Between ‘Nothing’ and ‘Something’: Narratives of Survival in H. G. Adler’s Scholarly and Literary Analysis of the Shoah

Abstract

H. G. Adlerçthe scholar, novelist, and poet who had been forced to spend 1942 to 1945 inTheresienstadt, Auschwitz, and in the Buchenwald subcamps Niederorschel and Langenstein-Zwiebergeçsaw an irreconcilable gulf between those who survived the Shoah only after directly su¡ering National Socialist extermination policies and those who, able to escape, survived in exile. In a letter written shortly after his liberation from the concentration camp and sent to Franz Baermann Steiner, a friend living in exile in England, Adler asserted the latter group could not possibly imagine ‘what has actually happened to us’. He emphasized that what the experiences of misery, hunger, dirt, hatred, illnesses, horror, and pain had done especially to the ‘inner self ’ of those who had passed through them and survived could not be expressed in words. Despiteçor perhaps precisely because ofçthe severe problems of narrative representation arising from the Holocaust, Adler had already planned at an early stage to represent his experiences in two ways: ‘When it came to the deportations, I told myself: I won’t survive this. But if I do survive, I want to represent it, and in two di¡erent ways: I want to explore it in a scholarly manner [. . .], and I want to portray it in a literary manner.’ Adler was indeed able to pursue this project after his liberation and created an extensive body of work that consists of two distinct