German and European Poetics after the Holocaust: Crisis and Creativity ed. by Gert Hofmann et al. (review)

“Crisis and Creativity” is an appropriate subtitle for this collection. More than half of the sixteen essays focus on the responses by famous crafters of the German language (such as Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, Ingeborg Bachmann, Rose Ausländer, Ilse Aichinger, Gott fried Benn, and Heiner Müller) to the crisis of meaning that followed in the wake of the Holocaust. As the editors concede, the possibility of poetry after Auschwitz has been debated since Theodor Adorno issued his famous dictum, namely that that such poetry is barbaric. They clarify in their introduction that this did not actually prohibit poetry after Auschwitz but rather demanded that poetry attempt the impossible: to describe the indescribable, to give voice to the unsayable. Given the wide range of scholarship on these issues, one may ask, why this book now? For the editors, the impending phase of post-memory lends new urgency to questions of Holocaust remembrance, as the last witnesses, survivors, and perpetrators pass away.

The best contributions to this collection are those that remain close to the chosen poet and texts. Gisela Dischner’s essay on Paul Celan, for example, is a model of intellectual sophistication and lucidity. Her “Reflections on Paul Celan’s Poetics” gives a cogent introduction to some of the vocabularies of meaning as well as the Klangsemantik (semantics of sound) in Celan’s increasingly esoteric later poetry. She provides both those familiar with Celan’s work and the uninitiated with a sensitive and meaningful essay.

Other contributions are also quite good, such as Elaine Martin’s essay on Nelly Sachs’s “Poetics of Silence,” Martin Marko’s analysis of the “Paradigms of Transformation” in Ingeborg Bachmann’s postwar poetry, and Marko Pajević’s essay on “Mistrust as Commitment” in Ilse Aichinger’s poetics. Each provides close readings of selected poems written in response to the Zivilisationsbruch, or breach in civilization, that Auschwitz represents. Despite differing ultimate aims, both Rüdiger Görner and Stefan Hayduk discuss Gott fried Benn’s influence on postwar poetry in terms of a contradiction between his poetry and his poetology, namely the continued investment in subjectivity while valorizing poetic “word magic” (140). Barry Murnane’s essay on Heiner Müller’s Germania cycle also stands out for its originality within the collection—as Murnane is one of the few who openly pits his subject against Adorno, as Auschwitz for Müller does not amount to the rupture of civilization, but rather one of many in history. Tatjana Petzer’s essay on Danilo Kiš intrigues and leaves the reader wanting to know more about Kiš’s “po-ethik” (266), a better play on words in German than in English.

The weaker essays in this collection get lost in poststructural discussions about language and its (in)ability to convey meaning and lose sight of the second part of Adorno’s dictum, namely the ethical desire to do justice to the past and its victims. The abstract terminology of such analysis seems too divorced, at times, from the traumas of history or, indeed, from any kind of lived human experience. In Renata Plaice’s essay, discussion of the victim in Müller’s Hamletmaschine ends in “irreducible exteriority” (177) and the “wordless literature of the upturned eye” (178). While still fruitful in analyses of liminal spaces and the presence of absence, the devotion to radical, anti-humanist Foucauldian theories in several of these essays suggests poststructuralism has reached its late, baroque phase of extreme involution. Perhaps less objectionable ethically, but just as problematic theoretically, is the fact that some poststructuralists in the collection work with an epistemology that denies words, especially abstractions, any stable meaning, yet these critics frequently deploy large, vaguely defined terms as if they were universally understood. In Annette Runte’s daunting stew of theorists, ultimately the most puzzling thing about her essay is that Runte does not seem to find...