Borges and the Total Library

 

One of Borges’ sweetest traits is his fidelity to the reading of his adolescence

       When a writer like Umberto Eco, who is a scholar of the highest level as well, references, say, Leibniz, one can take that reference for the visible mark left by Eco going through the master’s texts, G.I. Gerhardt’s edition of the Philosophische Schriften, pursued in Latin, French and German as far as need be. 

     When Borges, in the famous essay, The Total Library, refers to Leibniz, however, you know the reference was sifted through a book of popular science and philosophy: Dr. Theodor Wolff’s Der Wettlauf mit der Schildkröte. Gelöste und ungelöste Probleme – The race with the Tortoise. Wolff was a journalist, a writer on culture – although mostly at a journalistic distance. He is distantly of the same kind, although less systematic, as for instance Egon Friedell, or in the American context, Isaac Asimov, or the great Will and Ariel Durant. Another German writer, surely from Borges’s teen years, Kurd Lasswitz – a more Asimovian writer – is also mentioned, with some enthusiasm.

      Borges published the article in 1939, in an Argentina marked by anti-semitism and fascist-ophilia. There was a political undercurrent to the reference to Wolff.

      Theodor Wolff was a famous columnist in the German newspapers, and the editor of one of the great Berlin papers, the Tagblatt. He was also Jewish. Fleeing Germany after the Hitler takeover, he first went to Switzerland, where he was denied a visa, and then to France – which in the 30s did not put a lot of barriers up to the emigration of the German Jews, in contrast to the U.S. Unfortunately for us all, and fatally for Wolff, France fell to the Germans in 1940. Wolff during his period of exile was careful not to call attention to himself by criticizing the Third Reich. “With Eric Kaestner he was of the opinion that you could stop a snowball, but not an avalanche.” [From the Theodor Wolff website] The Italians arrested him in Nice in 1943 and handed him to the Gestapo. From whence he went to Drancy for transport to the camps, but was spared Auschwitz: he died in the Jewish hospital in Berlin: imagine the “care” in the Jewish hospital in Berlin.

      In 1939, Wolff, living in Nice and working on his memoirs, doubtless had no idea that an obscure Argentine writer was quoting him, and by quoting him, lifting him into the sphere of a different audience and a different posterity. Even though his posterity in Germany, after the war, was lined with articles and a biography, for here was a classical liberal assimilated Jew that the Adenauer era could point to with pride.

      I’ve tried to find Wolff’s text, but in that vast mass of texts – less library than maelstrom – offered by the Internet, this one text seems to be frustratingly absent. In Borges’ essay, as has been noted by Jonathan Basile in Tar for Mortar: “The Library of Babel” and the Dream of Totality, Wolff’s work is in some ways mixed up with the essay-story, The Universal Library, by Kurd Lasswitz. A story in a dialogue, the kind of philosophical conte that Brges’s own work was akin to – Borges loved the story as an oral product that travelled from one person to another, as in the beginning of The Intruder:

 “People say (but this is unlikely) that the story was first told by Eduardo, the younger of the Nelsons, at the wake of his elder brother, Crisian, who died in his sleep sometime back in the nineties out in the district of Moron. The fact is that someone got it from someone else during the course of that drawn-out and now dim night, between one sip of mate and the next, and told it to Santiago Dabove, from whom I heard it. Years later, in Turdera, where the story took place, I heard it again.”

      This is perhaps a kind of paradox – in a story about the total library, which concerns, in maniac detail, print and alphabets, the story itself is first told, leaps into the world through the tongue and the teeth and pronunciation and the ear – a library of oral tales underneath the library of printed ones. A library, this second of the tales told, that is especially dear to a blind old man. A library that escapes the Total library. Although who can say, now that we record everything, if that evasive oral library is not being dragged in to our library-panoptican of the registered signal?