Hans Keilson was not quite 23 years old when, in December 1932, he came home from his hospital job to news from his mother. “Someone named Loerke called,” she said. “He called to congratulate us. He’s going to recommend your novel for publication.” The call had been from the poet Oskar Loerke, on whose recommendation Keilson’s debut, Life Goes On, was published in 1933 by the S. Fischer publishing house in Berlin.
Keilson’s novel was the last by a Jewish author that Fischer published before the Nazis rose to power. A year later, the book was banned in Germany. On the occasion of a reissue of the novel a half-century later—it took Fischer that long to publish a second edition—Keilson wrote in the afterword that the publication of the book “was my entrance into German ‘literature’ and my exit from it too.”
Keilson’s career—psychiatrist, author in exile, German Jew—epitomizes 20th-century European history. He was born in 1909 in Bad Freienwalde, a small spa town east of Berlin. In the early 1930s, he was studying medicine and playing trumpet and fiddle. Suffering psychological “troubles,” he applied for treatment at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, but the analyst he saw there didn’t believe he was in urgent need of psychotherapy and turned him away. Keilson writes: “I went back home, furious, and sat down to write the opening sentences” of what would become Life Goes On.
It’s a cliché, though not necessarily untrue, that rejection creates fertile ground for a creative mind. But to be rejected from psychoanalysis is a highly unusual rejection. In Keilson’s essays, he writes extensively about Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, and one of his virtues as an author of fiction is his ability to analyze emotions in a cool and slightly detached way; he is not interested in merely describing or evoking emotions.
Life Goes On is the story of a family in a small German town during the economic catastrophe that followed the First World War. The most remarkable aspect of the novel is its portrait of the father, a struggling shopkeeper. He is a powerless, occasionally pathetic creature who nevertheless evokes empathy in the reader precisely because the reader is aware of the son’s uncomfortable and slightly camouflaged disdain for the father. The father embodies submissiveness and shame.
Keilson specializes in a specific type of male character: well behaved and always civilized, a bit comical but also powerless, a puppet of history. To appreciate and understand Keilson’s obsession with male weakness, it is important to remember that the history of Jews in Europe, especially in Central Europe, is largely the story of the impossible task of protecting their families. Keilson’s own parents were murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau. After the war his sister, who had immigrated to Palestine, said to her brother: “I would have been able to save them.”
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In 1936, Keilson’s future wife Gertrud Manz, a Catholic, graphologist, and divorcée, convinced him to flee Germany for the Netherlands. Here he hid and survived the war, Gertrud giving birth to their daughter Barbara in 1941. (Gertrud and Barbara were not in hiding: They were registered as Aryan and mostly living apart from Keilson, with Barbara listed on official papers as the daughter of a German soldier.) During this time, Keilson wrote the novella Comedy in a Minor Key, which was published after the war by the exile publishing house Querido. The story starts with the body of a Jewish refugee who died of natural causes while hiding in the Dutch city of Delft. His protectors, a young but rather dull couple, make a fatal mistake when they try to rid themselves of the corpse: They put it in a pair of their own pajamas that, because of a tag sewn in by the cleaner, can be traced back to them, and they are forced to go into hiding themselves. Whether this novella is a true comedy is unclear; Keilson would seem to lack the necessary malice and is not interested in social satire. The story is subtle, perhaps a bit too subtle. Above all, it is a portrait of the lack of professionalism that characterized at least some of the organized resistance in the Netherlands: well-intended but ill-prepared. Bravery is often a result of coincidence, and Keilson’s humanism takes the form of anti-heroism.
After the war and out of hiding, Keilson married Gertrud and started working as a psychoanalyst in the Netherlands. His second novel, The Death of the Adversary, was published in 1959; it’s a meditation on what it means to be someone’s enemy and the mistaken belief that people always need an enemy. Hitler and the Nazis are never mentioned explicitly but it is clear whom Keilson has in mind. After the book appeared in English, Time magazine put it on its list of the 10 best novels of 1962—in the company of Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, Shirley Jackson, Philip Roth, and Jorge Luis Borges. Yet even with that boost from Time, Keilson’s literary career did not take off.
His professional life as a psychoanalyst continued, though, and he worked with more than 200 of the only 2,000 surviving Dutch Jewish war orphans. They were the subject of his dissertation, for which he was finally awarded his doctorate in 1979. The dissertation, which was translated into English in 1992, starts with the epigraph “In place of Kaddish.”
Keilson never returned to live in Germany, instead becoming a Dutch citizen. Almost half a century after the war he wrote an essay entitled “Rather Holland than Homesick” (an inversion of the Dutch poet Leo Vroman’s famous postwar quip after he moved to the United States, “Rather homesick than Holland”). However, Keilson never adopted the Dutch language in his writing, and even after decades in the Netherlands, his essay on his adopted country is both awkwardly touristy and extremely German. Elsewhere, in one of his poems, he characterizes the Netherlands as the place where he pays taxes. He remained, in short, very much an emigré author—connected to the German language and people, but unable to live in his native land.
However, he outlived all other German exile authors, surviving long enough to see a surprising turn in his literary reputation. In August 2010, Francine Prose reviewed for the New York Times Book Review reissues of The Death of the Adversary and Comedy in a Minor Key. The books are “masterpieces, and Hans Keilson is a genius,” Prose wrote. “Read these books and join me in adding him to the list, which each of us must compose on our own, of the world’s very greatest writers.” Overnight, Keilson became a literary celebrity—in the United States but also in the Netherlands. He appeared on Dutch television and was photographed at literary parties while his books appeared on bestseller lists. He appeared to enjoy this belated recognition. But as he told a New York Times interviewer, “My work as a psychoanalyst is more important than my writing, and I mean this honestly.”
Less than a year later Keilson passed away at the age of 101.
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In 2010, Keilson’s second wife, Marita Keilson-Lauritz, found a diary that Keilson had kept in 1944 while in hiding in Delft apart from his first wife and daughter. In this diary, Keilson wrote among other things about his love for a young Jewish woman who was also in hiding and whom he visited regularly. (Unlike the vast majority of Jews in hiding, Keilson had forged papers and so was able to go out.) The woman, 12 years younger than Keilson, was named Hanna Sanders. Keilson’s diary mentions sonnets he wrote for Hanna, which an editor discovered after his death. The diary and sonnets have now been published in an excellent English translation by Damion Searls; they shed new light on Keilson’s literary work.
Love had been conspicuously absent from his writing, except for the titillating play of a child with other children and the arousing image of the mother of the main character in her underwear in his debut novel. And in The Death of the Adversary, love is associated with hate, reminding the reader of Primo Levi’s maxim that indifference, not hatred, is the opposite of love. Keilson writes: “But it must be a desperate love that demands or permits the desecration of corpses and the devastation of cemeteries at the dead of night.” Fascism as desperate love or as the result of desperate love—this is where Keilson the author cannot really be separated from Keilson the psychoanalyst. But love for another person, the love that gets along so well with lust, a higher desire mixed with carnal impulses, was not associated with Keilson until the discovery of the diary and the sonnets.
The diary is as much about the war and the gas chambers—Keilson knew what was happening in eastern Germany and Poland—as it is about his favorite authors, writing poetry, and his simultaneous love for Hanna and his wife Gertrud. Over the course of the war his affection for Gertrud grows. On December 12, 1944, he wrote: “And then I think about Gertrud and I’m scared. My love for her is just fear.” The reader is immediately reminded of the father in Life Goes On, a man for whom the love that remains is fear.
The great mystery of Keilson’s literary work is why he kept Hanna and his love a secret. A psychoanalyst colleague of Keilson’s who knew him well, Iki Halberstadt-Freud, is quoted in the Dutch edition of the diary: “He has never loved a woman more than Hanna.” So why did he keep her apart from his work? It seems that Hanna was not only Keilson’s greatest love but also his wound, and writing about Hanna or about love would be poking the wound.
Even after Gertrud passed away in 1969, Keilson chose to remain silent about Hanna. After the war Hanna tried to commit suicide, but it is unclear if her desperation originated in the loss of her love. From a poem that was written by Hanna, and from Keilson’s descriptions of her, we may infer that he was as important to her as she was to him. She later settled in Israel, where she married an electrical engineer. In 1970 she wrote a letter to Keilson in which she expressed the hope that they would meet again; this rendezvous may have taken place in the Netherlands in the early 1980s, but not much is known about it. Hanna passed away in Israel in 2008.
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In Hans Keilson’s sonnets and in his diary, love and horror are closely connected. He knew that as soon as the war was over he would return to his wife and child. His great love affair with Hanna could only last for the war’s duration.
Keilson was probably too much of a mensch, too civilized, to poke his wound for the benefit of literature. And perhaps he was right to avoid doing so; after all, he was first and foremost a psychoanalyst. Being too civilized is not always good for literature and not always good for survival. Nevertheless, with the publication of this diary, readers have access to some of Keilson’s finest writings.
Arnon Grunberg is the author of numerous novels, including Tirza and The Jewish Messiah.
