Holocaust Fact and Holocaust Fiction: The Dual Vision of H.G. Adler

Abstract

H. G. Adler bears the singular honor of having been simultaneously a prominent Holocaust historian, novelist, and poet. His diligence and discipline as a writer were nothing short of phenomenal. Although he returned from his ordeal in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and several labor camps physically and mentally exhausted and in despair at the loss of his wife and her mother to the Auschwitz gas chambers, he completed his massive study of the Theresienstadt labor and transit camp in 1948. In addition, his major works of fiction, Panorama and The Journey, were written in 1948 and 1950. Adler faced the same challenge that originally confronted many authors who were also survivors of the camp experience: how to find a language that might convey to their readers the unconveyable, a way of describing events to help them imagine what continues to be called unimaginable. The harsh resonance of poems he wrote while still in Theresienstadt manages to approach this goal. His son says of these poems that “they show the bodily torment of human beings condemned to extermination. Besides physical details the poems evoke an all-pervasive sense of fear and a tangible, suffocating feeling of anguish.” In one of them he introduces the idea of a “gestrige Zukunft,” a “yesterday future,” the notion that after the Holocaust conventional chronology cease to function. An “afterdeath” of the Holocaust stains memory and coexists with any future one chooses to pursue. Adler concentrates in a single turn of phrase the violation of se.quential time that remembrance of atrocity has added to the thesaurus of the literary imagination. In his Theresienstadt volume, in his poetry and in his fiction Adler developed styles that would compel his readers to “see differently” the subjects of his writing, creating unconventional pathways to our appreciation of the unfamiliar landscape of catastrophe we call the Holocaust.

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