Beyond guilt and atonement

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Beyond guilt and atonement. Coping attempts of an overwhelmed is an autobiographical collection of essays by the Austrian writer and Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry . The work is one of the central texts of the German-language Holocaust literature and is characterized by a radical self-questioning by the author, which aims at a “description of the essence of the victim's existence”. At the same time, Améry reflects in his essays on the elements of repression and exculpation in West German post-war society . His central demand is that the Jewish persecuted must be given an equal place in the public discussion about the National Socialist past.

Emergence

In addition to the publication of Primo Levi's Auschwitz report, Is that a human? (1961) and Hannah Arendt's thesis of the “ banality of evil ” in her report on the Eichmann trial , which Améry perceived as a provocation throughout her life , it was above all the sensational Auschwitz Trial in Frankfurt that prompted Améry to start his own reflections to write down and publish about camp life and survival.

On the occasion of the first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, he made a proposal for a radio broadcast to Karl Schwedhelm , the head of the literature department at Süddeutscher Rundfunk , for whom Améry had worked as a temporary cultural correspondent in Belgium since 1960. Through this inquiry, in which Améry announced an “Auschwitz diary”, which should contain reflections “on fundamental existential problems of the concentration camp universe and especially the reactions of an intellectual”, the decisive contact was made with Helmut Heißenbüttel , the head of the “Radio” department -Essay ”- not the other way around, as described by Améry in his autobiographical works.

Heißenbüttel invited Améry to first write the essay On the Frontiers of the Spirit , which was broadcast on October 19, 1964 on the night program of the Süddeutscher Rundfunk and read by Améry himself. Due to Heißenbüttel's positive response, Améry proposed the continuation of the "Auschwitz-Sendung" in May 1965, while at the same time reporting on his plan to publish a book on the subject, but at the same time referring to financial difficulties in implementing the project. Améry's plan aroused great interest at Heißenbüttel, so that in 1965/66 the other four essays from Beyond Guilt and Atonement were broadcast as radio reports. Helmut Heißenbüttel thus leveled Améry's success in the West German cultural scene of the 1960s. As a result, he remained a constant supporter of Améry and was also involved in the posthumous publication of Améry's works.

The book publication of Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne was closely tied to the radio work, since all texts had previously been broadcast as radio series and their realization could only be guaranteed through the well-paid broadcast. The essays were not unaffected by the working conditions at radio: They are characterized by a recurring formal structure and comprise 20 to 23 pages, which corresponds to a reading time of 50 to 60 minutes. The publication of the book text ultimately deviated little from the radio form, except that listener addresses and repetitions were deleted and Améry chose other titles. The choice of the literary form of the essay was also determined by the radio-specific possibilities, but this genre met Améry's demands perfectly, as it enabled him to write openly, based on his own experience, which draws the reader into the thought movement and encourages critical reflection should.

In the spring of 1966 the first edition of the book was published by Szczesny Verlag with a print run of 3,000 copies . In the autumn of the same year, a second edition was commissioned, but due to financial difficulties of the publisher, which was subsequently dissolved in May 1968, it was no longer possible. Améry was then referred to the liberal-conservative Klett Verlag by Heißenbüttel and the Merkur publisher Hans Paeschke . In 1977, 1980 and 1997 the essay volume was reprinted.

content

"At the limits of the mind"

In the first essay in the collection, Améry seeks to describe the intellectual's confrontation with the border situation in the Auschwitz concentration camp . The intellectual is defined by Améry as a person who is within a "spiritual", i.e. H. humanistic and humanistic, frame of reference lives. First and foremost, Améry asks the fundamental question of whether thinking could in any way help the camp inmate or alleviate his situation in the face of the everyday horrors in the camp. The answer is that the spirit not only did nothing, but left the intellectual alone and ultimately even led to his self-destruction. Isolated from like-minded people, the spirit loses its social function for the inmates in Auschwitz: Since there is a profound communication problem between the spiritual person and his non-intellectual comrades, the intellectual can no longer succeed in maintaining faith in a spiritual world. The mind degenerates into an unreality, a language game. Améry illustrates this thesis on the basis of a situation in which he remembers the stanza of a Holderlin poem on the way back from work , which, however, can no longer arouse any spiritual associations in him:

"Nothing. The poem no longer transcended reality. There it was and was only a factual statement: so and so, and the kapo yells "left", and the soup was thin, and the flags rattle in the wind. "

- p. 17

Since the spirit in Auschwitz ultimately loses its basic quality, the transcendence , the camp inmate feels, if not scorn or pain, at least complete indifference in the face of aesthetic ideas. Even worse, however, is the ability to think analytically and rationally: instead of being helpful in the borderline situation of the camp, according to Améry, this leads directly to self-destruction. In contrast to his “unspiritual” comrades, the intellectual can not understand the SS logic of extermination against the background of his humane worldview . However, once the initial resistance is broken, the intellectual, who is used to critical analysis and questioning, begins to question all previous certainties: In view of the total demonstration of power by the SS state within the camp walls, the prisoner soon has to face the self-destructive question of whether he anticipated his own Destruction is not about the rational enforcement of the law of the strong.

At the end of the essay, Améry raises a second fundamental question, the question of what spiritual people learned from the experience in Auschwitz. According to Améry, intellectuals have become neither wiser nor “deeper”, but they have become wiser insofar as they have become skeptical of any metaphysical statements. Ultimately, Améry describes those who have returned from the camp as “bared [...], plundered, emptied, disoriented” (p. 32) - in short: as a person who first has to laboriously learn the “everyday language of freedom” (ibid.).

"The ordeal"

In this text, Améry describes his arrest by the Gestapo in 1943 and subsequent torture in the Fort Breendonk camp . Based on his personal experiences, Améry develops two theses, which are mentioned at the beginning of the text and which run through it like a red thread: The first thesis says that the ordeal is "the most terrible event that a person can hold in himself" (p. 34), while the second is that the ordeal was not a mere feature of the Third Reich , but its essence.

Améry describes the first blow he received from his tormentors in the fort as a violation of his own physical limits, which is tantamount to an injury to his own self. With the certainty that all social conventions - such as the prohibition to harm or the duty to help - have become null and void in the situation of torture, there is a profound loss of world confidence. The pain that Améry went through in the further course of his torture is at the limit of linguistic communication. Since those who are tortured to the limit of pain experience their bodies like never before, Améry describes the torture as the complete flesh of man. Because of this, it remains indelibly branded:

“It's still not over. Twenty-two years later, I am still dangling from dislocated arms, panting and accusing myself. There is no 'displacement'. "

- p. 50

Améry also deals extensively with his tormentors. Since these raise the radical negation of the other to a principle, he sees it as justified to call them sadists . In the same way, according to Améry, sadism and torture represent the formative elements of National Socialism in its entirety.

"How much home do people need?"

In this essay Améry tries to find an answer to the question posed in the title. In doing so, he primarily deals with the specific situation of the Jewish exiles who fled the Third Reich , but also - despite his own reservations - also makes some generally applicable statements on the subject of homeland . In order to clarify the precarious situation of the Jewish emigrants, Améry differentiates her fate from that of other German emigrants : In contrast to these, the Jews not only lost all their property, their jobs and their familiar surroundings, but also atone for their fellow human beings and their language Home one. Their own compatriots had become enemies since the annexation of Austria, while their mother tongue developed more and more into a hostile one during the Third Reich. Since their homeland rights were subsequently withdrawn, the Jewish exiles no longer knew who they were:

“I was no longer an I and no longer lived in a we. I had no passport and no past and no history. "

- p. 58

In this context, homesickness turns into alienation from oneself, but ultimately into self-destruction, since the simultaneous feeling of homesickness and home hatred is an “impossible, neurotic state” (p. 66). The awareness of being a chased away, on the other hand, made Améry more aware of the importance of home. For him, home primarily means security:

“At home we have mastered the dialectic of knowing-knowing, trust-trust. [...] To live in our homeland means that what we already know happens again and again in minor variations. "

- p. 61f.

In exile, however, the facial expressions of strangers cannot be deciphered by the emigrant; no order can be found in their gestures, clothes and houses. Since the earliest sensory impressions constitute personality, according to Améry, mother tongue and the local environment become familiarity that guarantees a feeling of security. Ultimately, however, this means that there can be no “new home” for the exile. From Améry's perspective, this becomes a problem, especially in old age, as the aging person is increasingly dependent on memories of the past. However, according to Améry, the Jew who was expelled from the Third Reich is no longer entitled to his past. The sober conclusion of the essay is therefore short and sweet:

"It is not good not to have a home."

- p. 76

"Resentment"

In this essay, Améry is about to undertake a radical analysis of the victim's resentment towards the Germans who perpetrated the perpetrators . Améry describes his resentment with a certain irony as a social stigma, to which he has to admit, however. By redefining the term resentment, he aims to integrate and legitimize the persistent feeling as part of his personality. In the twofold demarcation against the negative cathexis in Nietzsche and in psychology , he ultimately emphasizes resentment as a “source of emotions in morality” (p. 98). In view of the crimes committed, resentment represents a revolt against the natural passage of time and the associated oblivion in society. To that extent, it contains a moral element for Améry, since it represents the moral resilience of people who see themselves as morally unique.

Améry opposes forgetting and the forgiveness of guilt on the part of the victims and instead calls for the unresolved conflict between the overwhelmed and the overwhelmed to be actualized. For him this demand has nothing to do with vengefulness or atonement; Améry is primarily concerned with "the redemption from the still ongoing abandonment of that time" (p. 86). In this context, Améry also speaks of the collective guilt of the Germans, which he regards as a “useful hypothesis”, “if one understands nothing other than the objectively manifest sum of individual guilty behavior” (p. 88). In view of the mass of perpetrators, too many of whom did not belong to the SS, “but were workers, card file operators, technicians, typists” (p. 90), the victim had to come to the assumption of a statistically understood collective guilt.

According to Améry, the “eradication of shame” (p. 95) and rehabilitation of the German people can only be achieved by not suppressing or covering up the events of the twelve-year-long Third Reich, but recognizing them as negative property of Germany. Resentment becomes an indispensable prerequisite for self-enlightenment of the perpetrators, as it arouses their self-distrust. Améry directs his committed demand in particular to the German youth, who should take responsibility despite their innocence.

"On compulsion and impossibility to be a Jew"

In the last essay in the collection, Améry reflects on the aporias of his (non-) Jewish identity. Furthermore, he investigates the process of regaining his dignity , which was stripped from him and all other Jews by the Nazi dictatorship , starting with the Nuremberg Laws . He describes his relationship to the Jews as non-relationship, since he did not grow up in a Jewish environment or community and therefore cannot call the Jewish religion , culture or language his own. Instead, Améry sees himself as a Jew without any positive determinability, who had to endure the catastrophe that befell him “without God, without history, without messianic national expectation” (ibid.). His Jewish identity lies primarily in his fate to be a Jewish victim of Nazi Germany:

“For [...] me, being a Jew means feeling the tragedy of yesterday weigh down on you. I have the Auschwitz number on my left forearm; it reads shorter than the Pentateuch or the Talmud and yet provides more thorough information. "

- p. 111

Without the international community intervening, the Jewish population was systematically degraded and threatened with death during the Nazi regime in the midst of German society. For Améry, the only way to regain the dignity that has been lost is to accept his fate as a Jew, but at the same time to rise up against it in revolt. This includes the constant attempt to convince society of the dignity of the victim. Accordingly, Améry intensifies the appeal to German society that was already hinted at in the essay Resentment:

“You don't want to know where your indifference can lead you and me at any hour? I tell you. It is none of your business what happened because you did not know or were too young or not even in this world? You should have seen and your youth is no license and break with your father. "

- p. 114

reception

Despite or precisely because of the provocations, especially the essay Resentment, Beyond Guilt and Atonement was granted an immense success, which is an indication of the changing climate of memory politics in the time after the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial , the statute of limitations debates and in the run-up to the 1968s -Movement may apply. After the broadcasts and publications of the essay series, Améry suddenly became a well-known author, who received numerous invitations from other broadcasters ( Hessischer and Bayerischer Rundfunk , Sender Freies Berlin , WDR, etc.) to give lectures and reading trips and whose contributions to discussions in well-known German newspapers ( Die Zeit , Frankfurter Rundschau , Süddeutsche Zeitung and others) and magazines (especially Merkur ) were in demand. Traces of a deeper engagement with his essays can be found in contemporary literature (for example in Ingeborg Bachmann , Helmut Heißenbüttel , Primo Levi and Imre Kertész ) as well as in Theodor W. Adorno's philosophy .

Despite all the recognition, Améry's relationship to Germany as the country of the perpetrators had to remain ambivalent . This is exemplified by the confrontation with the conservative writer Hans Egon Holthusen shortly after the publication of his essay volume, who had published a lengthy autobiographical text with the provocative title Freiwillig zur SS in Merkur (the place where Améry's Torture essay was published) . In it, Holthusen asked for forgiveness for the "negligence" of having volunteered for the SS in 1933, styling himself as a representative of " inner emigration " and as a "survivor".

It was left to Améry to point out the contradiction between the Jewish survivor on the one hand and the SS man on the other, which was already apparent in the term voluntariness: “You went to the SS voluntarily. I came elsewhere, quite involuntarily. "

literature

Original edition

  • Jean Améry: Beyond Guilt and Atonement. Coping attempts of an overwhelmed. Munich 1966.

Work edition

  • Jean Améry: Beyond guilt and atonement, unmasterly years of wandering, localities. Volume 2, Stuttgart 2002.

Audio book

  • Beyond guilt and atonement. Read by Peter Matic. mOceanOTonVerlag, Grosser + Stein sales, 2007.

Secondary literature

  • Matthias Bormuth , Susan Nurmi-Schomers: Critique from Passion: Studies on Jean Améry. Göttingen 2005.
  • Petra S. Fiero: Writing against Silence: Borderline Experiences in Jean Amery's autobiographical work. Olms 1997.
  • Torben Fischer (Hrsg.): Lexicon of “coping with the past” in Germany. Bielefeld 2007.
  • Sven Kramer : Torture in Literature. Their representation in German narrative prose from 1740 to Auschwitz. Munich 2004.
  • Andree Michaelis: Narrative Rooms after Auschwitz. (= WeltLiteraturen - World Literatures. 2). Berlin 2013.
  • Gerhard Scheit : Breendonk. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 1: A-Cl. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2011, ISBN 978-3-476-02501-2 , pp. 407-411.
  • Ulrike Schneider: Jean Améry and Fred Wander. (= Studies and texts on the social history of literature. 132). Berlin et al. 2012
  • Sylvia Weiler: Jean Améry's Ethics of Memory. Göttingen 2012.

Web links

Wikiquote: Jean Améry  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The page numbers refer to: Jean Améry: Beyond guilt and atonement. Coping attempts of an overwhelmed. Nördlingen 1970. This quote is from the preface, p. 9.
  2. ↑ J. Améry to K. Schwedhelm, letter of January 18, 1964. Quoted from: Jean Améry: Selected letters 1945–1978. Volume 8, Stuttgart 2007, p. 101.
  3. ↑ Schneider 2012, p. 38 ff.
  4. ↑ J. Améry to H. Heißenbüttel, letter of May 20, 1964. Quoted from: Jean Améry: Selected letters 1945–1978 . Volume 8, Stuttgart 2007, p. 108.
  5. ↑ Schneider 2012, pp. 51–52.
  6. ↑ See Fischer 2007, p. 160.
  7. ^ HE Holthusen: "Voluntary to the SS". In: Mercury. 10th year, No. 11, 1966, pp. 1037-1050.
  8. ↑ J. Améry: Questions to Hans Egon Holthusen - and his answer. In: Mercury. 21. Jhrg., Heft 4, 1967, pp. 393-395.