RIP George Steiner

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

"As a young academic all doors in America were open to me, I was offered not one but two professorships in comparative literary studies. But my father said: 'If you stay in America, Hitler has won.' (...) The same evening I told my young American wife: 'We go to Europe.'"

George Steiner (2014)

I've read only his Heidegger book but remember it as remarkably fair.

"... In short: more consciously, more violently than any other language, and in ways that may indeed have been influenced by Dada and its desperate call for a totally new human tongue with which to voice the desperation and hopes of the age, the German language after the first world war seeks a break with its past. Endowed with a peculiarly mobile syntax and with the capacity to fragment or fuse words and word-roots almost at will, German looks to elect solitaries in its past, to Master Eckhardt, to Böhme, to Hölderlin, and to such innovations as Surrealism and the cinema in its present, for instigations to renewal. The STERN DER ERLÖSUNG [by Franz Rosenzweig], Bloch's messianic tracts, Barth's exegetics, and, above all, SEIN UND ZEIT are speech-acts of the most revolutionary kind.
   It is only in this linguistic and emotive context that Heidegger's method becomes intelligible. SEIN UND ZEIT is an immensely original product. But it has distinct affinities to the exactly contemporaneous constellation of the apocalyptic. Like them, it would overcome the language of the immediate German past and forge a new speech both by virtue of radical invention and by a selective return to 'forgotten' sources ... "

George Steiner: Heidegger. Chicago 1991: The University of Chicago Press, pp. XI-XII.


+ ... Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg<https://www.zeit.de/thema/zweiter-weltkrieg> kehrte Steiner nach Europa zurück. Auf die Frage, weshalb er Amerika wieder verließ, antwortete Steiner in einem Gespräch mit der Literaturkritikerin Iris Radisch in der ZEIT zu seinem 85. Geburtstag<https://www.zeit.de/2014/17/george-steiner>: "Mir standen als junger Akademiker in Amerika alle Türen offen, man bot mir gleich zwei Lehrstühle in vergleichender Literaturwissenschaft an. Doch mein Vater sagte: 'Wenn du in Amerika bleibst, hat Hitler gewonnen.' (…) Am selben Abend sagte ich zu meiner jungen amerikanischen Frau: Wir gehen nach Europa."

Steiner sprach fließend Deutsch, aber ebenso perfekt Englisch, Französisch und Italienisch ... +

https://www.zeit.de/kultur/literatur/2020-02/george-steiner-schriftsteller-essayist-kritiker-tot-cambridge


Am 03.02.20 um 22:35 schrieb Mark Kohut:

https://twitter.com/toddgitlin/status/1224445002043887617?s=20

>From Language & Silence, read on my own first year university thru
some others---

If only I had been smart and disciplined enough to learn all i could have
from his work.
--
Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
.