Autor/Autorin
With regard to the German national culture of remembrance, which is committed to compassion and empathy, but has largely lost sight of the resistance of the victims and survivors and has not yet found a place for it, it must be said in advance that torture was not the cause of Jean Améry’s own death on 17 October 1978. The boundless helplessness suffered by the victim of physical overpowering, which is mentioned in the essay „The Ordeal“ from 1965, did not conquer Jean Améry. On the contrary, the writer confronted the most extreme injury that a human being can inflict on a human being with an essay on torture that corresponded to his political resistance to the National Socialists from the very beginning.
Jean Améry was born in Vienna in 1912 to an assimilated Jewish family and fled from the Nazis to Belgium in 1938. He was 31 years old and a member of the resistance movement in Belgium when he was arrested on 23 July 1943 while distributing anti-Nazi leaflets in Brussels. In Fort Breendonk, a so-called reception camp under brutal SS administration (now the Belgian National Museum), he was imprisoned, interrogated and severely tortured. In 1944, he was deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp. In 1945, he was liberated in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near the town of Celle in Lower Saxony.
In 1966, after the end of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, Jean Améry’s memoirs were published under the title Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne – Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten in the form of five essays, including the text „Die Tortur“, which he read out and recorded himself for SDR Radio.
absolut Medien has now published the highly insightful film DIE TORTUR by Dieter Reifarth (58’38) on a DVD, as well as DIE FESTUNG DERLOVEN (read by Jochen Nix, 56’12), JEAN AMÉRY – BETRACHTUNGEN (by Jean Améry biographer Irène Heidelberger-Leonhard, 35’12) and four audio files, read by Jean Améry for SDR between 1964 and 1966: „An den Grenzen des Geistes“ (58’37), „Wieviel Heimat braucht der Mensch“ (58’32), „Ressentiments (58’26) and „Über Zwang und Unmöglichkeit Jude zu sein (58’15).
The text „Die Tortur“, read by Améry, forms the narrative text, the auditory basis, of the film essay of the same name by Dieter Reifarth, which was awarded the rating „particularly valuable“ by the German Film and Media Rating Board (FBW). Reifarth travelled to the dark place of torture for the film. However, anyone who follows his images shot in Breendonk Fortress soon realises that it is not the eeriness of the authentic location, but rather Améry’s text about the insurmountable consequences of torture, presented in an extremely matter-of-fact tone, that makes the film essay a topical political statement.
As film viewers, we initially encounter the historical site and its visitors, who seem strangely hesitant and distant, in a similarly distanced manner. However, Améry’s memorable voiceover – „That’s where it happened to me, the torture“ – quickly and poignantly turns the torture of that time into an entirely contemporary event.
What initially appears to be a compulsory visit to the historical torture site, documented on film, quickly goes far beyond this and becomes an act of political action. By relying on Améry and audibly basing the survivor’s narrative on the images taken at the authentic torture site, Dieter Reifahrt succeeds in making the unheard-of tangible: „There is howling under the torture. Perhaps in this hour, in this second.“ The existential pain, which Améry reflects in a tremendously matter-of-fact way as a personal experience, no longer increases in the isolation of the fortress, through whose dark torture wings his narrative accompanies the film’s viewers in an almost unbearably gentle voice. A greater pain is impossible, the first blow is decisive, beating the tortured person into the total helplessness of an object and allowing the counter-human to emerge. Anyone who has experienced this monstrosity will never get over it, torture is insurmountable. „I don’t know whether anyone who is beaten loses their human dignity, but they lose their trust in the world.“ And a little later: „Those who have been tortured remain tortured.“
Twenty-two years after the experience, Améry writes and says that torture is the most terrible thing a person can keep inside them, and he reminds us: „But the same thing is kept in a great many people.“ „Who are all the others?“
Even then, the writer experienced the relativisation of National Socialism and heard the accusation that it was totalitarianism, communism. Torture was also practised elsewhere, in Vietnam, Algeria, Russia, Hungary, Spain, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia…, Améry writes and recounts, but for him torture is the apotheosis of National Socialism. Communism symbolised an idea of humanity, but fascism was „only a wickedness … the word humanity was hateful to it“, the National Socialists tortured like others, but „with the good conscience of wickedness … because they were torturers“.
Like its narrator Améry, the film THE TORTURE does not dwell for long on the blunt instruments of hatred and power, on the torturers of the martyred. Instead, it constantly follows the writer and survivor’s urgent question of what torture does to people, what questions it raises, how a person can continue to live with it, because „you can’t get rid of torture, like the question of the possibilities and limits of resistance.“
The essay culminates in what is probably Jean Améry’s most frequently quoted sentence: „Those who have succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world.“ So how can people do this to their fellow human beings? The question remains open and a constant challenge, as documented by two sober statements in the film’s closing credits. The film states that 161 countries have ratified the UN Convention against Torture and Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Amnesty International has documented torture or ill-treatment in 140 countries in recent years.