Манес Спербер: Жизнь и творчество австрийского писателя

Austrian writer

Manès Sperber (12 December 1905 – 5 February 1984) was an Austrian French novelist, essayist and psychologist. He also wrote under the pseudonyms Jan Heger and N. A. Menlos.

Sperber was born on 12 December 1905 in Zabłotów near Kolomea, in the Austrian Galicia (today Zabolotiv, Ukraine). Sperber grew up in the shtetl of Zabłotów in a Hasidic family. He was the son of David Mechel Sperber and the older brother of Milo Sperber born 1911, who was to become an actor in Britain. In the summer of 1916 the family fled from war to Vienna, where Sperber who, having lost faith, at 13 had refused to do his bar mitzvah, joined the Jewish Hashomer Hatzair youth movement. There he met Alfred Adler, the founder of individual psychology, and became a student and co worker. Adler broke with him in 1932 because of differences in opinion about the connection of individual psychology and Marxism. In 1927 Sperber had moved to Berlin and joined the Communist Party. He lectured at the Berliner Gesellschaft für Individualpsychologie, an institute for individual psychology in Berlin. After Hitler had taken power Sperber was taken to jail, but was released after a few weeks on the grounds that he was an Austrian citizen. He emigrated first to Yugoslavia and then in 1934 to Paris where he worked for the Communist International with Willi Münzenberg. In 1938 he left the party because of the Stalinist purges within the party. In his writing he started to deal with totalitarianism and the role of the individual within society (Zur Analyse der Tyrannis). In 1939 Sperber volunteered for the French Army. After the defeat, he took refuge in Cagnes, in the so called "zone libre" (free zone) of France, and had to flee with his family to Switzerland in 1942, when the deportation of Jews started in that zone too.

After the end of the war, in 1945, he returned to Paris, and worked as a writer and as a senior editor at the Calmann Lévy publishing house. Manès Sperber is the author of a novel trilogy: Like a Tear in the Ocean: A Trilogy, (1949–1955); of an autobiographical trilogy: All our Yesterdays (1974–1997), and numerous essays on philosophy, politics, literature, and psychology. Sperber was widely published and read in Germany, receiving the high profile Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels in 1983. In awarding the prize, the association described Sperber as a "writer, who tracked the path of the ideological aberrations of the century, and freed himself from them entirely. Throughout his life he retained the independence of his own judgement, and incapable of indifference, summoned the courage, to get himself onto that non existing bridge that only opens up in front of those who step out over the abyss." The German writer Siegfried Lenz gave the speech highlighting Sperber's lifetime achievement. One of his closest friends was the novelist Constantine Fitzgibbon who translated much of his work into English.

Manès Sperber is the father of Italian historian Vladimir Sperber and French anthropologist and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber. His first wife, Miriam Sperber, eventually emigrated to Champaign, Illinois, and became a counselor at the Psychological and Counseling Center there. His younger brother Milo was an English actor. Milo spent the last years of his life travelling around Britain reading from his brother's works.

Manès Sperber died on 5 February 1984 in Paris. He was buried in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris. In 1988, the city of Vienna dedicated a park in the Leopoldstadt quarter to Sperber. The Manès Sperber Prize for Literature (Manès Sperber Preis für Literatur) was established in 1985 by the Austrian Ministry of Art and Culture in honour of Sperber, with Siegfried Lenz winning the inaugural prize. as of 2023 it is worth 8000 euros.