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JEAN AMÉRY AND WOLFGANG HILDESHEIMER: RESSENTIMENTS, MELANCHOLIA, AND THE WEST GERMAN PUBLIC SPHERE IN THE 1960S AND 1970S A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Melanie Steiner Sherwood January 2011 © 2011 Melanie Steiner Sherwood JEAN AMÉRY AND WOLFGANG HILDESHEIMER: RESSENTIMENTS, MELANCHOLIA, AND THE WEST GERMAN PUBLIC SPHERE IN THE 1960S AND 1970S Melanie Steiner Sherwood, Ph. D. Cornell University 2011 The dissertation revisits the West German literary scene of the 1960s and 1970s to investigate how two of its Jewish participants, Jean Améry and Wolfgang Hildesheimer, sought to promote ethical responses to the Holocaust. The study incorporates literary analysis and socio-political reflections on the ethics of public life. First, it is an analysis of the relationship between judicial confrontation of the German criminal past, the silence in the wider German cultural sphere in the wake of this confrontation, and the two writers’ efforts to expose and address this ethical disconnect (chapter I). Second, it draws attention to two very different modes of reactive affect, ressentiment and melancholia. Through readings of Hildesheimer’s novels Tynset (1965) and Masante (1973) in chapters II and III, on the one hand, and Améry’s essay “Ressentiments” (1966) and the essay-novel Lefeu oder Der Abbruch (1974) in chapters IV and V, on the other, the dissertation analyzes these two modes. Hildesheimer employed a register of ethical writing that articulated the interconnected processes of mourning and melancholia, but unlike recent scholarship that focuses on these categories and valorizes melancholia as source of productive socio-political action, Hildesheimer did not prescribe them as exemplary modes of affective reparation. For Hildesheimer’s narrators, mourning the victims of the Holocaust becomes an impossible task that leads to an affective and communicative impasse of permanent melancholia. As Améry conceived ressentiment, it is, in contrast to melancholia, an affect that seeks to engage the wider community. If met with empathetic attention, Améry’s affect of ressentiment enables future socio- political dialogue between victims and their community. Améry thus argues for the moral superiority of ressentiments as the most appropriate ethical vehicle to redress crimes. By analyzing Améry’s philosophy of ressentiments, which challenges the privileged position of melancholia, and by investigating Hildesheimer’s approach to and ultimate rejection of melancholia, the dissertation argues for a nuanced understanding of the workings of affects and their ethical repercussions. The dissertation thus contributes to a growing body of international scholarship that elaborates—beyond melancholia and mourning alone—how various affects mediated in literature inform the ethics of public life after the Holocaust. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Melanie Steiner Sherwood was born in East Berlin where she witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall at the age of eleven. After a short-lived flirtation with mathematics she pursued a Magisterstudium at Martin Luther University Halle, Germany, in Anglo- American Studies and European History, with an emphasis on comparative judicial history of the early modern period. One year short of completing her degree she switched to a graduate program in German Studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where she was awarded a B.A. Equivalent for previous studies and received her M.A. in 2003 with a thesis on W. G. Sebald and Anselm Kiefer. She joined the Germanic Studies program at Cornell University the same year, entering the combined M.A./Ph.D. program. Since the fall semester of 2009 she has been teaching at Brandeis University as Lecturer of German in the Department of German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature. iii To Erik Ick dir ooch iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My foremost thanks goes to the chair of my committee, Leslie A. Adelson, who has been a constant source of scholarly guidance, intellectual challenge, and cordial support. Over the years she has encouraged my academic curiosity and been a stalwart ally, and I am incredibly fortunate to have had such a thoroughly enjoyable and fruitful apprenticeship with her. I am especially thankful for her comprehensive commentary on each chapter draft. I am also grateful to the other members of my committee, David Bathrick and Dominick LaCapra, for their invaluable intellectual stimulation and good humor. It was a pleasure and an honor to work with my advisors, and I thank them for their inspiration, reliability, and generosity. In addition to these fine teachers other members of the Cornell academic community have guided me, and I thank Werner Goehner, Art Groos, Peter Hohendahl, Gunhild Lischke, Ute Maschke, Diana Reese, Anette Schwarz, and Geoffrey Waite for engaging classes and academic encouragement. Finally I wish to thank Miriam Zubal, the German Department’s administrative assistant, for helping me navigate successfully through the graduate school bureaucracy. My graduate studies have been financially supported from inside and outside Cornell University. The generous funding, including conference and research travel money, by Cornell’s Graduate School deserves special acknowledgment. The Sicca Fellowship from the Institute of European Studies as well as a grant from the International Students and Scholars Office helped fund different stages of research and writing. The Humboldt Exchange Fellowship, cosponsored by Cornell University and Humboldt University, Berlin, and partially funded by the German Academic Exchange Service, allowed for invaluable year-long research at the archive of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and at Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach. This research was v jumpstarted by a two-month Graduate Stipend awarded by Deutsches Literaturarchiv. The literary archive in Marbach provided more than just financial aid; its supportive staff of librarians, archivists, and research associates made the research stage so much more productive and enjoyable. I wish to thank Marcel Lepper, Katharina von Wilucki, and Birgit Wollgarten in particular for their hands-on assistance. Because of the friends I made at Cornell University, I have felt more at home in Ithaca than anywhere else since leaving for college, and I am grateful for stimulating intellectual exchanges as well as welcome distractions with my fellow German Studies comrades, particularly Josh Dittrich, Erica Doerhoff, Sean Franzel, Sam Frederick, Grace-Yvette Gemmell, Tim Haupt, Yuliya Komska, Jens Schellhammer, Casey Servais and, by extension, Robin Fostel. My greatest thanks go to the other half of my incoming class, Martins Masulis, for his untiring patience in listening to my tirades, academic and otherwise. Outside the department Franz Hofer, Taran Kang, Daniel Koltonski, Emma Kuby, Stephen Moseley, Marie Muschalek and Ryan Plumley, Amy Phillips, Aaron Skrypski, and Kristen Stanley have been wonderful friends. On my first day at Cornell I was lucky to have met Emma Willoughby, who over the years has become my closest confidante and with whom I have shared many splendid times. The dissertation could not have been completed in Ithaca, and I am very grateful to Jenn Berg, Norah Esty, Sabine von Mering, Minh Nguyen and Jerrel Mast, and Tom Regan and John Brown for their friendship during the homestretch of dissertating in Boston, as well as to Toby Marriage and Hyeseung Marriage-Song, whose New York City doors have always been open to me. Other friends cheered from further away, and I thank especially Konstanze Krüger, who has been a terrific friend since our early college days, and Julia N. Wagner, my partner-in- crime in Swabian adventures. My gratitude and wishes for all good things go to John R. Klein, whose kindness and compassion sustained me for many years. Last not least vi I would like to thank Randy Patterson, who guided me through dark hours. I am not with my family as often as I would like, but they have been an constant source of practical and emotional support throughout the years. I am profoundly grateful to my mother and step-father, Christiane and Dieter Boss, and my father and step-mother, Michael and Petra Dürre, for their unconditional love, never- wavering confidence, and absolute reliability. My brothers, Dennis and Michael Steiner, have never failed to show me around town during my Berlin visits, and I am thankful to them for all the wonderful diversions from research that they offered me; I also thank their partners, Madleine Miethe and Hanna Weimann, respectively, for bringing them such happiness. I am a most fortunate wife to have parents-in-law who love me like a daughter, and I wish to thank Julia and Todd Sherwood for their constant encouragement and practical help. Many thanks also go to Todd’s extended family in New York, in particular to Betty Wallace, whose house has become my third home. Most of all, though, I wish to thank my husband, Erik Sherwood, whose many acts of kindness, love, and support are too numerous to mention. Suffice it to say, his steady confidence and pride in me gave me the endurance to complete the dissertation, even when faced with obstacles I would have deemed insurmountable on my own, and his diligent editorial help improved my writing greatly (and allowed for two terms from his own trade, mathematics, to sneak into my text). His companionship means the world to me, and I dedicate this work to him. For the past

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