H. Adler - Panorama

The refined sensitivity toward spoken language, which Josef unfailingly preserves in his consciousness, transforms Adler’s book into a Prague novel that once again, or perhaps for the last time, brings to the ear the local German that would have been spoken in the families of Kafka and Werfel. The city itself, in Josef’s consciousness, possesses nothing of the lyrical magic of “violet ink” that struck the young René Rilke, nor of the glowing decadence of the bordello as set down by Paul Leppin. Josef speaks of the modernity of the teeming city center in the new metropolis, but also of the old and suffocating “stony sea of this godforsaken city.” Like all children, Josef recalls the obligatory Sunday outings along the Moldau on a steamship headed for Königsaal (about which Werfel wrote one of his loveliest poems), and thus continually seeks to escape the stifling, cramped, and busy city. He takes long walks, not in the historic old city but instead, in the sparsely populated outlying towns, where the fields open up and the bricklayers work with the clay that reminds him of the golem. In old Prague, street talk is a mixture of Austrian German and Czech in idiomatic disarray. The heavy food, such as Grieskasch (gruel) or Powidl, Schkubanken und Platzken (plum jam, potato pancakes, and latkes) confirming the setting, while a pitiful man is a Hascherl , a little child is a Mimi (from the tender Czech word Miminko , or “baby”), scouts do not like using Papiersackeln (paper sacks), one goes to the Bio rather than the Kino , or cinema, and everywhere there is the Prague fondness for mixing möge (may) and möchte (would like), which used to make Karl Kraus see red, and which celebrates a return here, while common Bohemian concoctions serve to return an unspoken tremor to the diaphragm, such as zum Pukken prasken , meaning when something is so ridiculous that the cover of a jar (which in Czech is poklice or puklice) bursts (praskati , the Czech infinitive). Even the name of the mystical gong player Johannes Tvrdil brings a local element into ironic play. Johannes is the prophet, but someone who is called Tvrdil (Czech for “to assert”) implies someone who is pigheaded, didactic, and unwilling to consider counterarguments. His name is an ironic counterpart to the Pythagorian use of autòs ephá , “to cut off debate.”

Adler’s critics show at times a marked tendency, with some justification, to read Panorama as a coming-of-age novel, but also to treat the final chapter as a philosophical summation separate from the rest of the book, and therefore to underestimate the continuity of the thought process behind it. It’s not true that the first nine sections are concerned with events and the tenth is concerned only with piercing thought, such that everything happens only within conscious reflection. Instead, it may not be so easy to separate one from the other. Josef’s philosophical determinations are anticipated long before in the earlier scenes, while the motif of thought emerges, fades away, and returns in ever more emphatic guises. The young Wanderer, who camps with his friends in the woods surrounding Landstein Castle, for instance, is already full of the intellectual possibilities that the survivor turns into moral determinations in the shadow of Launceston Castle. Josef, the lonely youth, is attracted to the “pack” who want to start “another life” with one another, in pureness and above all “independence,” while the eighteen-year-old, who desires a “spiritual life,” takes part in a mass political demonstration only “out of curiosity,” thus experiencing the “dense crowd” in which people were “rubbing up against one another,” feeling disgusted by the streams of beer and dogmatic phrases at a people’s day arranged by the Party. The same happens in the circle of the mystics. “The true person defines himself,” while the group “forwards a herd mentality,” he managing to almost effortlessly resist the shimmering magic of the deafening gamelan. The months spent in the forced-labor camp while working on the railroad are for Josef particularly educational. As head of his group, he holds true to the youthful ideals of the Wanderers and remains unsatisfied by both the Marxist explanation of the political process, which Eugene lectures about, and the tragic, apocalyptic ideology of Dr. Siegler, who has lost all hope and has convinced himself that one can have the courage to look on with open eyes only while plunging into the abyss. The doctor is not aware what tenets of Nietzsche he is preaching, and Josef is right to reply that, without a moral purpose and a reason beyond itself, the world would make no sense at all.

While speaking with the apocalyptic doctor, Josef already touches upon those ideas that lead him to radically separate what is from what happens. He admits to feeling a conflicted “readiness to accept” the present. As a follower of Parmenides, not Heraclitus, inside the forced-labor camp, he separates true Being from that which is fleeting, if not fictional Time, which “controverts reality” and remains “always” in counterpoint to Being, “which is hardly or only partially bound to Time.” Notions of Time exist only inside human beings and can be found in our own projections, not in things themselves. Therefore it is foolish to want to live in the past, for “in the outer world it is not manifest,” the same holding true in awaiting some future threat, which Josef calls “unacceptable,” indeed “impure” and “unclean.” All of this sounds like an inhuman ontology, and yet this thinking constitutes for Josef, the survivor, the basis for a newly workable, secular, and tentative morality that does not hark back to memories; nor will allow itself to be frozen by fear of the future. “Nothing is more destructive than fear, for, senselessly, it leads to the death of meaning and is itself meaningless, fear able to enslave and murder before a death sentence is even lowered upon a man.” A readiness to accept — in Auschwitz and Buchenwald? Yes, even there, amid the stoic congruence of his powers of resistance, Josef distinguishes between mere passivity and fatalism, both of which appear “almost comical” to him, as they are only a “rebellion on the part of the uncertain.”

Josef himself knows that such thinking, which would provoke and anger his contemporaries, approaches “the limits of what is permissible.” But after being saved, he wants to finally breathe, to compose and test his thoughts, and not to make dogmatic proclamations. It is not possible to separate his idea of the “readiness to accept” from the enclosed horizon of his convictions, all of which are directed at sensibly defining man’s purpose in the world. And when Josef is inclined to tap concepts that belong more to the sphere of traditional religion, it’s important to understand how he does so. He is a late descendant of Nathan the Wise, who admired the nobility of all historical religions and yet eventually moved beyond them. The controversial “readiness to accept” binds Josef’s thinking closely with the concept of grace, which is resolved to “flow forth into life” from the beyond. Man can do nothing more than conjecture that it functions as the principle of “perfection” amid the human realm, and yet for the appearance of this grace, which he has experienced so often in his own life, he can only be grateful. He is obligated, at least in the modest means allowed him, to realize the perfection that he has been shown. Indeed, this insight is what leads to the “reversal” of the panorama, because from now on Josef will present himself to the world and act on behalf of his fellow men. Meanwhile, in a very late philosophical study published in 1987, Adler articulated many of Josef’s thoughts as his own in developing an “experimental theology” that respectfully sought to move beyond traditional religion.