ARTE | Metropolis – Kunst nach Auschwitz

75 years of Auschwitz liberation. The most terrible murders ever committed also pushed art into a deep crisis of meaning. "Writing a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric!" Theodor Adorno proclaims after the end of the war. The sentence was understood as a general verdict against all poetry as well as art in general after the Holocaust, as a concrete ban on the representation of art about Auschwitz and the concentration camps or as a mere provocative dictum. The controversy surrounding Adorno's sentence became perhaps the most important fulcrum of post-war aesthetic discourse. But the murder of millions of people cannot be forgotten. "Metropolis" speaks to Aleida Assmann and the Center for Political Beauty. What can an appropriate poetic form of memory look like? And how can it be kept alive when the last contemporary witnesses have died?