Panorama (2 page)

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.”

This combination of stoicism laced with a tinge of slightly rapt naïveté lies at the heart of both Josef’s and Adler’s worldview. At times it can be somewhat hard to take, with even Josef realizing that “his thinking is approaching the limits of what is permissible.” For while the “freedom of knowledge or the ability to know” may on the surface seem a noble thing to embrace in the face of despair, it hardly seems capable of standing up to the mechanized annihilation inherent in the camps. On the other hand, a “readiness to accept whatever might happen,” and to do so without fear, is a crucial last thread in the fabric of human dignity that no one would wish to let go of. In the end, in order to appreciate Adler’s moral response to the cataclysm that he survived, one has to understand his arrival at a position midway between naïve idealism and stony fatalism, which Josef perhaps best describes as “a liberation from despair, from hopelessness, arrived at
through resignation.” This resignation, however, is not a capitulation but an “acceptance” of the way things are, such that once “all anxieties … have been overcome there is much grace that can befall one, because simply to
be
is grace in itself.”

To ask whether this seems true or plausible in the face of the Holocaust is perhaps to miss the point of Josef’s or Adler’s arriving at such a perspective. Indeed, Josef makes very clear that he “wants nothing to do with empty equivocation leading to lame optimism or self-deception,” and that he also wishes “to avoid any kind of blindness.” Instead, amid the panorama of his experience and his memories, what Josef ultimately realizes is that “he cannot stand aloof.”

Accordingly, Josef’s mission and calling involves the implicit need to “bear witness to the existence of the lost ones.” This is very much what Adler felt his own mission to be, one that in many ways bespeaks a kind of religious devotion in his determination to capture not only what happened to those who had died but also the dignity with which so many still lived up to the moment of their miserable end.

To do this, Adler chose two paths: that of a thinker and that of a writer. In a television interview in 1986, he remembered feeling, upon his arrival at Theresienstadt, that “when I was deported I said to myself, I won’t survive this. But if I survive, then I will describe it, and I will do so in two key ways. I want to do it by setting down the facts of my individual experience, as well as to somehow describe it artistically. I have indeed done both, and the fact
that I have done so is not that important but is at least some justification for my having survived those years.” Hence, key to Adler’s work is the dovetailing of fact and fiction in trying to both scientifically and imaginatively encompass his experience.
Theresienstadt 1941–1945
would be the means of examining his past through the exacting lens of a scholar and a social historian. However, during the same decade in which he concluded his thousand-page study, he also wrote twenty-five hundred pages of fiction, completing five novels, of which
Panorama
was the first. Given this bifurcated strategy—one unique to almost any writer we know—Josef’s declaration that “the viewer is also the participant” also functions as a silent imperative behind the need for Adler’s artistic and moral approach. Indeed, it was one thing for Adler to “judge the run of affairs” in keeping the copious notes that would lead to the Theresienstadt book; it was yet another thing for him to “enjoin” his imagination with what had happened through the writing of fiction.

Of late, W. G. Sebald, who features Adler and his Theresienstadt study in the closing pages of his novel
Austerlitz
, in many ways blends Adler’s twin approach by presenting texts that seem to be carefully researched factual studies of the author’s own experience, replete with their own panorama of photographs, but which are also highly manipulated forays into the fictional sublime. Sebald has been accused of bordering on a kind of preciousness in bringing such a highly aesthetic approach to the Holocaust, and it is a criticism that Adler, too, faced in his dispute with Theodor Adorno on the question of whether it was even possible to write fiction or poetry after the camps. At the time, this sentiment was felt so deeply in German letters that Adler was not able to publish
Panorama
until 1968, twenty years after its completion, while his second novel,
The Journey
, did not appear until 1962, eleven years after it was completed. Worse yet, two novels from the same period have never seen the light of day, and the last of the five,
The Invisible Wall
, which was completed in 1956, didn’t appear until 1989, a year after Adler’s death. Against such daunting opposition from publishers and critics alike, Adler’s effort to render the truth through fiction must, indeed, have felt like a kind of “calling” in order for him to continue with it at all. Like Josef, he had to maintain “a positive attitude toward reality, or the seemingly real … for what we can know is a present—namely,
the
present.” Indeed,
the fact that so much of
Panorama
makes use of the present tense to elicit the immediacy of remembering the past also corresponds with Adler’s urge to avoid “sleeping as the world goes by,” a charge made all the more crucial by the fact that the novel is forced to describe a world that has vanished forever.