In this chapter , I draw a parallel between Améry’s intellectual attitude in Auschwitz and Descartes’s intellectual attitude in the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). I begin by showing Améry’s skeptical attitude, which grew out of his detachment and intellectual ponderings upon the cruelty and oppressiveness of camp life in Auschwitz. And that this skeptical attitude compelled him to find refuge in his intellect. Then, I discuss Descartes’s skepticism in the Meditations as a philosophical response to the tenets of scholasticism and the legacy of Aristotle’s philosophy. This discussion is followed by a comparison of Améry’s skeptical stance in Auschwitz with Descartes’s skepticism. Comparing Descartes’s skepticism, articulated in the Cogito , to Améry’s skeptical attitude in Auschwitz is inspired by the fact that their skepticism is prompted by an oppressive social context. The evil genius, in Descartes’s cogitations, is the theoretical incarnation of the oppressive dogmatism of the medieval clergy and Aristotelian philosophy. The Cogito presents the methodical articulation of Descartes’s skepticism toward the religious institution and scholastic philosophy of the seventeenth century. In similar fashion, the cruelty and oppressiveness of camp life in Auschwitz led Améry to doubt his physical existence and to assert his intellect as a coping mechanism. Descartes’s Cogito and Améry’s intellect are thus systematic responses. Also, I show how both Améry and Descartes took refuge in their intellect. Descartes sought refuge in the certainty of the I think after carrying out his methodical doubt. And Améry espoused intellectual transcendence as a coping mechanism after failing to comprehend the unifying thread that led to the rise of Nazism. The chapter concludes with Améry’s view that the intellect is in essence a logical framework similar to Descartes’s Cogito , which is primarily fit for contemplation. This realization constitutes the initial step in Améry’s aim to establish the existential limitation of rationality; philosophy is of no help when one confronts torture and oppression.
Améry’s Biography
Améry was born in Vienna as Hans Mayer, the only child of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, on October 31, 1912. His parents’ home was in the Vorarlberg town of Hohenems, where his paternal forebears had lived since the seventeenth century. After his father’s death in the First World War, he moved with his mother to the resort town of Bad Ischl in the Salzkammergut, where she managed a livelihood as the proprietress of an inn, while he attended the gymnasium in nearby Gmunden. Upon his graduation, mother and son moved again to Vienna. There Améry enrolled at the university, attending courses in philosophy and literature, but the necessity to work prevented the regular pursuit of his studies and intermittently he held jobs as porter, messenger, bar pianist, and helper in bookstores. At the same time he was caught up in the political turmoil of the 1930s that culminated in Austria’s incorporation into the Third Reich.
In Vienna, where anti-Semitism was rampant and Nazi sympathies were ever on the increase, the fully assimilated Austrian Améry gradually recognized the significance of his Jewish identity, which, after the proclamation of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, he regarded as personally binding. In 1937, against his mother’s resistance, he married a young woman of Eastern European Jewish origin, a native of Graz in the Styria region. In 1938 they fled together from Austria to Belgium, but an exiled Améry’s wife did not survive. She died of a heart ailment in Brussels at the age of 28 while he was captive in Auschwitz. His mother, who was not affected by the Nazi racial laws, remained in Vienna, where she died in 1939.
In 1940 Améry was arrested by the Belgians as a German alien and deported to southern France, where he was confined to various camps, among them the infamous Gurs camp in the Lower Pyrenees. He escaped from Gurs in 1941 and arduously made his way back to Belgium. What followed—work in the resistance movement, arrest, and torture by the Gestapo in 1943—is depicted and explored in the second chapter of At the Mind’s Limits. Although he recovered fully from the injuries he had suffered in the torture cellar of Fort Breendonk , their psychic imprint remained indelible, and it was this phenomenon, the irrevocable loss of trust in the world, with all that accompanied it, that he is concerned to illuminate in this book. The sequel to Améry’s torture in Brussels was the renewed torture of Auschwitz. Once the Gestapo officers recognized that he was not the German military deserter they suspected him to be, they summarily condemned him to the horrors of the death camp. After his liberation by the British in April 1945 Améry once again returned to Brussels, where he was to reside until his death. In order to support himself and his second wife—Maria Améry—he turned to writing.1 While in Brussels, he rearranged the letters of his last name into Améry and adopted it as his nom de plume.
Memory and Auschwitz
In the preface to the 1977s reissue of At the Mind’s Limits, Améry deliberately refrains from editing his first-hand account of torture in Auschwitz. His initial justification for this abstention is to avoid ‘a journalistic tribute to actuality’. However upon scrutiny, it becomes apparent that his refusal is motivated by his wish to leave the description of Auschwitz’s atrocities unaltered by the passing of time. Améry wished for every generation to read about his experiences of Auschwitz’s atrocities as they happened. The horrors of Auschwitz ought to remain unaltered by time as a fixed present on the European timeline. Améry offers a way of thinking about the temporally unbounded destructiveness of political violence beyond the model of trauma now conventionally used to explain those acts of violence that, from the sufferer’s point of view, will not stop happening.2 Furthermore, Améry remains steadfast in his conviction in stating: “I am unwilling to retract anything I have said here and have but little to add to it.”3 This statement suggests that he sets out to frame his narrative of Auschwitz’s atrocities as a memorial on the temporal axis. Early in the preface, Améry is demanding that Auschwitz’s horrors be recollected according to a distinctive memory process, which spares it of temporal irrelevance.
Furthermore, Améry is skeptical toward the integration of the horr...