H. G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds by Peter Filkins (review)

To shape the raw materials of a life into a biography always calls for skill in structural arrangement and thematically informed narration. By that criterion, Peter Filkins earns accolades for his masterfully constructed account of H. G. Adler and his "many worlds." Filkins has evoked those worlds compellingly through rich detail and lucidity of background that stamp his work as definitive. This is a comprehensive "life and times," no surprise in light of Filkins's many years of knowledgeable, devoted immersion in Adler and his writing (philosophy, theology, fiction, poetry, history, monumental scholarly studies), including sensitive translations of Adler's novels. His efforts have borne fruit in an authoritative biography exhibiting graceful clarity and depth. In each of seventeen chapters, Filkins presents one major aspect of Adler, all of which are interlocked for a full study of man and work. The last five chapters are titled, for instance, "The Writer" (237–60) "The Scholar" (261–84), "The Witness" (285–308) "The Maker" (309–30) and "The Man" (331–46), considering Adler in turn as poet and fiction writer, as unprecedentedly comprehensive historian and analyst of totalitarian dynamics, as public intellectual commenting on the Shoah, as theoretician (Vorschule für eine Experimentaltheologie), and as principled man living courageously. Filkins has also paid readers the respect of providing an index helpful in its meticulous organization and a bibliography (385–91) sensibly divided into (a) works by Adler chronologically arranged, (b) critical resources on Adler's work, and (c) general sources.

Two particular formal achievements make this biography remarkable. The first is Filkins's rare ability to switch with agility from closeup to wide view and back again, from the individual life to the relevant larger context. As just one example, the story of how Adler gradually conceived and carried out his staggering project entitled Der verwaltete Mensch: Studien zur Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland (268–84) after the praise accorded his earlier Theresienstadt: Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft moves from Adler's initial misgivings through the state of resistance to Holocaust studies in Germany at the time through the economics of the book market through the dogged opposition of archivists meant to cooperate. Filkins shifts from the smaller view to the larger while never losing focus; he shows Adler against the full background of his time without ever getting lost.

This achievement of developing the particular and the general in coherent alternation is all the more admirable in the first chapters (9–102), about Adler's life as a German-speaking resident of Prague. That whole culture was eradicated starting in 1939, first by Nazi savagery and then by postwar Czech retaliation and Communist takeover. The Prague German culture that produced fine literature is now as remote as the court of Aquitaine or the life of the Aztecs, its distinctive language now nearly as defunct as Old Irish, and expert commentators like Peter Demetz (see his essay "Die Legende vom magischen Prag") point out how irrecoverably the atmosphere of Rabbi Löw and the Golem, of Leo Perutz and Alfred Kubin, of Max Brod and Johannes Urzidil is lost in a past that might have been a thousand years ago. How much more difficult, then, to evoke that totally vanished world than England in 1970, for instance. Yet Filkins creates excellently detailed but wide-view accounts of Prague around 1900, backdrops that bring fully to life the issues pertinent to any educated German-speaking Prague Jew and that helped shape Adler as the man and artist he was (see especially 12–14, 21–23, 45–47, 57–59 for vivid renderings).

An even greater achievement is Filkins's lucidity in accounting for Adler's not merely surviving the concentration camps—almost miraculous in itself—but, like Viktor Frankl, turning unspeakable horror into something speakable after all, challenging Adorno's famous denial that poetry after Auschwitz was an indecency (245–49). Baptized in childhood and never an observant Jew, Adler awakened fully to his heritage under the...