Polymath devoted to an ideal of literacy as private reading and to exploring the relationship between the Holocaust and civilisation

George Steiner, who has died aged 90, was a polymathic European intellectual of particular severity. In an academic career that took him from the University of Chicago to Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, Cambridge and Geneva, Steiner held forth on tragedy, reading, the decline of literacy, the possibilities of translation, science and chess. He crossed swords with Noam Chomsky on linguistics and wrote the Fontana Modern Masters volume on the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

For half a century, Steiner was a commanding reviewer and a subtle and enthralling lecturer. His books established fields, set agendas, and upheld the highest standards. There has been nobody quite like him in contemporary British intellectual life.

He was feted and laden with honours from learned societies, research institutes and distinguished universities. Few academics of his generation received so many professions of respect. Yet, Steiner was far from satisfied. He felt that Cambridge University had behaved abominably in not appointing him to a lectureship. Those who remained silent about his ideas, or wrote mocking reviews of his books, were, he thought, all too likely to appropriate his central themes without acknowledgment.

The universities that fell over themselves to honour him had, with few exceptions, he claimed, been complicit in the erosion of literacy and the betrayal of standards demanded by mass society. As the level of civilised literacy declined, he found aficionados of “theory” (a term he held in special contempt) in so-called elite institutions, and sardonically noted that there were more opportunities to study popular culture in such institutions than to read Dante.

Steiner felt the democratisation of high culture had produced a collapse in genuine literacy. He passionately believed in the need to “read well”, to “engage the immediacy of felt presence in a text at every level of encounter”. He was bleakly uneasy about art that was raucous, disposable and that existed as performance. The humanistic elite alone had responsibility for the continuity of culture: “Ninety-nine per cent of humanity,” he argued, “contributes nothing to the sum of insight, of beauty, of moral trial in our civil condition.”

Everything he saw around him in the 60s left him agitated and enraged. His doubts over the American role in Vietnam were publicly expressed, but his misgivings about American civilisation went even deeper. In 1981, in an essay titled The Archives of Eden, which was intensely resented in the US, Steiner passed magisterial judgment upon an entire culture. He argued that American music was “of an essentially provincial character” and that American philosophy was “thin stuff”. The greatest American achievements in thought and culture were, he asserted, largely the product of European artists and intellectuals.

Steiner’s parents, Frederick and Elsie (nee Franzos), were secular Jews who lived in a cultured Viennese milieu of reading and music. His father, an investment banker, reached a high position in the Austrian Central Bank, but the shrunken horizons of post-Versailles Austria prompted a move. Although nominally Zionists, the Steiners had no wish to settle in Palestine, and in 1924 the family went to Paris, where George was born.

Their lives there were cosmopolitan, secular and multilingual. English, French and German were readily spoken at home. “My mother, so Viennese,” recalled Steiner, “habitually began a sentence in one language and ended it in another.” In his autobiography, Errata: An Examined Life (1997), Steiner recalled the “perpetual joy” at being raised in a polyglot home.

With “grim clairvoyance”, Frederick foresaw the fate of the Jews as the threat of Hitler’s regime loured over Europe. A quiet tip from a German banking friend impelled him to get the family out of Europe. They went to New York in 1940, settling in Manhattan, and George was enrolled in a French lycée, becoming a naturalised citizen in 1944.

He was able to complete the requirements for a BA at the University of Chicago at age of 19. There were quotas on Jews at the Ivy League universities in the 1940s, but none at the University of Chicago, and its well-founded reputation for highbrow intellectuality attracted a brilliant cohort of assimilated Jews. The careers of Saul Bellow, Allan Bloom, Philip Roth and Susan Sontag were shaped by that unique educational environment. It was at Chicago that Steiner first encountered the work of Heidegger. “I can still feel a hammering excitement that no other university has ever stirred in me,” he wrote in 1989.

He took a master’s degree at Harvard in 1950, and won a Rhodes scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he contributed to Oxford poetry magazines, won the chancellor’s English essay prize, and was interviewed by Sylvia Plath for an article in Mademoiselle magazine. He worked at the Economist for four happy years from 1952 and then was invited to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He spent 1958-59 on a Fulbright professorship teaching at Innsbruck, returning to Princeton in 1959 as the Gauss lecturer. His first book, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism, appeared in 1959.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest George Steiner lecturing at Oxford in 1994. Photograph: Tom Pilston/the Independent/Rex

Two years later he was appointed a founding fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, and The Death of Tragedy, a wide-ranging and erudite study of the classic texts, was published. Among its most enthusiastic reviewers was CP Snow, who became a friend and a valued guide to the Cambridge labyrinth in the early 1960s.

Steiner’s unsuccessful 1969 interview for a university lectureship was decided, he felt, when Muriel Bradbrook asked whether he had actually written that “to shoot a man because you disagree with him about Hegel’s dialectic is after all to honour the human spirit”. Steiner agreed that he had written that sentence. A feeling of being misunderstood and ill-appreciated at Cambridge contributed to his frosty relationship with the faculty. The suspicion at Cambridge was that, for all his polymathic intellectual achievements, Steiner was something of a fraud.

Nothing revealed the disagreeable inner life of “Cambridge English” more clearly than the attitude so often expressed, more in private than in public, towards Steiner. He found people in other disciplines, and not his ostensible colleagues in the English faculty, more congenial company during these years. After the debacle of his lectureship rejection he was elected to an extraordinary fellowship at Churchill College.

By then Steiner had established himself as a fluent and prolific essayist, publishing Language and Silence in 1967. In Bluebeard’s Castle, originally delivered as lectures at the University of Kent, followed in 1971. Extraterritorial (1972) suggested how strongly Steiner was drawn to technical work in linguistics, science and philosophy. The great extraterritorial writers, “driven from language to language by social upheaval and war”, were uniquely spokesmen of the age.

Steiner collected what he called his “working papers” of the 1970s in On Difficulty (1978), in which he explored two prophetic themes: the decline of privacy, and with it the emergence of new and threatening expectations of public exposure and utterance, and the changing status of the act of reading. That there was a decline in the “habits of solitary, exclusive reading” he felt was unmistakable, and perhaps inevitable. “What we must try to see to,” he wrote, “is that those who want to learn to read fully can do so and that they be allowed the critical space and freedom from competing noise in which to practice their passion.”

Penguin Books published George Steiner: A Reader in 1984, but it was No Passion Spent (1996), a collection of his essays of the two previous decades, that more comprehensively represented the range of his interests.

In the 1970s Steiner’s BBC radio talks and his book reviews in the Sunday Times and the TLS did much to make British intellectual life less provincial. He helped introduce the work of Jean Starobinski, Paul Ricoeur, Ernst Bloch, Theodor W Adorno, Thomas Bernhard (whom he regarded as the most important postwar German novelist), Paul Celan and Walter Benjamin to the Anglo-American world. He contributed more than 130 substantial reviews to The New Yorker between 1967 and 1997; George Steiner at the New Yorker (2009) collected perhaps a third of these pieces.

Steiner held a Guggenheim fellowship in 1971, and was appointed in 1972 to a chair in comparative literature at Geneva University where, while deconstruction and the influence of Jacques Derrida spread like a rash across the European and American academy, Steiner conducted a fabled doctoral seminar on comparative literature and poetics.

He turned increasingly to the study of translation, and to the enduring legacy of classical myths in western culture. After Babel (1973), an exploration of the nature and possibilities of translation, contained examples of Steiner’s bravura skills at what in Cambridge was called “practical criticism” (the close verbal analysis of passages of verse). Hostile to “theories of translation”, Steiner anticipated the remarkable flowering of translation into English that Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott and others brought about. From Steiner’s seminal book came dozens of academic centres for translation, not least that led by WG Sebald at the University of East Anglia.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest George Steiner discussing the power of music

Steiner, who had childhood memories of hearing Hitler’s speeches on the radio, had earlier noted in his Kent lectures that “much of my work has concerned itself, directly or indirectly, with trying to understand, to articulate, causal and teleological aspects of the Holocaust”. Writing before the proliferation of work in this field, he pondered the consequences for literature, and for language, of events that seemed to bring to full meaning something implicit in the German language and in European civilisation.

In his fiction, especially The Portage to San Cristobal of AH (1979), Steiner daringly gave AH – Hitler – arguments about Jewish responsibility for the Holocaust. Steiner refused permission for the novel to be translated into German or Hebrew. The powerful arguments of “AH” are unanswered in Steiner’s book.

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Adapted for the stage by Christopher Hampton in 1982 and performed in London as a play starring Alec McCowen, the production was engulfed in protests, pickets and bitter denunciations. In the theatre, McCowen’s final speech was greeted with thunderous applause. “No, no, no, no no,” Steiner insisted: not applause for Hitler, but for McCowen, for the theatrical occasion. There were some in the audience who were not so sure.

He continued to write a fiction of ideas throughout his career, beginning with Anno Domini, three novellas published in 1964. Proofs and Three Parables followed in 1992 and received the PEN/Macmillan fiction prize. The Deeps of the Sea (1996) collected The Portage to San Cristobal of AH and other shorter pieces.

In A Kind of Survivor, one of the few overtly personal essays in Language and Silence, Steiner described himself as someone who, but for the accident of history, might have been one of those millions who met their end at Auschwitz. Although he was personally non-observant, Steiner theoretically remained a Zionist and argued that Jews living in safe and secular societies such as Britain or the US had a continuing need for there to be an Israel. But the question of God (no less), and the possibility of a culture without God, was a growing preoccupation. There was a “theological” turn in Steiner’s later work, including Real Presences (1989) and Grammars of Creation (2001).

A late, unexpected succès de scandale came with the publication of My Unwritten Books (2008), seven essays on projects Steiner hoped to complete, but which for one reason or another remained unwritten. One intriguing project was a study of the higher envy between thinkers and artists. He also contemplated, and then abandoned, a book on Jewishness, deciding it was made impossible by his lack of Hebrew.

The project that caught the attention of reviewers was a study of the interplay of sexuality and language. Various examples hinted at a panoply of lovers in many languages: Ch with her “sanitised, academic German”, V with her Viennese grammar of lovemaking; in Genoa, it was A-M who instructed Steiner in the litany of seduction. It is possible that this chapter, The Tongues of Eros, was simply a joke, a colossal leg-pull. Perhaps not, but admirers of his work, and there are many, might prefer to leave it as that: an elderly though vigorous man playing with semantic Don Juanism.

Steiner’s personal papers were donated in 2000 to Churchill College, Cambridge.

In 1955 he married Zara Shakow, who became a distinguished political historian. She survives him, as do their children, David and Deborah, and two grandchildren.

• Francis George Steiner, writer and critic, born 23 April 1929; died 3 February 2020

• This article was amended on 9 February 2020. The Portage to San Cristobal of AH was a play, and not a one-man show.