The Shadowed Violence of Culture

Abstract

What was the role of high culture in the brutal lives of the inmates of Auschwitz? Were literature, art, and music effective tools for resisting the camp’s dehumanizing function or for resisting the Nazi ideology that held that Jews possessed no true language and no culture worthy of the name? At the same time, was high culture, in some unexpected way, complicit in Nazi violence? In other words, did culture tend to subvert the interests of Nazi power during the Holocaust or serve them? These questions are particularly relevant to our discussion since the Nazis saw Germany as the chief inheritor of the European cultural traditions, on which humanism is based, spanning from the ancients to the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Two authoritative voices on this topic are Levi and Auschwitz survivor Jean Amery (born in Austria as Hans Mayer). When Levi referred to culture, he meant the secular kind associated with modern Italy, Europe, and the humanistic world of science. Amery’s personal notion of culture was similar but not quite identical—for him, it was composed primarily of European philosophy and German literature. Treating Levi in depth and Amery succinctly, this chapter will analyze the two writers’ divergent points of view on the role of high culture in Auschwitz, especially poetry, and will place their remarks in the context of Theodor Adorno’s work on the role played by culture “after Auschwitz,” but also in Auschwitz and before.1