Every so often, a book shocks you into realizing just how much effort and sheer luck was required to get it into your hands. “Panorama” was the first novel written by H. G. Adler, a ­German-speaking Jewish intellectual from Prague who survived a labor camp in Bohemia, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and a particularly hellish underground slave-labor camp called Langenstein, near Buchenwald. Adler wrote the first draft in less than two weeks in 1948, three years after he had walked back to Prague from Langenstein and a few weeks after he had fled Prague just before the Communist coup. He wound up in England, but couldn’t find anyone willing to publish the book until 1968, 20 years and two drafts later. The book is coming out in English for the first time only now.

It’s hard to fathom why we had to wait so long. Adler, who died in London in 1988, was a gifted novelist as well as an important scholar. Under any circumstances, let alone such harsh ones, his accomplishments would be remarkable. In the 1940s and ’50s, he helped invent the academic discipline of Holocaust studies, despite never managing to secure an academic post. His anatomy of Theresienstadt, a way station on the route to Auschwitz that the Nazis passed off as a sort of spa for prominent Jews, was based on notes he took and hid while imprisoned there, which he supplemented after the war with interviews and archival research. The book remains the definitive account of that eerie “showcase” camp, and propelled him to some slight posthumous fame when W. G. Sebald quoted it at length in his novel “Austerlitz.”

Along with his scholarly studies, Adler also wrote fiction: five novels whose aesthetic sophistication and experimental form may have struck his contemporaries as troubling, given the raw nature of the events he was dealing with. (Making art about the Holocaust has been seen as vaguely unseemly ever since T. W. Adorno insisted that “After Auschwitz, it is barbaric to write poetry.”) In any case, Adler’s novels received little recognition among readers of German, possibly because they were so highly wrought, possibly because his reputation as a scholar kept people from taking his other writing seriously. And he is almost entirely unknown in the English-speaking world. Only three of his books have been translated: a historical work, “Jews in Germany”; a novel called “The Journey”; and now, “Panorama.” That American and British readers have had such limited access to Adler’s writing and thought for so long is, as the eminent scholar of modern German literature Peter Demetz has written, “one of the great intellectual scandals of our time.”

Of the two novels available in English, “The Journey” seems to me the greater work, an ambitious exercise in the collective stream-of-consciousness that tries to eavesdrop on the babble of an entire little world. Adler called it a ballad. I think of it as a symphony. Set in Theresienstadt and serving as a kind of companion piece to his sociological study of the camp, “The Journey” inhabits the inner experience of participants at every level of that grotesque experiment, from victim to bystander to Nazi. In addition to painting a group portrait of people in states of extreme confusion, despair, denial or madness, the novel’s round-robin of monologue and dialogue captures with almost scientific precision the social and psychological consequences of an almost unimaginable process: a giant bureaucratic apparatus recategorizing a large group of citizens as waste matter and proceeding to dispose of them as quickly as possible.

And yet, as haunting and, yes, beautiful as “The Journey” is, it can be difficult to get through in English. As best as I can tell from Peter Filkins’s deceptively mellifluous translation, Adler often relied on differences in dialect and vocabulary, in speech patterns, rather than on conventional exposition to indicate who was talking or whose thoughts were flowing at any given moment. While it may be possible for a German reader to keep track of Adler’s shifts in tone, they can’t be readily detected in translation.

“Panorama,” also translated by Filkins, is more straightforward and accessible, which is not to say that it lacks art. The title refers to the wooden cabinets of wonders that once traveled from city to city, offering scenes from the past or remote locales, “lit by a brilliant golden light, as if dipped in tropical sunlight.” The novel, a thinly disguised autobiographical bildungs­roman, opens with a very young Josef Kramer being taken to such a panorama by his grandmother. “Here is another world, which one can only gaze at, there being no other way to enter but to gaze,” he thinks a little sadly. “All the people and the distant lands that you encounter in these pictures remain untouchable behind the glass walls.” The rest of the novel will unfold, panoramalike, in discrete scenes from key moments in Josef’s life. By the end of the book, after he has passed through the death camps and into exile, we have become aware that these scenes, or at least the memories they’re based on, are the only possessions he has been able to hold on to, that the worlds contained in them have vanished, and that we too can only press our faces against the glass.

These worlds, however, do glow in “brilliant golden light” (except for the scenes in the camps, which are lit by dim, bare bulbs), and though seen and heard by Josef they are rich in meaning for us as well, packed with sights, sounds and words that we — safely on the far side of World War II — sometimes understand better than Josef does.

I don’t mean to imply that Adler employs heavy-handed foreshadowing. On the contrary, one of the feats of the novel is to remain intensely, cinematically, in the narrative present, where the pressures of daily life eclipse the machinations of history. Adler used his powers of observation and his prodigious memory to give each of these reconstructions its own texture and specificity. We feel the oppressive discipline and claustrophobic striving of Josef’s middle-class family in Prague more keenly than the World War I shortages that beset it; the satisfactions of life in the small country town where Josef spends a year going to school and herding cattle rather than the too-rapid industrialization and political instability roiling the city; the meanness of teachers and fellow students in a militaristic German boarding school instead of the specifically German chauvinism of the place.

What we almost never hear about are Jews and anti-Semitism, at least until the Germans occupy Czechoslovakia and send Josef to a labor camp. Josef himself is a thoroughly assimilated soul, a Jew only in the strictest racial sense of the term. His religious impulses push him first toward nature, encountered on blissful camping trips taken with fellow members of a German youth group called the Wanderers, then toward the world-spirit-seeking, vaguely Buddhist mysticism popular in the Czech avant-garde somewhat later.

As Adler whisks away one diorama and puts forth the next, he suppresses the ominous chords you half-expect to hear, warning of catastrophe. After all, narrative development doesn’t make much sense in a world that’s breaking down. What we get instead are motifs that appear and then reappear, mysteriously transformed. The harsh, angry authority figures of Josef’s childhood, his parents and the headmaster of his boarding school, will return in monstrous form as camp guards and Nazis who gather together the “children of the world” — that is, the inmates, who are “without a clue to what is happening to them,” which is why they must be rebuked, beaten and kept standing for hours “amid the dung or dust while awaiting the roll call.” Trains chug through many scenes, at first as the objects of Josef’s childhood love and fascination, then as tokens of his adolescent independence, then as instruments of horror when he is forced to join a labor crew at work on a railroad and finally when he is carried to Auschwitz in a cattle car.

Social norms and civic bonds begin dissolving when Josef is still a child, in the hardscrabble years of World War I. “Every occupation today has it hard, because no one is satisfied, and each yanks the last morsel from the mouth of the other,” the young Josef tells us, channeling the voice of his father. The war of all against all recedes to the background as Josef enters the hushed precincts of the rich to earn a living as a tutor to the sons of a venal financial executive. It re-emerges somewhat when he takes a job at a corrupt and disorganized cultural center, just before Hitler annexes the Sudetenland. By the time Josef reaches Auschwitz and Langenstein, the brutish state will be an overwhelming reality. By the last days of their internment, Adler’s fellow slave laborers have lost all semblance of humanity. They are “nasty to one another and pushing one another around, any sort of restraint having fallen away like walls from the soul.” They are “now no more than poor, frightened animals.”

Adler’s main failing as a Holocaust novelist is that he wrote too soon. Primo Levi, who also recorded his experiences shortly after the end of the war, understood that the task was to testify. In “Se Questo È un Uomo” (originally published in 1947 and titled “Survival in Auschwitz” when it appeared in English), Levi cloaked his considerable artistry in the almost neutral tone of a scientific treatise, and he tried to describe only one phenomenon: life in a death camp. As a result, we who were not there are given the emotional room required to process the reality of that which ought not to be real. In “Panorama,” by contrast, Adler used distinctly literary techniques to recreate the experience of having a civilization self-destruct while people are going about their lives and not paying attention. It’s like using impressionist brush-strokes to document a landscape made hideous by some industrial accident. In the first instance, it just comes across as wrong. We’re not interested in technique; we want to see.

Adler’s second mistake was failing to get his novels and his scholarly books published at the same time. For the irony is that he did testify, as well as any other survivor, if not better. His fiction should be understood as part of a larger project to represent the cataclysm from both the outside and the inside, using the documentary methods of history and sociology and the more subjective approach made possible by the novel.

“Panorama” has its flaws. The last scene, which takes place nominally in England but mostly inside Josef’s head, devolves into obscure philosophizing that might have been cut, or at least trimmed, had Adler’s editors thought of him as a writer likely to reach broader audiences. “Panorama” should have been the brilliant debut of a major German writer, rather than the afterthought to a scholar’s career.