The Journey (49 page)

The original title was
Die Reise: Eine Ballade
, yet for reasons of copyright Erichson chose
Eine Reise
, and he advised the author to drop the unusual subtitle,
Eine Ballade
. But since in Adler’s eyes the book was not a “novel,” which in his opinion is a genre that captures “an entire world,” he chose the more modest subtitle
Eine Erzählung
, or
A Tale
. This confusing,
somewhat lightweight subtitle is another reason the book was rarely noticed. In his review, Heimito von Doderer acknowledged the problem with the genre: “The author calls this book ‘A Tale.’ Yet it’s a novel. Not because of its length, but rather because of its universal reach.” Then came the concession: “Yet the work is really a ballad.” Doderer went on to explain his view: “A ballad does not accuse, it does not excuse. It is a crystalline form.” The ballad of
The Journey
is “liberating,” “it makes the subject, be it as it may (and here the case borders on the unbelievable), weightless and floating, without relinquishing any of its weight. A whole mountain of horror is turned into song.” Though Doderer was right to draw the analogy between the lyrical nature of
The Journey
and the ballad form, the term also makes sense on other levels, for in a ballad, according to Goethe’s definition, lyrical, dramatic, and narrative moments join together. These three forms of expression are bound together elaborately in
The Journey
. The polyphonic stream of consciousness leads us continually from one point of view to another. The reader often no longer knows who is speaking before the next voice enters. In this manner, the narrative stream runs from Paul’s thoughts to his mother’s feelings without our noticing a break, or the narrator’s reflections into the sister’s fears. As with a ballad, the book contains the refrainlike repetition of numerous central motifs. Thus the form of the ballad does not harken here to a traditional genre, but rather creates a new narrative form, one that can be placed somewhere among Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner.
The Journey
appeared almost at the same time as Faulkner’s great memoir of World War I,
A Fable
, and there are also parallels with
Ulysses
and
Between the Acts
, Ilse Aichinger’s
Herod’s Children
being another important point of reference. In the end, however, like Doderer, I am at a loss when it comes to finding suitable literary comparisons for
The Journey
. Roland H. Wiegenstein came to the most radical conclusion on this point in his review in
Merkur:
“The book belongs to no literary category whatsoever.”

The book is dedicated to Adler’s friends Elias and Veza Canetti. Soon after it was completed, Canetti formed a clear judgment:
The Journey
was “a masterpiece, written in an especially beautiful and clear prose, beyond rancour or bitterness.” Canetti went on to elaborate his view, using his own characteristic idiom: “I believe that your experience … has here met with a complete poetic transformation, one that has never before been
achieved.” Since Canetti considered a writer to be the “guardian of transformation,” we can assume that he was choosing his words most precisely, and that
The Journey
matched his own illuminating criteria for successful imaginative literature. The magic word
transformation
recalls the continual movement of
The Journey
, its overwhelming linguistic richness, that “boundlessness that tolerates no limit,” which the narrative voice invokes right from the start: “You travel many roads, and in many towns you appear with your relatives and friends; you stand, you walk, you fall and die.” That which Canetti called the mythic is found in the images that are continually transformed and used as leitmotifs, as well as in the various fairy-tale figures. Finally, Canetti was the first to arrive at what the novel meant for modernity. In the quality of the novel, which Canetti particularly stressed, we recognize its lasting relevance: “The most terrible things that could possibly happen to human beings are presented here as if they were weightless, delicate, and easily withstood, as if they could not harm the human core.” When the book appeared, Veza Canetti wrote to thank the author with a postcard from the British Museum that depicts the torso of Pallas Athene together with its head, from which the face has been broken off. “The book is
too beautiful
for words and too sad. We are proud of the dedication.”

The novel transposes the experience of the author, “estranging” it as Adler was wont to say, and removes it from the realm of the personal. Casting himself in the form of Paul Lustig, the writer transforms himself into the brother of his first wife, Gertrud Klepetar, to create a family unit. My father called Gertrud “Geraldine.” Here she is transfigured as Zerlina. Her parents, Dr. David and Elisabeth Klepetar, appear as Dr. Leopold and Caroline Lustig. Gertrud’s aunt, her mother’s sister, is portrayed as Ida Schwarz. In this way the family represents a sociological unit, a social atom whose very nucleus is annihilated by the destructive force imposed on them by history. This small group symbolizes the innumerable number of their fellow victims in suffering. The family name of the two sisters—Schmerzenreich—evokes the fate of this whole community bound together by a common fate. Their valley of tears is a realm of pain. “Lyrical irony” was what H. G. Adler called the style of the book, referring to the
lyricism of the language as well as to the ever-present use of irony that accuses but does not offend, that laments but does not complain, granting a lightness of tone to such appalling events without lessening the grief or shrinking away from the horror, and enveloping the victims themselves with the love that is due to them even in the moment of their downfall. The narrative voice speaks gently, a secret love suffuses the novel like the spirit of the ineffable in a lyric poem. At the outset we are told: “You were rounded up and not one kind word was spoken.” Right from the start, one senses the presence of the goodness that is absent from the events themselves. When Ida Schwarz begins her last journey, the narrator evokes the hour of her birth. We hear the midwife, “a capable woman,” inform the mother: “It’s a girl, Frau Schmerzenreich!” Here again a certain tenderness can be heard. We measure death against birth, compare things as they are with the circumstances that would be more appropriate to them. The incalculable horrors are measured against missing values. In this ironic context, pleasant words seem like satire. The executioners appear in the novel just as they themselves wish to be regarded. They are simply called “heroes.” Their method of execution, as attested by many to this very day, is hygienic. Everything is undertaken “with the utmost consideration.” In the play of values—which is also still relevant today—we also recognize the shared responsibility of economy and society, culture and the press. Through their own words, the fellow citizens, who actually know what is happening, judge themselves.

And so we wander on this
Journey
that moves with lyrical irony between concepts like “justice” and “faith” and symbolic images like “the journey” and “rubbish”—as Heinrich Böll noted—in a narrative that constantly returns to everyday matters and activities. “It only takes someone like Adler,” said Böll in characterizing the effect of this multivoiced dialectic in his
Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics
, “to describe something as seemingly harmless as rubbish collecting in order to reveal the uncanny.” We are led through the various stations of the novel almost unnoticeably, moving from Stupart to Leitenberg, then on to Ruhenthal and Unkenburg. Behind the names lie Prague (one thinks of Stupartgasse, around the corner from the Old Town Square), Leitmeritz, Theresienstadt, and Halberstadt. But the many strands of memory do not run in a straight line. The principles that the horror, the madness, the traumas, and the mourning obey
cause the course of this journey to run in ever-new directions until finally the narrator exhausts every path. Memory is a burning ember that defines the theme as well as the style. We experience from within how everything began: “The sickness had crept out of nowhere without a sign to alert the medical world before suddenly everyone fell sick. It was the first epidemic of mental illness.” In Ruhenthal the father dies. Then the aunt begins her journey to an unnamed place. Finally we follow Zerlina on her last journey. Everything resists this journey. Zerlina cannot admit to herself where she is headed. The narrator cannot follow her, can only try to find different ways to approach it. The ultimate place of terror, whose name today is on everyone’s lips as a symbol of these events, remains nameless. In the same way, the narrative voice refuses to name religions or nationalities. It was the very polarization of such groups that led into the abyss, and hence their concepts are of no use for the narrative. In this all-encompassing anonymity we see once again the power of the ballad, which transmutes the particular into the general. It is about people as such: “There are no roads. The names mean nothing.” Paul escapes the unnameable place, reaches Unkenburg, spends some time there, makes new friends, and then begins a new journey. The tale ends on a fitting note. In a dedication copy, the author one day wrote: “Only those who risk the journey find their way home.”

Born in Prague in 1910, H. G. Adler spent two and a half years in Theresienstadt before being deported to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Langenstein, where he was liberated in April 1945. Leaving Prague for London in 1947, Adler worked as a freelance teacher and writer until his death in 1988. The author of twenty-six books of fiction, stories, poems, history, philosophy, and religion, he is best known for his monograph
Theresienstadt 1941–1945
, for which he received the Leo Baeck Prize in 1958.
The Journey
is the first of Adler’s six novels to be translated into English.

Peter Filkins is a poet and translator. He is the recipient of a 2007 Distinguished Translation Award from the Austrian Ministry for Education, Arts, and Culture, a 2005 Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, and a past recipient of an Outstanding Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. He teaches literature and writing at Bard College at Simon’s Rock.

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DITORIAL
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Maya Angelou
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A. S. Byatt
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Caleb Carr
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Christopher Cerf
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Harold Evans
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Charles Frazier
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Vartan Gregorian
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Jessica Hagedorn
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Richard Howard
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Charles Johnson
Jon Krakauer
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Edmund Morris
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Azar Nafisi
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Joyce Carol Oates
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Elaine Pagels
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John Richardson
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Salman Rushdie
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Oliver Sacks
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Carolyn See
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Gore Vidal