Devil’s advocate for Hitler

Press, 2 March 1982, Page 19

Devil’s advocate for Hitler

STEPHEN FAY,

of the “Sunday Times,” London, inter-

views the author as one of the most controversial postwar plays opens in London.

Dr George Steiner’s title is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva. But he is much more: he is an authentic polymath. As we talked, one sentence of his encapsulated his several qualities. “I am haunted," he said, “by the Greek definition of the Word idiot, which is a man who steps out of the public forum." ■Steiner is haunted by his understanding of fear, nightmare. and temptation. Because he is a Jew and a moralist, he is pursued by the memory of the holocaust.

.The Greek definition of “idiot" springs to his lips because, believing that language is the key to all , human activity, he" is fluent in English. French, and German: Greek and Latin he mastered as a boy. of course, and he reads most Romance languages. He also relishes the public forum in which he performs as the author of “The Por-' tage to San Cristobal of A.H." His novel has been dramatised by Christopher

Hampton and directed by John Dexter.

George Steiner is a small, well-kept, 52-year-old, who leans forward urgently as words cascade from him, in an accent which bears traces of all his most fluent languages. “I lack the innocent creativity of a real artist,” he explains. “My novel is ideas and argument.” Rather. Steiner is a “passionate teacher." and his new class is a theatrical audience.

What will they learn? First, that Hitler's gift of speech is so seductive that he can. make evil appear acceptable. Because he believes that to provoke an audience is to honour it, Steiner's Hitler is allowed to rationalise the death of six million Jews, like this: In the first place, the idea of the 1000-year Reich was in-

spired by Zionism: “My racism is a parody of yours, a hungry imitation.”

And Jewish utopianism created a God who invented conscience; and made Marxism inevitable: “You are not men’s conscience, Jew. You are only his bad conscience. And we shall vomit j’ou so we may live and have'peace. A final solution.” Besides. Stalin was worse than him: “I was only a man of my time. . . a small man compared to Stalin. He perfected genocide when I was still a nameless scribbler in Munich." Moreover, without the holocaust, the Jews would have lacked the ruthlessness to sustain Israel: “The holocaust gave you the courage of injustice,- that made you drive the Arab out from his home, out of his fields, be-

cause he was lice-eaten and without resource, because he was in your divinely inspired wav.”

Even as devil’s advocate. Steiner observes that there are parts of Hitler's defence — especially the item about Stalin — which are difficult to refute. Elsewhere in the text, he insists that Hitler's massacre of the Jews left the Allied leaders — Roosevelt and Churchill,' as well as Stalin — quite unmoved. We are not therefore pounded with the glib allegation that we are all guilty, but Steiner does suggest that unless we remain constantly aware of the enormity of Hitler's crime, it will happen again. The dramatic lesson ends there, but Steiner uses an interview like a seminar in which he can cultivate his ideas. He sits back to explain

that Hitler and Stalin lowered the threshold of human dignity and awareness very profoundly, and the consequence of this is a condition for which he cannot find a single word (and if there was one. he would certainly know it). He was forced to use two: numb cant.

Only by virtue of numb cant. Steiner argues, is it possible to ignore the great crimes of our own time: the methodical destruction of the earth, and the West's cynical political support for dictatorships like Argentina. Turkey. Pakistan, and El Salvador because they are convenient “bulwarks."'

In his classes — which he teaches in England and the United States as well as Switzerland — Steiner observes that the children are no less immune to numb cant than their parents have become. “There is none of the whisky of hope, no utopian window; their insight into the limitations of human enterprise is too realistic.” Privately, Steiner finds the

students decent, but fears a dreadful conflict between private virtue and public disaster. These students lack moral fury, which quite evidently Steiner does not. though he tries to teach it: “I keep saying to my students: 'close the doors in your household and the thugs will take over the marketplace'." Since he says it so insistently and well, the size of the audience is growing, and like most good teachers. Steiner glows in response to the attention he is getting. He left me to be interviewed by Melvyn Bragg for a television programme. "Bragg wrote that I'd blown his head off.” reports Steiner. I don’t think he meant it. In the excitment, his threshold of linguistic awareness had dropped slightly.