Sebald Links June 2017

Peter Mendelsund cover design for The Emigrants, (New Directions, 2016)

In the current issue of The New Yorker (June 5 & 12, 2017), James Wood writes at length about W.G. Sebald. It’s a nice, modestly insightful overview of Sebald’s four books of prose fiction, interspersed with bits and pieces of Sebald’s biography, but its basically a rehash of several essays Wood has previously written about Sebald. Perhaps in an effort to find some new way to approach the writer, Wood decides this time to examine “W.G. Sebald, Humorist.” Wood has to work hard to uncover examples of Sebald’s dry, ironical humor, which is more apparent in interviews than in his prose fiction. It’s not at all clear what prompted Wood to write about Sebald now, although he does reference the “handsome new editions of Vertigo, The Emigrants, and The Rings of Saturn” designed by Peter Mendelsund and published by New Directions a full year ago (editions, unfortunately, that did nothing except package the old editions in new covers).

Ω

There will be a symposium “Po Sebaldzie” (“After Sebald) at the Goethe Institute in Warsaw on June 10, 2017. Everything I can find is in Polish. There is a website and a Facebook page. [Neither exist any longer.]

Ω

Finally, H.G. Adler’s massive scholarly book Theresienstadt 1941-1945: The Face of a Coerced Community has been published in an English translation for the first time, thanks to a collaborative effort between the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Terezin Publishing Project. There is more information and a complete Table of Contents here. The translator is Amy Loewenhaar-Blauweiss. Unfortunately it’s not cheap! I’ve written about Adler a number of times in recent years.

Literary Legacies & Networks – Witnessing, Memory, Poetics, Pt 4

As I neared the end of Witnessing, Memory, Poetics: H.G. Adler & W.G. Sebald I began to feel a bit claustrophobic as a succession of scholars resolutely examined the relationships between these two writers. But the final section, “Literary Legacies and Networks,” introduced a new set of faces to the volume – Franz Kafka, Theodor Adorno, Hermann Broch, and Heinrich Böll. In the first of three essays in this section, Martin Modlinger examines “The Kafkaesque in H.G. Adler’s and W.G. Sebald’s Literary Historiographies.” Adler made numerous references to Kafka in his books and short stories and, significantly, warned against viewing Kafka primarily as a prophet of the Holocaust. Adler believed that “totalitarianism makes up just one chapter of many equal, disturbing developments in modern history that Kafka’s work addresses.” Although Sebald’s use of Kafka has been written about frequently, Modlinger brings some new insights of his own, comparing Jacques Austlitz’s inability to gain access a real understanding of Theresienstadt (where his mother perished) with the surveyor’s inability to penetrate the castle in Kafka’s novel The Castle.

As a place of suffering and death, [Theresienstadt] cannot – and should not – be fully accessible to the living. Where literature approaches history, especially the history of the Holocaust, it needs to keep its proper distance. For Sebald, literary historiography can never claim to be able to present the factual or emotional truth of suffering; it can only describe the path of necessary failure toward such an understanding.

Helen Finch, one of the book’s editors (along with Lynn L. Wolff) writes about “Generational Conflicts, Generational Affinities: Broch, Adorno, Adler, Sebald.” Calling on Pierre Bordieu’s theory of literary capital, she looks at “the links between Adler and Sebald as part of a network of intellectual relationships that constituted the field of discourse in postwar Germany.” Ironically, even though Adler and Sebald represented different generations, both tried to jumpstart their literary careers early on by seeking the support of Theodor Adorno, the powerful faculty member of the influential Frankfurt School, whose theory of the dialectical nature of history and culture made him one of the leading gatekeepers of  postwar critical thinking. Finch also looks at the different responses that Adler and Sebald had to one of Germany’s other leading writers, Hermann Broch, whose 1932 novel The Sleepwalkers is often viewed as portraying the steps by which Germany descended over the course of several decades into the state in which Nazi Socialism could flourish.

And in the concluding essay, Frank Finlay examines “‘Der verwerfliche Literatbetrieb unserer Epoche’: H.G. Adler and the Postwar West German Literary Field.” Finlay draws upon the correspondence between Adler and Heinrich Böll to delve into the question of why Adler repeatedly failed to attain the same literary status and readership that Böll attracted with his work.

Witnessing, Memory, Poetics is, in the final analysis, an important anthology, in part because it is as much about the two writers H.G. Adler and W.G. Sebald as it is about the subject that they attempted to write about – the Holocaust. The very nature of the Holocaust exacerbated the generational and personal differences between Adler and Sebald – the Jew and the non-Jew, the target of Nazi policies and the son of a German soldier, the concentration camp survivor and the boy who scarcely experienced the war. Adler and Sebald shared the goal of memorializing one of the monumental tragedies in human history, but circumstances demanded that they respond differently. But in truth, as we move further and further away from the Holocaust (which will be seventy years in the past for children born in 2015), we need both the testimony of Adler and his generation and the guidance of Sebald and others if this terrible event is to have any meaning whatsoever in the future.

Helen Finch and Lynn L. Wolff, editors. Witnessing, Memory, Poetics: H.G. Adler & W. G. Sebald. Rochester: Camden House, 2014. For all of my posts on this book, click here.

“The fight against oblivion and silence” – Witnessing, Memory, Poetics, Pt. 3

This is the third of four posts on the recently published anthology Witnessing, Memory, Poetics: H.G. Adler & W.G. Sebald, edited by Helen Finch and Lynn L. Wolff. The third section of the volume is “Memory, Memorialization, and the Re-presentation of History”and contains two essays, the first being Dora Osbourne’s “Memory, Witness, and the (Holocaust) Museum in H.G. Adler and W.G. Sebald.” With their occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, the Nazis converted Prague’s Central Jewish Museum into a storehouse for material goods confiscated from the city’s Jewish population. It also served as a private museum for Nazi officials, offering “a grotesque parody [of] the traditions of the Jewish people” that portrayed them as an inferior race. After the war, however, H.G. Adler worked at the Museum for almost two years, participating in the restoration of its original function and collecting new objects for the purpose of building “an archive of persecution and of Theresienstadt,” the nearby concentration camp/ghetto. Osbourne examines the way in which the Museum functions in two of Adler’s novels – indirectly in The Journey and directly in The Wall.

Ruth Vogel-Klein’s essay “History, Emotions, Literature: The Representation of Theresienstadt in H.G. Adler’s Theresienstadt 1941-1945: Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz” has two primary goals. The first is to suggest that Adler’s so-called “documentary” book is actually more literary and more emotional than Sebald and others have claimed. She demonstrates how Adler injects elements of sympathy, fear, accusation, pity, and moral indignity into  his writing, which he viewed as a paradigm of sober impartiality. Her second goal is to assert that Sebald “subverts elements of Adler’s text in several ways” by insisting that Adler wrote in a “purely documentary mode.” This is not surprising. As we have seen in his essays in Logis in einem Landhaus (A Place in the Country), Sebald – like most writers and artists – gleans only selectively from those he views as his predecessors. Vogel-Klein concludes:

Adler is very far from Sebald’s melancholy world. The Theresienstadt camp is for Adler a warning, while for Sebald, it appears to be the confirmation of a malign world order. One element does connect both authors however: the fight against oblivion and silence which is carried out unceasingly and with ever new and increasing energy.

Helen Finch & Lynn L. Wolff, editors. Witnessing, Memory, Poetics: H.G. Adler & W.G. Sebald. Rochester. NY: Camden House, 2014. Here is a link to all of my posts on this book.

“The Poetics of Witnessing” – Witnessing, Memory, Poetics, Pt. 2

In the second section of the new book Witnessing, Memory, Poetics: H.G. Adler & W.G. Sebald, edited by Helen Finch and Lynn L. Wolff, we find essays by Katrin Kohl, Kirstin Gwyer, and Lynn L. Wolff grouped under the rubric “Witnessing Trauma and the Poetics of Witnessing.” The first essay is Katrin Kohl’s “Bearing Witness: The Poetics of H.G. Adler and W.G. Sebald.” Using as a touchstone Theodore Adorno’s now-infamous statement that “to write poetry after Aushwitz is barbaric,” Kohl examines how Adler and Sebald cope with the ethical issues of “bearing witness” through their poetry and fiction, focusing mostly on Adler’s novel Eine Reise (The Journey) and exclusively on Sebald’s Austerlitz. The principal contrast, of course, is that Adler was a survivor of the concentration camps while Sebald’s life was essentially untouched by the war or the concentration camps.

In an essay on poetics, which was apparently not published in Adler’s lifetime, Adler – who wrote both poetry and novels related to the Holocaust – directly countered Adorno’s dictum.  Adler declared that “the possibility of an artform cannot be decreed in theoretical terms.”

[Adler] thereby places literature written in the aftermath of the Shoah on a foundation that is independent of philosophical and ethical questions of legitimacy, and focused most immediately on poetic quality. He thus avoids pressing poetry into the service of bearing witness. However…he places the poet’s integrity and commitment at the center of poetic utterance…By freeing poetry from the obligation to respond to external constraints, he defends its potential as an independent counter-discourse that symbolizes the individual’s spiritual autonomy, and allows it to act freely as a force for humanity.

Sebald’s generation, Kohl asserts, was faced with the dilemma of being inundated with “mass statistics designed to induce guilt without emotional or moral understanding.” Sebald, therefore, had to “undertake the project of developing a poetics that responds to the sense of implication in events he perceived to be vital in terms of identity but which are at the same time not directly accessible” to those without firsthand experience of the Holocaust. His poetics, then, become the opposite of Adler’s. Sebald must “facilitate a process that can begin to construct a context in which past lives and actions gain meaning.” Kohl sees the gap between those who witnessed the Holocaust and those who did not as “unbridgeable,” essentially preventing someone like Sebald from “bearing witness” in a manner similar to the way in which Adler’s writing functions.

Sebald thereby evolves a narrative stance of empathetic respect based upon moral implications that rigorously refrains from appropriating any intellectual, moral, or emotional high ground, and above all dispels any notion of the person who was not there being able to act as witness.

Sebald, therefore, becomes a mediator, not a witness. “Where Adler writes sociological studies based on primary sources, and fictional works depicting characters who engage with immediate events, Sebald traces individual lives through the darkening mirror of history, giving them a voice that seeks to move beyond representation in the act of speaking.”

Ω

As if in answer to Kohl – and many others who have accorded Sebald a privileged, if not unique, literary place vis-à-vis the Holocaust, Kirstin Gwyer’s essay “‘Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte(n)’: Memory and Intertextuality in H.G. Adler and W.G Sebald,” debates the very legitimacy that Sebald sought for his position.  She deals directly with the tricky question of Sebald’s relationship to the Holocaust, focusing on two works: Austerlitz and a 1990 paper he wrote on “Jean Améry and Primo Levi.” Sebald was not of the generation that personally witnessed the Holocaust, yet in a variety of places and ways he suggested that he had both a special literary approach to the Holocaust (based on his understanding of  the theories of trauma and postmemory) and a personal connection to the Holocaust that seemed to transcend his lack of personal experience. “Even though he was too young to have any genuine firsthand memories of the war, he felt that he was the product of precisely the atrocities he did not experience.”

[In the 1990 essay] Sebald is unspecific about the nature of the horrors he did not experience, during a time of destruction he did not witness. Indeed, here as elsewhere, he is unspecific in a way that suggests he may be referring to more than the bombing of German cities that is, on the face of it, his topic….The never-experienced horrors are presented as having had a far more lasting impact on Sebald than his actual childhood did. The former, not the latter, were felt to have cast a shadow from which he could never emerge.

Gwyer, who I would describe as a gentle but rigorous skeptic, argues forcefully that Sebald “is effectively positioning himself as an elective heir to the victim collective and assuming the (literary) legacy of Holocaust trauma.”

Between its extensive use of intertextuality and its focus on the processes of, and possibilities inherent in, traumatic transmissions across victim-perpetrator or generational boundaries, Austerlitz appears as a text principally occupied with questions of legacy and legitimacy. As such, it…seems to be informed by a similar “wishful sense of belonging” on the part of Sebald – by a desire to be a “postmemorial” witness, invested enough to believe he can feel the pain of the past  and the pain of the victim, almost as if it were his own, but belated enough to feel better equipped to preserve of reproduce its traces in the present than a primary witness might be. 

“In the final analysis,” Gwyer writes, “it is difficult to say where Austerlitz falls on a scale assessing the degree and legitimacy of Sebald’s (literary) identification with,and possible appropriation of, a history, or story, that is not his.”

Ω

In the last essay in this section, Lynn L. Wolff tries to “build upon the major intertextual and thematic connections that this volume establishes between Adler and Sebald to explore the degree of ‘wit(h)ness’ in their relationship.” She focuses on two texts: Adler’s 1970 essay “Der Autor zwischen Literatur und Politik” (The Author between Literature and Politics) and Sebald’s 2001 talk/essay  “Ein Versuch der Restitution” (An Attempt at Restitution), contrasting Adler’s philosophy of “engagement” with Sebald’s sense of “restitution.” Adler, a Holocaust survivor who refused to make any autobiographical statements in his sociological or literary texts about the Holocaust, was wary that  “the emotional content” could easily (and understandably) color any survivor’s story. As Wolff puts it, “for Adler, a certain distance is essential for both bearing witness to and scholarly representations of the Holocaust.” To some extent, it is this distance that Sebald tries to employ in his own “poetics of engagement” with Germany’s past. Sebald “strives toward a form of ‘true’ and authentic witnessing that is only possible from a distanced perspective.”

Sebald’s Austerlitz can be read as his direct attempt at restitution, by engaging with Adler’s monumental work Theresienstadt and by bringing attention to this significant yet nearly forgotten survivor and scholar of the Holocaust. Finally, Sebald’s careful approach us further underlined by the title of the lecture, “Ein Versuch der Restitution”: It is important to emphasize the tentativeness in Sebald’s claim, for it is in this attempt, I would argue, that we can locate both the political promise and the respectful distance inherent in his works.

Helen Finch & Lynn L. Wolff, editors. Witnessing, Memory, Poetics: H.G. Adler & W.G. Sebald. Rochester. NY: Camden House, 2014. Here is a link to all of my posts on this book.

Witnessing, Memory, Poetics

Toward the end of W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, Jacques Austerlitz tells the book’s narrator that he has just read a “heavy tome, running to almost eight hundred close-printed pages, which H.G. Adler, a name previously unknown to me, had written between 1945 and 1947 in the most difficult of circumstances, partly in Prague and partly in London, on the subject of the setting up, development, and internal organization of the Theresienstadt ghetto, and which he had revised several times before it was brought out by a German publishing house in 1955…” It was a struggle for Austerlitz to understand the difficult German and he often spent an entire day translating a single page. “I might as well say it was almost as difficult for me as deciphering an Egyptian or Babylonian text in hieroglyphic or cuneiform script. The long compounds, not listed in my dictionary, which were obviously being spawned the whole time by the pseudo-technical jargon governing everything in Theresienstadt had to be unraveled syllable by syllable.” But Austerlitz persisted until the end and “read down to the last footnote,”anxious to absorb every detail of the terrible place where he had been imprisoned and where his mother had perished. Sebald’s retelling of Adler’s seminal study Theresienstadt 1941-1945: Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft. Geschichte, Soziologie, Psychologie,embodied in a single sentence some ten pages long, has resulted in new and widespread interest in Adler’s books, most of which had languished during his lifetime before falling into oblivion.

Hans Günther Adler was born in Prague in 1910. In 1941 he and his family were sent by the Nazis to a Jewish workcamp, then to Theresienstadt, where they remained for two and a half years before being moved to Auschwitz. Adler was the sole member of his family to survive the Holocaust. At the end of the war, he began his immensely detailed study of Theresienstadt, which was finally published in 1955. Taking up residence in London, he eventually produced more than twenty books, including the three novels. Until recently, none of Adler’s books were available in English translation, but by the end of 2014, it will be possible to read all three of his published novels in English for the first time thanks to Modern Library: The Journey (2009), Panorama (2012), and The Wall (December 2014).

In October 2012, a conference was held in London on the subject H.G. Adler/W.G. Sebald: Witnessing, Memory, Poetics, coordinated by Helen Finch and Lynn L. Wolff. Thankfully, Camden House has just published a volume of essays that emerged from the conference: Witnessing, Memory, Poetics: H.G. Adler & W.G. Sebald. In the first section of the book we hear from Finch and Wolff, Adler’s son Jeremy Adler, Adler’s translator Peter Filkins, and scholar Jo Catling.

Finch and Wolff set the stage in their introduction “The Adler-Sebald Intertextual Relationship as Paradigm for Intergenerational Literary Testimony.”

This volume investigates the connections between the major contributions that both writers have made in exploring the poetics of memory, asserting the ethics of witnessing, and establishing new forms of historiography….this volume reveals how, on the one hand, an earlier witness had been repeatedly dismissed as having written illegitimate literary testimonials, while on the other a contemporary author gained renown through his literary writings of Holocaust testimony, memory, and trauma.

In “Memory’s Witness – Witnessing Memory,” Jeremy Adler recalls his reaction when he read Sebald’s account of his father’s book in Austerlitz.

I read with fascination and a growing sense that he had crossed the line. What right had he to fictionalize a free agent? How could he justify his borrowings? Did his predatory witness distort a truthful memory? Sebald’s tragic death broke off the possibility of discussion, forever impeded reconciliation. And since then, I have experienced many different reactions to Austerlitz, from an anger comparable to that which Frank Auerbach voiced at the alleged theft of his personality in Die Ausgewanderten to the gratitude I now feel to Sebald for what was clearly intended as an act of homage.

Adler also summarizes how he views the connections between the two men, who never met or spoke to each other, much to Sebald’s regret.

Adler and Sebald have much in common. They are both scholar-poets -Dichter – who practice scholarship, fiction, poetry, and photography; both write as German-speaking exiles in England; and both stand in the tradition of Austrian literature defined by the work of Adalbert Stifter.

Peter Filkins, who has translated all three of Adler’s novels, writes that “Adler and Sebald are bookends to the central literary problem of our time – namely, in the face of immense suffering experienced at the hands of systematic, mechanized, and largely featureless forces acting upon largely nameless victims, what can literature do to depict, explain, evoke, or understand such suffering.” Ironically, Adler’s response, despite the loss of his family and his own personal suffering, was to erase himself from his writing, “to examine [Theresienstadt] in a scholarly manner and as such to let it remain completely free of any individual experience.” In fact, Filkins points out, it’s difficult to determine how memory might have played a role in Adler’s conception of the Holocaust since he left so few firsthand comments on his own Holocaust experiences. Sebald, on the other hand, with no personal experience of the Holocaust, saw that “his task as a writer is to get at that undiscovered truth” that witnesses choose not to see.

Jo Catling, in her essay “Writing the Medusa: A Documentation of H.G. Adler and Theresienstadt in W.G. Sebald’s Library,” tracks down and analyzes the various resources that Sebald had available to him on Adler, Theresienstadt, and the Holocaust – both in his own library and his university library.

Over the coming weeks I’ll continue to summarize the essays as I read the next three sections of Witnessing, Memory, Poetics.

Sebald Events Calendar October 2012

Earlier this summer I mentioned the conference on H.G. Adler/W.G. Sebald: Witnessing, Memory, Poetics being held October 10 and 11 at the Austrian Cultural Forum, London and the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London.  Well, the program, which is being coordinated by Helen Finch (Leeds) and Lynn L. Wolff (Stuttgart) is now available, so I thought I might just reproduce it for all to see.  It looks to be fantastic – except that I’m on the wrong side of the Atlantic Ocean to attend.  If anyone does attend, please send comments my way.

Wednesday, 10 October 2012
Venue: Austrian Cultural Forum, 28 Rutland Gate, SW7
19.00 Keynote Address
Peter Filkins (Gt Barrington, MA): Memory’s Witness – Witnessing Memory
Thursday, 11 October 2012
Venue: University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, WC1 (Court Room, 1 st floor)
8.30 Registration
9.00 Helen Finch (Leeds) and Lynn L. Wolff (Stuttgart): Welcome
9.20 Jeremy Adler (London): Opening Remarks
Panel 1: Witnessing
9.30 Katrin Kohl (Oxford): Poetics of Bearing Witness: Adler and Sebald
10.00 Lynn L. Wolff (Stuttgart): ‘Der Autor zwischen Literatur und Politik’: Adler’s ‘Engagement’ and Sebald’s ‘Restitution’
10.30 Discussion
11.00 Coffee
Panel 2: Memory
11.30 Ruth Vogel-Klein (Paris): Dreimal Theresienstadt: Adler, Sebald
12.00 Thomas Kraemer (Berlin): Zwei Modi der Erinnerung – ein autobiographisches Projekt. Zum Verhältnis von Wissenschaft und Literatur im Werk Adlers
12.30 Discussion
13.00 Lunch (own arrangements)
Panel 3: Trauma/History
14.30 Dora Osborne (Edinburgh): ‘Gesamelt, gepflegt und zum Leben erweckt’: Bearing Witness in the Museum
15.00 Martin Modlinger (Bremen): ‘Die Kartoffeln dem Volke! Kampf und Tod dem Hunger!’ – The Kafkaesque in Adler’s and Sebald’s Literary Historiography
15.30 Discussion
16.00 Tea
Panel 4: Intertexts, Contexts
16.30 Frank Finlay (Leeds): H.G. Adler and the Literature Culture of Post-War West Germany
17.00 Helen Finch (Leeds): Heimat in Poetry: Adler and Sebald’s Shared Literary Elective Affinities
17.30 Discussion
18.00 Concluding Remarks
18.30 Conference Ends

Adler’s Journey

Today’s New York Times/International Herald Tribune carries a review of H.G. Adler’s The Journey, a book that I wrote about briefly several months ago.  Written in the early 1950s and originally published in 1962, The Journey tells a story much like Adler’s own Holocaust experience (he lost 18 members of his own family, including his parents, and barely survived himself).  Nevertheless, according to reviewer Richard Lourie, this is “not a book of hopelessness and meaninglessness.”

“The truth is merciless,…always victorious.” Adler informs us, pointing the way to a means of surviving the worst that history can throw at people: “One must have a center, an unshakable quiet space that one clings to vigorously, even when one is in the middle of the journey, the unavoidable journey.”

For information about Theresienstadt for his book Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald turned to Adler’s monumental study Theresienstadt 1941-1945. Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft. Geschichte, Soziologie, Psychologie. The Journey is the first of  six novels by Adler (1910-1988) to be translated into English.  The Times has also put the opening part of the first chapter online.

Thus we remain in flight, there is no rest for us but the interior that we remember…

By the way,  translator Peter Filkins will be reading from The Journey on February 10 at 4 p.m. at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He will also read from Adler’s novel at 6 p.m. on February 11 at the Goethe-Institut of Chicago. Filkins teaches at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, MA. 

Adler, Theresienstadt, Sebald

In W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, much of the detailed information about the concentration camp Theresienstadt came from Hans G. Adler’s massive book Theresienstadt 1941-1945. Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft. Geschichte, Soziologie, Psychologie.

Random House is announcing “a major literary event” that will be of interest to any reader of W.G. Sebald.  Here’s the story of a new publication (directly from their website):

…the first-ever English translation of a lost masterpiece of Holocaust literature by acclaimed author and survivor H. G. Adler.

The story behind the story of The Journey is remarkable in itself: Award-winning translator Peter Filkins discovered an obscure German novel in a Harvard Square bookstore and, reading it, realized that it was a treasure unavailable to English speakers. It was the most powerful book by the late H. G. Adler, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, a writer whose work had been praised by authors from Elias Canetti to Heinrich Böll and yet remained unknown to international audiences.

Written in 1950 after Adler’s emigration to England, The Journey was not released in Germany until 1962. After the war, larger publishing houses stayed away from novels about the Holocaust, feeling that the tragedy could not be fictionalized and that any metaphorical interpretation was obscene. Only a small publisher was in those days willing to take on The Journey.

Yet Filkins found that Adler had depicted the event in a unique, truly modern, and deeply moving way. Avoiding specific mention of country or camps–even of Nazis and Jews–The Journey is a lyrical nightmare of a family’s ordeal and one member’s survival. Led by the doctor patriarch Leopold, the Lustig family finds itself “forbidden” to live, uprooted into a surreal and incomprehensible circumstance of deprivation and death. This cataclysm destroys father, daughter, sister, and wife and leaves only Paul, the son, to live again among those who saved or sacrificed him. The Journey reveals a world beset by an “epidemic of mental illness . . . As a result of the epidemic, everyone was crazy, and once they finally recognized what was happening it was too late.”

Linked by its innovative style to the work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, The Journey is as much a revelation as other recent discoveries on the subject as the works of W. G. Sebald and Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Francaise. It is a book proving that art can portray the unimaginable and expand people’s perceptions of it, a work anyone interested in recent history and modern literature must read.

H. G. Adler, born in Prague in 1910, was the author of twenty-six books of fiction, poetry, philosophy, and history. A survivor of Theresienstadt, Adler is best known for his studies of day-to-day life there, as documented in Theresienstadt 1941-1945 and Der verwaltete Mensch (Administrated Man). Also a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Adler lost his wife and her parents to the camps before leaving Czechoslovakia after the war to settle in England. Once there, he began writing novels about the Holocaust, The Journey being the first of five works of fiction. Working as a freelance writer and teacher throughout his life, Adler died in London in 1988.

If anyone wishes to pursue the Sebald-Adler connection further, I understand there is an essay on this topic by Marcel Atze in Ruth Vogel-Klein’s anthology W. G. Sebald. Memoire. Transferts. Images Erinnerung. Ubertragungen. Bilder (Strasbourg: Universite Marc Bloch, 2005).