The Passion of Reason: Reflections on Primo Levi and Jean Amery
Goodheart, Eugene
The dominant wisdom about the Holocaust is that its enormity surpasses comprehension. Having shattered traditional faith (how could God have permitted it to happen?), the Holocaust has acquired...
...in short, a way to find myself...
...It was not at all necessary that in German towns Jewish cemeteries and monuments for resistance fighters be desecrated...
...There is an implicit answer to the question in an essay Amery wrote in which he declares his allegiance to the classical Enlightenment...
...In spite of all that we have had to experience, I believe that even today, as in the days of the Encyclopedists, knowledge leads to recognition and recognition to morality...
...Judgment in the Gray Zone What separates Amery and Levi is the character of their judgments...
...In contrast, a confirmed communist like Levi's barber "never despaired," because "Stalin was his fortress, the Rock sung in the psalms...
...Levi here contradicts his own assertion that "culture was not useful in orienting oneself and understanding...
...Above all, they wish to understand what can be understood, make comparisons where they are appropriate, and insist upon the discriminations that are the basis for moral judgment...
...Resentment, Nietzsche and Max Scheler have taught us, is the emotion of the weak and the victimized...
...Forward by Alexander Stille (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), pp...
...Each individual is so complex that there is no point in trying to foresee his behavior, all the more so in extreme situations...
...The compromises and failures reflect moral ineffectuality or cowardice...
...Were not those who were preparing to destroy him in the right, owing to the undeniable fact that they were the stronger ones...
...Severe as divine punishment may be, they retain their human capacity...
...9 Cynthia Ozick, Metaphor and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), p. 47...
...And yet they go to the heart of the difference between Amery and Levi...
...It definitely was not useful in orienting oneself and understanding" 2 (my emphasis...
...When the pilgrim Dante encounters them, these pasts, filled with suffering of a kind different from what they experience in Hell, provoke his sympathy and we remember the condemned as they lived in the world...
...For the survivor, or a certain kind of survivor, the 522 • DISSENT triumph over Nazism changed nothing...
...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
...I must be careful to qualify this distinction...
...it is too deep, too awful, too terrible for the patience of time...
...The lesson of the camps has to do with the nature of human beings when they are forced to live in the conditions created by the camps...
...Amery's sense of extremity tends to divide the world sharply between victim and tormentor...
...On the contrary, he displays exemplary qualities of physical and moral courage...
...He himself hardly exemplifies the intellectual who has capitulated to power...
...Silence is better than speech, because speech trivializes the mystery by representing the events in familiar terms...
...They granted me a respite, ephemeral but hebetudinous, in fact liberating and differentiating...
...it could enhance an hour, establish a fleeting bond with a companion, keep the mind healthy...
...In open revolt I struck Juszek in the face in turn...
...Resentment and Reason In bringing together Levi and Amery, I do not mean to conflate their views...
...But not, as one might think, for reasons of courage and honor, but only because I had grasped well that there are situations in life in which our body is our entire self and our entire fate...
...To accuse the young would be just too inhuman, and according to universal concepts also unhistorical," writes this scrupulous resentful man...
...If Amery is the man of reason, Levi is the reasonable man...
...Levi in effect becomes a character in Dante's Hell, though, unlike Dante's character, undeserving of a place in it...
...But these examples seem irrelevant to the situation of life in the camps, where the threat (the word is too weak) is not simply to one's existence...
...Should one hope for a blow on the skull or death by exhaustion in the infirmary...
...I stand up for analytical reason and its language, which is logic...
...My reading of The Drowned and The Saved is at odds with Cynthia Ozick's interpretation of the book as a "suicide note...
...All "solutions" proposed by the moral intelligence to the abiding threat of extremity remain provisional and precarious, requiring an anxious vigilance...
...5 Quoted in Albert Camus, The Rebel (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 15...
...He devotes a chapter to the "Canto of Ulysses" in Survival at Auschwitz, recalling that a particular passage suddenly and inexplicably came to mind: Then of that age—old fire loftier born Began to mutter and move, as a wavering flame Wrestles against the wind and is over-born...
...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...When Levi speaks of rigor he means, I believe, a rigor that works against facile condemnations of the "sins" or "crimes" of the victims...
...Since this is an emotion that one does not act upon, it can fester and turn upon the resenter, wearing away at the fiber of his being and perhaps destroy him...
...Moreover, unlike the ideology critics who often desire the power and authority they decry in their adversaries, Amery in his resentment is singularly devoid of the desire for power...
...Suicide becomes an act of integrity, an implicit affirmation of the values the camps have rendered impossible...
...by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 136...
...One does not have to know how the passage came to his mind to be struck by how apt the memory of The Inferno is in the circumstances...
...The non-agnostic, the believers in any belief whatsoever resisted the seduction of power, provided they were not believers in the National Socialist doctrine," Levi writes...
...Survivors such as Primo Levi and Jean Améry write from a strenuous moral point of view, springing from the rationalism of the classical Enlightenment...
...In persisting in his resentment, does Amery in effect capitulate to the horror of the camps...
...But not all the witnesses mean to invite reverence...
...We, the master race, are your destroyers, but you are no 524 • DISSENT better than we are...
...In his heroic effort to understand and not simply judge, suggests Tzvetan Todorov, Levi did not entirely avoid the peril...
...Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella Rosenfeld...
...And, like a speaking tongue vibrant to flame FALL • 1994 • 523 Language, the tip of it flickering to and fro Threw out a voice and answered: "When I came . . . " He expresses puzzlement about "how or why it came into my mind...
...Amery's intellectual honesty and lucidity would make it morally impossible for him to embrace an ideology or a faith...
...Speech is necessary, because total silence would mean oblivion, and the moral imperative is never to forget...
...The torturers, or some of them, have been punished: we are reminded of those who have escaped punishment and prospered...
...The camps had as their aim the destruction of that essence, and it achieved its aim to the extent that it persuaded people that man is fundamentally, or by nature, brutal...
...Des Pres offers the examples of Dostoyevsky and Bertrand Russell, who, close to death, experience a recovery (in Dostoyevsky's case, a last minute reprieve from a death sentence) and testify to the delight and value of simply being alive...
...But the gray zone exists in a realm beyond risk or the efficacy of character...
...To speak or even not to speak in this way is paradoxically to threaten the Holocaust with a portentous verbal inflation that deprives us of a moral discourse in which discriminations and judgments can be made...
...This is a devastating indictment, more severe than Levi's exposure of the ineffectuality of the cultured man, but very much in the same spirit...
...We may be missing the lesson of the Lager by allowing the ethic of survival to provide the focus for discussion...
...The site of enlightened reason is the individual person whose sense of community with others may be abstract...
...His resentment is ultimately a grievance against "the antimoral natural process of healing that time brings about, and by which I make the genuinely humane and absurd demand that time be turned back...
...Levi focuses on the victims of the system who were degraded into collaboration: for instance, the sonderkommandos, the special squad of "privileged" inmates who were given enough to eat for a few months as a reward for running the crematoria...
...They do not claim to understand everything, for not everything is morally intelligible, but they do not deal in mysteries or wish to make them sacrosanct...
...Neither Amery nor Levi illustrates in himself the particular vulnerability of the agnostic 520 • DISSENT intellectual to the ravages of the camps...
...294-297...
...In its protest against nature ("the natural process of healing"), his resentment dramatizes the monstrous (that is, unnatural) character of the Holocaust...
...Resentment is the emotion that nourishes revolutionary ideologies, and only too often, as history shows, the revolutionary sense of justice...
...6) Please bear with us—we have accumulated quite a backlog of material, and you may have to wait for a few issues before you see your article in print...
...The risks incurred by his resentment are mainly internal...
...Ozick would not have arrived at her conclusions about The Drowned and The Saved before the fact of Levi's "suicide...
...The Inferno in its intensity helps us see the even more radical extremity of the Holocaust...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc...
...Levi's essay on "The Gray Zone" exhibits "pity and rigor" and a sensitivity to "extenuating circumstances" in the cases of persons who compromised or did not resist, which has no parallel in the work of Amery...
...Resentment declares itself against injustice, but is itself the source of injustice in its false accusations or in the disparity between the provocation and the emotion...
...It is an answer to what he imagines to be the psychological self-justifying strategy (the rationale) of the Final Solution...
...Moral reason or the cultural tradition is too weak a resource in extreme situations...
...But what does life itself signify...
...In the camps, Levi writes, "culture could be useful even if only in some marginal cases, and for brief periods...
...Neither their integrity nor their survival is a function of their philosophy...
...Contemporary critics of the Enlightenment have focused on the poverty of the communal imagination of Enlightenment thought, though 526 • DISSENT in theory the Enlightenment promises fraternity...
...Amery's rationalism knows its limitations as the doctrines of religion and Marxism do not...
...This is after the fact and less compelling than the way cultural memory, Dante, for example, performed in Levi's mind while he was in the camps...
...Painfully beaten, I was satisfied with myself...
...He himself summed it up beautifully in speaking of Amery's suicide: It was not commented on, it was not "comforted by tears...
...No one knows better than Levi or Amery how the cultured man, who has only the resources of a secular culture, often exhibits timidity, fear, even collaboration with the enemy in situations of totalitarian extremity...
...8 See Tzvetan Todorov, Face a l'extreme (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1991), pp...
...So we are in the presence of a paradox when the moral intelligence retrospectively engages the events...
...It would violate the truth to homogenize the survivors of the Holocaust, even if they happen to be of the same philosophical persuasion...
...Dante's characters are given the "freedom" to relive their earthly pasts in imagination, a permanently recurrent Helldefying imagination...
...They "respect" the mystery of the monstrous evil that produced the Holocaust, but that is not where their focus is...
...This may be to state the case hyperbolically, because even in the most extreme totalitarian situations there is some porousness, some room for maneuver...
...Crucible" is an ironic concession to the murderers, for they thought of their monstrous project as an experiment...
...As in some Borges fable, the only completely decent "review" of the Warsaw Diary or of Eli Wiesel's Night would be to re-copy the book, line by line, pausing at the names of the dead and the names of the children as the orthodox scribe pauses, when re-copying the Bible, at the Hallowed name of God...
...The desire for justice turns into a desire for revenge, and the sense of justice disappears...
...Unless otherwise noted, all references are to this book...
...Terrence Des Pres has made a case for survival itself as a value in extremity...
...6 See Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 97...
...He strikes back because his dignity as a living being is at stake, and his dignity blocked the path of a radical skepticism that would put his moral convictions in doubt...
...There may be something misleading in the severity with which Amery exposes the fecklessness of the agnostic intellectual in the face of power...
...7 The passage becomes a sort of mantra (if we can speak in this way of the complexity and elaborateness of Levi's recollection), enabling him to defy the circumstances of his existence and sustain himself...
...In the presence of mystery all one can do is to submit or to rage...
...Yet he possesses what seems like an ideological conviction about reason that contrasts sharply with his portrait of the self-doubting intellectual...
...On this point my experience and my recollections diverge from Amery's...
...Writing or speech, not silence, becomes the medium of piety...
...The intellectual found himself betrayed by the very qualities that were virtues outside of the camp: rationality, the questioning and self-questioning spirit...
...The gray zone is a feature of the moral life everywhere, but it has particular poignancy in situations of extremity...
...In Ozick's case, the irresponsibility is compounded by the fact that we are not sure that Levi committed suicide (hence the quotation marks above) or, if he did, we do not know and should not presume to know what the reasons were, since there was no suicide note...
...The permanent value of Amery is that he dramatizes a real possibility, not an inevitability, that the world can be transformed into an extremity in which life itself becomes worthless: a realm of value has temporarily been expunged...
...Not without first politely inquiring whether I was an Israelite, the man tried to convince me that there was no longer any race hatred in his country...
...The resentment itself is a wound, one of the deepest that the rational man can suffer...
...Philosophies may authorize virtues, but they do not determine character...
...Toward the end of the essay on "Resentments," Amery writes: "Perhaps already tomorrow [resentment] will lead me to selfcondemnation, by having me see the moral desire for reversal as the half-brained chatter that it already is today for the rationally thinking know-it-alls...
...My human dignity lay in this punch to his jaw—and that it was in the end I, the physically much weaker man, who succumbed and was woefully thrashed, meant nothing to me...
...To suggest that the mere capacity for survival reflects moral integrity is to insult the countless admirable people who perished in the Holocaust...
...Amery survived the camps only to take his own life...
...The danger, as Levi points out, is not that Amery, the agnostic intellectual, will lose his soul to power, but that in his "courageous decision to leave the ivory tower and go down into the battlefield," he will be led "to positions of such severity and intransigence as to make him incapable of finding joy in life, indeed of living...
...Theodor Adorn° writes from a sense of the sanctity of the experience, its unspeakableness, when he declares the impossibility and immorality of any writing about the Holocaust...
...They are as severe with the pretensions of a moral reason that believes it can master the world as any anti-rationalist critic—without, however, abandoning the cause of moral reason...
...The communal imperative can, of course, become a tyranny...
...Levi draws a different conclusion in Survival: "that in the face of driving necessity and physical disabilities many social habits and instincts are reduced to silence...
...He never conceded rightness to power as did the agnostic intellectuals he describes, but in taking his own life he may have implied that there is no self-sustaining answer to that power...
...But one may understand the logic of suicide differently...
...And Amery, for all his grudging admiration for the believer who meets his fate with confidence, has no curiosity about "a religious grace that for me did not exist, or about an ideology whose errors and false conclusions I felt I had seen through...
...And what of their descendants...
...We often speak of these justifications as rationalizations...
...How do we account for the contradiction between the portrait of the intellectual that Amery presents and his own apparently disconfirming behavior...
...and trans...
...Like a religious mystery, it has been shrouded with taboos...
...Understanding the tormentor, Todorov argues with compassion for Levi, may not be the task of the survivor...
...She makes a metaphor of the trading of blows in characterizing the book as "one of the blows returned by a pen of fire...
...The most devastating effect of sadistic torture on his psyche is the loss of "trust in the world...
...To trade blows in the camps is to invite death...
...Absolute intellectual tolerance and the methodological doubting of the intellectual became factors in his auto-destruction...
...Part of our witness as readers is to contemplate the characters of Levi and Amery and to meditate critically on their understanding and self-understandings...
...I have no wish to minimize the enormity of the Holocaust or to trivialize it with false comparisons...
...His meditations are saturated with philosophical and literary culture...
...But I cannot escape the impression that those who insist on the Holocaust as the modern version of the divine mystery, sui generis and intransitive, may inadvertently mystify what can be understood 518 • DISSENT and explained...
...Memories of Dante were of "great value...
...By wanting to reverse history in order to produce the German revolution that never took place, he is asking for the impossible, and he knows it when he speaks of his "genuinely humane and absurd desire" (emphasis added...
...Historical memory is required if history is not to repeat itself, and historical memory means self-mistrust...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...Amery would insist that his belief in reason is free of the mystifications of religious faith and Marxist ideology...
...6 The aim of the camps is "to reduce us to beasts," says Levi...
...Goethe, Hegel, Sartre, Mann: they belong to the spiritual authority that makes us attend so closely to his writing...
...Not unless "review" signifies, as perhaps it should in these instances, a "seeing-again," over and over...
...No longer the objective writer who cultivates "magisterial equanimity, unaroused detachment," 9 Levi now releases his FALL • 1994 • 525 pent-up rage against his tormentors and writes "the bitterest of suicide notes...
...He describes sadism (the "philosophy" of the torturer) as the desire "to nullify this world" and "realize his own total sovereignty...
...It represents the moral sanity that the camps tried to and did extinguish...
...Levi does not evoke the images of horror and degradation in the poem, beings frozen in ice, buried in excrement, suffering the most excruciating pain and without the promise of an end...
...Doesn't justice demand the utmost rigor in condemning the trimmers as well as the torturers, the compromisers as well as those who inflicted cruelties...
...they're the author's responsibility...
...One should not confuse survival with integrity...
...Levi's suspension of judgment is not an exercise in self-indulgence...
...Social habits and instincts constitute the essence of our humanity...
...Resentment, according to Nietzsche, luxuriates in imaginary grievances...
...At this moment—I felt it with piercing clarity—it was up to me to go a step further in my prolonged appeals case against society...
...It is difficult to regard these questions as anything but rhetorical...
...It is for this reason that in Survival Levi is careful to note instances of persons who managed to preserve their integrity and decency, no matter how extreme conditions were: I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today...
...It does not provide the sense of solidarity that one discovers among believers and ideologues...
...Both Levi and Amery exhibit in their writing a combination of character, intelligence, learning, and eloquence that apparently survived the degradation of the camps...
...The German people bear no grudge against the Jewish people, he said...
...What he has in common with the resentful man is the futility of his passion...
...I was my body and nothing else: in hunger, in the blow that I suffered, in the blow that I dealt...
...The willingness to die, even to take one's life, may be preferable to survival...
...But a philosophy is an instrument of understanding, and the effect of Amery's and Levi's rationalism is to keep alive a kind of moral discourse in response to extremity that the Holocaust was supposed to have made impossible...
...The aims of life are the best defense against death: and not only in the Lager [camps...
...And one's humanity entails a capacity to "refuse consent," to resist the effort of the torturers to turn one into a beast...
...The Inferno could be the poem of the Holocaust, were it not for the fact that even in hell the image of the human is preserved...
...Levi had always managed to combine equanimity with a moral lucidity that knew when to judge and with what degree of severity and when to suspend judgment...
...that is how he was used to dealing with all the Jews under his command...
...Against the view expressed by Bruno Bettelheim and others that ideals justify life and that one should be prepared to die for a cause, Des Pres affirms the survivor's "code" that life justifies ideals...
...And please remember that we can't return articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Utopian constructions when realized may turn out to be communities of terror...
...the Holocaust has acquired the sanctity of deity and become the object of a kind of reverence...
...But the obvious "inadequacy" of the solutions may be the only alternative to the intolerable "demystification" of our humanity by the Holocaust...
...3 Jean Amery, At The Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans...
...By conceding the overwhelming power of the torturer over mind as well as body, he has apparently conceded victory to the torturer...
...As a moral philosopher, Amery knows well the risks of resentment, and he defends the emotion with full knowledge of the criticism...
...As survivors of the event, they feel compelled to represent and understand their responses both at the time of their incarceration and after their liberation...
...8 I don't mean to diminish the penetration and complexity of Amery's moral intelligence...
...But his imagination is powerfully shaped and determined by the experience of extremity as Levi's is not...
...So better silence than speech or, if speech is inescapable, it must always know its limitations and finally confess its impotence...
...Amery cannot abide what he perceives to be self-satisfaction and lack of remorse, though he FALL • 1994 • 521 feels miserable in contemplating himself as a "Shylock, demanding his pound of flesh...
...There is no greater intellectual and moral horror than contemporary efforts at Holocaust revisionism, which claim either that the enormity has been exaggerated or that it never took place...
...The sacredness of the event is often displaced to the words that try to represent it...
...In the face of death, in the habit of death, the frontier between culture and lack of culture disappeared...
...if there are "lapses," as in his anger toward apparently well-meaning Germans who write to explain themselves to him, they seem hardly to justify the notion that Levi is announcing his suicide...
...He would "avenge" himself on the country that bred these torturers by inducing self-mistrust in their descendants...
...In ordinary situations, persons who conduct their lives in the gray zone are often the object of contempt: their equivocations and compromises, their failure to choose or decide, find little justification in the world outside of themselves...
...and not so much for his material aid as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror, something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving...
...These lines come from an essay, "The Intellectual at Auschwitz," in Levi's posthumous collection of essays, The Drowned and The Saved...
...In the camp he becomes an unskilled laborer, who had to do his job in the open—which meant in most cases that the sentence was already passed on him...
...severity and intransigence [that Amery took, which made] him incapable of finding joy in life, indeed of living...
...The witness is not a generic character, indistinguishable from other witnesses...
...Without a trade or a craft, the intellectual was particularly vulnerable in his external situation...
...The effort of the camps is to reduce human beings to the level of sheer need in which choice or agency of any kind becomes virtually impossible...
...Perhaps because I was younger, perhaps because I was more ignorant than he, or less marked, or less conscious, I almost never had time to devote to death...
...Amery states that one no longer thought about whether one would die, an accepted fact, but rather about how: "There were discussions about the time necessary for the poison in the gas chambers to take effect...
...Such a view allows what Levi sardonically calls the experiment to define the human condition...
...But neither Amery nor Levi feels in any way attracted by the faiths that sustain others...
...The sadist posthumously accomplishes his task of annihilating the world...
...Until we know many of the words by heart (knowledge deeper than mind) and can repeat a few at the break of morning to remind ourselves that we live after...
...It is in The Drowned and The Saved that Levi rebukes, if that is the right word, Amery's self-destructive retaliatory impulses as the sign of someone preoccupied with death and remarks in contrast his own devotion to the aims of life...
...It is a sign of mystification when a doctrine or dogma fails to perceive its own limitations, when it simply substitutes itself for the world...
...Amery embraces the discredited doctrine of "collective guilt...
...Amery, the rationalist, concedes the possible irrationality of his view, but there is implicit criticism of a comfortable rationalism that provides no vent for moral indignation...
...What does he mean to accomplish with his resentment...
...For George Steiner, the ideal reading of books and documents of survivors is an uncritical reverential act: These books and the documents that have survived are not for "review...
...he is less interested in the range of intermediate behavior that occurs in what Levi calls the gray zone...
...Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent references are to this work...
...There is nothing imaginary in Amery's resentments...
...For Levi, the answer is not that man is "fundamentally brutal, egoistic and stupid in his conduct once every civilized institution is taken away, and that the prisoner is consequently nothing but a man without inhibitions...
...2 Primo Levi, The Drowned and The Saved, trans...
...What emerges in At the Mind's Limits and The Drowned and The Saved are the extraordinary characters of men who emerged from the crucible of the Holocaust...
...The logic of suicide can be resisted, as Levi resisted it in his writing, by an understanding of the world as not wholly defined by the extremity in which both Levi and Amery found themselves in the years of the Holocaust...
...indeed, his work breathes contempt for it...
...Their writings are characterized by an intellectual modesty that distinguishes them from the hubristic rationalism of the classical Enlightenment...
...There were speculations about the painfulness of death by phenol injection...
...Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans...
...How, one might ask, can one question a sense of extremity where the Holocaust is concerned...
...This reading of Levi seems to me misconceived, especially surprising coming from so acute a reader as Ozick...
...Like Dante's characters, Levi "proves" in his very being the inextinguishability of the human face...
...Without ever losing respect for the enormity of the event, without minimizing the suffering, their own suffering, they are singularly free of a kind of piety before the event that paralyzes understanding or leads to self-righteousness...
...Its main object is the German good conscience that seems to have accompanied the prosperity that has risen from the ashes of Germany's defeat...
...My body, debilitated and crusted with filth, was my calamity...
...It was Erich Auerbach, a refugee from Nazism, who revealed the extraordinary humanity of the condemned figures in Hell...
...Dante's Hell is, after all, the work of an imagination, that of Dante's God, which also conceived Purgatory and Paradise...
...Surely people reacted differently from one another, and their reactions proceeded from differences of character, some people behaving more admirably than others...
...My body, when it tensed to strike, was my physical and metaphysical dignity...
...Amery is driven by the emotion of resentment, Levi is not...
...Amery's resentment illuminates the Holocaust as a premature rational response does not...
...4 Amery doesn't think of rationalism as an ideology or a faith, but in fact it functions as one: to speak of a philosophia perennis is to declare a belief in a world that can be challenged by moral reason, if not constituted by it...
...We will not consider manuscripts submitted simultaneously to several publications...
...Use WordPerfect 5.1 if possible, and send us the disk...
...Such rigor should serve the most important distinction of all: that between tormentor and victim...
...I had many other things to keep me busy—finding a bit of bread, avoiding exhausting work, patching my shoes, stealing a broom, or interpreting the signs and faces around me...
...He recognizes the possible pathology of his feelings, but he does not wish to concede his case prematurely to the psychologists...
...They have no quarrel with God, because they never believed in him...
...To do so would deny them the differences that mark them as individuals...
...Camp life demanded above all bodily agility and physical courage that bordered on brutality," 3 and the intellectual generally proved to be inadequate to the demand...
...Torture, he asserts, devalues the world for the victim, so even if the victim survives, the torturer has accomplished his goal...
...Of course, Amery's resentments need to be distinguished from the Nietzschean conception...
...Their aim is to describe what occurred with the greatest accuracy and truthfulness...
...Courage and cowardice and all the virtues and vices are matters of character...
...Please use inclusive language so that we don't have to make adjustments during editing...
...But that is not all...
...The resentment accumulates, becoming, in Scheler's words, "an evil secretion in a sealed vessel, like prolonged impotence...
...Leslie Fiedler's ascertaining of the guilt of the Rosenbergs from their letters to one another strikes me as another such example...
...They elevated me in my own eyes and those of my interlocutor...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...The intellectual . . . who after the collapse of his initial inner resistance had recognized that what may not be, very well could be, who experienced the logic of the SS as a reality that proved itself by the hour, now took a few fateful steps further in his thinking...
...They exist irredeemably beyond the gray zone...
...But the fact remains that the camps effectively eliminate the conditions of moral life...
...But even if it is true that he shows an aggressiveness in the book not to be found in his previous work, the identification of that aggressiveness with the literal trading of blows in Amery confuses fact with metaphor...
...The moral intelligence can still engage the predicaments and dilemmas of the victim...
...In Levi's words, "actually the experience of the Lager with its frightful iniquity confirmed me in my nonbelief...
...Jean Améry, Radical Humanism, ed...
...Conversations like the one I had in 1958 with a Southern German businessman over breakfast in the hotel were enough...
...We know that Levi, like many other survivors, never overcame his guilt for having survived...
...Such efforts reflect the extremity against which Levi posed an exemplary humanism...
...For this reason, Levi's own death (we are no longer sure it was suicide) remains shrouded in mystery...
...dehumanization, not death, is the worst that can befall a human being, which is the reason why it is important to have an ideal of what it means to be human...
...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
...He wants what he calls the "unresolved conflict between victims and slaughterers [to be] externalized and actualized," though he never makes clear what externalization or actualization would entail...
...Resentment is an emotion compatible with suicide, as Levi himself remarks when he comments on "the positions of...
...by Stuart Woolf (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1976), p. 102...
...His blows will only betray his vulnerability to the superior strength of the other, and he knows it...
...Rational questioning turns upon itself, and the man of reason loses confidence in reason...
...This is a far cry from the logic of his generic intellectual who acquiesces in his own destruction because might makes right...
...Even Amery cannot disburden himself of the culture that proved so useless to him in the camps...
...They convinced me that my mind, although besieged by everyday necessities, had not ceased to function...
...In acknowledging the overwhelming power of the Holocaust, it declares its radical refusal to abide it, to live within it...
...Since skepticism of the radical kind teaches that there are no grounded natural rights or moral categories, power becomes its own justification...
...Amery seems immune to the temptations of power...
...No emotion is adequate to the enormity of the event that is the object of Amery's emotion...
...The Drowned and The Saved exhibits these qualities throughout...
...George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New York: Athenaeum, 1967), p. 168...
...It prevented, and still prevents FALL • 1994 • 519 me from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice...
...But the internal situation was even worse...
...I profess loyalty to enlightenment, specifically to the classical enlightenment—as a philosophia perennis that contains all of its own correctives, so that it is an idle game dialectically to dissect it...
...And I maintain that it was not the Enlightenment that failed, as we have been assured ever since the first wave of the romantic counterenlightenment, but rather those who were appointed its guardians...
...Both Amery and Levi apply to their experiences the "corrective" of the moral intelligence...
...Even apart from the extreme case of the Special Squads, often those of us who have returned, when we describe our vicissitudes, hear in response: "In your place I would not have lasted for a single day...
...The testimony of Levi and others should caution us against the perniciousness of recent efforts to deconstruct and demystify "the human" in the putative interest of truth...
...In Amery the sense of the pathos of the agnostic intellectual verges on contempt, one is tempted to say self-contempt...
...There is a kind of irresponsible reading of a text that invents from a merely literary interpretation a history that requires evidence of another sort...
...This statement does not have a precise meaning: one is never in another's place...
...He acknowledges the horror, but he is not quick to judge—or rather he is quick only to judge the terrible system that turns even its victims to the performance of monstrous tasks: Every human being possesses a reserve of strength whose extent is unknown to him, be it large, small, or nonexistent, and only through extreme adversity can we evaluate it...
...The occasion for the essay is a remarkable work of fellow survivor Jean Amery, At the Mind's Limits, in which Amery exposes the utter defenselessness of the agnostic intellectual...
...The camps are the ultimate machines of determinism...
...it erodes the distinction between victimizer and victim by accepting the view that the victim in his dehumanization is no better than the master race...
...The visceral nonideological character of his resentment has compelling power because of the unparalleled enormity of the Holocaust and the system that bred it...
...For them the question is: how is it possible to remain human in the grip of extremity...
...Amery does not consider the possible price of a deep and persistent self-mistrust in the "opposite camp," where it can turn into a destructive counter-resentment...
...This is the task of the witness...
...Levi remarks that the worst often survived, the worst being the cleverest, the most opportunistic, and the luckiest...
...Levi's work is, of course, pervasively influenced by the Holocaust, but his temperament does not have the same susceptibility to extremity...
...The uniqueness of the Holocaust precludes comparisons, and comparison is essential to discourse...
...To deliver blows in a book against a defeated but still dangerous enemy may be an affirmative, even life-affirming act...
...Unlike the intellectual, who on Amery's account becomes complicit in his own dehumanization when he acknowledges the "rightness" of the power of his torturers, the believer (whether Christian, Jewish, or Marxist) remains morally intact because, in Amery's words, he experiences himself as "part of a spiritual community that is interrupted nowhere, not even in Auschwitz...
...nor is it possible to foresee one's own behavior...
...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...The criticism is all the more telling in the contrast both Levi and Amery make between the fate of the agnostic and that of the believer...
...In fact, it is Amery's resentment that troubles Levi's response to him...
...He is a particular individual, with a particular cast of mind and capacity for feeling...
...There are also telling references to literature in Levi's effort to understand what occurred in the camps, as in his quotation of a passage from Measure for Measure, which provides him with an image of despotism: Dressed in a little brief authority Most ignorant of what he's most assured, His glassy essence, like an angry ape Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As makes the angels weep...
...As proof he cited his government's magnanimous policy of reparations, which was, incidentally, well appreciated by the young state of Israel...
...Amery and Levi, in their passionate commitment to moral reason (and their avoidance of matters of faith), speculate and invite us to speculate about the possibility of moral freedom...
...Therefore I ask that we meditate on the story of "the crematorium ravens" with pity and rigor, but that judgment of them be suspended...
...Amery of course knows the literature of and about resentment, but in what may appear to his readers an exercise in perversity, he affirms his own inextinguishable resentment and insists on its moral value...
...Purgatory and Paradise are inconceivable in the mind that produced the Holocaust...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...Suicide is the negation of survival...
...The targets of Amery's resentment are not only the criminals who committed monstrous and unpardonable crimes against humanity, but also a whole nation, which in its indifference or timidity or sheer cowardice or robotic obedience allowed these crimes to occur...
...No dot matrix submissions, please...
...Levi also reminds us of the limits of humanism...
...The testimony survives, and it tells us that the moral vulnerability of the agnostic intellectual, the person of culture, is not absolute...
...A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your manuscript...
...He describes an episode in which he traded blows with a torturer, knowing that he would only suffer more blows, because it was the only way that he could preserve his dignity: In Auschwitz he once hit me in the face because of a trifle...
...The peril to be avoided at all cost is that understanding the powerful determinism that defined the camps will lead us to excuse the behavior of those who ran them...
...if we so wish, and we do so wish, we can destroy not only your bodies but also your souls, just as we have destroyed ours...
...Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 142...
...The wound inflicted will not heal with time...
...For them any faith seems to be a delusion in the face of the evil they experienced in the concentration camp...
...They made it possible for me to reestablish a link with the past, saving it from oblivion and reinforcing my identity...
...But the radical reduction in the possibility of action, the extremity of suffering, the lack of time for reflection, the continuous state of emergency: all these must produce in people who view the events from the comfort of ordinary life pity rather than judgment...
...The sense of outrage that greeted Hannah Arendt's thesis about the banality of evil can in part be explained by the feeling that she had violated the mystery in translating the experience into the quotidian...
...THE EDITORS 0 FALL • 1994 • 527...
Vol. 41 • September 1994 • No. 4
