Rethinking “After Auschwitz”:
Against a Rhetoric of the Unspeakable in Holocaust Writing
Naomi Mandel
1.
Just What Part of “Auschwitz” Don’t We Understand?
When Theodor Adorno situated contemporary culture “after Auschwitz,” he coined a phrase that
has...
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Rethinking “After Auschwitz”:
Against a Rhetoric of the Unspeakable in Holocaust Writing
Naomi Mandel
1.
Just What Part of “Auschwitz” Don’t We Understand?
When Theodor Adorno situated contemporary culture “after Auschwitz,” he coined a phrase that
has been accumulating significance and intensity as this culture moves on into the future and
Auschwitz recedes, reluctantly, into the past.
In the course of this movement, Auschwitz has
come to represent the Holocaust for contemporary imagination.
When we say “Auschwitz,” we do
not mean the concentration camp in occupied Poland, or we do not mean merely that; we also
refer to the vast network of bureaucracy, regional and personal politics, personal and impersonal
betrayals and hatreds, German nationalist and racist presumptions that found expression [End
Page 203] in National Socialism and a leader in Hitler, the scapegoat mentality and delusional
ideology produced by a centuries-old anti-Semitism—in short, the immense, cumulative, compl
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