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To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, said Theodor Adorno. He meant lyric poetry, or at least that is how Adorno qualified his bitter remark in later years. Even if you think Adorno still goes too far, ask yourself what it means, and what it risks, to write poetry about Auschwitz. In effect, this is the question Young addresses, though he is writing not about poetry, but primarily about memorials to the victims of the Holocaust.
Adorno, and his Frankfurt School colleague Herbert Marcuse, were concerned not only with the Holocaust, but with any artistic representation of suffering, which they feared must render the agony it depicts as beautiful, or at least meaningful. What if this meaningfulness, conveyed by the artistic form itself, regardless of its content, is itself a lie? What if supreme suffering shatters meaning? ‘Keep watch over absent meaning’, says Maurice Blanchot. Is it possible, especially in the realms of art and architecture, to create spaces and voids that speak the unspeakable without rendering it beautiful, and so consoling us with its harmonious form?
This is what many of the anti-monuments that Young tells us about attempt to do, such as the disappearing monument in Hamburg, by Jochen Gerz. A 40-foot high, three-foot-square pillar was slowly (over a period of seven years) lowered into a crypt in the ground. In an entirely different medium, but perhaps not an entirely different form, the comic books called Maus by Art Spiegelman recount his father's experience of the Holocaust. Portraying Jews as mice, and Germans as cats (friendly not-too-bright dogs represent Americans), Spiegelman seems to remove every last glimmer of the aura which is said to surround art. Isn't this enough to assuage even Adorno's concerns?
Or what about another project by Gerz, in which he and his students removed 70 of the over 8000 cobblestones in the square facing a castle