ABSTRACT
Few people seem to be aware that the often quoted statement by Theodor Adorno, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” was revised by him in a later essay to read,
I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric… Yet this suffering, what Hegel called consciousness of adversity, also demands the continued existence of art while it prohibits it; it is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it. (1962/1982, p. 313)
In this last statement, Adorno called our attention to the dialectic—the impossibility and, at the same time, the necessity of representing traumatic experience. It is this theme that we often encounter when we examine the art from the ashes of genocide. Each work of art is a window into the soul of the survivor and reflects this struggle to express what feels both impossible and imperative to communicate. The need to communicate, which is another version of the need for witness, requires that the witnessing other be open to surprise, free of preconceptions and misconceptions about the survivor experience. It is my contention here that this is often not the case.