Memoir: The Viennese culture wiped out by Hitler is the backdrop to Peter Singer's investigation of his grandfather's life.
So difficult is it for us to believe in the sexual lives of our immediate forebears that sometimes it can seem to us a wonder that we are here at all. In the late 1990s, Peter Singer found a cache of letters written by his maternal grandfather at the turn of the century to the woman whom he would eventually marry, and discovered to his astonishment that both young people had been strongly inclined toward homosexuality. Indeed, Singer's grandfather, David Oppenheim, began writing to Amalie Pollak in order to ask her advice on his passion - platonic, it would seem - for a 16-year-old schoolboy. He felt able to approach her in this way because he knew that she for her part was involved in a passionate relationship with a girl. He could tell her, too, that one of his best, male, friends was in a similar predicament, having fallen in love with the son of a Viennese politician, and was suffering "the kind of passionate torment that only a person of consequence can feel". There was a lot of it about, it seems, in old Vienna.
Peter Singer, who was born in Australia of immigrant Jewish parents, is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, and best-known as the author of Animal Liberation, the book which opened a broad debate on our treatment of animals. Singer has also written controversially on abortion and on euthanasia for severely handicapped infants. His work in this area has led to strong criticism from right, left and centre; the German news magazine Der Spiegel accused him of being a Nazi, and illustrated a critical article on him with archive photographs of transports to Auschwitz during the second World War. It is a bitter irony that Singer's grandfather died in Theresienstadt, the Nazi fortress in Czechoslovakia where Jewish prisoners were held while awaiting transportation to the death camps.
In Pushing Time Away, the story of David Oppenheim which Singer compiled from his grandfather's letters, the philosopher writes of how, when he was still a student,
my interest in ethics often led me beyond the bounds of philosophy to broader psychological questions about human nature. Is there a conflict between acting ethically and acting in accordance with self-interest? If so, how can human beings act ethically? Why do people do what they know to be wrong? To what extent is our ethics the outcome of our biological nature, rather than our culture?
A selection of letters from David and Amalie Oppenheim to their children, including Peter Singer's mother and her husband, who had fled Austria in the early months of the war, was published in 1996. When Singer came to read the book, which was co-edited by his aunt, Doris Liffman, he quickly realised how much he had in common with his grandfather. This realisation was strengthened when, in the summer of 1998, he visited the flat in Vienna where his Aunt Doris had lived and found bundles of letters from David Oppenheim to Amalie Pollak written between 1904 and 1906. It was these letters, along with other documents including correspondence between his grandparents and his parents, and David Oppenheim's published works, that Singer used as the basis for Pushing Time Away.
David Oppenheim was a scholar of the Greek and Roman classics, and was an inspirational teacher at the Akademisches Gymnasium, Vienna's leading secondary school, until he was dismissed from his post by the Nazis because he was a Jew. As a theorist on the psychological foundations of myths and fairytales he had worked in the early years of the century with Sigmund Freud and Freud's sometime collaborator, Alfred Adler. When a bitter schism developed between these two founders of psychoanalysis, Oppenheim sided with Adler; "I admired Freud," Oppenheim wrote years later, "but I loved Adler".
It was Adler's contention that neurosis springs not from a malfunctioning of the libido, as Freudian psychology insists, but from the patient's feelings of being inferior - Adler coined the term "inferiority complex" - of which sexual difficulties are a manifestation. In the confrontation with Freud, Singer writes, Adler maintained that "he was not denying sexual desires, but rather was trying to get behind what we see as sexual, to the more significant relationships that take on the guise of sexuality". It is not difficult to understand why such an approach would appeal to Oppenheim, who was steeped in classical texts on the self and the self's origins and destiny, a prey to feelings of inferiority, and still trying to sort out his own confused sexual identity. As his grandson points out, however, Oppenheim's interest in Adler's psychological theories was not clinical, but literary, "as an aid to understanding literary texts, and through them, the nature of human beings".
The basis of Oppenheim's thinking, and his life, was a firm belief in the Platonic injunction to "know thyself", for only through an understanding of oneself can one have any chance of knowing others in a deep and meaningful way. Knowledge of humanity, Menschenkenntnis, derives from an overall perspective, not from breaking things down into their parts. For Oppenheim, Menschenkenntnis was a task for the humanities, whereas academic psychology belonged to the natural sciences.
Instead of analyzing a character into its parts as a botanist might do in studying a new plant, those who seek knowledge of humanity must put the parts together to understand the whole. For this reason we do not gain Menschenkenntnis by a series of controlled experiments in artificial laboratory conditions; instead, it comes from a kind of intuition, dependent on putting oneself in the place of the person one is trying to understand.
It was inevitable, given these convictions, that Oppenheim would become a schoolmaster rather than a psychoanalyst. And by all accounts he was a superb teacher. Among a number of testimonies left by his former pupils the most impressive is a dedication to him in an essay by the Catholic writer and critic Friedrich Heer, who declared: "He taught me humanity." It is no coincidence that a high proportion of Oppenheim's pupils would become vociferous opponents of the Nazi regime.
In one of his essays Oppenheim had made what was for him a vital distinction between the "theoretical philosopher", for whom philosophy is a profession much like any other, and the "genuine philosopher", whose philosophy is grounded firmly in everyday life, and not just in the academy. This found a resonance in Peter Singer's view of his own work and, indeed, of his own life. Philosophising in the field of ethics, he, like his grandfather, was tackling the issue of
fundamental values, and what it is to be human. Was my own life echoing that of a grandparent I had never known? That thought began to take hold of me, and would not let go. I had to find out whether, despite the different times and places in which we lived, there was something that bound us together.
Pushing Time Away, then, is more than a family chronicle or an act of piety toward a forebear. Singer is after matters that are larger than a life, even a life as fascinating, exemplary and tragic as David Oppenheim's.
Despite their early sexual proclivities, David and Amalie were married in 1906. Singer is candid in admitting that "there is something in their relationship that remains mysterious to me". It was, however, a thoroughly successful, loving and enduring match. When David announced his engagement, his mother, being a mother, said to him: "Why do you want to marry her? You are young, rich, and handsome, and she is old, poor, and ugly!" Indeed, Amalie was from a lower-middle-class background, David had told her with brutal jocularity that "I could not describe you as a cameo beauty", and to cap it all she was the elder of the two by three years. David was content to ignore these disadvantages, remarking on the issue of her age that "what binds us pushes time away". All the same, one cannot but marvel at the complacency of a young man who, intelligent, highly educated, and a sometime colleague of figures such as Freud and Adler, should have known better. Amalie was as well-read in the classics as David was - they sometimes corresponded in Greek - and may even have been the cleverer of the two, but as soon as they were married she put aside her academic qualifications to become a traditional Viennese helpmeet.
David fought bravely in the Great War, and was wounded twice. When Hitler took power and war came round again, David imagined that his military record would protect him. Singer notes that in a speech to an international meeting of psychologists David had declared that Menschenkenntnis requires one not only to understand oneself but also "to know with whom we are faced". Although their daughters Doris and Kora - Singer's mother - and Kora's husband Ernst had escaped to Australia where they quickly secured entry permits for David and Amalie, the couple delayed their departure from Vienna, because of David's ill-health but also out of a kind of fatal lethargy, and an unwillingness to leave behind all that they knew, including, not least, David's precious library. For all his insistence on the necessity to know those "with whom we are faced", on this occasion, Singer writes, "in the hour when he needed it most, David's understanding of his fellow human beings failed him".
Singer's account of his grandparents' final years in Nazi-controlled Vienna and their transfer to Theresienstadt, the holding camp for Jews destined for the gas chambers, makes for harrowing reading. The peculiar horror of the place is caught in the brief account Singer gives of the day in November 1943 when the SS commandant, Karl Rahm, deciding on a whim that there must an accurate count of the camp population, ordered the 45,000-odd prisoners to march to a nearby valley where they were forced to stand all day, with no food and nothing to drink and no possibility even of going to the lavatory, while tallies were made by three separate groups of counters. Not until midnight did Rahm tire of trying to get the three tally-groups to agree on a figure, by which time more than two hundred prisoners had died from exposure.
David's and Amalie's fortitude, dignity and civilised resolve are a remarkable testimony to the couple's essential goodness. David, debilitated after what should have been a simple prostate operation, could not survive the rigours of life in Theresienstadt, and died there in February 1943. He was "one of the multitude" he had spoken of in a letter: of the 141,000 people sent to Theresienstadt, Singer tells us, only 17,000 survived. Among those survivors was his grandmother. She was given work in the camp's central filing office, and there is what Singer describes as a "disquieting possibility" that she saved herself by repeatedly moving her own file card and thus for three years escaped transportation to Auschwitz and the gas chambers.
Singer's epilogue to this fine, penetrating and heartbreaking book is disappointingly terse and even, dare one say it, a touch complacent. Addressing the central question as to whether David Oppenheim managed to live a "good life" despite all, Singer admits that the values for which his grandfather stood "suffered the most terrible defeat, the greatest fall, from lofty heights to abysmal depths, that history had ever known", but points out that what defeated them was in its turn defeated. Now liberal democracies are more firmly established in Europe than ever before, we have a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and steps are being taken to prevent a recurrence of the kinds of atrocity of which the Nazis were guilty. David's belief in the possibility of a world "in which we can once again appreciate the humane, nonsectarian, universal values embodied in the greatest writers of both ancient and modern times, is something that time has not pushed away".
One applauds Singer's determination to be positive here. Perhaps "belief" is the only fit weapon civilised people can employ against tyrants. Yet the last word, one feels, should go to Amalie. When she returned to Vienna from Theresienstadt, a friend asked her how she was managing to eat, since unlike her husband she had always observed Jewish dietary laws, and there was no kosher food to be had in Vienna in 1946. "If God allows such a good man as my husband to die," Amalie replied, "I don't have to follow his laws."
John Banville's last book, Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City, is published by Bloomsbury
Pushing Time Away: My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna By Peter Singer Granta, 254pp. £15.95