H. G. Adler
A Life in Many Worlds
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- 30,99 €
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- 30,99 €
Publisher Description
The biography of H.G. Adler (1910-88) is the story of a survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and two other concentration camps who not only lived through the greatest cataclysm of the 20th century, but someone who also devoted his literary and scholarly career to telling the story of those who perished in over two dozen books of fiction, poetry, history, sociology, and religion. And yet for much of his life he remained almost entirely unknown. A writer's writer, a scholar of seminal, pioneering works on the Holocaust, a renowned radio essayist in postwar Germany, a last representative of the Prague Circle of literature headed by Kafka, a key contributor to the prosecution in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Adler was a man of his time whose times lived through him. His is the story of many others, but also one that is singularly his own. And at its heart lies a profound story of love and perseverance amid the loss of his first wife, Gertrud Klepetar, who accompanied her mother to the gas chamber in Auschwitz, and the courtship and extended correspondence with Bettina Gross, a Prague artist who escaped to the Britain, only to later learn that her mother had also been in Theresienstadt with Adler before her eventual death in Auschwitz. His delivery of a lecture in Theresienstadt commemorating Kafka's sixtieth birthday, and with Kafka's favorite sister present; the nurturing of a younger generation of artists and intellectuals, including the Israeli artist Jehuda Bacon and the Serbian novelist Ivan Ivanji; the preservation of Viktor Ullmann's compositions and his opera The Emperor of Atlantis, only to see them premiered decades later to world acclaim; and the penury of postwar life while churning out the novels, poetry, and scholarship that would make his reputation - all of these are part of a life survived in the moment, but dedicated to the future, and that of a man committed to helping human dignity survive in his time and that to come.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Filkins, a Bard literature professor and translator of several Hans G nther "H.G." Adler novels, offers a powerful portrait of Adler (1910 1987), a scholar, novelist, poet, and tireless witness to the horrors of the Holocaust. The book focuses most effectively and eloquently on Adler's experiences in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, which forever colored his work and beliefs including his commitment to living a principled life devoted to the future yet cognizant of the lessons of the past. Raised in a German-speaking, largely secular Jewish community in Prague, Alder was never a practicing Jew, but did connect more deeply to Judaism while in the camps. There, he was sustained by his love of and intense engagement with literature and philosophy. Following the war, Adler became a passionate advocate for survivor reparations, and even provided an affidavit for the Eichmann trial. Perhaps most significantly, he wrote the monumental nonfiction works Theresienstadt 1941 1945 (1955) and Administered Man: A Study of the Deportation of the Jews from Germany (1974). Filkins could have better synopsized Adler's fiction, or more thoroughly introduced supporting characters in the narrative, important figures in Adler's own time, of whom readers may not have heard previously. But this vivid biography does create a convincing picture of a man who grappled with the unimaginable and, upon his death, was justifiably called righteous.