Entangled memories of violence: Jean Améry and Frantz Fanon

Abstract

In this article I discuss the entangled memories of the Holocaust and the anticolonial struggles in Western Europe in the 1960s by relating the writings of Jean Améry and Frantz Fanon. My aim is to show how Améry’s retrospective narrative of his lived experience in the Nazi camp was formed by his reading of Fanon’s experiences of colonialism, and how Fanon’s narrative of the colonial trauma was transposed and translated into Améry’s public testimony as a Holocaust survivor. The article argues that Améry’s individual memories found a certain mediated cultural form and narrative frame in the contemporaneous situation of decolonisation. The multilayered weave of fascist and colonial violence constituting Améry’s testimony highlights questions of memory’s multidirectionality and casts new light on how cultural memorial forms are shaped and shared.