Philosopher of Auschwitz

Irene Heidelberger-Leonard is Professor of German Literature at the Free University of Brussels. She has written extensively on the German post-war period and its relationship to National Socialism and is the editor of a nine-volume edition of Amery's writings. Her biography of Jean Amery was named as non-fiction Book of the Year by the German Cultural Foundation in 2004 and was awarded the prestigious biennial Einhard Prize for Outstanding European Biography 2005.

'[Jean Amery was] one of the few authentic voices on the Holocaust...based on the most "ponderous insights into the irreparable condition of the victims, and that it is from such insights alone that the true nature of the terror visited on them can be extrapolated with some precision."' - W. G. Sebald; 'one reads [At the Mind's Limits] with almost physical pain...all the way to its stoic conclusion' - Primo Levi; '[Jean Amery's] experience of torture at the hands of the Gestapo remains the locus classicus on the subject. Speaking out on behalf of the hitherto silent victims, Amery was one of the first - along with his fellow Auschwitz inmate Primo Levi - to universalize his ordeal. Irene Heidelberger-Leonard has evoked an unnecessary martyr whose death was as ignoble as his life was noble. The collective recollection of the Holocaust, more in anger than in sorrow, is Amery's legacy to a world in which he saw himself as a superfluous man. As this biography demonstrates, his witness has never been more necessary than today.' - Daniel Johnson, TLS; 'Jean Amery offers a perceptive view of Amery's life and work and is like all of Prof. Heidelberger's other books very well written and accessible also to the interested 'lay' public. I think it would be a very valuable book to be made available to an English readership.' - Andrea Reiter, Senior Lecturer in Modern Languages and Parkes Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Southampton; 'The Holocaust has its own saints, just like any other subculture. Jean Amery is one of them. There are biographies which transcend the boundaries of their genre, and can be read like novels. This is true of Irene Heidelberger-Leonard's work on Jean Amery which at the same time succeeds in conveying a monumental view of the historical era which he lived through.' - Imre Kertesz

• 1. VILLAGE IDYLL (1912-1924) - Bad Ischl and the Magic of the ForestHohenems: certificate of citizenship and ostensible homeland . The family . Early years in Vienna . Hans and Ernst Mayer: friends in life and death . Bad Ischl . Who or what is a Jew? . A divided heart . Winter world versus summer world . The tribulations of the young grammar-school boy2. ZIRKUSGASSE 48 (1924-1935) - The Enticements of ReasonLeopold Langhammer, Mayer’s mentor . Red Vienna . First encounters: Broch, Canetti, and the Austrian literary scene . Hans Mayer’s personal revolution . Approaches to the Wiener Kreis [Vienna Circle] . The future writer . Die Brücke3. HANS MAYER AS A WRITER OF FICTION - Die Schiffbrüchigen [The Shipwrecked], 1935/451935 Préludes . The first novel . Autobiography as historical writing . Althager - an alter ego? . The relationship to ‘the other’ . Genophobia . ‘Art should not describe life, but create life’ . 1945: To be or not to be . Auschwitz - a mass fate? . The Auschwitz discourse then and now4. YEARS OF WANDERING (1938-1945) - The Mind Knows no LimitsVienna before and after the Anschluss . Antwerp (1939-1940) . St. Cyprien - Gurs (1940-1941) . Flight to occupied Belgium . Resistance in Brussels . Breendonck (1943) . Torture in his novel (1945) . Torture in the essay (12965) . Auschwitz - Dora-Mittelbau - Bergen Belsen (1944-1945) . Jean Améry / Primo Levi - an excursus . Friends strange to each other . Coming home to no home5. LIVING ON - BUT HOW AND WHERE? (1945-1955) - The principle of educationThe original theme of suicide: Love’s Crown of Thorns: variation 1 . Heinrich Greyt: variation 2 . Die Selbstmörder: variation 3 . Kleist: variation 4 . Die Eingemauerten [The Immured]: variation 5 . Existentialism in France. Revolution of the mind? Fashion? Or the twilight of the ‘esprit français’? . ‘On the Psychology of the German People’: revenge? . Neither guilt nor atonement . Deranged criminals . Work will not make you free . Letter of farewell to Knut Hamsun . Where now? His fixed point: Maria Leitner . Vienna? Bad Ischl? The ‘indissoluble boyhood friendship’ . Cologne? Comrade Heinz Kühn . Dangerous games with identity . Lore’s London? ‘ Sartre’s Paris? . Zürich and the Dukas press agency? . Brussels old and new . The Adelboden sanatorium . Journalistic confectionery 6. JEAN AMÉRY THE JOURNALIST (1955-1965) - All Active on the Western FrontPortraits of famous contemporaries . Vive la science! . Jazz - heightened emotion . Stars of the fifties . Revelations . Gerhart Hauptmann, especially the negative aspects . Preface to the Future . Inventory . Alternative memory . The ‘engine’ of a culture? . France’s cultural mission to the world . Jean-Paul Sartre - First excursus . Sartre - writer of the Resistance . Sartre - the teacher of life . Sartre - the teacher of thinking . The first idea for Charles Bovary . Sartre - the mouthpiece of the wartime generation . ‘Le faux, c’est la mort’ . ‘The God that failed’ . America’s political sense of mission . In the name of the Cold War . The abolition of death, the glorification of sex . America’s cultural contribution: sociology . England between Europe and America? . England’s not so splendid isolation . Germany - an upswing through anaesthetization . First visit: Hitler never existed . Germany 1945, Germany 1952 . A cultural miracle? . No revocation of history . German thinkers after 1945 . German writers after 1945 . A break with emigration . No pact between reader and author . Hope and the second generation7. DRAMA OF THE MIND IN THREE ACTS­ - the autobiographical trilogyPrologue . Heissenbüttel and the consequences . Who brings whom to the meeting?. If not now, when? . The Auschwitz trial . A star is born . Act I: At the Mind’s Limits (1966): Auschwitz and the Intellectual . The single useful starting point: the ‘I’ . Less than welcome approval . At the body’s limits . Welcome approval . Merkur to the end . Adorno - friend or f