by Joshua Cohen
Adler encountered the second fictionalizing experiment only after liberation, when he returned to Prague as an orphan and widower. The city’s Jewry had been almost wiped out, but Josefov, the medieval Jewish quarter, had been preserved intact. Under the supervision of Reinhard Heydrich and Karl Rahm, the commandant of Theresienstadt, its synagogues, meeting halls, and burial society buildings had been turned into repositories of Judaica: prayerbooks, Torah scrolls, gold and silver religious paraphernalia, and textiles seized from across Czechoslovakia. These were to comprise the collection of a clandestine Jüdisches Zentralmuseum, accessible only to Nazi officers and researchers who required accurate, not anti-Semitic, information on an extinct race. The wartime museum held just four exhibits—among them a display of Hebrew manuscripts and an installation illustrating the Jewish lifecycle that featured a circumcision knife and a shroud—and was curated by Czechoslovakian Jewish specialists. The museum, reclaimed by the remnants of Prague Jewry in 1945, hired Adler to catalog its library of roughly one hundred thousand volumes. But then the new regime began clamping down on Jewish institutions, and by the end of the decade had effectively closed the museum by nationalizing it. Adler, however, was in London by then, and the only books in his cramped flat were the ones he was writing and the ones he’d smuggled out.
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CULTURAL CONTINUITY; COLLECTIVE MEMORY; the conflation of “belonging” and “belongings”; the assuaging power of art: These are all humanist concerns that after the Holocaust were less acceptable than ever to Adler’s London cohort of displaced Germanophones, who held with Adorno’s dictum that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
The essay the line is from, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” was written in 1949, just as Adler, who’d written poetry throughout his time in the camps, was trying to publish his first novel. The next year he reviewed Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music for the BBC Third Programme, and used the opportunity to initiate a correspondence with his fellow musicologist. Several meetings ensued, alternately fraternal and fraught. In 1956 Adorno invited Adler to lecture on Theresienstadt at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. In 1957 Adler was invited to give another talk, this time to a private circle. The title was “Ideologies Under Slavery.” Adler interpreted the title socially and psychologically: Ideologies are imposed on a people until a people imposes them on itself. Adorno’s interpretation was political and economic: Ideologies are the result of systems that determine the identities and actions of everyone, both oppressors and oppressed. A rift ensued, which Adorno exacerbated in the essay “Negative Dialectics” in 1966, in a passage that unmistakably attacks his former friend:
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….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.
Or of him, perhaps, who spent the war in Pacific Palisades, California?
The Wall travesties Adorno in the person of Professor Kratzenstein, a man convinced that all miseries are “the result of economic conditions.” He is the head of the International Society of Sociologists, which is the Institute for Social Research done up in clown makeup and fancy dress. Bereft in London, his English still shaky, Arthur seeks the support of the society for his Sociology of Oppressed Peoples, but all he gets are “platitudes” and “dogmatic declarations.” The émigré intelligentsia are no help either: Leonard Kauders (based on Franz Baermann Steiner) and Oswald and Inge Bergmann (based on Elias and Veza Canetti) refer him to a philanthropist who doesn’t offer any money, just a job at a wallpaper factory. Arthur is going broke for writing a book about deception, self-deception, and persecution, while professional Marxists brand him a schnorrer and advise him to return to Soviet Czechoslovakia. The absurdities of Theresienstadt and the museum recur in Hampstead, not quite as tragedy, but not quite as farce either.
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IT WAS ADORNO’S IDEA that capitalism had stripped philosophy of its revolutionary capacities. What was left was art, the last emancipator and partisan of truth. But Adorno was using the word “truth” (or Wahrheitsgehalt, “truth-value”) in a way that was already becoming outmoded. His “truth” always gestured toward an “essence,” a below-the-surface system of pitches, colors, or symbols that would organize an artwork and instantiate its worth; but contemporary usage was returning the word to its Enlightenment definition—quasi-scientific “factuality.” This is the position we’re in today, when most writers invoke “truth” only as a preemptive defense against those whose primary impulse is to fact-check and accuse.
It’s perverse that the closer a writer is to the Holocaust the more closely their work is scrutinized and questioned. In the 1990s the old news reemerged online that Elie Wiesel’s most famous Holocaust book was a revision of an earlier, fiercer Yiddish version. The French text, written under the spell of Sartre and Camus, sublimates the parochial appetite for revenge into a universalist obligation to testify. Wiesel’s revision was ammunition to denialists. He had already proclaimed, decades before he won the Nobel Prize, decades before he took Oprah to Poland, that “some events do take place but are not true; others are—although they never occurred.” Along with Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, Aharon Appelfeld, Piotr Rawicz, Jakov Lind, and Jerzy Kosinski, he elided events and fashioned composite characters to attain a sense of realism—but that doesn’t mean that Auschwitz was a hoax, or that Israel is illegitimate. Writers who survived don’t seem to be allowed the same license as Cynthia Ozick or Martin Amis, who’ve imagined their Shoahs in comparative peace.
The lasting legacy of Holocaust literature seems to be its utility as a template for contemporary sagas of victimization, be they memoirs of child soldiers in Africa, or of women throughout the ummah. These books are regarded as proof of adversity conquered: They dramatize all powerlessness or blunted will into martyrdom; their characters endure on heart alone, in scenes arranged with Hollywood cunning; their authors treat their grief as an imperative not just to write but for readers to read them. But Adler warily wrote the truth, and he did so by the Adorno method, even if Adorno never certified it: His fiction individuated the nonfiction he wrote, in forms that adapted, and realigned, the grotesque “nonfiction” he experienced. Between the two genres was a wall, perhaps “invisible,” perhaps imaginary—a mental fence between allied integrities.
Arthur concludes The Wall with a fantasy in which Kratzenstein offers him an apology, and celebrates his work at a sociology gathering on Shepherd’s Field—Hampstead Heath—which resembles a carnival, complete with bumper cars and a shooting gallery. As the festivities dwindle, and Arthur stalks back alone to West Park Row, he prepares himself to face the fact that not only was it all just a dream, but that its recording and even its dreaming have consequences: “Thus I have robbed myself of the last opportunity to find a place among my contemporaries, to feel that I have a function as a member of society, even if it is only that of being a recognized witness to what I have lived through.”
FROM THE DIARIES
WHAT KIND OF NEIGHBORHOOD IS PALILULA (BELGRADE)?
The kind of neighborhood where people think it’s fun to put stolen disarticulated decapitated mannequins out on their balconies.
THE HAGUE
The General answered the Examining Magistrate: “But how can it be genocide, if we killed them individually? Because we hated them individually—I did, separately—each and every one.”
CONDUCTING MORTALITY
ON HENRY-LOUIS DE LA GRANGE’S MAHLER
PLAYB
ILLS ARE NECESSARY ONLY INSOFAR as the art they describe is not; it is as if listeners have to be distracted from the music they’re supposed to be listening to. These programs tell us that the slow drag we’re about to hear is no ordinary funeral procession but a Trauermarsch, composed in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, under conditions of, usually, unremitting misery. Fill in the blank: The composer of this work suffered from insanity, tuberculosis, syphilis, or suicide. Go on any night to any concert hall: You will see people looking and seeing, not hearing, and the sound they make riffling pages is often louder than the pianissimos of the slowest slow movements. These notes, so opposed to musical notation, tell us the sequence of the evening’s entertainments and their stories as well, in the tradition of nineteenth-century “program music”—music that seeks associations outside of itself, aerating aural experience through reference to nature or philosophy, to literature or the visual arts. Although some metaphors provided by these notes reflect a composer’s intention, all insist on refusing music its abstraction, on transforming its absolute, mathematical quality into the emotionally relatable, the familiarly human. The New York Philharmonic’s most recent note for a “symphonic poem,” Eine Alpensinfonie by Richard Strauss, succinctly outlines, away from the five lines of the staff, its composer’s extramusical program:
The action takes place in the space of twenty-four hours, from predawn through the late night. Over the course of twenty-two discrete episodes (one is bipartite, so we may identify twenty-three events), the listener goes up the mountain and down again, encountering along the way a catalog of natural features one might expect to find on such a journey—forests, streams, meadows, and so on—as well as a hunting party (in the Sunrise), some close calls (slippery Dangerous moments and a violent Tempest), a spectacular view from the summit, and a post-sunset return home where our mountaineer(s) must surely sit back and contemplate what has been a most excellent excursion.
Among those who ventured a less excellent excursion into program music was Strauss’s friend and rival Gustav Mahler, who would write a program for his first symphony, which debuted in Budapest in 1889 as A Symphonic Poem in Two Parts. For its Hamburg revival of 1893, Mahler divided the work into Memories of Youth, describing movements one through three, and Commedia Humana, describing movements four and five; the untitled first and third movements were originally divided by an andante entitled Blumine, a flowery term for “flowers.” Unsatisfied in more than just his professional life, young Mahler was an inveterate revisionist: The first movement was said to represent spring, which “goes on and on,” followed by Blumine, then a scherzo entitled Full Sail; the second half of the symphony began with Aground, which was also the Trauermarsch, followed by the finale of Dall’Inferno al Paradiso, “the sudden outburst of despair from a deeply wounded heart.” The Hamburg performance also found Mahler appending to this symphony the subtitle Titan, even while denying that this had anything to do with the novel of the same name by Jean Paul Richter.
No poet and decidedly no impresario, Mahler eventually dropped the programmatic pretense and entitled his first symphony First Symphony, keyed in D major. As both a worshipper of Bach’s counterpoint and a director of opera, which was an art that preceded program music with story or dramatized plot, Mahler concluded that pure expression, or music qua music, was the higher calling. Leaving behind Strauss’s Alpine fantasies, and even Wagner’s rewriting of the Nibelungenlied, music in Mahler’s hands became abstract if not in sound then in inspiration, based on a literature of the soul whose only reader was himself. Mahler’s disavowal of musical narrative was the first display of the egotism that would keep audiences at arm’s length, not only from his compositions but from his conducting as well. With this denial Mahler promoted himself to genius, which he perceived sardonically as a sort of godhood—a position just superior to that of director of the Vienna State Opera.
Mahler was always an absolutist, a purist of the self. Henry-Louis de La Grange, the most Mahlerian of Mahler’s biographers, brands his subject with the following purist innovations: As a conductor, Mahler was the first to prohibit seating after the beginning of an opera, at least until the end of the first act, a practice that disturbed Habsburg higher society, who loved, above all, making an entrance; he was also the first to dismantle “the claque,” those purveyors of false applause who would provide singers with enthusiastic and enthusiastically remunerated audiences (he hired private detectives to shadow the wings). The first to value talent in acting as much as in singing, Mahler was a pioneer of opera staging, collaborating with production designer Alfred Roller on sets and costumes that sought unity with the music and not mere accompaniment. Mahler, in turn, was the only batonist outside of Bayreuth who would realize Wagner’s dream of the total theater, the Gesamtkunstwerk, “the total artwork”; even though this musician was himself fractured, thrice estranged, and homeless—not only as a conductor who’d rather compose but, by his own admission, as “a Bohemian among Austrians, an Austrian among Germans, and a Jew among all the peoples of the world.”
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HERE IS THE PROGRAM behind the program. He was born in 1860 in the kingdom of Bohemia, raised in the margravate of Moravia; his family, as Jews, had been granted freedom of movement by the ruler of those lands, Emperor Franz Josef. The Ausgleich of 1867 created the dual monarchy of Austro-Hungary, serving to grant equal rights to Austrian Jews (but not their Hungarian brethren), with the emperor finally giving constitutional credence to the ecumenical reforms of his predecessor, Josef II. Mahler studied in Vienna, lost a composition competition, and embarked on a career as conductor in the provinces (Ljubljana, Olomouc, Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, Hamburg). After converting not to Protestantism, which attracted many Jews of his generation, but to Austria’s more reactionary Catholicism, Mahler was appointed director of the Vienna State Opera, or Hofoper—the most prestigious position in the musical empire, and thus in the musical world.
Between conducting few worthwhile premieres and many revolutionary productions of Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner, Mahler wrote lieder, nine of his own symphonies, and left a tenth unfinished. He married Alma Schindler, “the most beautiful girl in Vienna,” according to Bruno Walter, Mahler’s conducting protégé, who was always ready to please. (Alma would sleep with the following personalities: architect Walter Gropius, painter Oskar Kokoschka, and writer Franz Werfel. She died a lionized drunk in New York a half century after the death of her first husband, whose memory she zealously cherished.)
The year 1907 was the family’s annus horribilis: their eldest daughter, Maria Anna, known as Putzi, had scarlet fever, then died of diphtheria at the age of four; Mahler was diagnosed with the weak heart that would kill him (his susceptibility to bacterial infection of the heart was probably caused by rheumatic fever); and, with an anti-Semitic campaign in the Viennese press setting the backstage for power plays over musicians’ pensions and repertoire that can only be described as operatic, Mahler quit the Hofoper to conduct in New York, at the Metropolitan Opera and, later, with the Philharmonic. Following his second Philharmonic season, just a week after the lunching ladies who administered the orchestra confronted him with outrageous contractual terms, Mahler incurred another heart infection. He died three months after that, in 1911 in Vienna, of endocarditis. De La Grange, not only a French baron but a fussy exquisitist, fawner, and manic completist, calls Mahler’s congenital disease a “mitral incompetence”; in the appendix of his four-volume, five-thousand-page biography, he gives Alma Mahler’s recipe for her husband’s favorite dessert, Marillenknödel, or apricot dumplings.
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IN THE SUMMER OF 1910, Mahler rushed on a depressed whim to Leiden, the Netherlands, for an informal consultation with a vacationing Sigmund Freud (it should be remembered that the name of that city, in German, means “pain”). There, during an extended stroll, Mahler apparently unburdened his soul to his fellow dre
amer and Moravian Jew. In the absence of their session’s transcription, we’re forced to settle for the work of de La Grange, who mistrusts the psychological and focuses instead on the facts, refusing to interpret. As the founding president of the Gustav Mahler Musical Library in Paris, a city that never particularly enjoyed his beloved composer, de La Grange has written a biography that tells us how Mahler made himself, and then how, like a god, he tried to remake the world in his image.
It would seem that de La Grange has done all this Freudian-unconsciously, believing he was confining himself to the essentials, even as the scope of his ambition betrays him as a man seeking to outbombast the best, obscuring the exigencies of Mahler’s life with hundreds of names and dates, musical analyses, and extended quotations of period journalism. Mahler is accorded so much biography—more than Thayer’s Beethoven (three volumes), more than Jahn’s Mozart (four volumes) and Newman’s Wagner (five short volumes)—because he came of age coevally with daily arts journalism (Mahler was both the most badly and well-reviewed conductor of his day, because he was the most reviewed), and because, as a conductor, he was a kind of celebrity. Just as an exorcism of Mahler’s art might require multiple soloists and choruses, redoubled strings, triple winds, and offstage ensembles, an organ, and a percussion battery that includes cowbells, an account of Mahler’s life requires similar resources in literature: over a million words, multiple languages, and fifty years of writing (finished in spring 2008, de La Grange began research in the mid-1950s). Conversely, giving a summary of these books is like producing a Mahler medley, condensing periphrastic brass into a brief fanfare, followed by thematic catalogs played in unrelenting succession. De La Grange’s first English volume follows Mahler from birth through his engagement at the Hofoper in 1897; Volume Two covers the beginning of that ten-year affair, through 1904; and Volume Three, which concludes with Mahler’s leaving Vienna in 1907, focuses on his personal and conducting travails, even while it chronicles his composing success: The Third and Fourth symphonies are played more widely; the Fifth is premiered; in only three summers off from the Hofoper, the “tragic” Sixth, the Nachtmusik Seventh, and the “Symphony of a Thousand” Eighth are composed. Volume Four is a translated, graphomaniacally expanded version of the French edition of Volume Three, La génie foudroyé (the bibliographic history of de La Grange’s project would require a biography of its own); it opens with Mahler’s first visit to America, the conductor “yearning,” as the poem says on Liberty’s pedestal in New York Harbor, “to breathe free.”