Dignity and Despair: The Double Bind of Jean Améry’s Odyssey

Abstract

Jean Améry’s life suggests a double bind of ethics: during the Holocaust, the effort to maintain one’s dignity often cost a Jew his or her life, and after the Holocaust, moral protest, involving the affirmation and struggle for those things that are worth living for, resulted for some survivors in despair when their efforts went unheard and unheeded. Améry’s moral protest ended in despair and suicide. Primo Levi once said of Améry that he imposed upon himself a position of such “severity and intransigence [so] as to make him incapable of finding joy in life, indeed of living. Those who ‘trade blows’ with the entire world achieve dignity but pay a very high price for it, because they are sure to be defeated.”¹ This chapter outlines the pathway Améry’s life took, including both the admirable stand of moral protest and his subsequent decision to take his own life. Améry left his Austrian homeland, became a member of the Belgian resistance, suffered torture by the Gestapo and the death machine of Auschwitz, and found himself in a world in which he could never feel at home. In At the Mind’s Limits, he writes through the prism of an existentialist giving testimony—testimony infused with the intellectual spirit and philosophic perspective of the Enlightenment, but flowing from a life of pain that ended in suicide.