Reading Poems in German from the Concentration Camps

THE GOAL OF THIS BOOK IS TO think about a selection of poems. These are disparate poems, but they are marked in two particular ways. The individuals who wrote these poems did so while they were imprisoned in concentration camps set up by the National Socialists, and they wrote in German, the language of their tormentors. These two historical factors alone do not determine the poems, but they condition our reading as they call attention with particular force to the creative act and to the aesthetic dimension in a context of extreme abuse and dehumanization. With the exception of Michael Moll (1988), critics have neglected these works by and large, preferring instead to engage philosophically and at great length with what, following Theodor Adorno, has come to be known as the question of the feasibility of “poetry after Auschwitz.” Such theoretical concern is not insignificant to the subject at hand, but the purpose of this book is to make space for the poems themselves, to linger with that we might call poetry in the camps.