H. G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds
Peter Filkins
(Author)
21,000+ Reviews
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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.
Product Details
Price
$36.99
Publisher
Oxford University Press, USA
Publish Date
March 12, 2019
Pages
424
Dimensions
6.2 X 1.2 X 9.4 inches | 1.65 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9780190222383
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
Peter Filkins is an award-winning translator and poet. He has translated three novels by H.G. Adler, Panorama, The Journey, and The Wall, as well as the collected poems of Ingeborg Bachmann. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the DAAD, and the American Academy in Berlin, he is the Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon's Rock.
Reviews
"The research and intellectual commitment behind the biography is formidable...[Filkin] has done H. G. Adler more than justice: he has created a luminous new work that parallels Adler's own practice in its combination of lyrical prose, scrupulous scholarship and humanism." -- Helen Finch, The University of Leeds, TLS
"Authoritative, deeply empathetic...a well-deserved celebration of a courageous and determined public intellectual." -- Kirkus Reviews
"This book is an intimate, detailed, and emotionally charged look at the life and times of Hans G�nther Adler...A deeply moving tribute to a man dedicated to keeping human dignity alive amid some of the greatest depravity the world has ever known, Filkins's abundantly researched, honest book reveals Adler as a wounded, flawed human being but also as a man gifted with inner strength, endurance, and the burning desire to take what he was given and make of his life an inextinguishable light for a world bound by darkness." -- Foreword Reviews
"[A] powerful portrait of Adler [...] this vivid biography [creates] a convincing picture of a man who grappled with the unimaginable and, upon his death, was justifiably called righteous" -- Publishers Weekly
"I cannot put this book down. I do not want it to end. Adler's is a world that bears inflections of Kafka, Levi, and ultimately Sebald - before, during, and after the war - a world that was always about to collapse, before, during, and after the war. And yet, in Filkins's telling, this is a life as a nightmare one doesn't want to shake off." -- Andr� Aciman
"Every page of Adler's work was written with the urgent rigor demanded by survivorship, and Peter Filkins - Adler's English-language translator and now his world biographer - honors that daunting mandate. His is a masterly and utterly engrossing study of one of the greatest minds to have been forged in the furnace of mid-twentieth-century Europe." -- Joshua Cohen
"Peter Filkins, the translator of three novels by the German-Czech master and Holocaust survivor H.G. Adler, now offers a meticulously researched biography of the writer, who has been compared to Kafka and Robert Musil. Since Adler's novels (and his massive study Theresienstadt 1941-1945) grew out of his own experiences, Filkins was already fluent in the life as well as the work and deftly folds his insights into the larger context of Adler's nightmarish times." -- Robert Wilson, editor of The American Scholar
