The Ethical Limitations of Holocaust Literary Representation

To Speak or Not To Speak One of the most famous and frequently cited dictums on Holocaust representation is Theodor Adorno’s statement that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ (1982, p.34). Clearly Adorno is not merely speaking about the act of writing poetry, but rather the tension between ethics and aesthetics inherent in an act of artistic production that reproduces the cultural values of the society that generated the Holocaust. Adorno later qualified this statement, acknowledging that ‘suffering [...] also demands the continued existence of the very art it forbids’ (1997, p.252). How then does one presume to represent something as extreme as the Holocaust, when in theory one cannot do so without in some way validating the culture that produced it? As Adorno notes: ‘When even genocide becomes cultural property in committed literature, it becomes easier to continue complying with the culture that gave rise to the murder’ (1997, pp.252-253). Coupled with this is the commonly held concept of the Holocaust as something that is ‘unspeakable’. As a number of scholars have noted, this is not true in the strictest sense of ‘unspeakability’, as much has been written, and indeed said, on the subject of the Holocaust. Even on the level of historical record, which methodologically adheres to hard fact and traditionally rejects survivor testimony as too ‘imaginative’: the verbal representability of facts suffices, in and of itself, to disprove the claim that the Holocaust is absolutely unspeakable. But since verbal representation does not pertain to facts alone, their representability does not suffice to