On May 6th, 2009, Dr. Robert Zaller spoke of his studies in the Dean's Seminar entitled "The Three Deaths of Jean Amery," sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences. His research focused on the consequences of torture on a human's spirit. The event had nearly 30 people in attendance.

Zaller began by giving background information on Jean Amery and why Jean Amery's story is relevant to society. Amery was born Hans Meyer in Austrio-Hungary to a Jewish father and Catholic mother. Even though he was raised Catholic, he was sent to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald when World War II broke out.

The U.S. Army liberated Amery, but he felt that his imprisonment was eternal. After the war, he changed his name to Jean Amery, a French anagram of Hans Meyer, because he felt disassociated from German society.

While in captivity, Amery was tortured and experimented on by Nazi doctors. In one such instance, his hands were tied behind his back and a hook hoisted his arms backwards up over his head; he hung from the ceiling for hours. Torture like this, according to Amery, was not meant only to break the humanity of the tortured, but also to break the humanity of the torturer. To Amery, reality was meant to be analyzed and questioned, but the death camps represented pure evil that could not be reasoned with.

Zaller commented that Amery saw death as the most finitely real and inconceivable of experiences because it is inconceivable to imagine the body annulled from the soul. But this was exactly what torture is meant to do; being tortured was Amery's living death, said Zaller. Amery stated that he entered into the death camps an agnostic, and he came out an agnostic. After the war, Amery came to identify himself as a Jew because of their status as a people without a homeland.

After two years of silence, Amery published his experiences in his autobiography, At the Mind's Limits. In this, his first autobiographical work, and other pieces, Amery laid out his argument that he could learn nothing from the death camps. Being in the concentration camps was the ultimate alienating experience because the camps were a negation of humanity.

Amery rarely wrote extensively about his Holocaust experiences, but rather mostly writing about suffering in general terms. As he recalled, he "could remember everything but connect nothing" about his Holocaust experience.

In On Aging, Amery mentions suicide for the first time. Zaller was quick to mention that Amery originally rejected suicide with scorn. Eventually Amery embraced suicide as a release. Aging was to Amery a process of denying the inevitable. Life soon becomes a gradual postponement of death, and looking in the mirror becomes a chore because of the failing body.

Amery committed suicide on October 17th, 1978. Suicide would allow him, as he stated in his principle work On Suicide, to escape the cage of his decrepit body. After a long and intimate relationship with death, he had finally come to embrace death completely. The Holocaust was a negation of his humanity, but death was an affirmation of it. As Amery said, "I die, therefore I am."