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.
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[edit] Biography
Born Hans Mayer in Vienna, Austria in 1912, Améry grew up first in the home of his Jewish paternal ancestors in Hohenems in the state of Vorarlberg, but after the death of his father in the Austrian army in 1916, was raised as a Roman Catholic by his mother in Bad Ischl in the Salzkammergut. Eventually Améry and his mother returned to Vienna where he enrolled in university to study literature and philosophy, but economic necessity kept him from regular pursuit of studies there.
Améry had never been raised in any sort of Jewish atmosphere, secular or religious. His father seems to have made little of his own Jewish ancestry, and, in any event, died in military service when Améry was only four. He wrote, "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". It was his reading of the just published Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which convinced him that Germany had essentially passed a sentence of death on all Jews with only the date of execution left open. With that sentence began his journey through "The Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew," but, to say he always remained conflicted about the place of Jewishness in his identity would be understatement. From 1943 until his death in 1978, its main symbolic expression would be the concentration camp serial number tatooed on his forearm.
In 1938, when the Nazis were welcomed into Austria and the country joined with Germany into a "Greater Reich," Améry fled to France, and then to Belgium with his Jewish wife, whom he had chosen in opposition to his mother's wishes. Ironically, he was initially deported back to France by the Belgians as a German alien, and wound up interned in the south. After escaping from the camp at Gurs and returning to Belgium, he joined the Resistance movement, at least in part, it seems, because it was more important for him to feel imperiled as a political than as a Jew.
Involved in the distribution of anti-military propaganda to the German occupying forces, Améry was captured by the Nazis, and routinely (and severely) tortured at the Belgian Gestapo center at Fort Breendonk. When it was established that there was no information to be extracted from him, he was "demoted" from political prisoner to Jew, and shipped to Auschwitz. Lacking any trade skills, he was assigned to the harshest physical labors, building the I.G. Farben factory at Auschwitz III, the Buna-Monowitz labor camp. In the face of the Soviet invasion in the following year, he was evacuated first to Buchenwald and then to Bergen-Belsen, whence he was liberated by British army in April 1945.
After the war, he changed his name to Jean Améry (a French anagram of his family name) in order to symbolize his disassociation with Germanic and alliance with French culture. (To the extent he was an intellectual—at least as profoundly complicated a matter as being a Jew—he became an intellectual disciple of Jean Paul Sartre.) He refused to write in German for many years, and 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: Contemplations By a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. Améry later wrote a book, On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death. Perhaps it was his philosophical explorations in this book—along with fears of aging and broken health, and in the face of what must have been a morale-shattering, growing disillusionment with both French philosophy and German New Left politics—that led him to take his own life by overdose of sleeping pills in 1978.
[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.
[edit] Further reading
- W. G. Sebald "Against the Irreversible" in On the Natural History of Destruction, 2003, Penguin pp147-72
