“Radigal Humanism” in “Radical Humanism”
Jean Améry: The Passion of Enlightenment
In 1977, on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday and a year before he took his life, Jean Améry said the following of himself: “With serious doubts, I try to practice a radical humanism that now as before I would like to place on the left—despite the rather painful fact that those who regard themselves these days as leftists are about to give me up for lost, while the Right sees this as no reason to grant me its trust (something I would find dubious and firmly reject anyhow).” “Radical humanism” characterizes Améry’s entire work, including the essays selected and translated for this volume. It communicates itself to the reader as the sum of those qualities that founded and upheld his position in German letters as a political and cultural essayist-critic of rare stamp and stature. Radical humanism found its expression in his loyalty to reason and enlightenment, his intellectual and personal integrity, his moral rigorism, his unwavering defense of humane values.
These qualities were strikingly evident from the start, when Améry, a survivor of SS torture and the Nazi death camps, surmounted his unwillingness to write for a German audience and in 1966 gained widespread esteem through his autobiographical essayistic study of the Auschwitz victim, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne. In 1980 the English translation, At the Mind’s Limits, introduced him in America also, where critics praised the work as a singular contribution to the literature of the Holocaust, as “the autobiography of an extraordinarily acute conscience,” bearing “in every word and thought the stamp of the authentic.” In America, as earlier in Germany, this book placed Améry in the forefront of those writers who, through literary confrontation with their ordeals as victims of barbarity, have given us insight, beyond the sheer physical horrors, into the essence of what must ultimately remain indescribable and inexplicable: the insane world of Nazi totalitarianism.
Améry had withstood the inferno of Auschwitz without the support of religious belief or a political ideology. He made no personal claims for his ability to survive, nor did he find in his survival any redemptive meaning. In the concentration camps, he wrote in the title chapter of At the Mind’s Limits, “we did not become better, more human, more humane, and more mature ethically.” Nor did he leave the death camp “wiser and deeper,” but he could say that he was “smarter,” that is, better equipped to recognize that the severest demands placed on us by reality are of a physical and social nature. His resentments as a survivor, incisively examined in a further chapter of his book, emerged only later, when the natural eroding powers of time had helped to blur the singular and irreducible character of Nazism and, while the victims were still haunted by their nightmares, to restore the victimizers to respectability. To this “objective” course of events Améry opposed the radically humane demand for a “revolt against reality, which is rational only as long as it is moral” (a thought central also to his essay in the present volume, “The Time of Rehabilitation”). Holding fast to his resentments, he not only rejected a forgiving and forgetting induced by social pressure but voiced the demand, which he said was both “humane and absurd,” that time itself be annulled through a moral turning-back of the clock. This subjective process would face the criminals, who were being absolved by the passage of time, with the immorality of their deeds and thus redress the moral and historical injustice, which the victims continue to bear as their personal suffering.
Améry knew that his protest against the objectification of historical events—“What happened, happened!”—would go unheeded, and his resentments found no possibility for catharsis. He witnessed, not only in the new Germany, the progressive strengthening of restorative forces and historical revisionism and with it the insidious stigmatization of the Nazi victims as the real incorrigibles of their time. The resignation and, what is most poignant, the indifference to which he gradually succumbed—a state that, along with his ruined health, led to his suicide—must be seen in direct relationship to the radicalism of his moral rebellion. At stake for him was recovery of his trust in the world, which had been shattered when he was compelled as a victim of torture to recognize that the social contract protecting the weak could be breached with impunity; at stake was release from the loneliness into which he had been plunged by the Nazis while the world stood silent.
Améry’s identification with the Left is documented in the essay “Wasted Words,” where he even expressed a sense of personal culpability for the failures of the Left in postwar Germany—although he had avoided that country altogether until 1964 and it was not until 1966 that his involvement there as a writer-intellectual became more pronounced. At no time, however, was he the adherent of a political doctrine or party, neither during the war, when he was active in a small communist-led group within the Belgian underground, nor in the postwar period. Of Marxism itself he said, in At the Mind’s Limits, that it was “an ideology whose errors and false conclusions” he had already seen through long ago. Later, he declared that he had come to see in Marx “less the dialectician and successor to Hegel than the prophet of a new morality, the direct descendant of the very same bourgeois enlightenment that in the eyes of modern Marxists—who disregard the human being—is but an unwieldy instrument of the ruling classes” (“Enlightenment as Philosophia Perennis”). In keeping with this conviction he called for a revision of the concept of “left,” from “an attitude toward the problem of economic hegemony” to “essentially a radical humanism” (“Wasted Words”). He saw the future of the Left, indeed its very existence, endangered by two developments of the late 1960s: the trend of the Left, specifically the New Left, to ally itself with fringe groups that were prone to violence, and its fixation on dialectics and social theory as absolutes. His worst fears were realized when, in the 1970s, proliferating leftist violence escalated internationally to naked terrorism.
The severest test of Améry’s self-perception as a leftist intellectual came in the wake of the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967. The Left’s abandonment of Israel, its support for the forces that were threatening the Jewish state with destruction, the emergence of a new antisemitism under the mantle of anti-Zionism filled him with anguish. The Auschwitz survivor, burdened with “the necessity and impossibility of being a Jew,” as he had formulated it in At the Mind’s Limits, became once again “a vehemently protesting Jew.” In a newspaper commentary of June 9, 1967, entitled “Between Vietnam and Israel,” he declared himself unequivocally: “Since enemy armies have been gathering about Israel, since the most unbridled voices from the Arab countries have already begun proclaiming that this small land will have to be turned into one big concentration camp, since there is talk of throwing Israel into the sea—[I am] no longer a leftist intellectual, but only a Jew.” This commentary and the Brotherhood Week address translated here under the title “Antisemitism on the Left” are but two of several articles and essays of this period that witness Améry’s passionate defense of Israel—and the assertion of his own authenticity, which was indissolubly bound to his Jewish identity and therewith to the fate of that country. His irrevocable solidarity with the Jewish state brought him rejection by the Left, even the loss of friendships, so that in the end he was truly “homeless on the Left” (as a section heading in his essay volume of 1971, Widersprüche, characterized his situation).
As a Jewish leftist intellectual Améry knew that the choice “between Vietnam and Israel,” had he really been faced with it, would have been no choice at all—since the will to authenticity had already decided for him; but he also knew that every personal stand, however compelling, is constantly challenged by social-historical actuality. In June 1977 openly voiced his anxiety after Menachem Begin and the Likud party, whose national-theocratic tendencies he rejected, had won the Israeli election. “The existential tie of every Jew to Israel remains,” he wrote, “but it may reach the point where it becomes a burden.” The courage of his convictions, even when it threatened discord with those to whom he was inseparably bound by a shared fate, marked his person indelibly.
Améry himself was ever disinclined to ascribe any such merits to his own person. From the beginning he denied the significance of his biographical self and consciously restricted its presence in his work. He regarded his experiences as the manifestations of “an ordinary fate in the most extraordinary of times,” and it was the currents and conflicts that made this time so extraordinary that he aimed to reflect in his writing—in a manner that would transcend what was merely individual. Although Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne and the two books that followed it, Über das Altern (On aging) and Unmeisterliche Wanderjahre (Lean journeyman years), were autobiographical—he called them collectively “a kind of essayistic autobiographical novel”—they offered little of the purely factual data of his life. It was only in subsequent years, through interviews and occasional pieces in anthologies, that the portrait of his intellectual existence, which alone mattered for him, was enriched by personal detail.
The first two essays in this collection, “After Five Thousand Newspaper Articles” and “Being a Jew,” are autobiographical in the traditional sense. They are meant to acquaint the reader with the course of Jean Améry’s late and sorely brief career and to clarify further the question of his Jewish identity, which he probed introspectively in At the Mind’s Limits. Although his reputation among German-language readers appears to rest largely on this, his first book, and on his much-disputed defense of suicide, Hand an sich legen (1976), his work documents a wide range of political and literary-cultural interests. As in the previous century for another German writer-in-exile, Heinrich Heine, France had become his second cultural homeland, and he was, in fact, a respected interpreter of contemporary French, as well as German, intellectual issues. He was sought after as a participant in symposiums and public forums; he read whole series of literary essays for radio broadcast, and in 1977 began to contribute a regular “film diary” to the journal Merkur. In addition to the five major works already cited, he also published two novels, Lefeu oder Der Abbruch (1974; Lefeu or the demolition) and Charles Bovary, Landarzt (1978; Charles Bovary, country doctor). Three essay volumes appeared posthumously: the autobiographical Örtlichkeiten (1980; Places and stations), a collection of literary criticism, Bücher aus der Jugend unseres Jahrhunderts (1981; Books from the young days of our century), and the mainly political-philosophical collection Weiterleben—aber wie? (1982; Carry on—but how?). On the side, as it were, he wrote copiously for newspapers, journals, and topical anthologies.
Above all, our selection is meant to illustrate both the diversity of Améry’s literary-intellectual interests and the moral fervor with which he pursued them. Beside the expressly autobiographical essays that introduce the collection, others, too, help to bring his individuality and the evolvement of his thought into clearer focus. Almost all the essays are intensely personal, that is, informed by “the emotion that befits a good cause,” as he himself put it in his address on antisemitism and the Left. Emotion is present as the confident, righteous anger of the survivor and witness in the essay on “The Time of Rehabilitation”; it is present in the homage to Sartre as critical reverence for the philosopher whose existentialism had uplifted Améry in his quest for self-realization after the degradations of Auschwitz, and as the sorrow he felt at Sartre’s fall from greatness; emotion pervades Améry’s scornful rejection of Simone Weil, whose religious mysticism and neo-irrationalism the enlightener and defender of reason could neither comprehend nor tolerate. Not seldom in Améry’s writing, as in his essay on the Warsaw Ghetto, this “emotion that befits a good cause” ascends to a pathos that is not declamatory or otherwise affected, but rather legitimized and authenticated by the integrity of his example as man and writer.
The twelve essays translated in this volume were written between the years 1967 and 1978. We selected them from a number of sources, mainly from the literary and political-cultural journals to which Jean Améry regularly contributed. Some were first delivered as radio talks or formal addresses and later published in anthologies; some appeared posthumously (for bibliographical data, see the source notes at the beginning of each chapter.) In all but one instance, that of “Antisemitism on the Left,” we have translated the titles of the essays more or less literally. In three instances, “After Five Thousand Newspaper Articles,” “In the Waiting Room of Death” and “Wasted Words,” we have added a descriptive subtitle. Translations from works quoted by Améry are our own.
We wish to thank Inter Nationes (Bonn) for support in making this translation possible. We are indebted also to Dr. Hubert Arbogast and Frau Edda Both of Klett-Cotta Publishers (Stuttgart) for their valuable assistance. To Mme Maria Améry (Brussels), we express deep gratitude for her help and encouragement. Her warm friendship has inspired our efforts.
Sidney Rosenfeld
Stella P. Rosenfeld
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