By Irène Heidelberger-Leonard (Translated by Anthea Bell)
I. B. Tauris, £20
The translation of Irène Heidelberger-Leonard's biography of the late Jean Améry is welcome because hers is the only full-length account of this Holocaust survivor and writer available in English.
However, the author's evident emotional involvement with her subject undermines the work. We see this complex, troubled individual, who took his own life in 1978, so wholly through her eyes that we are kept at a distance.
And, while the book is not scholarly enough for scholars, it is too academic for the general reader, who is likely to find it prolix and difficult. It exudes an air of eccentricity -– for instance, every chapter has up to 40 sub-divisions which seems whimsical and unnecessary.
Having edited nine volumes of Améry's writings, Heidelberger-Leonard ought perhaps to have left the biography to someone else. Her reconstruction of the life has a rose-tinted quality, and some of her judgments are questionable.
Jean Améry was a man to whom the intellect was everything. As a young man, he longed to be intellectual but didn't make it to university. He wrestled to produce intellectual ideas and works, churning out drafts of novels starring himself as an intellectual. He constantly tormented himself with his intellectual failures.
And he failed quite often. His professional life was precarious; he was incapable of sexual fidelity and not always honest. His journalism was largely trivial. He engaged in an embarrassing public squabble with the Italian author Primo Levi after Levi beat him into print about the experience they shared as slave workers in Auschwitz.
Améry had been born Hans Mayer, but changed his name frequently, searching for an identity he could live with, settling ultimately on the French-accented anagram of his surname. This regular name-changing got him into occasionally life-threatening difficulties with the Nazi authorities.
The central experience of his life was the Holocaust. He was tortured in a Belgian concentration camp, a slave labourer in Auschwitz, and somehow survived Bergen-Belsen. Outwardly, these experiences changed everything. Yet he appears to have pitied and loathed himself in 1945 much as he had in 1933.
Despite the lack of promise, Améry ultimately drew greatness out of himself through writing about the source of all his frustration. By turning his intellect on the question of the intellect, he found an original and important voice.
His essay, At the Mind's Limits, explores how the intellect failed as a survival mechanism in the camps. Intellectuals fared worse than others and in his view were almost certain to be destroyed.
Améry's conception is brilliantly original but, as with so much in his life, paradoxical. If intellectuals in the camps were doomed to death, why did he, so devoted to the intellect, survive to tell the world that the intellectuals had been doomed? By his own criteria, a man like him (and indeed, Levi) would almost certainly have perished.
Heidelberger-Leonard's portrayal gives a vivid sense of Améry's anger, ambition and ambivalence. But her book fails ultimately to convey what really drove this strange and intriguing of men.
Ben Barkow is director of the Wiener Library
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