Gaining Recognition for Critical Theory 405It fell to Enzensberger in 1959 to give an example of this literature:
Nelly Sachs. ‘The redemption of language and its enchantment is the
province of those who were In the dwellings of death.’^201 Hildesheimer,
in his poetics lectures of 1967, went a step further by designating poetry
as the only possible literary option after Auschwitz, pointing to Paul
Celan’s Todesfuge and Ingeborg Bachmann’s Früher Mittag, among other
poems. ‘So it’s not just horror, then, but flight and flashes of insight into
the terrifying instability of the world, the absurd.’^202
Adorno was of course well aware of the debate that had been trig-
gered by his dictum. He responded with his own contribution, ‘Commit-
ment’, a talk given first on Radio Bremen in 1962 and published shortly
thereafter in the Neue Rundschau: ‘I have no wish to soften the saying
that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric; it expresses in
negative form the impulse which inspires committed literature.... But
Enzensberger’s retort also remains true, that literature must resist this
verdict, in other words, be such that its mere existence after Auschwitz
is not a surrender to cynicism. Its own situation is one of paradox,
not merely the problem of how to react to it. The abundance of real
suffering tolerates no forgetting.’^203
Four years later, in his philosophical magnum opus, Adorno pro-
posed the new ‘categorical imperative’, ‘to arrange one’s thoughts and
actions so that Auschwitz will not be repeated.’^204
During these years it became common in Germany to argue that a
line should be drawn under the past. Marie Luise Kaschnitz and Ingeborg
Bachmann were among the writers who felt that Adorno’s call to re-
member the past was a moral imperative. Ever since their return to
Frankfurt, the Adornos had had a close friendship with Kaschnitz.
Their contact with the younger Austrian poetess, Ingeborg Bachmann,
a woman with a ‘very wayward and shy’ disposition,^205 did not develop
until she gave the poetics lectures in Frankfurt in mid-November 1959.
Relations with Adorno then quickly became friendly. Adorno began his
letters with ‘Dear Ingeborg’, and her essay ‘Music and Poetry’ of 1959
was obviously a subject after his own heart.
Kaschnitz and Bachmann, who were themselves good friends, were
preoccupied with the question of the meaning of poetry and, over and
above that, the problem of whether ‘in these desolate times’ every poem
was senseless and the poet would do best to remain silent.^206 The close-
ness Adorno felt to the literary works of these two writers could be
traced back to their self-doubts, and their search for new forms of ex-
pression and new stylistic methods. ‘In a society whose totality has sealed
itself up as ideology, only what does not resemble the façade can be
true.’^207 For their part, the two poets were attracted by Adorno’s critical
radicality, by his intellectual ambitiousness, and his profound knowledge
of literature, music and philosophy. The short texts that Kaschnitz
assembled in her book Steht noch dahin of 1969 contained definite signs
that she had been grappling with Adorno’s social theory. ‘Whether we