Novels After Auschwitz Can Be Barbaric

Theodor Adorno famously wrote that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” What, then, would he make of adaptations of the Holocaust itself — films and books that dramatize Jewish suffering during World War II? Sure these box-office hits and bestsellers help to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive, but at what cost? There is something grotesque about the dramatization of the Shoah, and one wonders when commemoration becomes desecration.