“Radigal Humanism” in “Radical Humanism”
After Five Thousand Newspaper Articles
1. Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne was published in the United States as At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980).
In the Waiting Room of Death
1. Klabund was the pseudonym of the German writer, dramatist, and poet Alfred Henschke (1890-1928). The German lines read as follows: “Am Sonntag fällt ein kleines Wort im Dom / Am Montag rollt es wachsend durch die Gasse / Am Dienstag spricht man schon vom Rassenhasse / Am Mittwoch rauscht und raschelt es: Pogrom!”
Antisemitism on the Left
1. The “Red Orchestra” was an intelligence network during World War II that provided information about German military events to the Soviet Union.
Wasted Words
1. Hans Filbinger, the governor of the southwest German state of Baden-Württemberg, was forced to resign in 1978 when it was revealed that as a navy judge during the Third Reich he had zealously sentenced at least four German servicemen to death.
2. Possibly, this is an autobiographical allusion. In 1975 the prosecutor’s office in Cologne initiated an investigation because of a—sensitive and misunderstood—statement Améry had made during a television round-table discussion in regard to the hunger strike of the imprisoned Baader-Meinhof terrorist group. The matter was soon dropped.
3. Victor Klemperer’s revealing study of the language of Nazism was first published in 1947 under the title LTl: Notizbuch eines Philologen (Lingua Tertii Imperii: A philologist’s notebook).
Nietzsche the Contemporary
1. The Wisdom of Life (1890) is the title of volume one of the English translation of Schopenhauer’s Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit (1886). The second volume is entitled Counsels and Maxims (1890).
2. The Lebensborn (“Well of Life”) maternity homes were institutions of the SS founded by Himmler for the purpose of breeding racially superior children for the Third Reich.
The Limits of Perspicacity
1. Améry’s reference is to Wittgenstein’s Das blaue Buch. Eine philosophische Betrachtung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970). This is a partial German version done by Wittgenstein in 1936 of his The Brown Book. It later became Part One of Philosophische Untersuchungen (1954; Philosophical Investigations).
2. Wittgenstein’s Vermischte Bemerkungen were first published in 1977 by Suhrkamp Verlag in Frankfurt. The English translation, edited by G. H. von Wright, was published in a bilingual edition under the title Culture and Values (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
3. See note I under “Nietzsche the Contemporary.”
Enlightenment as Philosophia Perennis
1. This is an allusion to the book Der Untergang der Erde am Geist (1924), by the philosopher Theodor Lessing (1877-1933). Lessing, the author of Der jüdische Selbsthass (1930; Jewish self-hate), was murdered by the Nazis in Czechoslovakia.
2. Améry’s novel Lefeu oder Der Abbruch (Lefeu or the demolition) was published by Ernst Klett Verlag (Stuttgart) in 1974.
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