ABSTRACT
Jean Amery born in Karl Kraus's Vienna, grew up during and after the First World War. By the early 1920s he was living in Bad Ischl, a picturesque spa resort in provincial Austria. In 1938 the Austrian government, encouraged by Berlin, discarded its sovereign independence and submerged itself within the Third Reich. Jean Amery enjoyed his youthful freedom at Bad Ischl in Austria's Salzkammergut region. In 1970 Amery was elected to the Berlin Academy of Arts and won the Critics Literary Prize of the League of German Writers. Amery put a real-world human problem at the centre of his thinking. He began exploring what made people's lives and deaths either satisfactory or unsatisfactory, and how individuals moved between these different conditions. Like Amery, Erich Schmid was an Austrian from Vienna who fled the Nazis, lived in Belgium, was deported to a detention centre in southern France, escaped, and joined the resistance.
