a “For nothing is resolved, no conflict is settled, no remembering has become a mere memory. What happened, happened. But that it happened cannot be so easily accepted. I rebel: against my past, against history, and against a present that places the incomprehensible in the cold storage of history and thus falsifies it in a revolting way. Nothing has healed, and what perhaps was already on the point of healing in 1964 is bursting open again as an infected wound. Emotions? [...] Where is it decreed that enlightenmenr must be free of emotion? To me the opposite seems to be true.”
(Jean Améry: Preface to the reissue in 1997 of At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (New York: Schocken, 1986), p. xi.)
b “You do not observe dehumanized man committing his deeds and misdeeds without having all of your notions of inherent human dignity placed in doubt. We emerged from the camp stripped, robbed, emptied out, disoriented—and it was a long time before we were able even to learn the ordinary language of freedom. Still today, incidentally, we speak it with discomfort and without real trust in its validity.”
(Jean Améry: At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (New York: Schocken, 1986), p. 20.)
c “Astonishment at the existence of the other, as he boundlessly asserts himself through torture, and astonishment at what one can become oneself: flesh and death. The tortured person never ceases to be amazed that all those things one may, according to inclination, call his soul, or his mind, or his consciousness, or his identity, are destroyed when there is that cracking and splintering in the shoulder joints. That life is fragile is a truism he has always known [...]. But only through torture did he learn that a living person can be transformed so thoroughly into flesh and by that, while still alive, be partly made into a prey of death. Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the world, which already collapsed in part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained. That one’s fellow man was experienced as the antiman remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror.”
(Jean Améry: At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (New York: Schocken, 1986), p. 40.)
d “There I was with fifteen marks, fifty; there I was getting lost in the line of relief recipients, crouching in the deportation train, spooning my soup from a can. Exactly how to define myself I did not know, since my past and my origin had been confiscated from me, since I did not live in a house but in a barracks number so-and-so, and since I also bore the middle name Israel, which had not been given to me by my parents but rather by a man named Globke.”
(Jean Améry: At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (New York: Schocken, 1986), pp. 58–59.)
e “Only I possessed, and still possess, the moral truth of the blows that even today roar in my skull, and for that reason I am more entitled to judge, not only more than the culprit but more than society—which thinks only about its continued existence. The social body is occupied merely with safeguarding itself and could not care less about a life that has been damaged. At the very best, it looks forward, so that such things don’t happen again. But my resentments are there in order that the crime become a moral reality for the criminal, in order that he be swept into the truth of his atrocity.”
(Jean Améry: At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (New York: Schocken, 1986), p. 70.)
f With regard to the notion of turning back the clock, Amery says this: “In two decades of contemplating what happened to me, I believe to have recognized that a forgiving and forgetting induced by social pressure is immoral. Whoever lazily and cheaply forgives, subjugates himself to the social and biological time-sense, which is also called the ‘natural’ one. Natural consciousness of time actually is rooted in the physiological process of wound-healing and became part of the social conception of reality. But precisely for this reason it is not only extramoral, but also
antimoral in character. Man has the right and the privilege to declare himself to be in disagreement with every natural occurrence, including the biological healing that time brings about. What happened, happened. This sentence is just as true as it is hostile to morals and intellect. The moral power to resist contains the protest, the revolt against reality, which is rational only as long as it is moral. The moral person demands annulment of time—in the particular case under question, by nailing the criminal to his deed. Thereby, and through a moral turning-back of the clock, the latter can join his victim as a human being.”
(Jean Améry: At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (New York: Schocken, 1986), p. 72.)
g “It is not Being that oppresses me, or Nothingness, or God, or the Absence of God, only society. For it and only it caused the disturbance in my existential balance, which I am trying to oppose with an upright gait. It and only it robbed me of my trust in the world.”
(Jean Améry: At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (New York: Schocken, 1986), p. 100.)
h “No one can escape from the history of his people. […] One should and must not ‘allow the past to rest,’ because it otherwise could be resurrected and become the new present.”
(Jean Améry: Preface to the 1970 paperback edition of Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten. In: Amery: Werke. Vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2002), pp. 626–628, here p. 628. (Transl. KL))
“On my left forearm I bear the Auschwitz number; it reads more briefly than the Pentateuch or the Talmud and yet provides more thorough information. It is also more binding as a basic formula of Jewish existence. If to myself and the world, including the religious and nationally minded Jews, who do not regard me as one of their own, I say: I am a Jew, then I mean by that those realities and possibilities that are summed up in the Auschwitz number.”[1]
“Everything will be submerged in a general ‘Century of Barbarism.’ We, the victims, will appear as the truly incorrigible, irreconcilable ones, as the antihistorical reactionaries in the exact sense of the word, and in the end it will seem like a technical mishap that some of us still survived.”[2]
In 1964, when the first Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial began, Jean Améry (Hans Maier), an Austrian Jew and Holocaust survivor, started writing his first volume of essays, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne. Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten (Engl. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities). First delivered as radio addresses,[3] the essays appeared in book form in 1966, published by the Szczesny-Verlag in Munich. The volume contains five texts: “At the Mind’s Limits,” “Torture,” “How Much Home Does a Person Need?” “Resentments,” and “On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew.” It was the great public response to the publication that founded Améry’s reputation as a deeply committed political and cultural critic in the German-speaking world, though he had been writing steadily since the end of the war, mostly for Swiss newspapers.
In Améry’s view, in his series of essays he brought an end to twenty years of silence by putting down on paper what he had experienced in exile, in the torture chamber, in the camp, and as a Jewish victim after Auschwitz in a “personal confession refracted through meditation,”[4] as he writes in the preface. Améry does not intend to give a documentary report on Auschwitz, and the “diligent historical, psychological, sociological, and political studies”[5] on the Third Reich offer little clarification, he thinks: “What occupies me, and what I am qualified to speak about, is the victims of this Reich. I don’t want to erect a monument to them, for to be a victim alone is not an honor. I only wanted to describe their condition—which is unchangeable.”[6] From the rebelling “subjective state of the victim,”[7] Améry speaks out in opposition to impersonally serene historical recollection. a
The first essay, “At the Mind’s Limits,” from which the English translation of the book takes its title, analyzes how mind, reason, and intellectual cultivation failed to provide any help to the intellectual prisoner in the concentration camp, and even had a self-destructive effect. The intellectual prisoners also did not take any “practical guidance” or “wisdom” away from the camp, Améry asserts. Their experiences can be defined only as a negation of a positive identity, as damage. b
In the second essay, “Torture,” Améry gives a greatly condensed account of the torture he suffered in Fort Breendonk in 1943. His own torture experience is defined, in a phenomenological description, as a physical overwhelming by the other person that is tantamount to an existential consummation of destruction, for the person being tortured can expect no help. c
The third essay defines the concept of home as security, “being secure,” a feeling that originates in childhood and youth and gives a person a past that belongs to him. The exiled Jews of the Third Reich simultaneously lost, along with their home and security, their entitlement to a past. d
In the essay “Resentments,” Améry interprets the resentments of the victims of Nazism with regard to Germany and the Germans as a wish for a “moral reality” e and a turning-back of the clock. f
In “On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew,” the final piece in the book, Améry reflects on the conditions of his Jewishness. He comes to the conclusion that as a non-believing and assimilated Jew, it is his destiny and duty to be a Jew as long as there is still a single anti-Semite alive and the social reality provides grounds for concern. g
The collection of essays titled At the Mind’s Limits occupies a central place in the reception of Améry’s writings. In some places, that reception can be reduced to this work alone, which can be considered canonical to some degree. In the decades following his death in 1978, there was a sharp decrease in the reception of his writings.
It was not only the political and intellectual right that treated him with hostility, as expected: Throughout the 1970s, it was primarily Améry’s criticism of the left’s anti-Zionism that put him repeatedly on a collision course with the left. The “Améry community” of the past few decades has stayed rather small. Those who continued publishing material on Améry were, most notably, Henryk M. Broder, Irene Heidelberger-Leonard, Jan Philipp Reemtsma, W. G. Sebald, Gerhard Scheit, and Stephan Steiner.
In the course of the historicization of the Shoah, the historical relativization that frequently accompanies it, and its large-scale utilization in popular culture, Améry’s voice appeared to find fewer and fewer listeners, and his systematic interventions, resentments, and refusal of identification seemed to be less and less welcome.
A quotation from the writings of Jean Améry is part of the inscription on the memorial plaque in front of the I.G. Farben Building in Frankfurt am Main. h
(GB; transl. KL)
