Re‐Membering Adorno: Political and Cultural Agendas in the Debate about Post‐Holocaust Art

This essay examines the reception of one of the most oft quoted and misquoted phrases in German literary history: ‘nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch’ (Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’, 1951). It argues that interpretations of Adorno's words by German writers and intellectuals have invariably failed to engage with the dialectical detail of his essay, and that these responses consequently reveal more about each individual writer's background and cultural and political agenda than about the issue of post‐Holocaust literature itself. By examining Adorno's original essay and then its reception by Peter Härtling, Harald Hartung and Hilde Domin in the late 1960s, at the height of the debate about ‘committed’ literature, this essay shows that the particular concerns of these writers have influenced how they cite Adorno's words. The analyses of essays by these writers reveal that the varying positions in the debate about Adorno's statement, generally considered irreconcilable, are grounded in the different approaches taken to literature by poets and by literary critics respectively. The literary critic achieved a more critical and therefore nuanced reading of Adorno's words, but it was nevertheless the responses of poets and authors that determined the trajectory of the debate as it continued into the 1970s.