In Praise of Resentment: A Selection from Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans (2019)
“No material payment can compensate for the suffering slavery inflicted. No one who has read a thorough description of slavery, in Auschwitz or Alabama, would prefer it, no matter the compensation, to never having been enslaved at all. This is part of what led Jean Améry to refuse to apply for reparations, though his financial situation after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen was hardly secure. With no formal schooling beyond the age of twelve, Améry found work as a freelance journalist in Belgium, writing on anything from NATO to Marilyn Monroe. His breakthrough came in 1966, when he released a series of essays, published in English under the title At the Mind’s Limits, reflecting on his experience as an Auschwitz survivor living in Europe during the twenty years that followed the war.
What could possibly heal the damage? To answer that question, Améry rehabilitated the idea of resentment, which Nietzsche decried as the attitude of sick, small-minded, slavish natures. Their ‘souls squint,’ Nietzsche sneered. Unable to cast off the wounds of the past, they are fixated on a wish that is as inconsistent as it is unnatural. Absurdly, resentment demands that the irreversible be reversed, the event undone. Améry turns Nietzsche on his head, proudly including himself among those whose morals Nietzsche despised as slave morality, since ‘every genuine morality was always a morality for losers.’ It may be natural to think of time as flowing only forward, but that thinking is not only extra-moral but anti-moral:
‘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 . . . . The moral power to resist contains the protest, the revolt against reality, which is rational only as long as it is moral. The moral person demands annulment of time—in the particular case under question, by nailing the criminal to his deed. Thereby, and through a moral turning-back of the clock, the latter can join his victim as a fellow human being.’
The only thing that could truly make up for those crimes would be turning back time and undoing them. Améry knew this is impossible, but he insisted that we recognize the depth and the morality of the longing for it. He also insisted on its sanity, arguing against the psychologists who were beginning the field of trauma studies; his resentment, he said, was a form of the human condition that is ‘morally and historically of a higher order than healthy straightness.’ He rejected the ‘morally impossible thought’ that the survivor’s wounds could be healed by the death of six million Germans. The only way to solve the problem, he concluded, was ‘by permitting resentment to remain alive in the one camp and, aroused by it, self-mistrust in the other.’ If this took place, Germans would have integrated Auschwitz into their natural history rather than allowing it to be neutralized by time.”—Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (2019)
