in these most evil crimes without either knowing or willing them. The right of
our deeper consciousness today would consist in recognizing that since he had
neither intended nor known these crimes himself, they were not to be regarded
as his own deeds. But the Greek, with his plasticity of consciousness, takes re-
sponsibility for what he has done as an individual and does not cut his purely
subjective self-consciousness apart from what is objectively the case. . . . But they
do not claim to be innocent of these [acts] at all. On the contrary, what they did,
and actually had to do, is their glory. No worse insult could be given to such a
hero than to say that he had acted innocently. (Ibid.: 1214, 1215)
Nothing is further from Auschwitz than this model. For the deportee sees
such a widening of the abyss between subjective innocence and objective guilt,
between what he did do and what he could feel responsible for, that he cannot
assume responsibility for any of his actions. With an inversion that borders on
parody, he feels innocent precisely for that which the tragic hero feels guilty, and
guilty exactly where the tragic hero feels innocent. This is the sense of the specific
Befehlnotstand, the “state of compulsion that follows an order” of which Levi speaks in discussing the Sonderkommando members, which makes any tragic
conflict at Auschwitz impossible. The objective element, which for the Greek
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hero was in every case the decisive question, here becomes what renders decision
impossible. And since he cannot master his own actions, the victim seeks shelter,
like Bettelheim, behind the prestigious mask of innocent guilt.
The ease with which the executioners invoke the tragic model, not always
in bad faith, provokes distrust in their capacity truly to give reasons for Ausch-
witz. It has been observed many times that the Nazi functionaries’ recourse to
Befehlnotstand was in itself impudent (among others, cf. Levi 1989: 59). And yet it is certain that at least from a certain point onward, they invoked it not so
much to escape condemnation (the objection was already dismissed during the
first Nuremberg trial, given that the German military code itself contained an
article authorizing disobedience in extreme cases) as, rather, to make their sit-
uation appear in terms of a tragic conflict, which was to their eyes clearly more
acceptable. “My client feels guilty before God, not the law,” Eichmann’s lawyer
repeated in Jerusalem.
An exemplary case is that of Fritz Stangl, the commander of the Treblinka
extermination camp, whose personality Gitta Sereny patiently sought to recon-
struct through a series of interviews held in the Düsseldorf prison, published
under the significant title Into that Darkness. Until the end, Stangl stubbornly
maintained his innocence for the crimes attributed to him, without questioning
them in the slightest as to their factual accuracy. But during the last interview
on June 27, 1971, a few hours before he died from a heart attack, Sereny remarks
that Stangl’s last resistances have crumbled and that something like a glimmer of
ethical conscience appears “in that darkness”:
“My conscience is clear about what I did, myself,” he said, in the same stiffly
spoken words he had used countless times at his trial, and in the past weeks, when
we had always come back to this subject, over and over again. But this time I said
nothing. He paused and waited, but the room remain ed silent. “I have never in-
tentionally hurt anyone, myself,” he said, with a different, less incisive emphasis,
and waited again—for a long time. For the first time, in all these many days, I
had given him no help. There was no more time. He gripped the table with both
hands as if he was holding on to it. “But I was there,” he said then, in a curiously
dry and tired tone of resignation. These few sentences had taken almost half an
hour to pronounce. “So yes,” he said finally, very quietly, “in reality I share the
guilt. . . . Because my guilt . . . my guilt . . . only now in these talks . . . now that
I have talked about it for the first time. . . .” He stopped.
He had pronounced the words “my guilt”: but more than the words, the
finality of it was in the sagging of his body, and on his face.
After more than a minute he started again, a half-hearted attempt, in a dull
voice. “My guilt,” he said, “is that I am still here. That is my guilt.” (Sereny 1983: 364)
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It is remarkable to hear this allusive evocation of a tragic conflict of a new
kind, one so inextricable and enigmatic as to be justly dissolved only by death,
from a man who had directed the killing of thousands of human beings in gas
chambers. It does not signify the emergence of an instance of truth, in which
Stangl “became the man whom he should have been” (ibid.: 366), as Sereny,
solely concerned with her dialectic of confession and guilt, seems to think. In-
stead, it marks the definitive ruin of his capacity to bear witness, the despairing
collapse of “that darkness” on itself. The Greek hero has left us forever; he can no
longer bear witness for us in any way. After Auschwitz, it is not possible to use a
tragic paradigm in ethics.
3.7. The ethics of the twentieth century opens with Nietzsche’s overcoming
of resentment. Against the impotence of the will with respect to the past, against
the spirit of revenge for what has irrevocably taken place and can no longer be
willed, Zarathustra teaches men to will backward, to desire that everything re-
peat itself. The critique of Judeo-Christian morality is completed in our century
in the name of a capacity fully to assume the past, liberating oneself once and
for all of guilt and bad conscience. The eternal return is above all victory over
resentment, the possibility of willing what has taken place, transforming every
“it was” into a “thus I wanted it to be”— amor fati.
Auschwitz also marks a decisive rupture in this respect. Let us imagine
repeating the experiment that Nietzsche, under the heading “The Heaviest
Weight,” proposes in The Gay Science. “One day or one night,” a demon glides
beside a survivor and asks: “Do you want Auschwitz to return again and again,
innumerable times, do you want every instant, every single detail of the camp
to repeat itself for eternity, returning eternally in the same precise sequence in
which they took place? Do you want this to happen again, again and again for
eternity?” This simple reformulation of the experiment suffices to refute it be-
yond all doubt, excluding the possibility of its even being proposed.
Yet this failure of twentieth-century ethics does not depend on the fact that
what happened at Auschwitz is too atrocious for anyone ever to wish for its
repetition and to love it as destiny. In Nietzsche’s experiment, the horror of
what happened appears at the start, indeed, so much so that the first effect of
listening to it is, precisely, to “gnash one’s teeth and curse the demon who has
spoken in such way.” Nor can one say that the failure of Zarathustra’s lesson
implies the pure and simple restoration of the
morality of resentment—even if,
for the victims, the temptation is great. Jean Améry was thus led to formulate a
genuine anti-Nietzschean ethics of resentment that simply refuses to accept that
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“what happened, happened” (Améry 1980: 72). “Resentments as the existential
dominant of people like myself,” he writes,
are the result of a long personal and historical development . . . . My resentments
are there in order that the crime become a moral reality for the criminal, in
order that he be swept into the truth of his atrocity. . . . In two decades of con-
templating what happened to me, I believe to have recognized that a forgiving
and forgetting induced by social pressure is immoral. . . . Natural consciousness
of time actually is rooted in the physiological process of wound-healing and
became part of the social conception of reality. But precisely for this reason it is
not only extramoral, but also anti moral in character. Man has the right and the
privilege to declare himself to be in disagreement with every natural occurrence,
including the biological healing that time brings about. What happened, hap-
pened. This sentence is just as true as it is hostile to mortals and intellect. . . .
The moral person demands annulment of time—in the particular case under
question, by nailing the criminal to his deed. Thereby, and through a moral
turning-back of the clock, the latter can join his victim as a fellow human being.
(Ibid.: 64, 70, 72)
There is nothing of this in Primo Levi. Naturally he rejects the title of “the
forgiver” which Améry attributes to him. “I am not inclined to forgive, I never
forgave our enemies of that time” (Levi 1989: 137). And yet for him, the impossi-
bility of wanting Auschwitz to return for eternity has another, different root, one
which implies a new, unprecedented ontological consistency of what has taken
place. One cannot want Auschwitz to return for eternity, since in truth it has never
ceased to take place; it is always already repeating itself. This ferocious, implacable experience appears to Levi in the form of a dream:
It is a dream within other dreams, which varies in its details but not in its content.
I am seated at the dinner table with my family, or with friends, or at work, or in
the countryside—in a surrounding that is, in other words, peaceful and relaxed,
apparently without tension and suffering. And yet I feel anguish, an anguish that
is subtle but deep, the definite sensation of some threat. And, in fact, as the dream
continues, bit by bit or all of a sudden—each time it’s different—everything falls
apart around me, the setting, the walls, the people. The anguish becomes more
intense and pronounced. Everything is now in chaos. I’m alone at the center of
a gray, cloudy emptiness, and at once I know what it means, I know that I’ve
always known it: I am once again in the camp, and nothing outside the camp
was true. The rest—family, flowering nature, home—was a brief respite, a trick
of the senses. Now this inner dream, this dream of peace, is over; and in the outer
dream, which continues relentlessly, I hear the sound of a voice I know well: the
sound of one word, not a command, but a brief, submissive word. It is the order
REMNANTS OF AUSCHWITZ
829
at dawn in Auschwitz, a foreign word, a word that is feared and expected: “Get
up,” Wstawac. (Levi 1988: 245–55, translation emended)
In the version recorded in the poem At an Uncertain Hour, the experience has the form not of a dream, but of a prophetic certainty:
Sognavamo nelle notti feroci
sogni densi e violenti
sognati con anima e corpo:
tornare, mangiare; raccontare.
Finché suonava breve e sommesso
il comando dell’alba:
“Wstawac”;
e si spezzava in petto il cuore.
Ora abbiamo ritrovato la casa,
il nostro ventre è sazio,
abbiamo finito di raccontare.
È tempo. Presto udremo ancora
il comando straniero:
“Wstawac.”
In savage nights, we dreamt teeming, violent dreams with our body and soul: to
go back, to eat—to tell. Until we heard the brief and submissive order of dawn:
Wstawac. And our hearts were broken in our chests.
Now we have found our homes again; our bellies are full; we have fin-
ished telling our tales. It’s time. Soon we will once again hear the foreign order:
Wstawac. (Levi 1988: 530)
In this text, the ethical problem has radically changed shape. It is no longer
a question of conquering the spirit of revenge in order to assume the past, will-
ing its return for eternity; nor is it a matter of holding fast to the unacceptable
through resentment. What lies before us now is a being beyond acceptance and
refusal, beyond the eternal past and the eternal present—an event that returns
eternally but that, precisely for this reason, is absolutely, eternally unassumable.
Beyond good and evil lies not the innocence of becoming but, rather, a shame
that is not only without guilt but even without time.
3.8. Antelme clearly bears witness to the fact that shame is not a feeling of
guilt or shame for having survived another but, rather, has a different, darker and
more difficult cause. He relates that when the war was nearing its end, during
the mad march to transfer prisoners from Buchenwald to Dachau, as the Allies
were quickly approaching, the SS shot to death all those who would have slowed
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down the march because of their physical condition. At times the decimation
would take place by chance, in the absence of any visible criterion. One day it
was a young Italian’s turn:
The SS continues. “Du komme hier! ” Another Italian steps out of the column, a
student from Bologna. I know him. His face has turned pink. I look at him closely.
I still have that pink before my eyes. He stands there at the side of the road. He
doesn’t know what to do with his hands. . . . He turned pink after the SS man said
to him, “Du komme hier! ” He must have glanced about him before he flushed; but yes, it was he who had been picked, and when he doubted it no longer, he turned
pink. The SS who was looking for a man, any man, to kill, had found him. And
having found him, he looked no further. He didn’t ask himself: Why him, instead
of someone else? And the Italian, having understood it was really him, accepted this
chance selection. He didn’t wonder: Why me, instead of someone else? (Antelme
1992: 231–32)
It is hard to forget the flush of the student of Bologna, who died during the
march alone at the last minute, on the side of the road with his murderer. And
certainly the intimacy that one experiences before one’s own unknown murderer
is the most extreme intimacy, an intimacy that can as such provoke shame. But
whatever the cause of that flush, it is certain that he is not ashamed for having
survived. Rather, it is as if he were ashamed for having to die, for having been
haphazardly chosen—he and no one else—to be killed. In the camps, this is the
only sense that the expression “to die in place of another” can have: everyone
dies and lives in place of another, without reason or meaning; the camp is the
place in which no one can truly die or survive in his own place. Auschwitz also
means this much: that man, dying, cannot find any other sense in his death than
this flush, this shame.
In any case, the student is not ashamed for having survived. On the contrary,
what survives him is shame. Here, too, Kafka was a good prophet. At the end of
The Trial, at the moment in which Josef K. is about to die “like a dog,” and in which the knife of the executioner turns twice in his heart, something like shame
arises in him; “it was as if his shame were to survive him.” What is Josef K.
ashamed of ? Why does the student from Bologna blush? It is as if the flush on
his cheeks momentarily betrayed a limit that was reached, as if something like a
new ethical material were touched upon in the living being. Naturally it is not
a matter of a fact to which he could bear witness otherwise, which he might also
have expressed through words. But in any case that flush is like a mute apostro-
phe flying through time to reach us, to bear witness to him.
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831
3.9. In 1935, Levinas provided an exemplary analysis of shame. According
to Levinas, shame does not derive, as the moral philosophers maintain, from
the consciousness of an imperfection or a lack in our being from which we take
distance. On the contrary, shame is grounded in our being’s incapacity to move
away and break from itself. If we experience shame in nudity, it is because we
cannot hide what we would like to remove from the field of vision; it is because
the unrestrainable impulse to flee from oneself is confronted by an equally cer-
tain impossibility of evasion. Just as we experience our revolting and yet un-
suppressible presence to ourselves in bodily need and nausea, which Levinas
classifies alongside shame in a single diagnosis, so in shame we are consigned to
something from which we cannot in any way distance ourselves.
What appears in shame is therefore precisely the fact of being chained to one-
self, the radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide oneself from oneself,
the intolerable presence of the self to itself. Nudity is shameful when it is the
obviousness of our Being, of its final intimacy. And the nudity of our body is not
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