Jean Améry
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Jean Améry (October 31, 1912 – October 17, 1978) was an Austrian of Jewish descent, noted for having written At the Mind's Limits, one of the central texts on the Nazi death camps.
[edit] Biography
He was born in Vienna, Austria as Hans Maier. He lived in Hohenems, a small resort city in the state of Vorarlberg. His father died in World War I, when his son was too young to remember him. From then onward Amery was brought up as a Roman Catholic by his mother and never practised Judaism. He studied philososphy and literature from a young age, including reading much of the canon of anti-semitic texts when Hitler came to power in 1933. Amery's reading brought him to an intriguing philosophical dilemma: as he writes, "I wanted by all means to be an anti-Nazi, that most certainly, but of my own accord; I was not yet ready to take Jewish destiny upon myself". Eventually, however, he did come to the conclusion that he was essentially Jewish, simply because he had been born so. This conviction is clearly evident in his later writings.
When, in 1938, the Anschluss united Germany and Austria, Amery fled to France and later to Belgium to escape the Nazis. Here he joined an underground Jewish resistance movement and was eventually captured by the Nazis. He was routinely tortured in a Nazi-Belgian institution known as Fort Breendonk, and when it was established that there was no information to be extracted from him, was moved to Auschwitz, where he spent a year, and later to Buchenwald and then Bergen-Belsen. He was liberated by British army at the end of the war in 1945.
After the war, he changed his name to Jean Améry (a French anagram of his given name) in order to symbolise his disassociation with Germany and newfound affinity with the French. He then refused to write in German for many years. Indeed, he did not write at all of his experiences in the death camps until 1964, when at the urging of German poet Helmut Heissenbuttal he wrote his book Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (literally "Beyond Guilt and Atonement"). It was later translated into English by Sidney and Stella P. Rosenfeld as At the Mind's Limits. Amery later wrote a second book, On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death. His philosophical explorations in this book evidently led him to a positive conclusion in his own mind regarding the virtues of suicide, for in 1978 he followed his own advice and killed himself by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.
[edit] Literary and philosophical achievements
Since the publication of At the Mind's Limits, Amery's stimulating and thought-provoking explorations of this little-covered facet of the Holocaust have led him to become one of the most respected and widely acknowledged Holocaust writers.
