[This post is the first in a short series. It draws on a conference paper I wrote and presented recently. I shall be omitting footnote references here.]
Primo Levi was the twentieth century's pre-eminent witness - pre-eminent both in general and, more specifically, among the voices that sought to draw attention to the shape of its central disfiguring tragedy. He attained this position because, as Philip Roth wrote of him shortly after his death, Levi had 'the moral stamina and intellectual poise of a twentieth century Titan'. Levi's name will forever be associated with Auschwitz, where he was imprisoned between February 1944 and January 1945. Indeed, he himself later said that but for his time there he would probably not have become a writer. I find this hard to credit in view of his exceptional wisdom about life and the world even as early as his mid-twenties, when he composed his memoir of Auschwitz, If This Is A Man.
Be that as it may, Jean Améry, who also survived Auschwitz, is less well-known to the general reading public, though for students of the Holocaust his book At the Mind's Limits is an essential reference - as the essay on torture which it contains should also be for anyone who works in the field, or cares about the defence, of human rights.
On a first reckoning, there is a clear contrast between the thought of the two men. Levi alluded to it himself in writing of Améry that he had been led to 'positions of such severity and intransigence as to make him incapable of finding joy in life...' In similar vein, Alexander Stille wrote that where 'Levi's books carried a message of hope, Améry sounded an unmistakable note of despair.'
This contrast between them is real enough, and I shall begin here by tracing some of its contours; I shall do so under the dual rubric of, in turn, hope and resentment. However, the main burden of what I want to say is that, transcending this contrast, there is a core insistence common to the two writers that is at least as important. In fact, given the strong human tendency to look away from what we find it difficult to bear or to assimilate, I will go further and argue that their shared insistence is more important than the contrast between them.
[The next post in the series is here.]