I
RALF DAHRENDORF
543
Thirty Years War. Sperber never fell for one moment to the tempta–
tions of fascism . But despite the strong influence of the proud psy–
chology of personality which one associates with his teacher, Alfred
Adler, Sperber shared the view for a while that organized com–
munism might lead to the realization of our hopes for a better world.
Indeed, the conditional "might" is a euphemism; Manes Sperber
was in fact a communist.
Recently, I have reread Sperber's books and several writings
about him. (I should add that I read them in German, in some
though not all cases the original language in which they were writ–
ten.) I met the great man at least once and remember his slight
figure, exuding irony and subtle humor but deeply involved by com–
passion , deeply humane .
God's Water Carriers,
the wonderful, almost
miraculous first volume of his autobiography,
All Our Yesterdays,
tells
the story; it is the most moving description of the
shtetl
which I have
read. He is, in a sense , the Tocqueville of the
shtetl,
never free of the
nostalgia for a world that no longer is , and yet fllied by courage to
live in a different, more "modern" world . "All our yesterdays have
lighted fools the way to dusty death" is the gloomy Shakespearean
motto ofthe book. Anyway, a man who could write about his origins
in this way at any time in his life cannot ever have been the sort of
person whom he described in his cycle of novels as a party-liner, not
even a "Sonnecke ," though this working-class communist- Thal–
mann? - seems to engage some of his sympathies.
The tragedy of
Like a Tear in the Ocean
is of course that of our
century.
It
is-dare I even mention it?-that of humans walking, or
being pushed, into gas chambers, individual human beings whose
names merge with a dark river of bloody history, "shapeless," as
Sperber emphasizes when he tries to explain the title of his trilogy.
"Shapeless" for him is a special word; its German version is
gestaltlos,
and
gestalt
is more than shape; it is a combination of structure and in–
dividual, perhaps after all "personality" in Adler's sense, which is
Sperber's answer to the inhuman forces of the century.
Like a Tear in
the Ocean
tells the story of the temptation of total answers, which
while not always intellectually convincing are sustained by a net–
work of organization, and of the conflict of this abstract abode with
the real homes of real people. One of his heroes after the other
discovers that what matters really is a woman, a child, a village , a
memory, and that man cannot live by the party alone. The reinter–
pretation of events by distant authorities, half-Kafka and half-Or–
well, emphasizes the border between the real and the unreal . And
