Contingency and the Limits of History by Liane Carlson

Author:Liane Carlson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

THE SELF AS HOME

In 1935, two years after Minkowski published Les Temps Vécu to an indifferent public, Améry, or Hans Mayer, as he was called then, sat in a Vienna café reading his death sentence in a newspaper. That, at least, is how he recounted that afternoon in later years when he wrote, “I do not believe that I am inadmissibly projecting Auschwitz and the Final Solution back to 1935 when I advance these thoughts today.… To be a Jew, that meant for me, from this moment on, to be a dead man on leave, someone to be murdered, who only by chance [nur durch Zufall] was not yet where he properly belonged.”30 In the end, it would be Améry’s own hand that would end his life in 1978, twelve years after his radio broadcasts and essays about his experience in Auschwitz lifted him out of obscurity, but, for as long as he lived, Améry remained insistent that his vulnerability, his exile, the sense of statelessness within his own skin that made his death inevitable, began that day in Vienna.

What changed that day was not only Améry’s sense of security or faith in the stability of the world, or even his assumption that his bodily autonomy would remain unviolated, though those beliefs would be stripped away in the years to come. Rather, I suggest in the following pages, the sense of foreboding and estrangement he felt that day marked the beginning of an impoverishment in his relationship to places that ended in his torture. This confluence of place and torture is not a coincidence. To Améry, driven from his country, home and exile would be the defining categories of his life.31 Even his torture would be felt as a shrinkage of safe space, as the circle of the familiar contracted and transformed his body into the last place he could call his own in an increasingly impoverished and hostile world.

None of what I just described—the slow constriction of place, imprisonment, torture, rise to fame—seemed at all likely at Améry’s birth in a small Austrian village in 1912. He was born into a nearly entirely assimilated Jewish family to a schoolteacher and soldier. As he would write in later years about his upbringing in his collection of essays, translated as At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities:

I see myself as a boy at Christmas, plodding through a snow-covered village to midnight mass; I don’t see myself in a synagogue. I hear my mother appealing to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph when a minor household misfortune occurred; I hear no adjuration of the Lord in Hebrew. The picture of my father—whom I hardly knew, since he remained where his Kaiser had sent him and his fatherland deemed him to be in the safest care—did not show me a bearded Jewish sage, but rather a Tyrolean Imperial Rifleman in the uniform of the First World War.32

Améry encountered antisemitism in his upbringing, but did not think much about it

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