Arnold Schoenberg’s Contribution to Pro Zion or Looking at Pre-Holocaust European Jewish History with its “Sideshadows”

Abstract

Arnold Schoenberg’s Contribution to Pro Zion or Looking at Pre-Holocaust European Jewish History with its “Sideshadows” Klára Móricz (bio) In his book Language and Silence, George Steiner reads Kafka’s surrealist nightmares as foreshadows of horrors to come. Kafka, Steiner claims, was a prophet who “was possessed of a fearful premonition,” “saw, to the point of exact detail, the horror gathering,” and “prophesized the actual form of that disaster of Western humanism which Nietzsche and Kierkegaard,” other perceptive prophets, “had seen like an uncertain blackness on the horizon.” Steiner asserts that: Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis, which was understood by those who first heard the tale to be a monstrous dream, was to be the literal fate of millions of human beings. The very word for vermin, Ungeziefer, is a stroke of tragic clairvoyance; so the Nazis were to designate the gassed. “In the Penal Colony” foreshadows not only the technology of the death factories, but that special paradox of the totalitarian regime—the subtle, obscene collaboration of victim and torturer. Nothing written on the inward roots of Nazism is comparable, in exact perception, to Kafka’s image of the tormentor plunging, suicidally, into the cogs of the torture-engine.1 Steiner admits that “Kafka’s nightmare-vision may well have derived from private hurt and neurosis,” but insists that it nevertheless proves “the great artist’s possession of antennae which reach beyond the rim of the present and make darkness visible.” To intensify the emotional effect of his point, Steiner adds: “Members of Kafka’s immediate family perished in the gas ovens; Milena and Miss Grete B. (who may have borne Kafka’s child) died in concentration camps.”2 Steiner thus turns literature into a sensitive device that can foreshadow the future. But was it Kafka’s fiction that foreshadowed the future, or Steiner’s post-Holocaust perspective that retroactively cast its shadow back on Kafka’s literary work? Steiner, like many post-Holocaust writers, deliberately blurs the boundaries between literary narrative and history in order to intensify the rhetorical effect. Literary scholar Michael André Bernstein called Steiner’s [End Page 61] technique “backshadowing,” a narrative device that, in Bernstein’s formulation, “endows the past with the coherence of an inevitable and linear unfolding.” According to Bernstein, backshadowing “works by a kind of retroactive foreshadowing in which the shared knowledge of the outcome of a series of events by narrator and listener is used to judge the participants in those events as though they too should have known what was to come.”3 Backshadowing is not only a literary device—historical and literary narratives are frequently governed by the same underlying principles.4 As studies of historical narratives attest, backshadowing is often seen as an indispensable tool for organizing historical events into a logical story.5 The telling of European Jewish history, culminating in the Holocaust, is especially susceptible to backshadowing. As historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi declared, the image of the Holocaust is shaped “not at the historian’s anvil, but in the novelist’s crucible.”6 Because of the trauma of the Holocaust, the pre-Holocaust past recreated in our historical imagination is full of the shadows of the horrific future that awaited European Jewry. Inadvertently, then, we construct a unified past for those forced to partake in a unified tragic future. But in our effort to keep the memory of the Holocaust and those who perished in it alive, do we not also eliminate parts of the past that do not fit neatly into the historical narrative culminating in the Holocaust? Should we not try to resist the rhetorically effective technique of backshadowing to reestablish what the literary scholar Gary Saul Morson calls the “sideshadows” of the past, the unrealized possibilities eradicated by what actually happened?7 In this essay I demonstrate the hazards of backshadowing by illuminating a sideshadow of the pre-Holocaust past through an episode in the life of Arnold Schoenberg, a composer whose life and work has been frequently interpreted through a lens shaped by the Holocaust.8 My aim here is not to revisit Schoenberg’s complicated relationship to his Jewish identity, or to repeat the oft-told story...