Traumatic Verses: On Poetry in German from the Concentration Camps, 1933–1945 (review)

Since the end of World War II several anthologies of poetry written in different languages by concentration-camp inmates have been published in various countries. In divided Germany both the FRG and the GDR published poetry collections, with the latter especially emphasizing the heroic struggle of (communist) inmates against the fascist (capitalist) oppressor. After 1989, a new wave of German anthologies appeared, this time shifting the focus from hero to victim commemoration, which thereby established the "genre of concentration camp poetry" (31).

What has delayed if not derailed the critical analysis and aesthetic appreciation of these poems are essentially two observations. The first one is Adorno's "after Auschwitz" verdict, whose decades-long controversy Susan Gubar summed up as follows: "The 1949 judgment of T. Adorno was taken to be as axiomatic as the biblical comment against graven images: To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" (229). Although numerous renowned writers and prominent literary scholars including Susan Gubar have agreed that over the years Adorno's verdict has been "over-referenced" (229), Nadar continues to invoke his authority, quoting Adornian pronouncements such as: "The so-called artistic rendering of the naked physical pain of those that were beaten down with rifle butts contains, however distantly, the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed from it" (68). Questioning such artistic renditions out of fear that some readers or viewers might derive sadistic enjoyment from them fixates on the deviant fringe of humanity and is an insult to the great majority of decent human beings whose natural response to suffering would be empathy and compassion. If Adorno were right, then the two-thousand-year history of depicting the crucifixion of Christ would have squeezed quite an excess of perverse pleasure out of Christ's agony on the cross. But when it comes to representing the Shoah, scholars continue to succumb to a peculiar Autoritätshörigkeit vis-à-vis Adorno's Critical Theory. Referring to his Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, Nader writes: "Adorno has written for instance against a deceptive literature that 'shows us humanity blossoming in so-called extreme situations, and in fact precisely there, and at times this becomes a dreary metaphysics that affirms the horror'" (93). From the safe distance of his "Exile in Paradise," as Anthony Heilbut called the sunny refuge of Hitler's refugees, it certainly was easy to demand the aesthetically correct poetry from concentration-camp inmates.

Related to Adorno's aesthetic proscriptions is an observation by Ruth Klüger, a well-known Auschwitz survivor and author of concentration-camp poetry herself: "No great poetry was composed in the concentration camps" (51), she concluded and to underscore her point she debunks her own poems from that time as "aalglatte Kinderverse" influenced by "Klassik, Romantik, Goldschnittlyrik" (67). Against the backdrop of such critical disapproval, Nader's study aims to do justice to poetic texts written by concentration-camp inmates of different religious beliefs and political persuasions by illuminating them from a variety of interpretive perspectives which include psychoanalytically informed close readings, the traditions and theories of mourning and melancholia, and especially the various studies on trauma and post-traumatic stress disorders.

With this complex approach Nader attempts to open up "multiple ways in which these poems speak to us now" (32). He takes Ruth Klüger's concentration-camp memoirs weiter leben. Eine Jugend (1994) and her somewhat different English version Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001) as illustrative model through which he highlights its two best-known poems "Auschwitz" and "Der Kamin." In his subsequent chapters Nader expands his exploration of "traumatic verses" through exemplary poems which describe central themes of the camp experience. These include several poems on hunger by various authors; "Die Häftlingsnummer" by the communist Hasso Grabner (1911–1976); "Gelungene Flucht" by the imprisoned resistance fighter Heinz Hentschke (1904–1970); "Unterwegs," "Fünfundzwanzig," and "Friedhof Obodowska" by the Jewish author Afred Kittner (1906–1991); "Gestreiftes Kleid," "Kette...