ABSTRACT
The claim that trauma may promote transcultural empathy sounds provocative. A paradigmatic thinker of the connection between trauma and transcultural empathy is Stef Craps, who gauges the possibilities and limits of the psychoanalytically inflected, deconstructive trauma theory that became paradigmatic during the 1990s with an eye toward non-Western cultures. The idea that trauma implicates people in the histories of others resonates in contemporary trauma studies, especially in theories that posit a transnational connectedness of cultural memory. This chapter shows how Jean Amery, an Austrian Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, defends resentment as an effective form of communication between former victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust. The critical thrust of Amery’s writing lies in the way it responds to, and attempts to break through, a sociopsychological disposition he perceives as specific to his German audience. Amery explicitly embraces resentment as the appropriate attitude toward his non-Jewish German readers.
