Schreiben gegen Schweigen : Grenzerfahrungen in Jean Amerys autobiographischem Werk

Traces Améry's life and discusses his writings on his Holocaust experience (in France, Belgium, and Auschwitz) comparing him with other authors of Holocaust memoirs, particularly Primo Levi. Describes his discovery of his Jewishness at the age of 17; he perceived it as imposed by society and quite early realized that it was a death sentence. He understood the Nuremberg Laws as initiating a process to deprive Jews of their dignity ("Würde"). In the camps, the intellect became meaningless; the body was all. Death was humdrum, unaesthetic, impersonal. Discusses Améry's problem in writing about his experience in German, his mother tongue of which the Nazis had dispossessed him, and which, moreover, had been perverted by their misuse of it. He did this (like Celan, Grass, and others) by parody and irony, and by inverting traditional patterns. As a survivor, he felt he had no right to live. He was in despair over the lack of response of the German public to his testimony, the relativization of the Holocaust, and the revival of antisemitism in the shape of left-wing anti-Zionism. In 1978 he committed suicide. A Revision of the author's thesis. 187 pages ; 24 cm