The novelist and sociologist H. G. Adler was a German-speaking Jew, born and educated in Prague. After surviving the Holocaust, he settled in London where he wrote an early and influential book of Holocaust history, among many other scholarly works, along with a series of novels that flout conventional understandings of the social and psychological consequences of Holocaust as well as of how it can be -- or should be -- represented. This talk will present Adler's contrarian views on the role of art and its institutions in promoting recovery after the Holocaust.

Samuel Spinner is Assistant Professor of Yiddish at Johns Hopkins University. His book Jewish Primitivism (Stanford, 2021) won the 2022 Modern Language Association book prize for studies in Germanic languages and literatures. He is now researching a book on monumentality in Holocaust commemoration and literature