ABSTRACT
There is a lot of controversy about whether the Holocaust represents a unique event in human history. There is an amusing British television sketch in which a variety of people describe their hard childhoods, the penultimate complainant claiming that all he had to live in when he was a child was a box. It might seem that if the Holocaust was not a unique event, then the idea that there could be no poetry after it loses all plausibility. Adorno's claim is not really a claim, it is an exhortation. It is a demand that those who would otherwise participate in cultural work take notice of the Holocaust and what the Holocaust means. What Adorno is stressing is that the event is of such significance that it cannot be pigeonholed away along with other apparently similar events. This seems to be what Adorno is demanding when he rejects the possibility of art after Auschwitz.
