I still border on a word and on another land,
I border, like little else, on everything more and more,
A Bohemian, a wandering minstrel, who has nothing, who
Is held by nothing, gifted only at seeing, by a doubtful sea, the land of my choice.
INGEBORG BACHMANN
“Bohemia Lies by the Sea”
WHEN H. G. ADLER RETURNED TO PRAGUE IN JUNE OF 1945, HE CARRIED within him the remains of a time and place that was no more, and that would never exist again. Exhausted, nearly dead from the two months’ trek back from the Langenstein camp outside Buchenwald, where he had been liberated by American troops in April, Adler returned to Prague by way of Theresienstadt, retrieving from Leo Baeck the voluminous notes he had taken during his two and a half years there. A decade later, these would become his monumental study Theresienstadt 1941–1945, his first significant publication, earning him the Leo Baeck Prize and early, yet fleeting acclaim. In that same ten-year period, however, Adler also wrote five novels, the first of which, Panorama, was produced in 1948, in the white heat of a survivor’s fervor, Adler having moved to London and permanent exile the year before.
Panorama is Adler’s elegy to a world that was no more. Pastoral, even comic in its rendering of the Prague and the Bohemia in which Adler grew up after World War I, it harks back to the past not out of mere nostalgia but, rather, to show how even amid the innocence of childhood and a world steeped in a history and a tradition that could be traced to the Romans, the seeds of its own destruction were planted, resting invisible and unknown beneath the surface but destined to blossom in the full terror and violence that would wipe out not only a people but also a language and a culture that had produced the likes of Franz Kafka and so much more.
For what is perhaps most important to appreciate about Adler and Panorama is that in many ways it is the culminating product of what is known as the Prague Circle of German letters, a distinct milieu whose writers and audience were primarily German-speaking Jews of the Hapsburg Empire, and who considered themselves citizens of that empire until its dissolution in 1918, their primary identification resting with the ancient kingdom of Bohemia throughout. After that came the formulation of Czechoslovakia, though even then Bohemia remained its largest and most populated region. Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938 marked the first time that Bohemia’s territory had been divided in nearly a thousand years. As we know, this annexation also set off the cataclysm that extinguished not only the writers of the Prague Circle but also their readers, not to mention every trace of the German language from the streets of Kafka’s Prague. Born there in 1910, Adler was at the tail end of the generation that could count Kafka as its immediate ancestor and whose literary style had been shaped by him and by the distinct sentence structure and diction that were native to the Prague Circle.
It requires no great leap, then, to see that Josef Kramer, whose life is depicted in Panorama, and whose biography mirrors Adler’s, is a clear manifestation of that other Josef K. of certain renown. Indeed, whereas Kafka’s object is largely to illuminate the nightmarish unreality of the everyday world that Josef K. finds himself trapped within, Adler’s is to create a mirror image of that world, in which he explores the everyday nature of the nightmare that he himself came to experience and to survive. At the start of the novel, the reader has no idea that Josef will end up in the Langenstein camp, or that, like Adler, he will end the book as an exile in England who cannot look forward without looking back. But the unknowable nature of such events is very much to the point, for neither could the young Adler, or the culture that bore him, see it coming. From the first page of The Trial, we know that Josef K. has woken to a world that will probably not allow him to survive. At the start of Panorama, however, we are immersed in the everyday charms of a milieu that, from the point of view of Josef Kramer, looking back through the panorama of his experience and memory, is all the more poignant for its unanticipated, yet inescapable, demise.
The consciousness at work formulating this past is also a key reason that Panorama is neither an autobiographical novel nor a bildungsroman meant to trace a certain kind of development and upbringing. For, indeed, the very conceit of formulating the novel as a panorama by structuring it as ten separate and distinct “scenes” from Josef Kramer’s life with no plot development between them is itself an augmentation of the autobiographical mode. Yes, all the principle moments of Josef’s life stem from Adler’s own, and yes, Adler saw his life as emblematic of the experience of an entire generation. And yet it is how he writes that life which distinguishes the true nature and intent of the book as a novel bent more on capturing a consciousness as it reflects on experience than on depicting that experience in any sort of pedestrian or naturalistic way.
Consider, for instance, the book’s style—the way its long, streaming sentences build clause upon clause in order to render the consciousness at work narrating the novel as much as the events themselves. Here, for instance, is Josef at around the age of eleven, living as a foster child on a farm in Umlowitz, a region and an experience that he loves through and through:
Now Josef is also a herder for Herr Neumann, who owns some pastureland, though most of the cattle graze in Purtscher’s fields on a side slope of the Haselberg. The cattle in the shed are tied up, and normally Poldi helps Josef release them, since he can’t do it alone, it going all right with the goats and with Cappi, but not as well with the other cows, the worst being Liesel, who is a restless animal that requires more patience. Josef holds a big stick that he made himself, though Otto’s is much nicer, even if it’s shorter and not as strong, Fritz being much more gifted at wood carving, for he can carve decorations and letters into the stick, such that it almost looks like something out of a picture from a book about Indians. Josef isn’t as good, having cut his finger once while he was carving in the open fields, the finger bleeding for so long that Josef had to wrap his handkerchief around it, while that night Herma made a proper bandage, carefully washing the finger at first and rubbing it with alcohol so that it wouldn’t get infected, though it burned like hell, Herma saying that was just what had to be, because there had once been a farm boy in Umlowitz who also cut himself, and no one did anything about the wound, such that the poor boy got a terrible illness called tetanus, and the next day he was dead, since there was nothing that could be done for him. And so Josef held his finger still, not wanting to get any tetanus, and two days later the finger was fine again and hadn’t gotten infected.
Two things stand out here. The first is the way in which Adler’s prose surreptitiously elicits how Josef’s thinking meanders from thoughts about getting the cattle out of the shed, to the stick that he uses, to Fritz’s talent for carving such sticks, to the dangers of cutting himself while carving, and, finally, to the importance of tending to such a wound in order to avoid infection and death. In a single stream of thought, then, we move from the child’s excitement over his bucolic adventures to the ultimate undermining of such euphoria, with the threat of death at rest within it. On the one hand, this is a powerful rendering of Josef’s own thought process, its motion and plummet, and the inner world that is quietly demarcated through it. However, the second, perhaps later impression that the reader will take away is the manner in which the arc of Josef’s thought and Adler’s narration anticipates the unknowable arc of Josef’s own future demise. Herma’s apocryphal warning about the farm boy who dies from tetanus because of medical neglect will one day culminate in the sufferings of the inmates at Langenstein, where “the smallest wounds fester straightaway, and everyone has such wounds from his slave labor, the limbs soon swelling, the body becoming discolored, nothing done in the infirmary, for there is no disinfectant, salve, or bandages.” Hence, what is a rural tragedy of ignorance and neglect for the farm boy eventually becomes the calculated abandonment of the inmates once their utility as slave labor expires, Adler’s evocation of the inmates’ suffering only compounding its poignancy when we realize that the conditions that gave rise to it have in some ways been there all along.
Yet, despite the extremity of the suffering that the novel eventually evokes, Adler’s style shares as much with what we think of as the stream-of-consciousness techniques of Joyce and Woolf as it does with the nightmarish atmosphere of Kafka. To the extent that it is an extension of the Bildungsroman tradition, it is essentially in the sense that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is also seen in that light. Here Stephen Dedalus’s journey from boyhood to committed young artist is granted a mirror image in Josef Kramer’s journey toward eventual exile and conflicted freedom. In addition, the detached manner in which the events of Panorama are reported (Josef rarely speaks directly but, instead, spends most of his time listening to others) is reminiscent of the way Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay or Mrs. Dalloway report on the life they observe around them, while what we note is the shape and motion of each woman’s consciousness as she observes. The result is a kind of engaged detachment, one that asks us as readers to read with each of these narrators as much as we read about them.
In Adler, this detachment has even deeper philosophical and moral implications. From the outset, the conceit of the panorama itself gives rise to the tensions that exist between the viewer and the viewed, between subject and object, and, finally, between present and past. To Josef as a small child, the trip on a streetcar to watch “various pictures from all over the world” pass by him, in the wooden cabinet for which his grandmother has bought two tickets, is a thrilling experience. Once again, though, and as so often occurs throughout the novel, the journey by train silently and menacingly foreshadows later travels by train that Josef cannot foresee. Similarly, the excitement of pressing his nose to a glass pane in trying to enter the world of “Vesuvius, Niagara Falls, the Great Pyramid,” or even the marvelous unfolding of language itself, as Josef spells out the title of the week’s program, “Li-ma, the Cap-i-tal of Pe-ru”—all of this is eventually turned on its head when, at the end of the novel, Josef considers returning to his homeland and the past but realizes that “he does not believe in the possibility of such a return, even though he knows that he can’t abandon it, but a gulf remains between him and the images of the panorama” that now lie in his memory.
All ten chapters of Panorama mention travel by train or streetcar, thus developing the motif introduced in the brief Vorbild, which describes little Josef’s trip to the panorama. Similarly, the Landstein Castle, which Josef so innocently visits as a fifteen-year-old member of a ragtag hiking club, will eventually be echoed by the Langenstein camp, and finally by Launceston Castle in England, erected by William the Conqueror, whose title further resonates with that other notorious “Conqueror” of Bohemia and of Josef’s life. Add to this the way that the “true path” that Josef distrustfully and briefly explores with the New Age guru Johannes Tvrdil (who is modeled on the avant-garde photographer František Drtikol) also returns as the path that he walks along as a forced laborer, or how Tvrdil’s mystical playing of a gong returns as “a gong, not a bell, a piece of iron rail that hangs from a rack that looks like a gallows” in Langenstein, and we begin to see that Panorama is an intricate web of themes and motifs that continually circle back upon one another. Be it apples, soap, bells, William Tell, Goethe, Schiller, or mushrooms, Adler threads a variety of repeated motifs throughout the novel, so that eventually Josef’s life seems more intricately constructed than even he realizes. Such correspondence can be exhilarating for us as readers, once we see the linkages embedded in Josef’s life and experience, but often linkages arise as moments of dark foreboding easily passed over, as when a pupil of Josef’s describes an outing to the countryside and mentions “a glance back at the railroad tracks providing a view of a little town with a church tower and a couple of factory chimneys, smoke rising from them.” But for Josef such repetition and return are constricting, if not chilling, especially when “the web of relations” he finds himself “ensnared in” threatens him with an existence whereby he must live for and with “memories that one can no longer enter.”
Adler, however, is more a stoic than a tragedian. Just as Stephen Dedalus’s heroism involves the arrival at a plane of regard that allows him to “pare his fingernails” before his own artistic creation, Josef’s real battle is to maintain his own humanity in the face of the dehumanizing forces that continue to mount against him. His own “irrepressible vitality” is the best weapon against this, for “even in the grip of seeming doom, his ability to contemplate what he observe[s] spread[s] beyond the searing pain of the sharpest despair.” Although this realization occurs to Josef more after the fact than within the camp itself, his determination not to give in to despair is also what allows him, at thirteen, to survive the grim atmosphere of the pseudo-military school that he attends, where he is slapped down by The Bull, the stern headmaster, for calling another student a “German pig,” but only because he has been called a “Czech pig,” which is of no concern to The Bull at all. As a distraction from this lonely, repressive existence, Josef, ironically, likes to secretly draw maps of railroads running between cities—Adler’s dark foreshadowing once again flowering in the mention of how the “web of railroads grows ever more thick” upon Josef’s hidden paper. Later, this secret will to map and describe drives both Josef and Adler to take notes on the horrors that surround them, the fodder of suffering turned into the fecund resilience of the imaginative act as it is shaped by sign and symbol alike.
When, some fifteen years later, Josef actually finds himself working as a forced laborer on the railroad that in all likelihood will soon carry him to the hell of Langenstein, this resilience is what allows him to acknowledge what a fellow laborer maintains; namely, that one “may indeed be a victim, but he is also a witness, and through that each can—whether through his own disposition or caprice—find a certain freedom, namely the freedom of knowledge or the ability to know.” Soon afterward, when Josef is asked by a friend if he indeed has any hope, Josef is quick to reply, “No, not hope, that’s not what he’d call it, but instead a readiness to accept whatever might happen, it’s probably life itself that we should accept at any moment without fear. Nothing is more destructive than fear, for, senselessly, it leads to the death of meaning and is itself meaningless, fear able to enslave and murder before a death sentence is even lowered upon a man.”
This combination of stoicism laced with a tinge of slightly rapt naïveté lies at the heart of both Josef’s and Adler’s worldview. At times it can be somewhat hard to take, with even Josef realizing that “his thinking is approaching the limits of what is permissible.” For while the “freedom of knowledge or the ability to know” may on the surface seem a noble thing to embrace in the face of despair, it hardly seems capable of standing up to the mechanized annihilation inherent in the camps. On the other hand, a “readiness to accept whatever might happen,” and to do so without fear, is a crucial last thread in the fabric of human dignity that no one would wish to let go of. In the end, in order to appreciate Adler’s moral response to the cataclysm that he survived, one has to understand his arrival at a position midway between naïve idealism and stony fatalism, which Josef perhaps best describes as “a liberation from despair, from hopelessness, arrived at through resignation.” This resignation, however, is not a capitulation but an “acceptance” of the way things are, such that once “all anxieties … have been overcome there is much grace that can befall one, because simply to be is grace in itself.”
To ask whether this seems true or plausible in the face of the Holocaust is perhaps to miss the point of Josef’s or Adler’s arriving at such a perspective. Indeed, Josef makes very clear that he “wants nothing to do with empty equivocation leading to lame optimism or self-deception,” and that he also wishes “to avoid any kind of blindness.” Instead, amid the panorama of his experience and his memories, what Josef ultimately realizes is that “he cannot stand aloof.”
The viewer is also the participant, there being nothing arbitrary, everything is tightly intertwined, thus forming Josef’s garments. Neither to extricate oneself nor to unite oneself is the first task, but rather to take something from it, no matter the cost. Sometimes it seems easier to judge the run of affairs than to take part in them, but nothing happens if one does, and sometimes that means entering the fray. It may be tempting to flee to one’s tower, but to do so is to sleep as the world goes by, and we sleep enough as it is, and thus we are compelled to be awake and to function, the piety of the solitary person shattered by the functioning of the world.
Accordingly, Josef’s mission and calling involves the implicit need to “bear witness to the existence of the lost ones.” This is very much what Adler felt his own mission to be, one that in many ways bespeaks a kind of religious devotion in his determination to capture not only what happened to those who had died but also the dignity with which so many still lived up to the moment of their miserable end.
To do this, Adler chose two paths: that of a thinker and that of a writer. In a television interview in 1986, he remembered feeling, upon his arrival at Theresienstadt, that “when I was deported I said to myself, I won’t survive this. But if I survive, then I will describe it, and I will do so in two key ways. I want to do it by setting down the facts of my individual experience, as well as to somehow describe it artistically. I have indeed done both, and the fact that I have done so is not that important but is at least some justification for my having survived those years.” Hence, key to Adler’s work is the dovetailing of fact and fiction in trying to both scientifically and imaginatively encompass his experience. Theresienstadt 1941–1945 would be the means of examining his past through the exacting lens of a scholar and a social historian. However, during the same decade in which he concluded his thousand-page study, he also wrote twenty-five hundred pages of fiction, completing five novels, of which Panorama was the first. Given this bifurcated strategy—one unique to almost any writer we know—Josef’s declaration that “the viewer is also the participant” also functions as a silent imperative behind the need for Adler’s artistic and moral approach. Indeed, it was one thing for Adler to “judge the run of affairs” in keeping the copious notes that would lead to the Theresienstadt book; it was yet another thing for him to “enjoin” his imagination with what had happened through the writing of fiction.
Of late, W. G. Sebald, who features Adler and his Theresienstadt study in the closing pages of his novel Austerlitz, in many ways blends Adler’s twin approach by presenting texts that seem to be carefully researched factual studies of the author’s own experience, replete with their own panorama of photographs, but which are also highly manipulated forays into the fictional sublime. Sebald has been accused of bordering on a kind of preciousness in bringing such a highly aesthetic approach to the Holocaust, and it is a criticism that Adler, too, faced in his dispute with Theodor Adorno on the question of whether it was even possible to write fiction or poetry after the camps. At the time, this sentiment was felt so deeply in German letters that Adler was not able to publish Panorama until 1968, twenty years after its completion, while his second novel, The Journey, did not appear until 1962, eleven years after it was completed. Worse yet, two novels from the same period have never seen the light of day, and the last of the five, The Invisible Wall, which was completed in 1956, didn’t appear until 1989, a year after Adler’s death. Against such daunting opposition from publishers and critics alike, Adler’s effort to render the truth through fiction must, indeed, have felt like a kind of “calling” in order for him to continue with it at all. Like Josef, he had to maintain “a positive attitude toward reality, or the seemingly real … for what we can know is a present—namely, the present.” Indeed, the fact that so much of Panorama makes use of the present tense to elicit the immediacy of remembering the past also corresponds with Adler’s urge to avoid “sleeping as the world goes by,” a charge made all the more crucial by the fact that the novel is forced to describe a world that has vanished forever.
Unlike historical scholarship, whose job is to help us understand what was, what happened, and, perhaps, the consequences that we live with now, the object of fiction on its most basic level is to remind us of what it means “simply to be.” For all its horror, for all the death and annihilation it unleashed, what we talk about under the vexed rubric of “the Holocaust” is also about those who struggled for the chance “simply to be.” To forget this amid our supposed awareness of the suffering and violence that would not allow them to do so is to risk forgetting the very humanity whose loss is at the core of the tragedy of which Adler attempts to speak. In this sense, Panorama is not a Holocaust novel per se. It is one man’s attempt to show us what it meant “simply to be” a boy in Bohemia in the early twentieth century, a young man in Prague in the Depression years, a forced laborer and an inmate during the great cataclysm, and, finally, a survivor and an exile in the postwar years bent on trying to understand where he had been, where he was, and where he was going amid the “panoramic view which allows the eyes to take account.”
And so Josef awakens, just as, at the end of Joyce’s novel, Stephen Dedalus finds that “his soul was waking slowly, fearing to awake wholly.” The Frau Director, whose children Josef tutors, maintains, “The story of man is about the transition from sleep to waking,” and this is very much Josef’s story, too. Every scene of Panorama ends with Josef drifting back into sleep—except the very last one, in which, finally, Josef is wholly awake to who he is and what he embodies in having survived. No doubt Adler felt much the same, and, clearly, the writing of Panorama was vital to the process of waking from his own nightmare. From here, he would go on to the heightened modernism of The Journey, constructing “a ballade” of voices whose score explores the dark phantasm of the journey to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz and back. His last published novel, The Invisible Wall, completes the trilogy by coming out on the other side to render the nightmare of the survivor’s guilt, memory having become as much burden as substance. If Panorama plays off Stephen Dedalus’s awakening, the ability to sustain consciousness through the sheer propulsion of language itself eventually lands Adler in the kind of linguistic brinkmanship found in Beckett—an ironic turn in itself, given Adorno’s embrace of the latter at the former’s expense.
However, there is no writer quite like Adler, despite all his modernist echoes; nor do we have a more substantive fictional rendering of the Shoah by another German-speaking Jew who survived it. Given Adler’s special attention to wordplay in both German and Czech, this alone makes his work an essential engagement with the period and its history. Add to this his penchant for writing scholarly studies with the eye of a writer, and for writing fiction through the mind of a philosopher and a historian, and we end up with a voice that is unique not only for what it has to say but, principally, for how it says it.
What would it mean to be able to live one’s life backward and to see how each crucial juncture is connected to, if not presaged by, every prior yet seemingly unrelated juncture? What would it mean if one were forced to? Jonathan Lear says of Oedipus that his main problem is that “he makes more meaning than [he] grasps.” Far be it from Adler to embrace a Freudian paradigm, for he was always highly suspicious of psychology as a discipline, seeing in it the false control of the clinical mentality, as opposed to the interpretive freedom inherent in the mythic sensibility. However, as pure analogy the comparison holds. Josef’s dilemma is that he has more meaning in his life than he knows what to do with—or, at least, to easily prevent it from gaining more control over his life than he has over it. Panorama is about the wresting of that control away from Josef’s experience and into his hands as a thinker and an observer, just as Adler’s writing of the novel is a means toward shaping that which all too menacingly sought to destroy him. Stephen Dedalus arrives at the aim of expressing “myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.” Adler chose the same, the crucial difference being that his hand was more forced than he would have preferred, his exile more bitter and haunting, since he was unable to return to his homeland even if he had wished to.
In the first and last stanzas of his villanelle “The Waking,” Theodore Roethke writes:
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
This shaking keeps me steady, I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
That Josef Kramer survives to take his waking slow, unlike his hereditary namesake, Josef K., is a blessing. That H. G. Adler lived to trace that waking, along with an entire world that “fell away” forever, is the triumph amid the darkness illuminating his Panorama.
Peter Filkins
October 25, 2010