The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.

The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.

There is something embarrassing in... the way in which, ... turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, ... wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them.

Kitsch evokes a future utopia looking back at a past that is selectively (mis)remembered, thereby helping to stabilize the present toward which kitsch is otherwise deeply anatagonistic.

The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic.

The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.