H.G. Adler (1910-1988) was one of the founding figures of Holocaust scholarship whose monumental monograph Theresienstadt 1941-1945. The Face of a Coerced Community (1955; 1960) was the first study to present a fully documented account of the Final Solution. This collection gathers together, for the first time in English, some of Adler's most important scholarly essays on the Shoah and connected themes. Ideas raised for the first time in his book on Theresienstadt are here taken up and developed at greater length, new accents are set, and new themes are explored. Spanning his thought across three decades they focus on the fate of the 'coerced' human being and reflect on freedom, enslavement, terror, concentration camps, persecution, the mass society, dread, loneliness, and ideology.

H.G. Adler was born in Prague in 1910 and studied musicology, literature, sociology and philosophy at Charles University. He was interned in various concentration camps from 1941-45, devoted himself to raising orphans in Prague after liberation in 1945 and emigrated to London in 1947, where he died in 1988. His published works include novels, such as The Journey and Panorama and scholarly works including Der verwaltete Mensch and Theresienstadt 1941-1945. Among others, Adler was awarded the Leo Baeck Prize (1958) and the Buber-Rosenzweig Medal (1974).

Introduction
S. Jonathan Wiesen

Chapter 1. After Liberation: A Word to the World in which we Live with our Fellow Men [die Mitwelt] ca. 1947
Chapter 2. Ideas towards a Sociology of the Concentration Camp. 1958
Chapter 3. Jews in National Socialist Camps (from a Historical and Sociological Perspective). 1973
Chapter 4. On the Morphology of Persecution. 1960
Chapter 5. The Experience of Powerlessness: On the Sociology of Persecution. 1961
Chapter 6. Individual or Masses? 1964/1976

Afterword
Jeremy Adler

Sources