H.G. Adler

Wednesday 18 May 2016 at 5.00 in the Taylorian:

A round table on the work of the Holocaust survivor, historian, novelist, and poet H.G. Adler (1910-88), with contributions by Jeremy Adler, Peter Filkins, Kirstin Gwyer, Katrin Kohl, and Lynn Wolff, chaired by Ritchie Robertson.
A conference on H.G. Adler will be held at the Institute for Modern Languages Research in London in the subsequent two days.
Jeremy Adler, the author's son, and formerly Professor of German at King's College London, has written extensively about his father's work. Peter Filkins, Professor of Literature at Bard College, USA, is writing Adler's authorized biography. Kirstin Gwyer discusses Adler's work in her monograph Encrypting the Past (OUP, 2014). Katrin Kohl edited Adler's largely unpublished poetry as H.G. Adler, Andere Wege: Gesammelte Gedichte (2010). Lynn Wolff, Professor of German at Michigan State University, has edited (with Helen Finch) Witnessing, Memory, Poetics: H.G. Adler and W.G. Sebald (Camden House, 2014).

This article explores the moral charge and pedagogical impulse in the works of H.G. Adler by considering his reflections on language and in particular his articles published in the journal Muttersprache during the 1950s-1960s. More than ‘mere’ philological considerations, these articles ultimately reveal Adler’s core concerns: the power of language (and art) to transform experiences into truthful testimony, the violent potential of language, and the danger of historical, in particular etymological, ignorance. Highlighting the distanced approach that Adler takes, his use of abstraction, and what he leaves unsaid, I show how Adler’s writing on language corresponds and contributes to his overarching efforts to enlighten current society and remind future world citizens of the crimes against humanity committed under National Socialism. To further develop the concept of political philology, the article considers Adler’s connections between language and violence in relation to Victor Klemperer’s specific analysis of the language of National Socialism in his LTI – Notizbuch eines Philologen.

Based on the extensive unpublished notes on Kafka and related correspondence that are contained in H.G. Adler’s literary estate held at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, this presentation outlines Adler’s engagement with Kafka, first documented during his imprisonment in Theresienstadt—where in 1943 and in the presence of Kafka’s sister Ottla, Adler gave lectures on the occasion of Kafka’s 60th birthday—and continuing throughout Adler’s years of exile in London. In addition to Adler’s scholarly engagement with Kafka, my presentation considers how Adler’s own literary works adapt elements of Kafka’s style and explore issues like bureaucracy and guilt that permeate Kafka’s works. In Adler’s novel Panorama (written in 1948 but not published until 1968), one hears the echoes of Kafka most clearly. This modernist, episodic novel about the protagonist Joseph Kramer lacks a traditional plot, employs language in such a way to create uncertainty for the reader, and presents ominous forces at work in establishing guilt. I explore how these echoes of Kafka (and the Kafkaesque), when brought together with the Holocaust, invite us to reconsider the notion of prophesy in Kafka’s writing, more precisely how Kafka’s works have been seen to foretell the dangers of bureaucratization and dehumanization that National Socialism then carried out to an extreme. A unique example of a literary representation of the Holocaust, written in German by a survivor during the immediate post-war period, Adler’s novel Panorama also raises a complex constellation of concerns around how we define the category of “post-Holocaust” literature.