Shift of Languages in the Works of
Robert Reiter
by
Imre J. Balázs (Cluj/Romania)
Permission to republish
16 June 2007
Imre Balazs
Published at DVHH.org
14
Oct
2007 by
Jody
McKim.
The
boundaries of a culture are defined
more or less precisely by the
boundaries of the language to which
it is connected. At first sight,
this hypothesis seems rather
plausible. However, if we take into
account the historical changes to
which a culture is exposed, we could
argue that this hypothesis has its
roots in fact in a regional and
historically circumscribed
perspective. The cultures of
different European ethnic groups
were linked for several centuries to
Latin. The radiation of religious
culture was to transcend the
boundaries of languages also in the
Balkans. Later on, German was also a
starting point for the innovation of
languages in Central Europe. French
appears to be an important source of
inspiration in Russia at the turn of
the century around 1900.
From
these examples we could easily come
to the opposite conclusion - that
languages are not important at all,
the link between language and
culture is circumstantial, that
culture can be easily globalized and
so on. What I would like to argue
here is in fact a double thesis.
First, that the boundaries of a
culture - beyond the criterion of
the language - are dependant on the
receptivity of the community that
creates it and reacts to it. From
this point of view, the question of
whether something does or does not
belong or to a particular culture
can be decided at the point of its
reception, not "genetically", that
is, not at its point of creation. In
many ways the structure of a culture
depends on what the group, the
community accepts as a part of its
culture.
The
second thesis is that the boundaries
of a culture remain in flux, in a
state of constant change. That is,
there are shifts in the structure of
a culture, in the set of criteria
according to which something is
accepted as belonging to a certain
community. This second thesis could
lead us to the question of
canonicity: in a more strict sense
we could say that only what becomes
canonical, what circulates among the
people belongs to a culture. This
would, of course, reduce the
horizons of this investigation.
Later I will discuss the possibility
of incorporating something into a
structure, into a tradition rather
than the actual act of its
incorporation.
The
poet I will speak about, Robert
Reiter, created his works at the
intersection of at least four
cultures, so the potentiality to
integrate him into different
structures of the Central European
tradition is quite plausible.
I will
insist first of all on the
historical-biographical background
that could indicate beyond the
factual level also the context and
the guidelines that framed the
developments in Reiter's reception.
This will serve as a sort of
introduction to the issue of shifts
of discourses (and shift of
languages, which in Reiter's case
can be seen as strongly
interconnected), and an
interpretation of these shifts.
Robert
Reiter (later also known as Franz
Liebhard) was born in 1899 in
Temesvar, his father being of German
and his mother of Slovakian origin.
Although the family did not
primarily use the Hungarian
language, he attended a prestigious
Hungarian school in Temesvar (with
such students as Arnold Hauser). The
language through which literature
and sciences entered his world was
Hungarian, the second decade of the
20th century being also a
progressive period in Hungarian
culture, which brought about not
only the breakthrough of modernist
literature in a broad sense, through
the review "Nyugat" (West), founded
in 1908, but also the more radical
discourse of avant-garde literature
that was promoted in those years
mainly by the reviews "A Tett" (The
Action) and "Ma" (Today), founded by
Lajos Kassák in 1915 and 1916,
respectively. In later life Reiter
often recalls his reading of these
periodicals, which circulated at
school and in the family, as well as
of other German journals such as
"Der Sturm".
The
region itself, the Banat, where
Reiter lived for several decades,
was characterized by the coexistence
of cultures: I will only note here
that Romanians, Hungarians,
Serbians, Germans, Jews inhabited
the city itself and the surroundings
of Temesvar for centuries,
constructing in a sense a miniature
version of the Habsburg Monarchy.
The first shift of languages in
Reiter's life, from German to
Hungarian, was therefore a
"cultural" option, although not a
very conscious one at the beginning. The context in which he made his
first steps towards
"self-development" made him become a
Hungarian poet. In some interviews
that he gave in his late years,
Reiter presents this shift as a
process that occurred over several
years and that is difficult to
reconstruct. As he suggests, his
older sister played an important
role in his assimilation into
Hungarian culture: "It is difficult
for me to describe my relationship
to the two languages. Getting to
know the language did not come of
itself: it was a result of many
circumstances and of a long struggle
and process. My sister was eight
years older than I, and she read a
lot - she was an intelligent person
and took care of what I did, what I
was preoccupied with during my first
years of school. ... She worked
perseveringly and sometimes even
nervously so that I would learn
Hungarian."(1)
In another interview he also points
out that, while he did not speak the
language at all at the beginning of
his first school year, at the end of
the year he already spoke Hungarian
fluently, according to his school
report.(2)
Starting from this point, it is
quite interesting that at the age of
17 he is already the founder of a
Hungarian literary review called "Holnap"
(Tomorrow), edited with some school
friends, featuring a program that
can quite rightfully be labeled as
avant-garde: "The review 'Tomorrow'
is a rupture with the past, a wild
growth of young people into the
future. Because: it is a sin to let
oneself be dislocated from his own
time. ... We keep the values of the
past but not the tradition. Because
authentic values never become simple
tradition. We feel a strong
solidarity, the atmosphere that
warms up everything; this is where
the social value of our effort lies.
And its aesthetic value cannot be
judged seen from the perspective of
old concepts." The school
administration bans the review after
the appearance of its first issue.
Reiter does not cease to publish
Expressionist poetry, however. Since
1917 he becomes a regular
contributor to the review "Ma",
edited by Lajos Kassák in Budapest,
the review that was, of course, the
main source of inspiration for his
own literary journal.
Reiter
studies at the university in
Budapest, becoming one of the main
figures in Kassák's circle. His
talent is noticed also by the
editors and contributors of the
modernist review "Nyugat". Reiter
recalls later on discussions with
Mihály Babits and Ernő Osvát,
both of whom invite him to publish
in their review. At
this stage, however, Reiter seems
devoted to the discourse of militant
Expressionism and its literary
institutions.
After
the 1919 revolutions in Hungary,
Reiter goes back to Temesvar that
has just become part of Romania.
This is the period when Kassák and
his former authors are driven into
exile all around the world, having
been declared undesirable in
Hungary. Kassák himself and some of
the members of his group come to
Vienna, and the review "Ma" is
revived in Vienna between 1920 and
1925. Reiter works in Temesvar as an
editor of social-democrat journals,
published in both Hungarian and
German. In 1922 he rejoins the
"Ma"-circle in Vienna and again
frequently contributes poems,
translations and even two essays:
Vázlat: Társadalom, művész,
művészet (An Outline: Society,
Artist, Art) and Dogma,
szkepszis, konstrukció (Dogma,
Scepticism, Construction). These
texts show already a mature
personality, marked by his readings
of philosophy and by his study of
philosophy at the University of
Vienna. They
also suggest that Reiter has now a
critical point of view as far as the
collective ideologies of the
Hungarian revolutions are concerned,
bearing, however, a sort of
idealism:
Materialist socialism (the product
of Western materialism based on
self-interest) cannot offer a
superior balance in the life of the
individuals and of society precisely
because of its (purely material)
nature. ... All movements that
remain within materialism, no matter
how revolutionary they may prove to
be in the material world, and even
if they create a new material order,
still maintain the constant struggle
towards a natural
(material-spiritual) balance that
only changes its outer appearance
and with time becomes more and more
intensive. ... The efforts through
which nowadays ... some try to link
art to some social movements and
thus to reduce it to an instrument
of agitation, of propaganda, are in
fact a degeneration into naturalism,
causing the death of art. Where
imitation begins, all possibilities
to create cease. It does not matter
in this sense, whether the object of
copying is a landscape or the given
social structures. The value of
imitation is not enhanced if it
refers to factories, barricades or
the marching crowd instead of quiet
lives."(3)
These
remarks reflect of course the
well-known position of Kassák and
his circle in connection with
communism and Marxist literary
theory: although sympathizing with
the socialists, they did not accept
a mimetic concept of literature, an
option which led to several
conflicts among Hungarian left-wing
artists. Robert Reiter writes in
this period a more and more
personalized version of Dadaist,
Constructivist and Surrealist
poetry. (In Hungarian avant-garde
poetry it is difficult to delineate
the different avant-garde discourses
because they do not follow specific
artistic movements, but rather
attempt to synthesize the results of
different movements.)
Financial
difficulties cause Reiter to return
to Temesvar in 1924, where he again
works as a journalist. The
shift of languages that I mentioned
at the beginning takes place soon
after his return. He ceases to write
and publish Hungarian poems in 1926,
and from then on signed his name as
"Robert Reiter", German journalist,
instead of "Reiter Róbert,"
Hungarian poet, - as he had signed
his works before. A few years later
he begins to write poetry again, but
German poetry, after the Second
World War even publishing some
volumes of poetry under the name
"Franz Liebhard," the name that
became famous for Romanian readers
of German poetry.
If we examine
the shift of languages - now from
Hungarian to German - we can see
that it is a multiple change: from
one language to another, from one
discourse to another, from one genre
to another. In a newspaper
article Reiter explains this shift
as follows:
"The poem I wrote about the keeper
of nature who passes through the
world in slippers made of straw,
besides the wind and with two
branches of rose above his head, was
my swan-song.(4)
I am a convict, bound to the galley
of weekdays, and a vulture is eating
my heart. ... Temesvar, 8 December
1926. From now on I am one of the
nameless chroniclers."(5)
This account refers in fact to the
shift of genres: Reiter changes his
identity from poet to journalist.
On the
other hand, with modernist poetry we
could also speak about a poetics of
silence. The prototype of this
"poetics" is, of course, Arthur
Rimbaud, who became a merchant after
abandoning poetry. Susan Sontag
identifies silence as a recurrent
"aim" of modernist art: "Silence is
the last gesture of the artist as he
secedes from the world: through
silence he frees himself from the
binds of the world - his patron and
client, consumer and enemy, judge
and falsifier of his works - that
imprisoned him."(6)
This means in fact a radical
response to the inadequacy of the
means of expression. Robert
Reiter, as an avant-garde poet
constantly experimenting with the
limits of language, could
"logically" conclude that there are
no artistic means to express the
wholeness that art points at.
Avant-garde poetry itself
experienced a crisis in the late
1920s. The previously well- known
reviews like "Ma", "Genius", "Periszkop"
all ceased publication around 1926.
The crisis of the avant-garde
discourse might have contributed
also to Reiter's decision to give up
poetry. Literature, writing as
communication, seemed possible at
this stage only by means of a
radical change for the poet: the
shift of discourse, of language and
of the audience at the same time.
With this decision Reiter moved
completely from the perimeter into
the sphere of German culture.
This
shift did not mean for him to
abandon his past totally. He
continued to be an author who felt
free to connect different cultures.
In this decade he publishes, for
example, the German translation of
the famous Romanian folk ballad "Miorita". In the letters written from Siberia
to his wife in 1948 (having been
deported because of his ethnical
background), he also mentions that
he had translated there some of
Goethe's poems into Hungarian. Later, he signs many articles
referring to the multicultural
regional traditions of the Banat as
Franz Liebhard. In this sense his
works represent a valuable
contribution to multiculturalism in
Romania.
In
1969 Franz Liebhard speaks in public
about his "colleague" Robert Reiter.
He presents the relationship between
the "two" poets as a paradox. He
refers also to a possible "shift of
generations" represented by the two
poets.(7)
Franz Liebhard, the poet of the
1930s and of the decades after the
Second World War, wrote poems in a
classical form and rhythm. The
imagery of these poems can be
linked, however, in at least some
cases, to the poetics of "Reiter".
The
reception of Robert Reiter's works
are noteworthy for several reasons.
I began by referring to the
historically changing boundaries of
any particular culture. In this
sense Reiter's and Liebhard's poetry
can be situated at the borders of
several cultures, or rather, as I
would suggest, as being part of
several cultures at the same time.
The examples of Emil Cioran, Mircea
Eliade, Tristan Tzara, Eugen Ionescu,
prominent figures of Romanian
culture of the 20th century (we
could, of course, also mention
authors like Samuel Beckett or
Vladimir Nabokov), point out the
fact that the language in which
someone creates can be overlooked in
some cases. Thus Cioran or Tzara can
become at the same time important
for both French and Romanian
culture. Reiter's case is somewhat
similar, although at a lower,
regional scale. His oeuvre is not
very vast, although he published
some volumes as Franz Liebhard after
the Second World War. His
approximately 70 poems written in
Hungarian have only now appeared in
a collected edition, despite József
Méliusz's constant efforts. It is,
however, noteworthy that a German
translation of these poems was
published in 1989 (the year of
Reiter's death) in Klagenfurt and
Salzburg.
This
means that Reiter is somewhat more
thoroughly integrated into German
than into Hungarian culture.
In the 1990s, however, through the
works of Pál Deréky, György Kálmán and
others, Hungarian avant-garde
literature became more and more
discussed, and some collective
anthologies were published,
including several poems of Reiter.
Also András F. Balogh in some of his
recent German writings pointed out
the importance of Reiter’s poetry.
In fact, it is Hungarian avant-garde
literature itself that is poorly
integrated into Hungarian culture at
this stage. The growing interest in
this period may in the next few
years bring about an important
change. Reiter's Hungarian poems are
also ready to be published in the
period to come.
It is
important to note also a growing
interest of Romanian scholars living
in Temesvar to get to know the
regional basis of culture in the
Banat. In recent years the Romanian
literary review from Temesvar called
"Orizont" published several articles
and documents referring to Reiter.
This could mean that the borders of
regional culture are more flexible
than those of national cultures. Reiter Róbert, Robert Reiter, Franz
Liebhard are no longer bound to
remain silent.
© Imre J. Balázs
(Cluj/Romania)
ANMERKUNGEN
(1)
Az avangardizmustól a helytörténetig.
János Szekernyés's interview with
Róbert Reiter. "Ezredvég", 1990, 1.,
p. 152.
(2)
A rejtőző költő. Transcript from
Péter Mag's interview with Róbert
Reiter, broadcasted on the National
Television in Romania on the 2nd
February 1976., p. 9.
(3)
Reiter, Róbert: Vázlat:
Társadalom, művész, művészet
(An Outline: Society, Artist, Art),
"Ma", 1922. pp. 2–3.
(4)
He speaks about his last poem
written in Hungarian, Jeromos
(Hyeronimus).
(5)
"Egy csöndes ember jegyzetei".
(Notes of a Quiet Man) "Temesvári
Hírlap", 6th March 1927.
(6)
Sontag, Susan: A csönd esztétikája.
(The Aesthetics of Silence)
Budapest, Európa Könyvkiadó, s.a..,
p. 9.
(7)
See Franz Liebhard Reiter Róbertről.
"A Hét", 14th June 1974. p. 6.
