The famous last thesis of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus – »Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.« – involves an obvious paradox: it contains a superfluous prohibition, since it prohibits something which is already in itself impossible. This paradox truthfully reproduces the predominant attitude towards the aesthetic representation of the holocaust: one should not do it, because one cannot do it. Jorge Semprún’s Spanish-Catholic origin plays a crucial role in his reversal of this prohibition. Elie Wiesel said that there can be no novel about the holocaust: a text which pretends to be that is either not about holocaust or it is not a novel. In contrast to this claim that literature and the holocaust are incommensurable, Semprún argues that the holocaust can only be represented by the arts: not aestheticization of the holocaust, its reduction to an object of documentary report is false. Every attempt to reproduce the facts about the holocaust in a documentary way neutralizes the traumatic impact of the described events – or, as Lacan, another atheist Catholic, put it, truth has the structure of a fiction. Almost none of us is able to endure, even less to enjoy, a snuff film showing real torture and killing, but we can enjoy it as a fiction: when truth is too traumatic to be confronted directly, it can only be accepted in the guise of a fiction. A direct documentary about the holocaust would be obscene, even disrespectful towards the victims. When used in this way, the pleasure of aesthetic fiction is not a simple escape, but a mode of coping with traumatic memory: it is a survival mechanism.


This is why we need to correct Adorno’s famous saying here: it is not poetry that is impossible after Auschwitz, but rather prose. Realistic prose fails, where the poetic evocation of the unbearable atmosphere of a camp succeeds. That is to say, when Adorno declares poetry impossible (or, rather, barbaric) after Auschwitz, this impossibility is an enabling impossibility: poetry is always, by definition, ›about‹ something that cannot be addressed directly, only alluded to. One shouldn’t be afraid to take this a step further and refer to the old saying that music comes in when words fail. There may well be some truth in the common wisdom that in a kind of historical premonition the music of Schoenberg articulated the anxieties and nightmares of Auschwitz before the event took place.


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