Deep remembering

Outside No 83 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs in Montparnasse, there is an unobtrusive grey plaque commemorating the “romancier et essayiste” Manès Sperber, who lived there for the final twelve years of his life. Passers-by could be forgiven for wondering who he is. In our collective memory, this master of remembering, who rightfully claimed for himself the title Erinnerer (“rememberer”), has been largely forgotten. Yet Sperber – who wrote in German and French, and whose surname means “sparrowhawk”, appropriately for a writer of such acuity – was once regarded as one of the foremost intellectual voices in Europe. What happened to him?

To understand his intellectual engagement and work as a novelist of extraordinary qualities, one needs to know something of his biography. Born in 1905 into a Hassidic family in Zablotow, a shtetl in Austrian Galicia (now western Ukraine), the young Manès lost his religious faith when confronted with the gruesome realities of the First World War. When his family moved away from the danger zone of the front line to Vienna in 1916, his Judaism turned decidedly political. Having joined Hashomer Hatzair, a secular Labour Zionist youth movement, at the age of barely sixteen, he met Alfred Adler, the founder of individual psychology, whose work centred on the meaning of belonging, family and the individual’s relations to his community. Adler and his young “master student” turned away from Freud’s libido-oriented approach to psychoanalysis. On Adler’s behalf Sperber went to Berlin in 1927 to spread the gospel of individual psychology in what was then the European capital of progressive culture.

It was at this point that Sperber became an active member of the Communist Party. Already in 1932 his political commitment distanced him from Adler, who was determined to keep his conception of individual psychology free from any political involvement, including campaigning against National Socialism. Following a short period of imprisonment for communist activities in 1933 – he was released with other Austrian citizens on Hitler’s birthday, in a curious gesture of the Führer’s solidarity with his fellow countrymen – he spent one year in communist circles in Croatia, and found himself thereafter in Paris, working to resist European fascism. Yet his aim of joining the International Brigades in support of the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War was thwarted, and by 1937 Sperber had become so disillusioned about the value and purpose of ideologically motivated activity that he left the Communist Party in protest against Stalin’s purges. His new calling, he decided, was to write about these experiences. The first fruit of this endeavour was his study On the Analysis of Tyranny (1939), a precursor to The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) by Hannah Arendt, who curiously failed to acknowledge Sperber’s pioneering work.

Following the German occupation of France, Sperber and his young family escaped from Paris to the south of France where, in Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1940, he began work on what was to become the first volume of his novelistic trilogy Like a Tear in the Ocean. The story of Communist partisans fighting for both their cause and their conscience, the trilogy typifies Sperber’s engagement with the big questions of history. Once the deportation of Jews set in under the Vichy regime, Sperber fled to Zurich, where his family was able to join him later. Soon after the war the Sperber family moved back to Paris, where he stayed until the end of his life in 1984.

It is in the context of this biography that the new edition of Sperber’s selected works must be understood. Edited by three leading experts on Sperber’s life and work – his biographer Mirjana Stančić, Rudolf Isler and Wolfgang Müller-Funk, the president of the Sperber Society and spiritus rector of the entire three-volume edition – the 2,000 or so pages are richly rewarding. For what they present is a stunning case of “deep remembering”, understood as a spur to literary creativity. Sperber’s friend Arthur Koestler might easily have employed the former’s literary use of recollection in his seminal study The Act of Creation (1964); Sperber’s own method can be characterized as a variation on Nietzsche, of whom he was an enthusiastic reader. One passage in Thus Spoke Zarathustra stayed with him in particular, turning into a leitmotif for his own writings (in R. J. Hollingdale’s translation): “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-across and a down-going”. Even in one of his final books Sperber reuses this bridge motif by relating it to time and adding a significantly relativizing adverb: “Just a Bridge between Yesterday and Tomorrow”.

If there is something inevitably eclectic in the way we remember things past, writing about remembering comes across as comprehensive, concise and precise in Sperber’s work. Its Proustian quality is undeniable when we consider the scope and intensity of the recollections documented in these three volumes. But it is also necessarily selective. This is why Sperber could claim that all his writings, even his most coherent compositions, were in essence fragmentary.

The actual selection criteria for this edition remain rather opaque. It is not quite clear, for instance, why the reader gets only a comparatively marginal piece by Sperber on Adler (on the latter’s “Austrianness”), and not, at the very least, an excerpt of his early monograph on his “master”. But we are richly compensated for these shortcomings with masterly essays on Lenin, de Gaulle and Dostoevsky; on hatred, which pre-empts André Glucksmann’s later treatise on the subject; and on love, which can be read as an original afterthought to Stendhal. On page after page one is struck by just how relevant his observations remain in our era of cancel culture; reading him, we can learn again how to swim against the tide, not least because all his essays are replete with personal recollections. It is not for nothing that a fateful phrase from Macbeth accompanied, perhaps even haunted, Sperber when writing his autobiography: “All our yesterdays”.

In an age of extreme ideologies Sperber drew clear consequences from his life experience – above all, that man is subjected to a “dictatorship of lies”. With his friend André Malraux, he shared an understanding of the human condition as determined by fundamental anxiety; this understanding made him question and doubt everything, “especially the certainty claimed by those who promise unbound liberty and future happiness but, in reality, propagate sacrifice and submission” to absurd rules and regulations. This was the reason why, in 1968, Sperber refused to side with the student rebellion, which represented to him yet another example of violence overruling reason.

In the edition under review his novelistic trilogy is appropriately framed by his memoirs and essays. When Like a Tear in the Ocean appeared, first in French translation in the late 1940s and early 1950s, then as a trilogy in the original German in 1961, it was hailed as a European roman à clef and compared to War and Peace. But à clef to what, exactly? Perhaps to the fate of individuals confronted with ideological systems that begin as intellectual projects before becoming all too political. The trilogy shows how ideologically charged words first cancel each other out, then kill those whom the ominous and anonymous “system” declares to be dissidents. One of the main characters, Dojno Faber, succeeds in emancipating himself from the intellectual straitjackets of communist and fascist ideology in favour of a democratic and pluralist conception of community. But it is a rare victory.

The protagonists in Like a Tear in the Ocean are shipwrecked in the sea of time. It is ultimately only nature that provides an anchor, for example for the partisans fighting against each other over the “right course” in Dalmatia. The “unspeakable tenderness” of the way in which the evening light spreads over the landscape has a healing effect on the physically and psychologically wounded protagonists of this trilogy in their “journey without end” – perhaps because their destination has always been within them. Even in the preface to his trilogy Manès Sperber alludes to Nietzsche’s famous subtitle to Zarathustra when he calls his novel a book “written for everyone and no one”. But this is followed by a qualifier: it was in fact written, he claims, for those not yet born. Forty years after his death, this new edition helps us to remember a master of the past who wrote for the future.

Rüdiger Görner’s novel Lotmans Kunst appeared in autumn 2022. He founded the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature at the University of London in 2002

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