One of the last great Jewish refugee intellectuals from Europe, George Steiner introduced European ideas and literature to Britain in a series of famous books of literary criticism. They included Language and Silence (1967) and In Bluebeard’s Castle (1971). He helped break the silence about the Holocaust in post-war British culture .
George Francis Steiner was born in Paris in 1929, the son of Viennese Jewish parents, Else (née Franzos) and Frederick George Steiner. He had one sister, Ruth. Their father was a senior lawyer at Austria’s central bank, the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, who had risen to meteoric eminence,according to Steiner, in his memoir, Errata. The family moved to Paris in 1924 because of Antisemitism in Vienna.
His father was a huge influence on the young George Steiner. “He embodied the tenor, the prodigality and glow of Jewish-European and Central European emancipation,” Steiner wrote. “The proud Judaism of my father waslike than of an Einstein or a Freud, one of messianic agnosticism. It breathed rationality, the promise of the Enlightenment and tolerance.”
George Steiner was educated at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly in Paris until the family fled to New York in 1940. He was one of only two Jewish children from his school who survived the war. After school in New York, he studied at the University of Chicago and at Harvard and in 1950 was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. His doctoral thesis at Oxford was initially failed and he became a leader writer at The Economist (1952-56) and then spent some years teaching in America and Austria.
In 1955, he married Zara Shakow, a New Yorker, who became a historian of international relations at Cambridge.
In 1960, he published his first book, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. The following year he became a founding Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge and published his second book, The Death of Tragedy. These two books established Steiner’s distinctive voice as a critic, writing about European literature and ideas, from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to Brecht; asking major questions about culture and humanity.
In 1964 he published his first book of fiction, Anno Domini, which introduced another central theme in Steiner’s work, the Holocaust, long before this became commonplace in Britain. He was not a historian. The questions that engaged him were about culture and the Holocaust. How could indisputably great writers and thinkers like the German philosopher Heidegger, embrace Nazism? How could Antisemitic violence emerge in the very heart of European culture? Why were Jews the main victims of Nazism?
Steiner was an outsider in several respects. A Jew, a European, a refugee, but also an academic who was more at home reviewing for The New Yorker and The Sunday Times than writing academic monographs.
He lectured to packed halls at Cambridge, introducing excited students to a new world: the great German-speaking central European intellectuals and writers of the late 19th and early 20th century, from Kafka and Rilke to Thomas Mann and Schoenberg; new ideas in anthropology and linguistics; but also the great figures of literary modernism, Joyce and TS Eliot, Proust and Pound.
Steiner was a prolific writer and essayist. His best-known works during the 1970s and 80s included In Bluebeard’s Castle (1971), Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (1972) and After Babel (1975). His other great passion was teaching. From 1974-94 he was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva. He continued broadcasting. In 1978 he gave the first Bronowski Memorial Lecture on the BBC and regularly appeared on Channel 4’s Voices, BBC 2’s The Late Show and ITV’s The South Bank Show, talking on subjects from fin de siècle Vienna to French intellectuals. He was a guest on Start the Week and Desert Island Discs.
His most controversial work of fiction was the novella, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., about Hitler (1980, adapted for the stage in 1982). In 1996 he published major selections of his fiction (The Deeps of the Sea) and essays (No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1996). A selection of his essays for The New Yorker, where he was chief literary critic for 31 years, appeared in 2008. Steiner was survived by his wife Zara and children David and Deborah.
David Herman
George Steiner: born April 22, 1929. Died February 3 2020
