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Jean Améry

Jean Améry

1912–1978

Nationality
Austria
Occupation
writer

Jean Améry (31 October 1912 – 17 October 1978), born Hans Chaim Maier, was an Austrian-born essayist who wrote about his experiences surviving the Holocaust.

Incarceration history

Biography

Jean Améry (31 October 1912 – 17 October 1978), born Hans Chaim Maier, was an Austrian-born essayist who wrote about his experiences surviving the Holocaust. 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.

Related people

Same nationality and era where possible; falls back to shared nationality or era.

  • Ester Tencer
    1909–1990Austria
  • Johann Neuffer
    1912Austria
  • Betty Hirsch
    1919–1996Austria
  • Georg Krausz
    Georg Krausz
    1894–1973Austria
  • Hugo Hantsch
    1895–1972Austria
  • Ruth Maier
    Ruth Maier
    1920–1942Austria

    Ruth Maier (10 November 1920 in Vienna, Austria – 1 December 1942 in Auschwitz, German-occupied Poland) was an Austrian woman whose diaries describing her experiences of the Holocaust in Austria and Norway were published in 2007; reviews described her as "Norway's Anne Frank.".

External references