H. Adler: Panorama

This combination of stoicism laced with a tinge of slightly rapt naïveté lies at the heart of both Josef’s and Adler’s worldview. At times it can be somewhat hard to take, with even Josef realizing that “his thinking is approaching the limits of what is permissible.” For while the “freedom of knowledge or the ability to know” may on the surface seem a noble thing to embrace in the face of despair, it hardly seems capable of standing up to the mechanized annihilation inherent in the camps. On the other hand, a “readiness to accept whatever might happen,” and to do so without fear, is a crucial last thread in the fabric of human dignity that no one would wish to let go of. In the end, in order to appreciate Adler’s moral response to the cataclysm that he survived, one has to understand his arrival at a position midway between naïve idealism and stony fatalism, which Josef perhaps best describes as “a liberation from despair, from hopelessness, arrived at through resignation.” This resignation, however, is not a capitulation but an “acceptance” of the way things are, such that once “all anxieties … have been overcome there is much grace that can befall one, because simply to be is grace in itself.”

To ask whether this seems true or plausible in the face of the Holocaust is perhaps to miss the point of Josef’s or Adler’s arriving at such a perspective. Indeed, Josef makes very clear that he “wants nothing to do with empty equivocation leading to lame optimism or self-deception,” and that he also wishes “to avoid any kind of blindness.” Instead, amid the panorama of his experience and his memories, what Josef ultimately realizes is that “he cannot stand aloof.”

The viewer is also the participant, there being nothing arbitrary, everything is tightly intertwined, thus forming Josef’s garments. Neither to extricate oneself nor to unite oneself is the first task, but rather to take something from it, no matter the cost. Sometimes it seems easier to judge the run of affairs than to take part in them, but nothing happens if one does, and sometimes that means entering the fray. It may be tempting to flee to one’s tower, but to do so is to sleep as the world goes by, and we sleep enough as it is, and thus we are compelled to be awake and to function, the piety of the solitary person shattered by the functioning of the world.

Accordingly, Josef’s mission and calling involves the implicit need to “bear witness to the existence of the lost ones.” This is very much what Adler felt his own mission to be, one that in many ways bespeaks a kind of religious devotion in his determination to capture not only what happened to those who had died but also the dignity with which so many still lived up to the moment of their miserable end.

To do this, Adler chose two paths: that of a thinker and that of a writer. In a television interview in 1986, he remembered feeling, upon his arrival at Theresienstadt, that “when I was deported I said to myself, I won’t survive this. But if I survive, then I will describe it, and I will do so in two key ways. I want to do it by setting down the facts of my individual experience, as well as to somehow describe it artistically. I have indeed done both, and the fact that I have done so is not that important but is at least some justification for my having survived those years.” Hence, key to Adler’s work is the dovetailing of fact and fiction in trying to both scientifically and imaginatively encompass his experience. Theresienstadt 1941–1945 would be the means of examining his past through the exacting lens of a scholar and a social historian. However, during the same decade in which he concluded his thousand-page study, he also wrote twenty-five hundred pages of fiction, completing five novels, of which Panorama was the first. Given this bifurcated strategy — one unique to almost any writer we know — Josef’s declaration that “the viewer is also the participant” also functions as a silent imperative behind the need for Adler’s artistic and moral approach. Indeed, it was one thing for Adler to “judge the run of affairs” in keeping the copious notes that would lead to the Theresienstadt book; it was yet another thing for him to “enjoin” his imagination with what had happened through the writing of fiction.

Of late, W. G. Sebald, who features Adler and his Theresienstadt study in the closing pages of his novel Austerlitz , in many ways blends Adler’s twin approach by presenting texts that seem to be carefully researched factual studies of the author’s own experience, replete with their own panorama of photographs, but which are also highly manipulated forays into the fictional sublime. Sebald has been accused of bordering on a kind of preciousness in bringing such a highly aesthetic approach to the Holocaust, and it is a criticism that Adler, too, faced in his dispute with Theodor Adorno on the question of whether it was even possible to write fiction or poetry after the camps. At the time, this sentiment was felt so deeply in German letters that Adler was not able to publish Panorama until 1968, twenty years after its completion, while his second novel, The Journey , did not appear until 1962, eleven years after it was completed. Worse yet, two novels from the same period have never seen the light of day, and the last of the five, The Invisible Wall , which was completed in 1956, didn’t appear until 1989, a year after Adler’s death. Against such daunting opposition from publishers and critics alike, Adler’s effort to render the truth through fiction must, indeed, have felt like a kind of “calling” in order for him to continue with it at all. Like Josef, he had to maintain “a positive attitude toward reality, or the seemingly real … for what we can know is a present — namely, the present.” Indeed, the fact that so much of Panorama makes use of the present tense to elicit the immediacy of remembering the past also corresponds with Adler’s urge to avoid “sleeping as the world goes by,” a charge made all the more crucial by the fact that the novel is forced to describe a world that has vanished forever.

Unlike historical scholarship, whose job is to help us understand what was, what happened, and, perhaps, the consequences that we live with now, the object of fiction on its most basic level is to remind us of what it means “simply to be .” For all its horror, for all the death and annihilation it unleashed, what we talk about under the vexed rubric of “the Holocaust” is also about those who struggled for the chance “simply to be .” To forget this amid our supposed awareness of the suffering and violence that would not allow them to do so is to risk forgetting the very humanity whose loss is at the core of the tragedy of which Adler attempts to speak. In this sense, Panorama is not a Holocaust novel per se. It is one man’s attempt to show us what it meant “simply to be ” a boy in Bohemia in the early twentieth century, a young man in Prague in the Depression years, a forced laborer and an inmate during the great cataclysm, and, finally, a survivor and an exile in the postwar years bent on trying to understand where he had been, where he was, and where he was going amid the “panoramic view which allows the eyes to take account.”

And so Josef awakens, just as, at the end of Joyce’s novel, Stephen Dedalus finds that “his soul was waking slowly, fearing to awake wholly.” The Frau Director, whose children Josef tutors, maintains, “The story of man is about the transition from sleep to waking,” and this is very much Josef’s story, too. Every scene of Panorama ends with Josef drifting back into sleep — except the very last one, in which, finally, Josef is wholly awake to who he is and what he embodies in having survived. No doubt Adler felt much the same, and, clearly, the writing of Panorama was vital to the process of waking from his own nightmare. From here, he would go on to the heightened modernism of The Journey , constructing “a ballade” of voices whose score explores the dark phantasm of the journey to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz and back. His last published novel, The Invisible Wall , completes the trilogy by coming out on the other side to render the nightmare of the survivor’s guilt, memory having become as much burden as substance. If Panorama plays off Stephen Dedalus’s awakening, the ability to sustain consciousness through the sheer propulsion of language itself eventually lands Adler in the kind of linguistic brinkmanship found in Beckett — an ironic turn in itself, given Adorno’s embrace of the latter at the former’s expense.