Sewanee Review

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

—Theodore Adorno, from “Cultural Criticism and Society” (1949)

In the spring of 2013 I was asked to teach an advanced topical composition course at the University of Colorado entitled “The Rhetoric of the Holocaust.” At first I was reluctant. I know the literature fairly well and believe it is essential to know it, but I find it difficult to spend extended time with such discouraging work. Indeed I have often explained my own lack of enthusiasm for genres such as horror and the Gothic because the aestheticization of sadism and hatred provide an all too chilling reminder of what human beings can actually accomplish if they put their minds to it. Such strategies for entertainment generally leave me cold. We have the real thing too close at hand. The greater challenge is how to integrate it into genres that offer, if not hope, sustenance, and even pleasure, if that is possible.

Still, having seen how poorly many Holocaust classes are taught, I decided to teach the course and duly assembled a reading list that covered a wide range of historical and imaginative genres. The students ranged from orthodox Jews to non-Jewish students who had never visited a synagogue. One student told me she knew nothing about Judaism, but signed up for the class because she was deeply troubled by her grandparents’ aggressive anti-Semitism. For the majority the material was tremendously difficult, not only because of its harrowing content, but because of its historical, moral, spiritual, emotional, and literary complexity. Interestingly enough, and even somewhat surprisingly, it was the last category, “literary complexity,” that turned out to be the analytical key to decoding the other categories for many of my students. Especially in our discussion of Primo Levi, close reading of such complexities helped them to begin to understand how the literary imagination can occasionally succeed in addressing horrific evil more powerfully and truthfully than even the most articulate history and philosophy. [End Page 498]

“Literary complexity” is now often slighted in discussions of how to address difficult historical or political issues. For many the humanistic ideology implicit in such a term has come to seem superfluous, especially in the wake of the intense historical trauma of the Holocaust. But this is an error. Despite Adorno’s well-known observation about the barbarity of writing poetry after Auschwitz, poetry may in the end be the only adequate way to address such trauma. The challenge is that one must be a very careful writer—and reader.

As the Adorno scholar Simon Jarvis and others have pointed out in conversation, it is important to give Adorno his due. His comment about the barbarity of writing poetry after Auschwitz comes in the context of a complex argument about how modern society reifies all relations, turning even horror into merely another aesthetic experience, thereby trivializing it. As Adorno comments only a few sentences before the famous Auschwitz quotation, in our current moment “even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter.” Further, Adorno did modify his views in “Meditations on Metaphysics” (Negative Dialectics, 1966), in which he makes it clear he had been primarily talking about himself when he made his initial comment. In Jarvis’s translation:

Everlasting suffering has as much right to express itself as the torture victim has to scream; so it might have been wrong to say that poetry could no longer be written after Auschwitz. The less cultural question, however, of whether it be possible to live after Auschwitz, or whether one who by chance escaped, and by rights should have been killed, may be allowed to live, is not a false one. His survival itself required the coldness, the fundamental principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which Auschwitz would have been impossible: the drastic guilt of the one who was spared. In revenge for being spared he will be visited by dreams; as, that he did not survive, that he was gassed in 1944; that his whole existence has been carried on only in his imagination, an emanation of the insane wish of one who...