How to bring closure to a study about someone approaching his final years, especially when—as we shall see—each year brought him closer to death by chipping away at his life? As Hermione Lee has noted, this is often a life history’s peril, where the effort to tie up the dangling threads reduces the odyssey to an essence it may never have had. We have been fascinated by exemplary deaths, or rather by deaths made exemplary, like Virginia Woolf’s or Nelson’s, replete with famous and mythologized dying words. We seek in the moment of death a meaning of a life.2
We are fortunate in at least one respect: Hirschman was aware of the dilemma. He wrote about it, often in pursuit of death’s ironical features. “The longer one lives,” he mused in his diary, probably in the late 1960s, “the clearer it becomes that life is short.” A few years later, he asked himself: “To conquer death—how? To die smiling. Practice smiling during orgasm. Smile and laughter as the essential prologue and epilogue to having sex. Making a woman laugh = make her open up, first her mouth—the rest follows. But why is laughter also the epilogue? Do we laugh about each other or about the fact that we were precisely so tierisch ernst (full of animal-like seriousness) just now?” It seems likely that Ursula’s illness provoked thoughts of mortality; his notebook is filled with such ruminations. Around the time of the death of his brother-in-law in May 1986, Albert almost foresaw his own biographer’s problem:
Obituary-writers love someone like Altiero with a higher & unitary mission that defines his life’s meaning for them. But why should we make the life of obituary-writers easy?
The convention of using a death to sum up a life, to lend conclusive—and concluding—significance to a subject’s work, is so tempting that it has become a literary parody. Ending is hard to avoid; death is impossible to, which is one reason why biographers have relied on the latter to resolve the former. But even this Hirschman knew. After all, death shadowed him from youth. The spirits of the deceased—his father, Mark Rein, Eugenio Colorni, the unmentioned relatives killed in gas chambers, the fellow volunteers in Spain—accompanied him in the way he viewed the world and in the way he wrote. What he could not know about his own ending was how to place and date it—until it was upon him. For Hirschman it took place, perhaps fittingly, in the Alps, where he had gone for the restorative powers of the mountains. It was the summer after his eightieth birthday. From 1972 onward, Albert and Sarah would visit Katia and Alain as often as possible, spending several weeks each summer at Puy St. Vincent in the Alps. A centerpiece of these vacations was a metronomic commitment to walking in the mountains. With each passing summer, Albert looked forward to reliving this childhood passion, all the more so as his French grandchildren joined him on outings.
Climbing near Puy St. Vincent in the Alps, 1982.
Albert enforced what others regarded only half-mockingly as “the German rules”: up at 6:00 a.m. sharp, an early breakfast, hit the trails by 7:00, steady walking for 50 minutes followed by 10 minute breaks. When the entourage reached the peak then the family rested and ate. It was not always easy to drill this into the occasional American tag-along, who often preferred to eat the whole way and take breaks whenever the going got tough. For Albert, it was not just the commitment to the routine and its standards, and no doubt the fond memories; he was truly inspired by the majesty of the peaks.
The visual inspirations and physical vigor were important for the days he was not walking. Part of the routine was to walk hard one day and take the next off for writing. When Albert and Sarah went to visit the Hoffmanns in their Swiss getaway near Bern, Stanley and Inge were slightly miffed that they saw so little of their guests, who were out the door at 7:30 sharp, and only after a day in the mountains would show up for dinner. At least then they could break out the wine and talk. But then the next day, Albert would hole himself up at a desk and spend hours writing on his yellow pads. This was not the shared vacation that the Hoffmanns had been looking forward to. But Stanley could not help but be impressed, though not surprised, by the work ethic.3
The summers thereby became reunions for Sarah and Albert with their daughters and their families. With his grandchildren as muses and surrounded by the mountain airs of his youth, he created a habitat for summer writing. This was where many of his final books were drafted. The writing of Rhetoric of Reaction filled those long, alternate days as he poured over his note-filled pads and read George Eliot’s Middlemarch.4
Hirschman was thus a healthy man. Wolf Lepenies arranged a photo shoot of Albert and Sarah with Christa Lachenmaier during a visit to Berlin in 1994. Albert was a little nervous, but conversation with the photographer and Sarah calmed him down. The result was a portrait of serenity with old age.
Albert had occasional troubles, especially with high blood pressure and tachycardia, which hospitalized him in Toronto and Boston. He had troubles with his right eye and later suffered temporarily from zinc shortages, which briefly affected his ability to taste. In early 1988, Sarah noticed something on Albert’s back. Tests revealed a nonmalignant tumor, which was later deemed dangerous sarcoma. Albert was admitted in February to the University of Pennsylvania hospital to have it removed. This was followed by seven weeks of draining radiation therapy five times each week. It was a scare, made worse because Albert fretted that he would not meet his lecturing obligations, especially in Paris in June. “This came as a big shock,” he told Mike McPherson. When it was over, he breathed a sigh. “Right now I feel fine, in fact enjoying what is much like a return from the realm of the damned.”5 In 1991 he was admitted to the hospital in Berlin for an angina pectoris angioplasty and the following year underwent radiation therapy again, this time for prostate cancer.
Albert and Sarah in Berlin, 1994.
Credit: Christa Lachenmaier/Laif/Redux.
The occasional frights did not slow him down, but he did indulge himself a little bit. After delivering the Patocka Memorial Lecture at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna in June 1996, Hirschman decided to splurge with part of the proceedings. He found an elegant hotel in the Alpine town of Pontresina and invited Katia and Alain to join him and Sarah. This was going to be a more relaxed vacation: on July 11, they made plans to take a cable car to the peak and walk down, an unheard of extravagance! Perhaps he should have stuck to his old drill, for on the descent Albert tripped and struck his head against a rock, severely gashing his face. It took three hours for Alain to get Albert to the bottom of the path, by which time he was covered in blood; the whole while he kept asking Alain if he was alright. A doctor cleaned him up and swathed his face in bandages. But it was clear that the damage was more than skin-deep. Albert’s speech was slurred, more hesitant. Then his gait changed; it was hard to keep his balance. He quickly returned to the United States, where doctors diagnosed a cerebral hematoma, by which time Albert was having more difficulties speaking.
He knew he was losing his grip. Benjamin Friedman, a Harvard economist who had struck up a late but active correspondence with Hirschman about the relations between economic growth and democratization, had sent Hirschman a draft essay and list of queries. Under normal circumstances, this would have elicited a lengthy response. Instead, he told Friedman that he found “it impossible for me to address myself to the kind of questions you are posing.” Wolf Lepenies had been planning a global colloquium on Albert’s work at the Kolleg in Berlin. By the middle of August, the effects were clear enough to someone who did not want to refuse a return to Berlin. “I am depressed,” he told Wolf, “and have some serious doubts about our returning to the Wissenschaftskolleg next year. I just feel that I would not be a particularly useful or productive member.”6 Orlando Fals Borda of Colombia’s National University asked him to come to Cartagena for a conference to discuss his work on development in Latin America. This must have been wrenching, for he had not been back to Colombia for many years. His accident “was quite a trauma,” he explained to his old friend. “I am better than I was, but simply cannot now envision undertaking the trip I was much looking forward t
o.” A concerned Fals Borda immediately responded with a fax, hoping for a speedy recovery.7
Being immobilized brought on depression. Doctors prescribed Prozac, then Zoloft. But there was little to arrest the steady, ineluctable decline, the deteriorating hearing and speaking, his tortuous difficulty writing, and the loss of affect or expression that had been such a subtle but important feature of his communication. Instead of reading, he spent long hours of the day asleep in his chair. Walks to the institute became prolonged shuffling excursions, which left him even more exhausted.
The Alpine tumble put an end to a long writing career. Words—the spoken and the written—that fascinated him through life became harder and harder to grasp. Their slipping epitomized an ending. As one might imagine, it was difficult to turn away the flow of invitations and solicitations. George Soros asked Hirschman to spend a weekend with him at his country home in Katonah, New York, in May to discuss “the capitalist threat” with a few friends. Unable to turn this one down, Hirschman went, but he was, by all accounts, the shadow of the sage he’d once been. His last writing effort was a short amalgamation of quotes and thoughts about the paradoxes of unintended consequences written for Soros’ Open Society Institute in late 1999.8 In September 1997, the Toynbee Prize Foundation announced that it would confer that year’s prize to Hirschman for his contribution to the “health of the social sciences.” He would join the likes of Raymond Aron, Jean-Paul Sartre, E. H. Carr, and others. Delighted, he accepted, and began to prepare his speech—which he decided would tackle the works of Toynbee and Gerschenkron. But it did not take long for Hirschman to realize that this was beyond his grasp. Having had a chance to reread Toynbee and a few other books, “I feel that I would be unable at this point in my life to generate the enthusiasm and energy needed to write. I hope you will forgive me,” he wrote to the president of the foundation. Besides, he never liked Toynbee and likely found the exercise less exciting in practice that it was in theory.9 In the end, arrangements were made to have Judith Tendler, John Coatsworth (the director of Harvard’s Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies), and Charles Maier step in with short speeches. Graciously, Maier took the opportunity to salute Sarah and the richness of Albert’s family life that had allowed him to explore literary, philosophical, and psychological connections because he was never alone.
Several publishers moved to assemble his final essays into anthologies. Hirschman gathered his self-reflective, Montaignesque works as a commitment to self-subversion for a collection with the same title, which Harvard University Press published. Some of the essays were personal retrospections and speeches from award ceremonies about the surprising turns of a life. But there was a broader point being made, which was captured in his last serious composition, written, perhaps fittingly, for the one-hundredth session of the Bergedorfer Gesprächskreis (Discussion Circle of Bergedorfer) in Dresden. The attendees were asked to think about “how much community spirit (Gemeinsinn) does liberal society require?” Hirschman’s answer began with a tale from Tolstoy about a peasant called Pakhom, who was obsessed with accumulating land. In his exertions to hoard, Pakhom died prematurely of exhaustion, by which time all Pakhom really needed was the plot for his grave. To Hirschman, Tolstoy’s warning was “that this is the amount of land we may well end up with if we fall prey to accumulating passion.” Hirschman was not denouncing greed. He was cautioning Germans against excessive calls for community spirit because it threatened to stultify necessary, but disorienting, conflicts. People had to disagree, struggle, bargain, and experiment; conflict was the real “glue and solvent.” “What is actually required to make progress with the novel problems a society encounters on its road is political entrepreneurship, imagination, patience here, impatience there, and other varieties of virtù and fortuna. I do not see much point (and do see some danger) in lumping all this together by an appeal to Gemeinsinn.” Closing with Machiavelli was no accident; for the Florentine, politics was an art in need of multiple activities, ranging from exit to voice to loyalty. The range thrived best when adversaries were willing to accept the uncertainty of their correctness. It withered in the face of intransigence. Hirschman’s version of political economy had never been easy to model because it was not about answers, designs, or solutions in pursuit of an equilibrium or balance. To his Dresden audience he warned that the idea of a prepolitical communal identity missed the point; one’s loyalty came from politics, its messiness and its possibilities. The third panel of his famous triptych, exit, voice, and loyalty, was now coming into relief.10
The book of which the essay was a part would exhibit his self-questioning at work, to show how the discovery of new meaning can come from subverting one’s earlier arguments. Immediately translated into many languages, A Propensity to Self-Subversion (1995) consolidated Hirschman’s global profile as a rare voice of learned humility and self-affirmation. Fernando Henrique Cardoso took time out from his presidential duties to write the foreword to the Portuguese edition—likening Hirschman’s disguised intellectual power and ambition to Machiavelli, “nibbling” at small questions to overturn and reframe grand theories—with a warning to readers: do not mistake nibblings (Hirschman’s petites idées) for fleeting interpretations. Modesty’s purpose is to enhance an argument’s virtue. Hirschman and the Princeton philosopher, Harry Frankfurt, struck up a correspondence about commitments to revisit one’s thoughts. Frankfurt insisted that there was an important distinction between self-subversion and self-refutation; the latter he associated with Bertrand Russell or Hilary Putnam. Hirschman was doing something quite different. “The reason your work is never completed,” observed Frankfurt, “is that you have a propensity to look for ways to enlarge it. What happens to you is not really that (as for Sisyphus) work you have previously done is completely undone, so that you must start again from the beginning.” On the eve of the French publication of A Propensity to Self-Subversion, Le Monde featured a long entretien of Hirschman, all but inducting him into its Pantheon of the century’s great intellectuals.11
Hirschman’s last tome was a slender affair including a lecture in Vienna about public and private intersections and his retrospective on the Marshall Plan, capped by a long 1993 interview with Carmine Donzelli, Marta Petrusewicz, and Claudia Rusconi that had been published earlier in Italian, German, Spanish, and French at the height of the impact of The Rhetoric of Reaction. Hirschman fretted over the title and yearned to allude to his theme of trespassing, which entitled his 1981 anthology. In the end, he settled for Crossing Boundaries, though his editor at Zone Books, Ramona Nadaff exclaimed that “I still believe it is important to discuss your concept of ‘trespassing’ and its binding force in your thinking.” He tried to oblige. By the end of 1997 it was all he could do to press himself into service to write one last paragraph for the preface.12
So it was that in the 1990s, the curves of history crossed. One charted the world’s ascending interest in Hirschman’s insights and recollections of the twentieth century as it came to a close. The other traced Hirschman’s dwindling ability to summon them.
In all the recovery-mania of the post–Cold War era, one that took remarkably long to surface was the story of Varian Fry and the operation to rescue refugees from Marseilles. As long as the Fry story remained submerged, so did Albert’s. Hirschman was no longer so resolutely tight-lipped about his role in the operation; it’s that the rescue operation was overshadowed by the Holocaust. In 1982, Laurence Jarvik released a controversial documentary, Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die, exposing the United States government’s and others’ resistance to accepting Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. It dealt briefly with the Emergency Rescue Committee’s work—and featured black-and-white footage of Hirschman’s testimony to the director, filmed at his home in Princeton. The documentary chronicled the shameful Allied policies and was quickly swept up in a debate about whether more could have been done to save Jews. In this heady climate, whatever examples of saving that did take place were afterthoughts. Indeed, the
footage of Hirschman, who spends the filming looking at a spot on the horizon as he recalled 1940, has him putting a damper on the ERC effort: “One tragic aspect of the story was that a great deal was accomplished and we were all very proud of what we accomplished. Perhaps everyone was so proud that”—and at this point Hirschman looked into the questioner’s eyes—“they forgot about the others. Looking back on this episode, that is perhaps, to some extent, the price that we paid for getting out these few.” While Hirschman was fond of unintended consequences, this self-incriminating twist—or at least what we are shown by a director keen to expose the do-nothing stance of others—merged the details of his own risks into a broader canvas of horror and complicity.13
It was not until the United States Holocaust Memorial Council offered Fry posthumous official recognition in 1991 that the story began to circulate. By then, the memory industry had shifted from revisionist histories of blame to a wave of public memorializing of survival. In 1996, the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem inducted Fry as one of the Righteous among the Nations. He was the first American. Varian Fry’s Surrender on Demand was republished in 1997 with an epigram from Beamish. That year, Teri-When Damisch produced a documentary, Marseille–New York: L’Etat de Piège ou La Filière Marseillaise, which featured Hirschman playing the part of Fry, Beamish, and raconteur. The film also reunited Mary Jayne Gold with Beamish. Whatever reticence he felt about public speaking melted away as he clearly enjoyed acting. In 1999, an association was formed in Fry’s memory in Marseilles; a French documentary filmmaker, Pierre Sauvage, also became involved in an organization called the Chambon Foundation. Hirschman’s role in the rescue operation, however, remained shrouded. The Varian Fry Institute (a division of the Chambon Foundation) did not include him in its list of sacralized figures. It continues to leave him out, inexplicably. So does Paris’s wall dedicated to those who helped save souls from the Holocaust, inexplicably. It was not until Sheila Isenberg’s A Hero of Our Own: The Story of Varian Fry appeared in 2001 that the fullness of Hirschman’s hidden, and hiding, hand was revealed. Her widely praised account had managed to incorporate results of her interviews with Hirschman before serious memory loss set in. The Jewish Museum hosted a remembrance of Fry’s activities in December 1997. A corner of the Fry exhibition was reserved for Beamish’s role. At the museum’s conference, Hirschman was asked for the first time publicly to recall his part as the last living member of the Marseilles group. By that point, unfortunately, his memory was fading.14
Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman Page 75