Jean Améry
| Born | Hanns Chaim Mayer 31 October 1912 Vienna, Austria-Hungary |
|---|---|
| Died | 17 October 1978 (aged 65) Salzburg, Austria |
| Occupation | Author |
| Nationality | Austrian |
Jean Améry (31 October 1912 – 17 October 1978), born Hanns Chaim Mayer, was an Austrian essayist whose work was often informed by his experiences during World War II.
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 German Gestapo, and several years of imprisonment in concentration camps. Améry survived internments in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and was finally liberated at Bergen-Belsen in 1945. After the war he settled in Belgium.
His most celebrated work, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (1966), suggests that torture was "the essence" of the Third Reich. Other notable works included On Aging (1968) and On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death (1976). Améry killed himself in 1978.
Jean Améry was born 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. 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."
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. 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".
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