Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. - Theodor W. Adorno

“Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit” (1959)

In America I was liberated from a certain naïve belief in culture and attained the capacity to see culture from the outside. To clarify the point: in spite of all social criticism and all consciousness of the primacy of economic factors, the fundamental importance of the mind—“Geist”—was quasi a dogma self-evident to me from the very beginning. The fact that this was not a foregone conclusion, I learned in America, where no reverential silence in the presence of everything intellectual prevailed.

Regressive listeners behave like children. Again and again and with stubborn malice, they demand the one dish they have once been served.