Jean Améry Totally Explained

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Jean Améry (October 31, 1912 – October 17 1978), born Hans Mayer, was an Austrian-born essayist whose work was often informed by his experiences during WWII. Formerly a philosophy and literature student in Vienna, Améry's participation in organized resistance against the Nazi occupation of Belgium resulted in his detainment and torture by the Gestapo, and several years of imprisonment in concentration camps.
Améry survived stints in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and was finally liberated at Bergen-Belsen in 1945. His most celebrated work, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, suggests that torture was "the essence" of the Third Reich. Other notable works included On Aging, and On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death.

Early life

Améry's name by birth was Hans Mayer. He was born in Vienna, Austria in 1912, to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. His father was killed in action in WWI in 1916. Améry was raised as a Roman Catholic by his mother. 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.

Religion

While Améry's family was "estranged from its Jewish origins, assimilated and intermarried", this alienation itself, in the context of Nazi occupation, informed much of his thought: "I wanted by all means to be an anti-Nazi, that most certainly, but of my own accord."
The Nuremberg Laws of 1935, the text of which he soon came to know by heart, convinced him that Germany had essentially passed a sentence of death on all Jews. Amery's The Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew speaks to this inner conflict as to his identity. He suggests that while his personal identity, the identity of his own childhood past, is distinctly Christian, he feels himself nonetheless a Jew in another sense, in the sense of a Jewishness "without God, without history, without messianic-national hope".

[F]or me, being a Jew means feeling the tragedy of yesterday as an inner oppression. On my left forearm I bear the Auschwitz number; it reads more briefly than the Pentateuch or the Talmud and yet provides more thorough information. It is also more binding than basic formulas of Jewish existence. If to myself and the world, including the religious and nationally minded Jews, who don't regard me as one of their own, I say: I'm a Jew, then I mean by that those realities and possibilities that are summed up in the Auschwitz number.

Later life

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'd 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 the British army in April 1945.

Name change

After the war, he changed his name to Jean Améry (the surname being a French anagram of his family name) in order to symbolize his disassociation with German culture and his alliance with French culture. He refused to publish in Germany or Austria for many years, thus only publishing in Switzerland. He didn't write at all of his experiences in the death camps until 1964, when at the urging of German poet Helmut Heißenbüttel, 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.

Literary and philosophical legacy

The publication of At the Mind's Limits, Améry's stimulating and thought-provoking exploration of the Holocaust and the nature of the Third Reich has rendered him one of most highly regarded of Holocaust writers. In comparing the Nazis to a government of sadism, Améry suggests that it's the sadist's nature to want "to nullify the world". For a Nazi torturer,

A slight pressure by the tool-wielding hand is enough to turn the other--along with his head, in which are perhaps stored Kant and Hegel, and all nine symphonies, and the World as Will and Representation--into a shrill squealing piglet at slaughter.

Like Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski, Améry was interned at Auschwitz, and survived only to take his own life (although the question of Levi having committed suicide is disputed).

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