In “Essay on Cultural Criticism and Society” (1949), Theodore Adorno puts forth a dramatic thesis: “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Adorno's statement implies that the experience of Auschwitz altered our relationship to language. In a way, Adorno argues, the Holocaust leaves us speechless. Following Adorno, artists, writers, poets, painters and filmmakers, as well as literary critics, have struggled with the issue of representation: how, if at all, should the Holocaust be represented? What does representing it mean if every representation is connected to the European project of Enlightenment, the very idea of humanism, its failure and aftermath? Among other things, the Holocaust reduced death from a unique experience that defines our humanity to mass production. Jean Amery, for example, argues that Auschwitz altered the European aesthetic of death and dying. After the Holocaust, death could no longer be seen through the prism of art: