“Radigal Humanism” in “Radical Humanism”
AMONG MY UNFORGETTABLE memories are those of the Christian feasts, especially the midnight mass at Christmas. If I try just a bit I am also still able to recite the Catholic Creed by heart. In such circumstances, how am I supposed to, how can I, speak of “my Judaism”? It did not exist. I was nineteen years old when, in the city of my birth, Vienna—more or less cast out and exiled from the Upper Austrian province—I first learned of the existence of a Yiddish language. On the other hand, there was my mother’s sister, like her a war widow, who lived with us and often gave me the soothing assurance that she would pray for me to Saint Anthony, her favorite saint; she maintained that in the most extreme distress he always helped. What had to take place so that today I not only dare to speak of “my Judaism” here, but I say at every available opportunity: I am a Jew?
My father was a full-blooded Jew, born in Hohenems in Vorarlberg. I didn’t know him. For I was born in 1912 and in 1914 he joined the army of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy as a Tyrolean Royal Rifleman. In 1916 he was killed in the war. If I try to reconstruct his Judaism I arrive at no clear result. It seems that he hardly bothered about the religious community to which he officially belonged. His own father, my grandfather therefore, was for his part already very much estranged from his Jewish origins.
My mother’s case was more complicated. She was a Christian but not “purely aryan,” as I learned later. Several times a day she invoked Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, which sounded in our native dialect like “Jessasmarandjosef.” She rarely went to church; just on important holidays. The prayer that she taught me was short: “Dear God, make me devout so that I can go to heaven.” I muttered it mechanically to myself in the evening, maybe until my ninth year, then I dropped it. So I didn’t become devout and heaven will remain closed to me. Now and then Mother used the one Jewish expression that I ever heard from her lips: nebbich. In our home there were always good reasons for nebbich as well as for Jessasmarandjosef. We were middle-class people who had become proletarians, nebbich, and neither Jesus, Mary, nor Joseph wanted to take pity on us. Jews weren’t spoken of, although everything connected with my origin was known to me. They concealed nothing from me, but things Jewish were not a topic of conversation.
After our move from the Upper Austrian province to Vienna, where antisemitism was a reality and the swastika a threat, my learning process began. I read everything I could turn up: from Langbehn to Moeller van den Bruck and Hans Blüher, from Houston Stewart Chamberlain and—more’s the pity—even the conqueror of interest serfdom, Gottfried Feder, to Rosenberg’s Mythus des XX. Jahrhunderts and also Hitler’s Mein Kampf. I absorbed all of this foulness in an extremely ambivalent state. On the one hand, it was becoming clear to me that in their minds and hearts these people had made all the preparations for plunging me and my kind into ruin (thus I read with hate and hostile agitation); on the other hand, I still wanted to remain “objective” at all costs. I suppressed my burning anger and imposed on myself an intellectual calm that I have long since recognized as nothing but an element of psychic repression. It was an entirely impossible éducation sentimentale for a young Jew . . . Jew? Well, yes. Gradually, I began to understand that I myself, as a Jew, was my subject, although as chance and milieu would have it, I had but little contact with “genuine” Jews, Jews who were politically alert and fully conscious of their problems. Did I avoid their company? I must confess that I don’t know anymore. All of that lies in life’s distant past, and I can no longer be sure what was half-conscious choice in my social behavior and what was fate. When I was nineteen years old, so I now believe, my entire spiritual structure was still a product of the dull provinces.
In the summer of 1932—Papen was already at the helm in Germany and clerico-fascism was already a threat in Austria—a decisive event took place that for me was weightier than all my good and bad reading, all my helplessness and provinciality: I fell in love with the girl who was later to become my first wife. She had the snow-white, lightly freckled skin of a true redhead, a tiny, turned-up nose, and a very beautiful large mouth with perfect teeth. She was eighteen, came from Graz, and spoke a dialect that was very close to my native one. She wore Austrian folk dress, so-called dirndls, which became her marvelously well. When it turned out that she was a full-blooded, professing Jew, even that her Styrian origin was not untainted, and that her father was an immigrant Ostjude, my whole world collapsed. “Das ist ein polnisches Judenmädchen,” said my mother, who regarded every woman with whom I happened to be involved as a loathsome troublemaker anyhow.
Despite maternal protest, I didn’t give up the fair-skinned girl, but I ignored her background. I wanted by all means to be an anti-Nazi, that most certainly, but of my own accord; I was not yet ready to take Jewish destiny upon myself. Why not? Well, it is clear: By reading so many national-socialist works, I had allowed the enemy to impose his image of my self upon me and had completely internalized it—as Sartre was to explain in his unsurpassable Anti-Semite and Jew. I wanted to oppose the Nazis and merrily joined in the scuffles that were constantly going on back then at Vienna University. But it was to be a decision made freely, and not because of “blood” or “race.” So it happened that at the same time as I was already turning away from Carossa and reading Feuchtwanger instead, I perfected my mimicry, which at bottom really wasn’t that—since, after all, I was actually not lacking in idiotic nativeness. My hair was blond, my eyes were blue, and I very successfully lent them a menacing flash. My thoroughly Jewish nose, inherited directly from grandfather, still did not have that unequivocal severity that it fortunately took on later and that marked me. I really found myself in a confusing state of mind: I was an Austrian who had been raised as a Christian, and yet I was not one. Not any longer. The overwhelming majority not only of the German people but also of my own Austrian people had excluded me from their community. I should have been able to accept this already then—if only I had been ready to accept the truth. But what was that, the truth? Was it hidden in mother’s Jessasmarandjosef, in the memories of midnight mass and high mass, in my dialect, in grandfather’s Vorarlberg family tree, or in my Jewish nose? When I try to reflect on this question today, I must in a very precise sense give due to the nose. Even for the distant past, which I now view differently.
I know that the word “race” is taboo. But only a fool can deny that there are human races and that these manifest themselves not only in physical characteristics (dark, fair, reddish skin color, etc.) but also in psychic and intellectual ones. I have no proof for it and am also aware that modern biologists would hardly want to accept my opinion. But in the end, do not the experiences of a long life count more than a few disputed laboratory papers that tomorrow will perhaps lead to totally different hypotheses? I am certain, and no current anthropological claim will shake this certainty, that my intellect and my spiritual constitution are Jewish—not in the sense of upbringing or milieu, which in my case were as un-Jewish as possible, but by birth. And now let whoever wants to call me a nasty “racist”!
But I’ve jumped ahead in my chronology. It is absolutely necessary to mention a date that was crucial for me: 1935. The Nuremberg Reich Citizenship Law, about which I read in a Vienna coffee house and whose text I soon knew by heart, finally made it completely clear to me that for the Nazis—and not just for the most rabid of them but rather for the majority of all Germans and Austrians—I was a Jew, or, as it said: “I was considered a Jew.” Once I tried reading the history of the Jews by Graetz, but it bored me. That is where things have remained until today; this too must be confessed. My knowledge of biblical events is limited to Thomas Mann’s Joseph tetralogy. My view of history is that of the average European who calls himself “educated” but who, as Robert Musil once said so delightfully of himself, is merely “broadly uneducated.” That is: there are gigantic gaps in this view that I never really took the pains to fill in. The story of the Chosen People is one of them. Only once in my life, in the icy cold winter of 1940–41, while interned by the French at Gurs in the Pyrenees, I attended an orthodox Jewish Chanukah celebration. Hearing the gripping, sorrowful cries to which the singsong of the worshippers intensified, I felt that I had been cast into another, thoroughly alien world. Standing next to me was the philosopher Georg Grelling. We looked at one another speechlessly and, alas, also somewhat ashamed. The fine gentleman from Berlin cleared his throat and said with embarrassment: “It’s like in the Ethnological Museum.” To the extent that I, as an atheist, grappled with the phenomenon of religion at all (and “grappled” is already saying too much), it was Christianity that stirred my interest. This is really not so incomprehensible. For to be a “Christian” doesn’t mean only to believe in God and His Son. To be a questioning Christian doesn’t mean that all one does is to clarify theological problems for oneself. It means participation in our culture. The ecclesia was always a presence for me; the synagogue was the Other. For this reason I cannot truly speak of my “Judaism.” I propose another concept that I am firmly convinced is weightier, a concept I declare myself to be an expert on, unconditionally and without concession: Being a Jew. At which point I can resume my earlier presentation in its proper chronology.
In 1935, I learned of and permanently internalized the Nuremberg Laws. My being a Jew became clear to me. What it meant for me at that moment gradually intensified in a frightening way due to my later experiences, but it has not actually changed qualitatively. Society decreed that I was a Jew; I had to accept the sentence. A retreat into subjectivity, which might have allowed me to claim that I didn’t “feel” Jewish, would have been an irrelevant, private game. Only a decade later did I read in Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew that the Jew is someone whom the others regard as a Jew. This was precisely my case.
When the thunderbolt struck, when on March 11, 1938, my country threw itself exultantly into the arms of the Führer of the pan-Germanic Reich like a bitch in heat that just can’t wait, I was ready. To be sure, one obstacle still had to be cleared: my mother. On the sly, she had taken care of everything. Her first fiancé, a flawlessly aryan gentleman, was ready to swear that in truth I was his child, and not that of my fully Jewish father. And a friend of the family’s, who had an important position at the Family Research Office, would straighten out the matter. For my part, I needed only to take care of a trifle in a hurry: part from my Jewish girl, who meanwhile had become my lawful wife. Even today I still ask myself, and find no answer, whether I would not have agreed to Mother’s proposal if I had been less passionately attached to this dialect-speaking Jewish girl, who would have cut the best figure as a model for the tourism offices of the “Ostmark.” I would like to say proudly: Certainly not; and I would have left my country even without having to, as an emigrant for reasons of principle. How incompatible are pride and honesty! The latter forbids me the former and I can only say: I don’t know what would have happened if . . . I still wasn’t familiar with the concept of “authenticity” that became so common after the war. But perhaps I vaguely felt nonetheless that a human being cannot exist within a total lie, one that encompasses his entire person, his entire life. I constituted myself as a Jew. Certainly, there were still hurdles I didn’t know how to take. At no cost, for example, did I want the mandatory middle name “Israel” to be inscribed into my papers; I didn’t get myself a passport because they would have stamped the red “J” into it.
In Antwerp, the first station of flight, it was the “Joodse Komiteit” that looked after us. He who had never lived among Jews was now surrounded by Jews exclusively, all of whom had nothing else on their minds—society saw to that!—than their being Jewish. As they said back then in the current jargon, there was now a “community of fate.” There was a “national community.” It stood the test. For the wealthy Jewish community of Antwerp took care of us as though we were its children. As for me, it was just as ugly as it was stupid when more than once I reacted with the most extreme irritation to the fellowship that surrounded me. The Yiddish language, in which I was addressed everywhere, was an unspeakable embarrassment for me. To be sure, I had accepted my being Jewish as a principle, but in daily practice I failed. I felt vaguely that I would have to pass through other, harder schools in order really to be what I was: a Jew. The teachers and taskmasters were already on the way.
On May 10, 1940, when the Germans began their general offensive across the western border, I—a “German citizen”—was arrested as an enemy alien. They took us deep into southern France. In vain did we emigrants try to make clear to the Belgian and French guards that we were not enemies of the allies, that we weren’t Germans, but Jews. These people understood nothing. Jews? What does that mean? Jewishness is a religion. Léon Blum is also a Jew. We had nothing to do with Blum, we were “des boches.” But when France was defeated in six weeks, the heads of the French seemed suddenly to have cleared up in a fabulous way. The “boches,” that is, the real Germans, looked after by Hitler’s Truce Commissions, were freed and admired as victors by the French in a most repulsively servile manner. We others, the refugees, unwanted in the Reich, were instantly transformed from the enemy into burdensome aliens and above all: into Jews, now in the full sense of the German racist notion. “Sale juif” superseded the abusive “sale boche.” The aversion against the Jews, as it seemed to me, certainly must have lain in much deeper strata of the French nature than their superficial “anti-bochisme.” The Jewish identity imposed on me by society—I could feel it more strongly every day—was no German phenomenon. It was not only the Nazis who turned me into a Jew. The world insisted that I be one, and I was ready to do what Sartre later called “assumer,” freely and inadequately translated, “to take upon oneself.” I wrested from myself the feeling of solidarity with every Jew. We were already locked into the ghetto, and it was like the one in which the world has enclosed the tiny state of Israel today.
Soon the teachers changed. The innocently brutal Gardes Mobiles who had insulted us in the Gurs internment camp disappeared—after I had broken out of the camp for the sake of my wife and beloved, hiked through half of France, and was again in German-occupied Belgium—the Master-of-Death from Germany had taken their place. The Résistance, which I joined in a most modest capacity and entirely without heroic emotional gestures, became, if I think about it today, my last, perhaps even only unconscious attempt to evade the Jewish identity that I had long since taken upon myself intellectually. The Jews were hunted, cornered, arrested, deported because they were Jews, and only because of that. Looking back, it appears to me that I didn’t want to be detained by the enemy as a Jew but rather as a resistance member. It was my last, absurd effort to escape a collective fate. Thus, I distributed ineffective flyers at the risk of my life but with the falsely proud consciousness that I was a “fighter” and not one of those who, bleating like sheep, allowed themselves to be led to the slaughter bench.
But after my arrest, reality immediately caught up with me. I was highly interesting to the bloodhounds as long as they thought I was a German deserter, soldier, perhaps even officer. When they became aware of my identity they threw me onto the dungheap. “Troop demoralization” was marked into my file, and as long as the fellows believed I was a deserter they submitted me to highly discomforting interrogations. When they realized who I was, I lost all relevance for them. There was no trial. I was subjected to the general death sentence; it was called Auschwitz. Can anything be added to what I have already recorded in my book At the Mind’s Limits? Perhaps only this: In Auschwitz my being a Jew assumed the final form that it has retained until today. While I had been arrested as a Résistance member, in Auschwitz I wore the yellow star and was a Jew like all those others who had never dared even to kick, let alone distribute seditious flyers. In the circle of hell the differences really did become perceptible and burned themselves into our skin like the tatoo numbers with which they marked us. In the abyss, all of the “aryan” prisoners were on a level so far above us, the Jews, that it can be measured only in light-years. They beat us when it pleased them; especially the Poles distinguished themselves at this, in a way that is unforgettable and should not be concealed. They had all internalized the Führer’s values—because tradition had trained them for it. They may have been destined to be slaves of the master race; but we were signed over to death. It reached the point where we Jews allowed ourselves to be beaten without resistance. Only once did I strike back, in the mistaken belief that in this way I could regain my human dignity. Then I recognized that it made no sense. The Jew was the sacrificial animal. He had to drink the cup, down to its bitter end. I drank. And this became my Jewish being. Judaism was another matter. I had nothing to do with it. I learned to understand Yiddish but made no effort to speak it. Now and then it happened that Eastern European Jews gathered and sang Yiddish songs, whose texts I halfway understood. It moved me deeply when a few of them once joined into a Zionist song with the refrain: “lach fuhr aheim”—“I’m going home.” “Aheim,” for them that was the Holy Land. Home, homeland, for me they would remain words without meaning. I was at home nowhere. I was a Jew and I wanted, and was, to remain one. After my return to Belgium in 1945, when I was becoming more and more interested in French culture and fell in love with the city of Paris, when Jean-Paul Sartre became something of a “father figure” for me, I no longer believed in assimilation. How could it have even been possible? I had never been “assimilated,” but rather I had been fully Austrian like anyone else. And still Jewish fate had overtaken me. How could I have now imagined—resurrected but more vulnerable than ever—that there was even the slightest glimmer of hope of my becoming a Frenchman? It was not because of the language. What made it impossible for me to invent a new present were the memories of childhood and youth, which formed my past and at the same time were no longer valid; they were destroyed and had long since decayed, but they still existed negatively. The exile-in-permanence that I chose was the sole authenticity I could attain for myself; being Jewish blocked all other outlets for me.
To be sure I had not acquired Judaism in the sense of historical tradition and a positive existential foundation of life. The only thing that binds me positively to the majority of Jews in the world is a solidarity that I have long since not had to enjoin on myself as a duty: solidarity with the state of Israel. Not that I would want to live in this country. It is too hot for me, too loud, too foreign in every respect. Also it is not that I approve of everything they do there. I detest the theocratic tendencies, the religiously tinged nationalism. I have also seen the country only once on a short visit and perhaps will never get there again. But even if I don’t speak their language and their way of life could never be mine, I am inseparably bound to the people of this tragic land, who are alone, abandoned by the entire world. For me Israel is no promised land, no territorial claim legitimized by the Bible, no Holy Land, but rather a gathering place of survivors, a political entity in which every single inhabitant, still and for a long time to come, must fear for his physical existence. For me, solidarity with Israel means keeping faith with my dead comrades.
Ever anew I make the attempt to distance myself. But I can never completely succeed. I am an alert critic of Israeli policies; I don’t hesitate to forfeit good will, to jeopardize friendships if I openly and sharply reject the present government of Israel as being irrationally and chauvinistically inspired. I say aloud that I am opposed to the man Begin and all he stands for. But when it is suddenly a matter of do or die and I sense danger for the little land that is desperately trying to defend itself, then—beyond a Judaism to which I can lay no claim since I don’t possess it—my being Jewish is in the end decisive after all. I take sides. For Israel—and I barely shrug my shoulders when my friends from the Left call me a renegade. They have it easy: loyalty to principles is child’s play. I make things hard for myself. For loyalty to fate, to which I submit, is an unclear concept, and whoever holds to it must jettison all convenient theories, all crutches of dogma; he stands on shaky ground. No God will help him, and no Marx. Least of all, a Hegel.
He can turn, I can turn, to nothing except experience, the quality of which is incommunicable. When the land of Israel, for me not a holy land, is threatened, I see flames everywhere. And I shout: Fire! I know that my cry fades away unheard. Those who are rooted in Judaism dispute my right to be heard, and in this they are logical. The others, who never experienced the threat as a personal, physical one, don’t listen anyhow. I cannot condemn them since I myself do not think daily about the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks. People talk about politics and history, objective events. I remain fixed to experience, to the bitter end. If I could claim Judaism as my own I could quickly turn subjective experience into objective, finalistic historicity. This path is closed to me. Four walls are closing in, the room is becoming smaller. Being Jewish (which I didn’t choose) without a Judaism (which descent and early surroundings would permit me to choose only at the price of an existential lie) leads to a melancholy that I must live through daily; a melancholy that accompanies my existence and would most likely be designated by specialists as “neurotic,” but that I regard as the sole frame of mind to which I am entitled.
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Améry first presented this essay as a radio address in 1977. It was subsequently printed without title in the collection Mein Judentum (My Judaism), ed. Hans Jürgen Schulz (Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag, 1978), pp. 78–89.
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