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

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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.

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.

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.

Ever since writing a term paper on Amery's "At the Mind's Limits", I have continuously come back to this work. There is a lifetime's worth of contemplation to survey here, not that this is an autobiography or even a complete memoir, but the years of his life on which he writes and the experiences dissected provoke a lifetime's worth of questions, mostly unanswered.

I think of this work as a distinct and great existential accomplishment. It provokes the reader to empathize while simultaneously making him question or even feel guilty for such empathy. How can an intellect, in the modern west at least, empathize with one who has experienced dehumanization to such an unimaginable degree? The short answer is that to try to do so is impossible and even probably detestable, morally speaking.

But isn't the motivation of Amery's expression the prevention of such dehumanization in future? And isn't such prevention dependent on empathetic attempts at least (among other things)?

These are unanswerable contradictions for the reader. But the introspective applications make this a necessary book to read over and over again.

Of all the Holocaust books, this book stands above the rest, with the content focused not on the gory details of Nazi atrocities (which are by themselves worth reading if you want to validate the experiences of those who suffered), but rather on the psychological implications of being a victim. Only books by Primo Levi contain this degree of depth of thought and introspection.

The author of this book writes his experiences through the eyes of an intellectual. It is very philosophy orientated, but much of which is debatable.

One blatant example is "people torture because their torturers". People torture through a series of environmental and cognitive phenomena. When people are given roles, they tend to play the part. When a nationalistic society uses Jews as a scapegoat for hyper-inflation due to a totalitarian leader, torture will occur. I do not believe people "torture because their torturers" because many of those who did torture others would not have done so if it were not for their environmental influence. They did not torture before the war, they did not torture after, therefore they are not torturers.

Second, I disagree with reviewers who say this book is "vivid" and shows how "sadistic" the Nazi regime was. The author INTENTIONALLY makes aversion to grotesque detail because he (correctly in my opinion) believes pain is pain and is indescribable in a comparison. This man did not have it bad for a Jewish prisoner. Obviously people who think this book is "vivid" have yet to read "The Survivor" which gives a more realistic view on how bad conditions could really be.

So who do I recommend this book to and why three stars?

I recommend this book to anyone interested in the holocaust. This is the only book I've come across that's written from an "intellectuals" point of view. As stated, this book is philosophy heavy with many bold statements and there's really no other book like it.

The three stars, to me, was because I became lost many times in the book. When i say "lost" I don't refer to the traditional sense, but I became lost in a sense that I zoned out due to lack of interest. This was partly due to several references which I feel were irrelevant and partly due to some of the ideas were debatable.

Amery did not only pick up a new French-sounding name, but (although this book was originally written in German) apparently also the circumlocutionary style of the French. If you like a book full of idle verbiage, with arguments beginning nowhere and leading nowhere, and references to passé writers such as Sartre, then this book is for you.

But it's not merely the style that I disliked. All essays (rants, more like) gravitate around Amery's pathological hate for all Germans, past and present. All Germans, except for some four individuals he mentions by name, are inherently bad. Nazis all of them, and torture is the essence of their being. Amery is dissatisfied with the world, because after the war, Germany was not permanently turned into a potato patch as the Morgenthau plan had envisaged it. A typical only child, Amery seems to think that the world should turn around his personal sufferings and frustrations. He hardly ever speaks of his fellow prisoners, and if he does, he belittles them because they are not interested in, let alone able to quote Liliencron or other poets Any Intellectual Should Know. Finally, as could be expected, the post-war generation of Germans is bad, because they do not want to permanently crawl in the dust before Amery.

I regret having spent money on this book.