PANEL DISCUSSION | BOOK PRESENTATION | H.G. ADLER’S PANORAMA: A CONVERSATION WITH PETER FILKINS & RUTH FRANKLIN
The Austrian Cultural Forum New York is pleased to host a conversation about Panorama, the first novel by Czech Holocaust survivor, H. G. Adler, which has just been published in English. Peter Filkins, who translated Panorama, and Ruth Franklin, author of A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, will discuss the impact of the novel on German postwar literature and why the novel was neglected for many years as a central part of Holocaust literature.
H. G. Adler’s semi-autobiographical novel Panorama was first published in 1968 but it has only just now been translated into English and, as the New York Times expressed, “It’s hard to fathom why we had to wait so long.” The novel is built around 10 “panoramic” scenes from the main character, Joseph Kramer’s life. The story follows Joseph from childhood in prewar Czechoslovakia, through his upbringing and his time as a prisoner in Auschwitz, until he finally goes into exile after the war.
Peter Filkins, an award winning poet and translator, has translated several of H. G. Adler’s works, including Panorama, making Adler’s novel accessible to an English speaking audience for the first time. Filkins currently teaches writing and literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Mass.
Ruth Franklin is a senior editor for The New Republic, has published her book A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction and has written on H.G. Adler’s life and work for The New Yorker. In this study, Franklin discusses central questions and controversies related to the genre of fictional literature about the Holocaust.
H.G. Adler (1910-1988), a Prague-born Jew, was himself a prisoner in several Nazi concentration camps. Adler chronicled his experiences in the camps in his renowned work Theresienstadt 1941-1945, and he became one of the central authors and scholars in the field of Holocaust studies. He was also among the first authors to write fictional accounts of the Holocaust in German.
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