Poetry after Auschwitz: Ben Barkow in conversation with Zoe Waxman

The Wiener Holocaust Library is delighted to host a special event with our former director, Ben Barkow, in conversation with Zoe Waxman, about his newest publication, Poetry after Auschwitz: Walking in West Cornwall with the Ghost of Great-Aunt Hilde. The event will be moderated by Dr Christine Schmidt, Deputy Director and Head of Research, and introduced by Dr Alessandro Bucci, the Director of Holocaust Centre North. Register to attend in person or online.

Published by Holocaust Centre North, Poetry after Auschwitz explores the lives of Barkow’s grandparents and their siblings and those of his parents in a series of linked poems. By directly going up against Adorno’s famous dictum that to write poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric, he probes the limits of representation in the context of the overwhelming need to let the suffering of the victims speak. Implicitly Barkow articulates the haunting and haunted reality of a life lived in the long shadow of the Holocaust.

Ben Barkow worked for 30 years in London’s Wiener Holocaust Library, 20 of them as its Director. This, together with his upbringing as a German boy in 1960s and 70s London – and his family’s silence about their Jewish heritage and sufferings during the Nazi era – underpins this poetic reconstruction of two generations.

About the Speakers

Ben Barkow currently chairs the Academic Advisory Board of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, charged with creating a national Holocaust memorial adjacent to the Houses of Parliament. He has served as Director of The Wiener Holocaust Library from 2000 until the end of 2019. He is the author, editor and translator of a number of books relating to the legacy of the Holocaust.

Prof Zoë Waxman is Professor of Holocaust History at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Writing the Holocaust: memory, testimony, representation (2006), Anne Frank (2015), and Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (2017), as well as numerous articles relating to the Holocaust and genocide.