Published April 20, 2009 | 
This poem by a Holocaust survivor is posted as my response to Hitler’s birthday. Celan’s Death Fugue may be the single best poem to come out of World War II. Do go read it.
Theodor Adorno raised the question of whether it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.
To me, poetry is, has always been, one of the few possible answers to the death camps, since long before I read Adorno or Celan. When I was a small child, I saw those pictures. (You know the ones.) They were in books on my father’s shelves. Books — poetry, stories, nonfiction, any kind of book — were the only defense I had against those images, against the searing things he did to me and animals, against the things he made me do, and which even then I sensed were a private expression of the same impulse that built the smokestacks.
Books are defiance even in defeat. They are victory even in death. Long after their authors are dead, they go on tapping out the message of freedom to prisoners caged in tyrannies of iron or clapboard. They can speak the truth when all utterance is forbidden and only lies are acknowledged.
Adorno’s oft-quoted dictum that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz is a quotation from a larger, far more complex and shifting attitude. (Good article on it by the late poet Reginald Shepherd.)
Adorno also wrote:
Literature must resist this verdict, in other words, be such that its mere existence after Auschwitz is not a surrender to cynicism…. It is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it.
Thank you for posting this.
I love Death Fugue, and wish I had a chance to debate some of the subtle differences in meaning that arise fro the translation., for instance “he cultivates snakes” is “er spielt mit den Schlangen” in German, meaning that he plays with the snakes, adding, to me all kinds of associations, some of which are different from those suggested by cultivating snakes, both real and metaphorical. The is the potential of an element of childlike innocence suggested by “playing”, maybe also the religious overtones of snake-handling. I’ve often wondered whether this could refer to the, to me, near impossible cognitive and emotional dissonance involved in te minds of people involved in authority position in totalitarian regimes.
Sorry, I’m thinking aloud here, and am maybe not all that coherent.
Thank you for making me think about this.
If you’ve ever read Magda Denes’ memoir, she speaks of her lifelong love of poetry, starting from when she was a tiny child and her older brother would teach her things. After the war, and his death, the family was in a refugee camp, literally trying to pull together a new life out of scraps of nothing. Magda, who was still a child, wrote and recited her own poetry for fellow refugees — bringing many of them to tears, even those who didn’t speak Hungarian, simply because they gained so much from the undertones and her intent. So, yes, I think that if a person feels empowered and cleansed by poetry, so be it.
*blinks hard* Thank you, L. Blessings.
One of humanity’s five or six greatest poets ever.
His friend Nelly Sachs is almost as great.
What a fantastic post. Thank you.
It’s barbaric not to write poetry after an Auschwitz. It is its own unique kind of history. Like Civil War letters.
I had not read the death fugue. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. Wow.