H. Adler - Panorama

Following a useful fiction coined by Max Brod, literary history often speaks of the Prague Circle of German writers, but the life of Adler would argue that one has to combine the circle with many other geometric figures in order to better appreciate the tangle of Prague writers amid their cafés and on their walks, while Robert Musil once said ironically that the majority of Prague writers were those who brilliantly managed to write nothing at all. Adler’s ancestors, for instance, were composed of religious teachers and businessmen. His father was a stationer and printer, and his mother, who was born in Berlin, wanted to become a doctor but, as we read in Panorama , was barred from doing so by tradition. Family life was unhappy and unpleasant, and the sensitive boy was sent to strange families and boarding schools beyond the borders of Bohemia, and placed in a school in Moravia before he was at last allowed to return home to his parents’ house and complete the graduate exams as an external student. The young man next sought the comforts of camaraderie in a scouting troop organized by youths, which was somewhat belatedly modeled on those founded in Berlin, after which he took refuge in his literary work. At eighteen it was clear to him that he had not the slightest curiosity or capacity to join any mass political movement or mystical circle, which in the Prague of the 1920s had a late flowering. Since the last third of the nineteenth century, Jewish fathers in Prague had more or less been successful businessmen, while the sons, who were denied access to any kind of political career in Czech Prague, chose, in protest against their materialistic fathers, to become poets, intellectuals, and scholars. (The wise grandfather of Karl Kraus’s magical operetta about Prague life admonishes his grandson in vain to align himself much more with businesslike “ Tachles ” than with literary “ Schmonzes, ” for instance.) Adler studied literature, philosophy, and musicology at university in Prague, writing his dissertation on Klopstock und die Musik , and finding himself in Berlin (while doing research in the national library) as the triumphant colonnades of the storm troopers moved through the streets.

In good times, a young person with his interests and inclinations would certainly have been placed on a path toward an academic career, but for a Prague Jew it was already too late for that. He wrote for himself alone and also worked as a scholar, as was done in the eighteenth century, by earning his living as a tutor while, in a slightly more modern manner, serving as the secretary of the Urania, the famous Prague adult-education center, where he became friends with Golo Mann and Elias Canetti when they lectured there. During this time he also worked for the Prague radio station that sought to counter the spread of Nazi propaganda with support for the republic through ideas on liberty disseminated in German. When Hitler’s realm mobilized against the Czech Republic, Adler traveled to Milan in order to prepare to immigrate to Brazil (where most likely things would have gone the way they did for Stefan Zweig), but the “beloved mother of Prague” (as Kafka knew) had her “claws,” both soft and sharp, and held fast to her writers no matter the peril they were in. Adler remained and worked in the book repository of the Jewish religious community in Prague before he and his wife, the Prague doctor Gertrud Klepetar, were deported to Theresienstadt in February of 1942, and in October 1944 to Auschwitz, where his wife and her parents were killed soon after their arrival. He was then transported for two weeks to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and then on to the Buchenwald-Niederorschel camp, where in underground chambers aircraft parts were assembled. The number of dead from exhaustion, hunger, and illness climbed daily. However, Adler never said much about his liberation from the camp. Having made the return sooner than Primo Levi, by the summer of 1945 he was home, where he taught Jewish orphans and worked on the reorganization of the Jewish Museum that had been set up by the Nazis. However, for German-speaking Jews who did not want to collaborate with the Communist Party there were no future prospects. Two weeks before the Communist coup, he managed to travel to London and, after his marriage with the Prague sculptor Bettina Gross, set up a life there in a gloomy apartment in a London suburb, whose window, if I remember correctly, looked out onto a giant gas meter. In London he began, as an unknown refugee, to write for publication — namely, his scholarly work, such as the monograph on Theresienstadt and Administered Man , his poems, which still revealed his Prague roots, and his prose works, which never entirely dissolved into the fictional. In 1948, he wrote the first draft of Panorama in less than two weeks, the third draft of which was published by Walter-Verlag in 1968, and is the version translated here.

Adler himself warned in many interviews against reading Panorama as an autobiography, recommending instead that we take the text as “a novel saturated with autobiography.” Josef Kramer, the narrator, is not entirely the same as H. G. Adler, though he shares Adler’s thoughts and experiences; nor have critics been tempted, whether rightly or wrongly, to emphasize the autobiographical aspects of the narrative and supply a real date and place for each chapter. Chronicles and autobiographical accounts have chapters, but Adler’s novel does not, the brief opening chapter and the title indicating that on aesthetic and philosophical grounds the novel works like an old-fashioned panorama that presents individual scenes (taken from the everyday world) which follow one after another with nothing more than a brief click in between. The “daily world disappears and is gone” (both in the panorama and in each concentrated reading); each image “is presented on its own and is clearly separated from the next”; there is no whole, only “individual pieces without end.” The narrator, or presenter, who thinks of the world as a panorama consisting of repeated depictions in various configurations, stresses that the images are “outside of time,” as are all works of art that await new viewers or readers. One looks at them “hard and fixed and tense,” from the outside and from a distance, and that person, as a viewer, cannot “enter them.” This they share with images in one’s memory; they “remain for a brief while, as a little bell rings, attention, a new image is on the way, or an old one, it’s hard to tell, the overview is lost, nothing left but heightened momentary views.” The images of the panorama and memory have their aesthetic distance, but at the same time they bear witness to the attitude of the narrator, which is reflective, if not radically introverted. In moments of bitter torment, he observes himself, but he cannot engage with the world outside, while finally, after leaving behind his terrible experiences, he arrives at the essential notion that it is high time to turn the panorama around and, rather than take in images, to present himself to the world. From the book’s conclusion then, in the idea of the world as a panorama lies “great danger,” which eludes any attempt to write, communicate, or act; nor is it impossible that in the central and structural metaphor there exists more than a grain of self-irony or self-criticism.

The image of the panorama (which is sustained by the division of the narrative and the pauses that occur in between, and which serves in the end as both a philosophical and an ethical motif) cannot hide the degree to which the narration is fashioned from what is heard, spoken, and thought, all of which predominates in each scene, such that, theoretical arguments notwithstanding, these narratives function as images that are heard more than seen, while if there were such a thing as an acoustical panorama this would be it. Josef reports again and again what he says, observes, replies, and answers, and he is never too tired to also tell us just as often what others say, observe, reply, and answer. As readers of Adler, we are close to the realm of Gertrude Stein, who firmly believed that the world is made up of those who talk and those who listen. (She felt that the truly gifted are those who can do both at the same time.) Elaborate descriptions of the immediately tangible, which was once a cornerstone of the realistic novel, exist nowhere, and direct speech, in quotes or as if spoken from the stage, flows quickly and seamlessly into indirect speech, except perhaps in the chapter on the Cultural Center, which, nonetheless, with its cinematic Marx Brothers effect is distinct from the other sections in a striking and sudden fashion. But the text does not just consist of one speech after another, for scenes, adventures, and experiences are continually brought to life, as if Josef were telling us about them, or what others say about them, and how what they say, as if it were a part of his inner monologue, is articulated now in a continual present. Josef has no bodily presence that responds to the charms and challenges of the world, but instead the consciousness inherent to his thinking, which is virtually bursting with the fullness and consequences of successive thoughts. The entire text involves the unfolding of consciousness, which works in waves, each paragraph an extended wave that runs almost the length of a page, and within these waves of consciousness, which think, hear, and articulate words, there is a surging current of continual gliding and streaming that leans toward parataxis, the combining of simple sentences, and which prefers to use the comma to bind together rather than to separate. It is in its own way a stream-of-consciousness epic, but one that still wishes to maintain the programmatic and fundamental ability to speak in a clear and orderly manner in order not to overwhelm the reader with an avalanche of words.