At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities - Softcover

Amery, Jean

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805207619 ISBN 13: 9780805207613

Publisher: Schocken Books, 1986

Synopsis

At the Mind's Limits is the story of one man's struggle to understand the reality of horror. In five autobiographical essays, Jean Amery describes his survival -- mental, moral, and physical -- through the enormity of the Holocaust. Above all, this masterful record of introspection tells of a young Viennese intellectual's fervent vision of human nature and the betrayal of that vision. Amery depicts the futile attempts of the intellect to cope with the overwhelming realities of Auschwitz. His torture is perceived as a reduction of self to the purely physical, with an accompanying loss of faith in the world. He struggles to come to terms with exile from his homeland as well as his feelings upon returning to the country of his persecutors. Finally, Amery, once the totally peripheral Jew, explains how complete acceptance of his Jewish identity, as compelled by his experiences in Auschwitz, is the only way in which he can regain human dignity."

About this title

Review

Because Auschwitz was among the most brutal of the concentration camps, ruled by capricious, pure force and not by any discernable political or social structure, the intellectual there "was alone with his intellect ... and there was no social reality that could support and confirm it." In other words, there was no place for the intellect to act, outside of the confines of a person's own skull. Jean Amery's At The Mind's Limits is a focused meditation on the position of the intellectual placed in "a borderline situation, where he has to confirm the reality and effectiveness of his intellect, or to declare its impotence: in Auschwitz." In the camp, Amery writes, "The intellect very abruptly lost its basic quality: its transcendence." Considering this loss, Amery describes his own experience of torture, his reactions of resentment, anger and bitterness, his loss of any vital sense of metaphysical questions and his search for some way to maintain moral character and Jewish identity in the absence of such consciousness. --Michael Joseph Gross

About the Author

Jean Amery (1912-1978) was born in Vienna and in 1938 emigrated to Belgium, where he joined the Resistance Movement. He was caught by the Germans in 1943, tortured by the SS, and survived the next two years in the concentration camps. He was author of seven volumes of essays and two novels. He committed suicide in 1978.
Sidney Rosenfeld, Ph.D., Professor of German at Oberlin College, and Stella P. Rosenfeld, Ph.D., are cotranslators of Radical Humanism by Jean Amery and Jewish Life in Germany edited by M. Richarz.

Edition details

• Publisher: Schocken Books
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0805207619
• ISBN 13: 9780805207613
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 127