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KAPITEL

1. "Homme de lettre"
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2. "Haas - der Weltbürger"
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3. Exilland Indien
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4. Zurück in Europa
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5. India - an 'ahistorical idea of history'
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6. Anhang
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Anil Bhatti:
Haas Willy (1891-1973)


There are many aspects of Haas' life and experiences in India which deserve greater attention. I would like to refer briefly only to his attempts as a litterateur to come to terms with 'India' as presented in his autobiographical recollection and to some comparative cultural reflections in his essays. Like all reconstructions his autobiographical recollection of India is also a construct in which the site of India as a place of exile is justified by an achieved awareness between conscious individual choice and inevitability. An individual acts out a personal history, the prefiguration of which he only becomes aware of in the form of a subsequent epiphanic realization. Given Haas' literary background, it is not surprising that this is articulated through a literary association. In this context Kipling's Kim and Gandhi function as chiffres for Haas' elective affinity to the country of his exile. Rediscovering Kim is one of the central passages of Haas' autobiography. As in all autobiographical reconstruction, Haas too tried to establish a secret pattern of life that unfolds itself gradually through the course of life's journey. Political reasons forced Haas to leave Europe. But why did he choose India? One of the reasons, he subsequently realized while in exile was Kipling's Kim, which he had read as a boy. The daughter of one of his Indian friends in Lahore showed him the famous canon, Kim's gun, with which the novel's action begins. A strange restlessness gripped Haas and he re-reads this book in one night with amazement, disbelief and indeed horror (LW260).

It seemed to him that subconsciously he had retraced the path of the narrative action of the book as an exile in India. He actually knew all the places in the book. All the places he had dreamed about when as a young boy he had first read Kipling's novel and he had forgotten that he knew these places. Only now, while reading the book again, he remembered.

Had the complicated preparations of his youth, he queries, been made by Providence for this? Did Professor Moritz Winternitz's lectures on Indology at the University of Prague and the study of Paul Deussen's translations of Indological texts take him towards India? He recalls seeing an Indian film in Venice in 1937 and wondering if he could ever work as a script writer for an Indian film production. (LW 261). And now he was in India. Fate, however, had sent him to India in a somnambulant state, so that he had been unable to recognize the dream world of his childhood. His wish had been fulfilled in an ironic and indeed malicious manner. It had come too late. Now he was over 50 years old.

Life in India had been a stage play with pain, laughter, and joy; but its meaning lay below the surface. Kim was the climax leading to an epiphanic awareness: I had the feeling that after this magical moment I would not experience anything in India. I felt myself to be indescribably near to Fate, to Providence, to a mysterious, clever, unbelievably inventive and infinitely ironic being, which I would not call 'God', although that is exactly what I would like to do. It was like a demiurge of the Gnostics, who had fulfilled everything that fate had decreed, exactly, but completely in reverse. (LW 262)

Almost in keeping with one of the laws of fiction, according to which the final insight into all the ramifications of narrative complexity also closes the narrative, it became clear to Haas that his time in India was coming to an end. Nothing remained after the war was over to really keep him in India. Although, as a British citizen, he could have lived in India, he felt the need to live in a German-speaking environ¬ment. His considerations were, however, not tinged with any 'sweet feelings of home’. It was merely the necessity of building up a new existence. As he says: 'I was already over 50 - much too late to put down roots anywhere' (LW 262).

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