The Journey
Page 39
And so we wander on this Journey that moves with lyrical irony between concepts like “justice” and “faith” and symbolic images like “the journey” and “rubbish”—as Heinrich Böll noted—in a narrative that constantly returns to everyday matters and activities. “It only takes someone like Adler,” said Böll in characterizing the effect of this multivoiced dialectic in his Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics, “to describe something as seemingly harmless as rubbish collecting in order to reveal the uncanny.” We are led through the various stations of the novel almost unnoticeably, moving from Stupart to Leitenberg, then on to Ruhenthal and Unkenburg. Behind the names lie Prague (one thinks of Stupartgasse, around the corner from the Old Town Square), Leitmeritz, Theresienstadt, and Halberstadt. But the many strands of memory do not run in a straight line. The principles that the horror, the madness, the traumas, and the mourning obey cause the course of this journey to run in ever-new directions until finally the narrator exhausts every path. Memory is a burning ember that defines the theme as well as the style. We experience from within how everything began: “The sickness had crept out of nowhere without a sign to alert the medical world before suddenly everyone fell sick. It was the first epidemic of mental illness.” In Ruhenthal the father dies. Then the aunt begins her journey to an unnamed place. Finally we follow Zerlina on her last journey. Everything resists this journey. Zerlina cannot admit to herself where she is headed. The narrator cannot follow her, can only try to find different ways to approach it. The ultimate place of terror, whose name today is on everyone’s lips as a symbol of these events, remains nameless. In the same way, the narrative voice refuses to name religions or nationalities. It was the very polarization of such groups that led into the abyss, and hence their concepts are of no use for the narrative. In this all-encompassing anonymity we see once again the power of the ballad, which transmutes the particular into the general. It is about people as such: “There are no roads. The names mean nothing.” Paul escapes the unnameable place, reaches Unkenburg, spends some time there, makes new friends, and then begins a new journey. The tale ends on a fitting note. In a dedication copy, the author one day wrote: “Only those who risk the journey find their way home.”
Born in Prague in 1910, H. G. Adler spent two and a half years in Theresienstadt before being deported to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Langenstein, where he was liberated in April 1945. Leaving Prague for London in 1947, Adler worked as a freelance teacher and writer until his death in 1988. The author of twenty-six books of fiction, stories, poems, history, philosophy, and religion, he is best known for his monograph Theresienstadt 1941–1945, for which he received the Leo Baeck Prize in 1958. The Journey is the first of Adler’s six novels to be translated into English.
About the Translator
Peter Filkins is a poet and translator. He is the recipient of a 2007 Distinguished Translation Award from the Austrian Ministry for Education, Arts, and Culture, a 2005 Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, and a past recipient of an Outstanding Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. He teaches literature and writing at Bard College at Simon’s Rock.
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