Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) was a German philosopher and social critic. In 1949 he pronounced the dictum that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, which was really intended as a challenge to his fellow-Germans, posing the profound question of what German culture could mean, or be, after the Holocaust. He later revised the dictum, stating that “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream”. He died too young to be familiar with the work of Max Sebald, and was probably unaware of the work of Heinrich Böll, but he was a close friend of Paul Celan; all three are writers who took up the Adorno challenge in their own ways, as did Günter Grass, who is acknowledged for doing so in a poem later in this collection. This “Retort To Adorno” is not a criticism, but for a Jew visiting Berlin, staring at the eagle still dominant above the Reichstag, and hearing the same old national anthem still playing, even though they no longer officially sing the words, it seemed the right title, and the right approach. The poem “Warsaw Pilgrimage” is really a continuation of this retort, if not actually of this poem. My story “Hunting Doughnuts In Berlin”, in the collection “Travels In Familiar Lands”, completes the trilogy, and is due for publication in 2015.
The rivers
are ice.
The earth
marshals its frigid strength,
brown with
over-cultivation.
From East to
West and West to East
the streets
unite in Christmas lights and tinsel.
Postcards of
the city
show a Wall,
a rifle-toting sentry, a field of mines,
but all of
this is history.
The
Reichstag, now refurbished, re-inhabited,
warms the
seat of future European government.
The marching
feet on Unter den Linden and Alexanderplatz
stamp only
to shake off the snow.
The Neue
Synagogue (new in 1866)
may now be
just a sad museum,
but down the
road the Judische Gymnasium is full,
the
Holocaust Memorial a dream of Albert Speer,
and in the
little theatre in the Hackesches-Hoef
Jews full of
Hechsher-Hofen mispronounce the name
while a
Swiss Jew from Narbonne who looks like Tevya
plays the
accordion in kletzmer style
and sings a
kleine liedele in Yiddish
for the
assembled ranks of Judeophile non-Jews.
When the
show is done I approach him at the bar in Hebrew,
thank him
for the Warshawsky rendering of Oseh Shalom
and the
several encores and the explanations of the songs.
We talk in
shrugs, as Jews have always done,
an arm
raised this way indicates the Brandenburg Tor,
a shoulder that way points out Hitler’s Bunker
on the Friedrich
Strasse, two hundred metres
from the
monument to Checkpoint Charlie on Rozinthaler Street.
Two hundred
metres from Oranienburg Strasse
where the
death of Jewry was proclaimed
a generation
and a half ago,
the Swiss
Jew and the English Jew shake hands,
exchange
addresses,
bid shalom,
concur in
parting that it is we who won.
"Retort to Adorno" is published in "Welcome To My World, Selected Poems 1973-2013", The Argaman Press. Click here to purchase the book.
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