Manès Sperber

Manès Sperber (1905 –1984) was an Austrian-French novelist, essayist and psychologist. He also wrote under the pseudonyms Jan Heger and N.A. Menlos.

Sperber was born in Zabłotów, in Austrian Galicia (today Zabolotiv, Ukraine), where he grew up in the shtetl of Zabłotów in a Hasidic family.

In 1916 the family fled from war to Vienna, where Sperber who, having lost faith, at 13 had refused to do his bar mitzvah, joined the Jewish Hashomer Hatzair youth movement. There he met Alfred Adler, the founder of individual psychology, and became a student and co-worker. Adler broke with him in 1932 because of differences in opinion about the connection of individual psychology and Marxism.

In 1927 Sperber had moved to Berlin and joined the Communist Party. He lectured at the Berliner Gesellschaft für Individualpsychologie, an institute for individual psychology in Berlin.

After Hitler had taken power Sperber was taken to jail but was released after a few weeks on the grounds that he was an Austrian citizen. He emigrated first to Yugoslavia and then in 1934 to Paris where he worked for the Communist International.

In 1938 he left the party because of the Stalinist purges within the party. In his writing he started to deal with totalitarianism and the role of the individual within society (Zur Analyse der Tyrannis).

In 1939 Sperber volunteered for the French Army. After the defeat, he took refuge in Cagnes, in the so-called "zone libre" (free zone) of France, and had to flee with his family to Switzerland in 1942, when the deportation of Jews started in that zone too.

After the end of the war, in 1945, he returned to Paris, and worked as a writer and as a senior editor at the Calmann-Lévy publishing house.