Franz Baermann Steiner: A Stranger in the World

By Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon

Franz Baermann Steiner (1909-52) provided the vital link between the intellectual culture of central Europe and the Oxford Institute of Anthropology in its post-Second World War years.

This book demonstrates his quiet influence within anthropology, which has extended from Mary Douglas to David Graeber, and how his remarkable poetry reflected profoundly on the slavery and murder of the Shoah, an event which he escaped from. Steiner’s concerns including inter-disciplinarity, genre, refugees and exile, colonialism and violence, and the sources of European anthropology speak to contemporary concerns more directly now than at any time since his early death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Dec 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781800732711

Jeremy Adler

Jeremy Adler is Professor Emeritus of German and Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London. He has published and edited books on many topics, including Goethe, visual poetry, Kafka, exile literature, Elias Canetti and Hölderlin. His co-authored biography of Franz Baermann Steiner was published in 2021. He reviews and writes for the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

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FRANZ BAERMANN STEINER

Methodology and History in Anthropology

Series Editors:

David Parkin, Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford

David Gellner, Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford

Nayanika Mathur, Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford

Recent volumes:

Volume 42

Franz Baermann Steiner: A Stranger in the World

Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon

Volume 41

Anthropology and Ethnography Are NOT Equivalent: Reorienting Anthropology for the Future

Edited by Irfan Ahmad

Volume 40

Search After Method: Sensing, Moving, and Imagining in Anthropological Fieldwork

Edited by Julie Laplante, Ari Gandsman and Willow Scobie

Volume 39

After Society: Anthropological Trajectories out of Oxford

Edited by João Pina-Cabral and Glenn Bowman

Volume 38

Total Atheism: Secular Activism and the Politics of Difference in South India

Stefan Binder

Volume 37

Crossing Histories and Ethnographies: Following Colonial Historicities in Timor-Leste

Edited by Ricardo Roque and Elizabeth G. Traube

Volume 36

Engaging Evil: A Moral Anthropology

Edited by William C. Olsen and Thomas J. Csordas

Volume 35

Medicinal Rule: A Historical Anthropology of Kingship in East and Central Africa

Koen Stroeken

Volume 34

Who Are ‘We’? Reimagining Alterity and Affinity in Anthropology

Edited by Liana Chua and Nayanika Mathur

Volume 33

Expeditionary Anthropology: Teamwork, Travel and the ‘Science of Man’

Edited by Martin Thomas and Amanda Harris

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/methodology-and-history-in-anthropology

FRANZ BAERMANN STEINER

A Stranger in the World

Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon

First published in 2022 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2022 Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Adler, Jeremy D., author. | Fardon, Richard, author.

Title: Franz Baermann Steiner : a stranger in the world / Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon.

Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2022. | Series: Methodology and history in anthropology ; Volume 42 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021028824 (print) | LCCN 2021028825 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800732704 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800732711 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Steiner, Franz Baermann, 1909-1952. | Steiner, Franz Baermann, 1909-1952--Influence. | Anthropology--Europe--History--20th century. | Anthropologists--England--Biography. | Poets--England--Biography. | Jewish authors--Biography.

Classification: LCC GN21.S775 A74 2022 (print) | LCC GN21.S775 (ebook) | DDC 301.092 [B]--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021028824

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021028825

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-270-4 hardback

ISBN 978-1-80073-271-1 ebook

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction. A Brief Life

Part I. An Oriental in the West

Chapter 1. Beginnings: The Prague German-Jewish Community

Chapter 2. Student Days in Prague and Jerusalem

Chapter 3. First Ethnological Studies in Vienna and London, and Fieldwork in Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia

Chapter 4. The Impact of the Early English Years

Chapter 5. The Exile

Chapter 6. The Oxford Anthropologist

Part II. Orientpolitik, Value and Civilization: The Social Thought

Chapter 7. Beyond ‘Culture Circles’: The Field Trip Revisited

Chapter 8. Zionism, Political and Cultural Critique

Chapter 9. On Slavery

Chapter 10. Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard

Chapter 11. Labour and Value

Chapter 12. Civilization and Taboo

Chapter 13. Simmel and Aristotle

Part III. The Poet Anthropologist

Chapter 14. Conquests

Chapter 15. Kafka in England

Chapter 16. The Chief Sociological Principle

Chapter 17. Suffering and Value

Chapter 18. In Search of the Universal Mathesis

References

Manuscript Sources

F.B.S.’s Unpublished Writings in the Schiller-Nationalmuseum, Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar

Unpublished Letters to and about F.B.S. and Memoirs Concerning Him at the Schiller-Nationalmuseum, Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar

F.B.S.’s Unpublished Writings and Other Sources in the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford

F.B.S.’s Letters to Veza and Elias Canetti, Private Collection, Zürich

Letters and Other Written Communications to the Authors

Published Sources

Selection of F.B.S.’s Published Writings

Published Sources Cited

Index of Names

Index of Subjects

FIGURES

Figure 1.1 Suse Steiner and Franz Steiner. Circa 1925. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

Figure 2.1 Suse Steiner, 1932, photographer František Drtikol. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

Figure 2.2 Franz Steiner after his return from Palestine, 1932, photographer probably František Drtikol. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

Figure 3.1 Ruthenian farmsteads, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

Figure 3.2 Ruthenian market, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

Figure 3.3 Gypsy homes in Ruthenia, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

Figure 3.4 Gypsy school, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

Figure 5.1 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky in her living room-cum-studio in Amersham with Veza Canetti, 1940 or shortly after. © Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust 2021.

Figure 5.2 Elias Canetti, Grinzing, Vienna, 1936. © Johanna Canetti.

Figure 5.3 H.G. Adler after his return from the camps, 1945. © The Estate of H.G. Adler.

Figure 6.1 Franz Steiner and Iris Murdoch, Trafalgar Square, autumn 1952, unknown photographer. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

Figure 6.2 Iris Murdoch, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

Figure 7.1 Ruthenian shepherd, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

Figure 7.2 Ruthenian pipe player, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

Figure 7.3 Uniate religious procession in Ruthenia, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

Figure 7.4 Gypsy girl in Ruthenia, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

Figure 7.5 Ruthenian girl, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

Figure 7.6 Orthodox Jewish youth, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

Figure 7.7 Ruthenian women at market, summer 1937, photographer Franz Steiner. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

Figure 17.1 Heinrich and Marta Steiner, Prague, 1938. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

Figure 18.1 Franz Steiner, circa 1952, photographer H.G. Adler. © Estate of Franz Baermann Steiner.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is possible to appreciate Aristotle’s sociological thought much better now than during the last few centuries; and this is very significant, not only for the stage reached in the development of sociological reasoning but generally for our cultural situation.

—Franz Steiner on Aristotle’s sociology

Two and a half decades have passed since we embarked on a project to edit and introduce Franz Steiner’s more important anthropological works to English-language readers in two volumes and to contextualize them with a selection of his political, aphoristic and poetic writings. We did so, as we put it then, ‘In the conviction that today’s intellectual climate … is a more auspicious moment for their appreciation’ than that of their composition (1999a/b: x). The reviews welcoming the collections proved our hopes were not misplaced;¹ and, as we explain in our Introduction, numerous hands in subsequent years have steadily built an impressive scholarly edifice on the modest new foundations we laid. The two Introductions we wrote for those volumes had been conceived as a single biographical work, and they were published as such in the definitive German-language edition of Steiner’s work.² So, we were delighted that Marion Berghahn, who took the risk of bringing our original publication into public view, reacted supportively to our intention to reunite the two halves of our English biography, in a revised, corrected and wholly updated form. Although we cannot be sure to have sourced all the latest literature, we are confident that this new version is up-to-date as regards research on Steiner and his circle and marks a decisive step beyond our original thoughts.

Our feeling more than two decades ago now feels even more appropriate:

Steiner would have recognized with approval the origins of many of the changes in our sociological reasoning and cultural situation that have occurred in the fifty [now seventy] years since he settled in Great Britain and set about transforming himself into an English-speaking anthropologist, though we can presume he would have expressed his inimitable doubts about others. It is a conducive moment, therefore, to consider his ideas together and to contextualize them ….

We might have gone further. Our subtitle – adapted from a late poem of Steiner’s that contains the line ‘What a stranger life is in the world’ (2000: 459) – reflects aspects of Steiner’s position as a poet-anthropologist-aphorist that we think bear underlining. Steiner’s stranger- or outsider-hood, in Simmel’s sense, is vital to understanding the circumstances of the insights he brought to mid-twentieth century anthropology. From Goethe’s day in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) down to Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), the figure of the outsider has formed a focal point in Central European thinking, and Steiner would have been cognizant of these strangers, who pay for their marginality with their lives. Moreover, among the favourite poets with whom he identified as a writer were Hölderlin and Trakl, who also lived on the margins. Steiner’s poem ‘To Hölderlin’ replicates the plural marginalities that Steiner experienced, chiefly as a German Jew in Prague and as a refugee in Oxford (2000: 81–82):

Homelands remained, the lands of the flights remained,

The paths of the flight …

…

Homelands remained, but who

Dared to return home …

…

The lands of refuge remain, the other lands,

Lands, which border and preserve their borders,

And their people with limited opinions

Seem pacified from long ago.

Is it concord? Alas, no.

Steiner nested his riven identity within a complex geography defined by the political discord of the longue durée. But if he shaped his alterity in terms of sociopolitical realities, there was also a religious dimension, which was that of the Zionist’s longing for Jerusalem. It is testimony to Steiner’s acceptance of his fissured identity, moreover, that as a Jew in Britain during the war he could devote a poem to an admired German poet: he invokes the poet’s ‘perfect pain’ and recalls the hostilities in images such as that of the ‘confused people’ (‘Volk’) and their ‘bleeding joy’. It is an ironic twist that the most sublime German poet, in the hands of a Jewish writer, should become a symbol of Germany’s conscience. As a well-read Prager, Steiner would also have been familiar with the theme of metaphysical homelessness as propounded by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, which could be defined by a distance from society or from God (Harper 1967) and tended to lead to pessimism or nihilism. Steiner grounded his solitude in his Judaism. There is no trace of nihilism in his work. To these complexities should be added those of Heidegger’s ‘uncanniness of being’ (‘Unheimlichkeit des Daseins’) in Being and Time (1949: 189). It is unclear when Steiner first read Heidegger, but the terminus ante quem is June 1950, the date he inscribed in his copy of Being and Time, which has survived in his library. This gives the best definition of Steiner’s existential otherness: ‘The un-homeliness must be understood as the most fundamental phenomenon existentially-ontologically.’ These various streams give an account of how Steiner’s self-understanding developed in the absence of an unequivocally defined national or ethnic identity. At the personal level, Steiner’s writing of poetry conflicts diametrically with the standard view of the poetic subject from Goethe to Celan: instead of the writing ‘self’, Steiner employs several, differently grounded voices in many poems. Something similar happens in his scholarship. Since Malinowski, it had been customary to treat the anthropological method of participant observation relation as consisting of an observer and the observed, but Steiner prepares us to consider a series of polar complexities, or multiple frames of reference. To explore his origins is to anticipate his goals. Or, to put this another way: not just where he and his ideas came from but what came with them, the radical notion not simply of the individual who is estranged but of the estranged individual as a marked instance of human life as a stranger in the world. On these grounds, we would contest David Mills’s claim, citing Steiner among others, that there is a risk that in ‘focusing too closely on personalities … intellectual genealogies quickly become disciplinary charters’ (2008: 20). Our intention was the converse of this, to reveal a complexity of personal influences that are captured neither by histories of departments nor by boundary-marking exercises of disciplines; to present what João de Pina-Cabral has insightfully dubbed his ‘silenced legacy’ to European anthropology (2020: 210). The range of Steiner’s work by far exceeds the intellectual competence even two authors from different disciplines can bring to bear. We are increasingly struck by Steiner’s insistence, at a time of methodological holism, of the importance of the part and its complex adjacencies: its attachment or detachment, inclusion or exclusion, repetition and transformation and so on. His commitment to take so little for granted.

We again offer our expressions of gratitude from twenty years ago, particularly conscious that few of those who wrote us personal communications then are any longer able to receive our thanks.

That we are able to reflect on Steiner’s life and work at all is thanks, in the first instance, to those without whom his anthropological writings would not have been preserved in a useable fashion: H.G. Adler, as Steiner’s literary executor, preserved Steiner’s papers and devoted himself tirelessly to the promotion of his Nachlaß. Steiner’s close friend Dr Esther Frank typed up an invaluable three-volumed selection of his aphorisms. Laura Bohannan and Paul Bohannan each prepared two essays and one book of Steiner’s for publication. Sadly, one of the books never appeared. Laura Bohannan edited the texts broadly concerned with religion: Taboo, ‘Enslavement and the Early Hebrew Lineage System’ and ‘Chagga Truth’; for his part, Paul Bohannan edited the papers predominantly concerned with political economy: ‘Notes on Comparative Economics’, ‘Towards a Classification of Labour’ and an edition of ‘A Prolegomena to a Comparative Study of the Forms of Slavery’, which was not published in his lifetime. We are grateful to Laura and Paul for their kind encouragement in several transatlantic telephone calls. Alfons Fleischli’s doctoral dissertation provided an invaluable starting point for our study of Steiner’s life and works; he kindly made his correspondence available to us, and even following publication of a new biography by Ulrich van Loyen, we remain indebted to his biographical chapters on Steiner.

We received overwhelming support from the then surviving friends and colleagues of Steiner’s Oxford period. Of his three living colleagues at the Institute: Mary Douglas and M.N. Srinivas each wrote memoirs that introduced the two edited volumes, and Mary also spoke to us on several occasions about Franz. Louis Dumont wrote us a moving private letter. Several other of Steiner’s contemporaries at Oxford or in London responded to written or personal enquiries, sometimes at great length: Paul Baxter, David Brokensha, Kenelm Burridge, Anand Chandavarkar, Ian Cunnison, Sir Raymond Firth, Ioan Lewis, John Middleton, Rodney Needham, William Newell, Julian Pitt-Rivers and David Pocock.

Iris Murdoch, one of the few readers familiar with his private writings, profoundly encouraged us in our aim to revive interest in the writings of Franz Steiner and particularly championed the plan to publish his aphorisms. Thanks to her generosity and that of her husband, John Bayley, we were able to quote extracts from Miss Murdoch’s private journal on Steiner written in 1952–53, which were kindly made available to us by Dame Iris’s official biographer, Peter Conradi, who also provided us with helpful information after the publication of our original volumes, which is included here. Elias Canetti responded to our request to write a memoir on Steiner, published elsewhere, which has proved invaluable. Johanna Canetti kindly provided us with copies of Steiner’s letters to her father and permission to quote from his works as well as an unknown photograph of her father; Sybille Miller-Aichholz generously transcribed for us Steiner’s letters to her; and David Wright kindly lent us Steiner’s letters to him. Michael Hamburger was unfailing in his support of Steiner, both through his translations and his own writings. Mary Donovan thoughtfully shared her personal memories with us, and Franz’s cousin, Lise Seligmann, wrote and talked to us about Franz Steiner and took a constant interest in the publication of his works. Our efforts to promote Steiner’s work in Germany were generously supported by the poet and publisher Michael Krüger and the social scientist and founder of the splendid Geisteswissenschaften page on the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Henning Ritter. We would also like to extend a special word of thanks to Thedel von Wallmoden, publisher of Wallstein Verlag, who took it upon himself to issue a generous three-volumed edition of Steiner’s collected works, thereby for the first time bringing him to the attention of a wider public in the German-speaking world.

Franz Baermann Steiner’s Nachlaß has been housed at the Schiller-Nationalmuseum, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, since November 1997. We remain grateful to Herr Jochen Meyer and the late Dr Inge Belke for making these papers available to us and to Herr Ulrich von Bülow for further assisting us in our research. The DLA has been quite exceptional in its support of our work, a fact we are honoured to record. The DLA also mounted a prestigious exhibition in 1998 curated by Dr Marcel Atze, ‘Ortlose Botschaft. Der Freundeskreis H.G. Adler, Elias Canetti und Franz Baermann Steiner im englischen Exil’ (‘Placeless Message’), which for the first time drew attention to this ‘circle of friendship’. The exhibition was also shown at important locations in Prague, Vienna and Berlin.

The wide-ranging nature of Steiner’s prodigious scholarship would have overcome our flagging attempts to follow his footsteps to an even greater degree without the help of numerous scholars (we retain their affiliation at the time): David Arnold – Professor of South Asian History at SOAS; Professor Yehuda Bacon – Bezalel Art School, Jerusalem, for help with a reference on Hugo Bergman; Christian Bartolf – Director of the Gandhi-Informations-Zentrum in Berlin; Matthew Bell – Goethe scholar and historian of eighteenth-century German anthropology at King’s College London; D.C.K. Glass, also at King’s College London – German scholar and bibliographer extraordinary; Professor Sir Ernst Gombrich – formerly of the Warburg Institute, University of London; Linda Greenlick – Chief Librarian of the Jewish Chronicle; Michael Knibb – Samuel Davidson Professor of Old Testament Studies, King’s College London; Jeremy Lawrance – Professor of Spanish, University of Manchester; Mike Morris – Librarian of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology of Oxford University; Robert Pynsent – Professor of Czech Language and Literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies; David Riches – of the University of St. Andrews as an ethnographer of the Arctic and subarctic; J.W. Rogerson – Emeritus Professor of Theology at the University of Sheffield who gave us his views on Steiner’s ‘Hebrew Lineage’ article; Gabor Schabert – freelance scholar and linguist who provided us with an evaluation of Steiner’s unpublished first dissertation, on which we have relied for our assessment; Erhard Schüttpelz – wide-ranging scholar in the social sciences who filled some interesting bibliographical gaps and kept us up-to-date with current developments in Germany; Chris Thornhill – scholar of German social and political theory and sociologist of law, University of Manchester, for whose views on Steiner’s Simmel lectures and German social science we are grateful; Zdeněk Vašiček – historian of archaeology, political scientist and expert on all things Czech and Slovak; Bernard Wasserstein – President of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies for reading our accounts of Steiner’s Zionism and the relevant texts; Shamoon Zamir – scholar of English and American literature at King’s College London, who helped us with ethnopoetics. Professor David Parkin, then of SOAS University of London saw the link between our interests, brought us together and helped us through the sources at Oxford. Chris Rojek grasped the point of our project quickly and supported it consistently. Marion Berghahn put us in her debt by taking the risk of allowing full rein to our initial ambitions for a two-volume edition of Steiner’s works and subsequently saw the merit of publishing our extensively rewritten and extended introductions together as a freestanding intellectual biography.

Michael Mack’s doctoral research at the University of Cambridge related Franz Steiner’s work to that of Steiner’s friend Elias Canetti. This has now been published (2001). We were grateful to Michael for his sincere support of this project and for permission to make use of his draft translation of ‘On the Process of Civilization’. His premature death is a profound loss for the field. Nicolas Ziegler, formerly a doctoral student at King’s College London, who wrote a thesis on Steiner’s poetry, was a constant support, too; he kindly made copies of many of Steiner’s letters and unpublished manuscripts for us and also made available two unpublished research papers, which we cite.

In rendering extracts from Steiner’s Conquests, Jeremy Adler was helped by the poet Franz Wurm, who checked the translations against the originals and made many suggestions that were gratefully adopted, with the aim of reproducing Steiner’s idiosyncrasies to the maximum extent compatible with English usage.

More than twenty years on, our remaining time is in our own hands. In the 1990s, when both in post, we were grateful to our Colleges for granting us periods of sabbatical leave in the academic year 1997–98 that enabled us to complete our research and editing. Grants from the Research Committees of the School of Humanities, King’s College London, and the School of Oriental and African Studies (both of the University of London) allowed us to engage the services of Carol Tully and Lisa Rowland as research assistants and of Christel Ahmad and Mary Warren, without whose help we could not have brought our original editorial project to completion.

The intervening years have seen us accumulate further intellectual and practical debts: we renew thanks to our co-workers in this field, Erhard Schüttpelz and Carol Tully, as well as to the late John Middleton for personal letters following the publication of the volumes we edited. Grateful acknowledgement is made of João de Pina-Cabral (for a detailed reading), Gesa Dane, Chris Hann and Martyn Rady (for pointing us to recent scholarship on Ruthenia and help in understanding the circumstances in the 1930s), Ulrich van Loyen and David Wengrow (for the text we quote explaining the significance of Steiner’s thought for the volume he had completed as co-author just before David Graeber’s premature death). Frances Carey, Chair of the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, provided us with a photograph of Marie-Louise von Motesiczky and Veza Canetti, as well as an image of Marie-Louise von Motesiczky’s painting of Franz Steiner and Elias Canetti, entitled ‘Conversation in the Library’, now at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, Schiller-Nationalmuseum. We are most grateful both to Frances Carey, the Chair of the Trust, and to the other Trustees for permission to reproduce these images, and for a generous grant to support reproduction in colour. In order of our encounter with them, Tom Bonnington, Melissa Gannon, Caroline Kuhtz and Sarah Sibley have expertly (and gently) guided us through the editorial and production processes at Berghahn.

Over twenty years ago, we acknowledged Eva Adler and Catherine Davies as constant supports. Happily, that circumstance is unchanged. We continue still to learn more than even we expected from the privilege of editing and thinking about Franz Baermann Steiner’s writings. The friendship we formed while doing so has deepened in the intervening years.

J.A. and R.F.

London 2021

Notes

1. See for instance, Henning Ritter, 2001 Times Literary Supplement 2 March, pp. 30–31; N.J. Allen, 2001 Comparative Criticism 23: 343–47; Aram Yengoyan, 2001, ‘On the Question of Heritage and Hierarchy in British Social Anthropology’, American Anthropologist 104(1): 334–39; Ritchie Robertson, 2000, Journal of European Studies 30(118): 242–44; Anselme Guezo, 1999, Sociologus Neue Folge 49(2): 247–49.

2. 2008, as the second of three volumes, also 2000 and 2009. For the reception of the anthropological writings in the German-speaking world, see among others Sven Hanuschek, 2008, ‘Das Tabu entsteht in Gefahr’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 7 November; Andreas Eckert, 2008, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 28 August; Ulrich van Loyen, 2008, Anthropos, 10 March; Daniel Jütte, 2008, ‘Anthropologe, Zeitdiagnostiker, Zionist’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 9 September; Stefan Ripplinger, 2008, Jungle World, 23 October; Gregor Thuswaldner, 2009, The Modern Language Review, 2 April; Manfred Bauschulte, 2010, Mittelweg, 15 October.

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, ‘Conversation in the Library’, London 1950. © Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust 2021.

INTRODUCTION

A BRIEF LIFE

My created heart says so with every beat:

Stay on the border …

—Conquests, V, ‘The Lonely Man’

Franz Baermann Steiner occupies a unique place in modern social and cultural anthropology. The fact that his singularity was recognized by only a handful of influential contemporaries is attributable to his early death, which occurred – cruelly – just when he had embarked upon his most mature and innovative writings. Working at the confluence of many of the significant theories and methodologies of the twentieth century, in the early post-war years – and especially in the all-too-brief period he enjoyed as a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford from 1950–52 – he had begun to select from among these various currents. At the time of his death, he was developing an unprecedented synthesis in mid-century anthropological thought. Broadly speaking, Steiner’s thinking stakes out a territory between the Jewish Haskalah or Enlightenment, German post-Enlightenment philosophy, modern linguistic thought, Marxism, Central European ethnology, German sociology, British social anthropology and early structuralism. He deploys these resources with a scholarly passion for truth – which for Steiner is never far removed from its Biblical source – allied to an overriding concern for the right to self-determination for non-Western peoples, among whom he includes his own Jewish people. In their equal concern for geopolitics and detailed local ethnography, his writings foreshadow trends in anthropology that were to become apparent only as the twentieth century turned into the twenty-first. In their deep aversion to the imposition of Western values on non-Western peoples, his writings relentlessly expose biases brought by Western reporters to their texts. His work may, indeed, be read as entirely critical, which is how Evans-Pritchard presented Steiner’s lectures on taboo on their posthumous publication, but Steiner’s early deconstruction of Western presuppositions cleared the ground for a fundamental defence of the scholarly, political and religious values he held dear.

Recognition of his scholarly significance has grown in the now more than twenty years since we edited a two-volume collection of Steiner’s work in English (Steiner 1999a, 1999b). Most tellingly, we have seen the twenty-first century publication in three volumes of his poetry, sociological writings and aphorisms (Steiner 2000, 2008, 2009), amounting to 1,800 pages in total – a substantial oeuvre for someone who published so little in his lifetime. A conference was devoted to Steiner’s work in 2000 immediately after the publication of our original volumes (Adler, Fardon and Tully 2003), and there has been wider interest in his close circle, for instance in the confluence of literature and anthropology in the London writings of Steiner, H.G. Adler and Elias Canetti (J. Adler and Dane 2014). Given the publication of these and other works, including full-length biographies of all three of these friends (Hanuschek 2005; Van Loyen 2011; Filkins 2019), the opportunity to revise our account for publication as a book was particularly welcome, not least since our studies had always felt like a book, and not simply on account of their length. Hence, we have rewritten some parts of our original Introductions, corrected others and added new materials. Our intention remains to set the development of Steiner’s ideas in a biographical context, recognizing Steiner’s affinity with various intellectual schools and pointing towards a synthesis of the ideas that he was beginning to wrest from his massive and extraordinarily wide-ranging scholarship in those two and a half years that he was a lecturer in the Institute of Social Anthropology at Oxford. To appreciate the numerous tensions this synthesis sought to contain, the reader needs to know something about the complexity of Franz Baermann Steiner: poet, aphorist, thinker, ethnologist, anthropological and philosophical theorist, Zionist, political activist, lecturer, friend and mentor. We summarize this briefly here to help orient the reader for our fuller account, some parts of which lead down byways less familiar to historians of anthropology.

Born in Prague in the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the young Steiner fully partook in the intellectual ferment that characterized the early part of the twentieth century, just as he was to witness at first hand some of its greatest political cataclysms. His father’s life was shattered by the First World War. His own existence was undermined by the Second World War. Political and intellectual engagement were two of the opposite if ultimately complementary facets of his life’s work. In the 1930s, he went through an early Marxist phase and subsequently studied at the Hebrew University in Palestine. His early Marxism was thereby tempered with political Zionism, and both these theories were to leave their trace on his anthropology. After completing his degree in linguistics at Prague, he went on to train in the Central European tradition of cultural anthropology at the University of Vienna, where he had the opportunity to study with some of the major exponents of the ‘culture circles’ school that then dominated German-speaking ethnology and was to exercise considerable influence in the United States. At this stage in his career, he specialized in Arctic ethnology. Then, in the mid- to late-1930s, he came to England, largely to study with Malinowski at the London School of Economics. However, he gravitated towards Oxford, where he became a student first of A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and, later, of E.E. Evans-Pritchard. Initially, he continued to concentrate on material culture but reached a turning point in his work around the year 1942. This was perhaps his period of deepest isolation.

It was at this time that he started fully to internalize the persecution that his people were experiencing at Nazi hands, and a sense of this suffering appears to have transmuted his thinking. Yet great as the changes clearly were that took place around this time, it is hard to pin them down precisely. His scholarly focus, according to the prevailing mood in England, switched from the Arctic towards Africa, and from ethnology to the study of social institutions. And it was to the institution of slavery, a subject selected as a penance for his people’s suffering, that Steiner now devoted the best years of his life. Many of his deepest thoughts can be traced to this study. He also brought to this area a profound interest in religion, values and epistemology. The project was phenomenally wide in conception and involved Steiner in the comparative study of practically every known society – from Europe to North America, Africa, India and the Far East. Although only a fraction of this learning materialized in his writing, it provided a sociological grounding for all his other work. A project on this scale was doomed from the start; doomed also in its attempt to combine continental comparative method with British particularism. For even in its more specialized British garb, the habitual mode of his thought remained continental in its syncretism. This was to prove one of the many rewarding tensions in Steiner’s writing, the division between universal comparative aspirations and particular, local realities.

From Evans-Pritchard himself to Mary Douglas, colleagues valued Steiner for his learning, which in Godfrey Lienhardt’s phrase made Steiner ‘an intellectual’s intellectual’. But there was also a less serious side to him. He was an avid sportsman – a great hiker and a skilful boxer (H.G. Adler [1953] 2006: 6). Thanks to his voracious reading – Professor Sir Ernst Gombrich always imagined Steiner as a veritable ‘bookworm’, practically eating his way through the stock at the British Museum (PC) – Steiner developed into a polymath. And his implicit but ever-present sense of universality informs the bewildering variety of projects he eventually worked on. From slavery, he was led to comparative economics, taboo and the theory