“Radigal Humanism” in “Radical Humanism”
After Five Thousand
Newspaper Articles
IT IS A WIDELY KNOWN, almost trivial fact that every piece of writing, even a theoretical one, has an autobiographical background, an autobiographical substratum. It is just a matter of the degree and density of the autobiographical element that finds its way into the work. To speak of my own case is somewhat difficult for me, since I must mention far too much that is quite personal and could easily be misunderstood as an anecdotal extra. The autobiographical component of the present piece is especially great; more precisely: I have to report on a personal and intellectual life that became a contemplative essay. By this I mean three closely related books that together embrace four decades of my intellectual life and that, in response to the editor’s inquiry, I would probably have to designate as “my first major literary work.” They are Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, Über das Altern, and Unmeisterliche Wanderjahre. 1
What most likely differentiates these books, as concerns their genesis, from most of the works cited in this series is the rather unusual and for me somewhat melancholy fact that they were published very late in my life. When I began writing Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, I was fifty-two years old. When the third volume of the autobiography, Unmeisterliche Wanderjahre, appeared, I found myself in the paradoxical position of being a “promising beginner” of fifty-eight. Such a special case deserves and demands thorough illumination. Permit me, then, to begin by reproducing here in catchwords the biographical sketch that I usually send to my publishers or to interested editors when they ask for one. Jean Améry, born in 1912 in Vienna. Studied philosophy and literature there. After the annexation of Austria in 1938, emigration to Belgium. During the war participation in the Belgian resistance movement. Arrest by the Gestapo in 1943 and deportation to various German concentration camps, among them Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen. Since liberation in 1945, freelance writer and journalist.
According to these particulars, then, my literary career should have begun at least twenty-seven years ago. One could well expect more than three slim volumes that I can designate, not without irony, as “a major literary work.” Did I idle away my time during those twenty-seven years or, to vary Rilke, did I write only when I would have died if I had been unable to write? No, unfortunately. If I attempt to estimate the quantity of what I committed to paper during this period, then I arrive at the dismaying figure of some five thousand newspaper articles that together would amount to about 15,000 pages, an almost frighteningly voluminous production. Of these 15,000 pages only the circa 450 of the above-mentioned autobiographical trilogy appear to me to be at all worth mentioning. This is a circumstance that I alluded to in Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne and in Unmeisterliche Wanderjahre. But it must be impressed on my audience once more—to be sure, briefly and clearly—if this text is to have any informational value at all.
As an emigrant who had been affected by the Nuremberg racial laws, as a resistance fighter and former Auschwitz inmate, for years I had found it mentally and morally impossible to work in, or for, Germany. Not until a generation of young intellectuals, newspaper and radio editors, publishers’ readers, and critics had arisen who were no longer associated in my mind with the Germany of the deepest humiliation—mine and the country’s own—not until I could again meet Germans impartially, did I feel free to work for German media. This was not possible before 1964, when I had a chance meeting in Brussels with Helmut Heissenbüttel, in whose person I encountered for the first time since 1933 a new and truly “other” Germany. Until this point I was compelled to earn my living as a journalist in the relatively tiny German-language market of Alemannic Switzerland; and there an unshakable law of the marketplace determined my path. While I was no longer young, I was totally unknown. As much as I wanted, I could have never found the means that would have enabled me to devote myself to a major work. There was no demand for the philosophic-sociological essays I was offering, let alone for books of this kind. Since I went on writing in the German language and managed just about halfway correct but stylistically flat texts in French, for nearly two decades I produced feuilletonistic and sometimes also political articles for Swiss daily and weekly papers that guaranteed me a certain external subsistence.
My identity as a writer, which I had been seeking since my sixteenth year, when my first manuscript was printed in Vienna, had vanished. I accustomed myself to the situation of a failure or a “raté,” as I preferred to say in French (because it sounded less dramatic and pathetic). In any case, in my own eyes I could claim the mitigating circumstances of an ordinary fate in the most extraordinary of times and tell myself that I belonged to a truly “lost” generation and to a lost domain of language. Only when I rediscovered this domain of language in its total dimensions did I discover myself as a writer too. But it was high time. Perhaps it was already far too late. At an age when others were harvesting, I began timidly to feel my way along and sow seed.
As I have already said, it was Helmut Heissenbüttel—whom I had met by chance—whom I vaguely told of my plan to make my experiences in the underground and the concentration camp the subject of philosophical speculation—since at that time the big Auschwitz trial was being prepared in Frankfurt. He immediately offered me his “Radio Essay” department of the South German Broadcasting Corporation as a forum. I agreed without hesitation, as though everything between Germany and me had suddenly been cleared up (which naturally was also an illusion, but I realized that only when I began writing). The radio series of five essays appeared as a book in 1966. Gerhard Szczesny, cofounder of the Humanistic Union, editor of the yearbook Club Voltaire, writer and publisher, took up the cause. At the same time, Hans Paeschke, the editor of the monthly magazine Merkur, took notice of me and asked me to become a contributor to his periodical. This, then, was my entry into German literature. I was fifty-four years old when my name slowly, very slowly began to mean something to a limited sector of the German reading public.
With the book Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, first published by Szczesny and reprinted by Klett-Cotta years later, I achieved what is called a succès d’estime, the saddest kind of success, as an English writer whose name escapes me once said, not without reason. The critics were friendly. The Zeit printed an appreciation from the pen of Horst Krüger, the Spiegel joined in with a kind of little write-up, numerous important German newspapers and radio stations followed. I am still not sure whether it was the intellectual and literary quality of the slim volume that I had to thank for its succès d’estime or whether it was the material treated in it: Auschwitz, the Jewish Question, torture, emigration. I have the suspicion that I merely struck a chord that began to vibrate just at a time when it was still fashionable to occupy oneself with the fate of the Nazi victims, and that today, when my friends on the Left are representing Israel as a universal plague and everyone’s sympathies are focusing on the Palestinian resistance fighters, I couldn’t tempt a soul with this book. Moreover, even if at that time the response by the critics was considerable, among the public it was modest enough. If I recall correctly, a mere seven thousand copies of the title (as publisher’s language puts it) were sold. Not a very impressive result. But the ice was broken in any case, and more and more radio and television stations, as well as daily and weekly papers, invited me to contribute.
Perhaps at this point I may parenthetically bring up an economic problem of free-lance writing. I have the impression that aside from a few very successful or moderately successful authors, most of us free lances would be unable to exist economically without the much-maligned “media.” For the independent writer, radio and television occupy the social position today that was once held by the patrons of art. I know that in saying this I am acting contrary to Heinrich Böll’s demand that an end be put to modesty. And maybe one really should not offer considerations like these on the radio (of all places), so as not to make the situation of the free-lance writer even more precarious than it already is. But I am reluctant to show such consideration for my colleagues and myself. Again and again, whenever I read sometimes quite difficult and demanding texts into a radio microphone, I ask myself uneasily: Who is going to listen to this? And then the medium really does appear to me as an anonymous patron and promoter or, if one wishes to view it differently and perhaps just as validly, a supporter of cultural policies that receive no backing from the federal and state governments.
But now back to my own work. I had escaped the drudgery of writing articles in 1966. I could contemplate writing about the things that were weighing on my soul. And as a late beginner I began with the autobiographical theme. First of all, this placed the decisive personal problem, the crux of my existence, at the center: aging. Clearly, the mere fact that as a person in the middle of the sixth decade of his life I was at the point in my career as a writer where others are at thirty or thirty-five, was reason enough to find aging especially painful. I was just starting out and at the same time I was already galloping at full speed toward the end. Given such circumstances, it would not have even required a weakened state of physical health to make the problem of aging the main concern of my writing. The influences of reading contributed their share. At that time I had just read the dramatic last pages of the third volume of Simone de Beauvoir’s recollections, Force of Circumstances, in French and the splendid essay of Sartre’s pupil André Gorz, “Le vieillissement,” and also—last, not least—the unusually fascinating contribution to the philosophy of corporeality by the German doctor and anthropologist Herbert Plügge (who meanwhile, alas, had died all too early). Proust’s uncanny, grandiose phenomenology of aging, set down in the last volume of Remembrance of Things Past, had been around me and in me for years anyway. Thus equipped, I began writing my second autobiographical book, Über das Altern. I ask myself, to be sure, whether and to what extent the designation “autobiographical,” which is debatable even in the case of Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, can be legitimately applied to my book on aging. I completely omitted everything private or anecdotal. I was concerned not with stories about myself but rather with reflections on existence and the passage of time that would begin introspectively but ascend to ever more abstract and general areas of thought; reflections on the nature of being sick and on death—which I said was “nothing, a nothing, a nullity” but at the same time also the outermost reference point of all our activity and striving.
The book did not appear with Szczesny, which had ceased to exist, but was published in the fall of 1968 by Klett, the house that puts out Merkur. Naturally, it first had to be read for the radio so that writing it would become economically feasible. And again, it was the South German Broadcasting Corporation, or Helmut Heissenbüttel, who gave me the first chance, as they also did two years later, by the way, with the third part of the autobiography, Unmeisterliche Wanderjahre. Oddly enough, the new work gained just a bit more than a succès d’estime. In the course of three years Klett was able to issue three printings. In view of the distinct unpleasantness of the theme and the difficulty of some of my trains of thought, this amazed no one more than me. Had I once more merely caught a propitious moment? Maybe. I believe, at any rate, that it was one of the first books in postwar Germany that dealt with the problem of aging, or dealt with it in a way that did not offer cheap consolation and promise readers that their life could “begin” at fifty or sixty. I said a clear “no” to that sort of well-meant nonsense. The tragedy of aging, old age, and death was presented and analyzed phenomenologically as such, in all of its horror. As I literally wrote back then, it was an undertaking that had to end all the more “disconsolingly” since I did not seek escape in religion. I spoke as a complete atheist: death retained its terrible sting; time did not dissolve into transcendent eternity.
With very few exceptions, in which there was criticism of a “defeatist” undertaking, as someone wrote, the reception of the book was, once again, quite favorable. This time, too, Zeit and Spiegel contributed; again, almost every important German newspaper or periodical followed suit. Once more, a phenomenon similar to that after the publication of Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne became evident: If after the appearance of the latter book I had virtually become a “professional Auschwitz survivor,” from whom people wanted to hear nothing else except commentaries on questions of Jewish identity and the existence of the victim, now I was suddenly the professional senex. From every likely and unlikely place people were requesting statements from me on the problem of the “third age,” as though I were a gerontologist. This was an expression of the same market phenomenon, hostile to the intellect, about which so many painters lament when they are exhorted by their agents to stick by all means to their “style.” The label triumphs over the law of change. My label now read “Old Age,” and it cost me some effort to convince the buyers or the dealers in the intellectual consumer goods I was producing that the problems of old age were not the only subject about which I might have something to say.
I finally escaped the old-age boom. But I adhered to my autobiographical themes. I had written on two crucial experiential complexes of my existence: on my aging, which occupied me with special intensity as a result of the frighteningly late start of my literary “career” (a word that I can only write in quotation marks), and on the fate of emigration and concentration camp imprisonment, which was responsible for this late start. I had, in the broadest sense, subjectively explored both complexes of problems. Now I was eager for more objectivity. Without being able to depart entirely from autobiography, I wanted to reflect in it the times, my time. Between 1930 and 1970 I had, after all, been witness to intellectual dramas and struggles that were worth talking about. On the one hand, I had gone the road, geographically, from Austria, or Germany, to France. On the other hand, after the first unsure intellectual steps of a provincial would-be poet lost in the daydreams of irrationalism, and the uncertain gropings of a philosopher inclined toward neopositivism, I had accustomed myself to what I hope was the halfway firm gait of a liberated, contemplative person with a rather good command of existential-Marxist topography. I had experienced Austrian clerico-fascism, the outbreak of the Third Reich, the intellectual world of the Résistance, the great disenchantment after the end of the war, the development of what is today called the “consumer society.” The fabulous power of fashion in all sectors of intellectual life was just as much a part of my time as the liquidation of the values that were presented to me in my youth by the older generation as “eternal” and sacred. All of that was well worth talking about. And proceeding ever anew from my personal experience, while never granting it more than minimal attention, I began writing the third part of my autobiography, the book that is dearest to me of all that I have written: the essay volume Unmeisterliche Wanderjahre.
This book also appeared with Klett, and that perhaps requires an explanation. After all, how does a rather pronouncedly leftist author come to be published by a house that all in all tends to be conservative? Über das Altern had landed at Klett more or less accidentally: Szczesny, my publisher at that time, had gone out of business and upon the recommendation of the monthly journal Merkur Klett agreed to put out the book quickly, by the deadline arranged with Szczesny. In the case of Unmeisterliche Wanderjahre the element of chance had already been eliminated. I had a choice; for although I was anything but a best-selling author, a number of big German publishing houses were interested in me. I remained with Klett because I appreciated the generous attitude of the publisher and because my consultations with the chief literary editor, Dr. Hubert Arbogast, had already taken on the character of a friendship.
The book appeared in the spring of 1971, and again the reception ranged from cordial to eulogistic. With very few exceptions, the reviews I happened to see in newspapers, weeklies, monthlies, and from the radio were such that allowed me to bank on success. But a commercial success did not materialize at all—despite the German Critics Prize, which I was awarded after the book was published (so that it was decked out with a shiny red ribbon). How come? That is what I ask myself and the publisher asks himself also. Neither he nor I will ever know. There is nothing more capricious than the external fate of a literary work. Was the text difficult? Certainly, it was even “bulky freight,” as one critic wrote. I had built into it numerous literary citations that I had not designated as such; in general, I did not want to disregard the cultural tradition since it is, after all, just as much a part of my theme as it is of me. On the other hand, when I reread this work it seems to me infinitely easier to digest than the countless sociological texts that are tossed onto the market by various German publishing houses, practically in series, and apparently find their buyers (despite their involved jargon, which all too often only disguises wretched trivialities). I personally regretted the fact that once again my success had been limited to a succès d’estime, and the pleasure I could take in this “estime” now stood in an ever more consternating disproportion to the economic outcome. As an explanation, I can offer the following hypothesis: On the one hand, Unmeisterliche Wanderjahre was written by an author who makes no concessions whatever to a conservative, or culturally conservative, milieu, behind which he always senses reaction, something he detests. On the other hand, the book sometimes strikes a sharp, polemical tone in regard to fashionable intellectual trends like structuralism, for example, or certain forms of modern poetry and the visual arts. It appears to me, then, that in this way I drove off my potential conservative readership without simultaneously gaining readers who span the spectrum from progressive to radical. Especially through my criticism of the New Left I may have become a ridiculous fossil in the eyes of those readers and buyers on whom publications such as Kursbuch, for instance, can rely. But the Right, which has a very sure instinct, considers me to be a subversive character, someone with whom it does not want to get involved, and this view was not altered by the fact that a conservative group, the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, awarded me its literary prize in 1972. Need I even add that my uncomfortable position between all of the parties seems to me appropriate to my writing, even if, at the same time, I am naturally not free of a certain disappointment? You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Of course, whoever says this runs the risk of winding up with no cake at all.
Precisely because this third and most certainly last part of the autobiography did not receive the response I had hoped for, I believed that I was on the right track with it. One must become independent of the size of printings and, in general, all external signs of success. Is it possible? This is a problem that extends beyond all subjectively psychological determinants into the societal realm. There is most certainly no total self-sufficiency in the case of literary creation. The poet who writes for his desk drawer is, like the poetaster-friend of the bank director John Gabriel Borkman, an absurdity, a laughingstock and a painful disgrace. But the author of a literary work who constantly steals a glance into the mirror, in the vain attempt to see himself as a society that in the end is reduced to a literary market might see him, is no less grotesque. The writer must be able to distinguish between legitimate success, which lies in the respect accorded him by like-feeling people, or, more precisely, by a certain community of like taste or mind, and purely commercial success, which is incalculable and unpredictable and scarcely has anything to do with the inherent qualities of a work.
I admit that this is not always easy, either emotionally or in the sense of a rational analysis of the facts. I myself often enough became fearsome and depressed when I had to conclude that my work was not rewarded by the epoch, a work that was written out of the epoch and for it, a work that from the start could not be expected to reach posterity (which is always a problematic concept anyhow). But when I recently read that in over a year barely ten thousand copies of Sartre’s monumental work on Flaubert were sold in France, it was a certain consolation for me—although I naturally am not drawing any unseemly comparisons between myself and the greatest thinker of the present. The probability that my three books, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, Über das Altern, and Unmeisterliche Wanderjahre, and thus my existence, my life were taken note of by a few thousand people after all, and that in this way I reached other people’s spheres of consciousness, is for me, to quote in a most old-fashioned way, “reward that is richly rewarding,” reward that I contentedly and gratefully pocket, with a modesty that, I hope, is in no way affected.
____________
“Nach fünftausend Zeitungsartikeln,” in Wie ich anfing . . . 24 Autoren berichten von ihren Anfängen (How I began . . . 24 authors tell of their beginnings), ed. Hans Daiber (Düsseldorf: Claassen, 1979), pp. 215-26. This essay was originally read by Améry on the radio.
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