This is the third of four posts on the recently published anthology Witnessing, Memory, Poetics: H.G. Adler & W.G. Sebald, edited by Helen Finch and Lynn L. Wolff. The third section of the volume is "Memory, Memorialization, and the Re-presentation of History"and contains two essays, the first being Dora Osbourne's "Memory, Witness, and the (Holocaust) Museum in H.G. Adler and W.G. Sebald." With their occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, the Nazis converted Prague's Central Jewish Museum into a storehouse for material goods confiscated from the city's Jewish population. It also served as a private museum for Nazi officials, offering "a grotesque parody [of] the traditions of the Jewish people" that portrayed them as an inferior race. After the war, however, H.G. Adler worked at the Museum for almost two years, participating in the restoration of its original function and collecting new objects for the purpose of building "an archive of persecution and of Theresienstadt," the nearby concentration camp/ghetto. Osbourne examines the way in which the Museum functions in two of Adler's novels – indirectly in The Journey and directly in The Wall.
Adler is very far from Sebald's melancholy world. The Theresienstadt camp is for Adler a warning, while for Sebald, it appears to be the confirmation of a malign world order. One element does connect both authors however: the fight against oblivion and silence which is carried out unceasingly and with ever new and increasing energy.