Panorama (72 page)

However man tests himself or is tested, he can always only give thanks, for thanks can accompany anything, gratitude being that which clothes shame and at the same time a kind of naked fervency, gratitude the victim
who does not have to be afraid of anything or ever betray himself. Grief exists, but gratitude does as well. This arrangement goes on forever, and so does stopping and resting, there being no calamitous collapse that results, but instead a quiet joy arises, which grows and flows throughout. Is terror then banished? Are the horrible events over? Do my lambs graze in innocence? Does no one lift a sword against another? And is the sword melted down into a plowshare? Is there something that can at last console? Oh, if terror would not turn into new terror and would do away with grief! Josef wants nothing to do with empty equivocation leading to lame optimism or self-deception, wishing to avoid any kind of blindness. He follows because he is challenged to, he doesn’t withdraw, he is called, but not into the green sweet-tasting grassland of the fools who are not lambs at all. He is called to a decision that manifests itself every day, which is why he cannot stand aloof. The viewer is also the participant, there being nothing arbitrary, everything is tightly intertwined, thus forming Josef’s garments. Neither to extricate oneself nor to unite oneself is the first task, but rather to make something of it, no matter what it takes out of you. Sometimes it seems easier to judge the run of affairs than to take part in them, but nothing happens if one does, and sometimes that means entering the fray. It may be tempting to flee to one’s tower, but to do so is to sleep as the world goes by, and we sleep enough as it is, and thus we are compelled to be awake and to function, the piety of the solitary person shattered by the functioning of the world.

Josef gets up. Once more he takes in the view, observing it closely in order to retain it forever, he not wishing to forget anything and to hold on to the legacy of Launceston Castle, he wanting to remember it all forever, what he thought here and dreamed, though he also feels that now it is finally enough. He cannot stay any longer, everything is closed, while what he will keep is what has been these rich hours, invaluable moments of contemplation never granted him before, he never having felt so fulfilled and perhaps also so empty of desire, though it’s not something that can continue or be surpassed. Josef wants to stay a bit longer, he wants to consider what happened to him here, he wants to pass it on to himself, to lock it within, so that it exists within him, as long as he exists. He recalls the whining pleas of a child who always wants to do something fun again, again, again, and again, and then one last time, but Josef is not waiting for that moment, he wants
only to extend one moment before the onset of another, always just a little more, just a little, then a little less, the taste of the end already a sweet and slightly bitter honey on the tongue, and then the finale, a last blow marking the end, an end, and the gong, and the Lord is in that blink of an eye a single Lord, and only for the blink of an eye, the little blink into the end before the final blink of an eye, for absolutely the last time, arriving at the end that has not yet occurred, the honey growing heavier, the bees already circling, an extension of the blink of an eye into the timelessness of the deepest perception, everything taken in with the highest intensity. Remain human, don’t keel over, don’t fall, quiet yourself within, so everything coalesces inside you, all that you possess and all that you do not possess, and now observe how the blink of an eye at the end opens and closes you.

Josef gets hold of himself, gathers in details and perceives a wholeness, as if he cannot believe that it’s there, yet he ascertains that he indeed apprehends something, it proving true, and Launceston lies as it always has at the foot of the hill, its streets winding about, the hill rising gently at first, then more sharply upward, the outer walls that once circled the castle capable only of being surmised but not actually seen. Josef finds it important that he’s not standing on a peak, that he’s not even at the highest elevation, the crumbling tower preventing any feeling of rising above the landscape, nor does it even allow one to look off in any direction, while behind Josef are walls, so if he wants to take in the entire view he must slowly walk around and circle the castle, after which he wants to go round again, though he walks round only once while contemplating. Then Josef remains standing at the spot where he rested for so long, he wishing to demonstrate his gratitude, though he doesn’t know how to do that, he quickly dismissing a sacrilegious idea of making a wreath out of some wild flowers and grass, for he feels it shouldn’t be any visible memorial, and such a feeble link to the memorial for the steadfast Quaker is forbidden, the latter having much nicer flowers than what Josef could pick from the little flowers growing in the grass, his hand brushing the lawn lightly, its blades bending slightly beneath his strokes, each leaf, each stalk bowing as if in reconciliation, the commemoration silent within. Thus Josef’s memory remains the only memorial, but this memory will leave with him, and the gratitude felt toward this place is contained within it. Because he thinks it all and ponders
it all again, he’s filled with a thousand voices and wondrous feathers and glittery dust, tenderness displacing departure, abidance continuing on.

Now it’s enough, Josef cannot linger any longer, he must carry out his decision, the border has been reached. He turns around and once more walks the length of the tower wall to the other side, where the steps lead down. He’d like to head off on the path to the castle dungeon once more, and he wavers, but then decides not to and gazes off toward the prison, it still being there, large leafy plants unfurling under the protection of the cool walls, no one allowed to disturb these weeds, no wind threatens their growth as they grow over the long-cosseted horrific story of this place, just as the cheery stories of other sites are also overgrown and mercifully enshrouded, the plants not sharing how they thrive on the works and deeds of humankind as long as they are not planted or tended.

Josef turns away and hurries along at a quick pace to the park exit, ignoring the plaques that proclaim the history of Launceston. Josef doesn’t look for a crowning moment to his experience here but is instead simply pleased by his waking steps, he being happy about everything that has awakened within him, and the fact that he is awake and so awake, though it’s not a heightened sense of satisfaction, nor does he feel any triumph because his sorrow has poured forth, for it is still tucked into every hollow and cleft and it looms above in every gable and treetop. Josef is enmeshed in the general run of things, he sees the people around him who are going about their business, some cars driving by, or he hears the long drawn-out whistle of a locomotive from the train yard, the abandoned barracks of the prisoners of war that are quickly falling victim to the elements. And everything that he sees and hears is open to the day, and indeed is simply there, spewed forth by open mouths and cavities, a single effusion into the day, into his salvation. And so Josef does not withdraw, for everything is present and not tied to the history that Josef has been pleased to say goodbye to, but he no longer knows that it is goodbye, for he is aware of no break between yesterday and today, all the colored threads having run together, an immense gushing, an overflow and a rippling stream in which the view that bursts forth from life, being a genuine blink of an eye, discerns nothing. And so Josef is not a lost one nor is he one who has been forgotten, he no longer hangs caught in a web of fleeting dreams that separate him from the everyday
world, because nothing is true anymore, each view continuing on to its no longer contested aims.

Josef no longer knows what he is saying goodbye to once the tower is behind him, he not having been disburdened through any kind of simplification but instead he is no longer trapped in such questions, they requiring nothing more of him, though he doesn’t doubt that each forward step will raise challenges. It’s idle to wonder what the next hours will bring, everything will come in its own time, Josef ready for it all, he feels it deep inside, though he is now in his own way without a past, it not forgotten but rather lost, he having to strain himself to see it through a veil. What he once thought a possession is now something alien and unrecognizable. Josef doesn’t know whether what history has to say has anything to do with him, whether it be this or that, because the past is so transparent in its intrusion that it no longer relates to any so-called “I” or “you,” nor is Josef sure any longer whether he is someone who has acted or is a witness or a victim, or whether he is all of these together in having been part of history or if he simply overheard a bunch of tales. The joy and sorrow back then were much the same thing, Josef almost ashamed and almost shocked that the distinction can seem so frivolous, but he is comfortable with the view that in the end it’s all the same to whatever in history clings to a certain event, since everything that happens is the price paid for living in the present, if only the individual accepts it. Josef accepts it, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to go on, for he can attest to his own existence as a person only to the degree that he is no longer reduced to the limits of his own personality, this being what he has learned on the hill in the castle park of Launceston, where to this day he has woken.

H
. G. A
DLER WAS ALWAYS RELUCTANT TO EASILY ATTACH HIMSELF TO ANY
group, class, or nation, preferring instead to think of himself as a “single unique individual,” in the radical spirit of the Enlightenment, who over time would slowly gain acceptance from a growing readership. Since the deaths of Paul Celan, Peter Szondi, and Jean Améry, all of whom took their own lives, there have not been many Jewish authors who write in German, above all in that generation of aging men and women who survived persecution and the death camps and maintained the capacity to bear witness to their experience in history’s Hell. This, though not only this, defines Adler’s particular situation. Amid the epoch of the Shoah, I see him as allied with with Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, and yet at the same time as different. Levi, who was a partisan before his arrest, was able to continue writing in Italian without hesitation (Italy’s Fascist society never set up an Auschwitz, and the notorius Riseria of Trieste was founded by the Nazi district leader), and Wiesel managed to complete his Wandering Jew-like journey from French into American English without ever being untrue to his first loyalty,
Yiddish, and the traditions of the shtetl. Adler was confronted with different alternatives. Like many of his background, at certain moments he may have doubted that German could still be used to write and speak, and yet he decided that what he wanted to say and write had to be done in German, which was also the language of the murderers, be it those at their writing desks or those at the barbed wire. As an exile in London, he belonged nowhere. “Jews should not feel at home anywhere,” he observed in an interview, refusing (although he valued his Jewish heritage) to identify with the national interests of the state of Israel or to serve as a “parade Jew” or “alibi” for the cultural and political establishment of the new German Republic. His exile involved a serious act of conscience, even if for him it was not at all a pleasant way to live.

Following a useful fiction coined by Max Brod, literary history often speaks of the Prague Circle of German writers, but the life of Adler would argue that one has to combine the circle with many other geometric figures in order to better appreciate the tangle of Prague writers amid their cafés and on their walks, while Robert Musil once said ironically that the majority of Prague writers were those who brilliantly managed to write nothing at all. Adler’s ancestors, for instance, were composed of religious teachers and businessmen. His father was a stationer and printer, and his mother, who was born in Berlin, wanted to become a doctor but, as we read in
Panorama
, was barred from doing so by tradition. Family life was unhappy and unpleasant, and the sensitive boy was sent to strange families and boarding schools beyond the borders of Bohemia, and placed in a school in Moravia before he was at last allowed to return home to his parents’ house and complete the graduate exams as an external student. The young man next sought the comforts of camaraderie in a scouting troop organized by youths, which was somewhat belatedly modeled on those founded in Berlin, after which he took refuge in his literary work. At eighteen it was clear to him that he had not the slightest curiosity or capacity to join any mass political movement or mystical circle, which in the Prague of the 1920s had a late flowering. Since the last third of the nineteenth century, Jewish fathers in Prague had more or less been successful businessmen, while the sons, who were denied access to any kind of political career in Czech Prague, chose, in protest against their materialistic fathers, to become poets, intellectuals, and scholars. (The
wise grandfather of Karl Kraus’s magical operetta about Prague life admonishes his grandson in vain to align himself much more with businesslike “
Tachles
” than with literary “
Schmonzes,
” for instance.) Adler studied literature, philosophy, and musicology at university in Prague, writing his dissertation on
Klopstock und die Musik
, and finding himself in Berlin (while doing research in the national library) as the triumphant colonnades of the storm troopers moved through the streets.