9 ideas
In July 1943 the Gestapo arrested Améry in Belgium for distributing anti-Nazi resistance leaflets and took him to Fort Breendonk. There his hands were shackled behind his back and he was hoisted by a chain until his shoulders dislocated, while he was beaten and questioned about accomplices he did not know. The episode is the concrete basis for his account of what torture does to a person.
Everyday life rests on the tacit certainty that others will respect one's physical boundaries and that someone will come to help if they do not. Améry argues this certainty is destroyed with the first blow. Once destroyed, it can never be fully rebuilt, so 'whoever was tortured, stays tortured.'
Under torture the victim becomes entirely body. Pain collapses the person into physical existence, cancelling thought, identity and future. Meanwhile the torturer experiences sovereign power by negating another human being, which is why Améry treats torture as the essence of the Nazi regime rather than an accident of it.
In Auschwitz, a mind trained in philosophy and literature gave the prisoner no protection. It could not refute the camp's brutal reality, which simply outweighed every abstract idea, and it made him more isolated from fellow inmates. Its skepticism dissolved the very convictions that might have sustained him.
Améry observed that religious believers and committed Marxists bore the camp better than the unaffiliated intellectual. Their faith placed the suffering inside a larger order that outlasted the present moment. The price was that they were no longer fully present in the world as it was, and he both envied that anchor and could not accept it.
In Auschwitz, a Polish criminal prisoner-foreman named Juszek hit Améry in the face. Améry punched him back and was then beaten far worse. He nonetheless felt he had reclaimed his dignity, arguing that for the persecuted, dignity became real in the physical act of counter-violence against those who denied it.
Home is the place where one reads signs, faces, dialect and customs without effort, and that fluency is the foundation of security. Exile takes this away, and it cannot be replaced later because it is formed in childhood. It was doubly lost when Améry's mother tongue and native Austria became the language and land of his persecutors, and his conclusion was that 'one must have a home in order not to need it.'
Améry defends resentment as a morally valid refusal, not a sickness to be treated. The victim declines to let natural time heal the crime, because forgiving and forgetting would let the perpetrators and bystanders settle the account at the victim's expense. Resentment insists that the wrong be recognized and that the perpetrator come to share the victim's wish that the deed be undone.
Améry grew up an assimilated Austrian with no Jewish religion, language or tradition. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and later the Auschwitz number on his forearm made him a Jew by a verdict of the world. He called this the necessity and impossibility of being a Jew: he could not claim the identity's positive content, yet had to accept it through solidarity with everyone threatened.