There are several worthwhile reasons for considering H.G. Adler in terms of the current debate about the Nazi genocide. Not only did he begin to reflect on the problem of representing these events at an early date when, in 1942, he was deported, but his views, even when not cited, have been deeply implicated in the current discussion, whether because of their role in confrontation with Adorno's philosophy, or because they are, albeit unwittingly, echoed almost word for word by Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity and the Holocaust. There is, so to speak, a public side to H.G. Adler's role in the study of the extermination of the Jews, marked by the innumerable books, essays, articles, and reviews which he published, and also an unknown aspect, which it is time to examine.

H.G. Adler is frequently cited as a source in the German-speaking world. Thus, for example, in an open letter to Hannah Arendt published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitungin 1963, Gershom Scholem invokes him as a standard reference; but it is also as a witness that he is invoked, as when Hermann Levin Goldschmidt refers to him in Das Vermächtnis des deutschen Judentums(The Heritage of the German Jews) where Adler's Theresienstadtmonograph serves him as the sole example of a Jewish testimony from the camps. Goldschmidt calls his book ‘invaluable, not only as a voice of Jewish self-definition, but even more important as a voice of Jewish self-reflection and self-examination’. Thirty years later, when the voices of other survivors had become widely known, Peter Demetz wrote: ‘I see Adler in the Shoah as a companion to Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel’. This evaluation led Demetz to conclude his chapter on Adler in his book After the Fireswith the words: ‘It is one of the great intellectual scandals of our time that his most important books, both the personal ones and those in search of historical truth, have yet to be translated into English.’

Adler's literary and scholarly work passes unnoticed in English and American texts like Langer's – admittedly selective – The Holocaust and Literary Imagination and Friedländer's Probing the Limits of Representation, which both take Adorno's dictum that there should be no art after Auschwitz as their starting point.