At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities [Hardcover]

Jean Amery (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1998

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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 --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Language Notes

Text: English, German (translation)

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 111 pages
• Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr (May 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0253177243
• ISBN-13: 978-0253177247
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #567,087 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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39 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars That Which is Incumbent Upon Every Human Being, October 9, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (Paperback)

To the world at large, none of the death camps is better known than is Auschwitz. There is now in existence a very large volume of literature regarding the atrocities committed in that infamous place, much of it written by its survivors. This literature is often reflective as well as descriptive as it recounts, not only the day-to-day horror of life and death but the destructive effects of relentless and senseless violence on human understanding. In this respect, the books of both Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi must stand as premier examples of intellectual and spiritual revelation as well as personal witness.

Jean Amery's At the Mind's Limit: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities must join the works of Wiesel and Levi as indispensable reading for anyone seeking to grasp the deepest range of emotions and implications the name Auschwitz should evoke. In this book Amery stresses the negative and shows on virtually every page how futile it would be to scrutinize the experience of a Holocaust survivor for anything even remotely redemptive. Auschwitz was destruction without deliverance, a place of inexplicable and implacable hostility against the very definition of humanity. As a consequence, a mind that searches Auschwitz, or any of the other camps, for reasonable and rational explanations will only be confronted with its own impotence. As Amery puts it, "In the camp the intellect in its totality declared itself to be incompetent...Beauty: that was an illusion. Knowledge: that turned out to be a game with ideas." The intellect, Amery tells us, was robbed of its transcendence, rendering the intellectual the most vulnerable of victims.

The five autobiographical essays that make up this remarkable book are models of intellectual sobriety, lucidity and moral earnestness. Amery's experiences at Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz and other camps, detailed in the first essay, brought him to the realization that all of his previously-held aesthetic concepts and analytic capabilities were rendered useless. "The aesthetic view of death had revealed itself to the intellectual as part of an aesthetic mode of life; where the latter had been all but forgotten, the former was nothing but an elegant trifle. In the camp no Tristan music accompanied death, only the roaring of the SS and the Kapos." Spiritually disarmed and intellectually disoriented, "the intellectual faced death defenselessly."

The book's second essay, which is unusually vivid, concerns the genesis and nature of sadistic physical torture. Torture was an essential component of Nazism and not a peripheral aspect. It was the determinant that defined and coalesced the basically depraved and destructive character of Nazism, an ideology "that expressly established...the role of the antiman...as a principle." Nihilistic principles have always existed, but German National Socialism distilled and purified them. They tortured, not to gain advantages, but because they were torturers.

The remaining three essays deal with a variety of topics, all related to and all centering on the ordeals Amery endured during the Holocaust as well as its aftermath. The book's concluding essay, "On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew," is a culminating statement that defines in wretchedly painful terms a dilemma that is far more than Amery's alone.

As Amery both felt and lived with the Holocaust, his awareness demanded that he contend with all manifestations of postwar anti-Semitism, something he did with increasing frequency during the final years of his life. Although his own Judaism was, to him, highly problematic, he was uncompromising in his opposition to those who attacked the ideological concept of the State of Israel. "The impossibility of being a Jew," he said, "becomes the necessity to be one, and that means: a vehemently protesting Jew."

Amery, however, worried that in any newfound prosperity the events of the Third Reich would be forgotten or simply submerged in accounts of the general historical epoch. And, indeed, even the young survivors of the camps have now reached their seventh decade of life. What will preserve the memory of the camps once the last survivor is gone? For, "Remembering," said Amery. "That is the cue."

The entire world was, and is, affected by the atrocities of the Holocaust. It therefore becomes incumbent upon every human being alive, and not just every Jew, as well as those human beings yet to be born, to bear the imprint of the Holocaust upon his heart. In this way, mankind will never cease to do what is so very essential. Remember.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Potent...Like a bitter drink you have to come back to..., July 31, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (Paperback)

I really can't say much about this book, except that it is the most worn in my library of over 1,000 volumes compiled from a lifetime of literature. This translation is amazing as well. This book is an intellectual's journey through, and life after, hell.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An extraordinary meditation on catastrophe., October 23, 2005

By 

Richard S. Moore (Huntsville, Alabama) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (Paperback)

Prior to reading Amery's book, I thought of myself as thoroughly read in what one French scholar has called "the writing of the disaster," but Amery's may be among the half dozen essential texts in the now overwhelming body of Holocaust literature. A profound meditation on language, on mind, and on disaster in the 20th century.