The Journey
Page 1
Praise for
The Journey
“Adler is finally getting his due.… The translation of The Journey is a publishing-world event.”
—The New Criterion
“Filkins has done a great service by introducing to English-speaking readers an important witness to the destruction of the European Jews.”
—Moment
“Strongly recommended … There is great beauty in this writing.”
—Library Journal
“After Auschwitz … critics believed that literature was no longer possible. Adler believed that it was not only possible, but necessary. Writing this astounding novel, Adler amply proved his point.”
—Historical Novels Review
“True to the madness of reality … For Adler, the lingering effect of his experience is disorientation, and his novel brings that feeling to life.”
—Booklist
“Bold unconventionality … startles like a gunshot … [an] extraordinarily ambitious attempt to articulate the unspeakable.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“There is an old Hasidic saying: If you carry your own lantern, you will endure the dark. And today, as the generation of survivors is almost gone, H. G. Adler’s The Journey—a reclaimed masterpiece—illuminates their soul and safeguards their spirit. This powerful work, both lyrical and stark, is a rekindled light through the dark of the past, to be embraced as one would an inheritance.”
—BERNICE EISENSTEIN, author of I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors
The Journey 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.
2009 Modern Library Paperback Edition
Translation and introduction copyright © 2008 by Peter Filkins
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random
House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design
are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., in 2008.
This work was originally published in Germany as Eine Reise by Bibliotheca
Christiana in 1962 and by Paul Zsolnay Verlag in 1999. Copyright © 1999
by Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna. This edition published in agreement
with Paul Zsolnay Verlag.
A portion of this translation originally appeared in Literary Imagination in 2006.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Adler, H. G.
[Reise. English]
The journey: a novel / H. G. Adler; translated from German by Peter Filkins.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-820-1
I. Filkins, Peter. II. Title.
PT2601.D614R4513 2008
833′.914—dc22 2008000072
www.modernlibrary.com
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Translator’s Note
Introduction by Peter Filkins
Dedication
The Journey
Afterword: Only Those Who Risk the Journey Find Their Way Home by Jeremy Adler
About the Author
About the Translator
The Modern Library
Translator’s Note
THE GERMAN TEXT FOR THE NOVEL IS TAKEN FROM THE 1999 REISSUE OF EINE Reise by Zsolnay Verlag, which in turn was printed from the plates for the original version, published in 1962 by bibliotheca christiana.
A segment of the translation was published in Literary Imagination, whose editors I wish to thank. In addition, I am deeply grateful to the American Academy in Berlin for a Berlin Prize Fellowship, without which this translation would never have been possible. I am also grateful to Bard College at Simon’s Rock for a sabbatical leave, and to the Austrian Society for Literature and the Ministry for Education, Arts, and Culture for research grants. My thanks also go to Jeremy Adler for his many patient replies to questions, to Philip Bohlman for his support and friendship, to Bernie Rodgers for reading an early draft, to Tess Lewis for her suggestions, to Chris Callanan for his resourceful help with queries, to Susan Roeper for being there throughout, and to my editor at Random House, Paul Taunton, who appreciated the novel’s import from the start.
Introduction
It seems unpardonable today that I had blocked off the investigation of my most distant past for so many years, not on principle, to be sure, but still of my own accord, and that now it is too late for me to seek out Adler, who had lived in London until his death in the summer of 1988, and talk to him.
W. G. SEBALD, Austerlitz
IF THERE WERE A DEFINING EXAMPLE OF A “LOST” WRITER, IT WOULD HAVE to be H. G. Adler. Born in Prague in 1910, he grew up in a secularized Jewish family and later studied musicology at Charles University in Prague, where he wrote a thesis on “Klopstock und die Musik,” completed in 1935. Like so many of his generation, however, his dream of becoming a professor and writer was soon postponed. Though he made attempts to emigrate before the Germans marched into Czechoslovakia, visas were difficult to come by, circumstances ever changing and confusing, the needs of family and friends too pressing to ignore. Adler was still in Prague when the Nazis arrived in 1939, and after marrying Gertrud Klepetar he was transported with her and her parents to Theresienstadt on February 8, 1942, where he immediately began taking notes for what would become his groundbreaking study, Theresienstadt 1941–1945, which he would publish in 1955 to wide acclaim. Adler and his wife spent two and a half years in Theresienstadt, which Adler called a Zwangsgemeinschaft, a slave community set up by the Nazis to cleanse the Reich of Jews in exchange for their “safe” passage and the worldly goods they were forced to leave behind. There his wife’s father died, while later in Auschwitz, Gertrud would join her mother on “the bad side” as they came off the train in order that she not die alone in the gas chambers. Adler’s own mother and father would also meet their deaths in other camps, a total of eighteen family members eventually disappearing into the horror.
As with so many survivors, a combination of good health, sharp wits, and pure luck saved Adler himself. After spending two weeks in Auschwitz he was transported to Niederorschel, a neighboring camp of Buchenwald, and eventually to Langenstein, where he worked in a factory that made sheet metal for airplanes. It was there that he was liberated by American troops on April 13, 1945, returning to Prague on June 20, barely alive. Eventually he regained his health and, after the Soviets moved in, emigrated to London in 1947, where he reunited with a childhood sweetheart, married, and had a son. However, he also remained an exile for the rest of his life, and died in 1988 after having published twenty-six books of poetry, fiction, philosophy, and history, as well as more than two hundred articles and essays on the Holocaust, Jewish history, literature, and philosophy. Never resting, never settling in any one field or genre, Adler described himself simply as a “freelance writer and teacher,” preferring to approach his subject matter through both literature and social science in order to carefully detail what he’d experienced, as well as render it in art so that it could be imagined by others.
Though it’s customary to begin with the basic biographical outline when introducing an author, in the case of H. G. Adler it’s absolutely necessary. Despite those twenty-six books and numerous articles and essays, his name hardly ever appears in the
standard works on the Holocaust. You will not find him listed in most encyclopedias of Holocaust writers, nor do most critics of Holocaust literature discuss his writing. Glancing mention is made here and there of his monograph on Theresienstadt, as well as his 1974 study of the systematic structures that set the Holocaust in motion, Der verwaltete Mensch (Administered Man). Almost nowhere, however, will you find mention of his poems or stories, nor of the six novels he wrote, four of which were published in his lifetime, receiving heartfelt praise from the likes of Heinrich Böll, Heimito von Doderer, and Elias Canetti. Though W. G. Sebald discusses Adler’s work on Theresienstadt in the climactic twenty pages of his novel Austerlitz, and a 2004 issue of Germany’s Text+Kritik focused on his entire career, Adler lived to face deep neglect amid the corrosive waves of time, ending up a man who set down his story in numerous works and genres only to see it lost before his very eyes. Only the recent republication of his novels and monographs has begun to bring the kind of attention they deserved in his lifetime.
How could this have happened? What is it about Adler or his work that could have led to such demise? Part of the answer lies in the mundane quirks of publishing, another part in the times in which he lived and wrote. Though Adler’s monograph on Theresienstadt received critical acclaim as well as the Leo Baeck Prize, his literary works were either published by very small publishers unable to support them with the proper distribution, or not published until years after they had been written. Eine Reise (which I prefer to call The Journey, Die Reise being the title Adler gave it when he wrote it in 1950–51) was not published until 1962. Peter Suhrkamp of Suhrkamp Verlag went so far as to say that as long as he was alive the book would never be published in Germany. Indeed, Suhrkamp died in 1959 and the book appeared from a tiny publisher three years later. Meanwhile, Panorama, Adler’s first novel, written in 1948, was not published until 1968, while Die unsichtbare Wand (The Invisible Wall), written in 1954–56, did not appear until 1989, a year after Adler’s death. Two other novels have never been published at all.
Beyond bad luck and the quirks of publishing, something else was afoot during Adler’s career, for one can perhaps hear the wall of resistance he confronted in Peter Suhrkamp’s categorical ban. The times were not ready for Adler, nor was he at ease with them. As we know, Theodor Adorno’s famous pronouncement that literature was no longer possible after Auschwitz was the accepted critical opinion of the day. Adler and Adorno corresponded, and it was on this position that they came to deep disagreement. Adler believed it not only possible to write poetry and literature after Auschwitz but that it was necessary, for only with the full engagement of the imagination would it be possible to elicit even a glimmer of the true nature of what had been suffered and, yes, survived. Adorno’s view, however, carried the day, especially with the generation of writers, editors, and publishers who controlled the production of literature in German after the war.* Add to this Adler’s exile in London, a condition that condemned him to a life lived on the periphery, and one can appreciate what it must have felt like to disappear in plain view, the irony being that this was the very same sentence that he, like millions of others, had seen carried out much earlier.
Neither Germany nor the world was ready for novels about the Holocaust in the 1950s. In fact, the number of novels published by Jews who had direct experience of the camps and lived to write fiction about them in German comes to a grand total of four. Jurek Becker’s Jacob the Liar is the best known, though Becker was only eight when he was imprisoned at Sachsenhausen. Edgar Hilsenrath’s Night, a fictionalized account of his experience at a camp in the Ukraine, is another; and Fred Wander’s The Seventh Well is a third, though it is arguably closer to a memoir than a novel. Adler’s The Journey, meanwhile, is the only one of the four set in Theresienstadt, that unique combination of a sealed town that would claim a mortality rate even higher than the death camps and the central depot for the transports to the east. Nonetheless, that is all: four novels, and no more, written in German by Jews who survived the camps. Astounding as this may sound, one need only recall that the overwhelming majority of Jews who were condemned to the camps were not of German origin, that numerous German writers wisely chose exile after 1933, and that of course the vast majority who did know the death camps firsthand did not survive to write about them. But four. In reverse proportion, it’s a number as staggering as six million.
To try to convey in short fashion the complexity and feel of a novel as strange and inventive as The Journey seems nearly impossible. Making free use of montage in jumbling its sense of time and place, and mixing philosophical speech with poetic imagery, pointed political insights with oblique imagist renderings, it is the most lyrical of the six novels, or epische Gesänge, Adler composed as matrixes of memory and history. Eine Erzählung, a tale was what Adler called it, underscoring its musical nature by attaching the subtitle Eine Ballade. However, the irony that lies in the application of such aesthetic terms to a Holocaust experience depends on the immediacy of that same experience being everywhere present in the memory that comes to shape and give voice to it. In this way, The Journey is as much about the soul and consciousness of the man who was possessed to write it as it is about the immediate suffering he endured himself.
Like an orchestral suite or tone poem, each separate part is related to all other parts through structural linkages, repeated themes, or even stark contrasts that depend on comparative readings to render the difference that both divides and unites them within the textual score. Composed of multiple voices and themes that at times barely seem to hold together, The Journey refuses to allow the reader a secure resting place, its continual change of verb tense and narrative voice keeping us uninformed, devoid of control, and insecure in our understanding of how the story will unfold. Such techniques find strong echoes in the writings of Franz Kafka, particularly in The Castle. Their disorienting effect also helps mirror the plight of those who suffered through the events themselves, for obviously to have lived through Theresienstadt or Auschwitz or the Holocaust is not the same as having at one’s fingertips the familiar historical narratives we have since developed. Adler’s Theresienstadt 1941–1945 grants a key insight into the sources behind the complexity of his fictional approach when he explains:
In Auschwitz, there was only the naked despair or the pitiless recognition of the game, and even if there existed a spark of an indestructible vitality, even if the soul managed to escape from time to time into a delusion, in the long run no one could deceive himself, everyone had to look reality in the face.
It was different in Theresienstadt. Everything there could be pushed aside, illusion flourished wildly, and hope, only mildly dampened by anxiety would eclipse everything that was hidden under an impenetrable haze. Nowhere had the inmates of a camp pushed the true face of the period further into an unknown future than here.… Only occasionally would the truth arise from the depths, touch the inmates, and after a bit of fright, they would [go back] into their existence of masks of masks.*
The urge to render an “existence of masks of masks” is what compelled Adler to create a fiction that employs the mythic trope of the fairy tale. Adler’s challenge then is how to give shape to an experience that was largely shapeless and unknowable in its immediate sense, and yet which needs to be shaped and made readable in order to be comprehensible. His answer, it would seem, is not to define its shape but instead to suggest one, art’s unifying thread of order and composition barely stitching together the various voices, events, places, and people into a unified though precarious whole.
Adler’s refusal to be typecast as a fiction writer, historian, philosopher, or poet also shows up in his unwillingness to traffic in categorical identities or referents in The Journey, for nowhere in the book (nor hardly in any of Adler’s literary works, for that matter) are the words Nazi, Hitler, Germans, Jews, camps, gas chambers, ghetto, et cetera, ever used. This approach also avoids the dangers inherent in trafficking in such reductive metonyms and thus masking t
he lived experience that stands behind them. Instead we are simply told of the Lustig family and the “journey” made by the aging father, Dr. Leopold Lustig; his wife, Caroline; her sister, Ida Schwarz; and the Lustigs’ two grown children, Zerlina and Paul. How their journey is recounted, however, is what the “tale” is about. Though in many ways the novel is composed from the perspective of Paul (the family’s only survivor and thus a stand-in for Adler himself), along the way the narrative is also spoken by the main characters themselves, the townspeople who observe them, the soldiers and officials who herd them onto the trains, the guards who watch over them, and a narrator possessed of an omnipresent sense of rage at what he pointedly refers to as Der Abfall, or the “rubbish heap” of history, which the good Dr. Lustig tends.
Der Abfall, however, also has another meaning in German, namely that of “the Fall,” or the descent from God’s grace with the election of sin by Adam and Eve in Eden. Amid the rubbish of history, then, Adler weaves a tale of metaphysical renunciation, sin, expulsion, and displacement, the fall and flight from God’s peaceable kingdom into human evil occurring against the backdrop of the Holocaust. The pursuit within such quotidian darkness, however, is one toward grace, and it is memory that provides the conduit by which the downfall is overcome. For through memory not only is consciousness restored and preserved among the survivors, but also the return of justice and its tenuous yet tenacious hold on life in the face of history.
Similar to the way in which Adler renounces the standard language of Nazi, Jew, death camp, et cetera, all place names in The Journey are fictional, though they indeed serve as metonymic ties to significant portals along Adler’s own journey. The Stupart that the Lustigs leave echoes the Stupartgasse that Kafka grew up on in Prague; and Kafka’s youngest sister, Ottilie, also spent time in Theresienstadt. Meanwhile, Leitenberg represents Leitmeritz, the town at which the trains unloaded near Theresienstadt, while Ruhenthal, with its biting overtone of “rest” or “peace,” stands for Theresienstadt itself. Lastly, Unkenburg is modeled after Halberstadt in Germany, but in a deeper sense it stands for the rootless realm of displacement that Paul later finds himself in at war’s end, and which Adler inhabited as well after surviving Auschwitz and Langenstein. Through fictional characters placed outside of a direct historical context and settings that only symbolically connect to actual places, Adler evokes the mythos that lies beneath the surface of experience, memory becoming, in the words of his son, Jeremy Adler, “the burning ember that defines the theme as well as the style.”