A rediscovered master of Holocaust writing.
(writing on The New Yorker in 2011)
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 (2011) . 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.
