Book Description: Jean Améry, Essays on Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Left

Reading Jean Amery’s essays is an emotional experience. His writing is expressive and conveys his deep underlying sadness. Améry’s situation, while not unique, found few willing to chronicle it. His Catholic mother raised him far from the Austrian-Jewish community. He testifies that he was aware that his dead father , a military casualty of World War 1, was born Jewish but he was otherwise indifferent and unexposed to Jewish education or identity formation. Then, he was a victim of Nazi concentration camps. He based his declaration of his Jewish identity on that experience. He documents how, during his six and a half decades, he felt the loss of ethnic and political identity which he only partially recovered.

Améry describes what must have been an unimaginably grotesque experience: he sat in one of Vienna’s mythic cafes and read about the recently enacted Nazi Nuremberg Laws with their racial classifications of humans. He discovered that they classified him as Jewish. Améry left Austria with his first wife who was Jewish. Astonishingly, at the beginning of World War 2, he was arrested in France as an illegal German alien. He escaped and made his way to Belgium, where he was arrested by the Nazis while participating in the Resistance. After torturing him, they sent him to the concentration camps, where he was classified not as a political resister but as a Jew. After his liberation and years spent rebuilding his sense of himself, he described his mental state: “The awareness of yesterday’s cataclysm and the legitimate anticipation of its possible future recurrence constitute the ultimate vanishing point. Bearing both of them within me, and the latter twice over because I barely escaped the former, I am not “traumatized,” I am facing up to reality in an intellectually and psychologically entirely appropriate manner.” Elsewhere, he wrote of his sense: “Being a Jew meant acknowledging that to flee from the death sentence passed down by the world into some kind of interiority, rather than accepting it as the world’s verdict, on the one hand, while at the same time physically rebelling against it, on the other, would be an ignominy.”

In other words, Améry saw himself as a Jew without Jewishness. He had no education in Jewish texts or civilization. He declared frankly: “it was in Auschwitz that my being Jewish attained its final form, which it has maintained to this day.” In other words, as he explained on several occasions, he saw himself a living example of Sartre’s theory: “… one is a Jew if identified by others as a Jew.” Whatever the form of Améry’s Jewish identity, he spoke from a uniquely European perspective, not Israeli, and certainly not traditionally culturally or religiously Jewish, which lends his perspective particular interest.

The essays in this volume focus on the period between the 1967 War and Améry’s suicide in 1978. As a passionately dedicated person of the Left, he was appalled, not to say scandalized, by adverse reactions within that part of Europe’s political spectrum to the Six Day War and to Israel’s right to exist. Read today, in the period following British Labour’s disastrous experience with the antisemitism of the Corbyn years, with the rise of antisemitic incidents in Western society, it is clear that his writing raises questions that have not gone away.

Améry was a sad man, which permeates his writing. Nevertheless, he was a journalist and a polemicist of considerable talent. His writing is journalistic in the best sense. He uses language that refers to profound ideas but does not intimidate.

Educators can use this collection of essays with high-level high school, college, and graduate students. It is accessible and thought-provoking. Améry’s distinctive Jewish identity may be significant for students who share his birth into a family with some Jewish antecedents but little Jewish self-awareness. Such students are an underserved component of the student community. Améry may contribute to their thinking about themselves and how they relate to the issues he raises.

Bibliographic Information:
Améry, Jean, Lars Fischer, and Marlene Gallner, Essays on Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Left, Studies in Antisemitism (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2021)
ISBN-13: 9780253058768