H. Adler: The Journey

Neither Germany nor the world was ready for novels about the Holocaust in the 1950s. In fact, the number of novels published by Jews who had direct experience of the camps and lived to write fiction about them in German comes to a grand total of four. Jurek Becker’s Jacob the Liar is the best known, though Becker was only eight when he was imprisoned at Sachsenhausen. Edgar Hilsenrath’s Night , a fictionalized account of his experience at a camp in the Ukraine, is another; and Fred Wander’s The Seventh Well is a third, though it is arguably closer to a memoir than a novel. Adler’s The Journey , meanwhile, is the only one of the four set in Theresienstadt, that unique combination of a sealed town that would claim a mortality rate even higher than the death camps and the central depot for the transports to the east. Nonetheless, that is all: four novels, and no more, written in German by Jews who survived the camps. Astounding as this may sound, one need only recall that the overwhelming majority of Jews who were condemned to the camps were not of German origin, that numerous German writers wisely chose exile after 1933, and that of course the vast majority who did know the death camps firsthand did not survive to write about them. But four . In reverse proportion, it’s a number as staggering as six million.

To try to convey in short fashion the complexity and feel of a novel as strange and inventive as The Journey seems nearly impossible. Making free use of montage in jumbling its sense of time and place, and mixing philosophical speech with poetic imagery, pointed political insights with oblique imagist renderings, it is the most lyrical of the six novels, or epische Gesänge , Adler composed as matrixes of memory and history. Eine Erzählung , a tale was what Adler called it, underscoring its musical nature by attaching the subtitle Eine Ballade . However, the irony that lies in the application of such aesthetic terms to a Holocaust experience depends on the immediacy of that same experience being everywhere present in the memory that comes to shape and give voice to it. In this way, The Journey is as much about the soul and consciousness of the man who was possessed to write it as it is about the immediate suffering he endured himself.

Like an orchestral suite or tone poem, each separate part is related to all other parts through structural linkages, repeated themes, or even stark contrasts that depend on comparative readings to render the difference that both divides and unites them within the textual score. Composed of multiple voices and themes that at times barely seem to hold together, The Journey refuses to allow the reader a secure resting place, its continual change of verb tense and narrative voice keeping us uninformed, devoid of control, and insecure in our understanding of how the story will unfold. Such techniques find strong echoes in the writings of Franz Kafka, particularly in The Castle . Their disorienting effect also helps mirror the plight of those who suffered through the events themselves, for obviously to have lived through Theresienstadt or Auschwitz or the Holocaust is not the same as having at one’s fingertips the familiar historical narratives we have since developed. Adler’s Theresienstadt 1941–1945 grants a key insight into the sources behind the complexity of his fictional approach when he explains:

In Auschwitz, there was only the naked despair or the pitiless recognition of the game, and even if there existed a spark of an indestructible vitality, even if the soul managed to escape from time to time into a delusion, in the long run no one could deceive himself, everyone had to look reality in the face.

It was different in Theresienstadt. Everything there could be pushed aside, illusion flourished wildly, and hope, only mildly dampened by anxiety would eclipse everything that was hidden under an impenetrable haze. Nowhere had the inmates of a camp pushed the true face of the period further into an unknown future than here.… Only occasionally would the truth arise from the depths, touch the inmates, and after a bit of fright, they would [go back] into their existence of masks of masks.*

The urge to render an “existence of masks of masks” is what compelled Adler to create a fiction that employs the mythic trope of the fairy tale. Adler’s challenge then is how to give shape to an experience that was largely shapeless and unknowable in its immediate sense, and yet which needs to be shaped and made readable in order to be comprehensible. His answer, it would seem, is not to define its shape but instead to suggest one, art’s unifying thread of order and composition barely stitching together the various voices, events, places, and people into a unified though precarious whole.

Adler’s refusal to be typecast as a fiction writer, historian, philosopher, or poet also shows up in his unwillingness to traffic in categorical identities or referents in The Journey , for nowhere in the book (nor hardly in any of Adler’s literary works, for that matter) are the words Nazi, Hitler, Germans, Jews, camps, gas chambers, ghetto , et cetera, ever used. This approach also avoids the dangers inherent in trafficking in such reductive metonyms and thus masking the lived experience that stands behind them. Instead we are simply told of the Lustig family and the “journey” made by the aging father, Dr. Leopold Lustig; his wife, Caroline; her sister, Ida Schwarz; and the Lustigs’ two grown children, Zerlina and Paul. How their journey is recounted, however, is what the “tale” is about. Though in many ways the novel is composed from the perspective of Paul (the family’s only survivor and thus a stand-in for Adler himself), along the way the narrative is also spoken by the main characters themselves, the townspeople who observe them, the soldiers and officials who herd them onto the trains, the guards who watch over them, and a narrator possessed of an omnipresent sense of rage at what he pointedly refers to as Der Abfall , or the “rubbish heap” of history, which the good Dr. Lustig tends.

Der Abfall , however, also has another meaning in German, namely that of “the Fall,” or the descent from God’s grace with the election of sin by Adam and Eve in Eden. Amid the rubbish of history, then, Adler weaves a tale of metaphysical renunciation, sin, expulsion, and displacement, the fall and flight from God’s peaceable kingdom into human evil occurring against the backdrop of the Holocaust. The pursuit within such quotidian darkness, however, is one toward grace, and it is memory that provides the conduit by which the downfall is overcome. For through memory not only is consciousness restored and preserved among the survivors, but also the return of justice and its tenuous yet tenacious hold on life in the face of history.

Similar to the way in which Adler renounces the standard language of Nazi, Jew, death camp , et cetera, all place names in The Journey are fictional, though they indeed serve as metonymic ties to significant portals along Adler’s own journey. The Stupart that the Lustigs leave echoes the Stupartgasse that Kafka grew up on in Prague; and Kafka’s youngest sister, Ottilie, also spent time in Theresienstadt. Meanwhile, Leitenberg represents Leitmeritz, the town at which the trains unloaded near Theresienstadt, while Ruhenthal, with its biting overtone of “rest” or “peace,” stands for Theresienstadt itself. Lastly, Unkenburg is modeled after Halberstadt in Germany, but in a deeper sense it stands for the rootless realm of displacement that Paul later finds himself in at war’s end, and which Adler inhabited as well after surviving Auschwitz and Langenstein. Through fictional characters placed outside of a direct historical context and settings that only symbolically connect to actual places, Adler evokes the mythos that lies beneath the surface of experience, memory becoming, in the words of his son, Jeremy Adler, “the burning ember that defines the theme as well as the style.”