ABSTRACT
Jean Améry is best known in the anglophone world as a Holocaust survivor and author of At The Mind’s Limits. Less well-known is that in the 1960s he was also a left-wing critic of left-wing antisemitism in West Germany. Marlene Gallner explores his writings on the inner life of the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, summed up by him in the phrase ‘Anti-Zionism contains antisemitism like a cloud contains a storm’. After a brief biographical introduction, the late political writings, which she argues remain in advance of many contemporary contributions, are examined. These writings centre on his attempt to explain why German society had failed to properly confront the Nazi past and why a new face of antisemitism had appeared there, in the student movement and the left in particular, which centred on an intense hostility to the Jewish State, and support for those who would violently destroy it. The reasons presented by Améry for the ‘existential binding’ every Jew has to the State of Israel, whether he or she believes in Zionism or not, are explored, along with his call for the left to rethink its stance towards Israel. In Améry’s stark judgement, those who reject Israel’s right to exist or seek to aid its destruction, are knowingly or unknowingly engaging in the realisation of a new Auschwitz.
