by Joshua Cohen
I do, for one, and all novelists should: Kraus is saying that the more care a writer takes with the surface sound of a sentence, the more the sentence can stray from sense. But he’s also slyly contradicting himself by coding that statement in a prose of remarkable phonic intricacy. Self-conscious style, though, isn’t something Franzen worries about anymore. In 2010 he told the Paris Review:
And, by a wide margin, I’ve never felt less self-consciously preoccupied with language than I did when I was writing Freedom. Over and over again, as I was producing chapters, I said to myself, “This feels nothing like the writing I did for twenty years—this just feels transparent.” I wasn’t seeing in the pages any of the signs I’d taken as encouraging when I was writing The Corrections. The sentences back then had had a pop. They were, you know, serious prose sentences, and I was able to vanquish my doubts simply by rereading them.
* * *
—
IF KEHLMANN’S CONTRIBUTIONS ARE SHAMEFUL, Reitter’s are dutiful and smart, and those reassuring initials “PR” attached to his notes were the only thing that kept me reading. Franzen’s Project might be redeemed if it attracts readers to Reitter’s two vital books: The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (2008) and On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred (2012). A snippet from the former is wiser on Kraus than all of Franzen’s equivocations combined:
Kraus operated in a medium in which, to a particularly extreme degree, literary language was made exchangeable and consumable and was assimilated into various projects of social advancement. His project of internecine resistance took him, correlatively, particularly far in the direction of developing a style that would not be easy to assimilate—that would not have “consequences” in the way he believed Heine’s literary journalism had.
But of all the presences in The Kraus Project, it’s not Reitter, Kehlmann, or Kraus who proves to be Franzen’s most dangerous interlocutor: It’s Franzen himself. He writes about his loneliness on his Fulbright trip to Germany; about his relationships with women, and with the specters of Harold Bloom and Pynchon. He writes about envy, and how it encourages productivity, and how it limits productivity, and about the folly of the very notion of artistic productivity. He writes against blogs, yet allows a comparison between Die Fackel and blogs; he writes about the way websites disturb the reading experience, but does it in pages bracketed into German and English sections and in notes that confuse me more than anything I read online—that confuse me more than the Talmud. He writes about competition and work ethic, but never mentions his own Heine: David Foster Wallace, a master of the nuanced citation who managed to be both smarter and more casual, crazier and kinder.
“My explicitly stated goal,” Franzen writes of himself in 1980s Berlin, “was to save the American novel—from social one-dimensionality, from critical preoccupation with the prison-house of language, from the off-putting avant-gardism of Pynchon and his kind.” Apparently, he stayed inside and smoked cigarettes and typed for twelve hours a day, and it was in reading this autobiographical stretch—in breaks from my own smoking and typing—that I came to recognize a landsman. It seemed that we were both involved in Bildung, or “cultivation,” the German-Jewish discipline that shaped my grandparents, from Cologne, and the method by which German Jewry sought to become not just accepted by an adopted homeland, but to embody its quintessence. I realized that Franzen—perhaps more than any other American novelist, and certainly more than anyone else ever raised in the Congregational Church in the Midwest—felt like a guest fighting to be loved by a host culture, yet conscious that such love can never be fought for, and that the struggle was in equal parts futile and imaginary. He let his origins oppress him, just enough for him to know how to oppress himself in the event that America didn’t exile him, or have him executed.
I’ve come to regard this as Franzen’s Jewish Problem: Denise’s overrelished Judeophilia in The Corrections, blatantly counterpointed with her mother Enid’s overrelished Judeophobia; the depiction in Freedom of Jewish neocons rallying around the Iraq War, and its ridiculous portrayal of a New York diamond-district salesman dealing rings while wearing phylacteries—which the religious wear only during prayer; and the way this book treats Kraus’s Jüdische Selbsthaß (Jewish self-hate) by the trick of letting Reitter sort it out, and the way it treats the Holocaust, by letting Kehlmann apostrophize it, leaving Franzen himself free to pontificate about Israel/Palestine with a sophistication that would barely pass muster on a local network affiliate, let alone on CNN. But I’m prepared to forgive him all this, as readers have to forgive Franzen everything, only because no one can ever hate him as much as he already hates himself. Franzen must know that he will never receive any review as cruel as the ones that, with each book and media appearance, he gives himself. It’s his awareness of all this, and his inability to restrain himself from betraying that awareness, that puts America’s foremost novelist in contention to become the world’s foremost Jewish novelist tout court—the inheritor of the crown of feathers. If only he were funnier, or cared a bit more about sex.
* The previous Kraus renaissance was just a minor part of the Americanization of Jewish-European literature, which began immediately after the Holocaust, with émigré translations of Arendt, Benjamin, Buber, Kafka, Scholem, and of the Yiddish tradition, published in affordable trade editions by Schocken Verlag, which, after being closed by the Nazis in 1939, left Berlin for Mandate Palestine, en route to New York. That period ended definitively in 1987, with Schocken’s acquisition by Random House, which in 1998 was acquired by Bertelsmann, a German media firm that during the war was the single largest publisher of Third Reich propaganda.
RECOGNIZED WITNESS
ON H. G. ADLER
ON MAY 18, 1961, TOWARD the end of Session 45 of the Eichmann trial, Judge Halevi asked State Prosecutor Bar-Or if he’d finished submitting into evidence all the documents relevant to the Theresienstadt camp. Bar-Or said he had, though of course there was also “the well-known book by Dr. John Adler”: “This is the outstanding book about Theresienstadt, and it is called Theresienstadt.”
JUDGE HALEVI: Was he there?
STATE PROSECUTOR BAR-OR: He himself was in Theresienstadt. I simply hesitate to burden the court with material. This is an excellent, authentic book. It is based on impeccable sources. It is a thick volume, and it is at the disposal of the court. I simply hesitate to submit it. Much has been written about Theresienstadt. I try to submit material which refers to the Accused, without impairing the general picture. We are faced with the difficult problem that one has somehow to compromise and to select, otherwise there is no end to it.
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt seized on the mention of this book by H. G. Adler as a rare moment of nuance in the trial:
The reason for the omission was clear. [Adler’s book] describes in detail how the feared “transport lists” were put together by the Jewish Council of Theresienstadt after the SS had given some general directives, stipulating how many should be sent away, and of what age, sex, profession and country of origin. The prosecution’s case would have been weakened if it had been forced to admit that the naming of individuals who were sent to their doom had been, with few exceptions, the job of the Jewish administration….The picture would indeed have been greatly damaged by the inclusion of Adler’s book, since it would have contradicted testimony given by the chief witness on Theresienstadt, who claimed that Eichmann himself had made these individual selections. Even more important, the prosecution’s general picture of a clear-cut division between persecutors and victims would have suffered greatly.
Arendt’s point is that no prosecution would have wanted, and no defense would have dared, to address the forced collaboration of Jews in their own extermination. No instance of a Jew unloading the cattle-cars could be allowed to mitigate the guilt of the Accused. But Arendt failed to state the obvious: that being forced to participate i
n another’s death while waiting for your own was victimization at its most perverse. What the Jerusalem judiciary didn’t trust the world to comprehend was something that was already being taught in Israeli schools, and for survivors was a basic fact.
* * *
—
HANS GÜNTHER ADLER ARRIVED in London in 1947, and wrote his nearly thousand-page book in feverish haste. He recorded the activities of the Judenrat alongside how many grams of food each inmate received each day, and how many hours they were allowed to sleep each night. Over the next three decades he became the survivor who wrote the most but was read the least, producing more than thirty books of history (The Administered Man, a study of the deportations of German Jewry), sociology (The Experience of Powerlessness, a study of camp organization), poetry, and fiction, all published on a shoestring in West Germany and not translated into English until now. The revival of interest in him began, in the English-speaking world, in 2001, when W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz was published. Austerlitz’s protagonist is obsessed with Theresienstadt and regrets that “now it is too late for me to seek out Adler, who had lived in London until his death in the summer of 1988.” In 2002, after Sebald’s death, the translator Peter Filkins came across a copy of the German original of The Journey, the middle novel of a trilogy by Adler, in Schoenhof’s Foreign Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Filkins found a very different Adler from the chronicler who had inspired Sebald. Adler’s subject remains the same whether he’s writing fiction or nonfiction—the events between his deportation in February 1942 and liberation in April 1945—but whereas the style of his nonfiction is conventionally academic, the style of his fiction embodies the trauma: Internal monologues turn out to have been spoken aloud; dialogue is exposed as two sides of a psychic break; events are given out of sequence; each passage’s vocabulary is determined by its theme—biblical, technological, legalistic, medical—rather than by its characters.
Panorama, the first volume, was written in 1948 but not published until twenty years later. It’s a third-person Bildungsroman about a character called Josef Kramer—a Josef K with his name made explicitly Jewish. When WWI breaks out, Josef is sent away from an unnamed city that resembles Prague to live with the Neumann family in provincial Umlowitz. Later, he attends boarding school and joins a scouting group on a trip to Landstein Castle. From here, the biographical correspondences can be confirmed: Adler was born to German-speaking Jews in Prague in 1910, studied musicology at its German University, and worked as secretary of the Urania, an educational association that hosted popular talks by the likes of Einstein and Thomas Mann; Josef follows a similar track. Adler was pressed into slave labor to help lay a railway line between Prague and Brno, then he was sent to Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and two subcamps of Buchenwald, Niederorschel and Langenstein. He puts Josef through all of that except Theresienstadt, which is reserved for the second novel in the sequence. In confinement Josef comes to realize that his life so far—from the Neumanns’ dry goods store to his education and employment—has been preparing him for the camps, where “everything is a useless nightmare, no one able to think beyond the day itself, the panorama narrow and closed in.”
The Journey, written in 1950–51 and published in 1962, adapts the deportation and internment experiences into an entire book that details in a mix of third-, second-, and first-person narration the destruction of the Lustig family—a doctor, his wife, their two adult children, and the wife’s sister. At Ruhenthal, which is Theresienstadt, they reenact Adler’s ordeal. Adler arrived in Theresienstadt with his wife, Gertrud Klepetar, in 1942; his parents, who arrived separately, died in the camp that year. Gertrud’s father died in 1943, and in 1944 her mother was deported to Auschwitz. Gertrud insisted on following, and Adler followed his wife. Both mother and daughter were murdered on arrival. Filkins, in his introduction to The Journey, writes that of all the German-language novels about the Holocaust, only three besides Adler’s have been written by Jews with direct experience of the camps: Fred Wander’s The Seventh Well, Jurek Becker’s Jacob the Liar, and Night—not the book by Elie Wiesel, who wrote in French, but a vengeful novel by Edgar Hilsenrath. Filkins’s point about the anti-Semitism of postwar German-language publishing would have been stronger if he’d noted that only one of his Germans, Hilsenrath, was born in the Reich. Becker was born in Poland, Wander in Austria, and Adler in what, at the time, was the third city of Austro-Hungary. Adler is the only member of this group whose books risk aestheticizing the killing, which he describes in a range of metaphors: The Lustig women are portrayed as rabbits; the crematorium is a zoo, a terrarium, a cinema, and an “ash factory”; the act itself is an efficient performance spoiled only by the victims, who “neglected at the end of the execution to step out from behind the curtain and acknowledge the cheers of those left behind.”
The final volume of the trilogy, The Wall, was written between 1956 and 1961 and published posthumously in 1989. Its narrator, Arthur Landau, remembers the immediate aftermath of the war in “the city,” which is still Prague, and his émigré life in “the metropolis,” which is London. Arthur is a freelance scholar immersed in an interminable manuscript with the working title Sociology of Oppressed People. He’s writing that book, and presumably this book too, in a drab flat on the fictional West Park Row, which he shares with his second wife, Johanna, and their two children, Eva and Michael. Arthur’s first wife, Franziska, was killed at Auschwitz, but his memories of her are so vivid that he is able to project images from their past together onto the wall of the title, a symbol, for him, of both the limits of meaning and of his salvation: “Before it I can exist and rise to become a figure that is visible and casts a shadow, though within myself I remain an indeterminate entity.” In German this final volume of the trilogy was published, against Adler’s wishes, as Die unsichtbare Wand (The Invisible Wall), to avoid confusion with the host of other books that appeared as the Berlin Wall came down.
* * *
—
EVERY WRITER ON THE HOLOCAUST is faced with an absurdity: that the most thorough chroniclers of the tragedy remain the Nazis themselves, who left a long paper trail of censuses, genealogies, banking records, transportation manifests, and matériel requisitions, a body of evidence accessible to anyone who understands German and euphemism (arisieren, “to Aryanize,” meaning to expropriate a Jewish-owned business; liquidieren, “to liquidate,” transferred from the lexicon of commerce to death). Holocaust survivor writers have had to become editors or translators of the Reich’s first draft, and none understood this better than Adler. Obfuscation through defamiliarization (describing Jews as “animals” and “units”), the revalencing of rhetoric (“reclaiming” the Slavic countries for the “Großgermanisches Reich”), the subordination of individual autonomy to archetype and allegory, the force of repetition: Adler may have been introduced to these techniques by Kafka, Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, or Alfred Döblin, but he mastered them by studying Goebbels and Eichmann and his clerks, whom Adorno called Schreibtischmörder, “desk-murderers.”
The Nazi bureaucrats were responsible for two of the most malevolent fictionalizing experiments of the twentieth century, both of which Adler experienced and wrote about. The first was Theresienstadt itself. In 1940, the Nazis converted the Czech garrison town into a camp for nearly 150,000 Czech, German, Austrian, and Polish Jews, a quarter of whom died of starvation, dehydration, or typhus. Most of the remainder were moved to Auschwitz and Treblinka. In the summer of 1944, with Denmark protesting against the deportation of its Jews to Theresienstadt, Germany capitulated to diplomatic pressure and allowed the International Red Cross to visit the camp to prove that no exterminations were being carried out on site. The Reich Security Main Office, sniffing a PR opportunity, ordered the Gestapo to implement Operation Beautification (Verschönerungsaktion), which would transform the camp temporarily into a picture-postcard hamlet.
Sebald describes it accurately in Austerlitz, because he relied on
Adler’s account. “It was decided,” Sebald writes, “to organize the ghetto inmates under the command of the SS for the purpose of a vast cleaning-up program: pathways and a grove with a columbarium were laid out, park benches and signposts were set up, the latter adorned in the German fashion with jolly carvings and floral decoration, over one thousand rosebushes were planted.” Food rations were increased; new clothes—not just uniforms—were sewn. Conditions in the barracks improved, especially after seven thousand prisoners were dispatched to Auschwitz a month before the inspectors’ arrival. Dr. Paul Eppstein, president of the Judenrat, was appointed mayor for the day, and tasked with leading the Red Cross contingent on a tour; Brundibár, a subversive children’s opera whose villain resembled Hitler, was performed; a football game was played, and there was a show trial in which Jewish lawyers, judges, and jurors tried another inmate for “theft.” The Red Cross report, made public only in 1992, might as well have been ghostwritten by the Reich: “The SS police gives the Jews the freedom to organize their administration as they see fit.” A later propaganda film presented the camp as a spa town for the Jewish elite, which explains Adler’s name for it in The Journey: Ruhenthal means “Valley of Rest.” The novel depicts it as a sanatorium with an identity problem: Sometimes the Jews are the patients and the Nazis are the benevolent physicians pursuing their “cure”; at other times the Nazis are “the diseased,” armed lunatics bent on eradicating their Jewish caretakers.
