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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            In the topography of the thought of René Girard, the desert holds special significance.  It is, first of all, the place of expulsion for the scapegoat, the deadly “frontier” to which the “unclean” victim is cast out as a curative for the violent contagion that has afflicted the community.  Quoting Georges Glotz, Girard notes that the word “’elimination’ . . .must be taken in its etymological sense—of expulsion beyond the frontiers,” the physical borders or territorial limits of a society.[1]  The desert has another meaning for Girard, however.  In his discussion of heroic askesis, Girard recalls “the life of privation led by the hermit monks in the desert,”[2] whose ardent renunciation of worldly desires for the sake of their desire for God enables God to fulfill that very desire. “The mystic turns from the world, “Girard writes, “in order that God may turn toward him and give him the gift of his grace.”[3]  In the first case, the scapegoat is driven out into the wilderness.  In the second, the ascetic—perhaps literally clad in the goatskin of penitents—actively seeks out the desert as a place of intimate encounter with God.  These two experiences—passive and active—of the desert may, through a phenomenological reduction, point to what the desert is:  that place where the one who is alone (literally, “all one”), who has been deserted, or who has deserted, discovers that he is never alone, that his very being is relational.  “The real structures,” as Girard puts it elsewhere, “are intersubjective. They cannot be localized anywhere”[4]

            The question of the intersubjective arises early in the writings of Edith Stein (1891-1942), appearing in her 1916/1917 doctoral dissertation On the Problem of Empathy, which she wrote under the direction of Edmund Husserl.  Her discussions there about the location(s) of the “I” help to explain how her acute sense of place heightens to a point of paradoxically disoriented orientation, a new “zero point,” in her later, specifically religious writings.  In this paper I first discuss Stein’s published work on Carmel as a place.  I then draw upon Stein’s personal letters to sketch the historical circumstances that brought the theme of place strongly into her consciousness during the years from 1933, when she first entered the Carmelite cloister in Cologne, to 1938, when she was transferred to the Carmel in Echt, Holland, to 1942, when she was taken from Echt to Auschwitz, to die in the concentration camp.  I then read these personal writings as an extension of her philosophical reflections in her dissertation.  Finally, I turn to her theo-aesthetic, final work, The Science of the Cross, a study of Carmelite spirituality, which was published posthumously.  It conjoins the topics of identity and place in a way, I argue, that radically underscores the intersubjectivity at the heart of all personhood.

            For Stein, Carmel is at once the desert and the garden.  In her 1935 essay “On the History and Spirit of Carmel,” she retells the story of the prophet Elijah, the legendary founder of the Carmelite Order.  In the Book of Kings, the prophet appears suddenly, without any previous introduction, to announce to the wicked King Ahab a period of drought:  “’As the Lord the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word’” (1 Kings 17:1).  The Biblical narrative of Elijah, as Stein emphasizes, sets the desert-world of Ahab’s idolatrous worship, parched by drought, against the desert world of the hermit Elijah, who “stand[s] before the face of the living God” and thus epitomizes the vocation of the Carmelites, who “watch in prayer.”[5]  The desert world of Elijah is undeniably the domain of persecuted scapegoats.  King Ahab and his wife, Queen Jezebel, have killed the prophets of the Lord; those who have survived this genocide have hidden, like Elijah, in caves in the wilderness (1 Kings 18:13).  Under a death-sentence, Elijah dresses in animal-hide.  “The hide of a dead animal,” Stein writes, “reminds us that the human body is also subject to death.”[6]  What Stein stresses, however, is not this persecution and passive hiding, but rather the prophet’s active renunciation of Ahab’s world and single-minded desire for God, whose presence he seeks in the desert:

He stood before God’s face because this was the eternal treasure for whose sake he gave up all earthly goods.  He had no house; he lived wherever the Lord directed him from moment to moment:  in loneliness beside the brook of Carith, in the little house of the poor widow of Zarephath of Sidon, or in the caves of Mount Carmel .[7]

Elijah’s voluntary dislocation of himself—his flight from the world, his stripping away of earthly goods, his life “outside all natural human relationships”—powerfully alters the world itself, turning the wilderness into a garden, where Elijah is miraculously sustained with food and drink; where he encounters the Lord himself “in soft rustling after a thunderstorm,”[8]   and gains a spiritual, paternal fruitfulness in his spiritual son and heir, the prophet Elisha, Elijah’s non-rivalrous double.

            Stein’s essay endeavors to show that the legendary founding of the Carmelite Order by the prophet Elijah is significant:  “We who live in Carmel and who daily call upon our Holy Father Elijah in prayer know that for us he is not a shadowy figure out of the dim past.  His spirit is active among us in a vital tradition and determines how we live.”[9] 

            Stein’s commentary on the living presence of Elijah among twentieth-century Carmelites gains added importance read alongside her personal history and correspondence.  A Jew who never disavowed her Judaism, but rather saw it as fulfilled in Christ, Stein found herself especially at home in a Catholic religious order that claimed a Hebrew prophet as its founder.  Like Elijah, too, Stein’s coming to Carmel resulted from a double-movement of estrangement, exclusion, and persecution, on the one hand, and of active longing, on the other. 

Because the post-doctoral habilitation was at that time not generally granted to women, her application at the University of Göttingen was denied in 1919, even though she graduated summa cum laude, was generally regarded as one of the most brilliant of Husserl’s students, and had worked closely with him as his assistant on Volume II of his Ideen.[10]  Her decision in 1921-1922 to become a Catholic was incomprehensible to many of her close friends and family members.  She obtained teaching posts in the college run by Dominican Sisters in Speyer (1923-32) and later at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Münster (1932-33), all the while struggling (as she wrote) ”to justify [her] scholarly existence” through continued publications, despite her “ten-year exclusion from the continuity of academic work.” [11]  Thus she kept alive the hope for an eventual habilitation and professorship (perhaps at the University of Frieburg , through the mediation of Martin Heidegger) and Martin Honecker.[12]  This hope met its last disappointment in 1931, due to “the economic crisis.”[13]  In 1932, she wrote to her good friend, Hedwig Conrad-Martius that she had “lost connection with [her life’s work] on all sides” and regarded herself as “generally incompetent for this world.”[14]  “But,” she concluded, “as long as the indications are that the Lord wants me in this position, I may not desert.”[15]  In the Spring of 1933, shortly after Hitler seized power, she was barred from giving public lectures and from teaching “because of [her] Jewish descent.”[16] In October of that same year, she entered the Carmel at Cologne .  “The umsurtz [military coup] was for me a sign from heaven,” she writes to her Jewish friend, Fritz Kaufmann (1891-1959), “that I might now go the way that I had long considered as mine.”[17]

Discussions of place and position abound in the letters between 1919 and 1933, as Stein struggled to fulfill her scholarly and womanly calling.  In this paper, however, I focus on the meaning of Carmel for her.  Entering Carmel meant, first of all, a change in her exterior environment that certainly affected her soul, however much she had already been living a “convent life” while still in the world.[18]  To Elly Dursey, a former student of hers who was considering a move, Stein wrote on November 25, 1936, “Every change in the external circumstances is already apt to disturb one’s inner peace.  Therefore, one should never seek [such a change] unless God provides it.”[19] In another letter, Stein confesses herself to be “a very awkward child in the novitiate,” who requires the “great love and patience” of her superiors and fellow sisters.[20] “It will be a good while,” she writes, “before I become a nun who is useful in any way.”[21]  The life behind convent walls can be one of “deep peace,” she confesses to Hedwig Conrad-Martius, adding, “But then one has to have a calling for it.  And for those who have their place outside, there is also a way outside.”[22]  Commenting on the adjustment of another woman to the life in Carmel , Stein provides a self-portrait:  “Perhaps only someone who has personally experienced what it means to wait for years and to have the pressure of living in an environment  totally differing in its value system from one’s own can appreciate what the days here meant for her.  She completely blossomed here.”[23]

The Carmel became a “garden,” for Stein, albeit one like the Biblical cave and mountainous ravines of Elijah:  “The walls of our monasteries enclose a narrow space,” she observes. “To erect the structure of holiness in it, one must dig deep and build high, one must descend into the depths of the dark night of one’s own nothingness in order to be raised high into the sunlight of divine love and compassion.”[24] As a plant grows in the space allotted to it, so too, Stein imagines her spiritual development to be conditioned by the exterior surroundings of the Carmel , its physical structure and temporal schedule.[25]  This Umwelt is maternal, in the sense that it (in the words of Joseph Grange) “gives identity an opportunity to become.”[26]

An enclosed garden, the cloister of Carmel centers on “God,” who “alone suffices”:   As Stein explains, “We . . . fulfill our Rule when we hold the image of the Lord continually before our eyes in order to make ourselves like Him. . . .He is present to us in the most Blessed Sacrament. . . .To stand before the face of God continues to be the real content of our lives.”[27]  The Carmelite faces the face of God, but at her back is the world that opposes God, in her heart is the whole world that needs and seeks Him.

In this sense, the Carmelite, as Stein knew, never leaves the world behind.  Stein’s letters from the Carmels in Cologne and Echt are full of concern for the fate of family members and friends exposed to the Nazi persecution.  “Please pray for my brothers and sisters,” she begs in a letter dated October 10, 1936, “My mother’s last great sorrow was that my brother Arno (who had always worked as her associate) had decided to sell the business, intending to go to America .  His wife and two of their children are already there.”[28]  Letter after letter contains some reference to the worsening situation.  To Paula Stolzenbach, for example, she writes:  “I would like to commend my relatives to you.  The situation gets more and more difficult for them.”[29]

Stein did not ever imagine herself to one of danger.  Her 1935 essay on the history of Carmel includes pointed references to the sixteen nuns of Compiegne , beheaded during the French “reign of terror.”[30] She alludes to the martyrdom on July 24, 1936, of three Discalced Carmelite nuns in a letter dated May 7, 1937:  “So far we still live in deep peace, entirely unmolested within our cloister walls.  But the fate of our Spanish sisters tells us, all the same, what we must be prepared for.”[31]  In October, 1938, she describes herself as “a very poor and powerless Esther,” who, like the Biblical queen, “was taken from among her people precisely that she might represent them before the king” in prayer, petition, and self-offering.[32]  In another letter, dated December 9, 1938, she reveals that she had already offered herself as a holocaustum in 1933,[33] when she entered Carmel and chose the name “Teresa Benedicta a Cruce”:  “By the cross I understood the destiny of God’s people which, even at that time, began to announce itself.”[34]

As “the atmosphere . . . [grew] steadily darker,”[35] in the winter of 1938, the Mother Superior in the Carmel at Cologne arranged for Stein’s transfer to the Carmel at Echt, The Netherlands. Stein arrived there on New Year’s Eve.  Her letters of the early months of 1939 describe her new home as a haven of warm welcome and protection, where she is “again in Carmel , surrounded by cordial maternal and sisterly love.”[36]  In Echt, she can continue her life of payer, study, and charitable intercession.  Stein highlights the continuities between the Carmels in Cologne and Echt, observing that “this house [in Echt] was founded by Carmelites from Cologne , when they were exiled in 1875.” [37]  Stein reports that these persecuted exiles, with whom she surely identified herself, “are buried here,” in a cemetery “within the enclosure,” where she is able “to greet [them].”[38]  Many of the Carmelites living in Echt are “German Sisters,” Stein writes, “several of them from Bavaria .”[39]  “The altar in our choir and many other [items] were brought along from Cologne ,” Stein points out in another letter from Echt, where she praises “the true spirit of Carmel here.”[40]  The Carmel in Echt is, in short, described by Stein as a home away from home, an extension of the monastery that she painfully left behind her in Cologne .

Echt is a place of tolerance, but also of vulnerability. Stein’s earliest letters from Echt refer to an ultimate shelter, not within physical walls or national boundaries, but in “God’s will, . . . the most secure port of peace.”[41]  Grateful for the refuge afforded her in Echt, Stein writes in April, 1939, “At the same time I always have a lively awareness that we do not have a lasting city here.”[42] Stein uses geographical locations— Bethlehem , Nazareth , the Desert—to structure her brief biography of the Carmelite Marie-Aimée of Jesus (1839-1874), composed in 1939.  “In the desert solitude,” Stein writes, “the instrument was forged, hardened in the fire of suffering.”[43] A place that is precisely a no-place, a place within and yet outside the world, the “’desert’ of Carmel ” eludes her description.[44] As Stein observes in a letter dated May 16, 1941, “the story of the souls in Carmel” remains “a secret history,” “hidden deep in the Divine Heart”:  “And what we believe we understand about our own soul is, after all, only a fleeting reflection of what will remain God’s secret until the day all will be made manifest.”[45]

Declared “stateless,” all “non-Aryan Germans in the Netherlands ” were ordered “to report for emigration by December 15,” 1941.[46]  The last months of her life in Echt were marked by efforts to secure permission for Edith Stein and her sister Rosa to be transferred to a Carmel elsewhere—in Switzerland or Spain .[47]  Those efforts failed.  “Come, Rosa,” she told her sister on the day of their arrest in the Carmel in Echt, “We’re going for our people.”[48] Deported in the company of 987 internees, Edith and Rosa Stein   died, together with 766 Jews from Drancy , on August 9, 1942 in the gas chamber in Auschwitz . [49]

Carmel as a place, a cloister, remained permeable to the atmosphere surrounding it.  Its physical sanctuary could be entered, violated.  The terrible historical situation in which Stein lived her life in Carmel might be analyzed as a “background experience” to Stein’s specifically religious experience, a “background” to her facing of God and to the discovery in God of her inmost self   But what sort of background?  The philosophical understanding of Stein, as articulated in her doctoral dissertation On the Problem of Empathy, militates against a simple juxtaposition of her person against a historical or geographical background, even as it demands that those backgrounds be taken into account.  As the preceding pages have endeavored to show, the “background experiences” of Stein—her past experiences, her solicitude for loved ones, her fear of an ever impending danger to them and to herself—continually co-determined her present experience within the Carmel, as they came to mind, filled her letters, and colored her prayer.  Understood “in a pregnant sense,”[50] the categories of “inside” and “outside” apply neither to Stein’s feelings or nor the Carmel itself as she came to understand it.  Driven into the Carmel , she found that she had always already been at home there.  Taken forcibly from it, she never really left it, because she had found her way to its innermost chamber in her own soul.[51]