Howard Jacobson: ‘A feelgood Holocaust exploits the dead and demeans the living’
It once felt impious just to mention Auschwitz. Now, 75 years after its liberation, the death camp has spawned a literary subgenre – and Hitler is in Oscar-nominated comedy Jojo Rabbit. Are we betraying the dead?
Silence is the angel with which literature wrestles. The silence of inadequacy to the task of expression – TS Eliot’s struggle against “last year’s words” while “next year’s words await another voice”. The silence of moral hesitancy or humane consideration. The silence enjoined by laws of blasphemy, or fears of persecution. The silence of bad conscience or exhaustion. The silence of tact.
Over and above these, the Holocaust for many writers and thinkers made reticence not a matter of choice but a moral and psychological obligation. “No poetry after Auschwitz” – the philosopher Theodor Adorno’s famous phrase, ringing through the deathly quiet like the plague bell, could be read both as an injunction and a lament.