The Gulag Archipelago...
...To hold before it a promised land...
...French intelligence, which fears the resurrection of evidence of its own nation's complicity under the occupation...
...Neglected novels such as Richard Hughes' The Fox in the Attic (1961) and Beryl Bainbridge's Young Adolf XI979) attempt to make Hitler credible by imagining his early years of failure, before the demonic within him was inserted into European history...
...Such inventions, Steiner claimed, were so incon-gruent with the instinctual life of the West that anti-Semitism erupted as a protest against such ethical and conceptual rigor...
...Yet legal norms as well as I ethical traditions make such a defense irrelevant...
...Indeed the Fuehrer's unredeemable iniquity and coarsening emptiness, malevolent rage and eerie mediocrity have long eluded the grip of art...
...The pseudo-biological nonsense that distinguished Nazi ideology from conventional German nationalism Hitler learned not from studying the Bible but from the cheap and squalid pamphlets he picked up in Vienna...
...This sinister skill is one that Steiner associates with the fear, enunciated in Jewish mysticism and repeated in After Babel, that the evil permeating the world may be due to an error in the transcription of Holy Writ...
...The credit for the viability of Israel belongs to the Zionists and their supporters...
...But he had neither been entrusted with the Final Solution, nor did he recall—in his frequent conversations with his Fuehrer—any mention of the Jewish Question that so obsessed Hitler...
...But this book differs from other, superior adventure yarns (Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and James Dickey's Deliverance come to mind) in that it is not about depravity or courage or honor or violence...
...There is nothing wrong in principle with "talking heads," if the talk is vivid (see, for example, the Platonic dialogues...
...What is equally peculiar is that this fictional Hitler is the spokesman for ideas which, in more modulated form, Steiner himself has advanced elsewhere...
...But the ease with which the historical and logical defects of the final chapter can be spotted is not entirely to the point, even though the construction of the novel and the obligations of remembrance demand an answer to Hitler's speech...
...Yet few of its formal and technical aspects are praiseworthy...
...Written in 1975-76, Portage has since been adapted for the London stage by Christopher Hampton, achieved best-selling status in France, and descended into an underground edition in the Soviet Union...
...and certainly its memory has charred the spirit of Israel...
...Portage marks the convergence of Steiner's intense moral curiosity and his hope that art might expiate the barbarism of the immediate past...
...4) Finally Hitler insists that, even though he may have been the false messiah, his policies led directly to the realization of the Zionist dream of national restoration...
...For example, the first point in Hitler's fictional defense is a gloss on "A Kind of Survivor" (1965), a Steiner essay: " By one of the cruel, deep ironies of history, the concept of a chosen people, of a nation exalted above others by particular destiny, was born in Israel...
...The moral and aesthetic demands of such a novel are problematic enough to have attracted attention, and continue to deserve consideration...
...In this novel Hitler is not ah adroit tactician, not a wily diplomat, not a political somnambulist moving inexorably toward the chancellorship or toward conquest...
...Against the repellent falsity of Hitler's summation, one honorable reaction may indeed be the muteness of his Israeli captors...
...In the dock they often disclaimed knowledge of the crimes they committed, or else they accused others—including, conveniently, their deceased leader...
...It has fallen to a Jewish novelist, therefore, to formulate the case for mass murder that its own perpetrators did not articulate before their judges...
...While Portage does not successfully imitate the turgid bombast of Hitler's sensation- i ally effective speeches, its final chap- i ter illustrates Steiner's claim that totalitarianism has contaminated the sources of language itself, an.d that such contamination is the signature of the inhuman...
...The point that Steiner is actually addressing here is the power of language itself—its capacity not only to communicate meaning but also to lie and mislead, to justify the unjustifiable...
...That omission is partly remedied in George Steiner's The Portage to San Cristobal of AM...
...Will the Word, Steiner wonders, be there in the end as well...
...By giving Hitler the last word, Steiner not only forces us to confront the perennial enigma of evil—he also imagines the one speech that the judges at Nuremberg never heard...
...Again, in "A Kind of Survivor," Steiner observed that "the state of Israel is undeniably a part of the legacy of German mass murder...
...As though countering one Israeli's searing recital of some of the torments inflicted upon European Jewry, Hitler seeks to exculpate himself by making four points: 1) Nazism, he claims, derived some of its controlling ideas from the Jews' own ancestors, who wished "to set a race apart...
...The plot is devoted to the efforts of four Israeli trackers to spirit him out, while representatives of other nations wait in the wings, threatening to seize him...
...And, because Steiner is more interested in recording Hitler's effect on others than their own motivations or conduct, the characterizations are weak...
...The wretchedly bad taste here is presumably mitigated by feverishness...
...To keep it from defilement...
...But it is awful to recognize that the terror that Stalin inflicted upon his own people was more lethal than the Nazi war against the Jews...
...Because Hitler never visited the extermination camps, fiction that has dared to face the enormity of the Holocaust has not incorporated its actual architect...
...That concluding chapter is the emotional center of Portage, its argumentation the primary claim the novel exerts on the reader's attention...
...Instead he is exclusively a creature of the word, a demagogue who has learned "the grammar of hell...
...There he argued that the Jewish passion for idealism and for abstraction took the form of (he Mosaic God, the Nazarene creed and the Marxist vision...
...It should hardly be necessary to record that the birth of the Third Jewish Commonwealth was the opposite of Hitler's intentions...
...This failed but provocative novel implies that the last days of Hitler may prefigure the last days of humanity...
...Had he not died when he did, there would not have been one of you left alive between Berlin and Vladivostok...
...The Israelis themselves do little but speculate tersely...
...Which brings us to the second point...
...Nor is he a crank...
...and the United States, personified by a wild-blue-yonder cowboy who is part-media hustler, part-CIA...
...In the beginning, St...
...But Hitler's captors are too exhausted and delirious to express themselves with much coherence, and their remarks are sometimes so wild that the reader cannot be expected to take them seriously...
...Though Portage has been called a thriller, the suspense is sucked away on the first page with the disclosure that an almost nonagenarian Hitler (b...
...The grotesque claim that Hitler made Zionism viable is based on the fact that Germany lost the war before the remaining third of European Jewry could be slaughtered...
...Among the challengers are British intelligence, including a character based on Professor H. R. Trevor-Roper, whose Last Days of Hitler (1946) concluded that the Fuehrer had committed suicide on April 30, 1945...
...Yet Steiner does not seem to realize how weighty is this additional indictment against the Jews, one of whose j scribes may be to blame for a misprint of considerable magnitude...
...Still holding American citiContributing editor Steve Whitfield is author of Into the Dark: Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism (Temple University Press, 1980...
...Toying with this hypothesis enables the author to tap an emotional undertow that his novel very much needs...
...3) The Third Reich was not unique in its devastation of human life...
...2) Hitler asserts that Jewry deserved its destruction because humanity found it too painful and burdensome to accept austere and "sick fantasies" like the ethical monotheism proclaimed on Mt...
...No judge or juror could be expected to sympathize with a murder- j er's argument that the fellow in the next cell was even more bloodthirsty...
...The author, a polylingual polymath of ferocious learning and intellectual ambition, infused with a charged opulence of style, is unaccustomed to such fame...
...For the truth is that Nazism lacked forthright advocates even among its leading perpetrators...
...Despite the historical evidence of the Chancellor's physical and emotional disintegration by the spring of 1945, despite the fictional Hitler's amazing defiance of the actuarial tables in a tropical region into which modern medicine could not penetrate, the trek back to civilization shows him to be more spry than his Israeli captors, who are at least 50 years his junior...
...Large statements of this kind, with which In Bluebeard's Castle is studded, wrench history out of any manageable shape and scarcely allow for rational procedures of verification...
...The novel is less engaged by how the Israelis behave toward their prisoner than by how the world ought to respond to his survival and his crimes...
...The real Hitler denied that Jesus was a Jew, a fact not permitted to subordinate Steiner's thesis in his In Bluebeard's Castle (1971...

Vol. 8 • December 1982 • No. 1


 
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