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Jean Améry (1912–1978) The Homesickness and Enlightenment of a Catastrophe-Jew by Roy Ben-Shai

Turn, then, to leave the cemetery ground, And for a moment thy swift eye will pass Upon the verdant carpet of the grass… Take thou a fistful fling it on the plain Saying, “The people is plucked grass; can plucked grass grow again?” (Bialik)

1. Hans Mayer becomes Jean Améry: Youth, War, Mission, and Death: A Biographical Sketch 1. Beginning Phase (Prewar Years): Hans Mayer, a Child in his Heimat and Aspiring Author

Holocaust survivor, essayist, and public intellectual Jean Améry was born as Hans Mayer in 1912 in Vienna.1 Améry’s mother was 1

This biographical sketch draws on some of Améry’s autobiographical essays: At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); Radical Humanism: Selected Essays (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); On Aging: Revolt and Resignation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), as well as on biographical sketches provided by his English translators: Sidney

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half-Jewish and, until her conversion to Judaism for the sake of her marriage to his father, she was a member of the Catholic Church. Despite her efforts to endorse Judaism, she remained more strongly attached to her Catholic heritage. His father — an observant Jew, born into the old and respected Jewish community of Hohenems in Vorarlberg, the westernmost region of Austria — died as a soldier during the First World War, when Hans, an only child, was five years old. With his death, Hans’s sole tie to his Jewish heritage was severed. Due to his father’s death and the postwar depression, the living standards of the Mayer family suffered a significant decline. When Hans was eight they left Vienna and relocated to Bad Ischl, a spa village in the Upper Austrian countryside where his mother took up the management of a small guesthouse. Although Améry always looked back on his childhood years as idyllic, the deterioration of their living standards and the move from the big city to the rural countryside nonetheless served to create a dissonance in his sense of identity. Améry’s initial relation to his Jewish identity was framed by cultural and socioeconomic disparity. The Jews at Bad Ischl were mostly outsiders or passing visitors, people, on the whole, of higher standing from a sophisticated urban background. These outsiders included summer vacationers at the guesthouse and Améry’s paternal grandfather, who, upon visiting, reacted with disapproval on hearing the thick rustic dialect suddenly emerging from his grandson’s lips. Being both Jewish and a city-boy — an outsider himself — Améry was caught in between identification with the distinguished visitors and identification with the locals. With neither

Rosenfeld in At the Mind’s Limits, pp. 104–111; John D. Barlow in On Aging, pp. ix–xviii; D.G. Myers, “Jean Améry: On Being a Jewish Victim,” in Lillian Kremer, ed., Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopaedia of Writers and Their Work (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 20–24; and Susan Neiman, “Jean Améry Takes His Life,” in L. Gilman and J. Zipes, eds., Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1997), pp. 775–84. I am indebted to the excellent and most extensive biography of Améry by Irène Heidelberger-Leonard, The Philosopher of Auschwitz: Jean Améry and Living with the Holocaust (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010).

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of them could he identify completely, and neither of them would fully perceive him as of their own. In terms of faith and tradition, Améry was only ever intimately acquainted with Catholicism, which was the faith of his school, his teachers, and his fellow pupils at Bad Ischl, as well as the church he attended regularly. Nevertheless, it was not the church, but the rustic dialect, ethos, and landscape that marked the place for him and took root in his soul. He never subscribed to any faith, neither before nor after the war and in later years would describe himself as “agnostic” by disposition.2 Améry was an autodidact. While he developed a passion for reading and learning at a very early age, he also harbored a deep aversion to school and schoolwork and an even deeper dread of taking, or failing, exams. The enrollment in a grammar school in a nearby town at the age of eleven proved a traumatic experience, and his feelings of inferiority to the wealthier, better-educated town boys only accentuated his sense of displacement. He left the school after only a year and would never again be enrolled in a formal institute of learning nor earn an academic degree. Améry and his mother returned to Vienna when he was fourteen years old. The Vienna of the twenties and early thirties, vibrant with intellectual and cultural activities and informal study circles, was just the place for an autodidact, by then an aspiring writer. He stayed in Vienna for almost fourteen years, during which he married a Jewish woman and made his living as an assistant bookseller and occasional bar pianist, all the while attending classes and engaging in various literary activities, including the completion of a first novel which remained unpublished during his lifetime. 2. Middle Phase (the War and its Aftermath): Between Hans Mayer and Jean Améry, a Journalist in Exile and his Heimweh

All changed for Améry in 1935, the year in which the Nuremberg laws were enacted. Describing the emotional consequence of reading these laws, he later wrote: “nothing can again lull me into

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At the Mind’s Limits, p. 12.

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the slumber of security from which I awoke in 1935.”3 As will be discussed later, “security” for Améry is synonymous with “home” (Heimat).4 If, until then, Améry had felt Austrian to all intents and purposes — and with his country dialect and sensibilities even more authentically Austrian than many of his urban and modernized compatriots — he now woke up to the realization that he had been living an illusion. Speaking in the name of survivors from similar backgrounds he later wrote: “We… had not lost our country, but had to realize that it had never been ours.”5 A veil of naiveté was abruptly removed, and Améry no longer knew who he was or where he belonged. In 1938, following the Anschluss, Améry and his wife fled the country. They arrived in Brussels where, using false identities, they joined an Austrian cell of the Belgian resistance. In April 1943, while distributing anti-Nazi flyers, Améry was seized by the Gestapo and brutally tortured. His first experience of torture, to which he would later dedicate one of his most important and influential essays, branded him permanently like an “unsightly birthmark.”6 When his real identity as a Jew was discovered by his captors, he was deported to Auschwitz (Monowitz). Towards the end of the war, when the camp was vacated, Améry was transported to Bergen-Belsen and stayed there until the liberation of the camp by the British in April 1945. On liberation, he returned to Brussels to look for his wife — the hope of reuniting with her had been a significant factor in his survival — but she was not to be found, and he feared she had abandoned him. It was only a few years later that he discovered that she had died of a heart attack during his internment. The years of abuse, combined with the loss of his primary source of hope and strength, left him both physically and mentally shaken, and he never fully recovered. He later remarried but remained childless. Feeling he no longer had a home in Austria (or in fact anywhere else), Améry remained in Brussels for the rest of his life. He made 3 4 5 6

Ibid., p. 95. Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., p. 36.

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a meager living as a freelance publicist and cultural critic, writing thousands of articles on an array of topics from American cinema and jazz to politics, literature, philosophy, and science. His adopted penname, Jean Améry — Jean, the French equivalent to Hans, and Améry, an anagram of Mayer — expressed his alienation from his prewar identity and homeland as well as his newfound admiration for the French intellectual ethos. His Francophile sentiments stemmed above all from the spirit of equality and solidarity that inspired the French Revolution and from the role of social critic — especially in support of oppressed groups — assumed by intellectuals, as epitomized in Emile Zola’s J’accuse!.7 For these reasons he particularly favored the French existentialists Jean Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir, emulating their efforts to find a balance between philosophy and literature on the one hand, and between individualism and political resistance on the other. Similarly, out of a sense of identification and solidarity with the oppressed, Améry felt it his duty after the war to endorse his Jewish identity. But he felt no more at “home” in this identity than he did in his own injured body and soul after the war. “There is no ‘new home’,” he wrote, “[h]ome is the land of one’s childhood and youth. Whoever has lost it remains lost himself.”8 A foreigner and exile unto himself, he was therefore to remain suspended between a French identity (to which he was sympathetic, but never belonged), a Jewish identity (to which he felt obligated, but which he could not positively assume), and a German identity (out of which he was traumatically cast, but to which he felt most deeply bound). His relation to the latter, in particular, was doubly arduous. He described 7

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An interesting allusion to Zola can be found in Améry’s last book, yet to be translated into English, Charles Bovary, Landarzt: Porträt eines einfachen Mannes (Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978). This book culminates in a letter of protest, entitled “J’accuse,” addressed to Gustave Flaubert by one of his own fictional characters, Charles Bovary, Emma’s husband. It is at once a critique of Flaubert’s masterpiece and a defense of the spirit of the French Enlightenment and the Revolution. In Susan Neiman, “Jean Améry takes his life,” Neiman also comments on the affinity between Améry’s variant of rationalism and writing style and that of French Enlightenment thinkers. At the Mind’s Limits, p. 48.

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it as homesickness (Heimweh, commonly meaning nostalgia) of a particular kind. What particularized the homesickness of the (neither-) German-(nor-) Jew was that for him, home (Heimat) came to mean two contradictory things. On the one hand, it connoted the idyllic land of his childhood memories, the only place where he felt complete and could find solace and joy. On the other hand, it signified the wretched country and people that betrayed his trust, repaid his love with hatred and not only excluded but brutally tortured him. As he wrote: “What we urgently wished, and were socially bound, to hate suddenly stood before us and demanded our longing. A totally impossible, neurotic condition for which there is no psychoanalytic remedy.”9 3. Concluding Phase (Mid-Sixties and Seventies): Jean Améry, a Public Intellectual and Essayist. Remaining Homesick, Calling Home

While there was no psychoanalytic remedy, Améry nevertheless found a platform to channel this neurosis and mobilize his lovemixed-with-hatred in an edifying rather than destructive way, by raising his voice at the betraying (and self-betrayed) Heimat. In 1965, he was commissioned to write and later read a lecture relating to his Holocaust experiences for the radio-essay program of the South German Radio station in Stuttgart (Süddeutschen Rundfunk Stuttgart or SDR). What ensued was a series of five radio talks addressing different facets of his Holocaust experience: Auschwitz, torture, exile and homesickness (Heimweh), resentments, and Jewish identity. These five essays were later assembled and published in book form under the title Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (“Beyond Guilt and Atonement,” translated into English as At the Mind’s Limits). Although Améry’s message in these lectures was by no means one of hatred, it was not a message of love and reconciliation either. He spoke with resentment and about resentments, all the while insisting that expressing his resentments and trying to clarify them

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Ibid., p. 51.

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was “also for the good of the German people.”10 Améry’s chief grievance against Germany was not so much the persecution of the Jews or any other group of people as the failure during the war of public conscience, in particular of self-proclaimed intellectuals, to resist and to revolt: to be, in his words, “no-sayers.” 11 The revolutionary spirit he so admired among French intellectuals was, in his opinion, woefully scarce among German intellectuals. It was precisely this failure that he now dedicated himself to addressing and perhaps correcting, embodying this spirit of revolt in his own voice and writing. Just as Améry felt it his duty to adopt a Jewish identity and to speak as a Jew, so he felt it his responsibility to intervene in German and Austrian politics. While the Heimat had turned its back on him, he refused (and felt unable) to do likewise. Through these radio talks Améry became something of a literary star, first in Germany and later in his native Austria. He won much critical acclaim and was awarded multiple prizes, received letters of admiration from laypersons as well as luminaries of the age, and became a regular presence on radio and television. He welcomed this success with ambivalence. Naturally, it gratified him and, more importantly, it enabled him to devote himself more freely and systematically than before to the pursuit of his vocation as a writer and intellectual. Nevertheless, each time he left his exilic abode in Belgium to embark on a lecture tour across Germany and Austria, he could not help but question, with some bitter irony, the integrity and viability of his own efforts and of their enthusiastic reception by “organs of public opinion” in the now odious Heimat. “I travel through the thriving land, and I feel less and less comfortable as I do,” he remarked. “What dehumanized me has become a commodity, which I offer for sale.”12 Améry remained prolific to the end. In addition to many individual essays, he also published six more books which started out as series of five radio-essays. While these later books do not engage 10 Ibid., p. 80. 11 See Aleida Assmann, “Two Forms of Resentment: Jean Améry, Martin Walser and German Memorial Culture,” New German Critique , vol. 90 (Autumn 2003), pp. 123–133. 12 Ibid., p. 80.

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directly with the Holocaust, many of them retain the approach introduced in his first work. Most noteworthy in this regard are Über das Altern (On Aging) from 1968, and Hand an sich legen (On Suicide) from 1976. Common to these books is an attitude of stern realism and a demand to face and describe things as they are — resisting beautification, idealization, and abstraction — especially regarding abject and painful experiences. The texts methodically oscillate between confession, literature, and philosophy; between intimate meditation drawing on personal experiences and an appropriative and critical engagement with scientific, literary, and philosophical sources. Suicide, as with all of the themes he wrote about, was a matter of personal importance for Améry, and his reflections on the subject neither began nor ended with the written and spoken word. He decided to write about suicide only after a failed attempt to take his own life (or rather, after a successful and much resented attempt by healthcare professionals to save it). In 1978 at the age of sixty-six, four years after the book’s publication, he succeeded in his second attempt at suicide. During a lecture tour of his native country, in a hotel room in Salzburg, Améry wrote a note to the police stating that he was taking his life of his own free will and in full possession of his mental powers, and took an overdose of sleeping pills.

2. Enlightenment, Heimat, and Identity after the Catastrophe: A Closer Look at Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (1966) (“At the Mind’s Limits”) 1. Enlightenment after the Catastrophe

In Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne Améry claimed that the “dark riddle” of the Third Reich was the contradiction between the cultural and intellectual hubris of the “people of poets and thinkers” since the time of the German Enlightenment and the moral poverty and depravity exhibited by the same people during the war. This contradiction was further intensified by the recruitment of intellectuals and scientists to the task of torture, humiliation, and murder and, in general, by the seemingly rational and meticulously

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organized manner in which this task was carried out. This “evil,” Améry wrote, “really is singular and irreducible in its total inner logic and accursed rationality. For this reason we are still faced with a dark riddle.”13 It was not Améry’s intention to offer a solution to this riddle, nor did he attempt to dissolve the contradiction or draw a causal connection or dialectical movement between the two polarities. It was enough for him to argue that the rise of Hitler’s Reich “issued, so to speak, through spontaneous generation from a womb that bore it as a perversion.”14 In other words, it was an idiopathic condition: a sickness without rational or reasonable cause (though not without origin) and therefore, a riddle.15 While not able to resolve the contradiction, Améry was nonetheless determined to face it, assuming that unless we have the courage to face it, the original perversion could be once again “actualized at any time.”16 Améry believed that facing the riddle and contradiction of the Third Reich necessitated revisiting the tradition of the Enlightenment rather than abandoning it. What he wished to preserve from the 13 At the Mind’s Limits, p. viii. 14 Ibid. 15 The suggestion of a pathological, and ultimately inexplicable, nature of the Third Reich is a recurring theme in At the Mind’s Limits. Thus for example, when rejecting attempts to shift the focus to his own psychological state after the war, Améry wrote: “I am not deranged and was not deranged, but rather… the neurosis was on the part of the historical occurrence. The others are the madmen, and I am left standing around helplessly among them, a fully sane person who joined a tour through a psychiatric clinic and suddenly lost sight of the doctors and orderlies.” Ibid., p. 96. The image of a clinic without doctors seems to contain an implicit reference to Heinrich Heine, who used similar imagery in On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 13 and 85. The influence of Heine’s genealogical analyses of German culture (and similar ones made by Nietzsche) can also be felt in Améry’s claim that “antisemitism has a very deeply anchored collective-psychological infrastructure which in the final analysis can probably be traced back to repressed religious sentiments and resentments,” At the Mind’s Limits, p. x. Concerning the affinity between the two, it is interesting to note that Heine, like Améry, was agnostic for most of his life, remained torn between a Jewish and a German identity, and was deeply sympathetic to the French. But unlike Améry, who wrote in German to Germans, Heine spoke primarily to the French about the Germans. 16 Ibid., p. x.

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Enlightenment was the need for rational and moral edification. What needed to be revised, however, was the erroneous view (as propagated by Immanuel Kant) that the ultimate purpose of rational and moral edification was the cultivation of autonomy and establishment of a purely rational control over emotional life and the judgment of historical realities.17 For Améry, the task of rational and moral edification was to cultivate self-mistrust, thus countering rather than exacerbating the hubris of the mind and its (self-deceptive) conviction in its own autonomy and powers. At the same time, it was to learn to face rather than suppress those aspects of reality, suffering, and emotional life over which the mind has no control and which it can barely withstand. Such cultivation can only be achieved by acquiring the habit of approximating the limits of the mind, that is, by reflecting on and describing limit-situations (Grenzsituationen) in which the mind is disabled or impoverished rather than empowered. In a preface to a 1976 reissue of At the Mind’s Limits, Améry described this revised understanding of the Enlightenment: [T]he concept of the enlightenment… as I understand it… embraces… the will and the ability… to speculate phenomenologically, to empathize, to approach the limits of reason… intellectual realms in which ratio does not lead to shallow rationalism. This is why I always proceed from the concrete event, but never become lost in it; rather I always take 17 Regarding the critique of Kant, refer to the earlier cited remark by Améry that “nothing can again lull [him] into the slumber of security from which [he] awoke in 1935,” At the Mind’s Limits, p. 95. The phrasing of this passage can be seen as a play on a Kant’s famous statement in which he claimed that his reading of the British sceptic David Hume woke him from his dogmatic slumbers and turned him into a critical philosopher. The ironic bite in Améry’s rendering of this statement is twofold: first, his own ‘awakening’ did not follow the reading of a philosophical text but of a legal document marking the inception of a grave historical reality and mass murder. Secondly, Améry awoke from an existential slumber of security and not only from an intellectual or theoretical dogmatism. Nevertheless, the allusion to Kant suggests more than mere irony or contrast. If Kant’s ‘awakening’ is at the roots of the German Enlightenment, Améry’s awakening, nearly two centuries later, is what eventually led him to go back to the same roots and revise their development.

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it as an occasion for reflections that extend beyond reasoning and the pleasure in logical argument to areas of thought that lie in an uncertain twilight and will remain therein… enlightenment is not the same as clarification. I had no clarity when I was writing this little book, I do not have it today, and I hope that I never will.18 This new approach was debuted in the first radio-essay Améry read in 1965. Entitled “An den Grenzen des Geistes” (“At the Mind’s Limits”), this was a testimonial reflection on his experiences in Auschwitz. Unique to Améry’s approach was his decision to focus on the experience of the intellectual in the camp. In this way, Améry’s testimony meant to confront and embody, in an inverted form, the contradiction of the Third Reich itself as mentioned above: personifying Geist in general, and “the people of poets and thinkers” in particular, in the figure of the intellectual person (geistiger Mensch) tuned victim, stripped of all dignity, freedom, and the power to think. This meeting of the intellectual and victim achieves two things: firstly, it addresses Auschwitz on philosophical rather than strictly testimonial and subjective-historical grounds, and conversely, it grounds philosophical reflection in a concrete historical event as personally undergone. Conducting a philosophical examination of traditional values and concepts in the light, or shadow, of a limitsituation as personally suffered allows for a more sober testing of their integrity and socio-historical relevance and for guidance of the process of their revision where needed. Most importantly, it disarms them of the poetic temperament and ideological hubris that habitually inspires them, yielding not apathy but a very different sort of pathos and emotional attunement. This same method of using the Catastrophe and the experience of its victims in order to check and revise tradition, values, and concepts is used throughout the five essays that comprise At the Mind’s Limits, as well as in later essays and books that bring other types of limit-situation (e.g., terminal illness, suicide) to the fore. Below, I will analyze the third and fifth essays of At the Mind’s Limits, “How Much Home Does a Person 18 At the Mind’s Limits, p. xi.

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Need?” and “On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew,” showing how the new method is employed to revise the concepts of universality, national or cultural belonging, and identity — German, Jewish, and other. 2. Germany between Heimat and Heimweh

In formulating his lectures on the Holocaust in the mid-sixties, Améry was just as concerned with the present as he was with the past, and this came increasingly to the fore when he addressed the question of Heimat. Améry was aware that he was speaking at a time of generational transition, when many of those born during the war or soon after were now reaching adulthood, possibly leaving their parents’ homes and entering university. These young people, some of whom were aspiring authors and intellectuals like his prewar self, were naturally confronted by the need to assess their relationship to the Heimat and its wretched past. Améry wanted to wake them, as he had been awoken, from their “slumber of security.” One of his chief worries was that these young people were ready to turn their backs on the idea of Heimat altogether because of its association with the narrow and fanatic nationalism of the previous generation. Améry insisted, however, that the fact that “reactionary indolence has taken over the entire complex of ideas associated with home does not obligate us to ignore it.”19 On the contrary, it calls upon us to pick up the notion of Heimat and carefully and responsibly rethink it. Unless we do so, we are prone to fall back on the universalist pretenses of the original architects of the enlightenment, pretenses that, for them as for us, could do no more than disguise or suppress parochial prejudices and cultural heritage. For the task of rethinking and revising the meaning and value of Heimat, Améry employed his new method of thinking, namely, grounding the reflection in a limit-situation. The limitsituation in this case is the experience of the forced-exiles who not only “lost [their] country, but had to realize that it had never been [theirs].”20 This exceptional condition serves as a test case to guide 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., p. 50.

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and check the integrity of thought on the subject. It also serves to ensure that the patriotic and loving feelings that may otherwise color it are constantly checked (though not cancelled out or denied) by the suffering and resentments of those for whom the ideal of the Heimat turned out to be a sordid illusion or worse. The title of the third essay of At the Mind’s Limits is a question: “How Much Home Does a Person Need?” This question is meant to provoke the feeling held by many of those who do have a home that they do not need it. Such a feeling, in Améry’s eyes, lurks behind the assumption of cosmopolitan identity or the philosophical view that one’s essential being (for example, as a human being, a thinker, an authentic individual etc.) is somehow fundamental and irreducible to the specific heritage and culture acquired during childhood and youth. In defiance of this feeling and the assumptions it fosters, Améry’s answer to the title question of the essay is unequivocal: “precisely at this time, when home is losing some of its repute, one is greatly tempted to… say: [one] needs much home, more, at any rate, than a world of people with a homeland, whose entire pride is their cosmopolitan vacation fun, can dream of.”21 Elsewhere in the essay the answer is articulated even more emphatically: one “must have a home in order not to need it.”22 As noted in the biographical sketch above, home for Améry implied the existential feeling of security, safety, and belonging — feeling secure in oneself (Sichsicher-Fühlens). It is precisely this sense of security that spares the need to worry about home or about where one is and therefore allows one to transcend specific situations and ties, and to delve into universalist and speculative flights. This security, however, is not a transcendental condition that stems ex nihilo. Explaining what security means and how it is acquired, Améry notes: [The] signals that we absorbed very early, that we learned to interpret at the same time as we were gaining possession of our external world, become constituent elements and constants of our personality… Mother tongue and native world grow 21 Ibid., p. 60. The italics are mine. 22 Ibid., p. 46. The italics are mine.

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with us, grow into us, and thus become the familiarity that guarantees us security.23 Only if and when home is lost does it become apparent how integral it is to one’s sense of identity and thought. The dominant feature of such an experience of loss is that of becoming insecure both within oneself and within the external world, “subject to disorder, confusion, desultoriness,”24 unable to either feel at home and at one with oneself or to forget home and transcend oneself. While it is impossible for individuals who have not lost their homes to fully identify with such an experience, reflecting on the contrast between one’s own condition and the condition described by the exiled can nonetheless inspire awareness of Heimat and security. But becoming aware of one’s feeling of security and of its impact (both enabling and restricting) on perception and thought, is ipso facto to become less secure and more confused, more mistrusting of one’s capacity for, and the validity of, idealization and abstraction. On the positive side, this impoverishment can determine, as it does for the exile, “a consciousness that allow[s], demand[s], force[s] a more thorough recognition of reality.”25 Raising awareness of Heimat in this way produces two contradictory results: on the one hand, a heightened identification with home — recognizing that the land, the people, the culture, and the heritage are all deeply bound up in one’s own personality — and at the same time, problematizing or shaking up this very identification. For Germans to arrive at such identity-dissonance is already to approximate the exilic condition of the German-Jew. Améry discusses the effects of security, not only in terms of cognition and perception but also in terms of emotional ties. As previously noted, he describes his condition as homesickness (Heimweh). To understand Améry’s use of the term, it is important to pay heed to its historical and cultural associations. The term evokes, and again problematizes, German Romanticism, in particular 23 Ibid., p. 48. 24 Ibid., p. 47. 25 Ibid., p. 45.

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the writing of poets such as Novalis and Eichendorff. During the eighteenth century, in a Germany under the sway of foreign invasions and in the wake of secularization and modernization, these poets gave voice to a crisis of identity and alienation alongside a philosophical, poetic, and historical search for an authentic identity and identification. Ironically, despite its emphasis on homelessness and homesickness, Romantic literature was subsequently canonized and engrained in the educational curriculum (in which Améry himself was schooled) to such an extent that it became as intrinsic to the German Heimat, to one’s childhood and youth, as the surrounding landscapes and scents. To identify with the Heimweh of the poets is, in that sense, to feel at home. Having thus become cultural tropes imbued with poetic pathos, the Romantic feelings of Heimweh and alienation have also helped to color the longing expressed by modern German nationalists for a grand homecoming — a regained authenticity and glory for the German (or Aryan) people and a connection to the soil. Since these sentiments are deep-seated in German heritage, they can easily resurge at any time of identity crisis or disturbance of one’s relation with the past and the Heimat. This happened before the war, and — Améry worried — could again happen now, during the 1960s. A particularly polemical gesture entailed in taking up this historically and culturally charged notion, is the integration of the experience of the German-Jew in this Bildung narrative, this problematic search for an authentic Heimat and German identity. When contrasted with the stark realism of the homelessness and homesickness of the German-Jew after the war the poetic Heimweh of the ‘truly German’ poets seems rather inauthentic or clichéd. Améry’s use of the word Heimweh therefore signifies not identification with the canonic literature and heritage but alienation from it. Indeed, one of the chief losses Améry experienced as a result of his betrayal by the Heimat is his childhood love and passion for German classical poetry, to which he was left reluctantly nostalgic. To emphasize this dissonance and loss, his descriptions of the experience of torture and exile are replete with implicit and explicit citations from the classics, including Goethe. It is almost as if Améry tried to contaminate, and in a sense parody, the poetic

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and philosophical purity of the older, dignified tradition so that it could no longer be invoked without emotional association to Auschwitz and its victims. In the order of moral thinking, however, such contamination by the vulgarities of socio-historical reality is not to denigrate the classics and their conceptions but rather to elevate them to the place of reality and truth: “We must free ourselves of traditional, romantically stereotyped notions,” only to encounter them again “in a changed form… at a higher point on the spiral of thought.”26 Rethinking the Heimat after the Catastrophe is no longer simply a matter of love, pride, or a longing for original or pure authenticity. Any such sentiments that Améry may have felt as a child are now checked by hate, shame, and resentment, and he wanted something of this neurotic relation to the Heimat to be imparted to his younger audience. Feigning to ignore the Heimat and the irreducible ties to it, or assuming the posture of homelessness or cosmopolitanism would not do; it could only attest to a failure of acknowledging and problematizing the fact of having, and being of, this home. By, so to speak, infecting his audience with his feelings of homesickness and insecurity, Améry’s goal was not to alienate them from his experience but, on the contrary, to establish a heightened intimacy or sense of shared fate. The loss of home should not be experienced as a merely subjective facet of the victims’ experience but as something more binding and integral to the home itself and its heritage. In this regard it should be remembered that in terms of Améry’s own sense of identity before the war, he was no more Jewish than German, and thus what happened to him might just as well happen to anyone.27 In this way, his hybrid and dissonance-ridden identity acquires a potential for universalization. What matters, in short, is not to whom it happened and why, but rather what happened and can no longer be undone, namely, the dissolution of community and the ruination of the Heimat as a sphere of security and trust (in fact, its transformation into a sphere of persecution and torture). As previously discussed, this experience of loss has 26 Ibid., p. 46. 27 Ibid.

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nothing to do with proud disavowal of home or the need for it; on the contrary, it accentuates and perpetuates homesickness and the urgent need for home. What is felt needed and missed by this new Heimweh is not some mythic or poetic domain of purity and originality but a home which promises safety to all its inhabitants; a home which shelters and integrates rather than banishes and dismembers. 3. A Catastrophe Jew

It was not uncommon for Jewish intellectuals and artists in prewar Vienna, Stefan Zweig for example, to cope with the dissonance of their identity and heritage by appealing to cosmopolitanism, or at least to ‘Europolitanism’ and ‘citizenry of art’ and thus striving to abolish not only their own identity conflict but parochial rubrics of identity altogether. As suggested, the young Hans Mayer’s dissonance was of a different variety than that of other Viennese Jews, making him particularly attached to rather than alienated from his Austrian identity. But because he could not fully identify with either an Austrian or a cosmopolitan identity, he first sought out his literary voice in the attempt to bridge between them. In 1934, he and a friend co-founded a literary journal called Die Brücke (The Bridge), with many of the entries written by Améry himself under different pseudonyms. The journal tried to reconcile between the modern, cosmopolitan spirit expressed and idealized in urban literature, and the traditional, Romantic spirit expressed and idealized by parochial literature.28 By the time of writing At the Mind’s Limits, this early conflict between tradition and modernity, and country and city had already been eclipsed by one far more disorienting: the conflict between his Jewish identity as a Holocaust survivor — a permanent victim in perpetual exile — and the German-Jewish (bridging) identity of his childhood and youth. Constant throughout this transformation, however, was Améry’s sense of being unable to identify fully with either side of the conflict. Therefore, in the later stage, he once again 28 For more on this see Irène Heidelberger-Leonard, The Philosopher of Auschwitz, pp. 22–23.

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sought his unique voice and contribution in an interstitial figure; this time, the ‘in-betweenness’ was no longer prefigured as a bridge but as a ridge, a “moral chasm” as he called it in the preface to the book: [N]ew generations molded by origin and environment are constantly rising in both camps [victims and perpetrators, Jews and Germans], and between them the old unbridgeable chasm is opening again. Someday time will close it, that is certain. But it must not be done by hollow, thoughtless, utterly false reconciliation, which already now is accelerating the time process. On the contrary: since it is a moral chasm, let it for now remain wide open.29 Although his prewar spirit of reconciliation was substituted after the war with a spirit of resentment and irreconcilability, the emphasis on ‘in-betweenness’ is common to both these phases. It conveys an effort on Améry’s part to work through an inevitable conflict and, while denying the possibility or even desirability of reconciliation between the two sides, to equally deny the semblance of a stable and mutually exclusive opposition. This comes to the fore in the book’s concluding essay, “On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew,” in which Améry sets up his own Jewish identity as a hybrid or counter-identity that embodies ‘in-betweenness’; a destabilizing rather than reifying mode of self-identification. As suggested by the title of the essay, Améry’s postwar Jewish identity was rendered unstable by an inherent contradiction: on the one hand, since it had been externally (and brutally) imposed it could not be positively and inwardly embraced by him, but on the other hand, since it was branded on his person (like “the six-digit number on [his] forearm”) 30, it was indelible and therefore had to be taken up. The first part — the impossibility to positively assume the Jewish identity — is explained by way of contrast in his essay on Heimat. 29 At the Mind’s Limits, p. ix. The italics are mine. 30 Ibid., p. 100.

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As part of his discussion of the various meanings and modalities of home, Améry refers there to the Jewish Diaspora. He emphasizes that, during the past few centuries and until the foundation of the Jewish state of Israel, the Jew had characteristically been an exile, meaning that, however paradoxically, the state of exile itself had become a home, a heritage, and an identity. This exilic home was cultivated in various ways: by establishing special languages and idioms, canonic literature, uniform practices and dress, and by adopting the ritualistic prayer for messianic homecoming. Remarking on the latter, he notes: “Next year in Jerusalem,” the Jews have promised themselves for generations during their Passover ritual, but it wasn’t at all a matter of getting to the Holy Land; rather it sufficed to pronounce the formula together and to know that one was united in the magic domain of the tribal God Yahweh.31 Throughout centuries of persecution and repeated dislocation this capacity to make a home of exile served as a source of resistance and a way of maintaining a communal identity in face of increasing pressures and temptations to disintegrate or assimilate. This anomaly is perhaps a limit-case of modern nationalism, but it is no exception to it. The exception, however, is provided by the case of those who, like Améry, were not brought up as Jews and therefore did not properly belong to that tradition of home-in-exile in the first place. Consequently, despite feeling deep solidarity with the Jewish people after the war, following his own experience of persecution, Améry nonetheless felt unjustified in using the pronoun “we” when speaking as a Jew. If his reluctant-but-insurmountable identification with the Germans was a source of great torment, the impossible-but-necessary identification with the Jews entailed “a deep-seated discomfort.”32 One can reestablish a link with a tradition one has lost, but one cannot freely invent one for oneself… Since I was not a Jew, I 31 Ibid., p. 44. The italics are mine. 32 Ibid., p. 82.

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am not one; and since I am not one, I won’t be able to become one… Everyone must be who he was in the first years of his life, even if later these were buried under. No one can become what he cannot find in his memories.33 So much for the impossibility of being a Jew; the necessity of being one, however, was a matter of acknowledging, if only in retrospect, a shared socio-historical reality. Even if the fact escaped his consciousness as a child and therefore remained absent from his memories, Améry was a Jew by birth and social convention. While no Jewish heritage was positively imparted and internalized, being a part of this people was nonetheless latent and made externally binding by the violent force of reality: I say reality with emphasis because in the end that is what matters to me. Antisemitism may be a form of madness; that is not what is in question here. Whether it is a madness or not, it is in any event a historical and social fact. I was, after all, really in Auschwitz and not in Himmler’s imagination.34 How then to reconcile and express this contradiction between necessity and impossibility? Améry’s answer was to formulate a distinct modality of identity and identification bearing the form of a double negation: “a non-non-Jew,” or alternately, a “Jew without positive determinants, the Catastrophe Jew.”35 With its inherent negativity and rupture, “the Catastrophe Jew” is less a term of belonging than of total alienation, not only from society but from self: “I was a person who could no longer say ‘we’ and who therefore said ‘I’ merely out of habit, but not with full possession of myself.”36 “I face my surroundings as a Jew who is alien and alone… I must accept being foreign [Fremdsein] as an essential element of my personality.”37 33 34 35 36 37

Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., p. 98. Ibid., p. 94 (where both formulations are used). Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 95.

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This hybrid and intrinsically foreign identity is the epitome of what Améry calls the “victim-existence” (Opfer-Existenz).38 Judging by his phenomenological analyses of this condition, which has torture to the brink of self-annihilation as its apotheosis, victimhood is not something that could be predicated upon a stable positive identity while leaving the latter intact. Inasmuch as this is not the case, and one’s sense of identity is not yet altered or destroyed by victimization and torture, the term ‘victim’ should be applied with some reserve. In other words, a fundamental and philosophically significant difference should be registered between the case in which being Jewish is antecedent, in the order of one’s experience, to victimization, and the case in which becoming or realizing oneself as a Jew is the consequence of victimization. In the latter case, victimization truly hits home, almost like a conversion, a complete alteration that cannot be reversed and is therefore binding albeit impossible and impositive (negative and externally imposed). The same distinction — between being victimized as X and being X as a victim — could be applied not only to the Jewish identity but to any other form of identification as well (say, being a woman or being black). Although throughout the book Améry is preoccupied with German-Jewish relations which, of course, framed his own sense of self and subjective experience, we should bear in mind that his entire discussion is framed, as proclaimed in its preface, by the task of revising the enlightenment. It is thus worth citing once more one of the core principles that guided his procedure: [A]lways proceed from the concrete event, but never become lost in it; rather… always take it as an occasion for reflections that extend beyond reasoning and the pleasure in logical argument to areas of thought that lie in an uncertain twilight and will remain therein.39 Seen through the lens of this statement, the Holocaust and the 38 Ibid., p.xiii. 39 Ibid., p. xi.

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ensuing modality of German-Jewish relations, in particular the condition of the Catastrophe-Jew, are the concrete events that form the necessary ground (or grounding) for reflection; one should not, however, get lost in them or in the subjective circumstances of Améry’s life and history. The point is to exemplify a way of thinking but not to exhaust it. What the Catastrophe-identity embodies, for all its concreteness and exceptionality, is a nonpositive mode of universality (a non-non-universality, to play on Améry’s own phrase). While it is certainly not universally applicable, it is nonetheless universally relevant if only in the sense that it is universally foreign or foreign to all. In his book on aging, Améry noted that “it’s a rather cheap truth to say that our condition [Befinden] generally gets noticed only when we are removed from our condition [Misbefinden].”40 The common, and indeed “cheap” saying is that one does not know what one has until it is lost. This saying, like most sayings, is only “cheap” when it lacks or neglects the grave cost and suffering of lived-experience and true, irreversible loss. We have seen how Améry attempted to give content and meaning to this idea in the earlier discussed claim that only the experience of losing one’s home brings into notice the meaning (and necessity) of a having a home to begin with. This approach, we have also seen, is a matter of structure in Améry mode of enlightenment thinking and moral edification. It could therefore be similarly suggested that his efforts to recount the experience of dehumanization — “the conditio inhumana of the victims of the Third Reich41 — is not an end in itself but a way of bringing into notice and awareness the meaning of (and necessity of maintaining) the human condition itself. Since the conditio inhumana was marked above all by isolation and the destruction of one man by another, the central feature of the human condition as revealed through this experience (by way of contrast and loss) is fellowship (Mitmenschlichkeit) and trust. For this reason, the wish with which he concludes the original preface to the book is “that this study has met its aims, [and could 40 Améry, On Aging, p. 34. 41 At the Mind’s Limits, p. vii.

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therefore] concern all those who wish to live together as fellow human beings [Mitmenschen].”42 His aversion to cosmopolitanism and hollow metaphysical universalism notwithstanding, Améry was clearly just as reluctant to turn his back on the universalizing and inclusionary aspirations of the enlightenment as he was unwilling (and unable) to turn his back on the notion of Heimat and national belonging. But universalism, and a universal conception of the human essence, like all other important ideas and values, must be seriously rethought and revisited in the aftermath of Catastrophe, not by way of abstraction and as a set of transcendental givens, but in the face of and relation to suffering and loss as historically inflicted and personally undergone. Just as the assumption of and reflection on German identity can no longer draw its inspiration from the Heimweh of the Romantics without passing through (and being checked by) the Heimweh of the German-Jew in Auschwitz, so too reflection on the human essence can no longer stop at the disembodied, transcendental ideal but must pass through (and be checked by) the Catastrophe and its dehumanized victims. Any inclusionary and universalizing project that is honest and selfaware must bring these persons and experiences into account lest it end up exclusionary. At the same time however, truly bringing their exilic condition as such into account entails the realization that total inclusion and universality are impossible — to recall, for the forced-exiles home was irreversibly lost. Hence, the pursuit of enlightenment after Auschwitz is both necessary and impossible. Awareness of this contradiction yields a philosophical attitude that, against the hubris of the original enlightenment, is personally involved, localized, embodied, attentive and empathetic, and above all, self-mistrusting and attuned to its own limitations. The Catastrophe-Enlightenment-Jew’s claim to universal relevance does not stem, therefore, out of heights of omnipotence or omniscience, but rather out of the depths of loss, disillusionment, and powerlessness. It is in this tone that he writes toward the conclusion of his book:

42 Ibid., p. xiv.

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“Hear, oh Israel” is not my concern. Only, a “hear, oh world” wants angrily to break out from within me… That is what awareness of catastrophe, the dominant force of my existence, requires.43

Works Cited Améry, Jean, Preface to the Future. Culture in a Consumer Society (London: Constable & Co., 1964). , At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980). , Radical Humanism, ed., Rosenfeld, Sidney and Rosenfeld, Stella P. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). , Charles Bovary, Landarzt. Porträt eines einfachen Mannes (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1993 [1978]). , On Aging. Revolt and Resignation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). , On Suicide. A Discourse on Voluntary Death (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). , “Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne. Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten,” in: Jean Améry, Werke II, ed., Scheit, Gerhard (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2002 [1966]). , “Über das Altern. Revolte und Resignation,” in: Jean Améry, Werke III, ed., Monique Bossart (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2005 [1968]), pp. 7–171. Assmann, Aleida, “Two Forms of Resentment: Jean Améry, Martin Walser and German Memorial Culture,” New German Critique, no. 90, Taboo, Trauma, Holocaust (Autumn 2003), pp. 123–133. Bialik, H.N., “The City of Slaughter,” in Complete Poetic Works of Hayyim Nahman Bialik (vol. I), ed., Israel Efros (New York: The Histadruth Ivrith of America, 1948), pp. 129–143. Heidelberger-Leonard, Irène, The Philosopher of Auschwitz. Jean 43 Ibid., p. 100.

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Améry and Living with the Holocaust (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010). Heine, Heinrich, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings, ed., Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007). Myers, D.G., “Jean Améry: On Being a Jewish Victim,” Holocaust Literature. An Encyclopaedia of Writers and Their Work, ed., S. Lillian Kremer (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 20–24. Neiman, Susan, “Jean Améry Takes His Life,” Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996, eds., S.L. Gilman and J. Zipes (New Haven: Yale UP, 1997), pp. 775–784.