{"id":135135,"date":"2019-04-04T09:00:25","date_gmt":"2019-04-04T13:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=135135"},"modified":"2019-04-02T15:42:43","modified_gmt":"2019-04-02T19:42:43","slug":"feminize-your-canon-etty-hillesum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/04\/04\/feminize-your-canon-etty-hillesum\/","title":{"rendered":"Feminize Your Canon: Etty Hillesum"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our monthly column\u00a0Feminize Your Canon<\/a>\u00a0explores the lives of underrated and\u00a0underread female authors.<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Etty Hillesum (Photo courtesy of the Etty Hillesum Research Centre, Middelburg, the Netherlands)<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1942, the year before she died in Auschwitz at age twenty-nine, the Dutch diarist and mystic Etty Hillesum wrote: \u201cI have the feeling that my life is not yet finished, that it is not yet a rounded whole. A book, and what a book, in which I have got stuck halfway. I would so much like to read on.\u201d She was in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam and had decided to stay, voluntarily, at the Dutch transit camp Westerbork as a \u201csocial welfare\u201d representative of the Jewish Council\u2014Joodse Raad<\/em>\u2014that had been set up to mediate between Jewish citizens and the Germans. Unlike some, Hillesum didn\u2019t expect her association with the council to save her, and she harbored no illusions about the tragedy engulfing Europe. What the Nazis wanted, she realized, was \u201cour total destruction.\u201d Still, she had hopes of coming through the war alive. She longed to channel her prodigious literary talent into writing Dostoyevskian novels, as well as documenting the history she witnessed. \u201cI shall wield this slender fountain pen as if it were a hammer,\u201d she declared, \u201cand my words will have to be so many hammer strokes with which to beat the story of our fate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hillesum\u2019s overriding impulse was not self-preservation but to share the fate of her people. \u201cI don\u2019t think I could feel happy if I were exempted from what so many others have to suffer.\u201d Despite offers of help, she refused to go into hiding, and returned to Westerbork of her own free will. During her months at the camp, thanks to her special mail privileges, she sent dozens of letters to friends. Composed with a finely developed novelist\u2019s eye, the letters illuminated her day-to-day life and work in the hospital barracks, the squalor, the desperation, the awful spectacle of weekly deportations to Poland, the tension of not knowing who would be next. \u201cHave you heard? I have to go,\u201d one frail young girl told Hillesum. \u201cSuch a pity, isn\u2019t it? That everything you have learned in life goes for nothing.\u201d Remarkably, Hillesum\u2019s optimism was unwavering. In July 1943 she wrote:<\/p>\n

The misery here is quite terrible; and yet, late at night when the day has slunk away into the depths behind me, I often walk with a spring in my step along the barbed wire. And then time and again, it soars straight from my heart\u2014I can\u2019t help it, that\u2019s just the way it is, like some elementary force\u2014the feeling that life is glorious and magnificent, and that one day we shall be building a whole new world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A few months later, as Hillesum boarded a train to Auschwitz along with her parents and one of her two brothers, a friend described her as \u201ctalking gaily, smiling, a kind word for everyone she met on the way, full of sparkling humor, perhaps just a touch of sadness, but every inch the Etty you all know so well. \u2018I have my diaries, my little Bible, my Russian grammar, and Tolstoy with me.\u2019\u2009\u201d Hillesum insisted on meeting death on her own terms: with an unbroken spirit and without, as she saw it, letting hatred reduce her to the moral level of \u201cthe savage, cold-blooded fanatics.\u201d On a postcard pushed through the slats of her cattle car, found and posted by farmers, she had written: \u201cWe left the camp singing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The evolution of Hillesum\u2019s strange and disconcerting capacity to transcend personal suffering, and to resist hatred in the face of the ultimate provocation, can be traced in the diary she kept for the last two years of her life. She gave the eight tattered notebooks to a friend (the ninth went with her to Auschwitz), intending for them to be published if she didn\u2019t survive. But there was no interest, and Hillesum\u2019s writings wouldn\u2019t see the light of day for four decades. Finally, in 1981, an abridged volume of the diaries was published by the writer and editor Jan G. Gaarlandt. \u201cThe very first sentences I read fascinated and shocked me,\u201d he writes in his introduction, \u201cand they have remained with me ever since.\u201d The English translation by Arnold J. Pomerans, An Interrupted Life<\/em>, came out in 1983 (along with many other foreign editions), to widespread acclaim. In The<\/em> New York Times Book Review<\/em>, the Holocaust scholar Terrence Des Pres called Hillesum\u2019s story \u201ca marvelous gift\u201d that has \u201cthe interior richness and woven design of a Jamesian novel.\u201d The unabridged version and editions with Hillesum\u2019s letters followed; all the original papers are kept at the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam.<\/p>\n

Hillesum\u2019s inner chronicle, as charming and playful as it is philosophical and profound, begins in March 1941: nine months after Hitler\u2019s takeover but before the Yellow Star decree. At first, Hillesum is not particularly preoccupied by the war, or by the tightening restrictions on the Jewish population in the Netherlands. She is an intellectual and extroverted law graduate doing postgrad studies in Slavic languages. Living in a shared house in the bohemian red-light district of Amsterdam, she rides her bike around, socializes with friends, and earns money from odd jobs including tutoring in Russian (her mother, Riva, fled the pogroms in Russia as a young woman). Naturally for someone in her twenties, sex figures centrally in Hillesum\u2019s thoughts. She is, boasts her inaugural diary entry, \u201caccomplished in bed\u201d and should be \u201ccounted among the better lovers.\u201d Later she characterizes herself as \u201cerotically receptive in all directions,\u201d including toward one of her students, a girl with a \u201cslim and lively boy\u2019s face.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it is Hillesum\u2019s love for her psychotherapist, a divorced German Jewish refugee in his fifties named Julius Spier, that proves life-changing. A prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Jung and apparently a stranger to therapeutic boundaries, Spier practices psycho-chirology\u2014personality analysis via palm reading\u2014and a treatment that involves physically, but ostensibly nonsexually, wrestling with his patients. Hillesum, having first sought Spier\u2019s help with her \u201cinner chaos,\u201d her mood swings and bouts of depression, becomes his secretary and then his lover. He tells her to keep a diary and to meditate, and under his guidance this previously irreligious and unobservant Jew reads the Old and New Testaments, Saint Augustine\u2019s Confessions<\/em>, and The Imitation of Christ<\/em>, by Thomas \u00e0 Kempis. Spiritually awakened and emotionally elevated, she grows besotted with her charismatic mentor. \u201cI have never met anyone,\u201d she marvels, \u201cwho had as much love, strength, and unshakable self-confidence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spier has a fianc\u00e9e who lives in London, as well as numerous other women clients, and Hillesum grapples with jealousy and cravings for \u201chis concentrated, undivided love.\u201d But she tells herself such feelings are irrational. She doesn\u2019t believe in \u201ceternal love,\u201d and is innately polyamorous. Even at the height of her fixation on Spier, she remains fond of another lover, her sixty-something landlord, Han. \u201cI don\u2019t think I am cut out for one man \u2026 Nor could I ever be faithful to one man. Not because of other men, but because I myself am made up of so many people.\u201d Reflecting on her concurrent sexual dalliances, she wonders: \u201cIs that sordid? Is it decadent? To me it feels perfectly all right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hillesum\u2019s rejection of chastity reflects a sophisticated feminism that seems to have arisen independently (all the authors she reveres, her favorite being Rilke, are men). Women, she observes, too often view a man as their source of strength, an attitude \u201cas distorted and unnatural as it possibly can be.\u201d She admits to sometimes mistaking male desire for \u201cthe ultimate confirmation of our worth and womanhood,\u201d and muses:<\/p>\n

Perhaps the true, the essential emancipation of women still has to come. We are not yet full human beings; we are the \u201cweaker sex.\u201d We are still tied down and enmeshed in centuries-old traditions. We still have to be born as human beings; that is the great task that lies before us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hillesum hankers after neither marriage nor children. Mainly, she\u2019s wary of passing on her family\u2019s \u201ctaint\u201d: the psychiatric problems suffered by her two younger brothers. Like their sister, both are geniuses. Mischa, a classical pianist, did a public performance of Beethoven at age six, and Jaap is a doctor who discovered new vitamins while still in his teens. But Jaap\u2019s severe depression has led to several stays in hospital, and Mischa has schizophrenia. Hillesum writes: \u201cWhen Mischa got so confused and had to be carried off to an institution by force and I was witness to the whole horror of it, I swore to myself then that no such unhappy human being would ever spring from my womb.\u201d On realizing she\u2019s pregnant, she doesn\u2019t hesitate to self-abort by taking twenty quinine pills, supplemented \u201cwith hot water and blood-curdling instruments.\u201d She tells the embryo: \u201cI shall bar your admission to life, and truly you should have no complaints.\u201d Within days, Hillesum is back to translating The Idiot<\/em>, having sex with Han, and enjoying \u201ca feeling of being at one with all existence.\u201d It might be the most cheerful and pragmatic depiction of abortion in the whole of literature.<\/p>\n

Hillesum congratulates herself, in the same sentence, for not adding \u201canother unhappy being to those peopling this sorrowful earth\u201d and for not having foisted a bad book on the world. Her desire to write a great book\u2014\u201canother Brothers Karamazov<\/em>\u201d\u2014is the source of much inner turmoil. She suffers from the artist\u2019s affliction of identifying, painfully and too clearly, the gulf between all she perceives and her ability\u2014even the ability of language itself\u2014to capture it faithfully. Decrying her earlier flights of creative inspiration as \u201cmental masturbation\u201d and swearing off \u201cclever formulations overflowing with wit,\u201d she swings between wild ambition and self-castigation. \u201cLife is composed of tales waiting to be retold by me,\u201d she pronounces grandly, before countering with, \u201cOh, what nonsense\u2014I don\u2019t really know anything.\u201d Hillesum doesn\u2019t regard her diary entries as literature, but as a means of self-exploration and psychological unblocking: \u201cYou don\u2019t put things down on paper to produce masterpieces, but to gain some clarity.\u201d Yet many of her ruminations, for example on the ideal literary style she hopes to one day perfect, are indeed mini-masterpieces:<\/p>\n

Looked at Japanese prints with Glassner this afternoon. That\u2019s how I want to write. With that much space round a few words. They should simply emphasize the silence. Just like that print with the sprig of blossom in the lower corner. A few delicate brush strokes\u2014but with what attention to the smallest detail\u2014and all around it space, not empty but inspired. The few great things that matter in life can be said in a few words. If I should ever write\u2014but what?\u2014I would like to brush in a few words against a wordless background. To describe the silence and the stillness and to inspire them. What matters is the right relationship between words and wordlessness, the wordlessness in which much more happens than in all the words one can string together.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hillesum\u2019s literary dreams are eclipsed by the travails of living in a society where she and her friends can\u2019t use public transport, ride bicycles, enter parks, or purchase basic necessities, but her cosmic serenity only deepens. \u201cI am not afraid of them \u2026 I don\u2019t know why; I am so calm it is sometimes as if I were standing on the parapets of the palace of history looking down over far-distant lands.\u201d The more she is tested, the more she believes that, as she often asserts, \u201clife is beautiful and meaningful.\u201d At the same time, she increasingly doubts that writing can bear adequate witness to her reality. \u201cI shall have to invent an entirely new language,\u201d she remarks after beginning work at the Jewish Council, \u201cto express everything that has moved my heart these last days.\u201d<\/p>\n

The reader is left in little doubt that Hillesum, had she lived, could have invented an entirely new language, written novels to rival her beloved Russian epics, and become an important spiritual guru: a female Viktor Frankl. The body of work she did produce in her brief life is of immeasurable importance, both as feminist social history and as Holocaust testimony. That Etty Hillesum isn\u2019t a well-known name, certainly not compared with Anne Frank, may be because of her ambiguous philosophical legacy. She is claimed by some as a Christian saint, owing to her diverse theological inspirations, such as the New Testament. This complicates Hillesum\u2019s status as a Jewish heroine, as does her principled refusal to go down fighting. Tzvetan Todorov, in his book Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps<\/em>, argues that, ultimately, \u201cher fatalism and passivity lent themselves to the murderous project of the Nazis.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a fair response to Hillesum\u2019s Tao-like creed of pure acceptance. But she always felt, given the Nazi systemization of mass murder, that scrambling to survive would be like \u201ccrowding onto a small piece of wood adrift on an endless ocean after a shipwreck and then saving oneself by pushing others into the water and watching them drown.\u201d To instead divert her energies into kindness and fellowship, into helping those around her, seems no less moral a choice. Hillesum\u2019s nonsectarian spirituality, which was underpinned by the type of meditation now correctly seen as a panacea for many twenty-first-century ills, makes her truly a woman for our time. Her advice for \u201cturning inward\u201d is as worthwhile today as it was three-quarters of a century ago:<\/p>\n

A lot of unimportant inner litter and bits and pieces have to be swept out first. Even a small head can be piled high inside with irrelevant distractions. True, there may be edifying emotions and thoughts, too, but the clutter is ever present. So let this be the aim of the meditation: to turn one\u2019s innermost being into a vast empty plain, with none of that treacherous undergrowth the impede the view. So that something of \u201cGod\u201d can enter you, and something of \u201cLove,\u201d too. Not the kind of love-de-luxe that you can revel in deliciously for half an hour, taking pride in how sublime you feel, but the love you can apply to small, everyday things.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of Feminize Your Canon here.\u00a0<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Emma Garman has written about books and culture for\u00a0<\/em>Lapham\u2019s Quarterly Roundtable,\u00a0<\/em>Longreads,\u00a0<\/em>Newsweek,\u00a0<\/em>The Daily Beast,\u00a0<\/em>Salon,\u00a0<\/em>The Awl,\u00a0<\/em>Words without Borders, and other publications.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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