H. Adler: Panorama

However, there is no writer quite like Adler, despite all his modernist echoes; nor do we have a more substantive fictional rendering of the Shoah by another German-speaking Jew who survived it. Given Adler’s special attention to wordplay in both German and Czech, this alone makes his work an essential engagement with the period and its history. Add to this his penchant for writing scholarly studies with the eye of a writer, and for writing fiction through the mind of a philosopher and a historian, and we end up with a voice that is unique not only for what it has to say but, principally, for how it says it.

What would it mean to be able to live one’s life backward and to see how each crucial juncture is connected to, if not presaged by, every prior yet seemingly unrelated juncture? What would it mean if one were forced to? Jonathan Lear says of Oedipus that his main problem is that “he makes more meaning than [he] grasps.” Far be it from Adler to embrace a Freudian paradigm, for he was always highly suspicious of psychology as a discipline, seeing in it the false control of the clinical mentality, as opposed to the interpretive freedom inherent in the mythic sensibility. However, as pure analogy the comparison holds. Josef’s dilemma is that he has more meaning in his life than he knows what to do with — or, at least, to easily prevent it from gaining more control over his life than he has over it. Panorama is about the wresting of that control away from Josef’s experience and into his hands as a thinker and an observer, just as Adler’s writing of the novel is a means toward shaping that which all too menacingly sought to destroy him. Stephen Dedalus arrives at the aim of expressing “myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile, and cunning.” Adler chose the same, the crucial difference being that his hand was more forced than he would have preferred, his exile more bitter and haunting, since he was unable to return to his homeland even if he had wished to.

In the first and last stanzas of his villanelle “The Waking,” Theodore Roethke writes:

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow .

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear .

I learn by going where I have to go .

This shaking keeps me steady, I should know .

What falls away is always. And is near .

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow .

I learn by going where I have to go .

That Josef Kramer survives to take his waking slow, unlike his hereditary namesake, Josef K., is a blessing. That H. G. Adler lived to trace that waking, along with an entire world that “fell away” forever, is the triumph amid the darkness illuminating his Panorama .

Peter Filkins

October 25, 2010

THERE’S A NEW PROGRAM TODAY. WE’RE GOING TO THE PANORAMA.” JOSEF hears the voice of his grandmother and looks up from his toy. Panorama. Various pictures from all over the world. “Really, are we going?” The toy is abandoned, the dominoes, the building set, the train. It’s a long way, yet Josef and his grandmother love the panorama. They sit in the streetcar, the motor rattles and sings. Josef often plays streetcar. He runs along the long curbstones of the sidewalk, which is the track. Josef hums with his mouth closed and imitates the streetcar. First he calls out, “Ding! Dong Dong!” then comes the humming and sighing of the motor. Streetcar conductor is the best job of all, for you get to sell tickets, punch the tickets, and call out the stops.

“We have to get off, Josef, come!” They draw past the embankment and see many people all dressed up. “Give me your hand! It’s so crowded here.” Already they have turned in to the quiet little lane where the panorama is located. Now they stand before the door. It’s a simple storefront with a small display window, and there Josef peers at the beautiful pictures, whether it be Vesuvius, Niagara Falls, the Great Pyramid, or other wonders of the world. There’s also an announcement for that day’s program. Josef sounds it out: “Li-ma, the Cap-i-tal of Pe-ru.”—“Come, come, there’s more to see inside.” They next enter a little lobby that is separated from the actual panorama by a heavy curtain. Behind a table on which stands a sign that says TICKETS sits a powdered woman. Grandmother gives her a silver coin and takes from the powdery lady two little red tickets, as well as a nickel and some copper change. Josef is allowed to pocket the nickel. “Save it! Don’t spend it on sweets!”

The grandmother weaves her way with Josef through the curtain and enters an almost completely darkened room. Around a polyhedral wooden cabinet high stools are arranged. In front of each one there are two round openings, which are dark peepholes located beneath a metal shield. You hold your eyes up or press them to the shield and the program appears. An attendant receives the guests and takes them to two free spots. The grandmother sits down, but the attendant lifts Josef up and presses him close to the peepholes. The two peepholes are there so that you see everything just the way it really looks, and everything is enlarged so that it seems completely alive. Everything appears lit by brilliant golden light, as if dipped in tropical sunlight. Each picture stands there for a minute, maybe less. To Josef it feels like a good long time. He’s pleased that it lasts so long, for he can’t get enough of the splendid sights. But it’s a shame that the people, animals, and wagons in the pictures don’t move. Though the fact they don’t move doesn’t make the life depicted in the beautiful pictures any less marvelous, it does make them seem like something outside of time. Before the pictures change, the delicate strike of a little bell warns: “Attention, time’s up! Get ready for the next wonder!” Then the picture moves away, another draws near, the next stands before Josef at last. If he doesn’t turn his gaze away from the peepholes and presses his face hard against the shield, he feels completely alone with the pictures. The daily world disappears and is gone. The viewer and the picture become one on the inside, no one can get in. Josef himself, however, cannot wander off into the pictures, for he remains sitting on his stool, his upper body bent forward slightly. Because of this he cannot sit comfortably, nor is there any chair back, so there’s no resting at all. In the panorama, however, that doesn’t matter. Josef is content. One can be comfortable anywhere else, it’s only in the panorama that this isn’t possible. Everything here is hard and fixed and tense. That’s why it’s not necessary for the grandmother to say, “Pay attention, in order that you get something out of this and learn from it!” Only when the pictures change does the tension ease for just a moment. Josef scoots forward on his stool in order to see better still. Beneath the peepholes a piece of tin is attached against which he breathes. The tin gathers moisture and sometimes Josef likes to run his fingers over its smooth flatness so that his fingertips feel damp. The grandmother pays no attention to Josef, for she knows how the panorama captivates him, so much so that he is better behaved than usual. That’s why the little naughtiness with wiping his fingers remains ignored. Normally there is no opportunity here to misbehave. The otherwise familiar world has disappeared. Here is another world, which one can only gaze at, there being no other way to enter but to gaze. Only these little holes are there for the eyes. Josef can see so for himself, simply by touching the glass, that there is no other way in. All the people and the distant lands that you encounter in these pictures remain untouchable behind the glass walls that are only large enough for the eyes.