ABSTRACT
In an afterword to Wolfgang Borchert’s play Draussen vor der Tür [The Man Outside], set at the end of the Second World War, Heinrich Boll wrote in 1955
Stalingrad, Thermopylae, Dien-Bien-Phu… What remains is a placename and a little pathos, with which the survivors drink themselves into a stupor, as if it were poor wine…2
Names from the two world wars function as markers. Those of the First World War are the names of the bloodiest battles: the Somme, Passchendael (with its acoustic overtones of ‘passion’ in English), Langemarck, Verdun. This is true to an extent of the Second World War too, with Alamein or (in spite of subsequent changes) Stalingrad. However, the best-known names of the Second World War are those associated with atrocities or with the large-scale killing of civilians: Lidice, Oradour, Katyn, Dresden, Coventry, and the two which dominate: Auschwitz and Hiroshima, subsuming Belsen, Treblinka, Dachau, Nagasaki. Furthermore, the tag ‘no poetry after Auschwitz’ has shown itself to be wrong. There was poetry in Auschwitz, and as a concept it has become in more recent times a poetic metaphor divorced, on the surface at least, from its reality and used by poets with no actual connection with the camps.3
