british holocaust poetry: songs of experience averred, nor was truth beauty.’^12 Furthermore,like British Great War propaganda,
Nazism itself seemed to have voided metaphorical discourse of meaning when, for
instance, in a notorious speech Himmler urged his SS officers to remember that the
slaughter of the innocent was ‘a glorious page’ in Germany’s history.^13 Yet, agreeing
with Lyotard, Schiff also forcibly stated the case for our need of poetry if we are to
‘reach out imaginatively to the experience of other individuals’, or at the very least
to bear witness.^14 This is a view that has been seconded by other critics such as Inga
Clendinnen, who refers to the philosopher Richard Rorty for support.^15 Schiff’s
anthology can be regarded as primary evidence for the continuing debates as to
whether Holocaust poetry is or is not possible, what kinds of response it can accom-
modate, and how our sensibilities may fail when confronted with such enormity as
the systematic dehumanization of whole peoples, including women and children.
So, what might we mean by ‘Holocaust poetry’? This will certainly depend on
what is now meant by the sign, ‘The Holocaust’. Although many Holocaust poems
are included in anthologies of Second World War poetry,^16 the two concepts are
not coterminous in space or time. Not only did the field of the Second World
War extend, as far as the British were concerned, to North Africa and South-East
Asia, but the racist and political policies that were fundamental to Nazism and to
the Holocaust commenced as soon as Hitler came to power in 1933. Holocaust
literature therefore rightly includes poetry written about events before Britain
declared war in 1939, such as W. H. Auden’s ‘Refugee Blues’.^17 Furthermore,
although we might say that the subject-matter of poetry written about the Second
World War would extend beyond the liberation of the Nazi extermination camps
in early 1945, spread to the Far East and to the defeat of Japan later in 1945, and
(^12) Hilda Schiff, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),Holocaust Poetry(London: Harper Collins, 1995),
p. xx.
(^13) Heinrich Himmler, speech to SS-Gruppenf ̈uhrer in Posnan, 4 Oct. 1943, in Steve Hochstadt
(ed.),Sources of the Holocaust(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 163–5.
(^14) Schiff, ‘Introduction’, pp. xiv and xxii.
(^15) Inga Clendinnen,Reading the Holocaust(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 163–4.
(^16) e.g. Ronald Blythe (ed.),Writing the War: Stories, Poems and Essays of 1939–45(Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1966), contains Sidney Keyes’s poem ‘Europe’s Prisoners’ and Stephen Spender’s ‘Memento’;
Catherine Reilly’s anthology of poetry from the First and Second World Wars,The Virago Book
of Women’s War Poetry and Verse(London: Virago, 1997), contains Holocaust poems by Audrey
Beecham, Karen Gershon, Lotte Kramer, Erica Marx, Evangeline Paterson, and Elizabeth Wyse; Hugh
Haughton (ed.),Second World War Poems(London: Faber, 2004), includes Paul Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’,
Nelly Sachs’s ‘Oh the Chimneys’, Lura Krugman Gurdus’s ‘Majdanek’, and poems by Primo Levi, Dan
Pagis, Janos Pilinsky, Miklos Radnoti, and Tadeusz Ro ́ ̇zewicz. One poem each by Gershon and Kramer
appear in Anne Harvey (ed.),In Time of War(London: Blackie, 1987).
(^17) In an attempt to display the roots of the Holocaust in anti-Semitism,The Holocaust for Beginners
follows Raul Hilberg in his 3-vol.The Destruction of the European Jews(New York: Holmes and Meier,
1985) by tracing the Holocaust back at least to the Crusades of 1096. See Haim Bresheeth, Stuart
Hood, and Litza Jansz,The Holocaust For Beginners(Cambridge: Icon, 1994), 5–7. Martin Gilbert
traces ‘the first steps to iniquity’ to Martin Luther’s ‘Honest Advice’ in 1543 (Gilbert,The Holocaust
and the Jewish Tragedy(London: Collins, 1986), 19).