When artists represent horrifying and traumatic events, discussions inevitably ensue over the appropriateness and necessity of such representations. It comes as no surprise that the debate about the function of art after the Holocaust has been particularly contentious in Germany and has been conducted with increased visibility and urgency since the country's unification. As early as the 1950s, however, German philosopher and social critic Theodor W. Adorno shaped West German debates about art's role in addressing genocide. Questioning the capacity of traditional aesthetic forms to convey such horror in a culture characterized by mass consumption, he specifically directed his critique toward lyric poetry written after the event. "Cultural criticism," Adorno stated in his essay "Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft," written in 1949, "finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And it corrodes even the knowledge why it has become impossible to write poetry today". Adorno's argument that the rupture in the continuum of German history must not be forgotten and that the limits of representation have been reached within the traditional parameters of art has been both applauded and critiqued. Despite his subsequent explications and modifications, scholars and writers repeatedly seized upon the phrase "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," often isolating it from its immediate and wider content and reading it, for example, as a prescriptive ban on poetry. As late as 2006, Lawrence Langer observed in Using and Abusing the Holocaust that the "after Auschwitz" citation remains an "authoritative force" and has not lost "its continuing appeal". Many German language studies on the poetry of the Holocaust, for instance, continue to frame and position their work in light of these debates.