by H. G. Adler
The Wall is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Translation, introduction, list of characters, and principal events copyright © 2014 by Peter Filkins
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
This work was originally published in Austria as Die unsichtbare Wand by Paul Zsolnay Verlag, in 1989. Copyright © 1989 by Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna. This edition published by arrangement with Paul Zsolnay Verlag.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins, Publishers for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Ars Poetica?” from The Collected Poems 1931–1987 by Czeslaw Milosz, copyright © 1988 by Czeslaw Milosz Royalties, Inc. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins, Publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Adler, H. G.
[Unsichtbare Wand. English]
The wall : a novel / H. G. Adler; translated by Peter Filkins.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-8129-9306-6
eBook ISBN 978-0-679-64455-2
1. Holocaust survivors—Fiction. 2. Exiles—Fiction. 3. Psychic trauma—Fiction. 4. Self-realization—Fiction. 5. Prague (Czech Republic)—Fiction. 6. London (England)—Fiction. 7. Psychological fiction. 8. Jewish fiction. I. Filkins, Peter, translator. II. Title.
PT2601.D614U5713 2014
833′.914—dc23 2014003513
www.atrandom.com
Jacket design: Gabrielle Bordwin
Jacket photograph: John Gay, Liverpool Street Station, London
(© English Heritage Photo Library/Bridgeman Art Library)
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction by Peter Filkins
The Wall
Dedication
Translator’s Note
List of Characters
Principal Events
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
About the Translator
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys to the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
—Czeslaw Milosz, “Ars Poetica?”
H. G. ADLER’S The Wall MARKS THE COMPLETION OF THE SHOAH TRILOGY that he began with the writing of Panorama in 1948 and continued with the composition of The Journey in 1950–51. Having finished a first draft of The Wall in 1956, and an extensive revision in 1961, Adler unfortunately did not live to see publication of the novel in 1989, a year after his death as a postwar exile in London. However, he considered it his crowning achievement as a novelist, and continued to make small changes to it well into the 1970s. Although he would also go on to write a social satire titled Hausordnung (House Rules), published in 1988, The Wall essentially marks the end of his career as a novelist, a remarkable run that saw the composition of six novels in ten years, beginning in 1946, as well as his seminal monograph, Theresienstadt 1941–1945: The Face of a Coerced Community.
Three of those six novels were never published, while the first two parts of the trilogy, Panorama and The Journey, were published out of their intended order in 1968 and 1962, respectively. After completing The Wall in 1961, Adler continued to write and publish short stories and essays, work on his other great study of the deportations, Administered Man, published in 1974, and privately write the poems that would eventually make up a collected volume of twelve hundred pages, published as Andere Wege (Different Ways) in 2010. Adler’s last book, published in 1987, was a treatise outlining an experimental theology that he had begun writing in 1938 and continued to work on during the two and a half years he spent in Theresienstadt. Although Adler’s career stretches across many disciplines—including literature, history, sociology, philosophy, and religion—there is something fitting in the fact that his last book is essentially the first he set out to write. Despite his having been deported from his native Prague and plunged into the nightmare world of Theresienstadt, then surviving no fewer than three concentration camps, including Auschwitz, as well as the loneliness and penury of forty years of exile in England, Adler’s sensibility remains consistent and unified, a mien suffused with the powerful, extreme experience it had survived, and yet able, in the end, to stand outside of that experience and give it meaning and order.
The struggle and cost of the effort to remain a unified person alive to the present, despite the weight of the past, lies at the heart of The Wall, and, as with Panorama and The Journey, Adler clearly taps his own biography in the shaping of this epic tale. At the novel’s start, we find Arthur Landau living in a “metropolis” that clearly mirrors Adler’s postwar London, while the city he remembers from “back there” is a sure stand-in for Adler’s native Prague. The fact that Arthur’s first wife, Franziska, perished in the war also alludes to the loss of Adler’s first wife, Gertrud Klepetar, to the gas chambers in Auschwitz. Similarly, the importance of Arthur’s second wife, Johanna, in saving his life ties directly to the crucial role that Adler’s second wife, Bettina Gross, played in getting him through the postwar years and beyond. Like Arthur, Adler also struggled to find sure footing in London, both economically and socially, despite the company of fellow exiles and friends, such as Elias and Veza Canetti, Franz Baermann Steiner, and Erich Fried. The Wall in fact functions as a roman à clef, for the portraits of Professor Kratzenstein, the oddly named So-and-So, and Oswald and Inge Bergmann are indeed caricatures of Theodor Adorno, Steiner, and the Canettis, respectively, while lifelong friends and colleagues of Adler’s also show up in various transformations.
But in several important ways this is where biography and fiction part ways, and even more so in The Wall than in the first two installments of Adler’s trilogy. For one thing, Arthur has two children with Johanna, whereas Adler had only one son with Bettina. Arthur’s work on his Sociology of Oppressed People certainly parallels Adler’s work on Theresienstadt 1941–1945, yet by the time The Wall was completed in 1956, Adler had enjoyed extensive success and renown with the publication of his monograph, whereas Arthur still awaits publication while doubting that his talents will ever be properly recognized or employed. Last, though Adler suffered the difficulties of exile, throughout his postwar life he continued to return to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland on extensive reading tours and research visits, all of which complicated the nature of his experience as an exile. True, he never did return to his native Prague, but as a German speaker and writer he identified strongly with German culture and society. Though he stated that he could not live in a land where the corner grocer might once have been a Nazi, he nonetheless had no trouble whatsoever returning to it.
Hence, while The Wall undoubtedly has powerful ties to his own life, it is important to realize that Adler is also the one standing on the outside, shaping Arthur Landau’s tormented psyche, rather than simply suffering it once again. Arthur may confess, “On the day they announced that the war was over, there was nothing left but a snakeskin, a dried, brittle skeleton that I could discern through tender self-regard, though I the living animal had slipped away, gone without a trace, no longer to be found,” and this may indeed be a very real description of Adler’s own state of mind in 1945, but the fact of its articulation argues that the author stands at a further, more stable remove. In this way, The Wall serves as the qui
ntessential novel of the survivor’s duress and guilt, for while Adler is the artist determined to shape it and give it meaning, his challenge is also to survive the seeming injustice of his own survival. Likewise, Arthur cannot help feeling that he is someone who has “ceased to exist, called it quits, [is] completely spent, the vestige of a memory of who I no longer am,… someone who can never find his footing, never land in one place,” but there is no reason to suppose that, in the end, the same holds true for Adler.
The Wall, like a symphony, is an arrangement of competing and interwoven themes, and Adler is the composer-conductor directing the entire opus. As a modernist montage in the same vein as the works of Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner, the novel takes up and repeats a host of key notes: the loss of Franziska and the struggles of the war; the return to Prague and Arthur’s hope of finding his parents alive; work in a museum that collects Jewish artifacts; Arthur’s anxiety about crossing the border and leaving his homeland and his friends for good; his eventual arrival in the “metropolis” of London; the effort to reconnect with old friends there and find meaningful employment as a writer and an intellectual; the neglect he suffers at the hands of prominent intellectuals who spent the war in exile; the first encounters with Johanna Zinner among these circles; their eventual courtship and engagement; the rearing of their two children; and, finally, Arthur’s continual fantasy of being “that first Adam” expelled forever from Paradise. Add to this list the recurring nightmare of two pallbearers showing up on his doorstep to cart him off in a hearse while he’s still alive, and the phantasm of Arthur’s consciousness is complete.
Like any consciousness, Arthur’s is a dense entanglement of past and present, fantasy and reality, daydream and meditation, hope and regret, tenderness and suffering, love and guilt—all of it occurring and recurring through the connected disorder of an extended chain of thought. However, because of the intensity and extremity of his experience, Arthur’s consciousness threatens to bind him forever to the past, and the narrative strategy of The Wall is meant to mimic this conflict. By employing a kind of mise-en-scène technique—whereby Arthur finds himself thinking about life in Prague right after the war only to then find himself at a gathering of postwar intellectuals in London, or back in the Bohemian forest where he once walked with Franziska—the novel shuttles the reader between the past and the present without any clear sign that such a switch has occurred. In fact, the past is always present for us as readers, as it is for Arthur, for it lurks in the shadows, waiting to appear at any moment, whether as reverie or as nightmare.
The novel’s nonlinear plot does at times make it difficult for us to know just what is going on or how we ended up in a certain locale or set of circumstances. However, such challenges are performative in nature and are meant to show how the duress of Arthur’s past constantly informs the present, in much the same way that flashbacks occur to those suffering post-traumatic stress, or even how everyday memory constantly transports us between realms, surprising us with what pops up suddenly in the course of our thoughts. Whether it be the voice that threatens to expel Arthur as Adam, his haunting memories of Franziska, his nightmares of being carted away by the pallbearers, or the guilty visions he has of his dead parents, all of these function as eruptive dislocations that not only control Arthur’s consciousness but define it. Therefore, the difficulty of the novel is really meant to engage the reader in the difficulty of being Arthur Landau, and to appreciate that is to appreciate the weight that extreme duress places on the imagination, as well as the imagination’s inventive capacity to order and comprehend the past in the most fantastical of ways through memory.
Indeed, the “wall” that Arthur finds himself standing before and unable to penetrate is the past. Because of this, Arthur realizes, “I don’t belong to human society. I and the wall, we are alone, we belong together; there is nothing else that I belong to.” Arthur, however, is not willing to settle for this, and thus he continually strives to make some connection to the world and to find a place within it. Unfortunately, despite initial avid interest in his past on the part of his old friends and the new people he meets, little practical help comes his way. Instead, like the heaps of prayer books and dusty portraits of the departed that he helped collect and sort at the museum “back there” (as Adler himself did at the Jewish Museum in Prague right after the war), in London’s “metropolis” Arthur is treated as a kind of exotic relic, interesting at first for the descriptions of the horrors he can provide, but ultimately dispensable as a fellow competitor for the limited opportunities available amid postwar privation.
All of this would make for a very dour novel, were it not for the fact that, in the end, The Wall is—surprisingly and paradoxically—a love story. Arthur’s life with Johanna and their two children is crucial to his survival, and their home together on West Park Row remains the anchor of his life throughout the novel. There is an immediate attraction between him and Johanna when they meet at a social gathering, and their relationship is what allows Arthur to come to grips with himself and with the past. Johanna, in fact, sees the wall that he confronts quite differently from the way he sees it. “I honestly believe that the wall is your protection,” she tells him. “It separates you from your past, from all the horror.” Although Arthur does not entirely agree, he nonetheless adores his wife and confesses, “When I look at Johanna I am often happy, though sometimes also sad, yet always something is affirmed, and many fears are tamped down. What happens between us folds in upon itself and creates an understanding; we trust each other, there’s no need to search for anything else.”
Yet search he does—for his parents, for release from Franziska, for support for his writing, for meaningful intellectual engagement, and for a place in the world. Though Johanna provides emotional grounding while in some ways living his life for him, writing is the other means by which Arthur finds some kind of solace. Just as the novel continually returns to West Park Row and his family, it is in his study that Arthur is most at home while working on his Sociology of Oppressed People. The source of this work is his own experience of survival during the war, just as Adler tapped his own past in order to write his study of Theresienstadt. But, as was true for Adler, Arthur does not simply write a memoir of his experience; he studies it in a scholarly manner, in order to do full justice to it and to the many who perished. He does this in part because of the difficulty of holding on to his experience through memory: “I collected so much experience and carried it along with me, so much pressing deep into my memories, held there as I told myself I would need it, and now it appeared to me it was indeed lost, myself unable to find it any longer, Franziska’s death and my survival having shredded the volume that gave the contents some kind of sense, all my stowed-away knowledge now covered in dust and ground down to a pulp.”
Although Arthur admits, at first, that “all I wanted to set down was one word, and yet it all remained bottled up inside me,” he does not give up. Realizing that “the less of a person I am because I am not allowed to exist, the more the world is closed to me,” he nonetheless sits down to write a story titled “The Letter Writers,” which appears about halfway through The Wall. This simple act somehow frees him, allowing him
to give in but not to give up.… To slam into the wall as if it were not there, to flatter and play about with it, as if it would let itself be conquered, yet to acknowledge it and not doubt such knowledge of it, accepting that it’s pointless to do so and will probably always be pointless. To exit the most secret depths with great vigor, as if victory were assured, and let myself be battered and defeated, pushed back, back into the hidden recesses! To hope for nothing and then to invoke the wondrous as if what I had never dared hope were already guaranteed.
Writing is what allows Arthur to exist, “to make a plea out of a continually obsessed conscience, a plea directed at someone beyond all borders,” be they the borders of geography, history, memory, or even time. This plea is particularly urgent because it is not one made by Arthur alon
e. Through his experience at the museum while collecting portraits and artifacts left behind by “the disappeared,” he comes to understand powerfully the burden of his responsibility as a survivor, as he tells his fellow curators:
We are remnant survivors, who are there for all who are not. That’s true in general; the living are there for the dead, for their predecessors, and thus we also represent the history of the dead. How difficult it is, then, to exist as oneself when we are also history, so much history! But we are particularly there for all those dragged away by force and annihilated.… We are the history of the exterminated, the history of the shadow that consumed them. And we collect what was stolen from them, what we can store up of their remains. But that is indeed alive and really not history. It amounts to neither memory nor keepsakes; it is commemoration.
Arthur’s experience and memory, then, are both singular and collective, and his effort to grapple with the past through writing is tied to a deeply felt need to commemorate the lives that were lost to it. For him, the past is both burden and sustenance, as it has formed his life in the present and is the only means by which he can find a way to the future.
However, what is most often missing from that past is particulars, Arthur admitting early in his courtship with Johanna that “there are only a few things that I recall precisely,” and that what he really possesses is “a memory for the relationship between things, for the dense interweaving of experience.” This also mirrors the narrative guise of The Wall. Rather than functioning as a memoir disguised as a novel, the book is a novel interested in the “interweaving of experience” and the performance of it. Given that the novel begins and ends with Arthur looking out his study window at two old women at a window across the street and the cat that walks nimbly along its sill, one might even entertain the possibility that the entire narrative takes place inside Arthur’s consciousness in a single day, much like James Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel that Adler deeply admired and read as early as the 1940s. Even if this is not the case, clearly The Wall encompasses the past and the present, and how both occur within Arthur’s consciousness, while at the same time that consciousness is meant to serve those who did not survive the past. “Until everything is thought through and made clear, I cannot rest, let alone find peace,” Arthur says to Johanna. “Thus there can be no escape.” At the same time, however, “memory is something else altogether. It’s the identification with the deportation and all its consequences, therefore with those who suffered extermination. That I can’t do. At best I was broken, perhaps shattered, but, because I indeed stand before you, I was not exterminated.”