Hans Mayer, alias Jean Améry, was born in Vienna in 1912. In 1938, he took refuge in Belgium and engaged actively in the Resistance. Arrested, he was confined in the Gurs camp, from which he managed to escape. Arrested again, he was tortured by the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz. Having succeeded in surviving, he wrote several books in which he seeks to understand the human being in the light of his experience of torture and of the camps. He was disappointed by the antisemitic positions taken by the new generation, in Germany, of anti-Nazi and anti-imperialist far-left militants, whose emergence he had watched with great interest. He committed suicide in 1978, in Salzburg.
The experience of torture and of the camp left in him a radical internal division, between what he had become and what he was and imagined himself to be before it. Confidence in his body, in his fellow citizens, and in culture had shattered. An extreme and lasting solitude resulted from it. To emerge from the trauma, he had to think through the elements that constituted it: Nazism, Auschwitz, culture, his death. He had likewise to reappropriate his body, to reconstitute its inner image. To break the relationship that the torturers had established, by force, with him, he tried to understand its elements, but also the mechanisms that made them act, and to consider them as other humans, monstrous, and no longer as anonymous forces exercising their omnipotence over him. To understand does not imply to excuse, just as this effort to free oneself from it does not imply appeasement, oblivion, or vengeance, which he refuses. He thus sought to recover his identity and to assume it, not from an external designation (camp survivor, victim, Jew), but from his experience of dehumanization and of the effort to free himself from it.
The ethical conditions of witnessing
Par-delà le crime et le châtiment. Essai pour surmonter l’insurmontable (At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities)1 is not a testimony about Auschwitz, but an attempt to define what his experience as a tortured man and a deportee was, what it made of him, what he makes of it. He wanted it to be also a reflection on the confrontation of an intellectual with the mass barbarism that was exercised upon him. This book is also a demonstration in action of the work of an intellectual: the questions he strives to answer with honesty, rigor, and humility; the temptations and the easy ways out that he rejects; the risk he takes of shocking the reader, or at least of not pleasing him; the courage he has to expose himself personally without protecting himself behind the authority of other recognized intellectuals; the ethical dilemmas he identifies and surpasses: “My task [of explaining my resentment] would be easier if I agreed to confine the problem to the domain of political polemic. I could then claim the authority of […], and arrive at relatively convincing conclusions without having to pass through a long and laborious intellectual labor […] What matters to me is the description of the mental state of the victim […] founded on introspection […], to justify a state of mind condemned in equal measure by the moralists and the psychologists […]: a thankless work of confession.”2
In his two prefaces (1966 for the original edition, 1977 for the second edition) to this book, Jean Améry specifies his major objective: to describe “the situation of the intellectual in a concentration camp.”3 He expects from it first of all to understand better the questioning that has long gnawed at him. The writing of the book answers this expectation: “It was during the work of drafting that the veil fell and that I discovered what had already appeared to me in a sort of half-conscious dreamy reflection.”4 It is not a matter, for Améry, of setting out research or reflections preexisting the writing, whose function would only be one of giving form.
The book of testimony
Améry strives to find the right balance between the objective and the subjective. He refuses that the intellectual be pure thought, in a relationship that is solely abstract, external to his book: “Where is it written that the enlightened attitude must renounce emotion? The contrary seems to me true. The enlightened mind will then accomplish its task correctly only if it sets to work with passion.”5 He must be there, with his voice. “My confession and my reflection gave rise to the study that follows, more exactly the description of the existence of every victim.”6 He must specify his identity as author of this book, but also his identity outside the book: “The Nazi victim, at once Jewish and political, that I was and that I am.”7
Setting out from his very experience, he addresses everyone, and his reflections concern everyone: “This work was written for a good cause: for it might concern all those who want to be the neighbor of their fellow man.”8 Nevertheless he specifies his privileged addressees: “Not my companions in misfortune, they know. The Germans who […] do not feel, or no longer feel, concerned.”9
If he does not recoil before susceptibilities and the risks of incomprehension or rejection, he advances with prudence, step by step, without seeking to mask, either from himself or from the reader, his hesitations, his doubts, his contradictions, and he continues to interrogate himself on the pertinence of his book — “What is the good of yet another reflection on the conditio humana of the victims of the Third Reich?”10 — on its form or its content. He refuses to use his authority as a recognized intellectual or as a victim to convince of his affirmations. Likewise he refuses to propose a finished, definitive reflection (in the possibility of which, moreover, he does not believe), but he shows the unfolding of his reflection, hoping that it will continue in him as much as in the reader.
At a distance from the first edition, he reevaluates his text in the light of the development of his own ideas, of those of other authors, of new knowledge, of the barbarisms that have developed in the world since the defeat of the Nazis: “The new old antisemitism is raising its head,”11 with new generations. Whence the necessity of reaffirming still more firmly the function of the book in such a context: “Since it is a matter of a moral chasm [between the executioners and the victims, and the descendants of the one and the other], it must, for the time being, remain wide open”12 and not allow time to close it, nor seek voluntaristically to do so. More precisely, it matters “that the German youth […] of the left not slip […] thoughtlessly to the side of those who are its enemies as much as mine,”13 by employing without reflection the generic words, the “big words” that are “dictatorship,” “fascism,” to qualify the current German political system and the laws and decrees that the current authorities produce. It is all the more important to make known to them the reality that corresponds to these words, that of the Nazism he knew and underwent.
Jean Améry knows that he is not the only one to seek to understand the experience of barbarism, but he sincerely thinks that his text retains its value, its pertinence, and its legitimacy. His position as a witness does not duplicate that of the historians. His objective is not to explain the Shoah and its multiple causes — historical, economic, sociological, political, cultural — but to speak of the victims, in which he is qualified. But outside of any militant or demonstrative objective. To do this, when it seems to him necessary, he does not hesitate to use strong words, not politically correct: “The executioners die too, fortunately.”14 Which is not contradictory with his scrupulous attention to weighing well the meaning of the words he uses, but also that of the words used by those he addresses, above all the new antifascist and anti-imperialist generations. For example, he asks them to distinguish “vigilance” from “paranoia,” not to lump together all the “formal democracies” by accusing them of being “fascist, colonialist, imperialist states,” including and above all the State of Israel.
The intellectual must always pose himself the question of the necessity of the book, for others and for himself, and be sufficiently conscious of the trigger and the demand that were at the origin of its writing or its reissue. For this book, these were the fear that the new antifascist and anti-imperialist German and European left might tip over into antisemitism under cover of anti-Zionism: “Then, for every contemporary of the Nazi horror, a threshold is reached that gives him the duty to intervene, whatever the consequences.”15 This implies that his objectives be clearly defined, as well as the readers he addresses: this book is “an appeal to German youth that it revise its positions,”16 even if this requires of him a certain rupture, a painful one, with his history: “That today I must rise up against my natural friends […] makes you doubt the meaning of any historical event and makes you, in the end, despair.”17
He widens these objectives and inscribes them in a vaster ensemble: “The reflections contained in this book were in the service of the Enlightenment […] The concept of Enlightenment […] encompasses far more than logical deduction and empirical verification; it signifies also […] to give oneself over to phenomenological speculation, to feel empathy, to draw near the limits of Reason [which is not] flat reasoning.”18 He specifies, in so doing, his method: “I always start from the concrete event, without, however, allowing it to lead me astray; I take it as a point of departure for reflections that go beyond reasoning and the pleasure of reasoning, in order to reach sectors of thought over which there reigns and will continue to reign a certain penumbra.”19
The book is written for the reader as much as for the author, who must learn from the very writing of his book, not only in the search for and the gathering of data, information, knowledge, but also from the very process of reflection. He does not seek to arrive at a completion, at a total and definitive clarification of a question, of a reflection, but to set in motion a process and to advance toward elucidation. The journey, of which the book is the site and to which it bears witness, is as important as the point of arrival, for the reader as much as for the author: “I was not clear when I wrote this essay, I am still not, and I hope never to be.”20 This is not a matter of false modesty nor of an empirical observation, but one of the major objectives of the book. “Clarification would be synonymous with a closed case, with the settling of facts that one can record in the dossiers of history. It is exactly this that this book wants to prevent.”21 The book brings information, on the events of the recent past, which must not be forgotten nor poorly known by the current generation, but it does not content itself with bringing a frozen knowledge — it is itself an act of resistance, in the present: “To bring back to memory does not mean to stow away in memory.”22
For the book, the writing of the book as well as its subsequent reading by readers and its diffusion in society, is a process and a combat.
The intellectual: a definition
“If I want to speak of the intellectual at Auschwitz […], of the ‘man of the mind,’ I must first define my object […] the intellectual in question […] Not every person exercising a profession that calls upon intelligence […] We all know jurists, engineers, doctors […] who are no doubt intelligent and even remarkable in their specialty, without their thereby deserving the qualifier of intellectual.”23 Améry intervenes in the public debate on barbarism, but also on aging and on suicide, through this book as much as through his other books, through his militant actions, his engagement in the Resistance, his taking of positions. Yet, strangely, he seems to define the intellectual by his intellectual references and his ways of thinking and not by his engagement in the public debate: “An intellectual […] lives within a system of intellectual references… The associative space of the intellectual is considerably more humanistic and above all centered on letters. His aesthetic consciousness is richly furnished. His inclinations and his aptitudes push him toward abstract reasoning. On all occasions, he can draw upon the history of ideas to elaborate his own conceptual associations.”24
The intellectual at Auschwitz
Upon his arrest, then in the first times of his deportation, he preciously keeps his identitarian cultural references, he continues to think like the intellectual he has always been. For some time, he can thus belong to these two extremes of the human, that of culture and civilization and that of barbarism and Evil. But he quickly observes that this cloven double belonging redoubles the physical quartering that torture inflicted on his body. He recognizes next that these two terms are inextricably linked and that he can think Auschwitz only in its relations with culture.
The loss of value and usefulness of intellectual functioning
The experience of torture and of the camp forces him to interrogate himself on the value and the consistency of the intellectual function in such circumstances, and to compare it to other ways of being and of thinking: “The intellectual could not adapt as easily to the inconceivable as the non-intellectual. Trained to question the phenomena of daily reality, he could not subscribe either to the reality of the camp, which offered a brutal contrast with everything he had until then believed possible on the part of man.”25 He specifies further on: “Nowhere else in the world did reality exercise an action as effective as in the camp […] Philosophical statements had lost their transcendence; they were now in part only concrete observations, in part sterile verbiage. […] Thought almost never granted itself any respite. But […] at each step it struck against its own impassable frontiers. In so doing, the coordinates of its traditional systems of reference collapsed.”26 The extreme consistency and violence of reality had crushed or excluded all possibility of thinking it, of imagining it, of giving it meaning. It could only be undergone, in an absolute passivity. Such was, at least, the objective of the Nazis and of the barbarism they imposed on the deportees. But these had numerous possibilities of resisting it.27 Améry had already undergone this omnipotence of brute reality in torture, which had reduced the body to flesh deserted by all conscious and unconscious image of the body: “It is only in torture that the coincidence of man and his flesh becomes total.”28
Likewise, he affirms with insistence that the intellectual is disadvantaged in relation to the religious and the political: “Their faith and their ideology offered them a fixed point in the world from which they could lift the SS state off its hinges,”29 “We skeptical and humanist intellectuals were the object of the contempt of Christians and Marxists alike.”30 “It was in exceptional cases that the skeptic […] became a committed Christian or Marxist. Most of the time […] he said: ‘there is an admirable illusion […], but it is only an illusion.’”31 He observes likewise that honesty is a disadvantage, that the common-law prisoners, installed at the summit, abuse the other deportees with the power the SS have delegated to them. The workers and the peasants resist better, for their practical capacities and their practical mind correspond better to the necessities of the camp, as do those who are accustomed to misfortune and misery.
The intellectual’s acknowledgment of failure
This acknowledgment is devastating, and Améry insists: “The mind at Auschwitz […] was of no help, or almost none.”32 Moreover, it prevents the intellectual from finding his place among the other deportees, which puts him in great danger: “At Auschwitz, the mind was only itself, and found no occasion to attach itself to a social structure, however precarious, however camouflaged it might be. Thus the intellectual found himself there alone with his mind, which was nothing other than a pure and simple consciousness deprived of all possibility of confronting and hardening itself in contact with a social reality.”33 Likewise, of “analytical thought: […] one can expect it to be at once a support and a guide on the paths of horror […] But in the camp […] rational and analytical thought was of no help and led straight to the tragic dialectic of self-destruction.”34 Améry strives, at the beginning, to preserve his way of being and of thinking: “The intellectual revolted before the impotence of thought, for at the beginning he still relied on that wisdom […] according to which ‘what has no right to exist cannot exist.’ […] Little by little there set in […] more than resignation […] an acceptance not only of the logic, but also of the value system of the SS.”35 Moreover, he is quickly rejected by the other deportees: “At the beginning […] the intellectual constantly watched for occasions for the mind to manifest itself socially, but […] suddenly lost its transcendence.”36 But this isolation, this impotence — do they derive from the very nature of the intellectual function or from the internalized way in which Améry used it? Would an engaged intellectual have adapted better to these conditions? Améry recognizes that the mind of the intellectual cannot function for itself, that it needs an external space and interlocutors.
The betrayal of culture
Améry makes another observation, just as devastating: “For the Jewish intellectual who had to his credit a German cultural baggage, whatever it was that he invoked, it no longer belonged to him, it was the property of the enemy.”37 He observes the failure of the intellectual — “He still relied on that mad and rebellious wisdom according to which ‘what has no right to exist cannot exist’”38 — as well as that of German culture, which he had so much sought to make his own, so much loved, and this observation, which redoubles that of having made erroneous life choices, accentuates his distress and his disarray. This culture betrayed one of the essential aspects of its function: it could not prevent barbarism. He affirms with bitterness, anger, and spite that culture can be of no support in the camps, that it relieves the deportee no more than it gives him the means to understand the barbarism he undergoes. On the contrary, it is useless (“Here too the mind found itself at its limits.”39), even harmful. Likewise, “the whole question of the activity of the mind no longer arises where the subject, on the point of dying of hunger and exhaustion, is not only deprived of his mind, but ceases even to be a man.”40 Nevertheless, the intellectual remains the one who has “the space in his consciousness where good and evil, the noble and the vile, the spiritual and the non-spiritual […] were able to oppose one another.”41
The intellectual and culture in spite of everything?
But to reject his culture, to tell himself that he was deceived and that he deceived himself, risks amputating him to the quick of the most precious and essential part of his being, of making whole sections of his identity and of his feeling of belonging to a history, an intellectual community, a society, collapse. He must understand the nature of this culture — if the Nazis were able to use it, it is because it was available — but also his passion for it. He must think the three terms of the problem, which are Nazism (its origins and what allowed its victory), Auschwitz (its functioning and his own resistance to dehumanization), culture (its characteristics and his relation to it).
He does not easily accept renouncing the mind and culture, and his passion for them flares up again as soon as an occasion presents itself: “That day when an infirmary orderly gave me a plate of sweetened semolina […] Filled with a profound emotion, I began first to reflect on the phenomenon of human goodness. This thought associated itself with the image of the brave Joachim Ziemssen of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. […] My consciousness was invaded […] by contents of books, fragments of music, and philosophical ideas that I absolutely wanted to consider as mine.”42 But the illusion is brief and his lucidity quickly regains the upper hand: “It was a veritable state of inebriation whose origin was physical […] These inebriations ended in a feeling […] of emptiness and shame […] They were profoundly inauthentic; the value of the mind is hardly comforted in such states.”43 On one side the positive aspect, which sustains; on the other the backlash, the fall of the illusion and the shame of having let oneself be taken in by it.
Facing death
Death, omnipresent in the camp, mobilizes all the physical, psychic, relational resources of the deportees, confronting them with the essential question: how to survive? Améry observes, on this terrain too, the disadvantage of the intellectual: “First, it was the total collapse of the aesthetic representation of death […] There was no place at Auschwitz for death conceived in its literary, philosophical, and musical form. There was no bridge linking the death of Auschwitz to Death in Venice […] The intellectual prisoner thus found himself disarmed before a death of which all aesthetic representation had collapsed […] He struck against […] the reality of the camp […] In practice […] what preoccupied the man of the mind exactly like his non-intellectual comrade was not death, but the manner of dying.”44 Shalamov, Delbo, or Primo Levi, along with numerous other deportees, do not share this position. They were able to lean on the writers they loved, such as Proust, Molière, or Dante. There exists, at the very heart of the human and of thought, an essential link between the unthinkable of one’s death and the man who must ceaselessly think it. But this demand that stimulates thought spins emptily in the context of the camp where, likewise, this essential link is broken. Améry specifies: “When he is free, man can, in thought […], dissociate death from the lived experience of death. […] But for the prisoner death no longer had a sting: neither to hurt him, nor to stimulate his thought. This is what explains […] that the camp prisoner — intellectual or not — knew the cruel anguish of having to die in such-and-such a manner, without really being afraid of death itself […] But they manifested […] worry about the consistency of the soup that was going to be distributed […] The reality of camp life triumphed over death and over the whole complex of the so-called last questions.”45
Jean Améry never ceased to be an intellectual, through thought and through action, and through his will to intervene in the public debate, in Germany and in Europe, on one of the essential questions of the twentieth century, that of collective barbarism. He did so from the experience of it that he lived in his body and his psyche, without concession, without protecting himself by a theoretical reflection and the confrontation with other authors, nor by the fear of exposing himself in what he had most intimate, nor by that of being brutally contradicted. He did so by interrogating the very consistency and the value of intellectual functioning and of the place of the intellectual in the face of torture and in the Nazi camp. His work and his method are still topical.
Works by Jean Améry: Les Naufragés (The Castaways), Actes Sud, 2010 (1935); Par-delà le crime et le châtiment — Essai pour surmonter l’insurmontable (At the Mind’s Limits), Actes Sud 1995 (1966); Du vieillissement (On Aging), Payot 1991 (1968); Lefeu ou la démolition (Lefeu or the Demolition), Actes Sud 1996 (1974); Porter la main sur soi — Du suicide (On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death), Actes Sud 1996 (1976); Charles Bovary, médecin de campagne (Charles Bovary, Country Doctor), Actes Sud 1991 (1978).
The reader who wishes to go further can also read: Heidelberger-Léonard I., Jean Améry, une biographie (The Philosopher of Auschwitz: Jean Améry and Living with the Holocaust), Actes Sud 2008. Oppenheim D., Peut-on guérir de la barbarie ? Apprendre des écrivains des camps (Can One Be Cured of Barbarism? Learning from the Writers of the Camps), Desclée de Brouwer 2012.
Notes
Améry J., Par-delà le crime et le châtiment. Essai pour surmonter l’insurmontable (At the Mind’s Limits), trans. from the German by F. Wuilmart, Actes Sud, 1995.↩︎
Ibid., p. 140.↩︎
Ibid., p. 7.↩︎
Ibid., p. 8.↩︎
Ibid., p. 20.↩︎
Ibid., p. 8.↩︎
Ibid., p. 17.↩︎
Ibid., p. 10.↩︎
Ibid., p. 10.↩︎
Ibid., p. 11.↩︎
Ibid., p. 15.↩︎
Ibid., p. 16.↩︎
Ibid., p. 16.↩︎
Ibid., p. 15.↩︎
Ibid., p. 17.↩︎
Ibid., p. 17.↩︎
Ibid., p. 18.↩︎
Ibid., p. 19.↩︎
Ibid., p. 20.↩︎
Ibid., p. 20.↩︎
Ibid., p. 11.↩︎
Ibid., p. 20.↩︎
Ibid., p. 22.↩︎
Ibid., p. 22.↩︎
Ibid., p. 38.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 54–55.↩︎
cf. D. Oppenheim, Peut-on guérir de la barbarie ? Apprendre des écrivains des camps (Can One Be Cured of Barbarism? Learning from the Writers of the Camps), Desclée de Brouwer, 2012.↩︎
Ibid., p. 82.↩︎
Ibid., p. 43.↩︎
Ibid., p. 45.↩︎
Ibid., p. 47.↩︎
Ibid., p. 48.↩︎
Ibid., p. 31.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 37–38.↩︎
Ibid., p. 39.↩︎
Ibid., p. 32.↩︎
Ibid., p. 34.↩︎
Ibid., p. 39.↩︎
Ibid., p. 53.↩︎
Ibid., p. 35.↩︎
Ibid., p. 35.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 36–37.↩︎
Ibid., p. 37.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 49–51.↩︎
Ibid., pp. 52–53.↩︎