If writing after auschwitz is, to quote (again) Adorno's seemingly timeless dictum, barbaric, then Heiner Müller's Germania cycle is, arguably, more barbaric than most. From the early poem “LACH NIT” (Laugh Ye Not) to the posthumously published Germania 3 Gespenster am Toten Mann (Germania 3 Ghosts at/on the Dead Man), these texts are populated by violent cannibals, petrol-slugging dictators, vampires, ghosts and murderers. Müller espouses a form of barbaric creativity as a response to barbaric German history. This group of texts and themes, which Müller periodically revisited and amended from the early 1950s until 1995, seems to take Adorno's critical concept literally, turning it into an almost homeopathic poetological model to engage with the barbarity of German history that has allegedly rendered poetry untenable, addressing historical barbarity with aesthetic barbarity. When read in the context of standard narratives of post–1945 writing, the Germania cycle is thus highly provocative: it takes the much commented-upon German barbarity of the Third Reich and turns it into a core component of a postwar poetics of spectral returns from the past within individual instances of history. What is provocative that seems to reject the very concept of an “after Auschwitz.” Auschwitz may function as the historical aporia of the twentieth century, but Müller's texts suggest that Auschwitz is not actually over at all, but rather lives on in the continuing presence of the political, rational, industrial and economic models of modernity that produced Auschwitz in the first place.