Theodor Adorno once famously said that poetry is no longer possible after the Holocaust. Well, if by “poetry” one means some sort of grand and flashy chatter that calls attention to itself by how catchy it is, like some advertising slogan, then certainly after the Holocaust to write such junk is questionable, to say the least.
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What else could possibly answer to the Holocaust, and the silence of all who were murdered in it? What else, besides silence itself? What else could be the Holocaust’s genuine memorial, what else truly preserve its memory?
Read morePoetry, Prayer, and Memory (2)
The God we encounter in Paul Celan’s poems in his Niemandsrose collection, the God to whom such poetry after the Holocaust calls us to pray, would be a God to whom even such “pure” Jews as Sigmund Freud and Jean Améry could pray.
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At one point in “The Meridian,” his acceptance speech for the 1960 Georg Büchner Prize for literature, poet Paul Celan remarks that “the poem today,” which in his case especially means a day that dawned only after the night of the Holocaust (a day that is still passing by us), “shows, as cannot help but be recognized, a strong tendency toward holding its tongue.”
Read moreArt After the Holocaust (4)
To remember the Holocaust means to come to dwell in the chaotic no-place of a place that art after the Holocaust creates, and to build together a human home there, the only place such a home can be built any longer today, this day that dawns only “after” the Holocaust.
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As I hear them, the poems of Paul Celan, who survived the Holocaust himself, gives us a definitive example of a poetry that truly comes after the Holocaust both substantively and chronologically.
Read moreForgetting Ourselves (3)
At rare times, what we call art provides us with a moment when we can at last forget ourselves in just such a truly liberating way. At those rare moments, art catches us up short, and opens before us at just that moment the opportunity to forget ourselves and to “set ourselves free”—free from ourselves, and thereby free at last just to be ourselves. It does so, according to Celan, at those moments when we are so suddenly and unexpectedly struck by a work of art, or something at work in that work, that it “takes our breath away,” as we commonly yet accurately say. We encounter “breath-taking beauty,” as we also say.
Read moreForgetting Ourselves (1)
“Those who have art before their eyes and on their minds [. . .] have forgotten themselves. Art draws away from the I. Art here demands a certain distance in a certain direction, on a certain path.”[1]
The poet Paul Celan made those remarks some fifty-six years ago in “The Meridian,” his acceptance speech for the Georg Büchner Prize for literature.
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