For more than fifty years, Klemperer meticulously chronicled his own experiences and his impressions of the social world around him; his labors yield a body of writing of overwhelming mass and scale. The effort of transcribing Klemperer's tiny handwriting and of annotating the diaries was clearly immense. Each of the German volumes contains 75-150 pages of very helpful (if still not exhaustive) editorial notes; the otherwise sound English translation unfortunately reproduces only a fraction of them. Both versions, alas, omit the keywords or headings Klemperer himself entered in the margin of the diary, in an attempt to catalog or keep track of its subjects. More regrettable still, both versions of the diary are abridged, the English version even more than the German "original." Those interested in the diary either as a socio-historical document or as a literary text have cause to regret the editors' strategy of elision. The "multiple repetitions" the editors say they have deleted may well have been crucial to interpreting Klemperer's psychic disposition at a particular moment or the nature of his recurring obsessions. The editors also note that "It was not possible to include all notes about reading and visits to the cinema" (So, 2:959). Yet for readers interested in German film history, Klemperer's diaries are most fascinating precisely in their evocative descriptions of particular cinematic occasions; what other gems would the unabridged edition have contained? Scholars interested in GDR literary and intellectual history, similarly, can learn a great deal from the reading notes that are included in the diary as published; what further conclusions about postwar literary taste and intellectual debates might have been drawn from the unabridged diaries?
There is still, of course, a lot of diary left, almost more than nonspecialist readers can handle. For some, indeed, the experience of tackling the diaries will seem similar, in duration and intensity, to that of reading Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927); since each volume takes weeks or months to finish, the memories of reading become mixed with the locales, details, and vicissitudes of daily life experienced concurrently. English-speaking readers may also experience Klemperer's journals as a modern-day equivalent of the famous seventeenth-century diaries kept by Samuel Pepys. In crucial respects, to be sure, these diarists remain very different. The overt expression of sexuality, for instance, plays a remarkably small role in Klemperer's wartime and postwar diaries (at least in their currently abridged form). Yet Klemperer resembles Pepys in his boundless impulse to record, his enduring preoccupation with the details (and language) of daily life, and his continual, obsessive need to catalogue his own financial, intellectual, and reputational assets. If Pepys gives us an unmatched record of daily life in London at the time of the Restoration, I Will Bear Witness gives us an unmatched record of life in Nazi Germany from the perspective of one of its victims--with the 1945 firebombing of Dresden the set piece equivalent of Pepys's famous account of the Great Fire of London.
In Germany, Klemperer is now regarded as one of the preeminent chroniclers of the twentieth century, particularly of the vicissitudes of recent German history. The fortuitous accidents of history that led to the diaries' publication in the very last years of the century have helped to give them an apparently definitive stature: recovered belatedly, these diaries offer both the last full view of the German twentieth century produced within it and in some ways the most comprehensive. The original German publication of I Will Bear Witness, moreover, shortly preceded the heated debates over Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. 4 For the most part, Klemperer's chronicle of daily life in the Third Reich refutes Goldhagen's postulation of a widely shared, eliminationist anti-Semitism among the German people. At moments, indeed, it suggests the relative unpopularity of Nazi anti-Semitism, which appears to have been buttressed by official actions but not, for the most part, by popular sentiment. What it chronicles instead are a staggeringly large number of personally witnessed incidents of resistance--if often not of conscious, organized resistance to the entire Nazi dispensation then certainly, repeatedly, of spontaneous, personal gestures of sympathy, regret, and intended compensation for specific injustices and cruelties suffered under Nazi rule.
In Klemperer's experience, working-class Germans often prove quite indifferent, even hostile, to Nazi doctrine. His diaries thus give unexpected weight to long-standing Communist claims of an almost innate antifascism among the German proletariat. They also give new credibility to the oral accounts of daily life under Nazism that circulated in the early postwar period. At least since the 1960s, the generational struggle between older Germans who experienced the Third Reich at first hand and younger Germans "born afterwards" (in Bertolt Brecht's phrase) has centered partly on the credibility of the older generation's memories and stories of Nazi Germany. 5 What older narrators remembered most vividly were their own innumerable small acts of defiance and resistance: a sandwich smuggled illicitly to a forced laborer, a complaint to the higher-ups, a critical remark made in public. Especially in the wake of the 1963 Auschwitz trials, younger auditors became increasingly skeptical of such anecdotes; to them, such stories seemed not only trivial, given the genocide going on in the background, but conveniently self-exonerating, a clearly self-serving filtering of memory.
In this respect, as in others, Klemperer's account of his experiences as a "star-wearer" is a revelation. (His diaries also make clear the relative crudity of even the best literary attempts to convey the atmosphere of the Third Reich; Brecht's Private Life of the Master Race [1935-8] and Anna Seghers's The Seventh Cross [1942], for instance, were the works of antifascist emigrés who necessarily lacked first-hand experience of the milieu they described.) Klemperer retained a (justified) fear of the Gestapo, a lingering fear of orchestrated pogroms, and a growing fear of the very young, entirely raised and educated in the racial hatred of the Third Reich. His dealings with the rest of the population, however, remained deeply unpredictable. For every shattering incident of public harassment or name-calling, Klemperer recorded several others in which unknown fellow Dresdeners expressed sympathy with his position. Some stopped him in the street, making a point of shaking his hand, although they did not know him; we are the greeters, one explained, who have resolved to express our solidarity with those forced to wear the Star. On the street at dusk as in his various work places, working-class men repeatedly called out to him as they passed, told him not to lose courage, and assured him that he was not alone. Although LTI retrospectively characterizes such episodes as deeply embarrassing, the diaries suggest they made a decisive difference to Klemperer and helped him to go on, day by day, in the face of overwhelming existential fear. Indeed, like the rest of the Jewish community, Klemperer constantly weighed and counted positive against negative encounters, trying to decide which represented the majority view, which were the real Germany, and which way the tide was turning.
The diaries also provide new answers to the lingering question of what, if anything, the German population knew about the Holocaust as it was being carried out. The Jews interned in Dresden's Jewish houses, we learn, eventually knew everything: they knew where (and approximately what) Auschwitz was; they knew that mass murder was occurring and that they might be the next victims. Their knowledge, however, came largely from sources "inside" the community and from illegal listening to foreign radio broadcasts. And despite relatively frequent, sustained, and often sympathetic interaction with the "Gentile" world, they apparently made little attempt to share their dismal knowledge with those outside the Jewish community; at best, they thought, they would not be believed, at worst, denounced for defeatism or sedition.
Endearingly, one of Klemperer's first responses to the political pressures of the Third Reich was to learn to drive and to buy a car; in an increasingly restricted and constrictive political environment, the freedom of movement offered by the automobile seems life-saving. Soon enough, however, the "privilege" of driving and car-ownership was stripped from him, one of many losses of the right to ordinary life. Over the course of the Third Reich, Klemperer and his wife became increasingly isolated from mainstream life; the Jewish houses themselves felt not so much like improvised communities as like places of forced proximity and collective hysteria.
Klemperer's main refuge was his writing. In addition to their many other fascinations, his wartime diaries stand as a moving paean to scholarship, to the torments of scholarly writing, and to the mysterious power of scholarly obsessions. At first encounter, Klemperer's continuing preoccupation with the vicissitudes of his book projects seems almost bathetic, given the shadow of death hanging over him and the world crashing down around his ears. 6 Yet what the diaries finally express is an alternating or dialectical consciousness about scholarship and writing that sees and grants all these objections only in turn to insist on and invest once more in the intrinsic importance (and psychic unavoidability) of the scholarly enterprise. "My book eats me up and keeps me alive and gives me balance," Klemperer wrote in October 1935 (I Will, 1:136); in LTI, he retrospectively described his wartime writing as a tightrope walker's balancing pole that helped to keep him upright in the face of danger and despair.
Both because of and aside from their fraught historical context, Klemperer's diary entries are unparalleled in their ability to capture the neurotic structure of the writing process itself. Moments, hours, days of almost delusional grandeur (the scholar's sense of power, originality, profound achievement in the act of writing) are regularly followed by corresponding moments of profound, despairing abjection (the scholar's sense of futility, imitativeness, nullity in the act of rereading), which then give way once more to a sense of euphoria, and so on and so on. Scholarly writing, Klemperer's account suggests, is driven alternately by ambition and by the fear of the void, by a sense of cosmic despair and by a hope of futurity, by the need to counteract a sense of futility or absurdity and by the hope of sustaining the exhilarating, intoxicating sense of intellectual breakthrough. Scholars it would seem (and perhaps other writers too) write not out of a need to trump one another nor even a need to preserve or reinterpret the world around them but to rejoin, blot out, or surpass their own existing writing. Not only when viewed at an institutional level but also already on the scale, and in the privacy, of the scholar's own study, scholarship perpetuates itself, proliferates itself, feeds on itself.
In Klemperer's case, of course, the need to write and work was driven not only by a perpetually looping psychic mechanism but by additional existential mandates. As Klemperer asked himself again and again, why should someone probably sentenced to death spend his final days laboring on a book that was quite likely doomed to be destroyed itself, never to find its readers? The answer, of course, is that the act of writing is itself a crucial act of self-affirmation. Such writing takes on further dignity from the Nazis' refusal to allow it, let alone to recognize, publish, or honor it.
With every year of the Third Reich, Klemperer's scholarly work became more tightly focused on the situation of the present; while LTI was intended to offer a scholarly analysis of Nazism from the vantage point of one trapped within it, Klemperer's diary became a place to record, with increasing self-consciousness, the tribulations of a whole people. In a recent review of the wartime diaries, Istvan Deak points out Klemperer's lack of responsibility towards those he chronicled: the unconscionable risks he took in keeping the diary throughout the Nazi period; his deliberate decision to name names in order to preserve the diary's status as a historical record rather than changing details to avoid incriminating his familiars and informants (should his diaries have fallen into the hands of the Gestapo during one of many house searches); his odd lack of gratitude (and postwar connection) to the family friend who at great personal risk harbored the diaries and his other scholarly manuscripts. 7 Such moral objections are on one level incontrovertible. What they may fail to take into account, however, is the status the writer and chronicler assumes, under extreme circumstances, as the repository, voice, conduit of collective experience and trauma--the role, we are frequently told, that writers have played historically in occupied Poland, or indeed that Kafka's mouse singer Josephine plays in the lives of her people.
In his translator's foreword to the second volume of Klemperer's wartime diaries, Martin Chalmers borrows an epithet from Jakob the Liar, the famous 1968 Holocaust novel by GDR writer Jurek Becker (himself a child survivor) and the basis of two films (the second released only last year). A humble pancake-seller interned in a Polish ghetto, Jakob accidentally overhears a German radio broadcast, pretends to his friends that he himself has a radio hidden away, and finds himself, against his will and better judgment, turned into a moral authority for the Jewish community. An inadvertent fabulist, his snippets of news, real and invented, and his promise of immanent liberation become necessary for the psychic survival of his fellow inmates. In LTI, Klemperer, too, describes overhearing "a few sentences" from a 1943 radio broadcast (LTI, 221); it supplied him not with war news but with further material to contemplate the Nazi uses and abuses of language (in this particular case, their American-style penchant for the superlative). Within Dresden's ghetto archipelago, Klemperer fulfilled a parallel but finally rather different role than Jakob the Liar. Formerly a professor at the local university, he was already a re of stature in the Jewish community. Once some of his circle sensed that he was collecting information about daily life and language, they began supplying him with materials, lending him books, even offering to help conceal his manuscript. They looked to him, it would seem, to give shape, meaning, and hopefully also posterity to their collective sufferings.
At the end of LTI, he describes the constant imprecations of one neighbor in the Jewish house, who felt Klemperer should not bother writing anything down. "Your writing is putting you in danger. And do you realize that thousands of others are suffering thousands of times more than you are? And don't you think that in time there will be more than enough historians to write about all this? People with better material and a better overview than you? What can you see, what can you record from your confinement here?" At "least once a day," on the other hand, another of the Klemperers' neighbors in the Jewish House
stormed into our room without knocking . . . and each time she said: "Write it down--you must write it down!" And then, with the same emotion, she would report on the latest house search, the latest suicide, the latest cut in ration cards. She believed in my role as chronicler, and in her childish eyes it was as if no other chronicler of the age would appear other than me, whom she so often saw sitting at the writing desk." [LTI, 284]
LTI took shape, then, in the crossfire between these two positions, each externalizing an aspect of Klemperer's own writing process: his perennial self-doubt, his intermittent sense of mission. Throughout the wartime diaries, indeed, he continually envisioned both the irretrievable loss of this (and the rest of his lifework) and a postwar dispensation in which this record and the people it described would all be famous.
As the reader remains fully aware, it is largely an accident that the more optimistic of the two scenarios actually came to pass. Throughout the Third Reich diary, the reader has the illusion of sharing Klemperer's suspense, anxiety, and claustrophobia. The first volume, in particular, is often a page-turner. The situation of Klemperer and of the Dresden Jews grows increasingly dire; it often seems that things can get no worse, and yet the reader knows from the date of each entry that the Third Reich still has many years to run and that the worst is yet to come. Curiously, the diary's suspense in some ways seems most acute in 1941, before the Holocaust was fully underway in Germany itself.
Thereafter, and through most of the second volume, the sufferings, deprivations, suicides, and deportations only intensified. "All Germany," Klemperer wrote in July 1942, "is a meat factory and butcher shop": while soldiers--and deportees--were being turned into corpses, pregnant women, encouraged by Nazi pronatalism, "bear their stomachs like a Party badge" (I Will, 2:111). 8 At the same time, Klemperer somehow almost learned to live with his harassed and vulnerable situation as one of indefinite duration--a partial stoicism similar, perhaps, to that eventually adopted by Anne Frank and her family in their cramped Amsterdam hiding place. Partway through the war, Klemperer was forced to work as a manual laborer, causing him sufferings both direct (since the work threatened his already weakened heart) and indirect (since it preempted most of his scholarly labors). Unexpectedly, however, the disadvantages and drudgery of this work were partly counterbalanced by the hitherto unfamiliar social spheres to which they exposed him; rather than spending the day at his desk, he was forced out of the house into close and frequently congenial interaction with working-class Germans. Initially, he imagined himself as Emil Jannings in F. W. Murnau's 1924 film The Last Laugh, reduced to demeaning labor and struggling not to break under the strain. Yet depleting as it was in many respects, this short-lived "worker's life" also offered an unexpected education of its own as it forced Klemperer to break out of the physical and mental claustrophobia of the ghetto.
In 1945, only months before the end of the war, the authorities resolved to round up and deport Dresden's last remaining Jews. Klemperer was forced to serve as messenger, bringing the chilling summons to friends and acquaintances and expecting that he himself would receive the next notice. A day later--deus ex machina--everything had changed completely; the Allied bombing of Dresden and the resulting firestorm made it possible for the Klemperers to flee the city altogether; hiding in the countryside, they managed to survive the rest of the war unchallenged. Klemperer of course continued to keep his diary, but with these unexpected developments, the journal's tone shifts completely, often evoking what seems close to an idyll. Despite the remaining dangers of the Klemperers' situation, they retain an acute sense of perils and confinement escaped. And finally, with the arrival of the Allied Armies, they celebrated their deliverance from Nazism and returned to Dresden, now under Soviet occupation.
Despite some lingering hardships, the postwar dispensation seemed full of promise. Klemperer joined the Communist Party in November, 1945, and he rapidly became prominent as a writer, intellectual, and public re. In 1947, LTI was published in book form in the Soviet Zone of Occupation but also was excerpted in newspapers, on the radio, and in lectures Klemperer delivered to cultural groups in various far-flung towns and villages. Thanks to such publicity, to the topicality and innate fascination of its subject, and to Klemperer's compelling style, LTI quickly became a popular classic in the Soviet Zone. In the GDR, despite various delays, censorship threats, and other difficulties detailed in his postwar diaries, it was reprinted repeatedly over several decades. Yet the book never enjoyed major circulation or influence in the West (perhaps in part due to its closing implication that the posterity of Nazi language was to be found on the Western side of the German-German divide). And unlike the contemporaneous work of Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach, Theodor Adorno, or Siegfried Kracauer (German-Jewish emigrés who lived in the United States and thus developed close connections with English-speaking intellectuals), LTI was never translated into English. The cold war itself, presumably, made early translation unlikely, especially given Klemperer's public identification with the Communist Party, with the Soviet Occupation Forces, and with the GDR. In its attention to the nuances and political meanings of German word usage, moreover, LTI was generally thought to be inherently untranslatable--a fear now laid to rest by Martin Brady's graceful translation.
Like Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life (written 1944-7, published 1951) and Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (written 1942-5, published 1946), LTI reflects on the author's experiences during the Third Reich. 9 While Klemperer stayed and was eventually trapped in Nazi Germany, Adorno and Auerbach emigrated after the Nazi rise to power (seeking refuge in Los Angeles and Istanbul, respectively). Minima Moralia and Mimesis announce themselves as works of--and about--exile. Adorno's work meditates, as its subtitle announces, on a "damaged life," its fragmentary, aphoristic form mirroring its contents, Mimesis, too, is full of an exile's longings for home; it begins with Ulysses' return to Ithaca in Homer's Odyssey. A brilliantly synthetic book about the Western literary tradition, in some ways the founding work (and still, arguably, the unacknowledged Bible) of the postwar discipline of Comparative Literature, Mimesis was written to shore up that tradition at a moment of its threatened eclipse; its famous reliance on symptomatic close readings, Auerbach explains, was mandated by the practical limitations of a scholar exiled in Turkey without ready access to most Western scholarship.
LTI was conceived and researched under even more dire circumstances, and they too leave their mark on the book's form and method. Quite literally expelled from Germany's libraries, Klemperer was forced to undertake a new kind of scholarship that took as its materials memories, everyday conversations, and incidents witnessed on the street, as well as whatever books and other publications to which he could still gain informal (often illegal) access. Brilliant in its linguistic and cultural analysis, LTI also makes virtuoso use of a very wide, very odd assortment of occasional texts: newspaper obituaries and birth announcements, pharmaceutical journals, pre- and post-1933 "trivial" novels, school textbooks. As such, LTI represents a pioneering attempt at reading culture and at a kind of unified discourse analysis. It may draw on nineteenth-century ideology critiques (Karl Marx, Gustave Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas, Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary); without, in all likelihood, being known to postwar French thinkers, it anticipates Roland Barthes's Mythologies, on the one hand, and the work of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault on the other. Its cultural diagnostics also stand in intriguing relationship to--but not in the shadow of--the Frankfurt School and the other famous theoretical work of early-twentieth-century Germany. Although immersed in the thought of the French Enlightenment, Klemperer did not appear to follow contemporary philosophy. (Even his discovery of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig--whose aperçu, "Language is more than blood," supplies LTI's epigraph--occurred only accidentally, he insisted, and only after the German-Jewish intellectual world turned inward as a response to segregationist pressures.) Klemperer was friendly with Kracauer during the Weimar Republic, but there is no sign in his Weimar or subsequent diaries that he had ever read Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Adorno, or Wilhelm Reich.
As Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg suggest in their The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, the impulse towards symptomatic cultural analysis was pervasive among Weimar intellectuals, driving popular journalists as much as those now renowned as "theorists." 10 Klemperer's own scholarly dialogue is with the scholarly traditions of Geistesgeschichte and philology and with res like E. R. Curtius and Leo Spitzer, fellow professors of Romance languages. LTI might be read, indeed, as a cross between Spitzer's "'Geistesgeschichte' vs. History of Ideas as Applied to Hitlerism" and his "American Advertising Explained as Popular Art" . 11 Spitzer conceived "American Advertising" as an experimental attempt to subject the Sunkist orange advertisement billboard he spotted along American highways to a sustained cultural and literary analysis; in the United States, at least, the essay is now famous as one prototype for the serious study of mass and popular culture. Klemperer's LTI is not only an earlier but a more sustained, more profound, and more genuinely popular piece of scholarship.
Unlike Spitzer's essays and unlike most of the work of the Frankfurt School, LTI is immediately accessible to a lay audience. Adorno's use of the aphoristic fragment in Minima Moralia links his work to a formally difficult high modernism. In contrast, Klemperer's LTI explains its own "notebook" structure, its autobiographical framing and materials, its verbatim quotations from the author's diaries of the period, its short, overlapping (and to the latter-day reader, Mythologies-like) essays, excurses, and vignettes as simply a function of its circumstances of composition. Denied access to a reference library, a typewriter, or even a safe place to store his diary, Klemperer was forced to compose (and hide) it piecemeal; the transcription, final composition, and publication of LTI took place shortly after the end of the war, before university libraries were fully reassembled or open again, so that Klemperer had no opportunity to recheck sources or perform a more exhaustive review of Third Reich writing and scholarship. LTI, Klemperer suggested humbly at the outset, would therefore have to stand as "the work of the first hour"; although not itself authoritative, it might remain useful as a starting point and a means to spur further and more sustained scholarship (LTI, 14).
In fact, LTI remains one of the most vivid, incisive, and, indeed, authoritative accounts of Nazi linguistic and cultural life, admirably lucid in its presentation and still suggestive in its implications.  He argues, for instance, in his pointed discussion of the "ent-" ["de"-] words (the prefix evoking a process of sloughing off or ridding oneself of something undesirable) that such neologisms sometimes took on murderous over- and undertones. On the other hand, he pieces together small linguistic details to arrive at a more general reading of the Nazi worldview. Some of these observations have since become commonplaces. Despite their heavy reliance on language and ceremony associated with or meant to evoke ancient tradition, the Nazis were also, paradoxically, eager participants in modernity, as is evident in such disparate linguistic manifestations as their preoccupation with superlatives, their reliance on the language of sportsmanship, and their penchant for linguistic depersonalization. LTI seems more original, perhaps, in explicating the Nazi relationship to time, the past, birth, death, posterity, apotheosis, resurrection, history. "What comes after the Third Reich?" ran a trick question posed on Third Reich apprentice examinations. Those who fell into the trap and answered "the Fourth Reich" (thinking forward in the series: Holy Roman Empire, Kaiserreich, Third Reich . . . ) failed the question and the political part of the examination. The Third Reich is eternal, of course; it will last for a thousand years, and nothing comes after it. At the same time, any number of "receptions, speeches and trivialities of the Hitler regime . . . were referred to as 'historic [historisch]'" (LTI, 210).
In LTI's most controversial chapter "Zion," Klemperer even contrasts this sense of historicity and historical mission with the earlier, related rhetoric deployed by Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. Like Hitler after him, Klemperer argues, Herzl became convinced of his own prophetic importance. When Herzl "advances his thoughts during a walk it is 'an historic hour,' and whenever he enjoys the most insignificant diplomatic success it immediately goes down in world history. And there is a moment at which he confides in his diary that his private life has now ceased and his historic life begun" (LTI, 210-11). The point of the Hitler-Herzl comparison is not exactly to equate Nazism and Zionism. 12 What interests Klemperer rather are Nazism's historical roots, its degree of shared intellectual property with other nationalist movements, and the subterranean, paradoxical influence of Herzl's Zionism on Hitler's anti-Semitic nationalism.
At many points, Klemperer offers learned (or at least improvised) disquisitions about the prehistory, even the pre-1933 usage, of now recognizably "Nazi" words. He is particularly interested in the way words, phrases, or modes of linguistic expression already in common usage take on (given the specific political pressures, institutions, and apparatuses of the Third Reich) a more pointed, more politically and temporally bound meaning. Klemperer's diaries show no sign that he has read or heard of Ferdinand de Saussure, yet like Saussure's influential introductory linguistics course, LTI carefully balances a diachronic view of language as a historical formation with a synchronic view of the language community. What is surprising about Klemperer's linguistically based view of Third Reich experience is his insistence that both proponents and opponents of the state eventually adopt state language and that those persecuted under the Nuremberg Laws decisively fail to cohere as a differentiable language community.
This thesis counteracts both anti-Semitic beliefs about Jewish "mauscheln" or other purportedly distinctively Jewish ways of using language and Zionist claims that modern Europe's assimilated and partly secularized Jews still form a coherent people. At the same time, Klemperer's own account frames itself as emphatically Jewish in its perspective on and experience of the Third Reich. LTI insists that to analyze Third Reich language use is necessarily to describe in detail the Nazi persecution of the Jews, and the way the victims seem, at least on a linguistic level, to internalize the worldview of their persecutors.
What still seems most crucial in Klemperer's account is its attention to popular usage and thus to the question of ideology as collectively transmitted, experienced, and inhabited through language. While continually alert to the differences in individual speakers' situations and ways of using languages, he stresses the apparently universal reach of Nazi linguistic coinages; by the end of the war, he claims, they permeated public and private, elite and working-class, official and even oppositional speech in every corner of the country. The regime's self-proclaimed "enthusiasts" (itself a crucial LTI word), its principled resisters, its Jewish victims, even Klemperer himself can be found using specifically and quintessentially Nazi coinages with all the ideological baggage they bring with them. Klemperer finds a rare and partial exception, to be sure, in the small village where he and his wife spend the last weeks of the war, for it is inhabited solely by a Slavonic minority group that uses Wendish, not German, in daily life.  Yet because of their closeness as a community, their ardent Catholicism, and their linguistic links to the "Slavic" peoples anathematized by the Nazis, the villagers remain resolutely (and within their own circle, quite openly) anti-Nazi.
Stimulating as LTI is, it remains haunted by an unresolved paradox. On the one hand, Klemperer wants to argue for the temporal and historical specificity of Nazi language. 13 A concept and a vocabulary of transcendence that means one thing in the nineteenth century, or in the mouth of Herzl, is transformed into something very different when linked to the apparatuses and public mouthpieces of institutionalized Nazism. Unlike Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler , in other words, Klemperer puts the emphasis not on the intellectual and historical preconditions for Hitler but on Nazism as actual, lived, spoken practice. 14 On the other hand, he seems driven not only by the need to describe a now-superseded political and cultural dispensation but also to prevent the linguistic--and thus ideological--afterlife of Nazism through the continued use of recognizably Fascist words and concepts.
The postwar diaries suggest a different, although related paradox. Now Klemperer seemed to believe that the past was over and could be put behind him . . . and then was amazed to find the echoes or specters of the past still hovering. Like Mimesis, Klemperer's wartime diaries are framed, at moments, in dialogue with Homer's Odyssey as a foundational text of displacement and alienation; when the war ended, he believed himself rescued, allowed to return to his old life, come home. In fact, his travails and alienation were far from over.
It is in the postwar period, oddly enough, once institutionalized anti-Semitism had vanished, that Klemperer became acutely aware of the potential for popular anti-Semitism in Germany, anxiously noting all lingering signs of it. Yet although some of his acquaintances detected vestiges of anti-Semitism within the ruling Socialist Unity Party, he generally did not. As he finally acknowledged in 1959, those attempting research on Jewish topics in GDR universities (like his nephew's wife, a Party member interested in researching the history of the German-Jewish medical establishment) could face powerful tacit opposition; indeed, "The topic of the Jews is not beloved in the GDR" (So, 2:744). For the most part, however, Klemperer found himself valued by the Communist leadership not only for his publically reiterated pro-Soviet stance but also as a principled antifascist (Jewish) victim of Nazism and advocate of fellow victims. In the early postwar period, to be sure, he was angered that he and his wife were not granted the most privileged status as "Victims of Fascism"; since the Nazis persecuted him on racial grounds rather than for active political resistance, he qualified for a somewhat smaller state pension, somewhat smaller supplementary rations, and so on. The distinction surfaced again, years later, when he attended the dedication of the Buchenwald memorial as an official guest; when a government minister expressed his surprise that Klemperer was not sporting the latest medal given to honor "anti-fascists," Klemperer somewhat tartly explained once more the state's own earlier distinction between "active resisters" and those automatically slated for Nazi persecution (So, 2:705). By now, however, he was preoccupied as much with the question of his own public recognition--and the status of the GDR academy in relationship to international scholarship--as with recognition and restitution for all Germany's Jews. "Always being in the position of Not-Fully-Being-Counted. From Jewish star to Jewish star. Since I have become a big wheel in the GDR, their Academy [of Arts], & Humboldt University wear the Jewish star" (So, 2:601). Such rhetoric at once paralleled Jean-Paul Sartre's contemporaneous equation of Jewishness with Otherness and threatened to devalue Klemperer's own particular fate during the Third Reich, suffered precisely (and nonmetaphorically) as a Jew, as a star-bearer.
As his rhetoric suggests, Klemperer remained deeply ambivalent about Judaism itself. On the one hand, the Church's partial abandonment of its Jewish converts during the Third Reich and Klemperer's postwar decision to become a Communist left him alienated from Christianity, from his own earlier attempts to assimilate by Christian baptism, and indeed from all forms of religious observance. When his second wife, a deeply pious Catholic, attempted to interest him in her faith, he felt only the gulf of background and belief between them (although he eventually consented to a secret church wedding ceremony to enable her to become a communicant again). On the other hand, his wartime sense of solidarity--or at least of shared fate--with other Jews gave way to a renewed attempt at assimilation into a new political situation and sometimes outright denial about his own Jewish background. During a 1957 visit to an old Prague synagogue, one of the worshipers asked whether he is Jewish, and he flatly answered "no" (So, 2:612). Already in 1952, he objected to a forthcoming homage that contained "rather a lot about the son of the rabbi, Jewish suffering etc. . . . to me philo-Semitism is as embarrassing as anti-Semitism. I am a German and a Communist, nothing else. In addition the consequences of philo-Semitism are only a new strengthening of anti-Semitism" (So, 2:351). Such objections seem at once historically obtuse and prescient. The year 1952 was to see the Soviet doctors' trial, the Slansky trial, and corresponding GDR reprisals against Communists who advocated the restitution of Jewish property; by the end of 1952 most of the GDR's small remaining community of practicing Jews had left for the West. Klemperer was by no means oblivious to these developments. Once again as during the Third Reich, shared concerns about the political climate brought him back into contact with his Jewish friends, yet his identification with them remained partial, incomplete, and short-lived. And while they became increasingly unsure of the SED's commitment to Jewish life, he continued to trust the Party.
Throughout the postwar period, Klemperer participated repeatedly in activities intended to commemorate the Holocaust: he attended GDR state ceremonies on the anniversary of the so-called Reichskristallnacht pogrom, he visited Auschwitz, he saw several films about Third Reich concentration camps. For the most part, however, he remained unable to grasp the fate of German and European Jews as a totality; like many Communists of his generation, indeed, he struggled to put behind him both the Holocaust and his own earlier life as a Jew. Yet a suppressed grief sometimes surfaced unexpectedly. In 1954, for instance, the Dresden Jewish Community invited him to sort through the "gigantic, somewhat damp, stacks of books" left behind by several waves of emigrés and deportees (So, 2:458). Among this huge mass of abandoned books, Klemperer found a number of French volumes that he took for his own scholarly use or for the university institute library. The expedition, virtually his first visit to a Jewish-affiliated building since 1945, left him pensive and possibly somewhat melancholy. Before Hitler, he learned from a synagogue employee, Dresden had 5,000 practicing Jews; now, 45 were left. Only a jumble of books remained to mark the passage of all who were gone.
Throughout both the Third Reich and the postwar period, Klemperer was desperately anxious about how many books he himself would leave behind. Hoping to make up for lost time, he became ever more ambitious over the course of the 1940s and 1950s--for a professorship at more and more prominent universities, for a National Prize, for a university rectorship. In the meantime, his self-doubt about his scholarship continued. The publication of Auerbach's Mimesis, in particular, plunged him into a profound depression (So, 1:374); immediately recognizing its brilliance, he felt the relative inadequacy of his own scholarly work (So, 1:589). He was later reduced to similar despair by reading Auerbach's other works or even by hearing the news of Curtius's death (which reminded him of the contrast between Curtius's scholarly achievements and his own work as a "journalist" [So, 1:550]). In fact, his own increasingly intense immersion in public life (lecture tours, cultural organizations, public commissions, parliamentary politics) and university politics, especially when linked with an ambitious and logistically complicated series of concurrent academic posts at universities in different regions of the GDR, left him little time or energy to pursue academic writing or even the intense reading he undertook during the Third Reich. By the time he finally retired in the mid-1950s, he felt too exhausted and ill to write with the intensity and rapidity he continued to expect of himself. Meanwhile, however, his years of forays into public life and the careful diary entries he continued to make provide latter-day readers with often fascinating details about daily life in the postwar period, from the lingering obsession with food to the rebuilding of cityscapes.
After 1945, Klemperer spent literally hundreds of hours at Party gatherings--conferences, commissions, parliamentary sessions--most of which he found excruciating. His only release, much of the time, was quite literally to sleep through the endless, largely predictable speeches. Yet he continued to seek out participation at such events, and despite often difficult conditions, his own terrible health, and his growing guilt about leaving his ailing, elderly wife at home alone, repeatedly traversed the country to attend them. In part, his efforts were altruistic; he wanted to help ensure structural reforms and cultural renewal that would forestall a recurrence of fascism. At the same time, he was dazzled by his newfound ability, after so many years of disenfranchisement, to move among the powerful. Swept up by their rhetoric of reform--but even more by their ability to make things happen--he willingly suspended some of his skepticism and disbelief.
When Klemperer joined the Communist Party in 1945, his diary supplied little preparation, motivation, or explanation for his conversion. His Weimar diaries suggested ambivalence in the face of the (failed) German Revolutions. And well into the early years of the German Democratic Republic, Klemperer continued to style himself, half defensively, as a bourgeois humanist (despite his Party membership, sympathy with Soviet accomplishments, public advocacy of Marxist social, political, and economic aims, and scholarly interest in the revolutionary legacy of the French Enlightenment). He continually imagined himself as someone caught in the middle, caught out, at odds with both the traditionalists and the innovators, the Right and the institutionalized Left. Yet well into the 1950s, he also continued to believe in the GDR as the "lesser evil" and that the Soviets provided the best--perhaps the only--bulwark against the recurrence of Nazism in Germany. "For me, the Soviet tanks are doves of peace," he reaffirmed in 1953, in the wake of the workers' uprising of June 17, crushed by those selfsame tanks (So, 1:390). At the same time, he remained acutely aware of the Soviets' continuing unpopularity among most denizens of the GDR. If another war were ever to come, if the Soviets ever pulled out of the GDR, he worried, he and other Communists would be persecuted as quislings and collaborators (So, 1:618).
At moments, he seemed caught in a kind of performative hypocrisy. On a 1952 official visit to Stalinist Romania (whose cultural climate struck him as "the most severe and fearful dictatorship" [So, 2:342]), Klemperer was continually frustrated; rather than meet with Bucharest academics to work out plans for cultural and intellectual exchange, he was forced into a more standard official-visitor itinerary designed to showcase "modern Romania." One afternoon, for instance, was spent on a mandatory visit to a museum of the socialist struggle, similar to--but unfortunately much bigger than--socialist shrines he had already visited in Poland and Czechoslovakia. "I was extremely bored, & then wrote admiring words in the guest book" (So, 2:338).  Afterwards, Klemperer regretted this display of temper, yet his true source of anger, arguably, was the half-repressed knowledge of his own, fully comparable combination of servility and orthodoxy. Years later, when he allowed himself a similar outburst in a GDR store and threatened to use his political authority to expose dishonest business practises, his second wife reproved him sharply. Whether such anxieties were justified or not, ordinary GDR citizens, she reminded him, lived in fear of summary arrest and of Party denunciation; by throwing his weight around, he only increased their paranoia.
The postwar diaries include fascinating information about daily political life and popular political sentiment in the GDR, from angry meetings of pacifist students opposed to German rearmament to the recurrent booing in the cinemas of industrial centers like Bitterfeld whenever newsreel footage of Walter Ulbricht and of Stakhanovite activists appeared on the screen. Particularly interesting are his detailed descriptions of Party operations, from repetitive speeches and pointless official meetings to unnerving public catechisms and self-criticism sessions. In the process, he offers cameos of many prominent GDR writers and intellectuals--Ernst Bloch, Arnold Zweig, F. C. Weiskopf, Johannes R. Becher, Anna Seghers, Helene Weigel, Robert Havemann, Hans Mayer, Stephan Hermlin, Kuba (Kurt Barthel), Wolfgang Harich, Alfred Kantorowicz--often cast in a critical or unflattering light.
The diaries also include running commentary on Party debates over aesthetics, as on a wide variety of cultural events and developments: a 1946 art exhibition that retrieved and revalorized Expressionist and Cubist artworks; the eclipse and reemergence of Jean-Paul Sartre as an approved writer; the literally heart-stopping first run of Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children (written 1939) and the more alienating production of Brecht's Life of Galileo (written 1938-9) at the Berliner Ensemble; Klemperer's ambivalent responses to Kafka; his negative initial reaction to the diary of Anne Frank (a "somewhat snobby teenager" [etwas snobistischer Backfisch] [So, 2:596]) and deeply emotional response to its dramatic adaptation; the by turns intriguing and inadequate new films produced at DEFA, the GDR state film studio. An inveterate cinephile during his earlier life, then barred from attending the cinema throughout most of the Third Reich, Klemperer was largely disappointed by postwar offerings. (During the early years of the Third Reich, he and his wife avidly watched new German entertainment films. Now he was largely irritated and disturbed by reprises of films from the Third Reich, only to find himself, at moments of acute political tension, newly appreciative of their escapist properties.) He reread Ernest Hemingway, irritated that this great stylist was not yet published in the GDR but puzzled, also, at the way the shift in his own reading circumstances since the fraught, terrified days of the Third Reich changed his sense of Hemingway's voice and affect. He puzzled over how to construe twelfth-century French poet Marie de France as proto-Marxist and over whether the Dadaists could properly be considered "revolutionary" in the political as well as the aesthetic sense. He attended Brecht's state funeral but was moved only by Ernst Busch's singing. The postwar diaries, in short, provide a fascinating introduction to aesthetic, cultural, and academic life in the Soviet Zone of Occupation and the early GDR.
Years after the publication of LTI, Klemperer still received fan mail from some readers, especially those who had also been victims of fascism, and anonymous letters from West German or Western-aligned readers, who urged him to distance himself publicly from the GDR's linguistic and human rights abuses--and to publish an LQI, an equally critical/analytic work about the language of the Communist dictatorship.  Phrases or linguistic usages he sees as forming part of an LQI, or Language of the Fourth Reich, include "monopoly capitalism" (So, 1:439); "collective" and the use of "Comrade" as a form of address (So, 1:448); "class-conscious" (So, 1:641); and later "cadre" (So, 2:469); "exploitation" and "vigilance" (So, 2:512). Yet unlike the more detailed working notes made in the Third Reich diary (which Klemperer would later characterize as "a laconic aide-mémoire, like a knot in a handkerchief" [LTI, 9]), the running record of new linguistic usages in the postwar diaries never seems like notes towards a publishable essay. Instead it seems testament to Klemperer's involuntary but half-suppressed urge to go on monitoring language use, even while he refused to draw the uncomfortable conclusions this new material sometimes suggested.
During the Nazi period, Klemperer kept his diary, talked with friends, and assessed current events as a self-conscious opponent of the regime; now, he viewed Soviet and GDR cultural policy as a sympathetic insider whose moments of criticism or skepticism only seldom entail more profound questioning of his underlying, fundamental alliance to this side of the cold war. Klemperer's rubric "LQI" might seem to imply a parallel with the Third Reich--and thus to indicate a "totalitarian" equivalence between Nazism and Communism. Some of the postwar usages he noted encouraged euphemism or suppressed historical complexity. "LIBERATING. No one conquers anymore, each 'frees': the 'Armies of People's Democracy' do it, the Partisans did it. . . . " (So, 1:679) When the SED began to encourage "voluntary" service, Klemperer knew the phrase concealed coercion; he remembered the nonvoluntary "voluntary" sacrifices Third Reich officials demanded of the public during the war, especially during the siege of Stalingrad (So, 2:467). Other aspects of Communist culture also seemed powerfully reminiscent of the Third Reich. He was repeatedly disturbed, in the early 1950s, by the Free Democratic Youth (FDJ), the official, ubiquitous Party youth organization whose massed, uniformed singing on festive occasions reminded him fatally of the Hitler Youth. By the late 1950s, having absorbed the damning revelations about Stalin's terror, he also recorded popular GDR fears of summary arrest and imprisonment. Formerly, he would have dismissed such fears as groundless hysteria. Now he granted that they were "not even unfounded. Nazi conditions" (So, 2:670).
Some postwar linguistic usages, moreover, involve a direct continuation of Nazi concepts: "artstreu" (true to one's own kind [So, 1:641]) was used by the Nazis to refer to racial essence; then the Communists used it to refer to the lasting influence of social formation. Yet the real afterlife of Nazi language, Klemperer insisted repeatedly, was to be found in West Germany. And the underlying logics of LTI and LQI were on the whole strikingly different. From his vantage point, the Sovietization of culture in the GDR appeared for the most part not as a cultural imperialism imposed externally and by force so much as the ceaseless striving of German Communists to imitate much-admired Soviet prototypes. Their conversion, in turn, effected wide-ranging changes in popular linguistic practice as in the practice of everyday life. Klemperer was particularly incisive on the way German officials and Party members strove to adapt the format, tone, rhetoric, even gestures of Soviet political culture. But he also made astute (and somewhat ambivalent) observations about a host of smaller social transformations, from the politicization of the weather report to the enforced intimacy of the adoption of the informal "Du" (rather than the more formal "Sie") as a mode of address among Party members; from the postwar shift of sexual and social mores (public discussions of venereal disease and abortion, profound, desacralizing changes in the status of marriage), to the politicization of the university at the expense of knowledge. (Caught up in political activities, Klemperer's postwar students often came to class late and left early).
He also noted the self-conscious, deliberate "proletarianizing" of ruling-class life, at least in its outer forms. Particularly in the early postwar period, when public transport remained difficult and unreliable, he and other dignitaries were ferried by private car from meeting to meeting and speaking engagement to speaking engagement. The prewar job-title of "chauffeur," in the meantime, had given way (LQI) to the new designation of "driver" (So, 1:712). In the new dispensation, the powerful scorned any public appearance of luxury, placed emphasis on utility and functionalism, and strove to suggest a greater equality between driver and driven. Klemperer's own stance towards such shifts in nomenclature, as towards LQI in general, remained ambiguous at best. For several generations of GDR writers, the social differences between driver and official passenger would epitomize the continuing gap between socialist theory and practice. In "Buckow Elegies" , a poem cycle protesting the government response to the 1953 workers' uprising, Brecht crystallizes the gap between intelligentsia and working people in the image of the poet sitting by the side of the road while the driver changes the flat tire. 15 So too, in his drama Hinze and Kunze , his prose poem cycle Reports about Hinze and Kunze , and his Hinze-Kunze-Novel , Volker Braun anatomizes the relationship between "Hinz and Kunz," driver and politico, as a socialist updating of the master-servant duel in Denis Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist and His Master or Brecht's Puntilla and Matti . Klemperer himself was angered to realize, in the late 1940s, that one of his drivers was not being properly fed at their official destination. When he complained to GDR Minister of Culture Johannes R. Becher, however, he was warned against "leveling" impulses. Years later, Klemperer still remembered and begrudged this exchange (So, 2:674). Unlike most middle-class intellectuals, he had had first-hand experience of menial status, and he retained at least a sentimental interest in working-class conditions. At the same time, his innumerable accounts of journeys in Party vehicles soon came to focus almost exclusively on his own comfort and convenience; he quickly gained a new sense of himself as an important personage whose passage through the world (or the country) ought to be as easy and cushioned as possible. These postwar diaries are particularly fascinating when read against more self-consciously literary attempts to analyze GDR life, although such comparisons also point up the aporias in his vision of the present. Compared both to Brecht and to Braun, Klemperer was profoundly uncritical of the relative material privilege (and greater personal freedoms) the GDR accorded to intellectuals and political leaders--despite his intermittent recognition of the popular resentment such differences caused and despite his own continuing envy of those who attained greater fame, visibility, and public recognition.
Blindspots notwithstanding, Klemperer remained interested in gauging (and at least through the early 1950s, in sharing) the spirit of the (new) age. His complicated peregrinations across eastern Germany (as he attended meetings, conducted speaking tours, and finally commuted weekly among several universities) allowed him to overhear, participate in, and record innumerable conversations between strangers on the train, to Klemperer a particularly interesting barometer of popular feeling. Again and again in such situations, he heard--and often intervened to refute--anti-Soviet sentiment. At home, too, he argued with relatives and (as once before at the beginning of the Third Reich) broke with some friends over their differing views of the new dispensation. By the mid-1950s, however, he had become more sympathetic to antiregime complaints. For one thing, his second wife was acutely attuned to the hypocrisies of the SED; he trusted her moral instincts and grew to deplore the Communists' persecution of religion. At moments, such intolerance seemed closely linked to the state's failure to grasp and respect the freedom of inquiry vital to the modern university. One Leipzig professor of Old Church Slavonic, for instance, came under repeated attack for his use of the Gospel and New Testament as a basis for instruction; he was accused of "giving 'grammatical Bible instruction'" (So, 2:687). To Klemperer, such ill-considered persecutions epitomized the ominous move, in the late 1950s, to render GDR universities more thoroughly and orthodoxically Marxist in curriculum and in faculty, a process that he felt sacrificed the advanced study of particular disciplines for a high-school-like inculcation of Marxist theory and that drove ever-growing numbers of professors (and even university presidents) to emigrate to West Germany.
During the early years of the Third Reich, Klemperer still attended movies and traveled around Dresden; he carefully recorded not only the rhetoric of the radio and the press but also many pieces of overheard conversation--including, for instance, the reactions of cinemagoers to anti-Semitic newsreels and features. During the rest of the Third Reich, he was marked by a star. Precisely because he was targeted as an enemy of the state, he also became a re whose very presence in public places solicited gestures of solidarity and abuse, expressions of anti-Nazi defiance, hopes, speculations, and confidences. In the postwar GDR, he became known as a Party-affiliated intellectual--and sometimes wore a Party badge in his lapel. (Thus when a GDR publisher resolved to market a literary almanac in both Germanies, he secured Klemperer's permission to airbrush the badge from his photograph, a "detoxification" measure intended to circumvent Western anti-Communist defense mechanisms [So, 2:443].) Nonetheless, he continued to receive confidences and to hear repeated complaints from strangers as from intimates.
Throughout the Stalinist-era GDR, Klemperer recorded recurrent political discussion in semipublic spaces where people complained openly of shortages, of their dislike of the Soviets, of their doubts about the Communist project, of the GDR's failures to provide material or political prosperity as measured against the West. To those of us who witnessed private and public life in the GDR in the 1980s, the records of such discussions seem finally unsurprising; under the right circumstances, and having sized up the other people present, GDR wedding guests might well indulge in anti-Honecker jokes, strangers on a train in lengthy jeremiads. In retrospect, of course, such utterances were probably riskier than their speakers realized since the level of Stasi surveillance and informing was much higher, even, than most ordinary citizens suspected. But Klemperer's records also suggest that GDR denizens felt fairly secure in their complaints because they assumed (probably correctly) that such sentiments were almost universal. The comparison with the Third Reich (in which several of Klemperer's acquaintances were arrested on the spot for critical utterances in public) is instructive. So is the comparison with contemporaneous GDR novels; in light of Klemperer's accounts, their characters' own highly stylized complaints about the GDR's imperfections (often culminating in a change of heart and a reaffirmation of state goals) seem to serve not so much an "alibi" or "ventilation" function as an amplification and didactic stylization of highly critical discourse apparently to be heard quite openly all around them. 16
As his second wife pointed out to him, Klemperer yearned deeply and ambitiously for increasingly high official honors, then, as each was finally granted, found himself profoundly depressed. Perhaps relatedly, he worried periodically over his 1945 decision to throw in his lot with the Communists. He remained convinced that life in "our" GDR was a hundred, even a thousand times preferable to life in West Germany, yet like the voluble strangers he met on the train, he remained uneasy about the discrepancies between Communist rhetoric and lived reality. These doubts gained intensity during the course of the 1950s: over the GDR's increasingly repressive and narrow cultural politics; over the blatant and, in his view, quite unnecessary, falsification of the 1954 elections (subsequent elections would be even more flagrantly rigged); over class-based rather than merit-based admissions to and exclusions from higher education; over continuing unofficial reports of arrests, arbitrary detentions, and the brutal conditions in GDR prisons (some of them refunctioned Third Reich concentration camps). 17 In the last diary entry in each year, Klemperer typically spent a few sentences or pages thinking over the year's course and events. The "summary" for 1955 was particularly grim: "Every day a final word of wisdom: stubbornly onward, work, don't think! Deepest political disillusionment. The only thing left of my enthusiasm: we are the lesser evil. And: Marxism is a) better than our SED government b) a religion like the other religions--and I can't believe" (So, 2:528). A few entries later, however, he was back in the midst of GDR cultural business as usual, complaining yet again of the predictability of the political speeches and expressing new anxieties about GDR rearmament. Later in the decade, his sense of an inner break with Marxism often sounded more absolute--yet the outer man continued to participate in official Party life. In November 1956, for instance, he was pleased to accept a silver "patriotic service medal," although the ceremony itself was somewhat truncated, presumably due to turbulent political conditions; the Hungarian Uprising was still in progress and the SED had arrested prominent GDR intellectuals accused of sympathizing with the "Petöfi Club."
Throughout the 1950s, he continued to work on topics of French and German cultural history--from the Marseillaise and Robespierre to Voltaire's relationship to Frederick the Great's eighteenth-century absolutism--that could be construed topically and controversially. Usually, however, Klemperer did all he could to avoid facilitating topical applications. When his nephew decided to leave the Party, Klemperer was sympathetic; he never, despite the degree of his own disillusionment, considered taking a similar measure himself, however. By the late 1950s, as he began to withdraw from public life, he occasionally allowed himself, at a party or parliamentary meeting, to take what he saw as a strong and controversial stand on issues of cultural and educational policy. At such moments, he felt himself a martyr to his beliefs. Far from criticizing government policy directly, however, these speeches usually involved what he himself styled as an old man's plea to maintain some aspects of humanistic education in the secondary and postsecondary curricula. And when prominent literary critic Alfred Kantorowicz was arrested, interrogated, released, and fled to the West, where he issued renegade denunciations of the GDR, Klemperer was shocked and censorious, not because he did not agree with some of the critique but because Kantorowicz's public stance had supplied fodder for West Germany, a state Klemperer continued to see as deeply Nazi-infiltrated and contaminated (even if characterized by slightly greater political freedom).  Sometimes, however, as he weighed the two sides, the balance sheet came out slightly less favorably. "I myself," he wrote in March 1958, "look to the East and the West with almost the same revulsion" (So, 2:680). In the final entry of that year, he reported that he was "without sympathy for the West and for the East. Germany is a worm squashed into two; both pieces bend themselves, both are contaminated by the same fascism, each in its way" (So, 2:733). Yet less than a month later, he was attending yet another round of official meetings.
The diary form not only records but perhaps exacerbates a kind of alternating consciousness; on some days, certain aspects of the GDR seem very troubling to the chronicler, by the next entry, they seem forgotten, or at least to have given way to more pressing and immediate concerns.  Some kinds of doubts recurred repeatedly over a period of months or years, but such entries never formed a critical mass that affected a permanent or decisive shift in consciousness--indeed, given the seriatim form of the diary and of the diarist's thinking, it is hard to see how they could.
Yet here again, there is an important difference between the Third Reich diaries and the postwar diaries. Klemperer's dire circumstances during the Third Reich and the oppressive weight of institutionalized anti-Semitism forced him at moments to reevaluate his memories of the past. In 1937, for instance, Germany's most notorious anti-Semitic newspaper ("which is displayed at every corner") ran a picture of two swimsuited girls at a seaside resort that, its sign announced, was now prohibited for Jews. "How nice that it's just us now!" the picture's caption confirmed (I Will, 1:233). For Klemperer, the picture dredged up a long-forgotten incident from around 1900. As a schoolboy, he experienced "little trace of anti-Semitism among either the teachers or the pupils. More precisely none at all" (I Will, 1:233). Nonetheless, when the Jewish students returned to school the day after Yom Kippur,
our comrades told us, laughingly and without the least malice (just as the words themselves were also only uttered jokingly by the altogether humane teacher), Kufahl, the mathematician, had said to the reduced class: "Today it's just us." In my memory these words took on a quite horrible significance: to me it confirms the claim of the NSDAP to express the true opinion of the German people. And I believe ever more strongly that Hitler really does embody the soul of the German people. [I Will, 1:233]
In retrospect, the apparently trivial incident is full of prophetic force. If it does not suggest an "eliminationist" anti-Semitism in Goldhagen's sense, it does imply that the forced segregation of Jews from the mainstream of German life offered some degree of collective wish fulfillment, and it does suggest the fragility of the much-vaunted German-Jewish symbiosis of the pre-1933 era.
The postwar diaries, in contrast, contain little of this kind of synthetic historical thinking. Klemperer's main thoughts of the past revolved around his memories of his first wife and their early life together, memories that became fraught with guilt in light of his increasing emotional distance from Eva Klemperer during the last years of her life and his relatively rapid and very happy remarriage to his twenty-six-year-old student Hadwig Kirchner. (Even here, as he frequently agonized in the diary, he was not sure to what extent his frequently expressed remorse, sorrow, and guilt was genuine, to what extent affectation.) To the extent that he thought back, then, the memories were usually private ones, the connections familial. Just as Klemperer's LQI notations rapidly ceased (save in exceptional cases) to consider the possible parallels and continuities with LTI, his retrospective moments in the diary rarely involved attempts to grasp the larger continuities and discontinuities in German history.
Despite his 1937 moment of despair, Klemperer continued to believe in his place in German society; despite his 1955 moment of despair and his gradual loss of faith in Marxism, he continued to support and buttress the GDR. Overall, his Third Reich diaries provide an important counterweight to Goldhagen's revisionist return to the "collective guilt thesis" of the 1950s. In turn, the conjunction of the wartime and postwar diaries provide material mainly against (but sometimes for) the totalitarianism model so popular in the West during the 1950s that equated Nazism and Communism as oppressive systems. LQI is not, for the most part, the same or even an equivalent to LTI; the social transformations of the postwar GDR are different in kind from the social transformations and exclusions of the Nazi period (even if its judicial practices and general political atmosphere eventually do seem reminiscent of its predecessor state). When he himself finally begins drawing such comparisons, they tend to be fleeting and impressionistic, usually lacking the detail and nuance of his earlier analytic work on Nazi culture. 18
During the Third Reich, he was motivated to write in self-defense, in a spirit of enmity and resistance, and in the hope of a different world to come. In the postwar period, he recorded life under Communism not as an opponent but as a sympathetic advocate; even at moments of greatest doubt, he seemed unable to imagine another dispensation than the one in which he found himself. Having failed to emigrate in time during the Third Reich, he was forced to bear witness to the regime's crimes but also became determined to stand fast in order to do so. In the postwar period, he never considered emigrating--and continued to see those who did as treacherous or opportunistic. Yet now he often appeared, even to himself, as simply stuck, as someone who had bought into the system around him without understanding its full ramifications and was now unable to contemplate divestment. He continued to keep his diary faithfully, but he was increasingly unsure to what end. "My dia. notes are becoming ever shorter. Time is lacking, and the belief that they will ever be able to be used," he wrote in October 1957 (So, 2:656). "I have lost all belief in having any effect," he reiterated in April 1959. "All belief in the Right and the Left.
 Yet "what is the point for me of living on, if I cannot produce any more, and no longer believe in the worth of what I have produced?" (So, 2:753) What haunted him, of course, is the specter not only of the writer no longer able to write but of a postwar career in support of what now seemed indefensible.
In the Plenum of the Chamber as Speaker for the Committee on Law I demanded in full belief the reintroduction of the death penalty for the worst political crimes--blowing up bridges, for instance. I condemned all those who defected to the West. Why don't I publicly recant today? . . . Why am I content with silence . . . ? . . . I can hardly be harmed. But what if they took the promised pension away from [Hadwig]?" [So, 2:751-2]
Even after seven years of marriage, in fact, Klemperer's second wife was still a young woman and still at the beginning of her own academic career. So despite the sincerity and depth of feeling expressed here, there is also something theatrical, almost affected, about this belated scene of conscience; in an unwitting parody of Brecht's Galileo, this scholar toyed with recantation but could not bring himself to renounce any of the comforts bought by conformity.
During the Nazi period, Klemperer looks down on those who accepted and acceded to the status quo because they lacked the intelligence or the will to resist (even if he later helps to rehabilitate some of these fellow travelers); he himself uses his prodigious energies and memory to record the wrongs of the age. In becoming, in the postwar period, a Communist, a public re, a re obsessed with fame and recognition, and then in becoming an old man, he also becomes more sympathetic to compromise--and ever less concerned with memory as a tool for cultural and self-analysis. As he underwent major changes in the transition from one dispensation to the other, Victor Klemperer himself seemed oddly discontinuous. The diary changes with him; somewhere in the process, he becomes for readers a considerably less sympathetic or at least less comfortable narrating presence. In the end, of course, this subtle, gradual transformation of narrating persona under the pressure of concurrent historical transformations is part of the diary's fascination--indeed part of the more general fascination of the diary as historical genre.
In its critical analysis of Zionist rhetoric, LTI analyzed Herzl's (inflated) sense of himself as a vessel of history, yet a similar self-understanding, paradoxically enough, seems central to Klemperer's own writings and persona. Sometime near the beginning of the Third Reich, we might well say of him, "there is a moment at which he confides in his diary that his private life has now ceased and his historic life begun." After the war is over, conversely, he tried to leave behind his self-appointed mission as a historical chronicler and to return, at least in his diary, to private life. Yet even while his diary attempted retirement, retreat, repression, he himself became a public re, visible and exposed on the historical stage.
German critics are right to claim Klemperer as one of the great twentieth-century chroniclers; we must hope that both an unabridged edition of the entire diary and English translations of the Weimar and postwar diaries will be published soon. It is very much to Klemperer's credit that his visibly "damaged life" (to use Adorno's phrase) yielded both such vital scholarship and such a fascinating, if contradictory, personal and historical record. "For me the great lesson," Klemperer noted already in November 1918 during the failed German revolution, "is that in the most desperate world-historical periods everyday life nonetheless keeps going and takes up what one might call the breadth of the room." 19 What is of greatest interest in this diaristic magnum opus, finally, is the relationship between his own subjective or at least positioned perspective on Germany's dramatic political, social, and cultural upheavals, the daily, domestic life he continued to live through them, and the changing nature of his own consciousness and narrative voice.
University of Chicago
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
1. Throughout the postwar period, Aufbau had been the GDR's most ambitious and prestigious literary press; after 1989, it quickly developed a distinctive new profile, revising and redocumenting the political, literary, and aesthetic history of the GDR and other parts of Eastern Europe. In addition to fascinating documentary histories of Aufbau's own publishing history, the press published important volumes, for instance, on the Soviets' reusage of Nazi concentration camps to house political prisoners during the Occupation and on the literary-political consequences of the SED's 1965 crackdown on the arts, as well as documentary collections that described the Stalinist career of GDR writer and pioneering Minister of Culture, Johannes R. Becher, and that resituated GDR writer Arnold Zweig in relationship to Zionism. See for instance Elmar Faber and Carsten Wurm, eds., Allein mit Lebensmittelkarten ist es nicht auszuhalten . . . Autoren und Verlegerbriefe, 1945-1949 (Berlin: Aufbau, 1991); idem, eds., ". . . und leiser Jubel zöge ein": Autoren- und Verlegerbriefe, 1950-1959 (Berlin: Aufbau, 1992); Günther Agde, ed., Kahlschlag: Das 11. Plenum des ZK der SED 1965: Studien und Dokumente (Berlin: Aufbau, 1991); idem, ed., Sachsenhausen bei Berlin: Speziallager Nr. 7, 1945-1950 (Berlin: Aufbau, 1994); Johannes R. Becher, Der gespaltene Dichter: Gedichte, Briefe, Dokumente, 1945-1958, ed. Carsten Gansel (Berlin: Aufbau, 1991); and Arnold Zweig, Jüdischer Ausdruckswille: Publizisktik aus vier Jahrzehnten, ed. Detlev Claussen (Berlin: Aufbau, 1991). During the mid-1990s, Aufbau also published memoirs and monographs about Stalinism in the GDR, the Soviet Gulag, the Slansky Trial, and so on.
2. See Victor Klemperer, Leben sammeln, nicht fragen wozu und warum: Tagebücher 1918-1932, 2 vols., ed. Walter Nowojski (Berlin: Aufbau, 1996); idem, Und so ist alles schwankend: Tagebücher Juni bis Dezember 1945, ed. Walter Nowojski (Berlin: Aufbau, 1996); as well as Hannes Heer, ed., Im Herzen der Finsternis: Victor Klemperer als Chronist der NS-Zeit (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1997), a volume of critical essays about the Third Reich diaries.
3. During the Third Reich, Klemperer clearly envisioned the postwar publication not only of LTI, as is evident from notes he made in his diaries, but also of some version of the diaries themselves. LTI itself, on the other hand, announced that Klemperer did not intend "to publish the entire diary for this period with all its observations of everyday life" (LTI, 10). This was probably a wise decision; as his own subsequent diaries made clear, the publishing climate of the Soviet Zone of Occupation and early GDR remained relatively unstable. In the heady days of the early postwar period, Klemperer repeatedly gave public speeches on political or literary-historical topics, then immediately found himself in dialogue with major publishers eager to develop long-term editing, translation, or critical projects with him. Yet although some of these projects actually reached fruition, others were eventually halted, censored, or suppressed. Any attempt to publish the wartime diaries in the late 1940s or early 1950s, one suspects, might have ended similarly.
4. See Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).
5. Bertolt Brecht, "To Posterity," in Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton, eds., Modern German Poetry 1910-1960: An Anthology with Verse Translations (New York: Grove, 1962), 226.
6. Throughout the twentieth century, German Marxists have criticized the parallel impulse to preserve, savor, and create art in the midst of cataclysm. During the failed German revolution of 1918, bullets damaged a Raphael hanging in a Dresden museum. In a letter to the editor, Oscar Kokoschka, then professor of art in Dresden, lamented this violent destruction of cultural legacy. This letter, in turn, elicited a savage polemical attack by Georg Grosz and John Heartfield, lampooning Kokoschka's implicit privileging of painting (and property) over human life. But it also prompted conciliatory statements from more orthodox Communists like Gertrud Alexander, advocating both revolutionary upheaval and artistic conservation. For the so-called Kunstlump debate, see Walter Fähnders and Martin Rector, eds., Literatur im Klassenkampf: Zur proletarisch-revolutionären Literaturtheorie, 1919-1923 (Munich: C. Hauser, 1971). So too in 1938, Bertolt Brecht's famous poem "To Posterity" ("An die Nachgeborenen") lamented that in such times "a conversation / About trees is almost a crime. / Because it includes a silence about so many misdeeds!" (Bertolt Brecht, "To Posterity," in Modern German Poetry, 227). And Adorno, too, wondered famously about the future of poetry after Auschwitz.
7. See Istvan Deak, "Cold Brave Heart," The New Republic (17 and 24 April 2000), 85-95.
8. To English-speaking readers, Klemperer's savage tone, here, may seem reminiscent of Jonathan Swift and his Modest Proposal. German readers may instead recognize echos of Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (1625-76), whose picaresque novels, set in the battlefields and in the devastated cities of the Thirty Years War, also inspired Brecht's most famous work of exile, Mother Courage and Her Children .
9. See Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974); and Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953).
10. See Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
11. These essays are both reprinted in Leo Spitzer, Representative Essays, ed., Alban K. Forcione, Herbert Lindenberger, and Madeline Sutherland (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), 205-22 and 327-56.
12. In the late 1940s, Klemperer was repeatedly forced to defend the inclusion of this chapter against objections that it could be used to anti-Semitic ends; by the mid-1950s, he noted the historical irony that his own critique of Zionism was now matched and bested by the GDR's institutionalized anti-Zionist line. He himself, in the meantime, condemned Zionist actions against the Arab population of Palestine as painfully reminiscent of Nazi clearances.
13. In his initial discussions of the historicity of language and linguistic formations, Klemperer repeatedly uses the metaphor of the "fossil" (LTI, 2-3); as Susan Buck-Morss has argued at length, the same metaphor is also central to the cultural-historical vision of Walter Benjamin's unfinished Arcades project. See Susan Buck-Morss, "Natural History: Fossil," ch. 3 of The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 58-77. In its mode of exploring cultural history, Klemperer's work has important resonances with the major intellectual projects undertaken, in exile, by German-Jewish emigres, presumably without direct influence in either direction.
14. See Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947).
| 15. | I sit on the roadside bank. |
| The driver changes a wheel. | |
| I do not like the place I have come from. | |
| I do not like the place I am going to. | |
| Why do I watch him changing the wheel | |
| With impatience? | |
| (Bertolt Brecht, "Changing the Wheel" [1953], Modern German Poetry, 237). |
16. Later GDR writers such as Hans Joachim Schädlich, Christoph Hein, and Monika Maron develop a more fine-grained and oppositional account of the way language works--or necessarily fails to work--in the Party-dominated GDR. At times, their analysis builds directly on Klemperer's pioneering LTI. See for instance Maron's discussion of the way Party language, with its "self-assurance . . . sentimentality and simple-minded metaphors" is recycled in family life to discuss "such grandiose topics as running the household or rearing children. There was no distinct boundary between private speech and this other language" (Maron, Silent Close No. 6, trans. David Newton Marinelli [London: Readers International, 1993], 49-50).
17. "In Bautzen, Sachsenhausen, Waldheim far too many prisoners, worst possible nutrition and hygiene, confessions, signatures coerced through beatings, etc. etc. People condemned to death by the Russians in the 40s for espionage, reduced to 25 year sentence. Those half-guilty and innocent people. Just now a partial amnesty carried out utterly arbitrarily. . . . And the GDR proceeds hardly differently than the way the Russians proceeded and proceed. If only a tenth of this is true, how will one counteract the next 17th of June? And what is my conscience towards the Party?" (2 March 1954; So, 2:429).
18. Only on rare occasions did he actually compare concrete political or linguistic specifics of East and West. See for instance So, 2:741.
19. Klemperer, Leben sammeln, 1:8.
The 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts, composed by Virgil Thomson with a libretto by Gertrude Stein, is a landmark in the history of American performance. Broadway had never before showcased a work in which words served the usual function of music, not telling a story or communicating meaning in a traditional fashion, but primarily sounding. The casting was also revolutionary, as the entirely black cast performed a work not written in dialect and unrelated to traditional themes of black life. This intersection in 1934 of Steinian modernism and black performance is more than an interesting episode in the history of theatre. It is a prime moment in which to examine a modernist text transferred to the stage, and the transformation of its poetics of "nonidentity" when the communicative medium is a performing body inscribed with social history. An examination of the Stein/Thomson project uncovers a tension between a high modernist strategy that rejected linearity and history and a visible physical racial identity that was, by definition, the cumulative effect of historical cultural narrative(s). On one hand, the high modernist project of Stein and others can be characterized as unrelated to the historical realism, concerned not with referentiality, but with the artistic capacity of syntax. 1 On the other hand, race is intrinsically a historical product and its injection through the casting decision into this high modernist project presented a serious challenge to a poetics that sought to bypass dominant social structures.
An important question about the 1934 production of Four Saints is whether the ostensible refusal of Stein's libretto to engage the discourse of the current social structure remained intact when embodied by a black cast in performance. I will argue that cultural narratives of race, which were reinforced by certain directorial choices, defeated her linguistic strategy for circumventing dominant structures. In fact, those narratives reinforced Stein's poetic project and complemented her artistic goals.
Stein's landscape conception of theater, which defies the traditional use of narrative and character, has an established place among major theatre and performance theories. The philosophical and artistic framework upon which her landscape performance pieces such as Four Saints are based can be inferred from writings such as The Geographical History of America and Lectures in America, both compiled after she saw the 1934 production of Four Saints. In Geographical History, she suggests that landscape theater is the presentation of a state of existing as opposed to a story or character sketch. The first time she uses act and scene titles in the book, suggesting a play, they precede a declaration of existence: "I am I because my little dog knows me." 2 Throughout the book she questions the role of the "little dog," or audience/observer, in delineating existence; it is clear that the Steinian theatre of Geographical History is concerned with the experience and acknowledgment of being rather than with narrative. Her theatrical goals find a parallel in the concept of spectacle, a nonnarrative flood of sights and sounds similar to a circus. Stein insinuated in Lectures in America that producing a theatrical experience of general, nonintellectual sensation was her goal: "All a child's feeling of the theater is two things. One which is in a way like a circus that is the general movement and light and air which any theater has and a great deal of glitter in the light and a great deal of height in the air." 3
The states of existence and being that are necessary for this theatrical experience are not to be confused with identity, which is a product of history and narrative structure. Because of identity's grounding in history, a "state of confusion" according to Stein, it has no place in a masterpiece, which is rooted in "the human mind": "Now identity remembers and so it has an audience and as it has an audience it is history and as it is history it has nothing to do with the human mind" (GHA, 133, 175, 139). This observation links history not only to identity but also to reception, acknowledging the element of social context in performance that presents a significant obstacle to high modernist ahistoricism in Four Saints, as I will show later. The characters in Stein's landscape theatre pieces do not have identities, as we cannot make inferences about their nature or characteristics based on dialogue, narrative progression in the piece, or references within it to a time "before" the staged action. Knowledge of the lives of the historical St. Térèse and St. Ignatius does not effectively supplement the audience's understanding of their namesakes in Four Saints because historical facts are irrelevant to the libretto and to the staging of the opera. We know from the opera's title and the characters' names that they are supposed to be saints, but this information is not helpful in predicting or interpreting their actions within the opera. The opera attempted to define "saint" not based on any a priori conceptions of identity but by constituting the label performatively in the terms of the acts the characters carried out within it.
These acts did not follow from causal relationships, nor did they build cumulatively as is characteristic of narrative structure. Instead, speech, movement, and action were isolated in unrelated tableaux that proceeded in a nondeterministic flow. The series of tableaux in which characters identified as Spanish saints were seen chatting, picnicking, marching in a processional, and painting giant Easter eggs were snapshots of existence rather than traditional scenes of action. Stein herself did not even characterize the movements of the characters as "doing": "But a really good saint does nothing and so I wanted to have Four Saints who did nothing and I wrote Four Saints in Three Acts and they did nothing and that was everything." 4 Here, she defines "doing" as that which does not happen in Four Saints: history and progressive action. The hyperbolic and campy staging of the play by Virgil Thomson, Maurice Grosser, and choreographer Frederick Ashton undermined the standard definition of action as that which inherently contributes to narrative progression. This was in agreement with Stein's musings in Picasso: "A thing without progress is more splendid than a thing which progresses." 5 The saints perform their actions for the sake of performance, actions that lead to nothing else "happening," but are complete in themselves. The actions performed early in the opera are not necessary for evaluating actions carried out later on and thus avoid the syncopative disunity that so irritated her in narrative. 6
According to Stein, narrative is unworthy of a masterpiece not only because it opposes unity but because it is "not interesting" (GHA, 142) and too common: "Everybody knows so many stories and what is the use of telling another story" (LA, 118). One perspective on her regard for stories is that it betrays her own white, bourgeois identifications by suggesting that all narratives, versions of history, and human experience have already been told: "It is perfectly extraordinary how many complicated dramas go on all the time. And everybody knows them, so why tell another one" (LA, 118). Such a position assumes that all voices and viewpoints have long been present and accounted for and thus denies any historical and social specificity in human experience. Thomson and Grosser understood and embraced Stein's position on narrative and consciously chose black performers to be the vehicles for her aesthetic. 7 The production deliberately situated black persons in a timeless realm devoid of history or stories. Such an artistic move is significant given the Jim Crow environment of 1934 and the corresponding need for its stories to become more visible.
In spite of her opposition to coherent narrative, Stein herself was interested in self-definition, though only in the context of a perpetually open-ended process. Her intention was not to ignore identity and go no further, but to free entities from the limitations of socially constructed identities. In her framework, a "masterpiece" is accomplished when language, entities, and signs are freed from historically and culturally determined referents to exist self-referentially but not definitively or statically. She believed that her landscape writing and theatre offered an alternative to narrative, a new way of telling what is not known. She sought to tell the "thing" itself, which had formerly been hidden at the margins: "But in my portraits I had tried to tell what each one is without telling stories and now in my early plays I tried to tell what happened without telling stories so that the essence of what happened would be like the essence of the portraits, what made what happened be what it was" (LA, 121).
The conveyance of nonnarrative essence defined a masterpiece for Stein; she wrote that this is what the human mind sees, a vision that is textured yet free of conventional dimensional form. Stein's favorite visual metaphor for landscape theatre was the view from her first airplane ride, which was aptly en route to see a production of Four Saints in the United States. The view from the air is complete without linearity, without progression; everything can be seen in one look. In the view from the human mind, all time is collapsed into the present, resulting in a complete unitary entity: "When you look at anything and you do not see it all in one plane, you do not see it with the human mind but anybody can know that. It is naturally that. And so it is because there is no time and no identity in the human mind" (GHA, 175). In a recent article on Four Saints, Daniel Albright further described her idea of landscape theatre as a "notion of eternity as an unrolled filmstrip, a simultaneous presentation of an image in all its possible projections into time . . . everything that has been and will be is there and merely needs to display various angles of itself." 8 Since all possible elements of the landscape are already there, any drama is a result of their various formations and arrangements rather than their creation or discovery. History and time become irrelevant.
The main obstacle to such a performance landscape, one that distinguishes it from a written landscape, is the inherently social and historical nature of the audience-performer relationship in which race and gender are visible. The audience members in 1934 carried with them theatrical and social experiences, including the viewing of other productions, that formed their expectations about what white and black people usually did and signified in performance. In at least a very basic way, these experiences structured Four Saints around narrative, despite Stein's intentions. They provided guidelines for the audience members as to how they might interpret the happenings on the stage, as well as when they should sit and stand, when they should be quiet, when they should applaud. These dynamics of theatrical reception introduced history and identity into the Four Saints production, and the disunity resulting from using the past for interpreting the present arguably survived regardless of Stein's artistic efforts to the contrary.
Four Saints juxtaposed her textual forté of nonreferentiality with the nature of performance, which, using Joseph Roach's definition, is primarily referential: "Offer[ing] a substitute for something else that preexists it . . . stand[ing] in for an elusive entity that it is not but that it must vainly aspire to both embody and replace"; it is always a reenactment, always refers to another performance. 9 This view of performance as an intrinsically citational act has long been argued for by performance studies scholars according to the paradigm of repetition with critical difference. In this model, meaning emerges from repetition and the instance of critical difference represents the potential for change. The referential nature of a performance enables the actions and images to signify to a viewer, while the idiosyncratic nature of nonmechanical repetition necessarily reinterprets the referent, nuancing the sign within the particular conditions of its expression. This paradigm is similar to Stein's approach to defamiliarization in writing, which also relies upon repetition and the related possibilities for rearrangements and change. If Stein's approach can be compared to that of Louis Zukofsky, however, the emphasis emerges differently: "We tend to write an expressive and musical verse rather than a magniloquent one. We seek the plasticity of words and their interrelations and musical connections rather than denotations." 10 This statement downplays the citational component of repetition that structures the performance model and instead focuses on the materiality rather than referentiality of language in hopes of moving beyond the preconceived and towards the horizon of the new. For instance, a portion of Stein's libretto for Four Saints reads: "If a magpie in the sky on the sky cannot cry if the pigeon on the grass alas can alas and to pass the pigeon on the grass alas." 11 The citational quality of the word "pigeon" is secondarily significant (after all, "pigeon" is not arbitrarily situated "on the grass," the association of the two referents having obviously been considered), but Stein is primarily concerned with the music resulting from the manipulation and repetition of sounds and words. In the medium of physical performance, such a concern with pliability and rearrangement finds itself in tension with the dynamics of the visual--the citational quality of raced and gendered bodies.
The visual performance text, intentionally or not, makes intertextual references to previous cultural performances. To adapt the "blank page" metaphor of Rachel Blau DuPlessis, the directors and actors of Four Saints did not face an empty stage upon which to perform. It was a stage crowded with previous representations of blackness, of opera, and of the avant-garde. When DuPlessis notes, regarding women's writing, "All our words are ringed by Words," the capital means all the uses of language that have been used to define the identity "woman." 12 In the same way, the actors in Four Saints stepped onto a stage on which their identities as black performers had already been historically constituted: "The body onstage, through its carriage, gestures and spatial relationships to other bodies, resonates with social history." 13 The visual presence of a racialized performing body evoked a cultural narrative that constructed blackness in opposition to whiteness. Aldon Nielsen agrees that certain a priori assumptions about modernist poetry were attached to the suggestion of race: "They all shared a common vocabulary of racial images. When modernist poets thought blackness, their thoughts were confined within the frozen metaphors of the language they thought in." 14 This quotation might be altered for a performance context as "when they saw blackness" to anticipate the largely white audience's reception of Four Saints and their situation of the opera in their current social context. In the case of Four Saints, Stein's libretto was more successful at helping words forget their usual contexts than helping bodies forget their races.
Her text, on paper, was necessarily incomplete as a performance text since it waited upon the interaction of the audience with performing bodies, a situation that injected social history into the performance of her otherwise nonreferential text. Stein herself wrestled with the implications of reception and the way it constructs identity. In Geographical History she decides at one point to wish away the problem of audience: "An audience cannot be layed away. Of course it can. It can but is it. Of course it can. Any audience can be layed away of course it can" (GHA, 149). At another time, she acknowledges the audience, but dismisses its defining power: "Being I I am I has really nothing to do with the little dog knowing me, he is my audience, but an audience never does prove to you that you are you" (GHA, 105). To apply this statement to the first production of Four Saints is to hypothesize the opera's existence apart from what was perceived by the audience from the various cultural locations that comprised it. Charles Bernstein seems to agree with this hypothesis in his discussion of Stein and identity: "Any cultural production can be viewed through the lens of its socio-historical circumstance. To ignore such contexts is to deny the social truths of the work. Yet such contexts are inadequate to establish a work's identity." 15 Albright went even further in this regard in his assessment of Four Saints: "[It] differs from its predecessors [Stein's earlier plays and writings] in that it contemplates a vacuum--an empty canvas, a region of the earth from which all finite objects have been removed" ("ONA," 3). This claim cannot possibly be true for the ephemeral medium of performance that, unlike other forms of art, exists only in the social context of its initial moment. Arguably, all other forms in which it is "preserved," such as play scripts, recordings, and written descriptions, cease to be "the work" Bernstein is referring to and are better characterized as residue or traces. 16 Hence, though the identity that consolidates around performance traces may evolve and change in time, the identity of the performance work itself is fixed, fleeting, and inevitably unrecoverable in its entirety. 17 In the case of the 1934 production of Four Saints, those conditions included the history of race in the United States, especially race in performance.
Though black operatic casts were effectively unheard of when Four Saints opened in 1934, the representation of blacks in theatre had a long history. The range of ways for blacks to be represented or to represent themselves in performance had always been extremely narrow, so that the appearance of black performers on stage would have evoked a limited number of expectations. The triggering of these expectations presented a problem for the adaptation of Stein's writing and her artistic goals of nonreferentiality to the stage in the case of Four Saints. At the time, most representations of black performers and characters were grounded in the American minstrel tradition, which certainly had been modified and expanded by new forms and performers as time passed. The very appearance of black performers on stage still referred to tradition despite the ahistorical nature of Stein's text.
Scholars debate the precise origins of American minstrelsy, though it is agreed that white entertainers such as Thomas Dartmouth Rice developed blackface burlesque acts for theaters and circuses as early as the 1840s. 18 After the Civil War, minstrel performers were more often African American, but the shows remained nonnarrative and nondramatic, emphasizing song, dance, and the spectacle of the overcostumed, overpainted construction of race. 19 In the twentieth century, as black performers became more common on the legitimate stage, their race often functioned as a stock stage device that carried certain comic and tragic inferences handed down from minstrelsy. The inferences especially important to this discussion involve the childlike nature, lack of intellectualism, and naïveté associated with the minstrel character. 20 These connotations were still well-understood at the time of the production of Four Saints, as evidenced especially by the success of Marc Connelly's The Green Pastures, which opened on Broadway in February 1930, won the Pulitzer Prize for that year, and was subsequently a cultural sensation on a national tour. 21 Like Four Saints, Green Pastures dealt with religious themes, albeit in a more conservative and traditional fashion. The play was presented as a collection of Bible stories retold from a naïve viewpoint and in the stereotypical vernacular of southern blacks. The production represented blackness with obvious links to minstrelsy and "made it on the faith of those who had no pretense of sophistication and who, therefore, could believe in an uncluttered and simple way. Doubt seemed impossible in a black child's fantasy" (HR, 251). A genealogy of Thomson's ideas about black people on the stage and his decision to cast Four Saints with black actors leads back to Green Pastures. Hall Johnson, the African American choir director for Green Pastures was the writer and director of a play in 1933 that also dealt with a variation of black culture centered on a religious theme called Run, Little Chillun'! Like Green Pastures, Run was a musical and was best known for its inspired choir numbers. Carl Van Vechten claimed that it was during the intermission for Run that Thomson decided to use black performers for Four Saints. 22 Considering his interest in theatre, it is reasonable to assume that Thomson also saw Green Pastures (which was much more celebrated than Run), though there is no concrete evidence to this effect. But even if he was not directly influenced by the production, he easily would have been able to reconcile its portrayal of simple people of faith with his own ideas about black people: "They are not afraid of religious subject matter; they do not overly intellectualize everything." 23 The review in the New York Times concurred with this view, leaving no doubt as to the function of the black actor as a cultural symbol in Green Pastures: "It follows the chronicle of biblical history as ignorant religious negroes of the South might conceive it in the childish terms of their personal experience. . . . At first you are delighted by the naive incongruities of the spectacle." 24 The use of the word "spectacle" foreshadowed later descriptions of Four Saints, though the two shows would on the surface appear to have little in common other than the color of their casts and their seemingly diverse treatments of religious faith.
Green Pastures' use of blackness as a stage device made it possible for white audiences to become "ignorant" themselves and vicariously experience a comforting, simple faith in an increasingly faithless time colored by the Depression, scientific advances, and persistent memories of the horrors of World War I. In spite of significant cosmetic and thematic differences, Green Pastures functioned much like a minstrel show as it "created a distance between white men's normative selves (what they had to be) and their natural selves (what they feared but were fascinated by)" (HR, 257). The play was successful because white Americans wanted to reclaim a simple faith, but class expectations and modern adulthood required that they remain intellectually grounded. Lott hypothesizes that this desire for regression could be found at the base of minstrel show humor with its "ability to reduce not only black people but white spectators themselves to children" (LT, 144). Green Pastures offered such an opportunity. Through this play, a white audience was able to project its desire to reclaim faith and childhood onto the epitome of ignorance and simplicity, the southern black, presumed to be untouched by class expectations and modern logic.
The spectacular, benign, fairy-tale quality of Green Pastures masked its promotion of white racial ideology regarding black people, which assumed that their cultures did not progress as those of whites did. 25 In this regard, black people epitomized Stein's conviction that "people really do not change from one generation to another, as far back as we know history people are about the same as they were." 26 Thomson may or may not have believed in the general stasis of humanity, but he did see black people as a link back to the time of St. Térèse: 27 "I often marveled at the miracle whereby slavery (and some cross-breeding) had turned them into Christians of an earlier stamp than ours . . . very much as Saint Thérèse had been" (VT, 239). The casting decisions for Four Saints take on new significance in this light, especially regarding Beatrice Wayne, who portrayed St. Teresa I and is even remembered today as the "eternal, unchanging" black woman: "She was positively saintly, a plain strong woman who radiated inner beauty" (VT, 249, emphasis added). The social inscriptions of African American bodies, combined with Thomson's pronouncements regarding blacks, such as, "They live on the surface of their consciousness," encouraged an interpretation of the cast's performances as "natural" and a perpetuation of the idea that black people, untouched by progress and history, were somehow intrinsically suitable for religious subject matter (VT, 253). The label of "natural" was commonly applied to black performers of the day, obscuring the roles that artistic skill, technical training, and hard work played in their successes.
Four Saints continued the tradition of black performance as nonnarrative spectacle. As a musical without a plot, it did not violate the white audience member's expectation shaped by minstrelsy, which did not encompass dramatic narrative. Granted, by 1934, plays such as Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones , Willis Richardson's The Chipwoman's Fortune , and Wallace Thurman's Harlem had showcased black actors in mainstream theaters in dramatic productions, but the majority of roles for black actors were still in musicals. The extremely popular black musicals of the 1920s, led by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle's Shuffle Along had no plot to speak of. By the time Four Saints opened, musicals such as Green Pastures and Run had introduced dramatic plots of varying degrees and experienced success on Broadway, but these shows still clung to traditional, stereotypical representations of blackness. While Green Pastures capitalized on the symbol of naïve southern blacks, Run emphasized black sexuality, voodoo, and primitivism. In any case, the majority of narrative dramas were still portrayed by white casts. This lack of black bodies within dramatic narrative structure carried significant meaning where racial identity was concerned. The cultural meaning attached to the narrative form was explained by the great dramatic actor Charles Gilpin, famous for starring in The Emperor Jones, in 1919:
Once, when Lillian Morrison and I were doing a turn together in vaudeville, I elaborated a routine and made it a genuine bit of a story. But the manager said, 'See here! You can't do that! That's a sketch!' Do you see? We were colored! Therefore we must not be permitted to act. . . . Apparently colored folks were not supposed to be regular human beings, with a knowledge of life. They were just human eccentricities, that did certain old tricks, wore certain kinds of queer clothes and were funny, the way monkeys in a zoo are funny. 28
Thomson betrayed a similar attitude with regard to the artistic initiatives of his black cast members, insisting, "I don't really want them to act. I want them to be moved"; he wanted Frederick Ashton to "make choreography . . . so that all movements will be regulated to the music, measure by measure and all our complicated stage-action made into a controllable spectacle." 29 Thomson's approach to the production, though motivated mainly by aesthetic intent, sought to deprive the black actors of agency in creating the art in which they were represented. Even such "purely aesthetic" goals of harmony and unity are worthy of a social critique when their achievement requires viewing black bodies as pawns on stage, to be moved to serve the purposes of the white directors. Considering the racial and social hierarchy in 1934, black actors were the logical choice for comprising a "controllable spectacle." This approach to performers is consistent with Stein's aversion to character in her modernist landscape vision of theater, in which persons should not stand out as actors or agents but should merely "be." As one critic has summed up the characters in the opera: "Saint Therese [sic] and Saint Ignatius are stage props: talking stage props. . . . Their appearance is justified by what they contribute to the set, the landscape." 30
Nonnarrativity is not the only possible comparison between Four Saints and the minstrel tradition. One of the traditional bits in the minstrel show was the oratory segment, which depended upon linguistic travesty for humorous effect. The black body of the orator, indicated not by the body of the performer but by exaggerated make-up and costuming, was coded as less intelligent than the white subject, yet aspiring to whiteness. With the audience understanding this meaning of the sign of the black body, a formal oratory performance by the minstrel actor was considered humorous. Typically, the orating performer, in the guise of a government official, preacher, or other public speaker, would use pretentious language incorrectly, failing to differentiate between homonyms and shades of meaning as, presumably, a white speaking body would not. 31 Further, the mere use of the formal oratory convention was in itself humorous travesty because the social constructions of race stipulated that a black speaking body would have no legitimate use for such conventions.
Aside from this general travesty of language, the speakers might be performing a more sophisticated satire on a different level, imitating well-known orators or politicians or spoofing current events of the day. 32 An interesting aspect of such a performance is that presumably a black performer actually would have to understand the correct usage of the language, as well as the normative versions of current events, in order to spoof them in the person of his blackfaced character. Thus, the oratory segment contained both an appeal and a threat: its appeal was that it erased adult responsibility and social codes of behavior through a mocking of those codes, allowing a comforting, childlike regression for the audience members; its threat was that it raised the possibility of real black orators who could stand in for or replace whites, introducing the possibility of whites' loss of social control. 33 The dynamic of Four Saints was such that it emphasized the oratory segment's appeal and erased its threat. Like the minstrel orators, the black performers in Four Saints used language in a pleasurable, nonsensical, childlike way. Since Stein's libretto provided no opportunity for character differentiation, however, the saints did not assume the positions of speaking individuals, even parodically. By creating "roles" in which performers need only function as pawns to be moved around the stage, Stein and Thomson minimized the threat of social replacement posed by black people speaking in public and retained a measure of control over the pleasure the travesty scenario produced. The combined forces of her refusal of character and his approach to staging reinforced a dominant social order in which the black performer appeared as the site of pleasure for whites but removed the threat of social replacement that traditionally accompanies mimicry.
The glistening cellophane set and elaborate costumes of Four Saints was Stein's landscape version of spectacle, embodying what she described as a child's feeling of the theatre: "A great deal of glitter in the light and a great deal of height in the air." Her libretto was a circus for the ear, a nonnarrative flood of pleasant-sounding nonsensical language, repetition, and linguistic trickery. The parallels between minstrelsy and Four Saints bring into relief the way the black cast may have worked in Stein and Thomson's favor in the production. As Weinstein has noted about Thomson's reasons for choosing an all-black cast, "There is something of a Barnum and Bailey flavor to a play about Spanish saints taking place on a stage with scenery composed entirely of cellophane, performed by an all-Negro cast choreographed to move like Balinese dancers." 34 The presumed neutrality of such a circus (or any form of spectacle) diverted attention from Four Saint's racist cultural genealogy with its ties to minstrelsy even as it implicitly referred to this cultural form. 35 Stein's success at escaping history through nonreferential language now comes into question since the nonnarrative circus that was Four Saints appears to have invoked already historical cultural tropes. Thomson, however, crudely denied that this was the case and presumed to be able to choose which "racial characteristics" were visible on stage:
My negro singers, after all, are a purely musical desideratum, because of their rhythm, their style and especially their diction. Any further use of their racial qualities must be incidental and not of a nature to distract attention from the subject matter. . . . Hence, the idea of painting their faces white. Nobody wants to put on just a nigger show. [VT, 232]
The reference to the possibility of painting cast members' faces white bore on aesthetic problems perceived by the show's designer, the artist Florine Stettheimer, who had "been concerned that the various shades of brown and black faces in the cast would disrupt her perfect color scheme" ("OFS," 110). In a solution that hearkened back to minstrel shows in which white and black performers alike blackened their faces with burnt cork to meet a white audience's expectations of blackness, Stettheimer used a single shade of brown makeup on the skin of the Four Saints cast members. She also insisted that their bare hands be made uniformly white through the use of gloves, having judged the bare black hand inelegant. 36 The need to present a seamless, undifferentiated version of blackness in culture proceeds from a social structure in which white power defines itself in opposition to a black subaltern.
Variety in blackness was threatening to the security of the place of whiteness because it suggested the possibility for unstable, shifting, less certain markers of identity and, hence, an unstable power structure. As Elin Diamond has stated, "The concept of 'differences within' complicates as well identity narratives (of nationhood or racial purity) and their bipolar structure of (true) self versus (alien) other. . . . If an identity is always different within itself it can no longer be an identity." 37 The repetition of artificially consistent black faces in Four Saints complemented Stein's literary trope of undivided landscape and her desire for artistic unity. Such a racial costume, however, was also in tension with her aversion to identity construction since it suggests a definite social identity in which all black people are the same. This tension raises the prospect of incompatibility when race is at issue between Stein's landscape aesthetic and her refusal to establish identity through character. In this situation, landscape itself becomes a recognizable social identity.
This status of black identity as a coherent "given" in performance furthered the fulfillment of Stein's wish that the audience should not need to take time to acquaint themselves with the performance terrain. She writes in Lectures in America, "I felt that if a play was exactly like a landscape then there would be no difficulty about the emotion of the person looking on at the play being behind or ahead of the play because the landscape does not have to make acquaintance" (LA, 122). In a landscape, all the elements are already present, transparent in that they do not have to "make acquaintance," that is, be discovered or found. A fragmented, complex, unfamiliar representation of blackness rather than the undifferentiated, character-less, monochromatic one created by Stein, Thomson, and Stettheimer in Four Saints would have required a process of familiarization and discovery by the audience, resulting in the emotional syncopation that so annoyed Stein in performance and narrative in general. That the audience did not have to sort out unexpected, nontraditional performances of black identity thus suited Stein's artistic goals perfectly. It is ironic that the presentation of subtly familiar (or at least unchallenging) constructions of race complements Stein's libretto, which, like so much of her work, emphasizes the defamiliarization of language.
The uniform presentation of race in the opera also complemented her landscape objectives because it was more conducive to abstraction than complexity and individuality: "The saints in Stein's opera are like people beheld at such a remote distance that they have receded into abstraction; they constitute a landscape" ("ONA," 7). Indeed, like many modernists, Stein held the view of black culture as an unchanging background. Her best known statement on blackness is the infamous passage from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: "Gertrude Stein concluded that Negroes were not suffering from persecution, they were suffering from nothingness. She always contends that the African is not primitive; he has a very ancient but a very narrow culture and there it remains. Consequently nothing does or can happen." 38
Other modernist poets concurred that blackness is a state in which "nothing does or can happen." Nielsen points out that for such writers, blackness fills the need for a poetic backdrop, or landscape: "There are a number of . . . passages in which Pound reduces the Afro-American soldiers to abstract blobs of color"; "Blacks in Williams' verse seldom complete significant actions; their value is lodged in their merest presence"; and Stevens has a "pattern of employing nonwhites as local color . . . go[ing] so far as to incorporate the debris that black people might leave behind them." 39 Though Thomson, not Stein, chose the black cast, it fit the prevalent modernist assessment of black culture perfectly.
In addition to the perception of black identity as uniform and unchanging, the stereotypical assumption that blacks were childlike and somehow more "natural" than whites fit the high modernist project of Four Saints. Though the project did not benefit from the sexual stereotypes accorded to blacks, this too was an aspect of white-constructed black identity that surfaced during the production. Stein herself was worried about the possible distraction that cultural associations with black sexuality might present, and her friend William Aspenwall Bradley recounted her comments in a letter to Thomson:
And I suppose they have good reasons for using negro singers instead of white, there are certain obvious ones, but I do not care for the idea of showing the negro bodies, it is too much what the English in what they call "modernistic" novels call futuristic and does not accord with the words and music to my mind. 40
One interpretation of this comment links it to the coding of the black body in culture as more sensual and sexually suggestive than the white body. She may have assumed that the appearance of black dancers on stage in transparent flowing skirts would lend a sexually suggestive tone to her language that she did not wish. 41 This interpretation of her comment is bolstered by evidence of excessive sexualization of black bodies by white intellectuals including Van Vechten, Thomson, and Ashton--for whom Harlem was in vogue in the 1920s and 1930s--Thomson's biographer explains that for many white gay men black bodies were symbolic of a sexual world not open to them in white society: "The possibility of illicit pleasure was one of Harlem's attractions: it was where men could find men to have sex with . . . well-dressed, deferential Harlem gentlemen acted as discreet providers" (VT, 225). There is evidence that these sexual exchanges between black Harlem and white New York did not always transcend the unequal social structure of society-at-large. A disturbing photograph from the original Four Saints production shows Ashton kneeling in a dark, three-piece suit, his head inclined down paternalistically toward three of the black male dancers who encircle him on a lower plane, naked ( 1). 42 The photograph might be interpreted as of questionable significance (since its particular circumstances are not known), were it not for the explicitly stated aesthetic goals of the whites involved, who sought to exercise absolute artistic control over an undifferentiated black "landscape."
Though it is uncertain exactly what effects stereotypes of black sexuality had on the production, Four Saints unquestionably capitalized on the simple, primitive, and natural qualities associated with black people. Similar to the function minstrelsy served for the lower and middle classes, one effect of Four Saints was escapism and relief from anxiety for upper class New Yorkers and intellectuals using the trope of blackness. The composition of the audience on the evening of the opera's opening has been well documented, as in this description by society writer Lucius Beebe, "The intelligensia in tortoiseshell glasses and the an representatives of fashion with monocles descended in an avalanche of ermine and broadcloth on the old Forty-fourth Street Theatre. 43 A review from the Chicago Daily News supports the view that Four Saints reinforced cultural stereotypes of black simplicity: "No race is so gifted in simplicity as the Negro. The Negro is childlike. Miss Stein's verse is reminiscent of the processes of every child's mind in a contented, a soliloquizing, a creative but inert state." 44 Van Vechten similarly described the effect of the black cast in a letter to Stein, "The Negroes are divine, like El Grecos, more Spanish, more Saints, more opera singers in their dignity and simplicity and extraordinary plastic line that any white singers could ever be." 45 In this regard, Four Saints continued a performance tradition that led through minstrelsy and back to Green Pastures. and positivism of American culture." 46
The mere appearance of black bodies on stage was not itself responsible for the perception of the performers as uncommonly simple and natural. Stein's libretto certainly contributed to this effect with its childlike syntax, its structural bias toward natural speech, and its similarities to the minstrel show oratory segment. In an analysis of her "How to Write," Albright points out that she "elaborates, at great length, Ernest Fenollosa's (and Pound's) belief that a language--or a prose style--should be judged according to the relevance of its grammar to the grammar of the natural world" ("ONA," 4, emphasis added). Keeping in mind that Thomson chose a black cast because he presumed that they would not overintellectualize her libretto, the cultural stereotypes attached to blackness complemented her "natural," flowing grammar in which any noun will do where a noun is required. Her repetitive, nonnarrative prose invites a childlike, playful approach to language that would have been suggested and reinforced for a white audience by the presence of black performers. Eric Lott's description of the minstrelsy oratory segment discussed above echoes common descriptions of her use of language as pre-Oedipal:
Onstage these fantasies were partly represented by a vexing and unmeaning linguistic creativity, a proliferation of huge, ungainly and onomatopoeic words that were meant to ridicule the speaker but which also called attention to the grain of voices, the wagging of tongues, the fatness of painted lips. Through them could be relived the forgotten liberties of infancy. [LT, 122]
Stein and Thomson's strivings toward the high-modernist goals of childlike spectacle, artistic unity, and natural grammar certainly benefitted from the tradition of minstrelsy and stereotypes about black people. The recent claim that Four Saints "takes place in a region elevated above all judgment of similarity and dissimilarity" sounds astounding after an analysis of how the production engaged with, benefitted from, and emphasized social constructs of racial difference ("ONA," 10).