563 G SEMINAR THEMES AND MOVEMENTS, Nelson. W 3-5:50
TOPIC: Holocaust Poetry
In Survival in Auschwitz holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi describes an indicative incident during his first days at the camp. Desperately thirsty, he reached out a window to grasp an icicle. A beefy guard knocked it away. “ Warum?” Levi asked. The succinct answer carried a certain uncanny ethical and philosophical depth: “ Hier ist kein warum.” Here there is no why. If the question could not be posed in the death camps, can it be posed in poetry instead? Can poetry put forth its humanity in the face of a world where all such values were extinguished?

In 1940 the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944) was drafted into a labor battalion along with thousands of his fellow Jews. As the war progressed and Hungary brought its policies into greater compliance with those of its German ally, these labor battalions, brutal from the outset, became increasingly lethal. Beaten and starved, the Jews were now randomly murdered. Radnóti nonetheless transformed the horror into poems and wrote them in a small notebook. On August 29, 1944 , nearing the end, he wrote the first of four poems under the title “Razglednicas,” Serbo-Croatian for “picture postcards.” A month later he writes the last of the “Razglednicas” on the back of a cod-liver oil advertising notice he found discarded. The poem predicts his death: “shot in the neck . . . blood mixed with mud was drying on my ear.” On November 9 th he met the fate he had anticipated, but nineteen months later, the war over, his body was disinterred and the blood stained poems recovered. Is it sufficient justification for poetry that his testimony now outlives his executioners?

There is n o more severe challenge to the aspirations and social functions of poetry than that posed by the holocaust. Leo Haber calls it “pale consolation, dear God of poetry, of justice, of mercy, / of explanations, for the murder of little children.” Adorno famously remarked that to write poetry after Auschwitz was obscene. Yet poetry was written both during the war and after, including anti-Semitic poems produced by the Nazis themselves. In that context we might conclude that the genre was so marked by its demonic uses that its myths of transcendence became a cruel joke. We will examine this whole history—poems written by wartime victims, witnesses, and perpetrators; poems written by later generations seeking to keep the historical memories alive and make the events more real. We will read poems from many different countries, using English language texts but comparing them to the original language texts whenever possible. In some cases multiple translations of individual poems exist. Again, we will compare them. Some translators feel one should find equivalents for Radnóti’s rhymes; others feel that is the worst choice possible.