“A Self-Displaced Person”: Peter Szondi, Being-Jewish, Comparative Literature

The association of Peter Szondi with the “Jewish question”, namely his experience of being-Jewish, the experience of exile and of (non-)belonging, tradition and its secrets, memories, and states of oblivion, are documented in his letters and can also be traced in his scholarly writings. Better argued: Szondi’s writings reveal, albeit in concealment, impressions, visions and ideas, tensions, anxieties, affinities, and acts of resistance towards the Jewish world. Szondi’s broken affinities to Judaism were, however, not separated from, but rather associated with his concerns regarding his own vocation, Beruf, as a scholar of Comparative Literature. In what follows I will introduce – in the form of “Notes” – a few lines of thought suggesting certain correspondences between Szondi’s reflection of being Jewish and his scholarly and institutional engagement, mainly in the 1960s, during his tenure at the Freie Universität Berlin. Our point of departure is Szondi’s statement, confession perhaps, in a letter to Gershom Scholem from May 1969, reflecting himself as a “self-displaced person”. This sentence addresses his biographical experience as a Jewish refugee from Hungary, a survivor of the Nazi camp of Bergen Belsen, who was saved with his parents by the Kasztner Transport, an emigrant (first to Switzerland [1944] and later to West Germany [1959]), who refers to himself as being a man of no real homeland, and who often admits his foreignness, solitude, and distress. Szondi, who – following his own confession – forgot, never learnt, or learnt improperly (verlernt) the meaning of being at home (Heimat), also provides in his letters a keen, critical, perspective on the conditions of Comparative Literature. Szondi’s experience and expression of his Judaism, anchored in displacement (forced or voluntary), can be traced as a figure, a line of thought, interwoven in his understanding of Comparative Literature as an area of study, a research enterprise, and a cultural paradigm. Displacement, while referring in Szondi’s statement to the consequences of deportation, imprisonment, refuge, the de/resettlement of the Jews during the 1940s, attesting to the experience of (chosen) migration, hints at certain conditions of existence (non-belonging), signifying, however, degrees of freedom, emancipation, and paths of escape. This experience, we argue, can be traced as one of the conditions of his work, framing his path (his method) as a scholar of Critical Theory and a reader of Comparative Literature. The argument of this essay is based on a few of Szondi’s letters, his correspondence with Ivan Nagel, Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno, Paul Celan, and Emil Staiger, among others. In Szondi’s letters one finds major references attesting to the experience of Judaism associated with reflections of displacement, which are not detached from the core issues of literature and scholarship. Reference to these letters thus implies a short survey of “intellectual biography”: The letters are acts-of-writing, in which Szondi’s life is re-presented. A strong sense of subjectivity, albeit a fragile, personal attitude is expressed in his letters. However, the letters also involve dialogue, responses, and debates. The letters contain not only a “date” (time and place, singularity) and a “signature” (proper name, subjectivity) but also an “addressee”. The letter is written for and sent towards – the other. Letters themselves are attached to acts of displacement. They signify departures, travels, paths, and detours, but not without the hope for reception. The letter is the documentation of a conversation, deferred, somewhat “ghostly”, of displaced, absent bodies. An early letter by Peter Szondi from April 1953, enclosed in his correspondence with his friend Ivan Nagel, presents an attempted interpretation of a short story, a fragment by Franz Kafka (1883−1924), “ein kleines altes Wandschränkchen”, a little, …