Chapter 14 - Representing the Unrepresentable

Summary

In “Essay on Cultural Criticism and Society” (1949), Theodore Adorno puts forth a dramatic thesis: “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Adorno's statement implies that the experience of Auschwitz altered our relationship to language. In a way, Adorno argues, the Holocaust leaves us speechless. Following Adorno, artists, writers, poets, painters and filmmakers, as well as literary critics, have struggled with the issue of representation: how, if at all, should the Holocaust be represented? What does representing it mean if every representation is connected to the European project of Enlightenment, the very idea of humanism, its failure and aftermath? Among other things, the Holocaust reduced death from a unique experience that defines our humanity to mass production. Jean Amery, for example, argues that Auschwitz altered the European aesthetic of death and dying. After the Holocaust, death could no longer be seen through the prism of art:

The first result was always the total collapse of the esthetic view of death. What I am saying is familiar. The intellectual, and especially the intellectual of German education and culture, bears this esthetic view of death within him. It was his legacy from the distant past, at the very latest from the time of German romanticism. It can be more or less characterized by the names Novalis, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Thomas Mann. For death in its literary, philosophic, or musical form there was no place in Auschwitz. No bridge led from death in Auschwitz to Death in Venice. Every poetic evocation of death became intolerable, whether it was Hesse’s Dear Brother Death or that of Rilke, who sang: “Oh Lord, give each his own death.” The esthetic view of death had revealed itself to the intellectual as part of an esthetic mode of life; where the latter had been all but forgotten, the former was nothing but an elegant trifle.