George Steiner has long seemed to his admirers like the perfect model of the assimilated intellectual Jew; a leader in his field (literary criticism), a polyglot and a thinker who both argues and embodies a European cultural perspective.

The glories of European cultural achievements at the turn of the century; modern science, the novel, orchestral music, printing, liberal democracy etc. seemed to augur for a great European civilisation. In reality of course that promise has been betrayed by enormous crimes against humanity carried out using some of these same achievements.

Particularly in his fiction — only a small part of his intellectual output — Steiner has tried to find ways of coming to terms with, or perhaps just exploring, some of the dark realities of this century in Europe.

Part of the later and more complete collection of Steiner’s fiction The Deeps of the Sea is taken up by The Portage of A.H. to San Cristobal, the novella version of a play of the same name. The play version, also available as a book, is well worth seeking out. The ’A.H.’ of the title is the noted Austrian Adolf Hitler. Steiner imagines him as hiding out for years in deepest South America and finally being tracked down and captured by Israeli commandos. The moment in the play when the actor impersonating A.H. appears out of the stage darkness — which becomes there and then ’the black night of history’ — is one of the most potent theatrical events ever.

Return no More is another ’what-if?’ story with the unlikely but interesting premise that a German officer returns in 1950 to the French village where he had served during the war and had ordered the execution of a young partisan. He returns, so he says, because ’the stench of forgetting is so strong in Germany that I came back here to breathe real air.’ He then tries to marry the partisan’s younger sister. Unsurprisingly some of the less forgiving villagers have a few drinks and eventually do him in. In this piece Steiner (most of whose Jewish school-friends in Paris were murdered by Germans) seems to suggest that the actual German unresponsiveness, the passive reaction to having committed the greatest crimes of a century of crimes is the result of the very enormity of those crimes. The easiest, the only ’reasonable’ thing for them to do is to sit back and breathe in ’the stench of forgetting’.

Cake too is set in the aftermath of World War Two and attempts to reverse the amnesia that means, for example, we have many films about the military campaigns of that period but very few about the murder of civilians organised by the Germans and their collaborators all over Europe. In this story of a young American in France some of the foetid air of occupied Europe is let out of the sealed casket where it’s been kept for fifty years.

Some of the foetid air of dear old Blighty (England) is released in Sweet Mars which carries out a Jewish outsider’s psychoanalysis on the rather schoolboyish psychology of the upper-middle class Englishmen that Steiner has mixed with. It is a sombre and clever story about what he calls the (English) ’voluptuaries of remorse.’

The three ’war aftermath’ stories were written in the early 1960s and are about the long-term impact of World War Two on a generation, Proofs a story from 1992 is about the impact of the collapse of Communism. Communism is a proper European-Jewish theme for Steiner to get his teeth into as its form of secular messianism attracted great numbers of Jews in both Eastern and Western Europe. As a piece of fiction it is more expertly written than the earlier stories, with delicious phrases such as (describing the East German frontier guards the day the Berlin Wall was breached) ’Border guards grinned vacantly and reached for cigarettes as do the bears in a bankrupt circus’. Steiner’s clever take on Communism is to compare it to Christianity; both share the same somehow ever-deferred millennium...

He also remembers Stalin’s twenty-five million victims, ultimately, in the Steiner view, the result of an idealistic over-estimation of the human spirit.

Steiner writes a kind of intelligent and readable philosophical fiction like that of Bertrand Russell, that seeks to investigate what the book jacket calls ’the nightmares of reason’ in our century. Very worthwhile stuff!

[The crippled German ex-soldier Falk recounts his youth — ed.]

’"I grew up in a very loud bad dream," said Falk. "I cannot remember a time when we were not marching or shouting and when there were no flags in the street. When I think of my childhood all I can remember distinctly are the drums and the uniform I wore as a young pioneer. And the great red flags with the white circle and the black hooked cross in the middle. They were constantly draped across our window. It seems to me I always saw the sun through a red curtain. And I remember the torches. One night my father woke me suddenly and tore to the window. The whole street was full of men marching with torches like a great fiery worm. I must have yelled with fear or sleepiness and my father slapped me across the mouth. I don’t remember much about him but he smelled of leather."

"School was worse. The drums beat louder and there were more flags. On the way home we played rabbit hunt and went after Jews. We made them run in the gutter carrying our books and if they dropped any we held them down and pissed in their faces. In the summer we were taught how to be men. They sat us on a log two by two. Every boy in turn would slap his partner as hard as he could. First one to duck was a coward. I passed out once but did not fall off the log. I never finished school. I suppose my final exam came in Lemberg when they told me to clean out a bunker with a flame-thrower. I had my graduation in Warsaw, marching with the victory parade. Now the drums never stopped. They were always pounding at us: in Norway; outside Utrecht, where I got my first wound; in Salonika, where we hanged the partisans on meat hooks; and at Kharkov, where this happened." Falk’s hand trailed absently along his leg.’ (Return No More p168-9)