Жан Амері: Ашувицтен аман қалған эссешінің өмірі мен шығармалары

Austrian born essayist

Jean Améry (31 October 191217 October 1978), born Hanns Chaim Mayer, was an Austrian born essayist whose work was often informed by his experiences during World War II. 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). He adopted the pseudonym Jean Améry after 1945. Améry died by suicide in 1978. 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 at Fort Breendonk, 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.

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. 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."

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. His wife later died of heart disease while hiding in Brussels. 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.

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.

In 1976 Améry published the book On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death. He died by suicide via an overdose of sleeping pills in 1978.

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". 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", 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:

<blockquote>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. (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".

Karrieren und Köpfe: Bildnisse berühmter Zeitgenossen. Zurich: Thomas, 1955. Teenager Stars: Idole unserer Zeit. Vienna: Albert Müller, 1960. Im Banne des Jazz: Bildnisse großer Jazz Musiker. Vienna: Albert Müller, 1961. Geburt der Gegenwart: Gestalten und Gestaltungen der westlichen Zivilisation seit Kriegsende. Olten: Walter, 1961. Gerhart Hauptmann: Der ewige Deutsche. Stieglitz: Handle, 1963. Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten. Munich: Szczesny, 1966. Über das Altern: Revolte undd Resignation. Stuttgart: Klett, 1968. Unmeisterliche Wanderjahre. Stuttgart: Klett, 1971. Lefeu oder der Abbruch. Stuttgart: Klett, 1974. Hand an sich Legen. Diskurs über den Freitod. Stuttgart: Klett, 1976. Charles Bovary, Landarzt. Stuttgart: Klett, 1978. Bücher aus der Jugend unseres Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1981. Der integrale Humanismus: Zwischen Philosophie und Literatur. Aufsätze und Kritiken eines Lesers, 1966–1978. Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1985. Jean Améry, der Grenzgänger: Gespräch mit Ingo Hermann in der Reihe "Zeugen des Jahrhunderts." Ed. Jürgen Voigt. Göttingen: Lamuv, 1992. Cinema: Arbeiten zum Film. Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1994. Jean Améry: Werke. 9 vols. Edited by Irène Heidelberger Leonard. Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 2002–2008. The collected works in German.

Charles Bovary, médecin de campagne: portrait d'un homme simple. Roman/essai traduit de l'allemand par Françoise Wuilmart. Actes Sud : Arles, 1991. Par delà le crime et le châtiment : essai pour surmonter l'insurmontable. traduit de l'allemand par Francoise Wuilmart. Actes Sud : Arles, 1995. Du vieillissement. Payot : Paris, 1991 [1968] ; rééd. Petite Bibliothèque Payot 2009
Le feu ou la démolition. Actes Sud : Arles, 1996 [1974]
Porter la main sur soi – Du suicide. Actes Sud : Arles, 1999 [1976]
Les Naufragés. Actes Sud: Arles, 2010 [1935]

Preface to the Future: Culture in a Consumer Society. Trans. Palmer Hilty. London: Constable, 1964. At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities. Trans. Sidney and Stella P. Rosenfeld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Radical Humanism: Selected Essays. Trans. Sidney and Stella P. Rosenfeld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. On Aging: Revolt and Resignation. Trans. John D. Barlow. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death. Trans. John D. Barlow. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man. Trans. Adrian Nathan West. New York: New York Review Books, 2018.