A landmark work of literary criticism that asks a troubling question: what becomes of language after catastrophe?

In Language and Silence, George Steiner explores the fate of culture, literature, and intellectual life in the shadow of the twentieth century’s greatest horrors. Writing in the decades following the Holocaust, Steiner confronts the uneasy fact that Europe’s most refined traditions of philosophy, poetry, and music coexisted with unimaginable violence.

Across a series of essays, he examines writers, philosophers, and the responsibilities of language itself, asking whether art and criticism can still speak meaningfully after such historical rupture. The result is both a meditation on literature and a philosophical inquiry into the moral limits of culture.