INTERVIEWER: How then, fifty years later, do you assess Adorno’s famous dictum, “No poetry after Auschwitz”?
STEINER:It seemed to me at the time an absolutely natural and crucial thing to say; and it hoped for disproof. That disproof came with Paul Celan’s poetry, which refuted that statement — and Adorno knew it before he died. Let’s take a few steps backward. The obscene question of counting dead heads doesn’t arise, but I group the concentration camps, whether they be in Poland, in Germany or all over the damn place, together: the phenomenon of massive incarceration and elimination of millions of human beings from one end of the world to the other. One of the possible responses is to say our whole culture proved absolutely impotent and defenseless, in fact it adorned much of this stuff. Gieseking was playing the complete Debussy piano music on the nights when one could hear the screams of the people in the sealed railway cars at the station in Munich on the way to Dachau, just outside Munich. They could be heard all the way to the concert hall. That is on record. There’s not the slightest witness that he didn’t play magnificently or that his audience wasn’t wholly responsive and profoundly moved.
So there was a nihilistic critique, which was Adorno’s, or the formulation of Walter Benjamin:“at the base of every major work of art is a pile of barbarism.” You could take that line, as many in the Frankfurt school in a sense did, but take it a step further and say, “Let’s shut up for a while.” I often had a dream of a moratorium on discussing these things at all — for ten years, fifteen, a hundred years — to try not to reduce them to articulate language, which in a curious way was to make them acceptable. That’s what Adorno really meant: Careful! Even the greatest outcry if it is formalized, let’s say, into verse or rhyme or stanzas, adds a mystery of acceptability to the phenomenon.
The second and most difficult step of all was saying, “No, in despite of all this, I can still convey, communicate something of the essential experience.” Out of the whole enormous range of Holocaust literature only three or four writers have pulled this off.
INTERVIEWER: Who are they?
STEINER: Celan above all. Without any doubt, Primo Levi, the Italian-Jewish writer: supreme, supreme, supreme. There isn’t a word out of place; it’s a miracle. One or two far less known East Europeans, some wonderful Latvian short stories. Perhaps half a dozen texts where I would say it has justified this incredibly bold attempt. But at what cost? Celan commits suicide. Primo Levi commits suicide. Jean Améry commits suicide. Long after, as if having borne witness, there was no more meaning to their lives and to the language they were using…
George Steiner// The Art of Criticism No. 2, from The Paris Review, no. 137.
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