Language:
English
Year of publication:
2010
Titel der Quelle:
Lessons and Legacies IX
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2010) 304-310
Keywords:
Améry, Jean.
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Influence
;
Guilt
;
Holocaust survivors' writings
Abstract:
After the Holocaust, Améry wondered how could masses of stalwart believers in a Reich founded on racial principles have so effortlessly become the bulwark of democratic values in a "new Europe"? Examines his book "Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne" (1966), and his attempt to make sense of his own experiences in the Holocaust and of the success of Germany's rehabilitation. States that Améry knew it was Cold War politics that dampened German “war guilt” for the mass murder of Jews and other racial outcasts, prisoners of war, and many other categories of helpless victims. It was only after the trial of Adolf Eichmann (1961) and the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials (1963–65) that extermination camps and lethal antisemitism entered the public memory of Nazi crimes. However, in his book he expressed the Holocaust victim's resentment towards the German perpetrators, he strongly opposed forgiveness and forgetting, and he demanded that young Germans, in particular, take responsibility for the Nazi crimes despite their own innocence.
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