Sinai before Switzerland: Three Dialogues in the Mountains

The other day, reading a new biography of the poet Paul Celan, I stumbled on a little mountain range I hadn’t expected to find. Franz Kafka’s “Excursion into the Mountains” (Der Ausflug ins Gebirge), Martin Buber’s “Dialog in the Mountains” (Gespräch in den Bergen), and Paul Celan’s “Conversation in the Mountains” (Gespräch im Gebirg). Three German Jewish texts. Three mountain scenes. Three ordeals of speech. And because literature is sly—because it likes to masquerade as a republic of solitary peaks while secretly conducting its business along ridgelines and echoes—I began to wonder what these heights were saying to one another.

A mountain makes a voice carry or fail to carry; it returns an echo or withholds one. In Jewish memory, it is Sinai before it is Switzerland: not a view but a summons, not landscape but imperative. Deuteronomy insists that Israel “heard the sound of words” and “saw no form”—nothing but a voice. At Sinai, when Moses speaks, God answers him. The primal Jewish mountain is already the scene of dialog.

Rabbinic tradition, characteristically, complicates the matter further. It refuses to let the mountain become merely sublime. A midrash on the Psalms—“Why do you look askance, O high-peaked mountains, at the mountain God desired?”—imagines the mountains themselves quarreling over which deserves revelation. The high-peaked ones put themselves forward; Sinai is chosen not because it is the grandest but precisely because it is the least grand. The mountain of revelation in Judaism is the rebuke to Everest.

There is, of course, another mountain tradition, the one every European essayist on peaks eventually meets huffing up the path: Petrarch on Mont Ventoux. The Italian poet says he climbed “to see what so great an elevation had to offer.” Petrarch looks out, then opens the Confessions and finds Augustine rebuking those who marvel at “the heights of the mountains” while forgetting themselves. Mont Ventoux becomes the mountain where landscape is discovered and immediately mistrusted. The German philosopher Joachim Ritter turned the episode into a parable: nature beheld aesthetically, at a contemplative distance, as compensation for a world increasingly handed over to use, measurement, and abstraction.

But that is precisely the tradition these three texts disturb: the mountain as the exposed place where address is attempted. This is why their kinship is more intimate than their Alpine settings first suggest. Kafka’s miniature belongs to the years before the Great War and appeared in his first book in 1913; Buber’s dialog came out that same year in Daniel; Celan’s prose piece appeared in 1960. A half-century lies between the first pair and the third. Also an abyss. Also Auschwitz.

These writers go to the mountains to test the word “you.” These are, at bottom, three meditations on the fate of the second person.

Kafka begins with a failure so small, so exact, so ridiculous that it can only be Kafka’s. Sinai is the mountain where speech overwhelms; Kafka gives us the mountain where speech can scarcely escape the throat and where, for that very reason, it begins to crave an echo. Petrarch’s summit dazzles the eye and then turns it inward, but Kafka’s mountain is less a panorama than a place where the voice goes out and, receiving no answer, begins inventing company out of its own deprivation.

Here’s his text in its entirety:

“I don’t know,” I cried without being heard, “I don’t know. If nobody comes, then nobody comes. I’ve done nobody any harm, nobody’s done me any harm, but nobody will help me. A pack of nobodies. Yet that isn’t all true. Only, that nobody helps me—a pack of nobodies would be rather fine, on the other hand. I’d love to go on an excursion—why not?—with a pack of nobodies. Into the mountains, of course, where else? How these nobodies jostle each other, all these lifted arms linked together, these numberless feet treading so close! Of course they are all in dress suits. We go so gaily, the wind blows through us and the gaps in our company. Our throats swell and are free in the mountains! It’s a wonder that we don’t burst into song!”

In this miniature, as so often in Kafka, the thing desired is nearly at hand and exactly withheld. Still, the silent cry wants an answer. Failing to find a real second person, it manufactures one, then many: a whole chorus of projected others.

Then comes the incantatory little trick by which negation proliferates into company. Nobody everywhere. Nobody as a multitude. The conversion of bare subjectivity into some kind of plural life. Yet the “we” it attains is spectral, generated by negation itself.

Buber seems, at first, to breathe a cleaner and more confident air. His mountain in Daniel is a place of orientation, of upwardness, but also of bodily discipline and rebuke: The rocks stand over Daniel “like an accusation.” If Kafka’s speaker calls into thinning air and receives only a comic pageant of negation, Buber’s text begins already in dialog:

Daniel: Let us go further. I take no pleasure in resting in the midst of the mountains. One must be able to remain upright, uphill, downhill, until one again stands in the valley and in the usual order. . . . The rocks tower in the air like a call, like an accusation. And only then do they become my brothers. . . . I stood up free in the vertical, and I was the vertical . . . and no cathedral’s buttress ever stood with such extended life as I.

But direction is the necessity of the soul. And because my body is happy with my soul since its direction mirrors itself in your direction, I might here, standing between the rocks, sing a prize song to you, if I could do it properly. But, in fact, it can only be said in deeds, not in words, and it manifests itself only through its effect: it is that which pulls me up in the morning and drives me into the wilderness, which visits me at midday and sends me to the living, which takes my hand at evening and leads me to God the high Lord of my all-solitude.

The Woman: . . . Give me your hand, Daniel.

Daniel: Here.

The Woman: . . . What do you see?

Daniel: My hand in yours.

The Woman: A horizontal, is it not?

Daniel: A horizontal.

This mountain dialog turns vertical striving into horizontal relation: the offered hand, the horizontal beam of companionship. Elevation is corrected by encounter. One might say that Buber takes the old mountain trope of revelation and socializes it. He insists that height must open not onto private transcendence but onto reciprocity. The revelation is not the view; it’s the other.

And here Sinai itself comes back into view. Moses says in Deuteronomy, “I stood between God and you.” At Sinai the space between is born under conditions of terror—the direct divine “you” is too much for mortal beings, so mediation becomes necessary. Buber’s between, by contrast, is not a concession to fear but the very place where human life becomes fully human.

That, in turn, casts Kafka in a new light. Buber imagines a space where presence meets presence. Kafka imagines a corridor full of wind: relation reduced to yearning. Buber gives us the handclasp; Kafka gives us linked arms with nobodies, a phantom choreography of belonging.

There are biographical reasons to hear the echo between these texts. Kafka attended at least one of Buber’s Prague lectures on Judaism (later published as Drei Reden über das Judentum); he published in Buber’s journal Der Jude; and though he found Buber’s retellings of Hasidic tales “insufferable” (unerträglich), he knew the Buberian summons to dialog well enough to be haunted by it.

Paul Celan, in turn, knew both predecessors from within. He translated Kafka’s mountain fragment into Romanian; he met Buber; and by the late 1950s, Buber was near enough in his ear for his own “Conversation in the Mountains” to sound, in its very title, like a deliberate braid of antecedents. But the title also declares a problem. What Buber had offered as dialog and Kafka as anticommunity returns in Celan under the sign of the missed encounter.

On reading a draft of Buber’s mountain dialog, the German Jewish writer Gustav Landauer wrote to Buber extravagantly, “You are achieving what Nietzsche did not achieve in his Zarathustra.” Celan’s piece was occasioned by a missed meeting in the Swiss village of Sils Maria, where, as it happens, Nietzsche had conceived Zarathustra. In the summer of 1959, Celan and his family traveled there to meet with Theodor W. Adorno, only to return to Paris early before they could meet.

On his return to Paris, Celan wrote “Conversation in the Mountains.” It begins with “the Jew, the Jew and son of a Jew” stepping into the high country with his “unspeakable” name and his stick, only to meet his cousin there under the burden of a shadow that is both borrowed and his own. First the sticks fall silent, then the stone—for a moment there is hush in the mountains. But not for long. “When one Jew comes along and meets another, then it’s goodbye silence, even in the mountains.” The flowers bloom to either side—Turk’s cap, rampion—yet the cousins can scarcely see them; a movable veil hangs in the eye, so that each image is caught, webbed over. “The babblers!” Celan cries and lets them talk.

In what follows, the mountain itself seems to utter “a language with no I and no Thou, pure He, pure It,” a glacial grammar of pure third person. Against that impersonal speech, one cousin insists that he had to speak:

Because maybe I had to talk, to myself or to you, had to talk with my mouth and my tongue and not just with my stick. Because who does it talk to, the stick? It talks to the stone, and the stone—who does it talk to?

Who should it talk to, cousin? It doesn’t talk, it speaks, and whoever speaks, cousin, talks to no one, he speaks, because no one hears him, no one and No One, and then he says, he and not his mouth and not his tongue, he and only he says: D’you hear?

You hear, says he—I know, cousin, I know. . . . You hear, he says, I’m there. I’m there, I’m here, I’ve come.

In the end, nothing like reciprocity has been secured; only a precarious self-presence has been wrested from the void. But it is something won: “I here, I … I on the way to myself, up here.”

By the time Celan writes, less than two decades after forced labor under the Romanian fascist regime, the mountain can no longer serve as a metaphysical holiday resort. The old alliance between elevation and consolation has been broken. German has carried decrees, euphemisms, and death sentences.

There is, from an earlier German Jewish world, a line attributed to Samson Raphael Hirsch: “When I stand before God, the Eternal will ask me: ‘Have you seen my Alps?’” It’s a lovely sentence. It imagines the mountains as divine gift and admires them as a religious obligation of gratitude. Celan answers from the far side of that confidence. His Alps remain beautiful, but beauty is no longer innocent.

Celan presses German—a language that bears history in its syntax like shrapnel—through the Jewish speech the Germans had mocked, stigmatized, tried to expel. Hence the terrible mountain sentence: “a language with no I and no Thou, pure He, pure It.”

Sinai had given Jewish tradition a mountain of voice without form; Buber had tried to convert the mountain into the scene of human reciprocity; Celan gives us the mountain after catastrophe, where nature’s speech is impersonal, glacial, withholding. In this light, Gespräch im Gebirg is not just a quarrel with Adorno’s dictum that “after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric” nor a lament over a failed meeting. It asks whether words can still make their way toward anyone. A stick can knock on stone; that is not yet dialog. Mouth and tongue may speak, but what if speech goes out only to No One?

Even where the world speaks only in the third person, the battered first person insists on coming forward and stammering, “I here.” That phrase is what remains of answerability under conditions that nearly abolish response. It’s hard not to hear the echo of the biblical “Here I am” (hineni), the response to a call at the beginning of the binding of Isaac, on a mountain path that is explicitly described as ascent to “one of the heights.” In Celan it is personhood wrestled back from the grammar of depersonalization.

Kafka’s desire for a “we” survives in Celan but in darkened form—no merry antichoir of nobodies, rather a fellowship of the wounded, the half-remembered, the still speaking. It is a survivor’s “we,” burdened with the unasked-for obligation to go on addressing.

In the midrash, the mountains argued over which would bear revelation. These three modern writers renew the quarrel by tracing a steepening drama of human address: Kafka sends up a soundless cry and populates the mountains with nobodies because he cannot bear the blank nothingness where a reply ought to be. Buber gives us the mountain where vertical striving becomes horizontal relation. Celan inherits both the cry and the ethics but also an “I” that still says, against the glaciers and against No One, “I here.”

Sinai was the great mountain of the second person, a place where the voice outran the image, where speech descended with such force that mediation had to be invented. Kafka, Buber, and Celan inherit that mountain after revelation has become broken. What survives in all three is not consolation, certainly not uplift, but the stubbornness of speech itself. Against silence, against No One, the human word still leans toward another word. It still asks to be answered.