by H. G. Adler
“It’s already late, my dear friend. I thank you for everything. You have helped me so much. Neither of us will forget this day. A day lived in the center, not the middle of the night.… Take care of yourself, and safe journey!”
“Safe journey to you as well! You know what I mean, don’t you? And please greet your loved ones from me!”
Paul looks around, but his friend, whose hand he could still feel, has slipped around the corner, and Paul has to hurry in order to get back to his barracks on Kanonenberg. Paul is not happy, but rather in high spirits and sustained by a deep current of feeling, thoughts swimming clearly and in relaxed streams through his satisfied consciousness amid a fertile quiet. So feels the wanderer, and he had never known such a feeling before, how deep his memories stirred and how far back they reached. To walk along as light as a feather was no longer hard for Paul. He could not have stood to hurry so just a week ago. Now he moves on ahead with ease, even uphill, his breath supporting his relaxed gait. He tells himself with confidence that he will make it through the journey, he doesn’t have to worry about whatever trouble lies ahead. It will happen! It will happen! I will be on my way! The road beckons. Someone should rouse the late sleeper, he should hurry, it’s almost eleven, the time is here for the rabble, a whistle blows and rattles, a smile of derision rains down from behind, go on home, off with you, go on home!
“I’m already home! I leave tomorrow!”
The American shines a bright flashlight on the idiot who shouldn’t be out on the streets, wondering what kind of guy he’s dealing with. He cackles out an order in English as a well-meaning joke, then he is quiet. Paul no longer listens; he’s a long way off from being asked to do anything today. Paul is already in the yard, his steps slowing. He climbs the couple of steps and then for the last time is a guest in the officer’s room. He is happy that there is no longer blackout, at last the light can shine freely through the window. Quickly he readies his things for the morning. Then he goes to sleep.
Paul is glad that he has everything in order; now everything will be as easy as the first night he was in Unkenburg, but without any feeling of death. The image of Zerlina enters his thoughts without sadness, his parents also arrive and look peaceful. Paul bows his head before them and without any shyness considers the dead who are there with him. He is confident that he will not feel ashamed before them anymore, that he will venture forth on the journey, and that the hand of life has been extended to him. Onward! He senses that, as long as he remains here, his longing will diminish and dissipate. He must no longer cling to things with such intensity and can now pull himself away from the column that he was chained to until earlier that day. Paul can still hear the time strike in the middle of his sleep, a quarter after, half past, patiently on and on. Then he no longer noticed how the night grew ever deeper and embraced him more and more and let the quarter hours continue to strike.
When Paul awakens it is early morning. Yesterday has flowed into today, as if today were still yesterday. Paul has no time to waste. He gets up and thanks the bed that has taken him in. He folds a blanket and attaches it firmly to the knapsack. After washing he quickly packs. When he’s done he takes the mirror off the wall, wipes it clean, covers it with a clean hand towel, and buries it in between some underwear. Then he closes the knapsack. After a little meal, Paul grabs the satchel, then he lifts the knapsack and puts his arms through the straps, lifting his suitcase meanwhile with his left hand. Paul thanks the room that has put him up so well. Already he is in the hall; he doesn’t leave his name on the door, but rather rips up the note and throws it away, leaving the door open.
Paul crosses the yard and thanks the barracks, thanks Kanonenberg as well. Now he follows the road down the hill, once more through the city, the little park in full bloom, the general’s statue without a head, the extinguished cathedral, the picked-over rubble of the old city already partially swept away, paths in between having been shoveled clear. Paul sees again the theater’s wreckage, its decay even further advanced, the walls perhaps ready to collapse. Then comes the house where Frau Wildenschwert lives, then the long street, and before long he passes police headquarters. Finally Paul is at the station.
“They’re readying a train.”
The man in the red cap assured him it was so. Paul should stand in line with the others who are waiting. The crowd grants him a spot. Paul says thank you and shoves his suitcase forward, his free hand already clutching the cool railing. Perhaps the people understand why he’s in such a hurry. He thinks he sees them waving, wishing him a safe journey, the rubbish and the rubble vanquished at last.
* Frau Holle is the title character of a Brothers Grimm tale.
* Frau Ilsebill is the name of the wife in the Brothers Grimm tale “The Fisherman and His Wife.”
* Unken means “toads” in German. Hence, Unkenburg is the “town of toads.”
Afterword
ONLY THOSE WHO RISK THE JOURNEY
FIND THEIR WAY HOME
Jeremy Adler
THE JOURNEY TELLS THE STORY OF PEOPLE WHO WERE FORBIDDEN. ORDINARY people with hopes and fears like the Lustig family. In the middle of their everyday life they receive the latest commandment, “Thou shalt not dwell among us!” and this simple sentence is the start of ever more monstrous decrees. “The entire world” has turned into “the forbidden.” The victims know it themselves: “We are all forbidden.” Such declarations reverse all normal conceptions, transforming a free society into a slave society with inverted institutions whose purpose it is to make life impossible. Thus we learn: “In the name of justice, injustice is installed.” Even though innocent people “invoke the need for justice,” what we hear is “Oh, what crazy ideas you get, still thinking about justice, as if you were never told that it’s already fit and just that inevitably you are ordered about and told to do things that only to you do not seem right.” Nothing remains as it was, and even the reader must find his way—led by the narrative voice—on a blind “journey” in a senseless world in which “all experience is betrayed,” where all words cease to exist, since in the end names “no longer mean anything.” In order to still try to evoke the unspeakable, the narrative voice chooses “the image of the journey.” Initially the “fleeting journey” simply serves as the image of fate, or in other words as a timeless metaphor for the plight of the people who have been forbidden. In addition, however, as is made clear at the start of the tale, the metaphor represents “memory itself, which sets out on the journey and is also dragged along through constant wandering.” Thus the novel creates the possibility of memory, by pursuing the path of the forbidden people through their own hopes and memories, in order to bear witness to the compassionate memory of the victims for posterity, and thus the simultaneous journey of the narrative voice itself. Elias Canetti recognized the groundbreaking aspect of this work: “It will become the classic book about this kind of ‘journey,’ no matter who is displaced or devastated, no matter to whom it happens.”
Born on July 2, 1910, in Prague, Hans Günther Adler grew up in a middle-class family, studied music, literature, philosophy, and psychology, and wrote a dissertation on “Klopstock and Music.” He experienced firsthand Hitler’s seizure of power while researching in archives in Berlin. He aspired to a career as an academic while seeking at the same time to establish himself as a writer. His hopes for each were destroyed in 1933. He then began work as a secretary in a Prague school for continuing education. By 1938 he had plans to emigrate. Unfortunately, these fell through. He remained in Prague and was intensely caught up in the confusion of the times. In 1941 he was put to work as a slave laborer building railroads. Then, in 1942, there followed his deportation to Theresienstadt along with his wife, the doctor Gertrud Klepetar, and her family. Gertrud’s father died there. Her aunt was transported east. Hans Günther and Gertrud Adler-Klepetar were deported to Auschwitz in 1944. There on the “ramp,” Gertrud chose to join her mother on “the bad side” in order that she should not die alone. After two week
s my father was transported to Niederorschel, an outlying camp of Buchenwald, and then to the underground factory at Langenstein, where he was finally liberated by American troops in April 1945.
Next he wandered—exhausted and sick—to Halberstadt, from where he began the adventurous return to Prague. He hardly had the strength to climb the stairs to the first floor when he got there, and for years he suffered from sudden spells of weakness. Nonetheless he managed to start a new life. He dedicated himself to the memory of the “precious dead” and found his vocation as a “witness to truth.” This gave him a new, in fact the sole, purpose for his life. In 1947 he fled the arrival of the Communist regime, leaving his native Prague for London. There he remained an exile, describing himself as a freelance writer “at home in exile,” though he was able to establish himself neither as a poet nor as a teacher. Eventually he found a footing as a writer in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, as well as in Israel and the United States. As his first biographer, Jürgen Serke, remarked, when he died in London on August 21, 1988, H. G. Adler left behind an unparalleled “Gesamtkunstwerk” made up of poems, stories, novels, scholarly studies, and essays. Among these The Journey holds a special place. It is his most tender, most moving book.
After he finished the first draft of his groundbreaking monograph Theresienstadt 1941–1945: The Face of a Slave Society, which he wrote between 1945 and 1948, with an unbelievable outburst of the energy that had been chained up in the camps, my father quickly produced five novels, including the novel of his formative years, Panorama (written in 1948 and published in 1968), and The Invisible Wall (written from 1954 to 1956 and published in 1989). The Journey, written in 1950–51, is the centerpiece of this unique confrontation with l’univers concentrationnaire, to use David Rousset’s term. Like many of the works from the early part of his career, the novel remained unpublished for a long while. For one thing, his reputation as a scholar after the publication of his Theresienstadt book in 1955 overshadowed his literary efforts. For another, the time was not yet ripe for a former prisoner to present his years in the camps in literary rather than documentary fashion. Moreover, the members of the Prague School that had shaped Adler’s writing had either been expelled or exterminated, and with them his works’ ideal readers.
Only gradually and through the repeated assays that have been made over the years are we able to comprehend the scale of the terror between 1933 and 1945. Memory fails in the face of facts. One needs only to think of how long it took for Primo Levi’s moving portrait of his life in Auschwitz to become widely known in order to recognize how difficult it has been to make the Shoah known in the world. Simply reporting events was in no way enough to develop awareness or to shape memory, and thereby enable readers to enter into the world of the camps. For the public at large, the decisive turning points were the Nuremberg trials, the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, and the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Outrage at the perpetrators who were still alive rekindled the memory of their victims. After that there was no looking away. Understanding still depends, however, on the perspective from which one views the events, with what degree of sincerity, and whether one accepts the truth. Whoever wants to look away has to ask himself in what direction he will turn his gaze. In The Journey this means: “The truth is merciless, and it is always victorious, always to people’s surprise, for nothing is as deeply mocked as the final victory of truth, even when its story involves countless insults, though never a final defeat. The truth is most terrible for those who never risk it.… Truth allows no escape … but it is never cruel.” People, so it seems, were simply not ready to listen to this kind of “truth” in a novel in the 1950s.
Although there were a number of voices at the time that spoke in support of The Journey, the book faced stiff opposition from several influential people. In England a well-known publisher advised H. G. Adler to take Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead as a model of how to tackle a novel about Auschwitz. In Germany, Peter Suhrkamp reacted with outrage: “As long as I live, this book will not be printed in Germany.” That is just what happened. Only after Suhrkamp’s death did the book find an independent spirit, Knut Erichson, who decided to publish The Journey in his Bonn publishing house, bibliotheca christiana, in 1962. “I’m not the publisher for you,” he explained to the author, “but I’ll publish the book because no one else will.” The notable typographer Hermann Zapf did the design, and so the book first appeared in a suitably elegant form. However, the publisher did not have the means to gain widespread attention for the work. Despite important reviews that should have helped the book to break through, it didn’t happen. The Journey remained a well-kept secret.
The original title was Die Reise: Eine Ballade, yet for reasons of copyright Erichson chose Eine Reise, and he advised the author to drop the unusual subtitle, Eine Ballade. But since in Adler’s eyes the book was not a “novel,” which in his opinion is a genre that captures “an entire world,” he chose the more modest subtitle Eine Erzählung, or A Tale. This confusing, somewhat lightweight subtitle is another reason the book was rarely noticed. In his review, Heimito von Doderer acknowledged the problem with the genre: “The author calls this book ‘A Tale.’ Yet it’s a novel. Not because of its length, but rather because of its universal reach.” Then came the concession: “Yet the work is really a ballad.” Doderer went on to explain his view: “A ballad does not accuse, it does not excuse. It is a crystalline form.” The ballad of The Journey is “liberating,” “it makes the subject, be it as it may (and here the case borders on the unbelievable), weightless and floating, without relinquishing any of its weight. A whole mountain of horror is turned into song.” Though Doderer was right to draw the analogy between the lyrical nature of The Journey and the ballad form, the term also makes sense on other levels, for in a ballad, according to Goethe’s definition, lyrical, dramatic, and narrative moments join together. These three forms of expression are bound together elaborately in The Journey. The polyphonic stream of consciousness leads us continually from one point of view to another. The reader often no longer knows who is speaking before the next voice enters. In this manner, the narrative stream runs from Paul’s thoughts to his mother’s feelings without our noticing a break, or the narrator’s reflections into the sister’s fears. As with a ballad, the book contains the refrainlike repetition of numerous central motifs. Thus the form of the ballad does not harken here to a traditional genre, but rather creates a new narrative form, one that can be placed somewhere among Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner. The Journey appeared almost at the same time as Faulkner’s great memoir of World War I, A Fable, and there are also parallels with Ulysses and Between the Acts, Ilse Aichinger’s Herod’s Children being another important point of reference. In the end, however, like Doderer, I am at a loss when it comes to finding suitable literary comparisons for The Journey. Roland H. Wiegenstein came to the most radical conclusion on this point in his review in Merkur: “The book belongs to no literary category whatsoever.”
The book is dedicated to Adler’s friends Elias and Veza Canetti. Soon after it was completed, Canetti formed a clear judgment: The Journey was “a masterpiece, written in an especially beautiful and clear prose, beyond rancour or bitterness.” Canetti went on to elaborate his view, using his own characteristic idiom: “I believe that your experience … has here met with a complete poetic transformation, one that has never before been achieved.” Since Canetti considered a writer to be the “guardian of transformation,” we can assume that he was choosing his words most precisely, and that The Journey matched his own illuminating criteria for successful imaginative literature. The magic word transformation recalls the continual movement of The Journey, its overwhelming linguistic richness, that “boundlessness that tolerates no limit,” which the narrative voice invokes right from the start: “You travel many roads, and in many towns you appear with your relatives and friends; you stand, you walk, you fall and die.” That which Canetti called the mythic is found in the images that are continually transforme
d and used as leitmotifs, as well as in the various fairy-tale figures. Finally, Canetti was the first to arrive at what the novel meant for modernity. In the quality of the novel, which Canetti particularly stressed, we recognize its lasting relevance: “The most terrible things that could possibly happen to human beings are presented here as if they were weightless, delicate, and easily withstood, as if they could not harm the human core.” When the book appeared, Veza Canetti wrote to thank the author with a postcard from the British Museum that depicts the torso of Pallas Athene together with its head, from which the face has been broken off. “The book is too beautiful for words and too sad. We are proud of the dedication.”
The novel transposes the experience of the author, “estranging” it as Adler was wont to say, and removes it from the realm of the personal. Casting himself in the form of Paul Lustig, the writer transforms himself into the brother of his first wife, Gertrud Klepetar, to create a family unit. My father called Gertrud “Geraldine.” Here she is transfigured as Zerlina. Her parents, Dr. David and Elisabeth Klepetar, appear as Dr. Leopold and Caroline Lustig. Gertrud’s aunt, her mother’s sister, is portrayed as Ida Schwarz. In this way the family represents a sociological unit, a social atom whose very nucleus is annihilated by the destructive force imposed on them by history. This small group symbolizes the innumerable number of their fellow victims in suffering. The family name of the two sisters—Schmerzenreich—evokes the fate of this whole community bound together by a common fate. Their valley of tears is a realm of pain. “Lyrical irony” was what H. G. Adler called the style of the book, referring to the lyricism of the language as well as to the ever-present use of irony that accuses but does not offend, that laments but does not complain, granting a lightness of tone to such appalling events without lessening the grief or shrinking away from the horror, and enveloping the victims themselves with the love that is due to them even in the moment of their downfall. The narrative voice speaks gently, a secret love suffuses the novel like the spirit of the ineffable in a lyric poem. At the outset we are told: “You were rounded up and not one kind word was spoken.” Right from the start, one senses the presence of the goodness that is absent from the events themselves. When Ida Schwarz begins her last journey, the narrator evokes the hour of her birth. We hear the midwife, “a capable woman,” inform the mother: “It’s a girl, Frau Schmerzenreich!” Here again a certain tenderness can be heard. We measure death against birth, compare things as they are with the circumstances that would be more appropriate to them. The incalculable horrors are measured against missing values. In this ironic context, pleasant words seem like satire. The executioners appear in the novel just as they themselves wish to be regarded. They are simply called “heroes.” Their method of execution, as attested by many to this very day, is hygienic. Everything is undertaken “with the utmost consideration.” In the play of values—which is also still relevant today—we also recognize the shared responsibility of economy and society, culture and the press. Through their own words, the fellow citizens, who actually know what is happening, judge themselves.