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Zusatztext “H.G. Adler’s works . . . survive as a magnificent achievement of courage! art! and the stubborn will to survive.”—Peter Demetz! Sterling Professor Emeritus of Germanic Language and Literature! Yale University “A masterpiece . . . For me! Adler has restored hope to modern literature.”—Elias Canetti! winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature “As important a find as Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française! and as well translated into English! it is indeed! as Veza Canetti wrote to the author in 1962! ‘too beautiful for words and too sad.’ ”—Sander L. Gilman! author of Jurek Becker: A Life in Five Worlds “A tribute to the survival of art and a poignant teaching in the art of survival. I tend to shy away from Holocaust fiction! but this book helps redeem an all-but-impossible genre.”— Harold Bloom Informationen zum Autor H. G. Adler Klappentext Here is "a rich and lyrical masterpiece”-notes Peter Constantine-the first translation of a lost treasure by acclaimed author H. G. Adler, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Written in 1950, after Adler's emigration to England, The Journey was ignored by large publishing houses after the war and not released in Germany until 1962. Depicting the Holocaust in a unique and deeply moving way, and avoiding specific mention of country or camps-even of Nazis and Jews-The Journey is a poetic nightmare of a family's ordeal and one member's survival. Led by the doctor patriarch Leopold, the Lustig family finds itself "forbidden” to live, enduring in a world in which "everyone was crazy, and once they finally recognized what was happening it was too late.” Linked by its innovative style to the work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, The Journey portrays the unimaginable in a way that anyone interested in recent history and modern literature must read. Augury Driven forth, certainly, yet without understanding, man is sub- jected to a fate that at one point appears to consist of misery, at another of happiness, then perhaps something else; but in the end everything is drowned in a boundlessness that tolerates no limit, against which, as many have said, any assertion is a rarity, an island in a measureless ocean. Therefore there is no cause for grief. Also, it’s best not to seek out too many opinions, because, by linking delusions and fears to which we are addicted, strong views keep you constantly drawn to what does not exist, or even if it did, would seem prohibited. So you find yourself inclined to agree with this or that notion, the emptiness of a sensible or blindly followed bit of wisdom, until you finally become aware of how unfathomable any view is, and that one is wise to quietly refrain from getting too involved with the struggles to salvage anything from the rubbish heap, life’s course demanding this of us already. Thus some measure of peace is attained. It’s a peace found in endless flight, but nonetheless genuine peace. It is to be sure not an escape from yourself, no matter how much it may seem so, but rather the flight that consists of a ceaseless progression along the winding paths of a solitary realm, and because you abide in this realm you can call it peace, for upon time’s stage everything remains fixed in the present. You’re still a part of this. You travel many roads, and in many towns you appear with your relatives and friends; you stand, you walk, you fall and die. You don’t believe you’re still on the stage, even when you acknowledge you were once on it. But you’re wrong, for they took you away and set you back onstage amid the fleeting journey. You didn’t escape, even when you seemed suddenly sunk, figuratively and literally. Yet what happens onstage? Many analogies are sought that often capture something essential, but none serves us better than the metaphor of the journey, which we can think of as flight. But what entity is it amid all thes...
