H. Adler: Panorama

A book that presents itself as a novel, however, does not stand or fall on the consequences of a philosophy, and the critical conversation that began to blossom in the 1960s, and which, unfortunately, later began to abate somewhat, arrived at its best moments in the question of how Adler writes, and by what ways and means he forwards or moves beyond the epic tradition. The tendency of some critics to stamp Adler as a latter-day Austrian writer in the imperial mode of those writing before World War I, or as a Jewish Kakanier, and thus see him as a Prague colleague of Heimito von Doderer or Robert Musil, is more convincing as nostalgia than as literary insight. Prague writers (when they didn’t come from Moravia, like Ernst Weiss) were drawn more to Berlin than to Vienna, for a variety of historical reasons, and the so-called “total novel”—i.e., the big, thick book that presents an entire epoch — can be found as much in the Viennese work of Doderer as in the writings of the Berliner Döblin. Rather, I find the beginning of a productive literary debate over Panorama already in the original reviews written by Martin Gregor-Dellin and Walter Jens, who radically disagreed with each other. Gregor-Dellin complained about the glut of realistic details, which the author surprises us with, calling it a “classic misunderstanding of the epic,” while Jens praised precisely the presentness of all the particulars that characterize Josef’s life, and asserted that the way they link us to the memory of our own experience is a sign of epic mastery. Yet both miss the chance to see that the abundance and density of details is not presented in an impersonal manner, as in a nineteenth-century novel, but rather appear and live entirely within Josef’s unremitting consciousness. The consequence of this is that Adler spares us, and himself, the need to externalize the world and reinvent it once again (as if that could be done with an Auschwitz), and instead lifts the sensual and visible, which is the first characteristic that we believe we recognize in all realistic novels, into the rapid unfolding of consciousness itself, which continually presses toward rhythmic, pulsing annotation. What we read, then, is a thought score on the brink of music.

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 1,000-page monograph, Theresienstadt 1941–1945 , for which he received the Leo Baeck Prize in 1958. Panorama , written in 1948, but not published until 1968, is the first of six novels written by him following his arrival in London. It was awarded the Charles Veillon Prize in 1969.

PETER FILKINS is a poet and a translator. He is the recipient of a 2007 Translation Award from the Austrian Ministry for Education, Art, 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. His translation of Adler’s novel The Journey was published by Random House in 2008.