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After Martin Walser's speech on the occasion of his peace prize awarded by the German booksellers in the Frankfurt Paulskirche in October 1998, a heated debate ensued that was afterwards documented in a publication of more than 600 pages. 1 Why then come back to this speech after all that could be said about it was printed in the collected volume? Sometimes it is the encounter with another text that opens up a new perspective. It was an essay by Jean Amery that had for me exactly this effect. In this essay I want to show how both texts critically reflect on the German social and political background of their specific decades.
1. Frank Schirrmacher, ed., Die Walser-Bubis-Debatte. Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1999).
In the middle of 1960s, a volume of essays by Jean Amery appeared under the title Beyond Guilt and Atonement, in which, according to its subtitle, "one overpowered by the past makes an effort to master the past" [Bewaltigungsversuche eines Uberwaltigen]. These attempts were written in a highly subjective style, situated between the genres of the essay and the confession. The Jewish-Austrian writer Hans Mayer was born in Vienna in 1912, he was active in the Belgian resistance and was subsequently persecuted, imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis. In his essays, Mayer, who after the war changed his German name into the French Amery, explored his post-Holocaust psyche and his status as a survivor. I shall concentrate on the essay entitled "Resentments," in which Amery scrutinized his feelingswhen travelling and lecturing in postwar West Germany. 2 In his text, he emphasizes that his feelings of resentment did not immediately arise from the mind of a physically and psychically wounded Holocaust survivor. Instead, he claims that this feeling was generated only later under specific socio-political circumstances. As long as postwar Germany had been held in general contempt and treated as an outcast among the nations, this feeling had been unknown to him. It arose only with the sudden transformation of West Germany from a country of collective guilt, ruins and rural fields of potatoes to a new political force and dignified nation in the Western union of the cold war. Instead of the effects of a "second treaty of Versailles" after World...