Erudite literary critic haunted by Holocaust

George Steiner, a renowned literary critic, died Feb. 3 of fever at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 90.

Immensely erudite, but with a flair that drew hordes of students to his lectures, Steiner was the rare literary critic whose scholarship was celebrated and debated far beyond university libraries.

He spent most of his career teaching at Cambridge, but he also was chief critic from 1966 to 1997 at The New Yorker.

Steiner hopscotched between Antigone, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Proust and Borges. He championed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance before the countercultural era did, but all his work was touched by the Holocaust.

He fled Paris with his Jewish parents shortly before the Nazi occupation in 1940. He told The Guardian that “not one of the Jewish children in my Lycée class survived. This haunts my work.”

The proximity of art to murder — “Europe,” Steiner observed, “is the place where Goethe’s garden almost borders on Buchenwald” — was a theme that ran throughout his entire oeuvre.

He became known for works such as Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (1967).

“The house of classic humanism, the dream of reason which animated Western society, have largely broken down,” he wrote in it. “We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.”

Francis George Steiner was born in Paris on April 23, 1929.

Steiner received his doctorate from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar, in 1955. He made his life in Europe, he said, because his father had said that if he did not, Hitler would have succeeded in ridding Europe of Jews.

In 1955, he married Zara Alice Shakow, a historian of international relations. She, a son, a daughter and two grandchildren survive him.

Steiner was inspired by Heidegger, who articulated a vision of humanity in which individuals are, as Steiner described it, “guests of life.”

“In my opinion, whoever is thrown into life has a duty to that life, an obligation to behave as a guest,” he once said. “What must a guest do? He must live among people, wherever they may be. And a good guest, a worthy guest, leaves the place where he has been staying a bit cleaner, a bit more beautiful, a bit more interesting than he found it.”