Witnessing, Memory, Poetics: H. G. Adler and W. G. Sebald ed. by Helen Finch and Lynn L. Wolff (review)

W. G. Sebald dedicated ten crucial pages of his fictional masterpiece Austerlitz (2001) to H. G. Adler’s foundational study Theresienstadt 1941-1945: Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemein-schaft: Geschichte, Soziologie, Psychologie (1955). This significant source of information on the camp in a climactic scene in Sebald’s work as well as the recent scholarly and popular interest in Adler’s writings provided the impetus for a symposium on both writers’ works as well as this subsequent collection of essays.

Despite his literary aspirations, Adler has principally been known for his insightful report on the Theresienstadt “ghetto.” After spending 1942 to 1945 in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, among other Nazi concentration camps, Adler began writing his scholarly and literary testimony on his camp experiences. His Theresienstadt became known as a pioneering documentary work and established Adler as a renowned authority on this camp. He was even called upon to provide expert evidence at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961. In the wake of this alleged new openness to Holocaust testimony, Adler’s testimonial novels Eine Reise and Panorama, along with his study of the deportations Der verwaltete Mensch, were eventually published.

If Adler constitutes one of the “first voices” to bear witness to the Holocaust, then Sebald has been regarded as one of the 1968 Generation, whose long prose works mark a new era in the literary engagement with memory and the Holocaust and as a “locus of moral authority.” Sebald bestowed this authority on Adler’s work, which recently (2008-2013) has seen a renaissance with English translations of The Journey and Panorama, which have been well received and reviewed in prestigious publications.

The essays in this volume are divided into four broad topics: Intertexts in Context; Witnessing Trauma and the Poetics of Witnessing; Memory, Memorialization, and the Re-presentation of History; and Literary Legacies and Networks. The essays vary in the scope and depth of their discussion. The first and last sections focus on more specific issues. The former includes studies of Adler’s and Sebald’s different writing styles, such as their use of narrators, and the volumes in Sebald’s Nachlassbibliothek. The latter focuses on the particular relationships and influences between Adler and/or Sebald and Kafk a, Broch, Adorno, and Boell and thus probably would appeal more to those interested primarily in postwar German literature.

The essays in sections 2 and 3 focus on broader issues, such as the numerous affinities between these two scholar-writers, including a fascination with institutions of memory (the museum, the archive, the collection), their exploration of the relationship between literature and history, scholarly research and literary portrayals of the Holocaust regarded as an ethical imperative of bearing witness to past atrocities, and the creation of texts that elude traditional genre classification and explore innovative narrative modes of portraying the past. Comparisons of their different writing styles and unique perspectives on the Holocaust shed light on the works of both men. If Adler as a survivor draws upon his personal experiences in his documentary and fictional writings that are dominated by the narrative present, then Se-bald’s works of “postmemory” bear witness secondhand, as they incorporate multiple sources of past narratives. For example, the various ways that Theresienstadt is remembered and rewritten by the two writers traces the ways in which cultural memories of Nazi crimes have developed in the decades after World War II. In particular, Adler’s documentary evidence as a direct witness in Theresienstadt and his high modernist fictional style contrasts with Sebald’s postmodern intertextual citations, melancholy bricolage, and engagement with media (film, photography, material traces) in his texts. As Finch and Wolff note, “In remediating Adler’s Theresienstadt, Sebald’s Austerlitz interrogates the text not only as a historical document of a past atrocity but also as an allegory of cultural memory” (10).

In the most illuminating essays, the intertextual relationship that connects Adler to Sebald serves...