World Books podcast: Peter Filkins

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A few years ago, Peter Filkins, an award-winning translator of German, walked into a Cambridge, MA bookstore, read a few pages of an obscure German novel and recognized that he had stumbled onto literary gold. Written in the early 1950s, ‘The Journey’ was one of the 26 volumes penned by the German Jew H. G. Adler, a Holocaust survivor who sought to memorialize and understand the experience through fiction, poetry, social history, and philosophy. ‘The Journey’ garnered enormous critical attention. Filkins has now translated another of Adler’s books, entitled ‘Panorama.’ Inspired by Adler’s life, the novel is told from the point-of-view of young Josef Kramer – the adolescent describes life in post-World War I Bohemia, from peace in a country town to oppression in a militaristic school and trauma in a German concentration camp. World Books editor Bill Marx spoke to Filkins about ‘Panorama’ and why many critics think Adler is a major addition to Holocaust literature.
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• Subscribe to the World Books podcast via iTunes
• Bill Marx’s Arts Fuse magazine