Adorno

404 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional

bitter price for this. But because the world has outlived its own

downfall, it nevertheless needs art to write its unconscious history.

The authentic artists of the present are those in whose works the

uttermost horror still quivers.^190

During the so-called Goll affair^191 in the early 1960s, in which Celan
stood accused of plagiarism, Adorno held back, although he had heard
from Marie Luise Kaschnitz and Ingeborg Bachmann of Celan’s intense
mortification. Adorno decided to show his solidarity with an essay on
the Sprachgitter collection of poems. He was particularly influenced in
this by the anti-Semitic flavour of the critical reception of Celan by such
critics as Hans Egon Holthusen, but also Günter Blöcker, and the tend-
ency to marginalize him as a ‘foreigner’ in West German literature. He
had made some notes on the subject following ‘an improvised paper on
hermetic poetry’ that he had given in summer 1967 in Peter Szondi’s
seminar in Berlin. But in the end he proved unable to write the essay
because he was trying to concentrate on his new book, the Aesthetic
Theory.^192 Celan doubtless regretted Adorno’s failure to write the essay
on Sprachgitter. But his disappointment did not prevent him from
declaring his unreserved approbation of Negative Dialectics, praise which
gave Adorno great satisfaction. For here, in the ‘Meditations on Meta-
physics’, he arrived at the definitive formulation of his dictum on poetry
after Auschwitz: ‘Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as
a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that
after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.’^193
Adorno’s repeatedly revised reflections on ‘culture after Auschwitz’,
which ‘including the urgent critique of it, is garbage’,^194 was a challenge
and not just for Paul Celan. During the 1950s, there was a long line
of writers^195 who made clear their objections to Adorno’s verdict, not
least Alfred Andersch, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Wolfgang
Hildesheimer.^196 They interpreted Adorno’s provocative assertion as a
call for the abolition of art and literature altogether – a conclusion they
would not have come to had they read the aphorism on the ‘baby with
the bath-water’ from the Minima Moralia: ‘That culture has so far failed
is no justification for furthering its failure, by strewing the store of good
flour on the spilt beer like the girl in the fairy-tale.’^197 It is true that
the voluminous correspondence between Adorno and Andersch^198 made
no mention of the question of poetry after Auschwitz. They were
concerned rather with other matters, such as the significance of Arno
Schmidt, the critical response to Benjamin, the mediation of modern
music, and dates for discussion programmes in the Evening Studio.
But in November 1959, Andersch gave a speech at a reception at the
publisher Arnoldo Mondadori, at which he pointed to the absurdity of
writing in Germany following the catastrophe.^199 In seeming contrast
to Adorno, he called for a literature that consciously faced up to the
horror, a literature after the end of literature.^200