Talk:Jean Améry
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1. What about Amery's activity in the Belgian underground ? 2. I'm not sure he was in Auszwits. In any case, he was first tortured and investigated by the Gestapo. at least as far as I know.
[edit] I don't get it
There's one thing I really don't get about Wikipedia. If there's already really good information about a subject online, such as the D. G. Myers biograpy of Jean Améry to which this (of course entirely insufficient) Wikipedia article links, why add another bit of information that will only overlap?
- Nothing's stopping you from editing this yourself. I would but I have other priorities right now.
- Oh, wasn't Bergen-Belsen liberated by the British? It seems the original author read the Myers bio in too much haste. Daniel Case 19:42, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
But as to the user's question, yes, Améry was in Auschwitz. He was first arrested on 23 July 1943 because of "anti-national-socialist propaganda" in the context of his participation in the Belgian résistance against the German occupation, and he was subsequently tortured in Breendonk. He would later write about the trauma of torture in the essay "Die Tortur." In January of the following year he was transferred to Auschwitz, where he managed to survive as a scribe for the I. G. Farben chemical company that used the camp's inmates as forced labour. Because of the approaching Red Army that would soon liberate Auschwitz, Améry and other inmates were transferred to other camps further west; Améry ended up in the subterranean work camp Mittelbau-Dora, a Buchenwald sattelite where rockets were manufactured. In April, he was again transferred, this time to Bergen-Belsen, where he and his fellow survivors were eventually freed by the British on 15 April. According to the article "Gegen sich denken können" [To be able to think against oneself] by Winfried F. Schoeller, from which I have culled some of the information I am presenting here (published in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit on 15. January 2004), Améry spent 642 days in German camps.
"Die Tortur," by the way, is published in _Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigen_ [Beyond guilt and atonement: Attempts to overcome by someone who was overcome], and was translated into English as _At the Mind's Limits_.
[edit] Post Hoc Ergo Proctor Hoc
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.
This is irreverant and crude. One cannot conclude meaningfully that Amery's suicide was the result of "following his own advice" simply because he did so after writing On Suicide.
The above quoted segment should be edited or removed.
