In Bluebeard's Castle by George Steiner: When Culture Did Not Prevent Barbarism
# In Bluebeard's Castle by George Steiner: When Culture Did Not Prevent Barbarism
George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle. Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture, Yale University Press, 1971 (French translation: Gallimard, 1973, reissued Seuil, 1986). 154 pages.
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In 1971, George Steiner delivered four lectures at the University of Kent as part of the T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures. The result is a brief, dense, uncomfortable essay—one of the most unsettling texts of the second half of the 20th century on the question of culture and civilization. The central question is simple to formulate, impossible to evade: how could a civilization that had produced Goethe, Beethoven, Kant, and Hegel give rise to Auschwitz? And if culture does not protect against barbarism—if it can even coexist with it unflinchingly—what does the word "culture" still mean?
Steiner does not offer a comforting answer. He offers something more useful: a rigorous diagnosis, supported by erudition that spans philosophy, literature, musicology, and the history of ideas.
The 19th Century as an Incubator: The Boredom Preceding Destruction
The first part of the essay traces back to the source. Steiner identifies in the European 19th century—that century of relative peace, material progress, melioristic optimism—the seeds of the 20th century's catastrophe. His central argument: the long peace (1815-1914) engendered a profound boredom within the cultivated strata of European society. Not the banal boredom of idleness, but a metaphysical boredom, a weariness of civilization itself, a dull desire for violent dissolution.
Steiner locates this boredom in literature (Baudelaire, Flaubert, the decadents), in philosophy (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche), and in music (Wagnerian chromaticism as an aspiration to dissolution). It is no coincidence: the culture of the late 19th century is permeated by an aesthetic of violence, a fascination with destruction, a "call to brutality" that prepared the ground for the coming catastrophes.
> « Are the forms of boredom and the call to brutal destruction constants in the history of social and intellectual forms, once they cross a certain threshold of complexity? »
This question, posed at the outset, is not rhetorical. It engages Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents), Rousseau and his nihilistic pastoralism, and the entire tradition of modernity's critique. Steiner does not answer directly—he sets the framework for an inquiry.
The Central Thesis: Culture Does Not Immunize Against Barbarism
The second part is the best known, and the most provocative. Steiner formulates what would become one of his seminal theses: high European culture did not constitute a bulwark against Nazism. It coexisted with it. In some cases, it accompanied it.
The image that crystallizes this thesis has become famous: nothing in the vicinity of Dachau interrupted the great winter cycle of Beethoven chamber music played in Munich. Camp guards could be readers of Schiller. SS officers took their children to museums on Sundays. Culture did not protect. It did not prevent.
Steiner goes further. He puts forward a hypothesis on the roots of Nazi anti-Semitism that remains one of the most debated in the essay: by killing the Jews, Western civilization sought to eliminate those who had "invented" God, who had imposed on the world the ethical demands of monotheism—what he calls the "blackmail of transcendence." The Holocaust would be, in this reading, a reflex of natural consciousness against the moral constraint that Judaism had introduced into Western history.
This thesis has been vigorously contested—notably by Irving Howe in Commentary (1972), who criticized it for being unverifiable and for dissolving the concrete historical responsibility of the Nazis into a metaphysical abstraction. The criticism is well-founded. But it does not diminish the force of the question posed: why was culture not enough?
The Post-Culture: The Loss of the Center
The third part, titled "In a Post-Culture," is perhaps the most relevant today. Steiner describes the situation of Western culture after the Second World War as a situation of "post-culture": the certainties that underpinned Western cultural hierarchy—the conviction that the Greco-Latin and Judeo-Christian tradition represented "the best that has been thought and said"—are irremediably shaken.
Two factors produced this upheaval. The first is internal: culture's complicity with barbarism destroyed its claim to moral authority. The second is external: decolonization and the rise of non-Western cultures ended the European civilization's monopoly on the definition of "superior" and "inferior."
Steiner does not rejoice in this collapse. Nor does he lament it with nostalgia. He analyzes it. And he poses the resulting question: in a world where the cultural center has been destroyed, where the hierarchy of values is contested from all sides, how can transmission, education, and creation be conceived?
His answer is provisional and honest: he does not know. What he does know is that the proposed substitutes—primitivism, neo-paganism, the counter-culture of the 1960s—do not constitute viable alternatives. They are, in their own way, symptoms of the same boredom he had diagnosed in the 19th century.
"Tomorrow": Three Scenarios for Culture
The fourth and final part is the most speculative. Steiner outlines three possible scenarios for culture in what he calls "post-culture."
The first is that of a high culture of minority: a restricted elite keeps the humanist tradition alive under increasingly marginal conditions, like the Irish monks who preserved ancient culture during the barbarian invasions. Steiner does not hide his ambivalence: this solution may be the only realistic one, but it implies a break with the democratic ideal of a shared culture.
The second scenario is that of a technicized mass culture: culture is reduced to the consumption of standardized cultural products, high culture survives as a museum curiosity, and authentic creativity takes refuge in marginal forms. This is, Steiner suggests, the dominant trajectory of contemporary Western societies.
The third scenario—the most radical—is that of a total rupture: Western civilization does not survive its own contradictions, and something entirely new emerges from its ruins. Steiner does not say what this would be. He only says that history has already known such ruptures, and that they are not necessarily ends.
What Steiner Still Brings Today
Published over fifty years ago, In Bluebeard's Castle remains a reference text for several reasons.
The first is its central question, which has lost none of its urgency: can culture—education, arts, literature, philosophy—form moral beings? Steiner's answer is no, or at least: not necessarily, not automatically. This answer is still disturbing, because it contradicts one of the founding postulates of liberal humanism.
The second is his diagnosis of boredom as a precursor to violence. In a context where advanced democratic societies are seeing rising forms of political nihilism and a fascination with destruction, Steiner's thesis on the 19th century deserves careful re-reading.
The third is his lucidity on the situation of "post-culture." Steiner wrote in 1971, but he describes with remarkable precision the cultural condition of the 2020s: loss of the center, contestation of hierarchies, proliferation of substitutes, inability to formulate a credible alternative to the humanist tradition without reproducing or caricaturing it.
The limits of the essay are real. The thesis on anti-Semitism as a "revolt against monotheism" is too abstract to be historically operative. The style—brilliant, sometimes too brilliant—can mask argumentative slips that critics have rightly pointed out. And Steiner remains, despite his efforts, deeply centered on the European tradition he claims to deconstruct.
But these limits do not diminish the value of the question posed. In Bluebeard's Castle is a book that refuses comfort. It asks its reader to confront what culture cannot do—and to reflect, from there, on what it still can do.
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George Steiner (1929-2020): born in Paris to Viennese Jewish parents, he grew up in New York and Paris, taught at Cambridge and Geneva. His other major works include Language and Silence (1967), After Babel (1975), and Real Presences (1989). In Bluebeard's Castle is often considered the most accessible synthesis of his thought on culture and barbarism.
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Bibliographic Details
- Title: In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture
- Author: George Steiner
- Publisher: Yale University Press
- Publication date: September 10, 1974 (original edition: Faber and Faber, 1971)
- Pages: 154
- Price: $22.00
- ISBN: 9780300017106
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Reading note written for the "Lectures" section of the Journal d'un Progressiste.
