Jean AmeryThinkers

Nazism | national socialism is stamped less with the seal of a hardly definable 'totalitarianism' than with that of sadism.

Nazism | national socialism 1s 2ery essence is in torture. It is in torture that the third reich materialized in all the density of its being.

Nazism | national socialism is antithetical to mercy. One has to torture, to destroy, in order to be great in bearing the suffering of others. Maturity is achieved in obliterating one's feelings of mercy.

Torture is a kind of sovereignty, the ability to reduce a person so entirely to a body and a whimpering prey of death a God or, at least, a demiGod.

Torture is border violation of one's self by the other, which can be neither neutralized by the expectation of help nor rectified through resistance.

Torture was done by the Nazis because they were torturers. They placed it in their service, but even more fervently they were its servants.

Torture is indelible such that to have been tortured is to stay tortured. It is ineradicably burned into one.

Torture is no longer feeling at home in the world. It blocks the view into a world in which the principle of hope rules.

Torture is experiencing that in this world there can be the other as absolute sovereign, the power to inflict suffering and to destroy.

Torture , in the inquisition, served as a theological purification, even rising to a perverted 'togetherness'. Today, in modern police torture, the relationship of theological complicity is absent and the torturer is solely the other.

Torture is the ability of a man to apply a slight pressure to another and to turn that man and his mind, in which are stored kant, and hegel, and all nine symphonies, into a shrilly squealing piglet at slaughter.

Torture is the inverse of the popular phrase that 'we feel well as long as we do not feel our body'... in it, one's flesh becomes a total reality and we are turned completely into flesh, only a body and nothing else.

Torture is the sole way through which a living person can be transformed so thoroughly into flesh and by that, while still alive be partly made into a prey of death.

Torture is the total inversion of the social world, in which we can live only if we grant our fellow man life, ease his suffering, bridle the desire of our ego to expand. But in the world of torture man exist only by ruining the other person who stands before him.