"We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning"
About this Quote
Steiner’s line lands like an ice bath on the comforting myth that culture civilizes. He isn’t making a cheap paradox about “beauty alongside horror”; he’s indicting the modern habit of treating art as a moral vaccine. The sentence is built to collapse a cherished separation: the private, elevated night world of Goethe, Rilke, Bach, Schubert, and the bureaucratic morning world of industrial murder. Evening and morning sit next to each other with banal continuity, as if Auschwitz were just another commute. That temporal detail is the cruelty: genocide isn’t presented as a demonic rupture but as a day job.
The specific intent is to force readers to face a post-Holocaust scandal: European “high culture” didn’t fail to prevent barbarism; it proved compatible with it. Steiner chooses German-language icons not to blame a nation’s art, but to stress proximity. This isn’t ignorance. It’s intimacy. The camp guard (or administrator) can be aesthetically fluent, moved by lieder and poetry, and still be morally anesthetized. Culture becomes a room you can leave.
Subtext: refinement can train perception while leaving conscience untouched. Worse, it can help build the very skills a modern killing apparatus rewards: discipline, order, obedience to form, reverence for tradition. Steiner, as a critic, is also implicating his own vocation. If criticism wants to matter after Auschwitz, it can’t keep pretending that masterpieces automatically teach empathy. It has to ask what kind of reader, listener, citizen our institutions are actually producing - and what they are permitting people to excuse.
The specific intent is to force readers to face a post-Holocaust scandal: European “high culture” didn’t fail to prevent barbarism; it proved compatible with it. Steiner chooses German-language icons not to blame a nation’s art, but to stress proximity. This isn’t ignorance. It’s intimacy. The camp guard (or administrator) can be aesthetically fluent, moved by lieder and poetry, and still be morally anesthetized. Culture becomes a room you can leave.
Subtext: refinement can train perception while leaving conscience untouched. Worse, it can help build the very skills a modern killing apparatus rewards: discipline, order, obedience to form, reverence for tradition. Steiner, as a critic, is also implicating his own vocation. If criticism wants to matter after Auschwitz, it can’t keep pretending that masterpieces automatically teach empathy. It has to ask what kind of reader, listener, citizen our institutions are actually producing - and what they are permitting people to excuse.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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