Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers 

Ann W. Astell

Carmel in Cologne, Echt, and Auschwitz:

Edith Stein’s Last Journeys and the Meaning of Place in Exile

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ABSTRACT

In January, 1939, the Netherlands was an ambiguous place for the Jewish Carmelite nun Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, known to the world as the philosopher Edith Stein (1891-1942).  Fleeing from Nazi Germany, she sought and found refuge in the Carmel in Echt, Holland .  That foreign place proved to be a home away from home.  Filled with true Carmelite spirit, the cloister at Echt was the very place to which the exiled Carmelite nuns of Cologne had fled many years before, in 1875; where they had been buried; and where the majority of nuns continued to be Germans.  Leaving Cologne behind, Stein found “the Old Carmel from Cologne ” again in Echt.  From that same place, however, Stein was taken by the Nazis and subsequently deported to Auschwitz , where she died in 1943.  A Jewish refugee, Stein was legally “stateless,” her only citizenship being, as she knew, in heaven (Phil 3:20 , Letter 299).  At first her haven, Holland became in turn her place of arrest and imprisonment.

            The story of Stein raises questions about the definition of place and how it is determined—not only about tolerance and vulnerability within Holland’s borders, but also about the transcendent separateness of Carmel itself as a divine space.  Removed from the world and free from its concerns, Carmel itself yet proved subject to invasion by Nazis officers.  Monastic literature itself sounds this ambiguity.  The monastery is at once a desert into which one voluntarily flees in order to seek God and a place of sanctuary  into which one is driven, hounded by one’s enemies—the place, in short, of scapegoats and of saints.  Where exactly is God to be found?  Conversely, how far can one’s enemies continue their chase?

            As a young student of Edmund Husserl, Stein had written her doctoral dissertation on the problem of empathy.  Recognizing the soul’s power to be affected by the feelings and desires of others, Stein wondered whether the soul has any boundaries, any walls, that can prevent a diabolical or an angelic invasion and possession.  What are the limits of mimesis, of empathy, of intersubjectivity?  Can the soul lose its freedom and cease to be the “zero-point” of orientation and autonomy?  Can the soul be taken over, the “I” dislocated and dispossessed, or does the soul have an innermost room, a sanctuary of freedom, that was ultimately and irreversibly its own?  If so, is God always already there?

            Taken from the convent, deprived of the support of her fellow nuns and exposed to danger and death, Stein found herself able to “live purely from within” (Letter 340, dated August 4, 1942) and to radiate charity to others.  Not even Auschwitz could eradicate this Carmel .