Jean Améry
Jean Améry
Jean Améry, born Hans Chaim Maier, was an Austrian-born essayist who wrote about his experiences surviving the Holocaust. His most celebrated work, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (1966), suggests that torture was "the essence" of the Third Reich. Other notable works included On Aging (1968) and On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death (1976). He
"Trust in the world, which already collapsed in part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained. That ones fellow man was experienced. as the antiman remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror. It blocks the view into a world in which the principle of hope rules."
Jean Améry"If one speaks about torture, one must take care not to exaggerate."
Jean Améry"It would be totally senseless to try to describe here the pain that was inflicted on me. Was it like a red-hot iron in my shoulders, and was another like a dull wooden stake that had been driven into the back of my head? One comparison would only stand for the other, and in the end we would be hoaxed by turn on the hopeless merry-go-round of figurative speech. The pain was what it was. Beyond that there is nothing to say. Qualities of feeling are as incomparable as they are indescribable. They mark the limit of the capacity of language to communicate. If someone wanted to impart his physical pain, he would have to inflict it and thereby become a torturer himself."
Jean Améry
