british holocaust poetry: songs of experience finding adequate forms of expression itself became a theme of writing about the
WesternFront in the First World War. Poets tried to express the inchoate horrors
paradoxically or ironically. Any elevated or metaphorical language was called into
question by poets like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Edmund Blunden,
who sarcastically opposed the use of classical war rhetoric.^2 The whole linguistic
crisis, exacerbated by wartime propaganda, was eloquently summed up by Ernest
Hemingway inA Farewell to Arms. There Lt Henry is ‘embarrassed by’ abstract
words such as ‘glory’, ‘honour’, and ‘sacrifice’, which are themselves what he finds
obscene‘beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of
rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates’.^3
The crisis worsened in the course of the century. We use concrete names such as
‘Passchendaele’, ‘Guernica’, ‘Hiroshima’, ‘Auschwitz’, ‘Mai Lai’, or ‘Szrebrenica’ to
stand baldly for atrocious facts that are incommensurate with either the language
of everyday experience or the exalted oratory of war. Nevertheless, as postmodern
theorists such as Lyotard have argued, we must remember such events if we
are to have an adequate sense of humanity and cultural identity. Yet the events
of the Holocaust alluded to by the words ‘Auschwitz’ or ‘Treblinka’ are said
to present a specific dilemma. According to survivors like Elie Wiesel, theunivers
concentrationnairecreatedbyNazismwasuniqueandincomprehensible:‘Auschwitz
defies imagination and perception; it submits only to memory.... Between the
dead and the rest of us there exists an abyss that no talent can comprehend.’^4 That
abyss cannot be bridged. Primo Levi agreed: ‘We the survivors are not the true
witnesses.... We survivors are only an anomalous minority who did not touch
bottom. Those who did, who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about
it.’^5 If that world was indecipherable to its victims, and unseen by its survivors, it
would seem even more impossible for outsiders to re-create it in art or translate its
experience into language. This appears to justify Theodor Adorno’s dictum that to
attempt to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz would itself be a kind of barbarism.^6
Nevertheless, to remain silent about the Holocaust would not only confirm the
exclusion of its victims from European culture, and thus be complicit with Nazi
policies; silence would risk repetition of the evil. In 1995 Andreas Huyssen cited
Primo Levi to support his view that, since ‘the Third Reich waged an obsessive war
(^2) SeeJohnSilkin(ed.),The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry(Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1979) for examples of relevant poems by Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, and Siegfried Sassoon,
especially Sassoon’s ‘The rank stench of theirbodies haunts me yet’ (pp. 123–4).
(^3) Ernest Hemingway,A Farewell to Arms(London: Penguin, 1929), 143–4.
(^4) Elie Wiesel,From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences(New York: Summit, 1990), 194. See
also Andreas Huyssen,Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia(London: Routledge,
1995), 257. 5
6 Primo Levi,The Drowned and the Saved, trans. R. Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1989), 63–4.
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, inPrisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 34. Adorno later modified this stance; having read Paul Celan’s
work, he allowed for the necessity of poetry to express suffering.