Could I just point out that Adorno is being misquoted?

He said:

Prismen, vol. 10a, p. 30.
Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur  
und Barbarei gegenüber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist  
barbarisch, und das frißt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht,  
warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben. (1955)

"The critique of culture is confronted with the last stage in the  
dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz  
is barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why  
it has become impossible to write poetry today."

This, above, is the original reference that is supposed to be quoted.

He also said, (among other reformulations & explications of the  
famous utterance):
Noten zur Literatur IV, vol.11, p. 603
Der Satz, nach Auschwitz lasse kein Gedicht mehr sich schreiben, gilt  
nicht blank, gewiß aber, daß danach, weil es möglich war und bis ins  
Unabsehbare möglich bleibt, keine heitere Kunst mehr vorgestellt  
werden kann.

"The phrase, a poem can no more be written after Auschwitz, has no  
validity on its own; what is certain however is that after it,  
because it was impossible and remains so for the unforeseeable  
future, cheerful art can no longer be imagined." [this one my  
translation.]


There's a decent PDF essay on the net by Elaine Martin on the whole  
subject, which I would recommend to anyone interested in the subject:

http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/issue2/martin.pdf


Suffice it to say, that Adorno's statement should not be boiled down  
to a soundbite or a slogan: it needs to be seen in the context of his  
thought and indeed the progressions in that thought throughout his  
career. I think the most important aspect of it is that Adorno was  
almost certainly only referring to German poetry - he read no other,  
I believe - and that his view would have been that the language had  
been so corrupted by the Nazi years that poetry itself had become  
problematic, not just after Auschwitz, but after the whole period for  
which Auschwitz had become a symbol.

Given my lack of philosophical skill or analysis, I am almost  
certainly getting this somewhat wrong. I also shied away from the  
translating his other quotes on the subject because I can't handle  
his prose most of the time . . .


Tony
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Tony Frazer
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Tel / Fax: (+44) (0) 1392-434511

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