Speech at PEN Berlin congress »The Trick is to Keep Talking«
2. December 2022, Festsaal Kreuzberg, Berlin
On Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt: Of the Torments of Survival
By Herbert Wiesner
Dear friends, dear guests,
my keynote speaks of the torments of survival, of the experiences of our oldest member and co-founder Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt. And since I myself belong to the elders, I also want to place a future into this keynote: I dedicate it to the young Iranian women who wish to keep their foreheads, their heads free..
Jürgen Arthur Goldschmidt, born the son of a Hamburg senior appellate judge in May 1928 in Reinbek near Hamburg, had the privilege of being sent abroad not with one of the Kindertransports, but by his parents.
He had just turned ten when his »expulsion« to Florence began; his brother, four years older, accompanied him at first. The parents had shown their children pictures of the towers and domes of the Tuscan metropolis. Thus might the Grand Tour of somewhat older sons have begun. The »J« had not yet been stamped into their passports. They would not have known what it meant, yet their lives in Germany were considered »unworthy«. As the train left Hamburg Central Station, father and mother »took off their hats so that the child would see them one last time as they were. On the platform, which narrowed in front of them, they grew ever smaller«.
Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt has varied and modulated this traumatic farewell, the torments of hiding, the shame of humiliation, again and again in several books and in both of his languages of writing since »The Day of the Mirror« (1982, translated by Peter Handke), above all in the stories »The Liberation« and »The Way Out«. He has—almost—only this subject, and he has no choice. Anyone willing to open themselves to the urgency and the unprotected yet never shapeless self-confession of this French-German writer will read whole strands of this unique material breathlessly, even on repeated occasions. Goldschmidt’s readers experience the repetitions as a special appeal: an intensification, a re-presenting, and also a fictionalization in the artistic sense.
Repetition objectifies and ritualizes the individual suffering that insists on continuation, because otherwise the guilt toward the victims of the Shoah would be unbearable. The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst William G. Niederland, who likewise fled via Italy in 1934, described this »survivor syndrome« as the »soul murder« committed against the survivors.
Sparing his readers nothing
The distantly related to the Mendelssohns and the Pringsheims, Georges-Arthur found his saving »The Magic Mountain« in March 1939 in the »seclusion« of the Collège Florimontane near Sallanche in the Alps, an experience that shaped his literary work, which only emerged very late. Contemporaries of about the same age, such as Enzensberger or Christa Wolf, who did not have to flee, had already reached the zenith of their creativity by around 1980.
In his late work »The Way Out«, the pupil perceives the dormer of the boarding school as an inverted ship’s hull. He sees himself inside it as a cabin boy, abused and beaten by the sailors. In reality, he has once again been locked in an attic room.
Although he is nearly grown and the war is over, the matron punishes him with rods, the cane, and a steel ruler on whose edge he must kneel. Still naked from the chastisement, he is locked for three days in the detention cell, on bread and water. Or he is put outside the door in winter. Since he is considered an orphan, there is no one from whom he might have received mittens and winter clothing. He is proud that his classmates are ashamed of his freezing hands. The thought that others might »make fun of his blue-violet welts« torments him, yet to him the punishment appears as a privilege »otherwise granted only to young aristocrats«.
Elsewhere the narrator says that he was accorded »the honor of punishment«. Half exposed, he is »paraded« before the eyes of his classmates. Dream and trauma merge in Goldschmidt into a suffering in which punishment is experienced as the only way out. In the self-assurance through punishment there appears something like the experience of »holiness«. The protagonist, who also gives himself the name Arthur Kellerlicht, registers his passion and stuffs the scraps of notes into the cracks of a wall. Only pain leads him to a ritual form of Jewish faith. Many, though not all, of the torments he endured accord with what we know from the accounts of abuse victims in ecclesiastical and secular institutions.
The inner life of language
The writer, who can formulate and then also modulate so gently, has spared his readers nothing, not even the involuntary share of his own shame, whether it be masturbation or bed-wetting. The kitchen work that Arthur Kellerlicht has to do as »Lisette«, wearing an apron under the guidance of the cheerful cook, begins, for the boarding-school pupil, »to become a delicacy«. (Her successor, the gaunt cook, then almost denounced him to the German occupying authorities.)
Under pre-emancipatory conditions one is probably moving here in the realm of humiliating forced feminization, which can be experienced as pleasure. In conversation with Tim Trzaskalik, Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt spoke of an »erotic punishment-fun« and pointed out that the French »fessé« for whipping »is, after all, a beautiful word«, one that »is entirely erotically charged«.
Goldschmidt’s highly complex book »The Way Out« allows such interpretations, but what he had set out to tell was much more than yet another account of a life lived. He marked out the literary frame of reference for his writing, pointing to Sigmund Freud’s text »A Child Is Being Beaten«, to Handke’s »Kaspar«, Rousseau’s »Confessions«, and again and again to the novel »Anton Reiser« by Karl Philipp Moritz. »À rebours« by Joris-Karl Huysmans, rediscovered by Michel Houellebecq, also belongs to this system, in which masochism is understood as an act of »integration«: only when the beaten one experiences pleasure does he regain his self.
At the very end of this moving book, even this way out into survival appears as a becoming-guilty in relation to a schoolmate of Arthur Kellerlicht who was executed by the SS.
The narrator of soul murder, honored with the Breitbach Prize and other high awards, has, as a lucid essayist and literary scholar, analyzed the inner life of language and meditated on the untranslatabilities of French and German. He loves the bright, radiant days, and »The Way Out« ends with a remembrance of his children and a tribute to his beloved wife. On the hills of Paris’s lively Belleville district he enjoys »the indigo-blue rumbling of the metropolis«.
* Herbert Wiesner, born in 1937, was director of the Literaturhaus Berlin until 2003. From 2009 to 2013 he was Secretary General of the PEN Center Germany