Beyond Good and Evil

Adorno said, as we all know, that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. This is not to say, as many imagine, that writing poetry after Auschwitz is to be forbidden, or is impossible. The word Adorno used, barbarisch, is worth pondering. Presumably he was applying it prescriptively to poets in the same way that he applied it to Stravinsky, whose music he reproached for what he saw as its murky neo-primitivism, as against Schoenberg's pure, clear-sighted modernity. Stravinsky, by fleeing to the prehistoric past of jungle rhythm and sacrificial dance, or, later in his career, by leading the Gadarene regression to an ersatz classicism--"Back to Bach!"--was in Adorno's opinion evading existentialist man's duty to confront his own times in all their complexity and atrociousness.

Of course, poets, like Stravinsky, took not the slightest notice of Adorno's stricture. Indeed, one of the greatest of twentieth-century poets, Paul Celan, not only continued to write poetry after Auschwitz but wrote poetry about Auschwitz itself, if we take "Auschwitz," as Adorno evidently did, as not only the name of a specific and terrible place but as a collective term for all the camps, and for the Holocaust itself.

In Liquidation, the latest novel by the Hungarian Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész to be translated into English, one of the characters, the writer B., or Bee, who was born in the death camp,

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