H. Adler - Panorama

Josef gets hold of himself, gathers in details and perceives a wholeness, as if he cannot believe that it’s there, yet he ascertains that he indeed apprehends something, it proving true, and Launceston lies as it always has at the foot of the hill, its streets winding about, the hill rising gently at first, then more sharply upward, the outer walls that once circled the castle capable only of being surmised but not actually seen. Josef finds it important that he’s not standing on a peak, that he’s not even at the highest elevation, the crumbling tower preventing any feeling of rising above the landscape, nor does it even allow one to look off in any direction, while behind Josef are walls, so if he wants to take in the entire view he must slowly walk around and circle the castle, after which he wants to go round again, though he walks round only once while contemplating. Then Josef remains standing at the spot where he rested for so long, he wishing to demonstrate his gratitude, though he doesn’t know how to do that, he quickly dismissing a sacrilegious idea of making a wreath out of some wild flowers and grass, for he feels it shouldn’t be any visible memorial, and such a feeble link to the memorial for the steadfast Quaker is forbidden, the latter having much nicer flowers than what Josef could pick from the little flowers growing in the grass, his hand brushing the lawn lightly, its blades bending slightly beneath his strokes, each leaf, each stalk bowing as if in reconciliation, the commemoration silent within. Thus Josef’s memory remains the only memorial, but this memory will leave with him, and the gratitude felt toward this place is contained within it. Because he thinks it all and ponders it all again, he’s filled with a thousand voices and wondrous feathers and glittery dust, tenderness displacing departure, abidance continuing on.

Now it’s enough, Josef cannot linger any longer, he must carry out his decision, the border has been reached. He turns around and once more walks the length of the tower wall to the other side, where the steps lead down. He’d like to head off on the path to the castle dungeon once more, and he wavers, but then decides not to and gazes off toward the prison, it still being there, large leafy plants unfurling under the protection of the cool walls, no one allowed to disturb these weeds, no wind threatens their growth as they grow over the long-cosseted horrific story of this place, just as the cheery stories of other sites are also overgrown and mercifully enshrouded, the plants not sharing how they thrive on the works and deeds of humankind as long as they are not planted or tended.

Josef turns away and hurries along at a quick pace to the park exit, ignoring the plaques that proclaim the history of Launceston. Josef doesn’t look for a crowning moment to his experience here but is instead simply pleased by his waking steps, he being happy about everything that has awakened within him, and the fact that he is awake and so awake, though it’s not a heightened sense of satisfaction, nor does he feel any triumph because his sorrow has poured forth, for it is still tucked into every hollow and cleft and it looms above in every gable and treetop. Josef is enmeshed in the general run of things, he sees the people around him who are going about their business, some cars driving by, or he hears the long drawn-out whistle of a locomotive from the train yard, the abandoned barracks of the prisoners of war that are quickly falling victim to the elements. And everything that he sees and hears is open to the day, and indeed is simply there, spewed forth by open mouths and cavities, a single effusion into the day, into his salvation. And so Josef does not withdraw, for everything is present and not tied to the history that Josef has been pleased to say goodbye to, but he no longer knows that it is goodbye, for he is aware of no break between yesterday and today, all the colored threads having run together, an immense gushing, an overflow and a rippling stream in which the view that bursts forth from life, being a genuine blink of an eye, discerns nothing. And so Josef is not a lost one nor is he one who has been forgotten, he no longer hangs caught in a web of fleeting dreams that separate him from the everyday world, because nothing is true anymore, each view continuing on to its no longer contested aims.

Josef no longer knows what he is saying goodbye to once the tower is behind him, he not having been disburdened through any kind of simplification but instead he is no longer trapped in such questions, they requiring nothing more of him, though he doesn’t doubt that each forward step will raise challenges. It’s idle to wonder what the next hours will bring, everything will come in its own time, Josef ready for it all, he feels it deep inside, though he is now in his own way without a past, it not forgotten but rather lost, he having to strain himself to see it through a veil. What he once thought a possession is now something alien and unrecognizable. Josef doesn’t know whether what history has to say has anything to do with him, whether it be this or that, because the past is so transparent in its intrusion that it no longer relates to any so-called “I” or “you,” nor is Josef sure any longer whether he is someone who has acted or is a witness or a victim, or whether he is all of these together in having been part of history or if he simply overheard a bunch of tales. The joy and sorrow back then were much the same thing, Josef almost ashamed and almost shocked that the distinction can seem so frivolous, but he is comfortable with the view that in the end it’s all the same to whatever in history clings to a certain event, since everything that happens is the price paid for living in the present, if only the individual accepts it. Josef accepts it, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to go on, for he can attest to his own existence as a person only to the degree that he is no longer reduced to the limits of his own personality, this being what he has learned on the hill in the castle park of Launceston, where to this day he has woken.

H. G. ADLER WAS ALWAYS RELUCTANT TO EASILY ATTACH HIMSELF TO ANY group, class, or nation, preferring instead to think of himself as a “single unique individual,” in the radical spirit of the Enlightenment, who over time would slowly gain acceptance from a growing readership. Since the deaths of Paul Celan, Peter Szondi, and Jean Améry, all of whom took their own lives, there have not been many Jewish authors who write in German, above all in that generation of aging men and women who survived persecution and the death camps and maintained the capacity to bear witness to their experience in history’s Hell. This, though not only this, defines Adler’s particular situation. Amid the epoch of the Shoah, I see him as allied with with Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, and yet at the same time as different. Levi, who was a partisan before his arrest, was able to continue writing in Italian without hesitation (Italy’s Fascist society never set up an Auschwitz, and the notorius Riseria of Trieste was founded by the Nazi district leader), and Wiesel managed to complete his Wandering Jew-like journey from French into American English without ever being untrue to his first loyalty, Yiddish, and the traditions of the shtetl. Adler was confronted with different alternatives. Like many of his background, at certain moments he may have doubted that German could still be used to write and speak, and yet he decided that what he wanted to say and write had to be done in German, which was also the language of the murderers, be it those at their writing desks or those at the barbed wire. As an exile in London, he belonged nowhere. “Jews should not feel at home anywhere,” he observed in an interview, refusing (although he valued his Jewish heritage) to identify with the national interests of the state of Israel or to serve as a “parade Jew” or “alibi” for the cultural and political establishment of the new German Republic. His exile involved a serious act of conscience, even if for him it was not at all a pleasant way to live.