Panorama Read online

  ALSO BY H. G. ADLER

  The Journey

  Panorama is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Translation and introduction copyright © 2011 by Peter Filkins

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House

  Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This work, excluding the afterword, was originally published in Germany as Panorama by Walter-Verlag in 1968 and by Paul Zsolnay Verlag in 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna. This edition published by arrangement with Paul Zsolnay Verlag.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Zephyr Press for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Bohemia Lies by the Sea” from Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, copyright © 2000 by Piper Verlag GmbH, Munchen. English translation copyright © 2006 by Peter Filkins. Reprinted by permission of Zephyr Press, www.zephyrpress.org.

  The afterword by Peter Demetz was originally published, in the German language, in Panorama by H. G. Adler by Piper Verlag in 1988 and is reprinted here, in translation, by permission of the author. Copyright © 1988 by Peter Demetz.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Adler, H. G.

  [Panorama. English]

  Panorama : a novel / H.G. Adler ; translated from German by Peter Filkins.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79446-8

  1. Jews—Czech Republic—Fiction. 2. Prague (Czech Republic)—Fiction. 3. Bohemia (Czech Republic)—Fiction. 4. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Czech Republic—Fiction. I. Filkins, Peter. II. Title.

  PT2601.D614P313 2010

  833′.914—dc22 2010015079

  www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Translator’s Note

  Introduction by Peter Filkins

  Dedication

  Panorama

  Afterword by Peter Demetz

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  THE GERMAN TEXT FOR THE NOVEL IS TAKEN FROM THE 1968 FIRST EDITION of Panorama published by Walter-Verlag, which was awarded the Charles Veillon Prize the following year.

  I am deeply grateful to the American Academy in Berlin for a Berlin Prize Fellowship, which was key to my initial work on Adler while translating his second novel, The Journey, Panorama being his first. Particular thanks goes to my colleague Chris Callanan for his immensely resourceful knowledge of German, and for his willingness to respond to and debate numerous questions on the text. I am also grateful to Jeremy Adler for his many patient replies to questions, to Philip Bohlman for his support and friendship, and to Peter Demetz for granting permission to reprint his excellent afterword. As ever, Susan Roeper has been there throughout, helping me to think through so many choices, while my editor at Random House, Paul Taunton, remains a guiding intelligence to this day.

  INTRODUCTION

  I still border on a word and on another land,

  I border, like little else, on everything more and more,

  A Bohemian, a wandering minstrel, who has nothing, who

  Is held by nothing, gifted only at seeing, by a doubtful sea, the land of my choice.

  INGEBORG BACHMANN

  “Bohemia Lies by the Sea”

  WHEN H. G. ADLER RETURNED TO PRAGUE IN JUNE OF 1945, HE CARRIED within him the remains of a time and place that was no more, and that would never exist again. Exhausted, nearly dead from the two months’ trek back from the Langenstein camp outside Buchenwald, where he had been liberated by American troops in April, Adler returned to Prague by way of Theresienstadt, retrieving from Leo Baeck the voluminous notes he had taken during his two and a half years there. A decade later, these would become his monumental study Theresienstadt 1941–1945, his first significant publication, earning him the Leo Baeck Prize and early, yet fleeting acclaim. In that same ten-year period, however, Adler also wrote five novels, the first of which, Panorama, was produced in 1948, in the white heat of a survivor’s fervor, Adler having moved to London and permanent exile the year before.

  Panorama is Adler’s elegy to a world that was no more. Pastoral, even comic in its rendering of the Prague and the Bohemia in which Adler grew up after World War I, it harks back to the past not out of mere nostalgia but, rather, to show how even amid the innocence of childhood and a world steeped in a history and a tradition that could be traced to the Romans, the seeds of its own destruction were planted, resting invisible and unknown beneath the surface but destined to blossom in the full terror and violence that would wipe out not only a people but also a language and a culture that had produced the likes of Franz Kafka and so much more.

  For what is perhaps most important to appreciate about Adler and Panorama is that in many ways it is the culminating product of what is known as the Prague Circle of German letters, a distinct milieu whose writers and audience were primarily German-speaking Jews of the Hapsburg Empire, and who considered themselves citizens of that empire until its dissolution in 1918, their primary identification resting with the ancient kingdom of Bohemia throughout. After that came the formulation of Czechoslovakia, though even then Bohemia remained its largest and most populated region. Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938 marked the first time that Bohemia’s territory had been divided in nearly a thousand years. As we know, this annexation also set off the cataclysm that extinguished not only the writers of the Prague Circle but also their readers, not to mention every trace of the German language from the streets of Kafka’s Prague. Born there in 1910, Adler was at the tail end of the generation that could count Kafka as its immediate ancestor and whose literary style had been shaped by him and by the distinct sentence structure and diction that were native to the Prague Circle.

  It requires no great leap, then, to see that Josef Kramer, whose life is depicted in Panorama, and whose biography mirrors Adler’s, is a clear manifestation of that other Josef K. of certain renown. Indeed, whereas Kafka’s object is largely to illuminate the nightmarish unreality of the everyday world that Josef K. finds himself trapped within, Adler’s is to create a mirror image of that world, in which he explores the everyday nature of the nightmare that he himself came to experience and to survive. At the start of the novel, the reader has no idea that Josef will end up in the Langenstein camp, or that, like Adler, he will end the book as an exile in England who cannot look forward without looking back. But the unknowable nature of such events is very much to the point, for neither could the young Adler, or the culture that bore him, see it coming. From the first page of The Trial, we know that Josef K. has woken to a world that will probably not allow him to survive. At the start of Panorama, however, we are immersed in the everyday charms of a milieu that, from the point of view of Josef Kramer, looking back through the panorama of his experience and memory, is all the more poignant for its unanticipated, yet inescapable, demise.

  The consciousness at work formulating this past is also a key reason that Panorama is neither an autobiographical novel nor a bildungsroman meant to trace a certain kind of development and upbringing. For, indeed, the very conceit of formulating the novel as a panorama by structuring it as ten separate and distinct “scenes” from Josef Kramer’s life with no plot development between them is itself an augmentation of the autobiographical mode. Yes, all the principle moments of Josef’s life stem from Adler’s own, and yes, Adler saw his life as emblematic of the experience of an entire generation. And yet it is how he writes that life which distinguishes the true nature and intent of the book as a novel bent more on capturing a consciousness as it reflects on experience than on depicting that experience in any sort of pedestrian or naturalistic way.

  Consider, for instance, the book’s style—the way its long, streaming sentences build clause upon clause in order to render the consciousness at work narrating the novel as much as the events themselves. Here, for instance, is Josef at around the age of eleven, living as a foster child on a farm in Umlowitz, a region and an experience that he loves through and through:

  Now Josef is also a herder for Herr Neumann, who owns some pastureland, though most of the cattle graze in Purtscher’s fields on a side slope of the Haselberg. The cattle in the shed are tied up, and normally Poldi helps Josef release them, since he can’t do it alone, it going all right with the goats and with Cappi, but not as well with the other cows, the worst being Liesel, who is a restless animal that requires more patience. Josef holds a big stick that he made himself, though Otto’s is much nicer, even if it’s shorter and not as strong, Fritz being much more gifted at wood carving, for he can carve decorations and letters into the stick, such that it almost looks like something out of a picture from a book about Indians. Josef isn’t as good, having cut his finger once while he was carving in the open fields, the finger bleeding for so long that Josef had to wrap his handkerchief around it, while that night Herma made a proper bandage, carefully washing the finger at first and rubbing it with alcohol so that it wouldn’t get infected, though it burned like hell, Herma saying that was just what had to be, because there had once been a farm boy in Umlowitz who also cut
himself, and no one did anything about the wound, such that the poor boy got a terrible illness called tetanus, and the next day he was dead, since there was nothing that could be done for him. And so Josef held his finger still, not wanting to get any tetanus, and two days later the finger was fine again and hadn’t gotten infected.

  Two things stand out here. The first is the way in which Adler’s prose surreptitiously elicits how Josef’s thinking meanders from thoughts about getting the cattle out of the shed, to the stick that he uses, to Fritz’s talent for carving such sticks, to the dangers of cutting himself while carving, and, finally, to the importance of tending to such a wound in order to avoid infection and death. In a single stream of thought, then, we move from the child’s excitement over his bucolic adventures to the ultimate undermining of such euphoria, with the threat of death at rest within it. On the one hand, this is a powerful rendering of Josef’s own thought process, its motion and plummet, and the inner world that is quietly demarcated through it. However, the second, perhaps later impression that the reader will take away is the manner in which the arc of Josef’s thought and Adler’s narration anticipates the unknowable arc of Josef’s own future demise. Herma’s apocryphal warning about the farm boy who dies from tetanus because of medical neglect will one day culminate in the sufferings of the inmates at Langenstein, where “the smallest wounds fester straightaway, and everyone has such wounds from his slave labor, the limbs soon swelling, the body becoming discolored, nothing done in the infirmary, for there is no disinfectant, salve, or bandages.” Hence, what is a rural tragedy of ignorance and neglect for the farm boy eventually becomes the calculated abandonment of the inmates once their utility as slave labor expires, Adler’s evocation of the inmates’ suffering only compounding its poignancy when we realize that the conditions that gave rise to it have in some ways been there all along.

  Yet, despite the extremity of the suffering that the novel eventually evokes, Adler’s style shares as much with what we think of as the stream-of-consciousness techniques of Joyce and Woolf as it does with the nightmarish atmosphere of Kafka. To the extent that it is an extension of the Bildungsroman tradition, it is essentially in the sense that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is also seen in that light. Here Stephen Dedalus’s journey from boyhood to committed young artist is granted a mirror image in Josef Kramer’s journey toward eventual exile and conflicted freedom. In addition, the detached manner in which the events of Panorama are reported (Josef rarely speaks directly but, instead, spends most of his time listening to others) is reminiscent of the way Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay or Mrs. Dalloway report on the life they observe around them, while what we note is the shape and motion of each woman’s consciousness as she observes. The result is a kind of engaged detachment, one that asks us as readers to read with each of these narrators as much as we read about them.

  In Adler, this detachment has even deeper philosophical and moral implications. From the outset, the conceit of the panorama itself gives rise to the tensions that exist between the viewer and the viewed, between subject and object, and, finally, between present and past. To Josef as a small child, the trip on a streetcar to watch “various pictures from all over the world” pass by him, in the wooden cabinet for which his grandmother has bought two tickets, is a thrilling experience. Once again, though, and as so often occurs throughout the novel, the journey by train silently and menacingly foreshadows later travels by train that Josef cannot foresee. Similarly, the excitement of pressing his nose to a glass pane in trying to enter the world of “Vesuvius, Niagara Falls, the Great Pyramid,” or even the marvelous unfolding of language itself, as Josef spells out the title of the week’s program, “Li-ma, the Cap-i-tal of Pe-ru”—all of this is eventually turned on its head when, at the end of the novel, Josef considers returning to his homeland and the past but realizes that “he does not believe in the possibility of such a return, even though he knows that he can’t abandon it, but a gulf remains between him and the images of the panorama” that now lie in his memory.

  All ten chapters of Panorama mention travel by train or streetcar, thus developing the motif introduced in the brief Vorbild, which describes little Josef’s trip to the panorama. Similarly, the Landstein Castle, which Josef so innocently visits as a fifteen-year-old member of a ragtag hiking club, will eventually be echoed by the Langenstein camp, and finally by Launceston Castle in England, erected by William the Conqueror, whose title further resonates with that other notorious “Conqueror” of Bohemia and of Josef’s life. Add to this the way that the “true path” that Josef distrustfully and briefly explores with the New Age guru Johannes Tvrdil (who is modeled on the avant-garde photographer František Drtikol) also returns as the path that he walks along as a forced laborer, or how Tvrdil’s mystical playing of a gong returns as “a gong, not a bell, a piece of iron rail that hangs from a rack that looks like a gallows” in Langenstein, and we begin to see that Panorama is an intricate web of themes and motifs that continually circle back upon one another. Be it apples, soap, bells, William Tell, Goethe, Schiller, or mushrooms, Adler threads a variety of repeated motifs throughout the novel, so that eventually Josef’s life seems more intricately constructed than even he realizes. Such correspondence can be exhilarating for us as readers, once we see the linkages embedded in Josef’s life and experience, but often linkages arise as moments of dark foreboding easily passed over, as when a pupil of Josef’s describes an outing to the countryside and mentions “a glance back at the railroad tracks providing a view of a little town with a church tower and a couple of factory chimneys, smoke rising from them.” But for Josef such repetition and return are constricting, if not chilling, especially when “the web of relations” he finds himself “ensnared in” threatens him with an existence whereby he must live for and with “memories that one can no longer enter.”

  Adler, however, is more a stoic than a tragedian. Just as Stephen Dedalus’s heroism involves the arrival at a plane of regard that allows him to “pare his fingernails” before his own artistic creation, Josef’s real battle is to maintain his own humanity in the face of the dehumanizing forces that continue to mount against him. His own “irrepressible vitality” is the best weapon against this, for “even in the grip of seeming doom, his ability to contemplate what he observe[s] spread[s] beyond the searing pain of the sharpest despair.” Although this realization occurs to Josef more after the fact than within the camp itself, his determination not to give in to despair is also what allows him, at thirteen, to survive the grim atmosphere of the pseudo-military school that he attends, where he is slapped down by The Bull, the stern headmaster, for calling another student a “German pig,” but only because he has been called a “Czech pig,” which is of no concern to The Bull at all. As a distraction from this lonely, repressive existence, Josef, ironically, likes to secretly draw maps of railroads running between cities—Adler’s dark foreshadowing once again flowering in the mention of how the “web of railroads grows ever more thick” upon Josef’s hidden paper. Later, this secret will to map and describe drives both Josef and Adler to take notes on the horrors that surround them, the fodder of suffering turned into the fecund resilience of the imaginative act as it is shaped by sign and symbol alike.

  When, some fifteen years later, Josef actually finds himself working as a forced laborer on the railroad that in all likelihood will soon carry him to the hell of Langenstein, this resilience is what allows him to acknowledge what a fellow laborer maintains; namely, that one “may indeed be a victim, but he is also a witness, and through that each can—whether through his own disposition or caprice—find a certain freedom, namely the freedom of knowledge or the ability to know.” Soon afterward, when Josef is asked by a friend if he indeed has any hope, Josef is quick to reply, “No, not hope, that’s not what he’d call it, but instead a readiness to accept whatever might happen, it’s probably life itself that we should accept at any moment without fear. 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.”