Reviewed by: The Wall by H. G. Adler Jason Baumer The Wall H. G. Adler. Translated by Peter Filkins. New York: Random House, 2014. 618 pp. H. G. Adler’s The Wall is an immensely moving work which depicts the postwar life and exile of Arthur Landau, a Prague-born sociologist, who struggles greatly to put the pieces of his life back together following the war. Landau’s difficulty in coming to terms with the past, and determining how to proceed in the postwar years, reveals to him slowly an impenetrable wall which pervades virtually every element of his life. While Adler’s writing style has frequently been compared to Franz Kafka’s, readers will likely also recognize the voices and styles of many of the seminal characters and works of postwar German-language literature, such as Beckmann from Wolfgang Borchert’s The Man Outside. Readers and Landau himself are initiated into the complex nexus of difficulties surrounding the ideas of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), in the questions of the relationship between victims and aggressors, survivors’ guilt, and with the complex issue of dealing with property seized by Nazis. While Landau certainly shares much in common with many of Kafka’s protagonists, Adler’s novel could be said to take place in the world that was prepared by Kafka’s works such as “In the Penal Colony,” The Castle, and The Trial. Landau himself shares in the charge of the Traveler in the Penal Colony, who is compelled to pass judgment on the treatment and integration of Holocaust survivors into the postwar world. Adler’s nebulous approach to narrative only underscores the magnificent difficulty with which Arthur Landau himself is faced. Reminiscent of the style of Anna Seghers’s The Excursion of the Dead Girls, Adler’s The Wall requires readers to follow closely the subtle narrative shifts that span from the present time of the novel in postwar London (the metropolis), to his attempts to gain footing in Germany immediately following his liberation, where he is literally picked up off the street by a passer-by, to his native city of Prague, where he returns in order to determine if anyone of his family [End Page 141] remains. Adler’s nonlinear narrative challenges readers to understand the tectonic shifts in setting and plot as the novel shifts both time and setting, and these changes occur at times without any warning. Without the aid of chapters or compartmentalization, readers are constantly jarred into the different phases of his own process of rebuilding his self, his career, and his family in the context of social strata accounting for merchants, intellectuals, exiles, and immigrants, all themselves equally struggling, some more inwardly, to come to grips with postwar life. One of the most fascinating ways in which Adler addresses the complicated challenges of postwar life can be found in the recurring story of Arthur’s work as a curator in a museum organized to process and store an overwhelming amount of private art and antiquities seized by the Nazis. The fact that these stories also continue to play out even in the contemporary world, with the discovery of vast hidden art collections in Germany, or the litigation of stolen art work during the war, only strengthens the relevance of the very questions with which Adler’s protagonist is primarily faced throughout the novel. The care with which Landau approaches work with the stolen art is in itself a symbol of his relationship to those lost in the carnage of the war. Landau constantly refers to the paintings as his sick patients, or as schoolmates, and this causes a great deal of tension with his colleagues, who are most often unable to accept Landau’s pessimistic and unstable relationship to the world. In a later flashback to his work at the museum, a job which inevitably leads to his travel to England and his escape from Germany, Landau also leads a tour of the hermitage that is also curated by the museum. In this stunning passage, Landau recounts the incalculable meaning of how the conquering powers sought to memorialize the ancestry of the people that they so methodically...