In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [54]
He fought as a foot soldier in World War I and then attended the Technical University of Vienna, where he graduated as a chemical engineer in 1922. He tried to get a job at the university, arguing that he should be awarded a professorship based on his invention of an education “machine” (questions written on one side of a page, answers on the other, and a separate sheet to cover up the answers during study), but he ended up working as a patent inspector in an electronics factory.
In 1938 the Germans marched into Austria, and Charles was sent to Dachau and then Buchenwald. His wife, Claire, who was a German Catholic twenty years his senior, worked tirelessly to get him released. Somehow, she helped secure him a British visa, and he was released on condition that he leave the country immediately. Claire had to stay behind. When the war broke out in 1939, she went to Czernowitz to stay with Charles's family, and when the war reached there, she fled through Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Siberia. Meanwhile, Charles traveled the other way around the world, through Canada, and on Christmas Eve 1940 they were finally reunited in Shanghai. Charles had worked at a factory in England, where co-workers told him he couldn't very well go around with a name like Blitz. So his name was now Charles Bliss.
The Blisses set up a photography and moviemaking business in Shanghai's bustling Jewish community. Over twenty thousand Jews who could not get visas for anywhere else had poured into Shanghai in the early years of the war, and they brought their European way of life with them—filling the streets with cafés, concert halls, and Yiddish newspapers. But Charles, as he puts it, “went ‘oriental’” He became fascinated with “those queer and mysterious Chinese characters” when he saw them “at night in thousands of multi-coloured neon tubes filling the sky and making it a beautiful sight out of a fairy tale.”
He hired a teacher and learned some characters, and he noticed, with astonishment, that when he recognized the characters on a shop sign or a newspaper headline, he read them off in his own language, not in Chinese. “Later on,” he says, “the familiar words of my language disappeared and I could visualize directly the real things depicted by the signs.” He thought he had discovered a potential universal language, a direct line to concepts. But the Chinese system was too complicated and arbitrary. Most of the symbols didn't look anything like the things they were sup-posed to represent, so it was too hard to learn. After a year of study, he gave up trying, and he started working on a new invention—a better, simpler system of pictorial symbols, “a logical writing for an illogical world.”
Such a language, he thought, would not just enable people of different nations to communicate easily with each other, but it would also free their minds from the awful power of words. Bliss had seen how Hitler's slogans made people believe that lies were true. Propaganda—mere words—had instigated terrible acts. Such misuse of language would be impossible, he thought, in a “logical” system of symbols that represented the natural truth. One could not get away with malicious manipulation of words in such a system, because inconsistencies and falsehoods would be instantly exposed. Here was an invention, Bliss thought, that would benefit humanity more than any invention before it.
At the end of the war Charles and Claire immigrated to Australia, where they settled in the suburbs of Sydney. They were full of excitement about their future. “We felt that the scholars of the Western world would receive me and my work with open arms. We were sure that the University of Sydney would offer me a place to work out the primers and textbooks for this wonderful idea.” But no one was interested.
Charles decided to work on his own, living off their savings, and write a book that would prove the value