Authors: H. G. Adler
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.”
Take for instance the following passage from early on in
The Journey
when the Lustigs and other citizens of Stupart are subjected to the repression that will soon lead to their removal from their own homes, the very notion of a stable society under the rule of law having been turned on its head:
All that had been forbidden in the world now meant nothing, for it had never been a law but rather an arrangement that rested on enforced custom. What was once taken in stride now appeared all of a piece to the law, which had the last word and did not allow anything to contradict it. Life was reduced to force, and the natural
consequence was fear, which was bound up with constant danger in order to rule life through terror. You experienced what you never had before. You rejoiced over that which you were allowed, but even this did not last for long, because any such comforts had only to be noticed and the next day they were taken away. Thus the tender juicy meat was taken away since you who are made of flesh need no meat. Then they banned fat, for your belly was full of fat. They denied you vegetables, for they stunk when they rotted. They ripped chocolate out of your hands, fruit and wine as well. You were told that there wasn’t any more.
Highways and byways were forbidden, the days were shortened and the nights lengthened, not to mention that the night was forbidden and the day forbidden as well. Shops were forbidden, doctors, hospitals, vehicles, and resting places, forbidden, all forbidden. Laundries were forbidden, libraries were forbidden. Music was forbidden, dancing forbidden. Shoes forbidden. Baths forbidden. And as long as there still was money it was forbidden. What was and what could be were forbidden. It was announced: “What you can buy is forbidden, and you can’t buy anything!” Since people could no longer buy anything, they wanted to sell what they had, for they hoped to eke out a living from what they made off their belongings. Yet they were told: “What you can sell is forbidden, and you are forbidden to sell anything.” Thus everything became sadder and they mourned their very lives, but they didn’t want to take their lives, because that was forbidden.
Here we see Adler’s musical touch in his constant play upon the word “forbidden.” No sequence of events leads up to the announcement of what is “forbidden,” nor does there seem much logistical sense in forbidding things like “shoes” or “dancing” or “night” or “day” except to demoralize and dehumanize those to whom such edicts are directed. Adler, however, explains none of this, but instead drops us directly into the psychological state of the “forbidden” through the arbitrary way it is imposed by anonymous powers for the sake of power itself. Add to this the way in which Adler speaks of the anonymous “you” who experiences all of this in both a first- and secondhand manner and we find ourselves in a kind of
netherworld, a place that is not a place, a time that is not a time, spoken by a person who is not a person, but rather the idea or vestige of a person. The result is the “almost futuristic deformation of social life” that the title character of W. G. Sebald’s
Austerlitz
cites after reading Adler’s study of Theresienstadt. One never quite knows where one is or who is speaking in
The Journey
, and that is much to the point. Such disorientation is meant to convey a society that has fallen into complete dissolution, one where all borders between perpetrator and victim are fluid and unbound, the menace that consumes them a force in itself.
Listen, for instance, to the following passage a bit farther on where Adler now switches from the firsthand “you” that speaks for the “forbidden” to the imperative use of “you” by the officials herding the “forbidden” onto the trains:
You’re being given a sign to move, don’t you see it? You have to admit that cross-eyed Herr Nussbaum is certainly on the ball. Everything goes off without a hitch. The assistants sigh deeply, but it’s a sigh of relief, for they have done well. Not a single complaint is heard. The heroes stroll and strut the length of the station platform. You sit down, one on top of another, four to a bench, eight to a compartment, like regular, upstanding citizens. But this is no ski hut, there is no snow. No, they are empty train cars. They are narrow, much more narrow than the huts you should have built, but which have already been finished, thus saving you the work. Everything has been taken care of, for they did not want to strain your silky little hands. Who could possibly complain about such sound accommodations? How could you have even completed the job when you have never learned to work with your hands?
You can’t be trusted with anything, everything must be arranged for you, because you are a lazy bunch that not even lifting a shovel can change. Like little children, everything has to be done for you, though you arrive at the dinner table without uttering the slightest thank-you. Nothing can be expected from you but your stinking smell. Everything you youngsters need has been taken care of for you, we’ve made sure of that. We have sacrificed
ourselves for you. If we were a little tougher with you, then you would get all worked up and melt right in the middle of snowy winter. You want snowdrops? We haven’t brought you flowers. It’s too late. The train will depart before we can get some. We’ll send them to you. Yes, everything your heart desires will be sent to you. But you should be off already! Have you forgotten something? That doesn’t matter. Just drop us a line, we’ll take care of everything. You can count on us. Can’t you see it in our faces? Just look in our eyes and you’ll see that we can be trusted! Something could happen to you? Who told you that? It’s just a bunch of stupid chatter! Not a single hair will be disturbed. Such transgressions are not allowed. Now you are traveling to safety, your new home, just like you always wanted. Is the good-bye hard for you? That’s hard for us to believe! No, we can’t believe it! The forbidden at last lies behind you for good, and now eternal freedom is waving you on. There you can do what you want. We wish we had the chance to share your lot, but unfortunately that has been denied us. With us lies the responsibility to worry about your well-being, and then to worry about your brothers who are also awaiting the journey.
Again we find several themes at play here. Mention of the “huts” that the “forbidden” were meant to have built alludes to the Jewish work details who were cruelly sent ahead to construct unwittingly their own future ghetto at Theresienstadt. This is countered by the focus on the train cars, as if the latter were luxury travel accommodations about to take them on a winter ski vacation, rather than the same trains that will later transport the “forbidden” to the east and near-certain death. Adler’s mix of allusions to the past, present, and future taps the ability of montage to link seemingly disparate times and places such that, again as in Kafka, one place is interchangeable with another amid the nightmare of a seemingly inescapable labyrinth. In addition, an almost comic book-like transparency reveals the bitter irony with which Adler designates the commanders as
“die Helden,”
or “heroes,” while his description of the henchman Herr Nussbaum as “cross-eyed” plays off of the vocabulary of deformity
and impurity that the Nazis so frequently cast upon their victims. Most sinister of all, however, is the way in which the voice of command and coercion mixes with a disembodied voice of disdain and mockery, leaving us to sort the two in much the same way that deportees were forced to sort through the lies and promises that duped them into signing over their lives in order to gain what they thought was the safe haven of Theresienstadt.