Abstract
How can we conceive of justice after Auschwitz? This question informs all of Jean Améry's writings. While Améry is famous for his defense of ressentiments and for problematizing the demand of forgiveness put on survivors after the war, I argue that a consideration of his reflections on revenge are indispensible for reaching a fuller understanding of his complex engagement with individual and collective notions of justice after Auschwitz. In his essay collection Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (1966), Améry is quick to dismiss the idea of revenge. However, the protagonist of Lefeu oder der Abbruch (1974), a Holocaust survivor, indulges in a fantasy of vengeance, followed by the fantasy of being brought to trial for his quest for justice. Relegating both revenge and the court to the realm of the imaginary, Améry depicts them in their failure to bring about justice and foregrounds the survivor's struggle to be heard by his or her community. I demonstrate that Améry—in dialogue with Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, and Simon Wiesenthal—is not primarily interested in the contours of justice as a juridical concept as much as he is renegotiating the terms of justice, community, and remembrance after the war.
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