Franz Steiner
| Franz Baermann Steiner | |
|---|---|
Photograph of Steiner taken in 1938
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| Born |
12 October 1909 Karlín, Austria–Hungary |
| Died | 27 November 1952 (aged 43) Oxford, England |
| Occupation | Anthropologist, poet |
| Language | German, Czech |
| Nationality | Czech, British |
| Genre | Anthropology, Literature |
| Notable works | Taboo |
Franz Baermann Steiner (born 12 October 1909 in the town of Karlín (the later suburb of Karolinethal), just outside Prague, Bohemia, died 27 November 1952, in Oxford) was an ethnologist, polymath, essayist, aphorist, and poet. He was familiar, apart from German, Yiddish, Czech, Greek and Latin, with both classical and modern Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Armenian, Persian, Malay, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, six other Slavic languages, Scandinavian languages and Dutch.
He taught at the University of Oxford from 1950 until his death two years later. His most widely known work, Taboo, is composed of his lectures on the subject and was posthumously published in 1956. The extensive influence his thinking exercised on British anthropologists of his generation is only now becoming apparent, with the publication of his collected writings. The Holocaust claimed his parents, in Treblinka in 1942, together with most of his kin.
His paternal family hailed from Tachov in Western Bohemia and his father was a small retail businessman dealing in cloth and leather goods. His mother's family was from Prague. Neither side practised Judaism, and his father was an atheist, but Franz received elements of a religious education at school, and from occasional attendance at synagogues. He belonged to the last generation of the German, and Jewish, minority in Prague of the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, who were to make distinctive contributions to German literature. From his early childhood he was a close friend of Hans Günther Adler and Wolf Salus, the son of Hugo Salus. In 1920 he entered the German State Gymnasium in Štepánská Street, where Max Brod and Franz Werfel had studied. He joined the Roter Studentenbund (Red Student Union) in 1926. He was attracted to Marxism early, a fascination that lasted until 1930, and also to political Zionism. He enrolled at the German University of Prague in late 1928 for coursework on Semitic languages, with a minor in ethnology, while pursuing as an external student courses in Siberian ethnology and Turkish studies at the Czech language Charles University of Prague. He studied Arabic abroad for a year, in 1930–31, at the Hebrew University in Palestine. In Jerusalem, after some time staying with an Arab family, he was forced to move out by the British, and took up digs with the Jewish philosopher Hugo Bergmann, a key figure in the development of Prague Zionism, a schoolfriend of Franz Kafka's, and an intimate of Martin Buber, Judah Leon Magnes and Gershom Sholem. It was from this circle during his stay that he developed views akin to those of Brit Shalom on Jewish-Arab co-operation, though he remained suspicious of fundamentalist Islam.
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