Peter Singer: Pushing Time Away: A Memoir

By MARGIE THOMSON

Australian ethicist Peter Singer is best known for the 1975 groundbreaker Animal Liberation that launched a worldwide movement, but this time he's turning his attention to his family.

In the Melbourne apartment of an elderly aunt he uncovers a bundle of letters written by his maternal grandfather David Oppenheim (1881-1943), an Austrian Jew who had been a classical scholar and a member of Sigmund Freud's Wednesday group.

Singer, described by The New Yorker as "the most influential living philosopher", struggles through the letters, years of correspondence between David and his wife, Singer's grandmother Amalie (Amalie's side of the correspondence is, sadly, mostly missing).

The letters are in German, in dense, almost illegible writing, but the translations are fascinating, offering a picture of a forensic, intellectual mind that seems a snap for Singer's own, and of a moment in time - a world and a now-lost way of being.

Singer takes a year off work without pay to pursue this man's history, travelling to Vienna and visiting places significant in his grandfather's life and death.

He is self-conscious about the project and subjects himself to his characteristic intellectual questioning.

"Why am I planning to put much larger issues aside to study the life and work of a minor, forgotten scholar who died half a century ago? Because he was my grandfather?

"Why should I be so concerned about my ancestors?"

Part of the answer he finds in the era in which David Oppenheim lived. "He came of age at the end of a century of peace and progress. European civilisation was at its peak ... For the educated classes in Vienna, life was good."

This was the city and the time in which Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Arthur Schnitzler, Karl Kraus, Max Reinhardt, Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler all lived and worked, where people gathered in the world's best coffee shops to debate new and exciting ideas.

But, says Singer, "By the time my grandfather reached his 60th birthday, this world was in ruins.

"Europe was, for the second time in his life, in the midst of a devastating war, and all the humane values and enlightened reasoning of his youth had been defeated by visceral emotion and brute force. The tragedy of this moral collapse is compelling in itself."

David Oppenheim spent his life striving to understand his fellow human beings. He researched by studying the classics and mythology, but also through his intense interest in psychology.

This led him to Freud (he and Freud even co-authored a paper, although it was never published) and then to Alfred Adler, to whom he remained loyal after Freud pushed Adler out of the Psychoanalytical Society.

"The exclusion of Adler and others who disagreed with fundamental tenets of Freud's teachings was a tragedy for psychoanalysis. It ensured that it would remain dogma, rather than science," Singer concludes.

His insights illuminate the present with his colourful look at past events and the ebb and flow of intellectual loyalties and the risks entailed in intellectual exploration - a potent factor in Singer's own life.

Yet, as Singer notes, for all his passion for understanding humanity, David's personal judgment proved disastrous.

As the political situation for Jews worsened, as Hitler swept to power in Germany, the Oppenheims failed to take the threat seriously. Many Jews left Austria - the Oppenheims' children, Singer's parents, among them - but David and Amalie stayed until it was too late.

They were eventually transferred to Theresienstadt, a Nazi-constructed Jewish ghetto near Prague, and there David died, ill and starving. Amalie survived, and after the war joined her children and grandchildren in Australia.

She had been an Orthodox Jew (David, however, was an atheist) but after her wartime experiences said, "If God allows such a good man as my husband to die, I don't have to follow his laws".

The Oppenheims' marriage was successful. Drawn together by their intellectual interests, and the surprising fact, unearthed by Singer, that they were both attracted to members of their own sex, their courtship consisted of long conversations about sexuality, and an agreement that honesty was essential.

"Let there be truth between us," David proclaimed.

Singer uses this unusual liaison to ask questions about our ideas on sexuality and homosexuality, and about the basis of a good marriage.

As he writes, he and his wife celebrate their own 30-year wedding anniversary and Singer, rigorous as always, peers closely at the sustainability of sexual attraction and the long-term marriage partnership.

"If admiration of intellect and character comes first, love can follow, and passion too," he writes.

"It doesn't work the other way around."

Intellectual training, and probably natural temperament, have made Singer appear intellectually fearless.

Many people, writing about their families, might let themselves be beguiled by what they want to be true, but he never seems to flinch from cool, analytical objectivity.

For all that, perhaps because of it, this book has real charm and warmth - a lurking, rather self-effacing passion. Singer shows us these people as they are and is so careful that we feel they have emerged from the reams of language, not only ciphers for their own time, but fully rounded human beings. We can almost hear their clothes rustle.

"In writing [this book]," Singer says, "I have felt that it is something that I can do for my grandfather, some way of mitigating, however slightly, the wrong that the Nazis did to him. Is that a defensible thought?"

I'm sure most readers will agree it is - and that in naming the dead in this way, he has discovered the best weapon to wield against the silence the Nazis tried to impose over the Jews.

* Fourth Estate, $34.99