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  • German and European Poetics after the Holocaust: Crisis and Creativity ed. by Gert Hofmann, Rachel MagShamhráin, Marko Pajević, and Michael Shields
  • Karl Ivan Solibakke
German and European Poetics after the Holocaust: Crisis and Creativity. Edited by Gert Hofmann, Rachel MagShamhráin, Marko Pajević, and Michael Shields. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011. Pp. 310. Cloth $75.00. ISBN 978-1571132901.

German and European Poetics after the Holocaust leaves little doubt that the lyrical form after 1945 is best understood as a relentless struggle against and “an act of categorical resistance” (5) to war or the kind of thinking that fosters persecution, barbarity, and crimes of ethnic cleansing. It cites Adorno’s standpoint on the paradox of literature after Auschwitz as the ethical impetus behind his condemnation of modern culture that solicited a genuine awareness for the agony of witnessing—a post-Holocaust trauma caught in the liminal space between guilt, shame, and remorse. The philosopher’s dictum cast a dark shadow over German poetry after 1945, and we can locate the German-language poets highlighted in the first section of this anthology—Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Ilse Aichinger, Rose Ausländer, and Charlotte Beradt—among the many victims of fascism as well as the eloquent adversaries of European postwar complacency, at once witnesses to the conflagration and also, in line with their biographies, staunch proponents of “the ‘purification’ of the ideologically corrupted German language” (125). Undeniably, their insistence on a symbolic order purged of Nazi traces authenticates a courageous “attempt to transform the prevailing sense of negativism into artistic and literary acts of resistance against history” (8). They are pioneers who not only verify the moral ambivalence of a nascent European culture in their lyrical works but also trace the after-effects of the war in their memoirs and poetic testimonials, illustrating “the absolute necessity [End Page 217] of giving voice to the suffering and the impossibility of doing so adequately” (19). Even though Adorno recanted in 1965 his misconstrued maxim that it is “barbaric” to write poetry after Auschwitz, the conviction of poets writing after 1945 remained steadfast: to “generate” texts that condemn the rationale behind war and Auschwitz, the ongoing murderous nature of social interactions, and the proliferation of violence under the veneer of postwar civil society.

What these poets saw as the ongoing conflicts in German society exposes the fascist undercurrents in human relationships and indicts the callousness of seemingly innocuous symbolic systems. For them, there was never a question of what to do following the trauma of Auschwitz. Remaining silent was never an option, since (as in the case of Rose Ausländer) their works seek out “procedures of partial resignification without full designification” (70). Echoing Celan’s concept of the Flaschenpost, the poets focused on the vulnerability and futility of remaining silent. Therefore, it seemed that the only conscionable act was to challenge Adorno and to craft verses of commemoration after Auschwitz. And even when their poems fell on deaf ears in Germany—since the general public chose to take little or no notice of the strong condemnation of a self-indulgent and prosperous German nation—the poets continued to seek out incisive words, expressions that conjured up “the shadow, the nuances, the in-between” (94) of social encounters, painstakingly crafted in such a way that observant readers could unambiguously and irrefutably glimpse postwar aberrations.

One should look at poetry after Auschwitz as a kind of witnessing by proxy, as Nelly Sachs and Rose Ausländer did, where the poets speak on behalf of the dead without usurping their place. Keenly responsive to the need for remembrance and reconciliation, the poets employ Holocaust metaphors to intensify the lesson that the isolated reign of terror under the Nazis was only one example of the savagery that is a much older characteristic of human nature. Accordingly, the theme of not forgetting, of remembering, is a constant consideration in lyrical works after 1945. The aim was to show that the brutal enmity and wanton slaughter epitomized by a machinery of annihilation continue to thrive in times of peace and that the reification of power and malevolence that made genocide possible did not subside after...

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