H. G. Adler, The Wall: A Novel, Trans. by Peter Filkins. Random House, 2014.
Compared by critics to Kafka, Joyce, and Musil, H. G. Adler is becoming recognized as one of the towering figures of twentieth-century fiction. Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti wrote that “Adler has restored hope to modern literature,” and the first two novels rediscovered after his death, Panorama and The Journey, were acclaimed as “modernist masterpieces” by The New Yorker. Now his magnum opus, The Wall, the final installment of Adler’s Shoah trilogy and his crowning achievement as a novelist, is available for the first time in English.
Drawing upon Adler’s own experiences in the Holocaust and his postwar life, The Wall, like the other works in the trilogy, nonetheless avoids detailed historical specifics. The novel tells the story of Arthur Landau, survivor of a wartime atrocity, a man struggling with his nightmares and his memories of the past as he strives to forge a new life for himself. Haunted by the death of his wife, Franziska, he returns to the city of his youth and receives confirmation of his parents’ fates, then crosses the border and leaves his homeland for good.
Embarking on a life of exile, he continues searching for his place within the world. He attempts to publish his study of the victims of the war, yet he is treated with curiosity, competitiveness, and contempt by fellow intellectuals who escaped the conflict unscathed. Afflicted with survivor’s guilt, Arthur tries to leave behind the horrors of the past and find a foothold in the present. Ultimately, it is the love of his second wife, Johanna, and his two children that allows him to reaffirm his humanity while remembering all he’s left behind.
The Wall is a magnificent epic of survival and redemption, powerfully told through stream of consciousness and suffused with daydream, fantasy, memory, nightmare, and pure imagination. More than a portrait of a Holocaust survivor’s journey, it is a universal novel about recovering from the traumas of the past and finding a way to live again.
“The Journey and Panorama... are modernist masterpieces worthy of comparison to those of Kafka or Musil.”—The New Yorker
This is Adler’s third (posthumous) and final work in the Shoah trilogy (after The Journey and Panorama), one of the very few works of Holocaust fiction written by a survivor. The author, once a prisoner at Theresienstadt and three other concentration camps, crafted this modernist homage to his despair over the course of many years; it was first published in 1989. His protagonist, Arthur—most certainly Adler himself—is an exile in the “Metropolis,” a thinly disguised London. He lives a bemused existence with his second wife, Joanna, and their two children, going through the motions of being a father, and indeed of being human. He has suffered something so dreadful that it is almost impossible to articulate, but it seems that his first wife perished in the war, as did his parents. In his dreams, which reflect in an absurdist way the real horror he faced, he returns to his father’s haberdashery in Prague; sometimes his parents are still alive and sometimes they die before his very eyes. Neighbors recognize and pity Arthur, knowing more than he about the fate of his family. He reminisces or dreams about being taken in by friends he does not recollect, of interacting with scholarly colleagues in London, and of meeting his beloved Joanna, on whom he relies utterly as his only link to the world in which he now finds himself adrift. He also imagines witnessing his own death. The symbolic wall of the title is purported to be the past, but it is much more: an existential barrier made of pain that separates him from the rest of humanity. The past and the present are indistinguishable in the stream of Adler’s consciousness, but this distracts very little from the story. The writing is sonorous and so entirely devastating that the reader is compelled to pore over every word. One cannot begin to share this author’s anguish, but can participate in not allowing it to be forgotten.- Publishers Weekly
Pensive portrait of a man struggling to find a place in the
world after enduring transformative calamity.
“To write poetry after Auschwitz,” wrote the German literary critic Theodore Adorno, “is barbaric.” But what of those who lived through Auschwitz? Just to live, to say nothing of writing, is problematic. So thinks the protagonist of survivor Adler’s novel, the last in a trilogy, the preceding two volumes of which were published out of order a half-century ago. There is the sheer guilt of being alive when so many died, and then there are the memories, the past that “hisses in my ears, causes horrible and sometimes also multiple sensations, pressing into me, lifting me, holding ready a thousand horrors….” Arthur Landau has lived. At the beginning of the 1960s, he's living in London, beginning to trust his neighbors a little, even though he and his family are the definitive strangers: “[T]he few people who know something about us are no less than an hour away.” The welcome trade-off, Landau says, is that no one bothers him, though the thought is always with him that he could just as easily disappear from the street with no one noticing or caring, as before. Landau’s world is one of memories that sometimes become very real—if only in his mind, though it’s not always easy for him or for readers to distinguish the real from the imagined, as with his Dostoyevski-an encounter with an “Assessor of Sympathies.” Landau’s disconnection is more affecting, and more open to the reader’s sympathy, than that of the protagonist of Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé, which has a similarly strident quality; Adler’s novel has a Kafkaesque dimension as well, save that Landau has at least the saving grace of an understanding wife who does what she can to make him feel safe, or at least safer, in the world: “She was happy to see,” Landau tells us, “that I had achieved a partial and tolerable sense of resignation.”
An eloquent record of suffering—and perhaps of redemption as well. - Kirkus Reviews
“To write poetry after Auschwitz,” wrote the German literary critic Theodore Adorno, “is barbaric.” But what of those who lived through Auschwitz? Just to live, to say nothing of writing, is problematic. So thinks the protagonist of survivor Adler’s novel, the last in a trilogy, the preceding two volumes of which were published out of order a half-century ago. There is the sheer guilt of being alive when so many died, and then there are the memories, the past that “hisses in my ears, causes horrible and sometimes also multiple sensations, pressing into me, lifting me, holding ready a thousand horrors….” Arthur Landau has lived. At the beginning of the 1960s, he's living in London, beginning to trust his neighbors a little, even though he and his family are the definitive strangers: “[T]he few people who know something about us are no less than an hour away.” The welcome trade-off, Landau says, is that no one bothers him, though the thought is always with him that he could just as easily disappear from the street with no one noticing or caring, as before. Landau’s world is one of memories that sometimes become very real—if only in his mind, though it’s not always easy for him or for readers to distinguish the real from the imagined, as with his Dostoyevski-an encounter with an “Assessor of Sympathies.” Landau’s disconnection is more affecting, and more open to the reader’s sympathy, than that of the protagonist of Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé, which has a similarly strident quality; Adler’s novel has a Kafkaesque dimension as well, save that Landau has at least the saving grace of an understanding wife who does what she can to make him feel safe, or at least safer, in the world: “She was happy to see,” Landau tells us, “that I had achieved a partial and tolerable sense of resignation.”
An eloquent record of suffering—and perhaps of redemption as well. - Kirkus Reviews
H.G. Adler’s The Wall is subtitled A Novel, but this is a novel like few others. It has been compared to Joyce’s Ulysses and indeed is written as a stream of consciousness. There are no chapter breaks, despite its length, and no breaks to indicate shifts of time and place, which are frequent and sudden. There are paragraphs (the book is not that Modernist) but they can be extremely long and contain sentences that run for over 100 words. Unlike Ulysses it is not constrained by time and place but ranges over two decades and two countries in no chronological, geographical or other order. The “story” begins with the narrator looking out of the window of his study and ends in the same way, presumably on the same day. In between we have a flight of memory, which slides between remembered incidents as one memory sparks another and occasionally slips into fantasy. In that sense the story is true to life, for that is how memory works before we cut and edit it, but it is hard work for the reader.
To make things easier, the translator, Peter Filkins (the book was originally published in German in Austria in 1989, the year after the author’s death, and is the concluding volume of a trilogy) has added a lengthy introduction at the beginning and a list of characters and a “Summary of Events” at the end, cross-referenced in detail to the pages in the book. In the introduction, Filkins explains that the work is not autobiographical, although written in the first person, since the narrator has a different name to the author, his wife has a different name, and they have a different number of children. However it is clearly a thinly fictionalised autobiography, and Filkins admits that the anonymous locations in which most of the book is set are Prague and London, where Adler lived.
The book is classified on the flyleaf as “Holocaust – survivors fiction”. I have not read the earlier volumes of the trilogy, which presumably cover the narrator’s experiences during the war. The Wall deals with the 10 to 15 years after his release from an unnamed camp, presumably Auschwitz, and his struggle to adapt to post-war life. Other reviewers have called this a study in survivor guilt, but if so the narrator’s guilt is deeply buried. His chief emotion is bitterness against his friends and neighbours who avoided deportation, either by escaping to the west before the war or evading it during the Nazi occupation. He feels that they do not understand what he suffered and that their offers of friendship and help are hypocritical. It is clear to the reader that it is they who have the guilt feelings; they feel they ought to help, but they find him a nuisance and are exasperated by his apparent reluctance to help himself. The reader himself has guilt feelings; he feels he should struggle through to the end because the author has suffered so unjustly, but it is not easy.
The narrator is not a sympathetic character, nor does he pretend to be. The closest parallel I know to this book is A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Secker 2014). It is written in the same style, and is similarly autobiographical and candid. I belonged to a book group which read this and they all hated it because they did not like the narrator. I think many people will dislike The Wall, but enough will admire it to make it sell like Knausgaard’s work.
Since this a novel unlike most others, the best way to read it is not to approach it like other novels. There is no narrative thread, so dive in anywhere and, as they say, enjoy! Use the Summary of Events as a guide. Some of the pieces are wonderfully entertaining, such as the encounters with embarrassed friends trying to escape the narrator without being offensive or lyrical episodes in the Sudeten mountains or grim life in austerity Britain in the winter of 1947. Do not be worried if it does not make sense. Accept the fantasies as well as the realism, enjoy them equally, and do not feel you have to press on to the end, for there is no denouement.
Finally, is there a message? The Wall is not about survivor guilt or post-traumatic stress, it is about alienation. It is about a man who is snatched from the world and when he returns it has all changed. Everything and everyone he knew has gone and he has no place in the new order that does not value his skills or experience. It is similar to the “novels of return” of the 1920s, about soldiers coming back from the Front. And what is the answer? Adler’s hero is lucky enough to find the love of a good and very patient woman. - Edward James
I’ve just remembered that tomorrow the translation of H. G. Adler’s final installment
of
the Shoa trilogy is scheduled for publication, a
stream-of-consciousness novel about a Holocaust survivor haunted
by nightmares and having troubles to readjust to normal life after the
atrocities of World War II. I first learnt about the book on Thomas
McGonigle’s blog. This
promises to be a challenging and harrowing book, judging by the early
reviews. Random House in their synopsis draw the inevitable comparisons
to the usual suspects when we talk about literary modernism: Joyce
Kafka, and Musil. Out of the three early reactions to the book (by Kirkus Reviews, by Publishers Weekly and by Historical Novel Society)
the last one is the longest and the most detailed so far. To my mind,
the key sentence from that review, which is bound to intrigue any
adventurous reader, is the following: “Since this is a novel unlike most
others, the best way to read it is not to approach it like other
novels.” We also learn that the translator Peter Filkins has generously
added a list of characters and a summary of events for the reader not to
be completely lost in this apparently disorienting narrative without
chapter breaks. A German language reader will be surprised to find out
that the German edition (the original title is Die Unsichtbare Wandt) is actually out of print
.
Can’t help remembering that old Biblical saying about the prophet
in his own home town. I expect to see more detailed reviews coming up in
the next few weeks, but based on what little has been said on the novel
in the English language information space so far, the publication of The Wall is certainly going to be an important literary event for all of us.- theuntranslated.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/h-g-adlers-the-wall-will-you-climb-it/ONE Of late I have been reading an advance copy of THE WALL by H. G. Adler.
TWO I had looked into the two previous books by Adler that had been translated: THE JOURNEY and PANORAMA. However the what-ever-it-is that gets a person to actually read a book was not there. THE WALL has been different.
THREE There is no way to read THE WALL quickly and that of course is what is always demanded and while I asked to review the book for the Los Angeles Times--- where I had reviewed over a hundred books over the years--- I have not heard from the editor.
FOUR THE WALL is to be published by Random House in December, an appropriately dead and proper time for a book that as I am reading makes me think of books I have had the privilege of reading and reviewing: THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES by Roberto Bolano, THE EMIGRANTS by W. G. Sebald, EXTINCTION by Thomas Bernhard, A BOOK OF MEMORIES by Peter Nadas, and FIASCO by Imre Kertesz.
FIVE I was prepared to read these books by having read among what are now classic authors and thinkers: Max Stirner, James Thomson BV, Julian Green, Ivan Turgenev, Ernst Junger, E.M. Cioran, Louis Ferdinand Celine, Robert Pinget, Jack Kerouac, Nina Berberova... all such lists are just that: lists.
SIX Here is a passage from THE WALL.
The wall before me has never disappeared; I have known it for many years, not knowing when it first sprang up, though I didn't always see it. Only when I peer forward intently and want to believe that I exist do I see it. Otherwise it does not appear to exist; for hours, often for days, even many weeks on end, I do not notice it...
SEVEN THE STORY: Arthur is happily married with two children and living in what seems to be London. He has survived both the Nazi attempt to murder him and the Communist aftermath...
EIGHT As far as I can tell, as a reader of THE WALL, I live only in the time of the passage of the pages... those mythical places: past, present and future are always present on every page but sometimes there is a hint of something that might be called a back and forth momentarily in time...
NINE 672 pages.
TEN A last quote in which Arthur talks of his wife, the who she is to him:
It's unimaginable to me what would remain of Arthur Landau without Joanna, because I have ceased to exist, called it quits, am completely spent, the vestige of a memory of who I no longer am, maybe even a message from nowhere, someone who can never find his footing, never land in one place. Other people are just as dubious...
ELEVEN I have not mentioned the names of the camps that Adler endured as I was wondering if we have gotten to a point where we can read say the books of Adler, of Imre Kertesz, of Abram Tertz, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn without mentioning this experience?
TWELVE I probably should have been talking about Hermann Broch and Elias Canetti and Hermann Langbein but I have already indicted and convicted myself with the previously mentioned books and authors. - abcofreading.blogspot.com/
H. G. Adler, Panorama, Trans. by Peter Filkins. Random House, 2011.
Excerpt: ‘Panorama’
Only recently available for the first time in English, Panorama is the newly rediscovered first novel of H. G. Adler, a modernist master whose work has been compared to that of Kafka, Joyce, and Solzhenitsyn. A brilliant epic told in ten distinct vignettes, Panorama is a portrait of a place and people soon to be destroyed, as seen through the eyes of the young Josef Kramer. It moves from the pastoral World War I–era Bohemia of Josef’s youth, to a German boarding school full of creeping prejudice, through an infamous extermination camp, and finally to Josef’s self-imposed exile abroad, achieving veracity and power through a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of our greatest modern masters. The author of six novels as well as the monumental account of his experiences in a Nazi labor camp, Theresienstadt 1941–1945, H. G. Adler is an essential author with unique historical importance. Panorama is lasting evidence of both the torment of his life and the triumph of his gifts.
“Haunting . . . as remarkable for its literary experimentation as for its historical testimony.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Panorama
should have been the brilliant debut of a major German writer. . . .
Under any circumstances, let alone such harsh ones, [Adler’s]
accomplishments would be remarkable.”—The New York Times Book Review
“[A] stirring novel . . . expertly and elegantly translated by Peter Filkins.”—Los Angeles Times
The first English-language translation of an opus by Adler (The
Journey), Czech writer and Holocaust survivor, opens with the young
Josef Kramer, at a "panorama," a rotating display of pictures of exotic
places. The novel's structure imitates that of the panorama, each a
snapshot of an epoch in Josef's life, from a neurotic childhood to a
year in the countryside, then a period in a hellish boarding school. The
most biting and amusing sections are Josef as a tutor in a wealthy and
dysfunctional family and working at a frenetic "cultural center." Each
episode ends with Josef drifting to sleep, trying to create internal
order from chaos. War comes and two sections deal with Josef as a forced
laborer and his time in concentration camps and his reflecting on his
life from self-imposed exile in Britain. Adler's writing is
stream-of-consciousness, heavily philosophical, and the style changes as
Josef matures. Adler's portrayal of daily life and a young man's
existential maturation in the region of Bohemia between the wars is full
of satirical and loving detail that turns grim in the Holocaust
sections. But the long, clause-heavy sentences feel clunky in
translation and make this book more fascinating as a treasure of
cultural and literary history than as a purely narrative read. - Publishers Weekly
A Czech Jew who wrote largely in German and survived both
Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, Adler is the author of a number of
contemplative and variously challenging works of Holocaust witness,
including The Journey (1962), which was recently translated into English
for the first time. With this novel saturated with autobiography (the
author’s phrase), Adler chronicles various moments in the life of
protagonist Josef: unhappy childhood in Prague, brutish boarding school,
teenage adventures in the bucolic Czech forest, political and
bureaucratic frustrations as a young academic, and, finally, hardship
and bleakness in a concentration camp. It is written in a captivating
stream-of-consciousness style that wanders yet comes to circle certain
salient observations, and readers may note stylistic and philosophical
continuities between this and the work of W. G. Sebald, who claimed
Adler as a major influence. But, in part, the beauty of this work is
that it can’t be easily categorized: it’s not quite a bildungsroman;
it’s delightfully if erratically satirical; it’s hauntingly bleak yet
possesses echoes of the transcendent. This is an important book by an
author who deserves not to be forgotten. --Brendan Driscoll
Every so often, a book shocks you into realizing just how much effort
and sheer luck was required to get it into your hands. “Panorama” was
the first novel written by H. G. Adler, a German-speaking Jewish
intellectual from Prague who survived a labor camp in Bohemia,
Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and a particularly hellish underground
slave-labor camp called Langenstein, near Buchenwald. Adler wrote the
first draft in less than two weeks in 1948, three years after he had
walked back to Prague from Langenstein and a few weeks after he had fled
Prague just before the Communist coup. He wound up in England, but
couldn’t find anyone willing to publish the book until 1968, 20 years
and two drafts later. The book is coming out in English for the first
time only now.
It’s hard to fathom why we had to wait so long. Adler, who died in
London in 1988, was a gifted novelist as well as an important scholar.
Under any circumstances, let alone such harsh ones, his accomplishments
would be remarkable. In the 1940s and ’50s, he helped invent the
academic discipline of Holocaust studies, despite never managing to
secure an academic post. His anatomy of Theresienstadt, a way station on
the route to Auschwitz that the Nazis passed off as a sort of spa for
prominent Jews, was based on notes he took and hid while imprisoned
there, which he supplemented after the war with interviews and archival
research. The book remains the definitive account of that eerie
“showcase” camp, and propelled him to some slight posthumous fame when
W. G. Sebald quoted it at length in his novel “Austerlitz.”
Along with his scholarly studies, Adler also wrote fiction: five novels whose aesthetic sophistication and experimental form may have struck his contemporaries as troubling, given the raw nature of the events he was dealing with. (Making art about the Holocaust has been seen as vaguely unseemly ever since T. W. Adorno insisted that “After Auschwitz, it is barbaric to write poetry.”) In any case, Adler’s novels received little recognition among readers of German, possibly because they were so highly wrought, possibly because his reputation as a scholar kept people from taking his other writing seriously. And he is almost entirely unknown in the English-speaking world. Only three of his books have been translated: a historical work, “Jews in Germany”; a novel called “The Journey”; and now, “Panorama.” That American and British readers have had such limited access to Adler’s writing and thought for so long is, as the eminent scholar of modern German literature Peter Demetz has written, “one of the great intellectual scandals of our time.”
Of the two novels available in English, “The Journey” seems to me the greater work, an ambitious exercise in the collective stream-of-consciousness that tries to eavesdrop on the babble of an entire little world. Adler called it a ballad. I think of it as a symphony. Set in Theresienstadt and serving as a kind of companion piece to his sociological study of the camp, “The Journey” inhabits the inner experience of participants at every level of that grotesque experiment, from victim to bystander to Nazi. In addition to painting a group portrait of people in states of extreme confusion, despair, denial or madness, the novel’s round-robin of monologue and dialogue captures with almost scientific precision the social and psychological consequences of an almost unimaginable process: a giant bureaucratic apparatus recategorizing a large group of citizens as waste matter and proceeding to dispose of them as quickly as possible.
And yet, as haunting and, yes, beautiful as “The Journey” is, it can be difficult to get through in English. As best as I can tell from Peter Filkins’s deceptively mellifluous translation, Adler often relied on differences in dialect and vocabulary, in speech patterns, rather than on conventional exposition to indicate who was talking or whose thoughts were flowing at any given moment. While it may be possible for a German reader to keep track of Adler’s shifts in tone, they can’t be readily detected in translation.
“Panorama,” also translated by Filkins, is more straightforward and accessible, which is not to say that it lacks art. The title refers to the wooden cabinets of wonders that once traveled from city to city, offering scenes from the past or remote locales, “lit by a brilliant golden light, as if dipped in tropical sunlight.” The novel, a thinly disguised autobiographical bildungsroman, opens with a very young Josef Kramer being taken to such a panorama by his grandmother. “Here is another world, which one can only gaze at, there being no other way to enter but to gaze,” he thinks a little sadly. “All the people and the distant lands that you encounter in these pictures remain untouchable behind the glass walls.” The rest of the novel will unfold, panoramalike, in discrete scenes from key moments in Josef’s life. By the end of the book, after he has passed through the death camps and into exile, we have become aware that these scenes, or at least the memories they’re based on, are the only possessions he has been able to hold on to, that the worlds contained in them have vanished, and that we too can only press our faces against the glass.
These worlds, however, do glow in “brilliant golden light” (except for the scenes in the camps, which are lit by dim, bare bulbs), and though seen and heard by Josef they are rich in meaning for us as well, packed with sights, sounds and words that we — safely on the far side of World War II — sometimes understand better than Josef does.
I don’t mean to imply that Adler employs heavy-handed foreshadowing. On the contrary, one of the feats of the novel is to remain intensely, cinematically, in the narrative present, where the pressures of daily life eclipse the machinations of history. Adler used his powers of observation and his prodigious memory to give each of these reconstructions its own texture and specificity. We feel the oppressive discipline and claustrophobic striving of Josef’s middle-class family in Prague more keenly than the World War I shortages that beset it; the satisfactions of life in the small country town where Josef spends a year going to school and herding cattle rather than the too-rapid industrialization and political instability roiling the city; the meanness of teachers and fellow students in a militaristic German boarding school instead of the specifically German chauvinism of the place.
What we almost never hear about are Jews and anti-Semitism, at least until the Germans occupy Czechoslovakia and send Josef to a labor camp. Josef himself is a thoroughly assimilated soul, a Jew only in the strictest racial sense of the term. His religious impulses push him first toward nature, encountered on blissful camping trips taken with fellow members of a German youth group called the Wanderers, then toward the world-spirit-seeking, vaguely Buddhist mysticism popular in the Czech avant-garde somewhat later.
As Adler whisks away one diorama and puts forth the next, he suppresses the ominous chords you half-expect to hear, warning of catastrophe. After all, narrative development doesn’t make much sense in a world that’s breaking down. What we get instead are motifs that appear and then reappear, mysteriously transformed. The harsh, angry authority figures of Josef’s childhood, his parents and the headmaster of his boarding school, will return in monstrous form as camp guards and Nazis who gather together the “children of the world” — that is, the inmates, who are “without a clue to what is happening to them,” which is why they must be rebuked, beaten and kept standing for hours “amid the dung or dust while awaiting the roll call.” Trains chug through many scenes, at first as the objects of Josef’s childhood love and fascination, then as tokens of his adolescent independence, then as instruments of horror when he is forced to join a labor crew at work on a railroad and finally when he is carried to Auschwitz in a cattle car.
Social norms and civic bonds begin dissolving when Josef is still a child, in the hardscrabble years of World War I. “Every occupation today has it hard, because no one is satisfied, and each yanks the last morsel from the mouth of the other,” the young Josef tells us, channeling the voice of his father. The war of all against all recedes to the background as Josef enters the hushed precincts of the rich to earn a living as a tutor to the sons of a venal financial executive. It re-emerges somewhat when he takes a job at a corrupt and disorganized cultural center, just before Hitler annexes the Sudetenland. By the time Josef reaches Auschwitz and Langenstein, the brutish state will be an overwhelming reality. By the last days of their internment, Adler’s fellow slave laborers have lost all semblance of humanity. They are “nasty to one another and pushing one another around, any sort of restraint having fallen away like walls from the soul.” They are “now no more than poor, frightened animals.”
Adler’s main failing as a Holocaust novelist is that he wrote too soon. Primo Levi, who also recorded his experiences shortly after the end of the war, understood that the task was to testify. In “Se Questo È un Uomo” (originally published in 1947 and titled “Survival in Auschwitz” when it appeared in English), Levi cloaked his considerable artistry in the almost neutral tone of a scientific treatise, and he tried to describe only one phenomenon: life in a death camp. As a result, we who were not there are given the emotional room required to process the reality of that which ought not to be real. In “Panorama,” by contrast, Adler used distinctly literary techniques to recreate the experience of having a civilization self-destruct while people are going about their lives and not paying attention. It’s like using impressionist brush-strokes to document a landscape made hideous by some industrial accident. In the first instance, it just comes across as wrong. We’re not interested in technique; we want to see.
Adler’s second mistake was failing to get his novels and his scholarly books published at the same time. For the irony is that he did testify, as well as any other survivor, if not better. His fiction should be understood as part of a larger project to represent the cataclysm from both the outside and the inside, using the documentary methods of history and sociology and the more subjective approach made possible by the novel.
“Panorama” has its flaws. The last scene, which takes place nominally in England but mostly inside Josef’s head, devolves into obscure philosophizing that might have been cut, or at least trimmed, had Adler’s editors thought of him as a writer likely to reach broader audiences. “Panorama” should have been the brilliant debut of a major German writer, rather than the afterthought to a scholar’s career.
Judith Shulevitz
Along with his scholarly studies, Adler also wrote fiction: five novels whose aesthetic sophistication and experimental form may have struck his contemporaries as troubling, given the raw nature of the events he was dealing with. (Making art about the Holocaust has been seen as vaguely unseemly ever since T. W. Adorno insisted that “After Auschwitz, it is barbaric to write poetry.”) In any case, Adler’s novels received little recognition among readers of German, possibly because they were so highly wrought, possibly because his reputation as a scholar kept people from taking his other writing seriously. And he is almost entirely unknown in the English-speaking world. Only three of his books have been translated: a historical work, “Jews in Germany”; a novel called “The Journey”; and now, “Panorama.” That American and British readers have had such limited access to Adler’s writing and thought for so long is, as the eminent scholar of modern German literature Peter Demetz has written, “one of the great intellectual scandals of our time.”
Of the two novels available in English, “The Journey” seems to me the greater work, an ambitious exercise in the collective stream-of-consciousness that tries to eavesdrop on the babble of an entire little world. Adler called it a ballad. I think of it as a symphony. Set in Theresienstadt and serving as a kind of companion piece to his sociological study of the camp, “The Journey” inhabits the inner experience of participants at every level of that grotesque experiment, from victim to bystander to Nazi. In addition to painting a group portrait of people in states of extreme confusion, despair, denial or madness, the novel’s round-robin of monologue and dialogue captures with almost scientific precision the social and psychological consequences of an almost unimaginable process: a giant bureaucratic apparatus recategorizing a large group of citizens as waste matter and proceeding to dispose of them as quickly as possible.
And yet, as haunting and, yes, beautiful as “The Journey” is, it can be difficult to get through in English. As best as I can tell from Peter Filkins’s deceptively mellifluous translation, Adler often relied on differences in dialect and vocabulary, in speech patterns, rather than on conventional exposition to indicate who was talking or whose thoughts were flowing at any given moment. While it may be possible for a German reader to keep track of Adler’s shifts in tone, they can’t be readily detected in translation.
“Panorama,” also translated by Filkins, is more straightforward and accessible, which is not to say that it lacks art. The title refers to the wooden cabinets of wonders that once traveled from city to city, offering scenes from the past or remote locales, “lit by a brilliant golden light, as if dipped in tropical sunlight.” The novel, a thinly disguised autobiographical bildungsroman, opens with a very young Josef Kramer being taken to such a panorama by his grandmother. “Here is another world, which one can only gaze at, there being no other way to enter but to gaze,” he thinks a little sadly. “All the people and the distant lands that you encounter in these pictures remain untouchable behind the glass walls.” The rest of the novel will unfold, panoramalike, in discrete scenes from key moments in Josef’s life. By the end of the book, after he has passed through the death camps and into exile, we have become aware that these scenes, or at least the memories they’re based on, are the only possessions he has been able to hold on to, that the worlds contained in them have vanished, and that we too can only press our faces against the glass.
These worlds, however, do glow in “brilliant golden light” (except for the scenes in the camps, which are lit by dim, bare bulbs), and though seen and heard by Josef they are rich in meaning for us as well, packed with sights, sounds and words that we — safely on the far side of World War II — sometimes understand better than Josef does.
I don’t mean to imply that Adler employs heavy-handed foreshadowing. On the contrary, one of the feats of the novel is to remain intensely, cinematically, in the narrative present, where the pressures of daily life eclipse the machinations of history. Adler used his powers of observation and his prodigious memory to give each of these reconstructions its own texture and specificity. We feel the oppressive discipline and claustrophobic striving of Josef’s middle-class family in Prague more keenly than the World War I shortages that beset it; the satisfactions of life in the small country town where Josef spends a year going to school and herding cattle rather than the too-rapid industrialization and political instability roiling the city; the meanness of teachers and fellow students in a militaristic German boarding school instead of the specifically German chauvinism of the place.
What we almost never hear about are Jews and anti-Semitism, at least until the Germans occupy Czechoslovakia and send Josef to a labor camp. Josef himself is a thoroughly assimilated soul, a Jew only in the strictest racial sense of the term. His religious impulses push him first toward nature, encountered on blissful camping trips taken with fellow members of a German youth group called the Wanderers, then toward the world-spirit-seeking, vaguely Buddhist mysticism popular in the Czech avant-garde somewhat later.
As Adler whisks away one diorama and puts forth the next, he suppresses the ominous chords you half-expect to hear, warning of catastrophe. After all, narrative development doesn’t make much sense in a world that’s breaking down. What we get instead are motifs that appear and then reappear, mysteriously transformed. The harsh, angry authority figures of Josef’s childhood, his parents and the headmaster of his boarding school, will return in monstrous form as camp guards and Nazis who gather together the “children of the world” — that is, the inmates, who are “without a clue to what is happening to them,” which is why they must be rebuked, beaten and kept standing for hours “amid the dung or dust while awaiting the roll call.” Trains chug through many scenes, at first as the objects of Josef’s childhood love and fascination, then as tokens of his adolescent independence, then as instruments of horror when he is forced to join a labor crew at work on a railroad and finally when he is carried to Auschwitz in a cattle car.
Social norms and civic bonds begin dissolving when Josef is still a child, in the hardscrabble years of World War I. “Every occupation today has it hard, because no one is satisfied, and each yanks the last morsel from the mouth of the other,” the young Josef tells us, channeling the voice of his father. The war of all against all recedes to the background as Josef enters the hushed precincts of the rich to earn a living as a tutor to the sons of a venal financial executive. It re-emerges somewhat when he takes a job at a corrupt and disorganized cultural center, just before Hitler annexes the Sudetenland. By the time Josef reaches Auschwitz and Langenstein, the brutish state will be an overwhelming reality. By the last days of their internment, Adler’s fellow slave laborers have lost all semblance of humanity. They are “nasty to one another and pushing one another around, any sort of restraint having fallen away like walls from the soul.” They are “now no more than poor, frightened animals.”
Adler’s main failing as a Holocaust novelist is that he wrote too soon. Primo Levi, who also recorded his experiences shortly after the end of the war, understood that the task was to testify. In “Se Questo È un Uomo” (originally published in 1947 and titled “Survival in Auschwitz” when it appeared in English), Levi cloaked his considerable artistry in the almost neutral tone of a scientific treatise, and he tried to describe only one phenomenon: life in a death camp. As a result, we who were not there are given the emotional room required to process the reality of that which ought not to be real. In “Panorama,” by contrast, Adler used distinctly literary techniques to recreate the experience of having a civilization self-destruct while people are going about their lives and not paying attention. It’s like using impressionist brush-strokes to document a landscape made hideous by some industrial accident. In the first instance, it just comes across as wrong. We’re not interested in technique; we want to see.
Adler’s second mistake was failing to get his novels and his scholarly books published at the same time. For the irony is that he did testify, as well as any other survivor, if not better. His fiction should be understood as part of a larger project to represent the cataclysm from both the outside and the inside, using the documentary methods of history and sociology and the more subjective approach made possible by the novel.
“Panorama” has its flaws. The last scene, which takes place nominally in England but mostly inside Josef’s head, devolves into obscure philosophizing that might have been cut, or at least trimmed, had Adler’s editors thought of him as a writer likely to reach broader audiences. “Panorama” should have been the brilliant debut of a major German writer, rather than the afterthought to a scholar’s career.
Judith Shulevitz
The Czech
intellectual H. G. Adler is known as a Holocaust writer who, according
to Harold Bloom, “redeemed an all-but-impossible genre.” Adler’s
autobiographically saturated works of fiction have been called
“modernist masterpieces” by The New Yorker, likened to
the works of Kafka and Musil, as well as the stream of consciousness
techniques employed by Joyce and Woolf. However, unlike their works,
Adler’s Panorama is actually readable -- though it is for the most part impenetrable.
The section of Panorama that directly deals with the Holocaust is fewer than 50 pages. Rather than being a work of Holocaust fiction, Panorama
is an unfocused, sweeping vision of an entire life. It is about
humanity, but from the point of view of an individual, since “the only
thing that can be sensibly described is what we each experience alone.”
The structure verifies that Adler did not intend the book to be
pigeonholed as Holocaust or Jewish literature, as it is divided into ten
equally weighted sections of Joseph Kramer’s life, mostly spaced
apart in five year intervals. Ultimately, it is a work of art, not
history.
In recreating his world, Adler writes with long, twisting and turning sentences, jumping from one topic to the next along the chain of association, like the scattered dreams of someone writhing in their sleep. I found myself becoming mesmerized by the word flow as I sunk deeper into the dizzying march of characters and their idiosyncrasies. Adler gets into the heads of Josef’s employers and mentors, often writing several page long monologues, where we can only imagine Josef on the other end, nodding meekly. There is danger of getting lost in the ever accruing details, as the blurred edges of sharp memories siphon poignancy, producing an elusive narrative. It is hard to identify with Josef; he’s a ghost in the machine.
A “question-box” of a child, Josef relays pieces of adult conversations about World War I and post-war scarcity, voices that run around on “long, dirty spider legs.” He meticulously describes items in his mother’s kitchen, and relates a child’s confusion about being told not to keep secrets but also not to spit out everything he hears. His reality is like the panorama his grandmother takes him to see: “open and beautiful and unattainable,” where little is allowed, barriers are everywhere, and Josef, for the most part, cannot take part in it.
As an adolescent, Josef is sent away to another family in the country for having become “too anxious.” It is a time when the young writer doesn’t like to write because he holds the pencil the wrong way, with “fingers curled around.” He is then sent back to the city to The Box, a disciplined boarding school focused on good breeding and order, a place where Josef spends his time “making imaginary maps of places that don’t exist” to keep from suffocating. His classmates are brutes, and the oppressive school subtly foreshadows the concentration camp to come.
At 18, Josef appears with a fully formed identity. He’s an individualist, highly philosophical yet distrustful of the spiritualist-artists of Prague that surround him, believing that mistrust is “only means of self-protection.” An entire chapter is devoted to the first day of Josef’s first job as a tutor and philosophy student during the Depression, drowning under the presence of his pupil’s overbearing mother, a woman obsessed with Freud and psychoanalysis. At twenty-five, Josef holds a PhD and attempts to get a nominally paying job at The Cultural Center, whose director is trying to reconcile the fascists and Bolsheviks. Since “any ass can get a doctorate,” Josef is reduced to stamping tickets at the Center’s theater (where he brushes shoulders with Thomas Mann).
At 30, Josef labors to build an unnecessary railroad in a work camp. Here, over three hundred pages into the novel, the word Jew is used for the first time. Hitler is first referenced, but only as “he.” Adler masterfully recreates the atmosphere, writing that “hardly anything is known at all during this time, everything kept simmering behind a secret veil, though it must be something quite horrible.”
It is at age 35 when Josef is brought to Langenstein Camp, a place “where fear lives” and where “laws have lost their meaning.” In the camp chapter, Adler’s prose elevates to phenomenal eloquence, describing the “nadir of inhumanity” as a poet would describe the cosmos. Amidst the most disgusting event of history, with “chaos churning the people into a teeming brew,” Josef lives a pure life and relinquished, a life that “feeds on memories alone,” surviving only on hopes and dreams, after being “robbed of the justification for existence.” The panorama is now narrow and closed in. Like Adler, Josef takes copious notes throughout his incarceration, in order to eventually bear “existence to the lost ones.” The results of the notes Adler took at Buchenwald are his twenty-six books. That’s not to say we should understand Josef’s experience as Adler’s own; the scene where Adler’s wife chose to follow her mother to the gas chamber, among other personal tragic experiences, is conspicuously absent from the novel.
Five years after the war ends, the lost ones have become the forgotten ones. Josef is safely in England, where Adler lived the rest of his life, though never felt at home. This final section is dominated by rumination; Josef’s mind is plagued by memories, yet he cannot penetrate them, since “the past in the deepest sense doesn’t exist.” Images can be seen and experienced, but never reached. Josef contemplates the idea of panorama as a conception of man as observer and observed, as subject and object, the panorama as an unsuccessful attempt to dissolve the borders between people; like matter and spirit, we must remain separate from each other. After this idea the panorama becomes reversed, with Josef deciding to present himself to the world for observation, rather than the other way around. The atrocity is embraced, since “everything that happens is the price paid for living in the present.” Josef continues to ascend into philosophical reverie, only to conclude that “philosophy is often refuted by life.”
Panorama is impenetrable because it aims to capture reality, and we cannot wrap our minds around reality. In that sense, the novel is supremely successful. We can strive to understand the tragedies of life, seek to find meaning, attempt to analyze and make some sense of it, but ultimately all we can do is live through it and accept it.
Josef accepts it.- Randy Rosenthal
In recreating his world, Adler writes with long, twisting and turning sentences, jumping from one topic to the next along the chain of association, like the scattered dreams of someone writhing in their sleep. I found myself becoming mesmerized by the word flow as I sunk deeper into the dizzying march of characters and their idiosyncrasies. Adler gets into the heads of Josef’s employers and mentors, often writing several page long monologues, where we can only imagine Josef on the other end, nodding meekly. There is danger of getting lost in the ever accruing details, as the blurred edges of sharp memories siphon poignancy, producing an elusive narrative. It is hard to identify with Josef; he’s a ghost in the machine.
A “question-box” of a child, Josef relays pieces of adult conversations about World War I and post-war scarcity, voices that run around on “long, dirty spider legs.” He meticulously describes items in his mother’s kitchen, and relates a child’s confusion about being told not to keep secrets but also not to spit out everything he hears. His reality is like the panorama his grandmother takes him to see: “open and beautiful and unattainable,” where little is allowed, barriers are everywhere, and Josef, for the most part, cannot take part in it.
As an adolescent, Josef is sent away to another family in the country for having become “too anxious.” It is a time when the young writer doesn’t like to write because he holds the pencil the wrong way, with “fingers curled around.” He is then sent back to the city to The Box, a disciplined boarding school focused on good breeding and order, a place where Josef spends his time “making imaginary maps of places that don’t exist” to keep from suffocating. His classmates are brutes, and the oppressive school subtly foreshadows the concentration camp to come.
At 18, Josef appears with a fully formed identity. He’s an individualist, highly philosophical yet distrustful of the spiritualist-artists of Prague that surround him, believing that mistrust is “only means of self-protection.” An entire chapter is devoted to the first day of Josef’s first job as a tutor and philosophy student during the Depression, drowning under the presence of his pupil’s overbearing mother, a woman obsessed with Freud and psychoanalysis. At twenty-five, Josef holds a PhD and attempts to get a nominally paying job at The Cultural Center, whose director is trying to reconcile the fascists and Bolsheviks. Since “any ass can get a doctorate,” Josef is reduced to stamping tickets at the Center’s theater (where he brushes shoulders with Thomas Mann).
At 30, Josef labors to build an unnecessary railroad in a work camp. Here, over three hundred pages into the novel, the word Jew is used for the first time. Hitler is first referenced, but only as “he.” Adler masterfully recreates the atmosphere, writing that “hardly anything is known at all during this time, everything kept simmering behind a secret veil, though it must be something quite horrible.”
It is at age 35 when Josef is brought to Langenstein Camp, a place “where fear lives” and where “laws have lost their meaning.” In the camp chapter, Adler’s prose elevates to phenomenal eloquence, describing the “nadir of inhumanity” as a poet would describe the cosmos. Amidst the most disgusting event of history, with “chaos churning the people into a teeming brew,” Josef lives a pure life and relinquished, a life that “feeds on memories alone,” surviving only on hopes and dreams, after being “robbed of the justification for existence.” The panorama is now narrow and closed in. Like Adler, Josef takes copious notes throughout his incarceration, in order to eventually bear “existence to the lost ones.” The results of the notes Adler took at Buchenwald are his twenty-six books. That’s not to say we should understand Josef’s experience as Adler’s own; the scene where Adler’s wife chose to follow her mother to the gas chamber, among other personal tragic experiences, is conspicuously absent from the novel.
Five years after the war ends, the lost ones have become the forgotten ones. Josef is safely in England, where Adler lived the rest of his life, though never felt at home. This final section is dominated by rumination; Josef’s mind is plagued by memories, yet he cannot penetrate them, since “the past in the deepest sense doesn’t exist.” Images can be seen and experienced, but never reached. Josef contemplates the idea of panorama as a conception of man as observer and observed, as subject and object, the panorama as an unsuccessful attempt to dissolve the borders between people; like matter and spirit, we must remain separate from each other. After this idea the panorama becomes reversed, with Josef deciding to present himself to the world for observation, rather than the other way around. The atrocity is embraced, since “everything that happens is the price paid for living in the present.” Josef continues to ascend into philosophical reverie, only to conclude that “philosophy is often refuted by life.”
Panorama is impenetrable because it aims to capture reality, and we cannot wrap our minds around reality. In that sense, the novel is supremely successful. We can strive to understand the tragedies of life, seek to find meaning, attempt to analyze and make some sense of it, but ultimately all we can do is live through it and accept it.
Josef accepts it.- Randy Rosenthal
H. G. Adler, The Journey: A Novel. Trans. by Peter Filkins. Random House, 2011.
Here is “a rich and lyrical masterpiece”–notes Peter Constantine–the first translation of a lost treasure by acclaimed author H. G. Adler, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Written in 1950, after Adler’s emigration to England, The Journey was ignored by large publishing houses after the war and not released in Germany until 1962. Depicting the Holocaust in a unique and deeply moving way, and avoiding specific mention of country or camps–even of Nazis and Jews–The Journey is a poetic nightmare of a family’s ordeal and one member’s survival. Led by the doctor patriarch Leopold, the Lustig family finds itself “forbidden” to live, enduring in a world in which “everyone was crazy, and once they finally recognized what was happening it was too late.” Linked by its innovative style to the work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, The Journey portrays the unimaginable in a way that anyone interested in recent history and modern literature must read.
In this ambitious and challenging rediscovery, originally
published in 1962, Adler (1910–1988) relates the tragic tale of the
Lustig family—doctor Leopold; his wife, Caroline; their children,
Zerlina and Paul; and Caroline's sister, Ida—who are sent to the walled
city of Ruhenthal after authorities label them forbidden. Taking place
during an unspecified period of war and genocide, the story is based on
Adler's experiences at Theresienstadt, a labor camp where he was
imprisoned for two and a half years during WWII. An unidentified
narrator reports the Lustigs' struggles in a stream-of-consciousness
style, diverging frequently into the lives of others, among them Johann,
a street sweeper, and Balthazar, a reporter. Attempting to reproduce
authentically the characters' nightmarish disorientation, Adler's
narrative style is aggressively abstract—constantly shifting subjects
and setting in a convoluted sense of time and sequence. It's a
difficult, admirable undertaking, for fans of experimental fiction, but
many readers will find its structure frustrating and inaccessible. - Publishers Weekly
This unusual and noteworthy novel is a fictional account by a
German-speaking Jew who survived the Holocaust. Adler (1910–88) was born
in Prague and was imprisoned in Theresienstadt (Ruhenthal) and
Auschwitz. In his wanderings after the war, he later came to consider
himself a freelancer and teacher. The story, if such a diffuse
presentation may be called that, follows the Lustig family from their
internment by the Germans until the demise of every member but one.
Adler (Theresienstadt, 1941–1945: The Face of a Slave Society)
employs a kind of montage, eschewing a straightforward narrative. Jeremy
Adler, the author's son, provides an afterword in which he explains,
"As with a ballad, the book contains the refrainlike repetition of
numerous central motifs." There is great beauty in this writing, though
general readers will find it difficult to follow. The text has been
masterfully translated by Filkins, who provides an essential
introduction. The German text of the novel is from a 1999 reissue by
Zsolnay Verlag. Strongly recommended for all Holocaust
collections.—Edward Cone
Only recently available for the first time in English, Panorama is the newly rediscovered first novel of H. G. Adler, a modernist master whose work has been compared to that of Kafka, Joyce, and Solzhenitsyn. A brilliant epic told in ten distinct vignettes, Panorama is a portrait of a place and people soon to be destroyed, as seen through the eyes of the young Josef Kramer. It moves from the pastoral World War I–era Bohemia of Josef’s youth, to a German boarding school full of creeping prejudice, through an infamous extermination camp, and finally to Josef’s self-imposed exile abroad, achieving veracity and power through a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of our greatest modern masters. The author of six novels as well as the monumental account of his experiences in a Nazi labor camp, Theresienstadt 1941–1945, H. G. Adler is an essential author with unique historical importance. Panorama is lasting evidence of both the torment of his life and the triumph of his gifts.
“The novel’s streaming consciousness and verbal play invite comparison
with Joyce, the individual-dwarfing scale of law and prohibition brings
Kafka to mind, and there is something in the hypnotic pulse of the prose
that is reminiscent of Gertrude Stein.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A tribute to the survival of art and a poignant teaching in the art of
survival . . . I tend to shy away from Holocaust fiction, but this book
helps redeem an all-but-impossible genre.”—Harold Bloom
In the spring of 1950, the philosopher and cultural critic Theodor Adorno, who was then teaching at the University of Frankfurt, received a letter from H. G. Adler, an unknown scholar living in London. Adler informed Adorno that he had reviewed the professor’s “Philosophy in Modern Music” for the BBC, and mentioned that he happened to be the author of an academic study of Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. Adorno wrote back, and a friendly correspondence sprang up between the two men, despite a fundamental conflict in their viewpoints. A year earlier, Adorno, a core member of the Frankfurt School of Marxist social theorists, had written an essay titled “Cultural Criticism and Society,” setting the terms for the debate over the literary representation of the Holocaust in a single famous dictum: “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” By contrast, Adler, a survivor of the camps, had started writing poems about them while he was still a prisoner, and went on to address his experiences during the war both in novels and in scholarly accounts. In Adorno’s ideologically driven view, no kind of sense could be drawn from the victims’ fate; to try to impose an artistic coherence upon such a monstrosity was an inherent falsification, and to write poetry in its shadow epitomized the decadence of bourgeois culture. For Adler, the attempt to assimilate the horror of the camps into art was a necessity—not only an essential aspect of his life’s work but also a means of recapturing his own humanity after the catastrophe.
Like Adorno, Adler, who was born in Prague to a German Jewish family in 1910, was a musicologist by training. In February, 1942, he was deported to Theresienstadt. After two and a half years of imprisonment there, followed by a brief period in Auschwitz and another six months in two smaller labor camps near Buchenwald, he was liberated in April, 1945. Within a year of his emigration to London, in 1947, he had completed the exhaustive “Theresienstadt 1941-1945.” More than nine hundred pages long, the book is a comprehensive study of the camp from every perspective: sociological, historical, economic, anthropological, psychological. In a letter of recommendation to American publishers, the émigré novelist Hermann Broch wrote that the book would become the standard work on the subject, and that Adler’s “cool and precise method not only grasps all the essential details but manages further to indicate the extent of the horror in an extremely vivid form.” (The book was published in Germany in 1955 and quickly became a touchstone in German Holocaust studies, but it has never been translated into English.)The Theresienstadt book was only the beginning for Adler, who produced a quantity and a diversity of writings about the Holocaust that seem to have been equalled by no other survivor. In the decade after the war ended, he wrote at least five novels, two of which Peter Filkins has recently translated into English: “The Journey,” which appeared in 2008, and now an earlier work, “Panorama” (Random House; $26). In addition, Adler produced poetry, works of history, collections of documents and testimonies, essays on a vast variety of topics, and another colossal (and still untranslated) sociological tome on the deportation of German Jews, called “The Administered Man” (1974). In an interview near the end of his life—he died in 1988—Adler recalled thinking, upon his arrival at Theresienstadt, “If I survive, then I will describe it . . . by setting down the facts of my individual experience, as well as to somehow describe it artistically.”
In his introduction to “Panorama,” Filkins writes that Adler’s “dovetailing of fact and fiction in trying to both scientifically and imaginatively encompass his experience” is “unique to almost any writer we know.” Among survivors, Primo Levi also accomplished something like it—combining precise observations of Auschwitz, in such works as “If This Is a Man” and “The Drowned and the Saved,” with more freewheeling depictions of his experiences in “The Truce” and “The Periodic Table.” But Levi’s fiction was ultimately less ambitious than Adler’s. “The Journey” and “Panorama” are very different works, each with its own distinctive style, but both are modernist masterpieces worthy of comparison to those of Kafka or Musil. Yet until recently they have been almost entirely unknown—not only in the English-speaking world but even in Germany, where Adler faced unusual difficulties in getting published. “The Journey,” written in 1950-51, did not appear until 1962. “Panorama,” Adler’s first novel, was written in 1948 and first published twenty years later.
In his introduction to “The Journey,” Filkins writes that “the times were not ready for Adler,” but even recent critics have tempered their admiration of “The Journey” with surprise: Harold Bloom commented that he tends to avoid Holocaust fiction, “but this book helps redeem an all-but-impossible genre.” Yet why should the genre be nearly impossible? People have always created art in response to adversity; the Holocaust, whatever its historical uniqueness, cannot be an exception to a universal rule. Still, the idea of a Holocaust writer who fails to confine himself to the facts of his experience has always been difficult to accept. We expect our survivors to be witnesses and chroniclers, not artists.
“Panorama”
depicts, in broad strokes, the path of Adler’s early life. The book
takes the form of ten scenes in the life of its narrator, Josef Kramer
(whose name betrays his creator’s debt to Kafka), starting with a
prologue in which the little boy is taken by his grandmother to visit a
panorama, an exhibit of moving pictures viewed through a screen: “Two
peepholes are there so that you see everything just the way it really
looks, and everything is enlarged so that it seems completely alive.”
The early scenes depict Josef’s childhood: his bourgeois upbringing in
an unnamed city that must be Prague, his torturous years at boarding
school, a summer spent camping with a youth group called the Wanderers.
(Perhaps to emphasize fiction’s universality, Adler almost never uses
identifiable names for places or people: “Panorama” refers to Hitler as
“the Conqueror,” and to concentration-camp inmates as “the lost.”) As a
young man, Josef joins a mystical-philosophical circle surrounding a
photographer guru, with whom he soon grows disillusioned; he interviews
for a job as a tutor for a wealthy family; and he works at an institute
identified as the Cultural Center, haphazardly run in Kafkaesque fashion
by a group of employees who are overwhelmed by their own bureaucracy.
Like the literal panorama in the prologue, the book’s chapters are
distinct and self-contained, but, as they scroll by, certain
commonalities become apparent. Peepholes, lenses, or scopes of different
types appear in nearly every chapter; likewise, the chapters function
as openings into a life, presenting partial pictures that are
nonetheless complete unto themselves.
By the
time Josef is thirty, the war is under way. The chapter “Building the
Railroad” shows him doing forced labor. He befriends a violinist, and
the two men sustain each other with talk of music and art. But by the
next scene we are in “Langenstein Camp,” which, it soon becomes clear,
is one of the satellites of Buchenwald to which Adler was sent. The
chapter gives a glimpse of the conditions in the camp—“no nails on the
walls, no stools, no table, no bench, nothing, nothing at all, no beds,
no straw mattresses, nothing but the bodies of the lost, clothed in rags
of many colors”—before zooming out to chronicle Josef’s journey there
via Auschwitz. And now Adler imagines what happened to the rest of the
prisoners, the ones selected for death: Stripped and hardly sheltered from the elements, the doomed are loaded into trucks, their tired feet not having to walk much farther, the conspirators striking the doomed from the rolls, order always maintained, the doomed trucked once more through the camp toward one of the temples of murder made of concrete, the doomed unloaded between the flower beds of the front garden, then pushed or dragged down some steps into the dressing room with the reassuring sign announcing THIS WAY TO THE SHOWERS. See, here you will wash up, your soul has grown dirty, you need a good scrubbing, but now you will be clean, you will sanctify yourself in order to meet your salvation. . . . Look, how this is a shrine into which you are being led, you are precious, we want to keep you secure, you shouldn’t run away, just go on in, go with the others, just as thousands and thousands have gone before you and will follow you, go, it’s so easy, just go.
This passage is remarkable for any number of reasons: its gently pulsing lyrical rhythm, its use of religious vocabulary to describe the profanest of events (“temples of murder,” “salvation”), its direct address to the reader as if he or she were among the victims (“it’s so easy, just go”). But it is remarkable also for depicting an aspect of the Jewish tragedy that is considered, both by scholars and by the general public, to be beyond the limits of representation. Even critics who admired “Schindler’s List,” to give but one example, were repelled by the movie’s shower scene, which, in an interesting coincidence, is filmed through an Adler-style peephole. The gas chamber is a place where the imagination has feared to tread. But Adler demonstrates that even this barrier can be broken with compassion and taste. His novel would be poorer without this essential scene.
The camp episode is extraordinary also in its position within the novel. Most works of fiction about the Holocaust take the events of the war as their primary focus, adopting the time line of history as the novel’s own: they begin somewhere around the start of the war and end soon after liberation. But “Panorama” takes a synoptic view in which the camps are but a single moment: its peepholes are windows not only into Josef’s life but also into the twentieth century. At the same time, the camp chapter is linked thematically to earlier scenes. The routine at the boarding school is a sinister foreshadowing of what is to come, with its brutal instructors, mottoes painted on the wall, bread that tastes like straw, and even a roll call in which the pupils are forced to stand outside every morning to have their personal hygiene and clothing inspected. (Adler later referred to the school’s real-life model as his “first concentration camp.”) The repetition of such motifs gives the camp episode a grim familiarity. Auschwitz, in Adler’s telling, is simply another episode in the life of a European Jew.
The
panorama is not comprehensive: a crucial scene is missing. That scene
is Theresienstadt, to which Adler gave fictional representation in “The
Journey,” the third of the five novels written during his postwar decade
of frenetic activity. (Two are still unpublished.) But first he wrote
“Theresienstadt 1941-1945,” his academic magnum opus and the book for
which he was best known—often to his chagrin—during his lifetime. (In an
interview in the last decade of his life, more than twenty-five years
after the book’s publication, he complained that he was still known as
“Theresienstadt-Adler.”) Adler was deported to the camp in February,
1942, with his first wife, Gertrud, and her parents. He remained there
until October, 1944, when Gertrud’s mother was assigned to a transport
for Auschwitz, and her daughter and son-in-law decided to accompany her.
(Gertrud’s father had died in Theresienstadt.) Upon arrival at
Auschwitz, Gertrud’s mother was immediately selected for the gas
chamber, and Gertrud chose to join her rather than allow her to die
alone. Adler’s imaginative distance in that passage from “Panorama”
describing the gas chamber becomes all the more remarkable with the
knowledge that he must have been envisaging his wife and mother-in-law
inside.
Adler’s son, Jeremy, a professor of
German at King’s College, London, who has written extensively on his
father’s work, remarks on the “almost unbearable objectivity” with which
Adler was able to describe his own experiences. This quality greatly
impressed Adorno, who wrote, “It lies beyond the bounds of the
imagination that a gentle and sensitive person could maintain his
self-awareness spiritually and remain capable of objective thought in
this organized Hell, the blatant purpose of which, even more than
physical destruction, was the destruction of the self.” Adler himself
writes, in his introduction to “Theresienstadt 1941-1945,” that within a
few months of his arrival in the camp it became clear to him that he
had a responsibility to analyze his situation systematically rather than
passively surrender to it. “I said to myself: You must observe life in
this society as soberly and objectively as a scientist studying an
obscure tribe. . . . Thus I lived in the camp simultaneously as both an
outside observer and a typical prisoner.” Adler modelled the book on an ethnographic study that he came upon in the camp. In addition to the materials he was able to gather while imprisoned, he had access to a trove of documentation immediately after liberation, when the Prague Jewish Museum hired him to create an archive of the war years. Ultimately, Adler had tens of thousands of documents at his disposal. Transports, housing, food supplies, work details, medical facilities—no element of life in the camp is left out. In the chapter on “Population,” he records the places of origin of the camp’s residents—mainly Bohemia and Moravia, Germany, and western Poland—as well as their physical characteristics and linguistic groups. Under “Economics,” lengthy tables list everything from the types of toiletries available to the jobs assigned to the inmates. In W. G. Sebald’s novel “Austerlitz,” the title character, for whom Adler’s book assumes a nearly cosmic significance, muses that Adler describes life in the camp “down to the last detail in its objective actuality,” and recapitulates some of the book’s more revealing observations, including the fact that the number of dead rose so sharply at one point that the joiner’s workshop could not keep up with the demand for coffins.
Jeremy Adler points out that, in Adler’s major scholarly books, the only indications of his personal connection to his material are the dedications: “Theresienstadt 1941-1945” is dedicated to Gertrud, who “for thirty-two months did all she could for her family, up to the limits of her strength,” while “The Administered Man” is dedicated to his parents, who were killed at death camps. But the works nonetheless served a highly personal purpose. In the introduction to “The Administered Man,” which extends the investigation begun in “Theresienstadt” to conditions under the Nazis more generally, Adler wrote that in order to go on living he needed to put his own camp experience in a broader historical perspective. In an interview with the journalist Alfred Joachim Fischer, he was even more explicit. Fischer asked, “Isn’t the act of writing such a book . . . a form of self-laceration, a continual re-churning up of a horror that most people would prefer to repress?” On the contrary, Adler responded: “I would not be here before you today if I had not written that book. That book constituted my self-liberation.” He later elaborated, “I felt that I couldn’t go on, that the pain of what had happened would leave within me an abyss of despair, a gaping emptiness, if I didn’t try, in this way, to overcome the monstrosity both intellectually and emotionally; and so I had no other option but to begin my research.”
But
the objective history alone was not enough to fill Adler’s emptiness;
the creative aspect of his endeavor was equally significant. Although he
had begun making notes almost as soon as he arrived in Theresienstadt,
his observations found their first expression in poetry. All in all,
Adler wrote more than a hundred and thirty camp poems—a hundred in
Theresienstadt and the rest after his journeys to and from Auschwitz.
One of the poems in a sequence titled “Theresienstadt Pictures,” of
which only selections have been published, is called “Totenfeier,” or
“Funeral Rites,” a term that Adler also uses in the dedication of the
Theresienstadt study to Gertrud. The poem, which depicts an
unsentimental burial in the camp, is nearly as documentary in spirit as
the monograph.
“Totenfeier”
is classical in style, with regular metre and rhyme. But “The Journey,”
which depicts the transport of the elderly Dr. Leopold Lustig, his
wife, and their adult children—is decidedly experimental, in a style
that one critic has called “Holocaust modernism.” The book’s initial
reception was unwelcoming. Adler wrote the novel in 1950-51, but it did
not appear until 1962—possibly because Peter Suhrkamp, then the head of
the influential German publishing house bearing his name, vowed, in an
astonishing burst of hostility toward Adler, that the book would not be
published as long as he was alive. (Suhrkamp died in 1959.) It was
eventually published by Biblioteca Christiana, an obscure house in Bonn.
As late as 1980, Adler lamented in an interview that the book was
“almost entirely unknown.”Part of the trouble, perhaps, was that Adler was unwilling to categorize “The Journey” as a novel, preferring the musical term “Ballade.” The novelist Heinrich Böll, an admirer of Adler’s, argued, in an essay printed in 1963, that Adler’s objection to calling the book a novel despite its obvious resemblance to the form had to do with its subject matter: “Adler cannot call the story he tells a novel, because that makes it sound like something imaginary, and the uncanny journey on which Doctor Leopold Lustig and his family are sent was not imagined by Adler.” Nonetheless, Adler was frustrated with critics who tried to read the book as a chronicle of his own experiences. He found it understandable, he wrote in a response to his early readers, that book reviewers chose to focus on the contents of the novel. “But the knowledge of its contents does not suffice for an understanding of this multilayered story as fiction.” Neither a novel, exactly, nor reportage: Adler was asking his readers to accept a discomfiting in-between form.
“The Journey” flickers constantly between fantasy and reality, at times telling its story in linear, chronological fashion, then suddenly switching perspective between the characters or skipping back and forth in time: one character’s death and illness are described in reverse order. As in “Panorama,” places appear in disguise, with Theresienstadt bearing the ironic name Ruhenthal—literally, “valley of rest,” which gives it the double connotation of both a spa town and a place of final repose. The “journey” of the title is the Lustig family’s deportation to the camp, but it is also a metaphor for life. There are few specifics: as in “Panorama,” the words “Jew,” “Hitler,” and “gas chamber” almost never appear. When the novel addresses Nazism, it is depicted in the guise of a “mental illness” that has spun out of control: “The sickness had crept out of nowhere without a sign. . . . It was the first epidemic of mental illness, but no one recognized it as such, neither the patients nor the doctors. No one told anyone he was sick, for as a result of the epidemic everyone was crazy, and once they finally recognized what was happening it was too late.”
In
his introduction to “The Journey,” Filkins writes that “neither Germany
nor the world was ready for novels about the Holocaust in the 1950s.”
Holocaust fiction had already started to appear in the first years
following the war, by such writers as Tadeusz Borowski and the author
who wrote under the name Ka-Tzetnik 135633 (literally, “concentration
camp inmate”). But these bluntly written works were recognized as
plainly testimonial. A literary novel was an altogether different
animal. As Adler wrote, “It is a question of different categories of
reality, and there is nothing to be gained from holding fast to the
facts in literature, facts that only a chronicle of experience or an
academic work of history or sociology can properly encompass, while in a
work of art these experiences are recast, transformed, even
incinerated—a process through which literature arises.” This
transformation was largely lost on his readers at the time. A few
friends in America, including Hermann Broch and Hannah Arendt, tried to
help Adler with the publication of his Theresienstadt book, and Arendt
cited it in “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” Yet colleagues took considerably
less interest in Adler’s fiction.
Adorno, too,
was happy to engage Adler on the aesthetics of musicology, but shied
away from a more sensitive subject of mutual interest: the question of
aesthetics after the Holocaust. And naturally so: where could the author
of the no-poetry-after-Auschwitz dictum and the poet of Theresienstadt
find common ground? The two men nonetheless maintained their friendship
for nearly a decade, until Adorno invited Adler twice to deliver
lectures in Frankfurt about Theresienstadt. The second of these lectures
was not a success. As Jeremy Adler tells it, Adler wanted to speak
about a propaganda film that the Nazis had made in the camp and its
relation to “human blindness under slavery.” Adorno proposed, instead,
the theme of “ideologies under slavery.” Adler apologized for failing to
fulfill the expectations of Adorno and his students, but later took
revenge in his posthumously published, still untranslated novel “The
Invisible Wall,” in which a “Professor Kratzenstein” spouts a parodic
jumble of Marxism and psychoanalysis. The professor, Adler writes,
“could not sufficiently emphasize that all suffering, insofar as it was
not based in human nature, derived from economic factors. Concentration
camps, for example, evolved from a specific form of exploitation, and
everything else which made them so disgusting must be explained by
sociopsychological means.” Kratzenstein here sounds suspiciously like Adorno in a chapter toward the end of his “Negative Dialectics” (1966), in which Adorno revisits his original dictum. “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems,” Adorno writes. He continues: “But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living—especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared.” It is hard to think of a more grotesque example of the limitations of ideology in understanding the Holocaust. Adorno’s perspective fails utterly to take into consideration the human dimension of the catastrophe, whereas Adler, even in his academic works, never lost sight of the human pain that underlay every aspect of his gigantic subject.
Adorno went on to address Adler more directly, in a passage that touches the root of their conflict:
A man whose admirable strength enabled him to survive Auschwitz and other camps said in an outburst against Beckett that if Beckett had been in Auschwitz he would be writing differently, more positively, with the front-line creed of the escapee. The escapee is right in a fashion other than he thinks. Beckett, and whoever else remained in control of himself, would have been broken in Auschwitz and probably forced to confess that front-line creed which the escapee clothed in the words “trying to give men courage”—as if this were up to any structure of the mind.
The “escapee” in this passage is Adler, Jeremy Adler and others have written. Adorno, while recognizing the survivor’s strength, is critical of his humanism, which he dismisses as a “front-line creed”—a cheaply gained trench religion, in other words, which serves as the last-ditch hope of a man who glimpses his nearly inevitable death. In contrast to Beckett’s nihilism, Adler’s approach—to investigate, to contextualize, even to transform—is profoundly positive. He strove to write novels that were documentary and academic works that were emotionally gripping, creating a body of work in which both the parts and the whole functioned with a common purpose: to illuminate, in as many ways as possible, the terrors of the Nazi years. Seen this way, the Holocaust is not a gash in the fabric of the universe; it is a historical event, the lessons of which we are obliged to study carefully.
Adler once recalled that before the war he had a recurring dream in which he was walking with Hitler through the streets of Prague, trying to disabuse him of his anti-Semitism. The optimism of this dream is of a piece with the optimism of Adler’s scholarly and literary project: the belief that one’s words will be received and understood, and that they might go so far as to alter the path of the world. In Sebald’s novel, Austerlitz laments, “It seems unpardonable to me today that I had blocked off the investigation of my most distant past for so many years . . . and that now it is too late for me to seek out Adler.” Thankfully, for the rest of us it is too late no longer. - Ruth Franklin
HG Adler: his life and work
“ I said to myself: ‘If I survive all this, and I very much doubt it, then I will bear witness to everything that I experience, not, however, by a personal record, but in an objective, scholarly form’” (HG Adler, 1981).
HG Adler was born into a Jewish family in Prague in 1910 and studied musicology, literature and philosophy at Charles University, gaining his doctorate there in 1935. He was prevented from pursuing an academic career by the rise of the Nazis in Germany and in 1941 was sent to work at a labour camp in Bohemia, before being deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp with his first wife, Gertrud, and her family.
Even while still in the ghetto, Adler was able to give artistic expression to his experiences; altogether, he wrote over a hundred poems in Theresienstadt, as well as systematically collecting material for his later studies. Closely involved in the cultural life of the ghetto, Adler was instrumental in saving Viktor Ullman’s Theresienstadt opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis; his own works owe their preservation to Rabbi Leo Baeck, who looked after them when Adler was finally deported to the East. After more than two years confined in the Nazis’ “model ghetto”, the Adlers were transported to Auschwitz on 12 October 1944. On the selection ramp Adler was ordered to an outlying work camp; his wife refused to desert her mother, accompanying her to the gas chamber so that she should not die alone.
On liberation, Adler returned to Prague in June 1945, finding work as a tutor and helping to develop the Jewish Museum before emigrating to London in 1947, where he lived in exile until his death in 1988. He married Bettina Gross in England and renewed friendships with writers and artists from pre-war Prague, many also living in exile. Adler was one of the last representatives of the Prague school of German literature, following in the traditions of Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke. Although he saw himself primarily as a poet, he wrote numerous plays and essays, as well as a number of novels including Eine Reise (1962) and Panorama (1968). He published widely in the fields of literature, sociology, religion and philosophy, yet it is as a witness and historian of the Holocaust that he is best known.
It was important to Adler to record what he had witnessed in the ghettos and camps of the Second World War and he became one of the first writers to describe and analyse the Nazi persecution of the Jews. His comprehensive study of the Theresienstadt ghetto, Theresienstadt 1941-1945: das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft, was completed in 1948 and first published in 1955. It remains one of the most detailed and thorough studies of the organisation, history and sociology of a single concentration camp, and quickly established Adler’s reputation as a founder of Holocaust scholarship. Despite taking seven years to find a publisher, Theresienstadt met with immediate success when finally released and the book’s scholarly impartiality was held in such high regard in Germany that it was accepted by the courts as legal evidence of the “Final Solution". - www.kcl.ac.uk/library/collections/archivespec/collections/adler.aspx
Where do the boundaries of Austria end? The boundaries of the Federal Republic are clearly defined, but the boundaries of Austrian literature, culture and memory are are a lot wider and a lot less clear. Robert Musil termed the sprawling, dysfunctional and multicultural Austro-Hungarian Empire ‘Kakania’, and Kakania brought forth many brilliant writers who were born well beyond the current boundaries of Austria, but who certainly contributed to Austrian culture. Perhaps the most famous of these is Franz Kafka (born in Prague, now in the Czech Republic), but there’s also Rainer Maria Rilke (also from Prague), Joseph Roth (born in Brody, now in Ukraine), Elias Canetti (born in Ruse, now in Bulgaria), or Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (born in Lviv, now in Ukraine).
One nearly-forgotten writer from that lost Kakania is H. G. Adler (1910-1988). He was born in Prague and attended the German University there; although he never met Kafka, he considered himself close to the rich tradition of Prague-German writers that included Kafka as well as, among others, Johannes Urzidil and Adler’s friend Franz Baermann-Steiner. Adler’s early career followed that of an ambitious young writer and cultural entrepreneur; he received a doctorate, went to work at the cultural institute Urania, and worked on publishing his poetry.
But in 1938, the Nazis invaded Prague, and the Prague Jewish literary culture Adler belonged to was destroyed. In 1942, he was deported to Theresienstadt, in 1944 to Auschwitz, and was in an underground labour camp at Langenstein when the Second World War ended. Astonishingly, Adler kept writing, not only in Theresienstadt but also in Langenstein, and managed to preserve the work he produced there. In 1947 he emigrated to England, determined never again to live in a country that had been ruled by the Nazis, and embarked on a period of intensive writing. At the same time as composing a massive, and authoritative, sociological study of Theresienstadt (Theresienstadt: Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft), he wrote a series of novels bearing witness to his experience in the Holocaust and dissecting the condition of modern society.
Adler’s ongoing work as a sociologist and historian of the Holocaust was hugely successful and prestigious; however, his literary works struggled to find publishers. Finally, he managed to get his ‘ballad-novel’ about Jewish deportation, Eine Reise, published by a small Christian press in 1962, followed by two selections of his short prose, and then Panorama, a novel surveying the first half of the twentieth century, drawing on his own biography. The novels sunk more or less without a critical trace, and a third novel, Die unsichtbare Wand, was only published after his death in 1989.
Adler’s novels and prose are intellectually brilliant, linguistically experimental, passionately felt. They bear witness to the murder of European Jews and to the harrowing after-effects of the Holocaust on survivors. At the same time, they work out an ethical way to keep living in a world in which such atrocities happened. More, they are satirical accounts of the hypocrisies and follies of the first half of the twentieth century, and often very funny, in a sometimes horrific way. ‘Adler is really a frustrated humorist’, said one reviewer of Eine Reise – a humorist frustrated by the horrors of genocide.
So why didn’t these exceptional novels find a wide audience, despite several republications (and why are there still novels of Adler’s languishing unpublished)? Was it the subject-matter, too traumatic for a post-war audience in denial? Was it that, unlike the well-connected German exiles and “inner emigrants”, Adler had been in concentration camps for the duration of the war, and hence did not have the same influential contacts and patrons as those writers did? Was it that his ‘Kakanian’ style – drawing on a rich Prague German heritage of linguistic experimentation and an Austrian tradition of satire – was thought inappropriate to write about the Holocaust? Was his Kakanian view of the twentieth century out of time, or out of place, after 1945?
Happily, Adler is currently being rediscovered, thanks in part to the tireless work of his son, Professor Jeremy Adler, to bring his work to a wider audience. In the past four years, a biography, H. G. Adler: Privatgelehrter und freier Schriftsteller by Franz Hocheneder has appeared, Katrin Kohl and Hocheneder have published his collected poetry as Andere Wege, and Peter Filkins has translated The Journey and Panorama into English, and is working on Die unsichtbare Wand. Further, W. G. Sebald mentioned Adler’s Theresienstadt as a key source in his celebrated novel Austerlitz, guiding even more readers to his work.
In connection with this resurgence of interest, I am organising a conference, together with Dr. Lynn Wolff from the University of Stuttgart, H. G. Adler/W. G. Sebald: Witnessing, Memory, Poetics, to be held at the ACF and the IGRS on the 10-11 October 2012. We’re privileged to host Peter Filkins, Jeremy Adler and Katrin Kohl, among others, as speakers, and hope that the event will draw out these commonalities between these two great writers of the Holocaust and memory, and suggest productive avenues of comparison between them.
It’s to be hoped that all this renewed interest in his work will help H. G. Adler, belatedly, to his rightful place as a major name in Austrian literature – and to help his work further transform our ideas of what ‘Austrian literature’ really means.- Helen Finch
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