Comfortable Words

When I was working at the Wiener Library (the research institute for the study of Nazism and the persecution of the Jews) in the 1980s, after the original collection had been transferred to Tel Aviv, we began to solicit bequests and donations of books from people who might have titles of relevance to us. For the first time in living memory there were empty shelves waiting to be filled. So the chief librarian and I began our tour of north-west London, of Highgate and Hampstead, Hendon and St John’s Wood (‘Hephzibah . . . only wished she could find a reference in the Bible to God’s covenant with English Jews, promising them St John’s Wood High Street,’ wrote Howard Jacobson in The Finkler Question) – visiting the flats and houses of the lucky few, the exiles and refugees and survivors, to scour their libraries.

These ranged from the scholarly and exhaustive, where tomes in German, French, Italian, Hebrew, Russian and English lined the studies and sitting-rooms, to simple glass-fronted bookcases containing little more than the works of Goethe and Schiller. What a comment it was on the ignorance and malignity of the Nazis that they should have harried, abused and driven out a people who so prized the great figures of German culture. We had no place for Goethe and Schiller but we took their selected and collected works, their biographies and correspondences and anthologies, as the price to be paid for the rare finds we were after – a collection of Friends of Europe pamphlets from the 1930s, perhaps, or a run of Leopold Schwarzschild’s Neue Tagebuch (published in exile from Paris) – in the way someone who only likes strawberry creams has to buy the whole tin of Quality Street. I took advantage of the ballast that came in to boost my own modest book collection, offering a few pence for items outside the library’s remit and of no resale value to it: Heine’s The Romantic School, maybe, or Victor Mollo’s The Complete Bridge Player. Just once or twice we came upon a treasure trove, in German-Jewish terms the equivalent of the Amber Room; and it was from one of those that Kurt Hahn’s copy of the Book of Common Prayer came into my possession. As I recall, it arrived with the library of Robert Weltsch, one of the richest collections that came our way in those years. Weltsch had been a leading figure in the German Jewish community of the Thirties, editor of the Jewish Review and author of a defiant leading article there in April 1933 entitled ‘Wear the yellow badge with pride’. He got out to Palestine in 1938 and eventually settled in England. Originally from Prague, Weltsch when younger had been a member of the Czech-German-Jewish circle which included Franz Werfel, Max Brod and Franz Kafka. So it was no surprise that his library contained plenty of these writers’ works, many with pencilled annotations, and with clippings and scribbled notes stuffed between their pages. These books (perhaps signed by their authors) had not accompanied their owners into exile – how could they have? – but in handling the volumes and scanning the handwritten notes, you certainly felt you were connecting with a past world, a cultural, intellectual, literary, social world now lost and gone for ever, except in memory. To find the Book of Common Prayer among the collection was a surprise. To discover the name of Kurt Hahn – the founder of Gordonstoun and originator of Outward Bound – stamped on the inside cover, an even greater one. There was the intriguing, if minor, question of how a book of Hahn’s had found its way into Robert Weltsch’s library, but that may not have been so odd: Hahn was also part of the German-Jewish diaspora in Britain, even if not connected to the Prague circle (although he was descended from a Grand Rabbi of Prague on his mother’s side). Weltsch had been director of the Leo Baeck Institute in London, whose purpose was to recover the history of the German Jews; no doubt Kurt Hahn had been interested in its work. He probably contributed to it, perhaps providing a memoir of how he had protested against Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933, been briefly imprisoned, struggled to keep his boarding-school at Salem going through the first year of the Third Reich, and then, recognizing the impossible, left the German tyranny behind and moved to Britain to re-found his school in a new setting. So was this the Gordonstoun headmaster’s Book of Common Prayer, the one he took to chapel with him every day – and twice on Sundays – as my own headmaster had taken his twenty years previously? It was the familiar chunky vingesimo-quarto size, printed on India paper, gilt-edged, with marbled endpapers, and bound in a green-tinged soft leather which made it comfortable, and comforting, to hold.

Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all who truly turn to him.

What had been Hahn’s relationship to Christianity? He converted in 1945, according to the Dictionary of National Biography. Had he believed, or accepted, that to run a boarding-school in this country you needed the established religion to be part of it, and so readily conformed to its practices himself? After all, he was educating the sons of Albion now. I suspect that our own headmaster took a similar view. Better they should be raised in this religion than none at all; and as well this religion as another. In Hahn’s case, perhaps he shared Claude Montefiore’s liberal Jewish view that Christianity also revealed truths about the nature of God. We tended not to use our own prayer-books at school: there were standard-issue ones waiting for us in the chapel pews, along with Hymns Ancient and Modern. At home in the holidays, however, when, before rebellion set in, I trooped off to Matins with the family on Sunday mornings, I would self-importantly carry one of my father’s copies of the Book of Common Prayer to church. It was in the same bulky, weighty format, with a similarly soft cover, as Kurt Hahn’s. No wonder the book stirred memories when it fell into my hands. Not just the book. From years of repetition, many of the passages of this prayer-book were sewn into the lining of my memory, and a mere glance at the familiar friable pages brought them back. Confessions, creeds and collects were implanted in my mind, their language indissolubly entwined with any attempt to address the Almighty or express those emotions – of humility, gratitude for life, confession of ignorance, acceptance of mortality – that are largely the preserve of religion.

Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws . . .

As it happened, it was around the time the Weltsch collection arrived that I started to go to church again, after a gap of seventeen years. The return was driven partly by personal difficulties but also by an inability to find satisfactory answers to the problems posed by the place where I was working. The Wiener Library was full of paradoxes, the central one being that it existed to preserve the record of one of the greatest crimes in human history. At one moment I was assembling exhibition material on Kafka – all three of whose sisters, Gabriele, Valerie and Ottilie, died in the ‘great destruction’ – the next I was reshelving a massive bound volume of Das Schwarze Korps, the SS weekly. At every turn one was confronted by the evidence of something so heinous it defied belief. The Dutch pastor Visser’t Hooft expressed the contradiction well: ‘From that moment onwards I had no excuse to shut my mind to information which could find no place in my view of the world and humanity.’ It was at the moment I realized I was unable to comprehend the events the Library documented that I picked up Kurt Hahn’s Book of Common Prayer and returned to the religious liturgy of my youth. The sinew, rhythm, gravity and plain-speaking of its prose were a great balm. The effect was a faint echo of that of the Easter church bells on Goethe’s despairing Faust:

Und doch, an diesen Klang von Jugend auf gewöhnt, Ruft er auch jetzt zurück mich in das Leben. (And yet from childhood up familiar with the note, To Life it now renews the old allegiance.)

And so on one of the following Sundays I took Kurt Hahn’s Book of Common Prayer and headed off for the morning service at St Marylebone Parish Church. As it turned out, though, I was too late. Not for the service; too late for the Book of Common Prayer. While I had been away, the liturgy had been rewritten. Matins, for so long the main Sunday morning service, Holy Communion being reserved for pious early risers at 8 a.m., had been replaced by something called the Eucharist. And on the service sheet, after the heading Choral Eucharist, were printed the words ‘Series 1 & 2 revised’. Back in the pews, unsuspecting, I tried to recite what I knew by heart, but it no longer chimed with what was being declaimed from the chancel.

The Lord be with you And with thy spirit

had become

The Lord be with you And also with you.

I persevered for a few more Sundays until I finally got the message: the Book of Common Prayer was no longer the book of common prayer, it was one alternative among several, and the least favoured. With it had gone, among other prized things,

Then shall the Priest, turning to the people, rehearse distinctly all the TEN COMMANDMENTS

– to quote from the second page of the old Communion service. Did Kurt Hahn feel that there at least the new religion he had embraced was a proper continuation of the old? It is a simple thought, but one that struck me often enough as I reshelved Nuremberg Trial documents, or passed the great map on the wall of the Library’s entrance hall which recorded the toll of Jewish victims in the various countries of Europe, that if more Germans had obeyed the second of the commandments which God gave to Moses –

Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself

and the sixth –

Thou shalt do no murder

– there might have been no reason for the Wiener Library, no reason either for Kurt Hahn to have left Salem for Scotland, and hence no reason for his copy of the prayer-book – still with me to this day – to have ended up in the hands of a lapsed Anglican modern linguist.

 Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 36 © Anthony Wells 2012