Intellectuals and the Memory of Auschwitz. Améry, Levi and the Unusual Case of Viktor E. Frankl

This article explores the theme of the crisis of the twentieth-century intellectual by examining how it manifested itself in regard to the Nazi concentration camps, the most tragic episode of the twentieth century. To examine this theme, I turn to the writings of intellectuals who both lived and survived this horrifying experience. For these survivors, the concentration camp – or, by metonymy, Auschwitz – was interpreted a posteriori not only, or not simply, as a devastating experience that they had to come to grips with, but also as the ultimate struggle of the subject and of humankind – a crossroads, and perhaps the decisive crossroads determining the relationship between the intellectual and the world.