Panorama (73 page)

In good times, a young person with his interests and inclinations would certainly have been placed on a path toward an academic career, but for a Prague Jew it was already too late for that. He wrote for himself alone and also worked as a scholar, as was done in the eighteenth century, by earning his living as a tutor while, in a slightly more modern manner, serving as the secretary of the Urania, the famous Prague adult-education center, where he became friends with Golo Mann and Elias Canetti when they lectured there. During this time he also worked for the Prague radio station that sought to counter the spread of Nazi propaganda with support for the republic through ideas on liberty disseminated in German. When Hitler’s realm mobilized against the Czech Republic, Adler traveled to Milan in order to prepare to immigrate to Brazil (where most likely things would have gone the way they did for Stefan Zweig), but the “beloved mother of Prague” (as Kafka knew) had her “claws,” both soft and sharp, and held fast to her writers no matter the peril they were in. Adler remained and worked in the book repository of the Jewish religious community in Prague before he and his wife, the Prague doctor Gertrud Klepetar, were deported to Theresienstadt in February of 1942, and in October 1944 to Auschwitz, where his wife and her parents were killed soon after their arrival. He was then transported for two weeks to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and then on to the Buchenwald-Niederorschel camp, where in underground chambers aircraft parts were assembled. The number of dead from exhaustion, hunger, and illness climbed daily. However, Adler never said much about his liberation from the camp. Having made the return sooner than Primo Levi, by the summer of 1945 he was home, where he taught Jewish orphans and worked on the reorganization of the Jewish Museum that had been set up by the Nazis. However, for German-speaking Jews who did not want to collaborate with the Communist Party there were no future prospects. Two weeks
before the Communist coup, he managed to travel to London and, after his marriage with the Prague sculptor Bettina Gross, set up a life there in a gloomy apartment in a London suburb, whose window, if I remember correctly, looked out onto a giant gas meter. In London he began, as an unknown refugee, to write for publication—namely, his scholarly work, such as the monograph on Theresienstadt and
Administered Man
, his poems, which still revealed his Prague roots, and his prose works, which never entirely dissolved into the fictional. In 1948, he wrote the first draft of
Panorama
in less than two weeks, the third draft of which was published by Walter-Verlag in 1968, and is the version translated here.

Adler himself warned in many interviews against reading
Panorama
as an autobiography, recommending instead that we take the text as “a novel saturated with autobiography.” Josef Kramer, the narrator, is not entirely the same as H. G. Adler, though he shares Adler’s thoughts and experiences; nor have critics been tempted, whether rightly or wrongly, to emphasize the autobiographical aspects of the narrative and supply a real date and place for each chapter. Chronicles and autobiographical accounts have chapters, but Adler’s novel does not, the brief opening chapter and the title indicating that on aesthetic and philosophical grounds the novel works like an old-fashioned panorama that presents individual scenes (taken from the everyday world) which follow one after another with nothing more than a brief click in between. The “daily world disappears and is gone” (both in the panorama and in each concentrated reading); each image “is presented on its own and is clearly separated from the next”; there is no whole, only “individual pieces without end.” The narrator, or presenter, who thinks of the world as a panorama consisting of repeated depictions in various configurations, stresses that the images are “outside of time,” as are all works of art that await new viewers or readers. One looks at them “hard and fixed and tense,” from the outside and from a distance, and that person, as a viewer, cannot “enter them.” This they share with images in one’s memory; they “remain for a brief while, as a little bell rings, attention, a new image is on the way, or an old one, it’s hard to tell, the overview is lost, nothing left but heightened momentary views.” The images of the panorama and memory have their aesthetic distance, but at the same time they bear witness to the attitude of the narrator, which is reflective, if not radically introverted.
In moments of bitter torment, he observes himself, but he cannot engage with the world outside, while finally, after leaving behind his terrible experiences, he arrives at the essential notion that it is high time to turn the panorama around and, rather than take in images, to present himself to the world. From the book’s conclusion then, in the idea of the world as a panorama lies “great danger,” which eludes any attempt to write, communicate, or act; nor is it impossible that in the central and structural metaphor there exists more than a grain of self-irony or self-criticism.

The image of the panorama (which is sustained by the division of the narrative and the pauses that occur in between, and which serves in the end as both a philosophical and an ethical motif) cannot hide the degree to which the narration is fashioned from what is heard, spoken, and thought, all of which predominates in each scene, such that, theoretical arguments notwithstanding, these narratives function as images that are heard more than seen, while if there were such a thing as an acoustical panorama this would be it. Josef reports again and again what he says, observes, replies, and answers, and he is never too tired to also tell us just as often what others say, observe, reply, and answer. As readers of Adler, we are close to the realm of Gertrude Stein, who firmly believed that the world is made up of those who talk and those who listen. (She felt that the truly gifted are those who can do both at the same time.) Elaborate descriptions of the immediately tangible, which was once a cornerstone of the realistic novel, exist nowhere, and direct speech, in quotes or as if spoken from the stage, flows quickly and seamlessly into indirect speech, except perhaps in the chapter on the Cultural Center, which, nonetheless, with its cinematic Marx Brothers effect is distinct from the other sections in a striking and sudden fashion. But the text does not just consist of one speech after another, for scenes, adventures, and experiences are continually brought to life, as if Josef were telling us about them, or what others say about them, and how what they say, as if it were a part of his inner monologue, is articulated now in a continual present. Josef has no bodily presence that responds to the charms and challenges of the world, but instead the consciousness inherent to his thinking, which is virtually bursting with the fullness and consequences of successive thoughts. The entire text involves the unfolding of consciousness, which works in waves, each paragraph an extended wave that runs almost
the length of a page, and within these waves of consciousness, which think, hear, and articulate words, there is a surging current of continual gliding and streaming that leans toward parataxis, the combining of simple sentences, and which prefers to use the comma to bind together rather than to separate. It is in its own way a stream-of-consciousness epic, but one that still wishes to maintain the programmatic and fundamental ability to speak in a clear and orderly manner in order not to overwhelm the reader with an avalanche of words.

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.