VOLUME 16 NO.8 AUGUST 2016 journal The Association of Jewish Refugees Modernists in exile n 19 May 2016, a conference was held einer Zwangsgemeinschaft (Theresienstadt 1941- Filkins, the American translator of Adler’s at the University of London’s Senate 1945: The Face of an Enforced Community) prose works, the novels are at last becoming House with the title ‘A Modernist (1955), still the most detailed account of any known in the Anglophone world. A Journey, Oin Exile: The International Reception of H. single concentration camp ever written. His Filkins’s translation of Eine Reise (originally G. Adler’, convened by Professor Jeremy published in 1962), appeared in 2008, Adler (King’s College London), H. G. Adler’s that of Panorama (written in 1948, but not son, and Professor Elinor Shaffer (School published until 1968) in 2011, and that of Advanced Study, University of London). of Die unsichtbare Wand (1989) (The Wall) Adler, one of that special breed of Central in 2014. These are ambitious attempts to European polymaths whose oeuvre extended convey the experience of the Nazi persecution from scholarly studies to poems and novels, of the Jews and the concentration camps was a close friend of the anthropologist by means of the techniques of the modern and poet Franz Baermann Steiner (see the novel; the unconventional innovations report on the stone-setting in his memory and disjunctions that characterise them are in our January 2015 issue) and a friend of profoundly unsettling to the reader. Panorama Elias Canetti, winner of the Nobel Prize employs a stream-of-consciousness style for literature in 1981; both the latter were to encompass the stages in the life of Josef refugees from Nazism who settled in Britain Kramer, a boy in Prague, a victim of the camps before 1939. The three men are sometimes and finally a refugee in Britain, seen in a series referred to as ‘das Dreigestirn’, which translates of scenes resembling the views in the ‘wonder rather weakly as ‘the triumvirate’, though the cabinets’ (the ‘panorama’ of the title) that German word literally means ‘three-stars’, toured country towns in the 1930s. Eine Reise, described in the New Yorker as a conveying more aptly the stellar nature of their H. G. Adler, 1910-1988 contributions to literature and scholarship. (photo by Josef Rast, 1969) modernist masterpiece worthy of comparison The May conference was a historic with Kafka or Robert Musil, chronicles the landmark: the first conference to be dedicated study of the deportation of the Jews from surreal and incomprehensible nightmare in his adopted homeland to the full range of Germany, Der verwaltete Mensch – Studien of deprivation, deportation and death that works by a major refugee intellectual. H. G. zur Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland overwhelms and destroys the Lustig family, Adler – he stopped using his given names, (The Administered Human Being – Studies on leaving only the son Paul as a survivor; the Hans Günther, because that was the name the Deportation of the Jews from Germany), novel has been called a work of ‘Holocaust of the SS officer in charge of the deportation was published in 1974. Neither book has modernism’, and it stands as a living refutation of Jews from the Czech lands – was born been translated into English, though they of Theodor Adorno’s oft-cited adage that there in 1910 into a German-speaking Jewish are acknowledged as foundational works can be no poetry after Auschwitz. Through the family in Prague, where he studied at Charles of Holocaust scholarship and though their figure of Arthur Landau, the main voice and central consciousness of Die unsichtbare Wand, University. In February 1942 he was sent to author spent 40 years of his life in Britain. Adler depicts, often with elements of fantasy Theresienstadt (Terezin) with his first wife, The conference held in May aimed to and the grotesque, a trajectory similar to his Gertrud; in October 1944, they were deported restore the balance between these historical/ own, in which Landau lives out in London what to Auschwitz, where Gertrud opted not to anthropological studies and Adler’s innovative the novelist Cynthia Ozick describes in her let her mother go to the gas chambers alone. and experimental novels and poems. review of the book in the New York Times as ‘the Adler was sent to work in labour camps and Thanks to the devoted efforts of Peter forlorn displacements of a melancholic exile’. was liberated at Langenstein, a satellite camp Of these three modernists in British exile, of Buchenwald, in April 1945. He returned to only Elias Canetti, born in Bulgaria in 1905, Prague but left for Britain in 1947 to escape RELOCATION OF AJR who had already made his name in interwar the looming Communist takeover. He died in HEAD OFFICE Austria with his novel Die Blendung, written London in 1988. Adler was the product of an The AJR’s Head Office has moved to in Vienna and published there in 1935, extraordinarily highly cultured environment; received the recognition that his achievements he took a doctorate in musicology, but Winston House merited. Die Blendung was translated into was later to emerge as a scholar across a 2 Dollis Park English in 1946 under the title Auto-da-Fé, variety of disciplines, combining historical, London N3 1HF by the distinguished historian Dame Veronica ethnographical and sociological approaches in The new address is close to Finchley (C. V.) Wedgwood. Canetti moved away from his studies of the concentration camps, as well works of literature to pursue his interest in the as writing major modernist novels and poems Central Tube Station, Northern Line, and is on a number of bus routes. phenomenon of the crowd that inspired his that drew on his experiences. study Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power) Adler became known principally for his The AJR’s telephone number (1960), though in his later years he published study Theresienstadt 1941-1945: Das Antlitz remains 020 8385 3070. continued on page 2 journal AUGUST 2016 Modernists in exile continued his celebrated autobiographical trilogy Die gerettete Zunge (The Tongue Set Free) (1977), Die Fackel im Ohr (The Torch in My Ear) Visit to Air Transport Auxiliary Museum (1980) and Das Augenspiel (The Play of the Eyes) Tour led by Paul Lang (1990). Franz Baermann Steiner died in 1952, 5 September 2016 aged only 43; only later did his study Taboo, published posthumously in 1956, become a FLY A SPITFIRE STIMULATOR standard work on its subject. Steiner is known Join us for a visit to the Air Transport Auxiliary Exhibition. Listen to a forgotten story of in Britain mostly to academic specialists, courage, skill and sacrifice. 70 years on, it is difficult to believe that Britain was so desperate that the amateur pilots of Air Transport Auxiliary (men and women) were employed to fly while Canetti, despite his Nobel Prize, has dozens of different types of war plane between factories and front-line squadrons. never achieved widespread recognition in You will have the opportunity to fly a Spitfire Stimulator and we will have lunch in a this country. local restaurant before our return. It is therefore all the more pleasing to be For an application form, please call Head Office able to welcome a novel that introduces the on 020 8385 3070 or email [email protected] reader to the refugee milieu in which these three formidably erudite and creative men lived. Jeremy Adler’s novel, The Magus of Portobello Road (London: Alphabox Press, 2015, price AJR CARD AND GAMES CLUB £12.95), is an ambitious attempt to rework Please join us at our new Card and Games Club the Faust legend, familiar from Goethe’s on Tuesday 30 August at 1.00 pm drama, against the background of the London at North Western Reform Synagogue, of the post-war decades that played host to a Alyth Gardens, Temple Fortune, London NW11 7EN Card games including Bridge, Backgammon, Scrabble – you decide. struggling and marginalised group of refugees Games are dependent on numbers being sufficient. from Hitler. The figure of Faust, the vastly A sandwich lunch with tea, coffee and Danish pastries will be served on arrival. knowledgeable scholar who, dissatisfied with £7.00 per person his life, enters into a pact with the devil, has Booking is essential – when you book please let us know your choice of game. natural associations with the scholarly refugee Please call Susan Harrod on 020 8385 3070 or email [email protected] intellectuals at the heart of the novel, in which magus-like figures are transported from their Central European intellectual habitats to North Kensington’s landmarks, from Portobello Kensington and Hampstead. Market to Henekey’s pub on Portobello Road; It is with pleasurable pangs of recognition pubs, including the King of Bohemia on that one reads the novel’s vivid re-creation Hampstead High Street, play a considerable AJR Lunch of post-war London, in particular the drab, part in the depiction of London as it swings genteelly impoverished neighbourhood into the Sixties. The figure of the Hampstead- where North Kensington shades over into dwelling writer Zachariah Stubbs (Starobinski) Sunday Wormwood Scrubs. This is where Gabriel is loosely based on Canetti and the figure of Prince, a somewhat otherworldly intellectual Johnnie Prince’s ‘Uncle’ Frank on Steiner. 25 SEPTEMBER 2016 who has survived the camps, has settled with But the novel is far more than a realistic If you would like to attend, his wife Beatrice and his young son Johnnie, roman à clef. It is strikingly experimental, not please complete the enclosed from whose perspective as a child and teenager least in the self-referential scenes that present the in the 1950s and 1960s much of the novel writing of a novel.