1. VILLAGE IDYLL (1912-1924) - Bad Ischl and the Magic of the Forest Hohenems: certificate of citizenship and ostensible homeland . The family . Early years in Vienna . Hans and Ernst Mayer: friends in life and death . Bad Ischl . Who or what is a Jew? . A divided heart . Winter world versus summer world . The tribulations of the young grammar-school boy 2. ZIRKUSGASSE 48 (1924-1935) - The Enticements of Reason Leopold Langhammer, Mayers mentor . Red Vienna . First encounters: Broch, Canetti, and the Austrian literary scene . Hans Mayers personal revolution . Approaches to the Wiener Kreis [Vienna Circle] . The future writer . Die Brucke 3. HANS MAYER AS A WRITER OF FICTION - Die Schiffbruchigen [The Shipwrecked], 1935/45 1935 Preludes . The first novel . Autobiography as historical writing . Althager - an alter ego? . The relationship to the other . Genophobia . Art should not describe life, but create life . 1945: To be or not to be . Auschwitz - a mass fate? . The Auschwitz discourse then and now 4. YEARS OF WANDERING (1938-1945) - The Mind Knows no Limits Vienna before and after the Anschluss . Antwerp (1939-1940) . St. Cyprien - Gurs (1940-1941) . Flight to occupied Belgium . Resistance in Brussels . Breendonck (1943) . Torture in his novel (1945) . Torture in the essay (12965) . Auschwitz - Dora-Mittelbau - Bergen Belsen (1944-1945) . Jean Amery / Primo Levi - an excursus . Friends strange to each other . Coming home to no home 5. LIVING ON - BUT HOW AND WHERE? (1945-1955) - The principle of education The original theme of suicide: Loves Crown of Thorns: variation 1 . Heinrich Greyt: variation 2 . Die Selbstmorder: variation 3 . Kleist: variation 4 . Die Eingemauerten [The Immured]: variation 5 . Existentialism in France. Revolution of the mind? Fashion? Or the twilight of the esprit francais? . On the Psychology of the German People: revenge? . Neither guilt nor atonement . Deranged criminals . Work will not make you free . Letter of farewell to Knut Hamsun . Where now? His fixed point: Maria Leitner . Vienna? Bad Ischl? The indissoluble boyhood friendship . Cologne? Comrade Heinz Kuhn . Dangerous games with identity . Lores London? Sartres Paris? . Zurich and the Dukas press agency? . Brussels old and new . The Adelboden sanatorium . Journalistic confectionery 6. JEAN AMERY THE JOURNALIST (1955-1965) - All Active on the Western Front Portraits of famous contemporaries . Vive la science! . Jazz - heightened emotion . Stars of the fifties . Revelations . Gerhart Hauptmann, especially the negative aspects . Preface to the Future . Inventory . Alternative memory . The engine of a culture? . Frances cultural mission to the world . Jean-Paul Sartre - First excursus . Sartre - writer of the Resistance . Sartre - the teacher of life . Sartre - the teacher of thinking . The first idea for Charles Bovary . Sartre - the mouthpiece of the wartime generation . Le faux, cest la mort . The God that failed . Americas political sense of mission . In the name of the Cold War . The abolition of death, the glorification of sex . Americas cultural contribution: sociology . England between Europe and America? . Englands not so splendid isolation . Germany - an upswing through anaesthetization . First visit: Hitler never existed . Germany 1945, Germany 1952 . A cultural miracle? . No revocation of history . German thinkers after 1945 . German writers after 1945 . A break with emigration . No pact between reader and author . Hope and the second generation 7. DRAMA OF THE MIND IN THREE ACTS - the autobiographical trilogy Prologue . Heissenbuttel and the consequences . Who brings whom to the meeting?. If not now, when? . The Auschwitz trial . A star is born . Act I: At the Minds Limits (1966): Auschwitz and the Intellectual . The single useful starting point: the I . Less than welcome approval . At the bodys limits . Welcome approval . Merkur to the end . Adorno - friend or f