W. G. Sebald begins his consideration of Jean Améry with a quotation from that author's Lefeu oder der Abbruch (Lefeu or Demolition): ‘Let my unhappiness burn and be extinguished in the flames.’ It was an indication of Améry's forlorn intent simultaneously to permit his suffering to be known and to see it consumed in its own expression. It was Améry's restraint that impressed, a restraint sometimes presented as a casual irony, but it was his insistence on confronting what others chose to forget which compelled Sebald's attention and respect.

George Steiner, whose family escaped from Europe to safety (only one or two of the Jews in his French lycée survived), contemplated what it was not to have died, or to have survived after seeing into hell: 'not to have known how one would behave at the midnight of history, not to know and yet to meet from time to time those who behaved magnificently and do not even want to talk about it – those who have been to the frontier of their own selves – leaves one with a feeling of, I would not call it envy, but a certain ache of unknowing.