Language:
German
Year of publication:
2009
Titel der Quelle:
Exil
Angaben zur Quelle:
29,2 (2009) 5-21
Keywords:
Améry, Jean
;
Holocaust (Jewish theology)
;
Suicide Religious aspects
;
Judaism
Abstract:
Views the essays of the Austrian-born Jewish writer Jean Améry as attempts to communicate and overcome his experiences in the Holocaust, while assuring himself of his German mother-tongue and testing its limits and functions after 1945. Emphasizes that Améry positions himself firmly as a victim and takes the bodily pain he suffered under torture in Breendonk in 1943 as the starting point for his reflections. Shows that Améry was influenced by Sartre and maintained, as opposed to the Frankfurt School and Theodor Adorno, that Germany's role in the Holocaust was not incidental and that victims and perpetrators could not be interchanged. Discusses Améry's "Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne" (1966), which features all his central themes: his self-understanding as Jew, the situation of the intellectual in the concentration camp, torture and its effects, the inescapable relationship of the victim to his past, and the vulnerability of the victim who has lost his homeland. The essays included in the collection also discuss the uniqueness of the Shoah and German guilt. Améry, born Hans Mayer in Vienna in 1912, was arrested in Belgium and interned in various concentration camps, including Auschwitz, between 1940-45. He committed suicide in 1978.
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