Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 The past remembered
- 2 W. G. Sebald: an act of restitution
- 3 Rolf Hochhuth: breaking the silence
- 4 Peter Weiss: the investigation
- 5 Arthur Miller: the rememberer
- 6 Anne Frank: everybody's heroine
- 7 Jean Améry: home and language
- 8 Primo Levi: from the darkness to the light
- 9 Elie Wiesel: to forget is to deny
- 10 Tadeusz Borowski: the world of stone
- 11 Memory theft
- Coda
- Notes
- Index
7 - Jean Améry: home and language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 The past remembered
- 2 W. G. Sebald: an act of restitution
- 3 Rolf Hochhuth: breaking the silence
- 4 Peter Weiss: the investigation
- 5 Arthur Miller: the rememberer
- 6 Anne Frank: everybody's heroine
- 7 Jean Améry: home and language
- 8 Primo Levi: from the darkness to the light
- 9 Elie Wiesel: to forget is to deny
- 10 Tadeusz Borowski: the world of stone
- 11 Memory theft
- Coda
- Notes
- Index
Summary
How much home does a person need? Not to the same degree … that our mother tongue proved to be hostile, did the foreign one become a real friend. It behaved and still behaves in a reserved manner and receives us only for brief formal visits. One calls on it, comme en visite des amis, which is not the same as dropping in on friends. La table will never be the table.
Jean Améry, At the Mind's LimitsWithout a mother tongue, a person has a defect.
Aharon Appelfeld, The Story of a LifeW. G. Sebald begins his consideration of Jean Améry with a quotation from that author's Lefeu oder der Abbruch (Lefeu or Demolition): ‘Let my unhappiness burn and be extinguished in the flames.’ It was an indication of Améry's forlorn intent simultaneously to permit his suffering to be known and to see it consumed in its own expression. It was Améry's restraint that impressed, a restraint sometimes presented as a casual irony, but it was his insistence on confronting what others chose to forget which compelled Sebald's attention and respect.
George Steiner, whose family escaped from Europe to safety (only one or two of the Jews in his French lycée survived), contemplated what it was not to have died, or to have survived after seeing into hell: 'not to have known how one would behave at the midnight of history, not to know and yet to meet from time to time those who behaved magnificently and do not even want to talk about it – those who have been to the frontier of their own selves – leaves one with a feeling of, I would not call it envy, but a certain ache of unknowing.
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- Information
- Remembering and Imagining the HolocaustThe Chain of Memory, pp. 258 - 284Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006