Paris (AFP)
He could talk about Kafka, Homer, Dostoevsky, the Holocaust or pornography with the same passion, without ever being superficial. The philosopher George Steiner who died on Monday in Cambridge (Great Britain) at the age of 90 was an "honest man", elegant, erudite and subtle.
A great voice of the 20th century, the essayist was born in Paris in 1929 to Viennese Jewish parents. To escape Nazism, he joined the United States with his parents in 1940 where he acquired American nationality (while retaining his French citizenship).
A pupil at the French lycée in New York, then later a teacher in Geneva, Princeton, Yale and Cambridge, polyglot, great reader (he was long the literary critic of the New Yorker), George Steiner had only one belief: that of verb.
"I would like the memory that one keeps of me to be that of a master to read", he liked to say, adding that he wished to be recognized as "someone who has spent his life reading with other".
Its culture was encyclopedic. To think, he explained, is to dialogue with other languages, other cultures. The gift of languages with which he was endowed had given him the glee to communicate to the reader the most erudite knowledge.
He was the man of the essay, the story, the criticism as well as the novel. He will have published more than twenty works ranging from ancient Greece to the great Russian novels, from Shakespeare to the abyss of the Shoah.
Since 1994, he had lived in retirement in his Cambridge home.
In one of these last interviews, published by the Italian daily Corriere della Sera in April 2019, he confessed: "I feel tired for years and many of my friends have left. But memories keep me alive".
He said he was concerned about the rise of xenophobia on the European continent. "Hatred for the stranger, hunting for Jews, excuses for self-defense and weapons are dangerous signs of a terrible regression, a prelude to violence," he worried.
In a book of interviews with Laure Adler, "The passion for the absolute", this cosmopolitan, hating passport and flags, stressed: "We can be at home everywhere. Give me a work table and it will be my homeland" .
- "Platonic Anarchist" -
Among the recurring themes of his work was this mantra: culture does not save from barbarism. The Buchenwald Nazi camp, he often recalled, was only a handful of kilometers from Weimar, the city of the German poet Goethe.
He liked to say: "I was one of the very first to say: + we sing Schubert in the evening and we torture in the morning +. I would like to understand but I never had the answer".
Lucid and willingly ironic, George Steiner also sometimes annoyed in particular in France. Others criticized him for defending the work of Céline and even more of Lucien Rebatet, author of the anti-Semitic pamphlet "Les décombres". He was bitterly criticized for his friendship with Pierre Boutang, a close friend of Maurras.
Asked about Rebatet, he replied: "He was obviously a bastard and I may have overestimated his work. But I still keep his novel written in prison, + Les deux bannards +, for a great book. nothing to do there. The great literature is often right. And I continue to prefer Céline to Aragon ... ".
Some also criticized him for his criticism of the State of Israel.
Sometimes taxed elitist, until the end he remained caustic, not fooled and endowed with a pinch humor without laughing. He defined himself as "a Platonic anarchist".
In an interview, granted in French, to the newspaper Le Monde in 2013, he said: "Now that I am very close to my end, I grip a joke that I find of breathtaking depth. It comes from Yiddish circles from Brooklyn: + Is there a god? - Of course, but not yet +. This + not yet + brings me some inner strength.
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