The truth of the Holocaust calls upon us to open all our own identities to all who choose—whether under compulsion of external circumstances (as with Améry) or by the experience of free, inner vocation (as with Freud)—to claim those identities themselves, given their own conditions of birth and heritage.
Read moreArt After the Holocaust (1)
Art—at least that art that has been purified of all artifice and flashiness, all grandiloquence and gaudiness—can call us back from the sort of forgetting of ourselves that shames us, and into the sort of forgetting of ourselves that honors us. It can call us back from forgetting ourselves negatively and into forgetting ourselves positively—back into forgetting ourselves precisely by honoring our obligations, and paying what we owe.
Read moreHolocaust Remembrance (5)
Significantly, though he died in 1938, even before the Kristallnacht pogrom let alone the implementation of the “final solution,” and had no tattooed number on his arm, Sigmund Freud said much the same thing as Jean Améry, the Auschwitz survivor, later did.
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In my preceding post, I argued that our remembrance of the Holocaust must remain a carefully articulated one, in which we are careful to honor all he victims of the Holocaust at the same time that we preserve acknowledgment of the disproportionate suffering that the Holocaust inflicted on some segments of the general population--above all, but not exclusively, on those who were classified as Jews. Not to show such care to remember all the victims in their full articulation into disproportionate segments is to “forget ourselves” in the negative sense of a self-forgetfulness that works to our own dishonor.
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Fifty years ago, Jean Améry insisted, with the full right given him by the fact of his own survival of Auschwitz, that for the German people truly to remember the Holocaust would be for that people to bring itself as a whole and at last to judgment for what it did during those years. However, Améry, at least, was never under the illusion that any such thing would ever happen. Already fifty hears ago, he knew it never would.
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When a community has committed crimes against some of its own members, there can be no genuine reconciliation of the community as a whole (both those who were made to suffer and those who made them suffer, both victims and perpetrators) at the level of “historical practice” itself, as Jean Améry calls it (rather than at the level of what an American expression disdainfully refers to as “pie in the sky bye and bye”) unless the victims are allowed to cherish their resentments, and the perpetrators in turn are made to maintain a deep and lasting self-mistrust.
Read moreBorder Crossings
Borders are things that are meant to be crossed. Otherwise, they cease to be borders, and become barriers instead.
Read moreHolocaust Remembrance (1)
Holocaust "survivor" Jean Améry knew as well as Primo Levi, another famous “survivor” of Auschwitz in the same sense that Améry was (both eventually committed suicide), that he was required to speak not only for his own sake but also above all for the sake of those who could no longer speak for themselves—those who could no longer speak for themselves, because they had been murdered by the Germans and their accomplices during the Holocaust.
Read moreForgetting Ourselves (3)
At rare times, what we call art provides us with a moment when we can at last forget ourselves in just such a truly liberating way. At those rare moments, art catches us up short, and opens before us at just that moment the opportunity to forget ourselves and to “set ourselves free”—free from ourselves, and thereby free at last just to be ourselves. It does so, according to Celan, at those moments when we are so suddenly and unexpectedly struck by a work of art, or something at work in that work, that it “takes our breath away,” as we commonly yet accurately say. We encounter “breath-taking beauty,” as we also say.
Read moreForgetting Ourselves (2)
What we call “art” can sometimes offer a false feeling of forgetting oneself in the positive sense, the sense of setting oneself free of “the bondage of self.” That is so, at least, for some of what we commonly call “art.”
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