The Journey
Page 2
Take for instance the following passage from early on in The Journey when the Lustigs and other citizens of Stupart are subjected to the repression that will soon lead to their removal from their own homes, the very notion of a stable society under the rule of law having been turned on its head:
All that had been forbidden in the world now meant nothing, for it had never been a law but rather an arrangement that rested on enforced custom. What was once taken in stride now appeared all of a piece to the law, which had the last word and did not allow anything to contradict it. Life was reduced to force, and the natural consequence was fear, which was bound up with constant danger in order to rule life through terror. You experienced what you never had before. You rejoiced over that which you were allowed, but even this did not last for long, because any such comforts had only to be noticed and the next day they were taken away. Thus the tender juicy meat was taken away since you who are made of flesh need no meat. Then they banned fat, for your belly was full of fat. They denied you vegetables, for they stunk when they rotted. They ripped chocolate out of your hands, fruit and wine as well. You were told that there wasn’t any more.
Highways and byways were forbidden, the days were shortened and the nights lengthened, not to mention that the night was forbidden and the day forbidden as well. Shops were forbidden, doctors, hospitals, vehicles, and resting places, forbidden, all forbidden. Laundries were forbidden, libraries were forbidden. Music was forbidden, dancing forbidden. Shoes forbidden. Baths forbidden. And as long as there still was money it was forbidden. What was and what could be were forbidden. It was announced: “What you can buy is forbidden, and you can’t buy anything!” Since people could no longer buy anything, they wanted to sell what they had, for they hoped to eke out a living from what they made off their belongings. Yet they were told: “What you can sell is forbidden, and you are forbidden to sell anything.” Thus everything became sadder and they mourned their very lives, but they didn’t want to take their lives, because that was forbidden.
Here we see Adler’s musical touch in his constant play upon the word “forbidden.” No sequence of events leads up to the announcement of what is “forbidden,” nor does there seem much logistical sense in forbidding things like “shoes” or “dancing” or “night” or “day” except to demoralize and dehumanize those to whom such edicts are directed. Adler, however, explains none of this, but instead drops us directly into the psychological state of the “forbidden” through the arbitrary way it is imposed by anonymous powers for the sake of power itself. Add to this the way in which Adler speaks of the anonymous “you” who experiences all of this in both a first- and secondhand manner and we find ourselves in a kind of netherworld, a place that is not a place, a time that is not a time, spoken by a person who is not a person, but rather the idea or vestige of a person. The result is the “almost futuristic deformation of social life” that the title character of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz cites after reading Adler’s study of Theresienstadt. One never quite knows where one is or who is speaking in The Journey, and that is much to the point. Such disorientation is meant to convey a society that has fallen into complete dissolution, one where all borders between perpetrator and victim are fluid and unbound, the menace that consumes them a force in itself.
Listen, for instance, to the following passage a bit farther on where Adler now switches from the firsthand “you” that speaks for the “forbidden” to the imperative use of “you” by the officials herding the “forbidden” onto the trains:
You’re being given a sign to move, don’t you see it? You have to admit that cross-eyed Herr Nussbaum is certainly on the ball. Everything goes off without a hitch. The assistants sigh deeply, but it’s a sigh of relief, for they have done well. Not a single complaint is heard. The heroes stroll and strut the length of the station platform. You sit down, one on top of another, four to a bench, eight to a compartment, like regular, upstanding citizens. But this is no ski hut, there is no snow. No, they are empty train cars. They are narrow, much more narrow than the huts you should have built, but which have already been finished, thus saving you the work. Everything has been taken care of, for they did not want to strain your silky little hands. Who could possibly complain about such sound accommodations? How could you have even completed the job when you have never learned to work with your hands?
You can’t be trusted with anything, everything must be arranged for you, because you are a lazy bunch that not even lifting a shovel can change. Like little children, everything has to be done for you, though you arrive at the dinner table without uttering the slightest thank-you. Nothing can be expected from you but your stinking smell. Everything you youngsters need has been taken care of for you, we’ve made sure of that. We have sacrificed ourselves for you. If we were a little tougher with you, then you would get all worked up and melt right in the middle of snowy winter. You want snowdrops? We haven’t brought you flowers. It’s too late. The train will depart before we can get some. We’ll send them to you. Yes, everything your heart desires will be sent to you. But you should be off already! Have you forgotten something? That doesn’t matter. Just drop us a line, we’ll take care of everything. You can count on us. Can’t you see it in our faces? Just look in our eyes and you’ll see that we can be trusted! Something could happen to you? Who told you that? It’s just a bunch of stupid chatter! Not a single hair will be disturbed. Such transgressions are not allowed. Now you are traveling to safety, your new home, just like you always wanted. Is the good-bye hard for you? That’s hard for us to believe! No, we can’t believe it! The forbidden at last lies behind you for good, and now eternal freedom is waving you on. There you can do what you want. We wish we had the chance to share your lot, but unfortunately that has been denied us. With us lies the responsibility to worry about your well-being, and then to worry about your brothers who are also awaiting the journey.
Again we find several themes at play here. Mention of the “huts” that the “forbidden” were meant to have built alludes to the Jewish work details who were cruelly sent ahead to construct unwittingly their own future ghetto at Theresienstadt. This is countered by the focus on the train cars, as if the latter were luxury travel accommodations about to take them on a winter ski vacation, rather than the same trains that will later transport the “forbidden” to the east and near-certain death. Adler’s mix of allusions to the past, present, and future taps the ability of montage to link seemingly disparate times and places such that, again as in Kafka, one place is interchangeable with another amid the nightmare of a seemingly inescapable labyrinth. In addition, an almost comic book-like transparency reveals the bitter irony with which Adler designates the commanders as “die Helden,” or “heroes,” while his description of the henchman Herr Nussbaum as “cross-eyed” plays off of the vocabulary of deformity and impurity that the Nazis so frequently cast upon their victims. Most sinister of all, however, is the way in which the voice of command and coercion mixes with a disembodied voice of disdain and mockery, leaving us to sort the two in much the same way that deportees were forced to sort through the lies and promises that duped them into signing over their lives in order to gain what they thought was the safe haven of Theresienstadt.
But what of the Lustig family and their individual plight? How are we meant to follow their story while Adler mouths the many voices of the diseased society that surrounds them? The answer is that, in a certain way, their absence from the novel is also a kind of presence. When Adler explores the complex and interwoven relations between the citizens, victims, commanders, officials, and henchmen, our longing, in diminished form, is for the simple human reality of the Lustigs, which they must have longed for themselves. When Adler returns to their story, balance and clarity return to the narrative, though he is also careful to allow this to happen only in the most unreal of circumstances. This way the Lustigs are granted a certain dignity in the handling of their own plight, rather than their circumstances constantly controlling them, however m
uch they are unable to overcome them in the end. Leopold Lustig, for example, may be interned, but he is not a prisoner. He is indeed stripped of his license to practice medicine, but he cannot be stripped of his ability to think and reflect. On the other hand, Leopold’s presence is passive, interior, largely unspoken, and largely unknown to those around him. Adler’s mission is to make visible the invisible, to excavate that which has been buried, in this case literally. The result is that both Leopold and Adler reach a surprising, if not paradoxical, denouement when Leopold both asserts his own sense of dwelling within this place while also recognizing the forces that have condemned him to it.
Leopold dies in Ruhenthal; Caroline, Ida, and Zerlina pass into the darkness of the death camps; only Paul lives to return. His will be the consciousness, however, that preserves the thought and memory of them, while Adler’s own duty is to construct the complex means by which to convey but the slightest glimmer of their being. Adler’s own memory of course provided the fuel for the white heat of his tale’s content, but it is the cool hand of the artist, Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus paring his fingernails while gazing on at the outrage of history, that forges his tale in modernist fashion.
Indeed, if this Leopold reminds us of another Leopold lost in the labyrinth of Joyce’s Dublin, the deeper irony is that Theresienstadt is a labyrinth leading to quintessential negation rather than the climactic affirmation of Ulysses. At the same time, one would be remiss not to acknowledge the symbolic linkage between Leopold Lustig and Leo Baeck, the spiritual leader of Germany’s Jews, who was also interned at Theresienstadt and who also worked on the garbage detail there. Fortunately, Leo Baeck did not die, but survived the war to, among many other things, preserve Adler’s voluminous notes on Theresienstadt, which Adler then retrieved after his liberation from Langenstein. Hence, Leopold’s fictional death and disappearance among the refuse is countered in real life by Adler’s mining of the factual detritus through the assistance of Leo Baeck’s act of preservation. That Adler then uses the “refuse” of his experience to create vivid factual and fictional renderings of it is his triumph.
“So what is literature good for?” asks W. G. Sebald in the last essay he wrote, just weeks before his death, a talk titled “An Attempt at Restitution,”* which he delivered at the opening of the Literaturhaus in Stuttgart. Answering this question with a question that Hölderlin asked himself, Sebald inquires, “Am I … to fare like the thousands who in their springtime days lived in both foreboding and love, but were seized by avenging Fates on a drunken day, secretly and silently betrayed, to do penance in the dark of an all too sober realm where wild confusion prevails in the treacherous light, where they count slow time in frost and drought, and man still praises immortality in sighs alone[?]” This, in fact, is Adler’s question, and the conclusion Sebald reaches also seems pertinent: “The synoptic view across the barrier of death presented by the poet in these lines is both overshadowed and illuminated, however, by the memory of those to whom the greatest injustice was done. There are many forms of writing; only in literature, however, can there be an attempt at restitution over and above the mere recital of facts and over and above scholarship.”
Adler’s approach in The Journey is ideally suited to transposing Hölderlin’s “synoptic view across the barrier of death,” thus rising to the standard that Sebald seeks. Through the figurative use of the Lustig family as a stand-in for those who lived, suffered, and died in Theresienstadt, as well as the arch use of the “rubbish heap” and the so-called heroes who watch over the prisoners and sadistically invoke the “forbidden,” Adler provides a symbolic frame for the misery inherent to his experience, along with an artistic approach that constantly keeps us off balance as readers as we try to appreciate that experience. Adler accomplishes this by asking us to see beyond his metonyms in order to imagine the experience they represent for ourselves. In this way, Adler’s work is both about Theresienstadt and not about it at the same time. Indeed, in some essential way it can never be about the misery endured there, but instead about the imperative for the imagination to attempt to imagine the unimaginable, be it Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Darfur, or the next mindless atrocity destined to cross our television screens as we look on, helpless and aghast.
Vitriolic, yet possessed of discipline and artistry; tender, yet refusing self-pity; accusatory, yet knowing the dignity of compassion and forgiveness, The Journey is Adler’s attempt not at restitution, perhaps, but at the restoration of memory through the fluidity of consciousness evoked through language rather than the fixed edifice of a monument. Only within the music of our consciousness do we connect and reconnect, harken and repeat the disparate elements of our lives, and literature remains the deepest evocation of that process. Through this act of preservation H. G. Adler becomes an “entity capable of remembering itself,” as the journey “arrives at a sense of peace.” Die Reise is the tale of that journey and the apex of Adler’s art.
Peter Filkins
December 15, 2007
* For a discussion of Adler and Adorno, see Jeremy Adler, “The One Who Got Away” in The Times Literary Supplement, October 4, 1996.
* Quoted from Norbert Troller’s introduction to his book Theresienstadt: Hitler’s Gift to the Jews, translated by Susan E. Cernyak-Spatz (Chapel Hill: Univeristy of North Carolina Press, 1991).
* Collected in Campo Santo, edited by Sven Meyer and translated by Anthea Bell (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005).
For Elias and Veza Canetti
The Journey
Augury
DRIVEN FORTH, CERTAINLY, YET WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING, MAN IS SUBJECTED to a fate that at one point appears to consist of misery, at another of happiness, then perhaps something else; but in the end everything is drowned in a boundlessness that tolerates no limit, against which, as many have said, any assertion is a rarity, an island in a measureless ocean. Therefore there is no cause for grief. Also, it’s best not to seek out too many opinions, because, by linking delusions and fears to which we are addicted, strong views keep you constantly drawn to what does not exist, or even if it did, would seem prohibited. So you find yourself inclined to agree with this or that notion, the emptiness of a sensible or blindly followed bit of wisdom, until you finally become aware of how unfathomable any view is, and that one is wise to quietly refrain from getting too involved with the struggles to salvage anything from the rubbish heap, life’s course demanding this of us already.
Thus some measure of peace is attained. It’s a peace found in endless flight, but nonetheless genuine peace. It is to be sure not an escape from yourself, no matter how much it may seem so, but rather the flight that consists of a ceaseless progression along the winding paths of a solitary realm, and because you abide in this realm you can call it peace, for upon time’s stage everything remains fixed in the present. You’re still a part of this. You travel many roads, and in many towns you appear with your relatives and friends; you stand, you walk, you fall and die. You don’t believe you’re still on the stage, even when you acknowledge you were once on it. But you’re wrong, for they took you away and set you back onstage amid the fleeting journey. You didn’t escape, even when you seemed suddenly sunk, figuratively and literally.
Yet what happens onstage? Many analogies are sought that often capture something essential, but none serves us better than the metaphor of the journey, which we can think of as flight. But what entity is it amid all these travels that recalls its own essence? It’s memory itself, which sets out on the journey and is also dragged along through constant wandering. This entity, however, cannot leave its present location; that’s why it acts in the present and finds space enough to unfold upon a single stage, which allows nothing else to appear but this entity capable of remembering itself, and so the image of the journey as flight arrives at a sense of peace, the entity that experiences it having been born in memory itself.
We are often reproached for the passivity of our beginning, of how reluctant we were to bring matters o
ut into the open. But we cannot blame ourselves for our own expulsion, for that would imply that we wanted to give up. Thus we begin our search for a resting place ever anew; driven perhaps by an insatiability that in the end defines us, we are the heralds of life. The previously drawn analogy between the journey and peace becomes nothing but an analogy unto itself the moment we apply it in practical terms, becoming invalid in the world at large, because now everything appears to be in motion and indeed transforms itself entirely through motion. With good reason, one could speak of a passion or obsession that would sweep others along with us insofar as we are able to capture the living breath of our experience in motion. For indeed, we are our own creation; whether we are denied or accepted at our final end, when one must answer for oneself, much more depends, namely the flourishing of a world that, out of its deepest despair and highest aspirations, is called upon to form its own, in a certain sense, eternal countenance amid the destruction of our only meaningful and yet impalpable achievement, one accomplished in and for itself without the participation and help of the world at large.