Co-sponsored by European Studies, the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic, the Center for Jewish Studies, and the Department of History.
Poet, novelist, author of two seminal Holocaust studies, one of the earliest historians of Auschwitz, a last representative of Kafka’s Prague, and expert for the Eichmann trial, H.G. Adler (1910-1988) survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and two other concentration camps. With friends Leo Baeck, Elias Canetti and Heinrich Böll, he forged a deeper understanding of the Shoah, engaging Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem. His the story of a generation that fell victim to one of history’s darkest chapters, but also of a mind that saw how history was shaped by social forces still threatening our everyday lives through the power of technology over the individual, the controlling role of government, and the struggle to maintain human decency in menacing times.
Peter Filkins is an award-winning translator and poet. Besides three novels by H.G. Adler — Panorama, The Journey, and The Wall — he has translated the collected poems of Ingeborg Bachmann. He wrote the first biography of H.G. Adler which has been published most recently.