Jean Améry

Jean Améry was born as Hanns Chaim Mayer in Vienna, Austria, in 1912, to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. His father was killed in action in World War I in 1916. Améry was raised as a Roman Catholic by his mother.[1] 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.

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."[1]

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935, the text of which he soon came to know by heart, convinced Améry that Germany had essentially passed a sentence of death on all Jews.[1] His 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, the sense of a Jewishness "without God, without history, without messianic-national hope".[2]

[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 do not regard me as one of their own, I say: I am a Jew, then I mean by that those realities and possibilities that are summed up in the Auschwitz number.

— Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits, p. 94

The railway to Auschwitz

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, Regina, whom he had chosen in opposition to his mother's wishes.[3] She later died of heart disease while hiding in Brussels.[4] 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, he returned to Belgium where he joined the Resistance movement.

Involved in the distribution of anti-military propaganda to the German occupying forces, Améry was captured by the Nazis in July 1943 and routinely 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, where he was liberated by the British army in April 1945.

The main gate of Buchenwald Concentration Camp.

After the war, the former Hanns Mayer changed his name to Jean Améry (the surname being a French-sounding anagram of his family name) in order to symbolize his dissociation from German culture and his alliance with French culture.[1] He lived in Brussels, working as a culture journalist for German language newspapers in Switzerland. He refused to publish in Germany or Austria for many years, publishing only in Switzerland. He did not 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 ("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.

He later married Marie Eschenauer, whom he was still married to at the time of his death.[5] In 1976 Améry published the book On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death. He committed suicide via an overdose of sleeping pills in 1978.[6]

Grave of Jean Améry at the Zentralfriedhof Vienna.

The publication of At the Mind's Limits, Améry's exploration of the Holocaust and the nature of the Third Reich, made him one of the most highly regarded of Holocaust writers. In comparing the Nazis to a government of sadism, Améry suggests that it is 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.

Améry's efforts to preserve the memory of the Holocaust focused on the terror and horror of the events in a phenomenological and philosophical way, with what he characterized as "a scant inclination to be conciliatory".[7] His explorations of his experiences and the meaning and legacy of Nazi-era suffering were aimed not at resolving the events finally into "the cold storage of history",[8] but rather keeping the subject alive so that it would not be lost to posterity, as an abstraction or mere text. As he wrote in his 1976 preface to Beyond Guilt and Atonement:

I do not have [clarity] today, and I hope that I never will. Clarification would amount to disposal, settlement of the case, which can then be placed in the files of history. My book is meant to prevent precisely this. For nothing is resolved, nothing is settled, no remembering has become mere memory.[8]

With the prize money that the Viennese writer Robert Menasse received for the Austrian State Prize (1999) he re-founded the “Jean Améry–Preis für Europäische Essayistik”, whose winners were Lothar Baier, Barbara Sichtermann (1985), Mathias Greffrath (1988), Reinhard Merkel (1991), Franz Schuh (2000), Doron Rabinovici (2002), Michael Jeismann (2004), Journalist, Drago Jančar (2007), Imre Kertész (2009), Dubravka Ugrešić (2012), Adam Zagajewski[9] (2016) and Karl-Markus Gauß (2018).

Améry was known for his opposition to antisemitism in postwar Germany and support for the state of Israel, which he said was "more important than any other" country to him. In 1969, he wrote an article in Die Zeit in which he stated: "Anti-Zionism contains antisemitism like a cloud contains a storm".[10]

• Christopher Bigsby, Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Ch. 7.
• Irène Heidelberger-Leonard, The Philosopher of Auschwitz: Jean Améry and Living with the Holocaust. Translated by Anthea Bell. London: I. B. Tauris, 2010. First published in German as Jean Améry: Revolte in der Resignation (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2004). Also published in French as Jean Améry (Arles: Actes Sud, 2007) and Spanish as Jean Améry: Revuelta en la resignación (Valencia: Universitat di Valencia, 2010).
• Guia Risari, "La paradossale condizione di un non-non ebreo", "Qol", n. 64, lug.-sett.1996
• Guia Risari, "Jean Améry, la morale del risentimento - La Shoah e gli storici", "Golem L'Indispensabile", n. 12, dic. 2003
• Guia Risari, "Il risentimento come principio creativo","Materiali di Estetica", n. 8, gen. 2003
• Guia Risari,"Jean Améry. Il risentimento come morale", Franco Angeli, Milano, 2002 [monography]; Jean Améry : il risentimento come morale, Roma, Castelvecchi, 2016, ISBN 9788869446078.
• W. G. Sebald, "Against the Irreversible" in On the Natural History of Destruction, Penguin, 2003, pp. 147–72.

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