Jean Améry and the time of resentment

Abstract

The article provides a close reading of Jean Améry’s essay, ‘Resentments’ from the perspective of temporality. Although firmly grounded in a specific historical and political context (Améry, a Holocaust survivor, reflects on the aftermath of his experiences during the war), I argue that this essay offers valuable insights into Améry’s philosophy of temporality. After establishing the context and structure of Améry’s ‘Resentments’, the article delves into a discussion of the temporal aspects found in the text: (1) Delay: the emergence of resentments and their connection to trauma. (2) Eternal Recurrence: Améry’s critique of Nietzsche, along with surprising interconnections between their ideas. (3) Natural Time and Forgiveness: Améry’s critique of the temporal structure of forgiveness and the morally questionable prioritization of the future over the past. (4) Moral Time and the Irreversible: the distorted temporal structure of resentments, and Améry’s thought-provoking exploration of the phantasy of time’s reversibility. (5) The Future: Améry’s direct address to the young Germans and his unexpected suggestion on how they should treat their past and history, emphasizing responsibility rather than blame, as the key their past provides for the possibility of their future.

Introduction

‘It was over for a while’, wrote Jean Améry in 1966, ‘It still is not over. Twenty-two years later I am still dangling over the ground by dislocated arms, panting, and accusing myself. In such an instance there is no “repression.” Does one repress an unsightly birthmark? One can have it removed by a plastic surgeon, but the skin that is transplanted in its place is not the skin with which one feels naturally at ease’ (ML, 36). ¹ After his release from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, Améry returned to his prior life as a journalist and essayist, married, won several literary prizes and even helped efforts organized by volunteers to collect used children’s clothes to be sent to impoverished Germany (R, 65 [123]). ² For more than 20 years he carried his birthmark in silence. He did not speak or write about his horrible experiences in the camps, the terrible hunger and loss of trust, or the cruel Nazi ‘torturer specialist’ Praust, who was responsible for his beating up to the point when he lost consciousness. But Améry never forgot, and he never forgave. During these two decades of silence, Améry, in his own words, had ‘been in search of the time that was impossible to lose’ Then, ‘suddenly everything demanded telling’ (ML, xiii).

We can explain his period of long speechlessness in terms of trauma, of the difficulty of facing what cannot be experienced but did indeed happen. We could say that Améry could not cope with and work-through his terrible and unbearable memories, or even, that his silence was a form of avoidance or inhibition that served as a defence mechanism against the pain of remembering. But for Améry, the point lies elsewhere. It is not about himself and his own irreparable soul, that of a victim too damaged to confront his memories. The decision to write after his long silence was, rather and perhaps surprisingly, a resolution that had to do with the world itself or more accurately, with what had become of it with the passage of time. It was a decision to face this world that had, in time and one might say in haste, moved forward, with a disturbing mixture of forgetfulness and indifference. This moving-forward, forgetting and in some cases also forgiving, was for Améry a critical juncture, the moment in which he had to – finally – speak. But to speak, for Améry, was to sustain – not abandon or even soften – the resentments he felt. Améry is not trying to ‘overcome’ the trauma by speaking about it (indeed, he writes from the very beginning that he is a man who was already and irreparably overcome by it), nor does he want to argue for a collective guilt on part of the Germans. His aim is, rather, to present his readers with a point of view that might at first seem counter-intuitive. Améry defends resentments. It is only the logic of resentments with which one can face the world, can make sense and can provide him with a truthful and honest, even if uncomfortable, stance to take. This is a personal stance: the victim – and only the victim – has access to the sole genuine moral compass: ‘Only I possessed, and still possess, the moral truth of the blows that even today roar in my skull, and for that reason I am more entitled to judge’ (R, 70 [131]). Améry’s intention is not to convince, he rather throws his words blindly ‘onto the scale, whatever it may weigh’ (R, 72 [134]). This ‘weigh’ turns out to be nothing less than a radical suggestion that resentments should be viewed as moral rather than a pathology or weakness.

‘Resentments’ is the fourth essay in Améry’s At the Mind’s Limits [Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne], published in 1966. In the five chapters of this book, Améry gives an account of his experiences during the war which had remained for him unchanged over the years, as if frozen in time. He speaks about life in the camps, his experience of torture, the loss of his homeland and its implications, his complex relationship with his Jewish identity (for him both a ‘necessity’ and an ‘impossibility’) and finally, what I will devote the rest of the article to, a description and, more crucially, a defence of the resentments he feels towards his perpetrators. Although he planned an essayistic study in which he would completely avoid using the word ‘I’, while writing he realized that the first-person voice is the only possible starting point for his discussion (ML, xiii). The result is a unique combination of a personal confession and a philosophical meditation, a text he describes in a letter as what can only be written ‘in complete honesty, or not written at all’. ³ This is probably Améry’s most discussed text in the secondary literature, and has received much scholarly attention mainly due to its philosophical weigh and its relevance to contemporary historical issues related to questions of reconciliation, forgiveness and the possible value of resentments. Although to my mind this is a very personal text, perhaps the most personal in the book, it is true that Améry’s philosophical framing of the problem of resentments extends a generous invitation for interpretation. Owing to the abundance of interpretations of the text, I allow myself to focus on my own point of entry into it.

‘Resentments’ exemplifies what I take to be the nexus of Améry’s work as a whole: his unique conception of temporality. In all of Améry’s texts (including those on old age and suicide, philosophy, politics and film), there is a clear backbone of temporality and an exhaustive examination of the different forms in which we experience time and conceive it philosophically. Instead of proclaiming the unity or unifying effect of time, which he associates with the biological, natural flow of time that we traditionally perceive as a source of consolation and a promise of a future to come, Améry insists on emphasizing the temporal configurations that are all governed by distorted, fissured structures, which lack continuity and succession providing us only with an excruciating circularity.

My emphasis on Améry’s conception of temporality unites the two dominant interpretative orientations of his work, often conceived of as mutually exclusive. The first perspective aligns with holocaust studies and research on trauma, where ‘Resentments’ is read from the standpoint of Améry’s autobiography, his experiences in the camps, torture and exile. This approach emphasizes his unique writing style combining personal yet distanced prose. These scholarly works usually adopt an interpretative perspectives in which Améry stands as an exemplary case of autobiographical writing by a traumatized survivor whose writings are not only confessional, but also harbour important theoretical, psychological, political and moral implications, regarding resentment as an exemplary moral emotion. ⁴ .

The second interpretative orientation takes a more philosophical perspective, from which Améry’s essay is read as a rigorous moral account or defence of resentments, its relation to justice, revenge and the impossibility of forgiveness or reconciliation, considered philosophically and not psychologically. Another hallmark of the philosophical readings of Améry is the tendency to consider him together with other philosophical figures, elucidating his work by way of its affinities, or sometimes oppositions to other philosophers, in the case of ‘Resentments’ this is usually Nietzsche. ⁵

By focussing on temporality in my reading of ‘Resentments’ I bring the two aforementioned interpretative orientations together and aim not to overlook the autobiographical and personal realm, but at the same time, to extract from it its philosophical significance. In what follows, I will spotlight the temporal aspects and models found in ‘Resentments’, emphasizing the different ways in which Améry illuminates the ‘mad’, twisted and dis-ordered time of resentments. I will therefore structure the text around the following temporal structures: delay, eternal recurrence, natural time and forgiveness, moral time and the irreversible, and finally, the future.

Delay

‘Resentments’ begins with an intriguing description of a delay. This is, however, not a simple putting-off or postponing of what Améry knew he had to speak of. It is not the kind of hindering that can be ascribed to the difficulty to confront traumatic events, a form of repression where the defence mechanism forces the trauma to remain harboured and protected within. Améry describes a delay of a very specific structure, one that emerges suddenly and in a single moment, almost in a flash, and is pertinent to his relationship with the world around him from that point onwards.

In the years after the war, Améry reports, he felt himself to be relatively ‘at ease’. As much as this phrasing might sound inappropriate, Améry does not ascribe this feeling to an overcoming of his traumatic experiences during the war (nowhere is such an overcoming to be found throughout his works), but rather, to a fundamental feeling of right-mindedness and an equivocal stability of his identity. He felt tolerably intact, describing a stable, almost sensible and realistic attitude that had to do not so much with his relation to his past experiences and memories, as it was associated with the way he found himself in the world and in its solidarity with him. In a tone that is scarcely found elsewhere in his writings, Améry feels himself ‘seen’ by the world: despite the clear allusion to himself as a ‘resurrected’ and a skeleton that was revived with American corned beef cans; he was also treated as a ‘hero’. Germany was then perceived by the world (and not only by its victims), as an object of hate that crystalized into contempt, and was regarded as a land that should ‘live, but no more than that’ (R, 65 [122]). The collective guilt that was insinuated in these views was not entirely accepted by Améry but he confesses he didn’t mind it especially: ‘Let collective crime and collective guilt balance each other and produce the equilibrium of world morality [mochten sich die Waage halten und das Gleichgewicht der Weltsittlichkeit herstellen]’ (R, 65 [122-123]), he wrote. For a desperately short while and for the first time in his life, Améry was exactly what he was (R, 64 [122]): in tune [gestimmt] with public opinion (R, 65 [123]) and feeling a ‘mutual understanding’ [im wechselseitigen Einverständnis] between himself and the rest of the world (R, 64 [122]). This feeling of accord and agreement preserved Améry in a state devoid of resentments: there was no possibility nor reason for it. This euphoria, however, did not last long.

Améry’s transformation occurred on a train. It occurs in a mundane and almost marginal moment: he is riding the train, picks up a random newspaper and browses through it almost absentmindedly, when he finds a letter to the editor, written by an anonymous German. Three lines of this letter are enough to completely transform Améry’s feeling of safety and stability into sheer anger and a complete absence of absolution: ‘Germany will become great and powerful again. Hit the road, you crooks’, the man wrote in the letter. To Améry, these words sounded like a complete discord. ‘I heard a German voice that sounded different from the way I believed it was obliged to sound for a long time to come: remorseful’ (R, 66 [124]). The acoustic metaphor is important here: from a state of harmony with the world, he is thrust into a cacophony. Instead of remorse, there is complaint. Rather than being a gradual process, the transition from harmony to dissonance is immediate, almost abrupt. This moment on the train has, moreover, something counter-intuitive to it: the trigger for the discord and in turn, for the emergence of Améry’s resentments, does not stem from his own, secluded and tormented self or lies in the relationship with his past. Instead, it arises from the recasting of his relationship with the world, a world that was until that moment in complete agreement with him and is now suddenly exposed in its utter foreignness. Furthermore, what we would perhaps expect to be the object of his resentments – namely, the German atrocities during the war – is replaced by the world that has, in time, learned to accept them. To put it in temporal terms: Améry’s resentments are generated not by his past but by his present; not by the German wrongdoers, but by his contemporaneous world. ⁶

The letter exposed in a brutal light that instead of taking responsibility for their crimes, the Germans perceived themselves as victims who (also) suffered in the battlefield, whose houses were (also) bombed and were themselves unfairly blamed for it in what, as Améry describes it, was a war that dismembered their country. Not only have the Germans cast themselves as victims, struggling to overcome their own traumas, but they also ‘bear no grudge against the Jewish people’ (R, 67 [125]), as one friendly businessman told Améry over breakfast. This is what W. G. Sebald described as a ‘conspiracy of silence’. ⁷ But even more than Germany itself, it was the world itself that sought to move forward, to overcome and leave the atrocities of the past behind. For Améry, this dissonance is not so much a problem of justice or even fairness; it is a question of identity: his own as well as Germany’s. The harmony he felt with the world in the beginning of the text is transformed into a dissonance, where one musical note stands out, just like Améry’s own ‘raised finger’ in the ‘midst of the world’s silence’ (R, 78 [143]). This stands not only on the background of his converted enemies, but also in relation to his fellow victims, who are now, like the rest of the world, rushing towards forgiveness or reconciliation.

Améry expounds on his experience of dissonance as follows: ‘I thought that I was right in the middle of contemporary reality and was already thrown back onto an illusion [Ich wahnte mich mitten in der Wirklichkeit der Zeit und war schon zuruckgeworfen auf eine Illusion]’ (R, 66 [123–124])]. It is significant to linger on the German original here. Améry’s use of ‘wähnen’ does not refer merely to having one opinion or another (about one’s whereabout, in a wide sense) but is strongly linked to knowing something for certain, to be sure about it. In that sense, Améry’s feeling of being in accord with the world was simultaneously a feeling of safety and belonging, and not only a confidence related to factual knowledge. The continuation of the sentence is crucial: this feeling of safety is associated here with the ‘reality of time’ – Wirklichkeit der Zeit – namely, what Améry takes to be here the true nature of time, in the sense of being in tune with it, finding oneself in it. But it is also pertinent to the fact that this ‘being true’ is transparent, almost intangible, until it is suddenly cracked open, for instance, when reading a letter in an arbitrary newspaper on a train. Again, there is no gradual process here, but rather, a sudden coup in which one finds himself at the edge of a terrifying open abyss. This is similar to the way in which the delay of resentments is only revealed to us when it is already in its full blossom, when it’s too late to go back. ⁸

In the second part of the sentence, Améry makes clear what is for him the contrast of the truth of time: illusion, and more precisely, being thrown from the safety of being in accord with time, to the illusion of being completely outside of it, distorted in and with it, finding out too late that he can no longer unfetter himself from the grip of time’s convulsion. What will become the signature of this essay – the distorted structure of time – appears already here, at the essay’s very beginning. In the midst of the feeling of safety and accord, Améry suddenly finds himself confined by an illusion with which he was duped for 20 years, unable to grasp the true workings of the political ‘world clock’ in yet another temporal metaphor (and not ‘political winds’ as the English translation has it) [Was die politisdie Weltuhr wirklich geschlagen hatte], whose ticking marks the dissonance of the future to come (R, 65 [123]). It is now that the mask is torn open and, like a Russian doll, a new trap is divulged: without him noticing it, the world has already begun to move forward, while he was left behind, no longer synched, stuck in the muddy ground of his past, that now served as the fertile soil for the cultivation of his resentments. This sets the stage for the transformation of harmony into the monstrosity of time that will continue to occupy the rest of the essay.

Eternal recurrence

We are accustomed to think of resentments through a critical lens. Resentments trap us in their own circular, repetitive movement, enclosing us in a continuum from which there is no escape. We are, in effect, trapped in time, or in one of its segments that keeps recurring. Resentments have a way of locking us in the confines of our own affliction, that has long transcended the pain of the specific wrongdoing and was transformed into a general and all-encompassing feeling of rage that has no way out. When we are resentful, we become bitter, spiteful and obsessed with the past wrong that was inflicted on us, forever consumed by the tormenting imbalance between the crime and the complete absence of punishment. Resentment is, however, not a feeling identical to rage at utter injustice, nor does it lead to acts of vengeance or retribution. This is one of the reasons we resent resentments: they are passive, reactive and poisonous. The explicit origin of this reactive characterization of resentments is Friedrich Nietzsche. ⁹

Améry indeed presents his account of resentments on the background of Nietzsche and within an explicit polemic with the latter’s ideas. Following Nietzsche, Améry uses the French ressentiment in order to differentiate it from resentment. Nietzsche condemns ressentiment for its utter reactivity and passivity. In the Genealogy of Morals, to take one prominent example, he identifies the origins of the imaginary ‘slave revolt’ in the inability to act, or more explicitly, to actively avenge. Instead of executing their anger and feeling of injustice, the weak and passive choose resentments. They might imagine revenge, he explains, but never dare to execute it. ¹⁰ It is for this reason, that for Nietzsche resentment becomes such a central emotion, one that forms the strong basis, as well as dangerous whirlpool, of herd-morality. The weak choose reactivity over activity and believe that everyone have to be enslaved equally, or equally suffer the same injustices society imposes on them. They are therefore, according to Nietzsche, able to constitute their identity and moral virtue only by negating the other, and never by affirming themselves. Slave morality is hence an embodiment of every possible negation of life, activity and self-affirmation. Conversely, the capacity to forget and ‘let go’ are signs of health and often of nobility. ¹¹

Contrary to Nietzsche, Améry defends his resentments passionately. He describes himself, with a somewhat ironic and bitter tone, as holding slave morality, or a ‘morality of losers’ as he puts it, however for him, this is no weakness but rather the only possible moral choice (R, 81 [148]). For Améry, resentments stand at the centre of morality as such and are, as Heyd puts it, ‘the authentic indication of honesty and moral integrity, the true sign of personal non-conformity and power to escape the herd’. ¹² They stand for the only possible moral stance, one which does not surrender to the life-force of forgiveness or overcoming (which in Nietzsche go together with the ‘overman’) and courageously faces the suffering induced by evil, without ever turning away from it. Améry’s relation to Nietzsche, however, does not begin and end with his explicit critique in ‘Resentments’. Although he is very critical of what he takes to be Nietzsche’s binary and flat view, he nevertheless keeps an open discussion with him and refers to him several times in the text, including the wonderful sentence ‘the man who dreamed of the synthesis of the brute with the superman must be answered by those who witnessed the union of the brute and the superman’ (R, 68 [127]). ¹³ One of the most interesting examples of the surprising rapport between the two thinkers is found in Nietzsche’s image of the ‘eternal recurrence’. Interestingly enough and despite the obvious scholarly interest in the relationship between the two thinkers, the existing literature about it does not address this image, whose significance to the understanding of Améry’s position is no less important than the discussion of ressentiment in the Genealogy, especially insofar as temporality is concerned.

Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘eternal recurrence’ embodies one of his boldest attempts to present the strength inherent to self-affirmation and its essential connection with the undermining of any possibility of a Theodicy. At the end of The Gay Science, Nietzsche famously describes a thought-experiment, narrated using a second-person voice, addressed to ‘you’, namely, the reader. In this experiment, a demon appears and poses the question of the possibility that ‘this life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence […] The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’. ¹⁴ How would we answer? Nietzsche asks. Would we accept the ever-recurrence of this life with every pain and joy in it, or would we throw ourselves down and curse the demon for posing such a question? Nietzsche then refers the unimaginable strength entailed in accepting the demon’s test which he describes as a ‘tremendous moment’ whose absolute acceptance is on the one hand divine, yet on the other, will also ‘transform and possibly crush you’. ¹⁵

It is here that the connection between Nietzsche’s thought-experiment and Améry’s account of resentments becomes clear. Despite his explicit critique of Nietzsche’s ressentiment, the latter’s eternal recurrence comes very close to Améry’s being captured in the eternal recurrence of resentments. In what is similar to the temporal structure of trauma, life – and in Améry’s case, one stretch of life – returns and recurs again and again. There is no way out, and this eternal recurrence indeed and most clearly, ‘crushes’ Améry. As much as for Nietzsche ressentiments are exemplary of weakness, the acceptance of the demon’s proposition is a moment of unmatched strength. In Améry, interestingly, the two converge. The insistence to defend his resentments embodies the moral strength and truth he finds in them, and in them alone. With this he comes exceedingly close to Nietzsche: for both, the trap of eternal recurrence is one we take (or should take) upon ourselves actively, it is an act of strength and self-affirmation. For both Améry and Nietzsche, the choice to embrace the demon’s challenge is a mark of the highest form of morality, one that demands us of a high price but is at the same time integral to the only proper life to live. In an uncanny mirror image, Améry is caught in precisely this movement of recurrence, however, unlike Nietzsche's perspective of strength and affirmation, Améry’s experience is one of terrible, recurring and unending suffering. ¹⁶ There is, however, one important difference. As Susan Neiman has shown, there is something essentially pre-Holocaust in Nietzsche’s experiment: after Auschwitz, such a demand can no longer be posed, let alone accepted. ¹⁷ To this I add, that in Améry’s case, the continuous experience of wrongdoing must be considered in the context of evil as thereby, of others. In Nietzsche’s case, the discussion is, more confined, and has to do with an enclosed space between man and himself. ¹⁸

Natural time and forgiveness

On the background of this customary view of resentments (shaped strongly by Nietzsche’s account), forgiveness and reconciliation are typically regarded as the nobler and more virtuous reactions to a wrongdoing. Forgiveness implies the ability to overcome, not allowing the event and the perpetrator to dominate our lives and memories. If the Nietzschean eternal recurrence is an expression of the affirmation of the individual, then forgiveness marks an affirmation of a somewhat different kind: that of society and the belief in its system of justice and its ability to leave the past behind and move toward the hope inherent in the future. Viewed this way, forgiveness has to do with the ‘natural’ flow of time that we believe will heal our wounds and dull the pain we feel. But more than it involves the perpetrators to whom our forgiveness is granted, forgiveness is a way to do good to ourselves: those forgiving turn their backs to the past and choose to give priority to the future’s open-endedness rather than to the impasse of the past (R, 69 [129]). Bishop Joseph Butler was the first to explicitly link resentment (and revenge) to forgiveness, and his work remains a foundational reference in all subsequent discussions of this relationship. In his sermons, he contextualizes the discussion within the fundamental imperfection of the world (in this sense, his discourse is much wider than Améry’s) and presents various human responses to these imperfections, with reconciliation being his ultimate goal. In an imperfect world filled with wrongdoings and suffering, Butler argues that man must find a way to reconcile with it. While resentment might seem constructive or even reasonable at times, it is forgiveness and reconciliation that one should strive for. ¹⁹

In this context, Améry defines forgiveness, and with it the future, as the most ‘genuine human dimension’ (R, 68 [128]), that we usually treat not simply as a temporal indication but more importantly (and problematically) a matter of value: ‘Future is obviously a value concept [Wertbegriff]. What will be tomorrow is more valuable than what was yesterday. That is how the natural feeling for time will have it’ (R, 76 [139]). But Améry importantly, deems forgiveness to be immoral. This is the critical point: the human dimension, the natural perspective that casts its eye on the future and the value of potential, rather than that of past destruction, stands in stark contrast to what Améry takes to be the only possible moral stance (R, 72 [133]). Resentment is so invested in the past, that the future appears completely blocked to it (R, 68 [128]). It is unable to turn away from it and is fixed on past injustices so strongly that it was as if it takes itself completely out of time, or its time-sense [Zeitgefühl] is ‘twisted around, dis-ordered’ [verdreht, ver-rückt] (R, 68 [128]). Resentments lead us into a trap: If what is genuinely human is the future, then resentments are inhuman. Conversely, if, according to Améry, resentment is the only possible moral justifiable stance, then the only reasonable (yet inherently paradoxical) conclusion is that being human and being moral are not concomitant.

Améry uses an exceedingly critical, even scornful tone when speaking of those who believe in the natural power of the time’s passage, a view modelled on two different yet corresponding conceptions. The first is the physiological processes at work when wounds heal. In this model, we should allow ‘what happened to remain what it was’, not intervene with the natural flow of time, and go by the saying that time heals all wounds (R, 71 [132]). The second model is the social logic of time, that according to Améry, puts the future, progress, overcoming the past and leaving wrongdoing behind, at its main focus. Those who go by such logic, are quick to forgive and they do so ‘lazily and cheaply’, subjugating themselves to social logic thereby conceiving themselves not as individuals, but rather, as mere functions of the social structure. According to Améry, society elevates the goal of its continued existence over all other values, and is ‘occupied merely with safeguarding itself and could not care less about a life that has been damaged. At the very best, it looks forward, so that such things don't happen again’ (R, 70 [131]). Améry’s description of those who waive their own identity for such common interests is far from gracious. They are insensitive, indifferent, dissolve their individual identity and incorporate themselves, in the moral sense, into the consensus of society (R, 70-71 [131]). Their sentiment that time heals all wounds, is completely oblivious to the cost of such healing. Their character is not extramoral but ‘antimoral’ [widermoralischen], he writes (R, 72 [133]). To say, as they do, that ‘what happened, happened’, is for Améry hostile to morals as well as to the intellect (R, 72 [133]).

Améry’s own view marks the complete opposite. First, one should not only doubt and challenge the logic of the healing power of natural time, but also actively stop such processes. Second, in the context of his critique of social time, man has ‘the right and the privilege to declare himself to be in disagreement with every natural occurrence, including the biological healing that time brings about’ (R, 72 [133]). In other words, human beings are distinguished precisely by their ability to struggle against the passing of time; resentments mark the tenacious yet hopeless revolt against time’s passage and its natural, corrective effects (R, 72 [133]). It is the most desperate, but at the same time, most human form of revolt, one that provides a gloomy mirror image of my previous claim about the impossibility of concomitant between the moral and human. Hopeless revolt (or ‘revolt and resignation’, to borrow the sub-title of Améry’s book on ageing) is revealed to be the only way in which we can be human and moral at the same time. Those who believe in the natural and social model of temporality do not possess his obsessive and consuming, dis-ordered feeling of time. Theirs is straight and obeys a certain reality-principle; his is twisted and distorted. Theirs is natural, his is moral.

Although Améry's argument regarding natural and moral time is one of the most relevant aspects of my examination of his conception of time, his discussion of forgiveness remains undeniably constrained and lacks depth. Most importantly, the binary structure Améry sets up between resentment and forgiveness, can be misleading. It is not only resentment, but forgiveness too, that remains anchored to the past, deeply immersed in it. In both cases, there exists a desire to turn back time, an aspiration that is evidently unrealistic. Thus, it would be inaccurate to simply position forgiveness as a forward-looking stance toward a clean-slate future or being invested in potential rather than impossibility. Those who choose to forgive, do not wipe out the past for the sake of their future, as Améry portrays them. Instead, they wholeheartedly acknowledge the irreversibility of the past and choose to master their own response to it. Améry fails to recognize forgiveness too, shares a sense of respect for the past. ²⁰

Améry's argument centers not so much on the impossibility to forgive, but rather on the moral importance of the refusal to do so. Such refusal is a strong moral stance, entailing a willingness to pay the highest possible price and to live in a twisted, dis-ordered time, out of time as we know it. It is important to note that Améry’s resolute struggle with what he calls natural time in favour of the moral time of resentment, is not an attempt to overcome suffering. On the contrary, he insists that we safeguard suffering’s negative effects and cling to them so as to sustain a deep commitment to a past time that cannot and should not be forgotten. He focuses on the essential role of the individual’s voice, a voice that should be praised rather than criticized or simply tainted as pathological. As Brudholm puts it, the voice is heard ‘when moral repair fails to come about and when the voicing of resistance invites demonizing and pathologizing social responses’, and is therefore not only legitimate but also an expression of a dignified response to evil or wrongdoing that were not met with our expectations of justice. ²¹ Those filled with resentments are not only moral, but also experience temporality entirely differently than others: resentments cause time to cease being only of a biological or social sense (that of progress, hope and healing), and time is, instead, moved into the moral sphere.

Moral time and the irreversible

Améry offers a strong, gripping alternative to the weaknesses and moral difficulties inherent in natural and social time. He designates his alternative ‘moral time’ and characterizes it as follows:

[I]t did not escape me that ressentiment is not only an unnatural but also a logically inconsistent condition [Zustand]. It nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past [Es nagelt jeden von uns fest ans Kreuz seiner zerstorten Vergangenheit]. Absurdly, it demands that the irreversible be turned around, that the event be undone [das Irreversible solle umgekehrt, das Ereignis unereignet gemacht werden]. Resentment blocks the exit to the genuine human dimension, the future. I know that the time-sense [Zeitgefuhl] of the person trapped in resentment is twisted around, dis-ordered [verdreht, ver-rückt], if you wish, for it desires two impossible things [zweifach Unmoglichen]: regression into the past and nullification of what happened [dem Rückgang ins Abgelebte und der Aufhebung dessen, was geschah]. (R, 68 [128]).

In this passage, that Brudholm describes as one of the essay's most cryptic yet significant moments, Améry provides a detailed explanation of the exact existential state of being consumed by resentments. The resentful man is fastened to his past, trapped in the ever-recurring circle of the pain of what has been. This represents a unique sense of time, one that demands two essential impossibilities: first, a regression into to the past, and second, the complete annulment of what happened, that is, a complete overturning of time. ²² Améry does not deny the essential absurdity of his claim, on the contrary, he insists on it, and thereby stands firm in his demand for the moral truth of the conflict in which, as Sebald puts it, Améry ‘finds himself is to be seen not in any readiness for reconciliation but in the unremitting denunciation of injustice’. ²³

The importance of the passage lies not only in the forceful metaphor of being ‘nailed’ to one’s past, but also in Améry’s use of the term ‘irreversible’, with which he links between past, memory, resentment and un-doing. It is important to make clear that although he brings up the fantasy of reversal (which I will detail in what follows), Améry is hardly delusional; he understands perfectly well that what was done cannot be undone. There is no travelling back in time, let alone any way to change the events of the past. But Améry is not after the possible, the logical or the natural. He is after the moral. And the moral, as he strongly suggests, is impossible to achieve. In this regard, as Ben-Shai puts it, resentment serves as the conduit through which ‘the moral injury – this event of dislocation or twisting – translates itself into a moral demand’. ²⁴ Thus, the time of resentment becomes convoluted and dis-ordered, trapping us in its inherent impossibility. To explicate this, Améry returns to his own formulation in his essay on torture where he described himself as being twisted and distorted, suspended hanging from the ceiling, his wrists bound in iron chains. ²⁵ In the same way, he writes in ‘Resentments’: ‘It is said that we [the victims] are “warped [verbogen]” […] But it also sets me the task of defining anew our warped state, namely as a form of the human condition that morally as well as historically is of a higher order than that of healthy straightness’ [Geradheit] (R, 68 [127]). This is a very important claim.

It is, of course, not only the victim’s arms that were distorted while he was hanging from the ceiling. It is also his soul, his trust in fellow human beings, his human dignity and perhaps most fundamentally, the logical structure of the world as such. This distortion, however, is revealed here to be the very truth, the right ‘position’ so to speak. There is perhaps something deformed about resentments and its indefinite destructiveness, but this deformation is also what grants resentments their moral value. In this sense, forgiveness might represent a good-spirited, future-oriented, pragmatic viewpoint, what Améry describes as a ‘unisonous peace chorus’ which proposes, all too cheerfully: ‘not backward let us look but forward, to a better, common future!’ (R, 69 [128]). But for Améry, this ‘forgiving’ position, has something essential that it fails to recognize or act upon.

Although he admits that this is a purely impossible wish (or phantasy), he nevertheless insists on expounding. Améry uses another metaphor with which he describes how the two parties would meet – in phantasy – outside of time. This image appears in two instances of the text. In the first, it pertains to the individual level (Améry and his torturer), and in the second, to the collective level (victims and the German people after the war). Let me elaborate.

Améry fleshes out the idea of irreversibility for the first time, when he recalls Wajs, the SS man who has tortured him and murdered many others, and was eventually executed. In Améry’s phantasy, when standing in front of the firing squad, moments before his death, Wajs ‘experienced the moral truth of his crimes [erfuhr die Moralische Wahrheit seiner Untaten]. […] he was with me’, Améry writes, ‘and I was no longer alone with the shovel handle’ (R, 70 [131]). In this image, Améry frees himself from the unbearable and extreme loneliness of his condition. He now stands, together with Wajs, and both of them want ‘exactly as much’ to ‘turn back time [Hinrichtung die Zeit], to undo what had been done [das Geschehen … ungeschehen machen]’ (R, 70 [131]). If this encounter could happen, Améry writes, he would ‘have died calmly and appeased’ along with my fellow man (R, 71 [131]), that is, Wajs. This scene is striking because Améry brings together the effect of resentment, the impossibility to do anything to rectify it and the phantastic account of the complete overturning of time.

A similar image appears towards the end of the text, this time describing not the individual, but rather, the collective. ‘On the field of history’, Améry writes, ‘there would occur what I hypothetically described earlier for the limited, individual circle: two groups of people, the overpowered and those who overpowered them [Überwältiger und überwältigte], would be joined in the desire that time be turned back [Zeitumkehrung] and, with it, that history become moral’ (R, 78 [143]). Here too, both parties are joined together. Although one is responsible for the past wrongdoing and the other is its victim, both join in their impossible desire. Both want to turn back time, to reverse the irreversible. Both want the impossible – to stand outside of time – and it is only with this impossibility that they can stand together, morally.

With these two quotes, Améry sets forth a way out from the binary of resentment and forgiveness, that he himself adhered to until this point in his essay, and by expounding on the fantasy of the reversibility of time, he introduces a third possibility. This by no way means that Améry has finally submitted himself to consolation or any other form of alleviation, his resolution is rather tragic and heart-rending. In order to understand Améry’s argument, we must begin by paying careful attention to his repetitive description of his own loneliness. This is a prevalent theme throughout At the Mind’s Limits, and comes up in various and seemingly unrelated moments. Améry is desperately isolated in the torture cellar; he finds himself completely alone with his intellect in the camp; he is lonely despite being surrounded by other people (mostly Germans) who are indifferent to his suffering; ²⁶ lonesome in exile, as well as within his own Jewish identity, and so forth. One could clearly say that the primary impetus for his suffering is this loneliness: he describes the experience of his persecution as being, ‘at the very bottom, that of an extreme loneliness’ (R, 70 [131]). On this background, Améry introduces his phantastic wish for the reversal of time. But he does not make this wish alone, he is joined by his perpetrator Wajs (in the first aforementioned passage) and by the German ‘group’ of people (in the second). The only possible escape from his utter loneliness is by coming together with the perpetrators, as if joining forces in their common wish to turn back time. Clearly, the two sides have entirely different interests motivating their wish: the victim wants to undo the evil that has turned his life into a continuous experience of trauma, and the perpetrator, standing before his executors, wants to undo his own deeds so as to escape punishment. The intensity with which they pose their wish, however, is almost identical. Each of them could not want anything more. Alford describes this moment as utopic, one in which there a glimpse of an impossible whole in which both victims and perpetrators ‘want the same thing in the same way’. ²⁷

The tragedy here is evident. The only way left for Améry to alleviate his loneliness is to form a community, but there is no choice insofar as the members of this community are concerned. These can only be the perpetrator, and never his fellow victims (who have already forgiven and forgotten, moved along with the natural flow of time). The strength of the two descriptions of the phantasy of reversal lies in that the only ally Améry has is his perpetrator, and this alliance is based on an impossibility: that of turning back time. ‘The moral person demands annulment of time [Aufhebung der Zeit] […] by nailing the criminal to his deed [des Untäters an Seine Untat]. ²⁸ Thereby, and through a moral turning-back of the clock [Zeitumkehrung], the latter can join his victim as a fellow human being’ (R, 72 [133–134]). Put differently, Améry and Wajs form an alliance based on the impossible, on the vain attempts to fight the natural flow of time in favour of a phantasy. But nevertheless, they stand in this dead-end together.

The future

It seems that we are left with an utter impossibility. Moral time remains the only conceivable temporal structure for Améry, however, as the two aforementioned scenes suggest, it is clearly impossible to achieve. Is this indeed the conclusion of Améry’s account of resentments? Are we simply left empty-handed, nailed to the past without the possibility of an alternative temporal structure? A future? There is perhaps no happy ending and no resolution for Améry’s own suffering and his inability to forgive, however, there can still be hope and a future to the world. I began my discussion with a critical moment that ended the long delay, the long twenty years of silence that took Améry to write his book. However, this critical moment on the train, was not a merely subjective one (namely, related solely to Améry’s own processing of his trauma). It was, rather, a moment intertwined with the world and with history. To recall, when he read the letter in the newspaper, he realized that there was a striking dissonance between himself and the world. Or, between moral time and natural time. I would like to end with a brief discussion of the alternative openness Améry leaves us with, after all. Something I think about as the element of ‘future’ in the essay.

According to Bernstein’s interpretation of Améry, resentments are a result of the victim's refusal to allow their own moral truth be suppressed by society until it disappears completely. In his reading, the reconstitution of a moral community that can encompass both victims and perpetrators requires that both parties rebel against the social and natural structures of time, challenging the logic of forgetfulness and forgiveness. In the post-war German context, this would imply that Nazi genocide would be integrated as an indelible part of the history of German culture. Since, according to Améry, such a moral community was not (and cannot be) materialized, a further step is required, in which resentment becomes, in Bernstein’s phrasing, ‘the moral attitude that alone is capable of sustaining the demand that past suffering matters in the historical consciousness of present society; without resentment society becomes an immoral organism […] Without a moral history there cannot be a moral present’. ²⁹ Resentment, therefore, plays a crucial role in the reconstitution of a community. However, in Bernstein’s reading, there is no genuine possibility of the victim’s inclusion in such moral restoration. Resentment remains the sole appropriate and just response to moral injury and devastation. In fact, Bernstein suggests that Améry introduces moral injury as a new moral category. He acknowledges that historical facts cannot be reversed, but he does insist that the catastrophic past be addressed in the present. ³⁰

To fully grasp Améry’s position, we should remind ourselves of the context in which the essay about resentments was composed. Améry originally wrote his small collection of essays to be broadcasted on radio. They were aired on Süddeutscher Rundfunk (the radio of South Germany) to a German audience, Améry sitting in the studio and reading the text himself in German. Actually, ‘Resentments’ was the original title Améry chose for all of these radio talks (an idea later abandoned in favour of the title ‘Beyond Guilt and Atonement’). ³¹ Améry was first and foremost a writer; It is therefore significant that he decided to speak, rather than publish in writing, his essays. ‘I do not want to address […] my comrades in fate’, he writes, ‘They know what it is all about’. Instead, Améry decides to address the Germans (The text’s initial title was ‘The Germans’), most of whom ‘do not, or no longer, feel affected by the darkest and at the same time most characteristic deeds of the Third Reich’ (ML, xiv).

Despite Améry’s unreserved commitment to his resentments, not only personally but also as a moral stance, it is equally important for him to reach out to the German audience. We would perhaps expect a vengeful tone, but this is not the case. While resentments are what fastens him in iron chains to the past, crucifies him as he describes it, the text itself actually presents a discourse about the future, or about its potential. When Améry turns to his German audience he does so not as a prosecutor speaking of some form of collective guilt they bear. On the contrary: ‘To accuse the young’, he writes, ‘would be just too inhuman, and according to universal concepts also unhistorical. After all, what does a twenty-one-year-old student who has grown up in the calm climate of a new German democracy have to do with the deeds of his fathers and grandfathers?’, (R, 75 [139]). Collective guilt, according to Améry, can only be useful as a vague statistical statement, and nothing more than (it is he who is burdened with guilt, he writes bitterly). ³² What, then, does Améry seek here? Why is he addressing young Germans if not in forgiveness or vengeance? Let us look closely at his exact words.

And I enter into the realm of German history and historicity as I speak further of the victim's resentments. I am obliged, however, to define their objective task. Perhaps it is only concern for my own purification, but I hope that my resentment—which is my personal protest against the antimoral natural process of healing that time brings about [moralfeindliche natürliche Zeitverwachsen], and by which I make the genuinely humane and absurd demand that time be turned back [Zeitumkehrung]—will also perform a historical function. Were it to fulfil the task that I set it, it could historically represent, as a stage of the world’s moral dynamics of progress, the German revolution that did not take place. This demand is no less absurd and no less moral than the individual demand that irreversible processes be reversible [Reversibilität irreversibler Prozesse]. (R, 77 [141])

In this passage, Améry differentiates between guilt and responsibility. He realizes the former is unfair, even ‘absurd’, and seeks the latter. His insistence on clinging to his own resentments is not only related to some personal pathology or protest. He has before him an ‘objective task’ that is related to the very realm of German history, where he is seeking to ‘perform a historical function’ (R, 77 [141]). His resentments may seem absurd, do not obey any form of a ‘reality principle’ and are definitely not pragmatic. They have, however, a unique power to contribute to what he calls the ‘moral development of the world’. It is true perhaps, that Améry is performing a somewhat coarse and wide movement in which he includes a collective (and does no pay enough attention to the nuances between different levels of guilt and responsibility), however, as Brudholm rightly argues, his concern in the essay is not justice but rather, the ‘actualization’ of the very problem. Améry’s aim is ‘to initiate a public, national confrontation with the guilt incurred by the conduct of the past. The nuances would—one hopes—arrive later’. ³³

Améry’s point in ‘Resentments’ is that German historical consciousness cannot be selective and free to choose its own constituents, opting for Goethe, Mörike and Baron von Stein, leaving aside Blunck, Schäfer and Himmler. If Germany will truly bear responsibility for its deeds, it would be insufficient to lay claim to a national tradition only where it was honorable, and to disavow it in cases where it was not (R, 76 [144]). Elsewhere, along similar lines, he writes that a new philosophy of history would have to be written after the Holocaust, adding that ‘It was the people in the ghetto who recorded its [this history’s] first sentences’. ³⁴

Resentment is a feeling marked by its unsurpassable ability to contain, to harbour. In the same way, Améry demands that the Germans contain this now indelible part of their national history: Auschwitz cannot be, in that sense, treated as an external or accidental event in German history, nor is it an ‘exception’: it is and has to be made an integral part of it. This way, he concludes, ‘the German people would remain sensitive to the fact that they cannot allow a piece of their national history to be neutralized by time, but must integrate it’ (R, 78 [142]). Yes, time moves forward, leaving past events are left behind – but time is not only a matter of physics. It is also deeply interconnected with memory, consciousness and identity. It is about accumulation and integration, which together form the only possibility for a future.

For Améry, the survivor, there is clearly no future, not because there is no way out (he can always join the ‘happy chorus’ of those forgiving and forgetting), but rather, because he opts to remain crucified to the past, intentionally positioning himself out of time. The young Germans, however, do in fact possess the possibility of a future – but only if, according to Améry – the past is unreservedly integrated into it. Améry’s proposition is, in that sense, one that is exclusively open for the Germans and never for the survivors who remain, despite everything, an aching thorn in the flesh of time. They continue to raise their resentful finger, but they raise it only to mark their own impossibility.

Conclusion

Améry’s position in ‘Resentments’ is no doubt radical, at times even subversive. However, this is not only due to his austere moral stance; it is also rooted in his distinctive perspective on the temporal dimension of resentments. I have delineated five of these aspects here: delay, eternal recurrence, natural time and forgiveness, moral time and the irreversible, and the future. While each of these aspects is compelling on its own, it is when they stand in relation to one another that the uniqueness of Améry’s argument stands out most clearly. When we revisit Améry’s essay through the lens of temporality, it becomes apparent that resentments are always out of time. They appear in delay, endlessly circle around themselves, completely barren, devoid of any potential of growth and offering no future for those who insists on clinging to them. Each of the temporal structures, in its own singular way, is distorted and violated, breached and haunted. Nothing is natural, and everything is moral.

Whether it is valued or scorned, viewed as morally productive or destructive, resentment is undeniably an extremely powerful emotion with profound moral implications. What Améry contributes to our understanding of this emotion is his insistence on its capacity to utterly disrupt our experience of time as such. It is, therefore, not merely about moral time, the time of forgiveness, or the grappling problem of the irreversibility of time, but rather, a way to sense our own existence as temporal beings, where ‘The time is out of joint’, to use Shakespeare’s famous phrase from Hamlet. Despite the apparent differences between Hamlet and Améry, both are brought to confront an extraordinary, unthinkable event that has abruptly turned their worlds upside down, essentially uprooting time from the fragile joints that once secured it. In both cases, time can no longer progress ‘naturally’, things cannot be simply left behind, gradually overcome or smoothed over as time continues to unfold. The past emerges in a way that transcends mere memory; one must persistently remain attached and wholly committed to it. Even when Améry seems to mark a stark dividing line between two of the temporal structures aforementioned – resentment and forgiveness – I have demonstrated that they have in fact, an intriguing and productive interconnection. Both insist on an inseparable connection with the past and thereby defy in tandem, the natural flow of time, leaving it shattered and its potential for continuity, defeated.

In Améry's view, Auschwitz did not merely happen the way any other event happens. In this context, he quotes Hans Magnus Enzensberger who asserted that Auschwitz should become ‘Germany’s past, present and future’ (R, 78 [143]). In other words, it would cease to be just an event within time and become a complete inversion of time itself. Just like the aforementioned scene where the desire for irreversibility is a common thread, here too, Améry presents one of his most compelling arguments, yet at the same time, perhaps also one of the most challenging to accept. The victims and perpetrators, or the ‘overpowered and those who overpowered them’, join together in their past ‘that, despite its extreme oppositeness, they still have in common’ (R, 77 [141-142]). The victims will retain their resentments, refraining from vengeance or reconciliation, while the perpetrators will grapple with the enduring resentments directed toward them, experiencing their own self-doubt. In other words, the present remains devoid of any concrete action, but the past will linger on, vivid and disquieting, for both sides.