TS Eliot’s The Waste Land was published 100 years ago this month, in the bleakness that followed WWI. It is one of a number of works of literature of the period that stare into the abyss while seeking out meaning; in this, they can be held to prefigure the devastation of the Holocaust.

Eliot, who was famously antisemitic, draws on a scholarly range of ancient sources, including the Hebrew Bible, to portray the cultural fragmentation which led to the rise of fascism and the Shoah.

In a despair-ridden search for meaning amid breakdown, Eliot alludes to the fierce diatribes of prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel against their idolatrous people in lines such as these:

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.”

The anguish in the poem extends to Christian, Hindu and Buddhist literature, and to myth and legend, the subject of recent works by the anthropologists, James Frazer and Jessie Weston, on the universal quest to overcome the curse of drought and wasteland.

In his eclectic associative method, with its multitude of voices and styles, Eliot owed much to Ezra Pound, editor of The Waste Land — the poem is dedicated to Pound — and was in thrall to Joyce’s Ulysses, which appeared at the same time.

Yet the modern work which most deeply impressed Eliot in his poetry was Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness (1899). Constantly undercutting the moral idealism associated in the late-19th century with colonialism and imperialism, Conrad exposes the genocide of black Africans by Belgian colonialists in the Congo — the total was in the millions. Forcing the local population into slavery, the colonial masters worked them to death on the railway cut through the jungle for the rapid transport of goods, especially elephant tusks. Ivory is collected by traders such as Kurtz, a paragon of European Enlightenment idealism, whom Marlow, the narrator, is sent to find. He finds a ruthless, all-powerful dictator and mass murderer.

Conrad leaves no doubt of the malevolence of the human “heart of darkness”, the corruptibility of the Enlightenment (“the sunlight can be made to lie”), the transformation of Eden into a waste land, and the destruction of countless lives. Dying slaves move in a death-in-life, recalling the phantom Musselmänner in Primo Levi’s harrowing account of Auschwitz, of the typical inmate as “an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of thought is seen.”

Heart of Darkness, written a half-century before the Holocaust, suggests that Auschwitz in some respects (as the historian Yehuda Bauer wrote) did not deviate from human norms.
Here is Conrad on the African genocide:

“They were called criminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting shells, had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea. All their meagre breasts panted together, the violently dilated nostrils quivered, the eyes stared stonily uphill. They passed me within six inches, without a glance, with that complete death-like indifference of unhappy savages…

“I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly… Near the same tree two more bundles of acute angles sat with their legs drawn up. One, with his chin propped on his knees, stared at nothing, in an intolerable and appalling manner: his brother phantom rested its forehead, as if overcome with a great weariness; and all about others were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence.”

Kurtz, having abandoned restraint, is master of this evil: “Exterminate all the brutes.” Rotten to the core, a ruthless tyrant, plunderer and murderer, he lives in an impenetrable darkness of the heart, the hidden evil “where the sun never shines”; and he dies with the whispered cry, “The horror! The horror!”

Eliot returns continually in his poetry to Conrad’s hellish images of death-in-life, in lines such as these in The Waste Land:

“A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.”

He also returns to Conrad’s imagery of the hollowness of European civilisation, and the hypocrisies of so-called Enlightenment, as in The Hollow Men (1925):

“Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion…”

To Eliot, World War I confirmed the truth of human evil; as Conrad put it in the pre-war novel, Under Western Eyes (1911), “a belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness”.

This truth Conrad knew as a Polish child under Tsarist Russian rule. Born in Berdichev in 1857, about 100 miles west of Kiev, he was exiled with his parents, both revolutionaries, in 1862. After their early death, Conrad was raised by an uncle, then sent to Marseilles in 1874 to take up a seafaring career; he left the sea and became an English writer in his thirties.

Conrad’s disillusionment and despair at Russian totalitarianism and abuse of power and at the hollowness of European Enlightenment have many echoes in Russian Jewish literature, particularly the Hebrew poetry of Chaim Nachman Bialik. Both belonged to oppressed minorities in the Tsarist empire; both hated it and exposed social and psychological conditions leading to violent revolution; both were tormented by human frailty and self-deception, yet longed for a better world.

The satirical irony with which Conrad and Eliot portray Western ideals might be expected also in Levi’s account of Auschwitz. Yet to Levi Enlightenment still has meaning in the death camp, and he quotes Dante from memory, without irony, though enslaved, dressed in striped camp uniform, starving and uncertain of his survival to the next day, yet overpowered by a sudden flash of insight into Ulysses’ fatal exhortation to his men in Dante’s Hell, Canto 26, to explore the unexplored Atlantic:

“Think of your breed:
for brutish ignorance
Your mettle was not made;
you were made men,
To follow after knowledge
and excellence.”

In this moment, Levi forgets he is a slave: “As if I also was hearing it for the first time: like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment I forget who I am and where I am.” To Levi, Auschwitz, the total defacement of the human image, a negation of life and beauty, was the ultimate waste land: “Within its bounds not a blade of grass grows, and the soil is impregnated with the poisonous saps of coal and petroleum, and the only things alive are machines and slaves — and the former are more alive than the latter.”

Yet in Ulysses’ call for the continual human exploration of the unknown — including the Hell humankind can create on earth — Levi finds “perhaps the reason for our fate, for our being here today”.

This optimism resonates with ancient Jewish responses to catastrophe, turning despair to hope. Levi, amid the horror, in a moment of reprieve transforms the death camp into a site of hope, for the defeat of barbarism and the ever-renewed human quest for knowledge and excellence.

Eliot evidently never experienced a comparable epiphany of hope for civilisation. Nor did he recognize the tide of post-1918 antisemitism — reflected in his poems, such as Gerontion and Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar — as symptomatic of societal breakdown in The Waste Land, a betrayal of European civilization rooted in Jewish Scripture.

David Aberbach is Honorary Research Associate at the Environmental Change Institute, Oxford. He is author of ‘The Environment and Literature of Moral Dilemmas’he Essay