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Miranda Pinch - Ernst Sommer

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106 pages

English

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Arguably the earliest literary depiction of the Holocaust, begun 19 days before the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.Based on the latest intelligence from central Europe - smuggled out to the Jewish World Congress and the Czech and Polish Governments in Exile in London.A moral debate on the dilemma - to suffer or resist?

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Historical fiction

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Publié par	Miranda Pinch
Date de parution	01 juin 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783013241
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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REVOLT OF THE SAINTS
A TRIBUTE TO THE HEROES OF THE WARSAW GHETTO
ERNST SOMMER
*
Arguably the earliest literary depiction of the Holocaust was written 19 days before the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
While a work of fiction, this novel was based on intelligence smuggled out from central Europe to the Jewish World Congress and the Czech and Polish Governments in Exile in London.
A moral debate on the dilemma - to suffer or resist?
Copyright Miranda Pinch and Jane Rosoux 2013
(Ernst Sommer s granddaughters)
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
English translation by Harry C. Schnur
Original final chapter translated by Jennifer Taylor
Cover design by Liz Dodsworth
Written in the summer of 1943, the German original of this novel under the title Revolte der Heiligen was published by El Libro Libre, Mexico, 1944.
First published in English by Alliance Press 1946
Contents
Ernst Sommer - A Short Biography
Preface
Prelude
Part One
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Part Two
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Final Chapter- Original Version
Ernst Sommer - A Short Biography
Ernst Sommer was born on 29 October 1888 in Iglau, a German-speaking town that, at that time, formed part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When the Empire was dissolved after the First World War, this region was assigned to the newly-founded state of Czechoslovakia.
After studying law at the University of Vienna, Sommer married and, in 1920, opened his own small legal practice in Karlsbad, that area of Czechoslovakia which later became known, notoriously, as the Sudetenland.
In addition to his legal work, Sommer developed political and literary interests. He joined the Social Democratic party, acted as its legal advisor and served as a town councillor. By 1935, he had published a play and three works of fiction; co-edited a short-lived cultural periodical that sought to foster understanding between the German and Czech traditions; and regularly contributed theatre reviews to the local press.
Sommer s publishing opportunities were severely curtailed by developments in Germany; he was able to place one novel with publishers in Czechoslovakia in 1937 before he was forced into exile by the German occupation of the Sudetenland. As a Social Democrat and a Jew in imminent danger of arrest, he fled to Prague, at that time still free of the German yoke. Through his political connections he was able to secure a visa for Great Britain and was evacuated under the terms of the Munich agreement. Sommer arrived in London on 5 November 1938 and arranged for his wife and daughter to join him the following year.
In Britain, Sommer eventually settled in London. Barred from practising law, he was forced to find employment where he could, and for a time worked as a wine waiter. However, he continued to write, and a grant from the Czech Government in Exile meant that he could devote himself exclusively to this craft; it was during this period that Revolt of the Saints (Revolte der Heiligen) was written.
The end of the war brought no immediate improvement to Sommer s position. The news from his homeland could not have been worse. He learnt that his mother had been deported to Theresienstadt where she had committed suicide by jumping from a window; and that his sister had been gassed in Auschwitz. Sommer did not adjust to his life in England and sought to leave at the first possible opportunity. In July 1946, he travelled to Czechoslovakia, where he remained until November; the autumn of the following year was also spent there in a vain attempt to re-activate his Czech citizenship. But there was no place for the German-speaking minority in post-war Czechoslovakia. In 1945, as soon as he was restored to power, Bene expelled the Sudeten Germans and the same policy was applied to the area round Iglau, Sommer s native town. Therefore, he had to remain in exile in London, but was eventually permitted to practice as a consultant in international law. He continued to write, but developed Parkinson s disease and, on 20 October 1955, at the age of 66, Ernst Sommer died in London.
Preface
This work, a study of the morality and psychology of opposition, has been variously described as a novel and a short story . It has obvious parallels to the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, which took place in the spring of 1943 and claimed an estimated 14,000 Jewish lives. However, from his correspondence, it is clear that Sommer actually began writing the story on 1 April, predating the uprising by 19 days.
Sommer s connection with several Jewish agencies in London provided him with information on the latest developments in central Europe and he was struck by the fact that, in addition to being confined to ghettos, Jews could also be assigned to labour camps where they were required to use their skills to contribute to the German war effort. Sommer s previous literary works had shown a preference for historical settings - for example Botschaft aus Grenada (Message from Granada) (1937) depicted the persecution of the Jews by the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada in fifteenth century Spain - but in this case he must have felt the need for a more explicit, contemporary setting. For, in addition to Jewish sources, Sommer also had access to information obtained by the London-based Czech and Polish Governments in Exile. In this way, he learnt of the first attempts at the industrialised extermination of his co-religionists, with specially adapted vans serving as mobile gas chambers. This triumph of German technology formed the subject of a short story entitled Die Gaskammer (The Gas Chamber) that appeared in the exile press in December 1942.
In Revolt of the Saints , set in a Jewish slave labour camp in occupied Poland, Sommer examines the moral and psychological response of this closed community to the pressures of enforced labour, where discipline is maintained by the threat of deportation to an extermination camp. The introduction of a manager who increases the workload functions as a pivotal moment, and a debate ensues on the best way to respond - whether to engage in armed resistance, which would result in death with honour, or to maintain the more traditional position of passive acceptance of suffering in the hope this would ensure the survival of at least some of the inmates. These arguments, expressed by two of the characters in the story, represent the two ends of the spectrum, but Sommer also includes figures representing various intermediate positions, not excluding that of self-serving collaboration and sabotage. In this fictional work Sommer anticipates the post-Holocaust debate on whether the Jews of occupied Europe can be said to have contributed to their own destruction through the collaborative stance of such institutions as the Jewish Councils, here represented by the characters of Jonas and Michael.
This story, which with Die Gaskammer constitutes one of the first literary depictions of the Holocaust, demonstrates the author s extraordinary prescience of the fate of European Jewry; many of the details can be verified by documentary evidence of Jewish resistance in Poland. An extract - the final chapter - appeared in an anthology of German-Bohemian writing published in London. Yet, before the work could be published in its entirety, compromises had to be made. Using his contacts with the Free German League of Culture, Sommer was able to place his work with the left-wing exile publishing house El Libro Libre in Mexico, but the publishers required revisions to this final chapter. In the original ending, the prisoners and their captors perish in a firestorm created by Russian bombers tasked with impeding the German war effort by destroying the camp workshop. This was not acceptable to Sommer s Marxist editor since such an indiscriminate action by Russians ignorant of the workers uprising was not compatible with Soviet propaganda. A better conclusion, it was suggested, would be one in which only the Germans were attacked. The author was advised to show that the Soviet air force, in receipt of intelligence from the partisans, had unfortunately come too late to help the Jewish uprising but had taken the opportunity to bomb the German armed column. Sommer agreed to the changes, and the work appeared in Mexico in 1944 dedicated to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto. The revised version has formed the basis of all subsequent editions.
SOURCES
Stefan Bauer, Ein b hmischer Jude im Exil : Der Schriftsteller Ernst Sommer (Munich: Oldenbourg Vlg., 1995).
Anthony Grenville, The Earliest Reception of the Holocaust: Ernst Sommer s Revolte der Heiligen ( German Life and Letters , April 1988), pp. 250-265.
Dr Jennifer Taylor
Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies
Institute of Modern Languages Research
University of London
D r Jennifer Taylor is a founder-member of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies (formerly London Research Group for German Exile Studies), Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London. She has published widely on German-speaking exiles in British exile, including the following work specific to German-Bohemian exiled writers:
Stimmen aus B hmen : Die deutschsprachige literarische Emigration aus der Tschechoslowakei in Gro britannien nach 1938: Rudolf F