Writing the Displaced Person: H. G. Adler’s Poetics of Exile

Helen Finch

doi:10.3390/h8030148

Abstract

This article discusses the work of the Prague Jewish writer H. G. (Hans Günther) Adler (1910–1988) as an important contribution to the poetics of German-Jewish displacement in the wake of World War II. It demonstrates the significance of Adler’s early response to questions of refugee status, displacement and human rights in literature. The article argues that Adler’s work can be seen as providing in part a response to the question raised by Hannah Arendt, Joseph Slaughter and other recent theorists of literature and human rights: what poetic form is adequate to give literary expression to the mass displacements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century? Adler’s short story ‘Note of a Displaced Person’ and his lengthy novel The Wall demonstrate the role that modernist poetics of fragmentation, in particular the legacy of Kafka, can have in bearing witness to this experience. They also demonstrate that the space of exile and displacement provides Adler with a vantage point from which to comment on the rights catastrophe of the twentieth century. Adler’s work develops a theological understanding of the crisis of displacement, a crisis that can only be resolved by restoring a relation between the divine and the human.

Highlights

I understand enough English to know that Displaced Person means a person who has forfeited their place, their position, their situation
The Wall uses fragmentation, satire, allegory and grotesque humor to show the effects of memories of persecution in the Shoah on the experience of exile and displacement
Arendt insisted on the individual responsibility of Jewish functionaries for their decisions to carry out Nazi orders, whereas Adler ‘preferred to view the Shoah as a tragic fate set in motion by powers larger than the individuals’ (Filkins 2018, p. 293)

Summary

Introduction

I understand enough English to know that Displaced Person means a person who has forfeited their place, their position, their situation. I argue that Adler’s portrait of the central European Jewish experience of the mid-twentieth century, and his theological view of human displacement, forms a unique contribution to the writing of displacement, statelessness and exile These are topics that have taken on a recent importance during the ‘turn’ to human rights and in particular to the work of Arendt The Wall uses fragmentation, satire, allegory and grotesque humor to show the effects of memories of persecution in the Shoah on the experience of exile and displacement It is the first-person fictional narrative of a survivor of the Shoah, Arthur Landau, who attempts to find friends and family in his European home town before moving to a Western metropolis (very like London). Arendt insisted on the individual responsibility of Jewish functionaries for their decisions to carry out Nazi orders, whereas Adler ‘preferred to view the Shoah as a tragic fate set in motion by powers larger than the individuals’ (Filkins 2018, p. 293)

Displaced Personhood

Mechanical Materialism

Conclusions