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Steiner narrowly escaped the immensity of history. His father, a Viennese banker who had established himself in Paris, got his family to New York just before the Germans reached the French capital in 1940. Steiner, then eleven, considers himself "maimed for not having been at the roll call." He has remained in the shelter of academia, with degrees from Chicago and Harvard, a Rhodes scholarship, a doctorate at Oxford, an appointment to Cambridge's new Churchill College, a professorship of comparative literature at the University of Geneva and periodic visits to Harvard and Yale. But he says of it all: "I am an exile everywhere."
The Cambridge exile suits him. A fire crackles in the fireplace. Steiner's American wife Zara, who teaches history at Cambridge, serves sherry before lunch. His daughter Deborah, briefly home from Harvard, helps in the kitchen (Son David is in New York to try his hand at banking). A large sheep dog settles on the hearth. But Steiner insists that the sense of security is fragile.
"I'm haunted," he says, "by a photograph in the New York Public Library archives that shows Hitler standing like a beggar, with a torn raincoat, his hat in front of him, and no one is listening to him. But then ten people listened, and then a million . . . My whole work is devoted to language, to the central fact that we can use words to pray, to bless, to heal, to kill, to cripple, to torture. Man creates—and he uncreates—by language. And I have never seen a satisfactory explanation of why there is no brake inside us, nothing which says you can't say the next thing. This absolutely fascinates me, that there is no limit to the autonomous power of human speech.
"Of course," he adds, "Hitler could not have done what he did without everybody else. The Germans, who have been at the Everests of abstract thought and intensities of feeling, they went with Hitler into the Holocaust. The Germans saw in Hitler the apotheosis of their history, and they felt that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche prepared for his doctrines. I am very involved with the idea that those who were destined to be at the highest were going to go to the bottom of mankind. But Hitler also has a demonic singularity—there is a sense in which he is every man in our time in the barbarism that goes on."
Nearly 20 years ago, Steiner wrote that when he listened to his children breathing in the stillness of his house, he would grow afraid. That has not changed. "I am utterly trying to teach my children the sense of vulnerability," he says, "and keep them in training for survival."
—By Otto Friedrich. Reported by Lawrence Malkin/Cambridge