ABSTRACT
Ever since Theodor Adorno’s famous, though often misunderstood, injunction against writing poetry after Auschwitz, the propriety of using art to depict the Holocaust has been fiercely debated.1 It has often been argued that any writing about the Holocaust, either as history or art, results in falsification. As Emily Miller Budick puts it, “To survivors and nonsurvivors alike, the Holocaust has always seemed to be beyond our ability to know it and therefore to represent it. Writing about the Holocaust…has seemed…not simply to miss it but to violate it: to distort or trivialize or even to deny it” (329-30). Efraim Sicher notes that current Holocaust remembrance “once more stir[s] up the questions Theodor Adorno and Elie Wiesel raised about legitimacy and authenticity” (“Introduction” 7).
