A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel 2010
Borges and the longed-for jew
The lesson of the master
“Well! What are you?” said the Pigeon. “I can see
you’re trying to invent something!”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 5
IN 1944, AGENTS OF HIMMLER’S secret service began arriving in Madrid to set up an escape route out of Germany for the defeated Nazis. Two years later, for reasons of security, the operation was moved to Buenos Aires, where it established itself inside the Presidential Palace, with the accord of the recently elected president, Juan Domingo Perón. Argentina had remained neutral during World War II, but most of its military had supported Hitler and Mussolini. The rich upper classes, noted for their antisemitism, though they opposed Perón in almost everything else, remained silent about his pro-Nazi activities. In the meantime, rumors of what was taking place began to circulate within the Jewish community. In 1948, to stifle the incipient protests of the Argentinean Jews, Perón decided to appoint an ambassador to the newly created state of Israel and chose my father, Pablo Manguel, for the post. Because my father was Jewish (the family had arrived from Europe and settled in one of Baron Hirsch’s colonies in the Argentinean interior), there was much opposition to his nomination, especially from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, traditionally staffed by Catholic nationalists. A Vatican-approved candidate was proposed, but Perón, who realized how much he needed the Jewish support, held firm. In later years, and in spite of the (still) growing documentary evidence, Perón would deny ever having helped the Nazi cause and held up my father’s nomination as proof of his Jewish sympathies. Today we know that among Perón’s most notorious protégés were Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele.
In Perón’s Argentina, Jorge Luis Borges was one of the few intellectuals to speak out against the Nazis. As early as April 1934, in answer to an accusation by the editors of the nationalist magazine Crisol (that he “maliciously hid his Jewish ancestry”), Borges published a short text, “I, a Jew,” in which he acknowledged that he often delighted in imagining himself a Jew, but that, alas, he had not been able to trace a single Jewish ancestor in the past two hundred years of his family history. Though he had never felt it necessary to defend his belief in the importance and value of the Jewish culture which had fed his own literature (the stories of the Bible, the wisdom of the Talmud, the scholarship of Gershom Scholem, the nightmares of Gustav Meyrink and Kafka, the poetry of Heinrich Heine, the legend of the Golem, the mysteries of the Kabbalah), he mocked the antisemites who obsessively sought Jewish roots in all their enemies. “Statistically speaking,” Borges mused, “the Jews were very few. What would we think of someone in the year 4000 who discovers everywhere descendants of the inhabitants of San Juan [one of the least populated of the Argentinean provinces]? Our inquisitors seek Hebrews, never Phoenicians, Numidians, Scythians, Babylonians, Huns, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Ethiopians, Illyrians, Paphlagonians, Sarmatians, Medes, Ottomans, Berbers, Britons, Libyans, Cyclops, or Lapiths. The nights of Alexandria, Babylon, Carthage, Memphis have never succeeded in giving birth to one single grandfather; it was only to the tribes of the bituminous Dead Sea that such a gift was granted.”
Neither did he condemn German Kultur. In an article published on 24 March 1939 in El Hogar (a popular Argentinean family weekly), Borges reviewed a book by a certain Louis Golding, ominously called The Jewish Problem. Borges agreed with Golding’s attack on antisemitism, but he disagreed with the author’s tactics. Antisemites, Borges said, “seek (absurdly) to deny Jewish contributions to the culture of Germany; Golding seeks (absurdly) to limit the culture of Germany to Jewish contributions alone. He declares racism to be absurd, but, with an almost servile symmetry, he does nothing more than oppose Jewish racism to Nazi racism. He constantly moves from a necessary defense to an unnecessary onslaught. Unnecessary, because Israel’s virtues do not require the demerits of Germany. Unnecessary and imprudent, because this is somehow equivalent to accepting the thesis of the enemy, that postulates a radical difference between a Jew and a non-Jew.” A year later, shortly after Germany’s invasion of Denmark, Borges transcribed a dialogue with an Argentinean Germanophile. For Borges, his interlocutor is a contradiction: rather than a lover of Germany (of whose culture he knows nothing), he is merely a hater of England. He is also an antisemite: that is to say, he wants to expel from Argentina the Slavo-Germanic community whose members boast names of German origin (Rosenblatt, Grünberg, Nierenstein) and speak a German dialect, Yiddish.
But beyond mockery, Borges thought that Jewish culture carried, metaphysically, a symbolic weight. He felt that Hitler was engaged in a purpose that was ultimately impossible—the annihilation of Jewish culture — because Jewish culture (Borges believed) stood essentially for the culture of humanity; if that were so, then Hitler’s wish to eliminate the Jews was merely part of a cosmic machinery set up to prove in aeternum the Jews’ survival. “Nazism suffers from unreality,” he wrote in “A Comment of August 23, 1944,” the day of the liberation of Paris. “It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, kill and wound for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph. I shall hazard this conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated.” Two years later, in the short story “Deutsches Requiem” (a sort of precursor to Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillants), a Nazi officer attempts to explain himself and his deeds: “The world was dying of its Judaism and of that sickness of Judaism which is the faith of Jesus; we taught it violence and the faith of the sword. That sword will now kill us, and we are comparable to the sorcerer who weaves a maze in which he is forced to roam until the end of his days, or to David who pronounces judgment on a stranger and condemns him to death, and then hears the revelation: You are that man.” At that point, the Nazi officer utters these powerful words of his own damnation: “If victory and injustice and happiness be not for Germany, let them be for other nations. Let Heaven exist, even if our place be Hell.”
“Like the Druzes, like the moon, like death, like next week, the distant past forms part of those things that can be enriched by ignorance,” Borges had written in “I, a Jew.” In such a state, in which good and evil are swept away with the same indifference, the events of the past will be reinvented and a false memory will be set up as truth. This is what happens in one of his later stories, “Utopia of a Man Who Is Tired.” Here Borges describes a nightmare set in the future, in which he is led by a guide who helpfully explains to him the brave new world. At one point Borges sees a domed tower. “That is the crematorium,” his guide points out. “Inside is the lethal chamber. They say it was invented by a philanthropist whose name, I believe, was Adolf Hitler.”
A dignified, self-effacing, intellectually honest man, Borges wished not to be remembered; he hoped that a few of his writings would survive, but to his own fame he was indifferent. He longed for personal oblivion (“to be forever but not to have been,” he says in a poem) and yet feared the capricious memory of History, or, rather, the capriciousness with which we tend to rewrite the facts of History to suit our meanest, basest impulses. That is why he despised politics (“the vilest of all human activities”) and believed in the truth of fiction and in our ability to tell true stories.