Manès Sperber · Lablypedia

Early life

Manès Sperber was born on 12 December 1905 in Zabłotów, near Kolomea, in the Austrian Galicia (now Zabolotiv, Ukraine). He grew up in the shtetl of Zabłotów in a Hasidic Jewish family. His father was David Mechel Sperber and his older brother was Milo Sperber (born 1911). Milo later moved to Britain and became an actor, often reading from Manès's works.

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

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

After Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party took power in Germany 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 with Willi Münzenberg. In 1938 he left the party because of the Stalinist purges within it. 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 by Germany, he took refuge in Cagnes, in the "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.

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Career

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.

Sperber was the author of a novel trilogy: Like a Tear in the Ocean: A Trilogy, (1949–1955); of an autobiographical trilogy: All our Yesterdays (1974–1997), and numerous essays on philosophy, politics, literature and psychology. Sperber received the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels in 1983. In awarding the prize, the association described Sperber as a "writer, who tracked the path of the ideological aberrations of the century, and freed himself from them entirely. Throughout his life he retained the independence of his own judgement, and incapable of indifference, summoned the courage, to get himself onto that non-existing bridge that only opens up in front of those who step out over the abyss." The German writer Siegfried Lenz gave the speech highlighting Sperber's lifetime achievement.

One of his closest friends was the novelist Constantine FitzGibbon, who translated much of his work into English.

Personal life

Sperber was the father of the Italian historian Vladimir Sperber and the French anthropologist and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber. His first wife, Miriam Sperber, eventually emigrated to Champaign, Illinois, United States, and became a counsellor at the Psychological and Counseling Center there.

Death and legacy

Sperber died on 5 February 1984 in Paris. He was buried in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris.

In 1988 the city of Vienna dedicated a park in the Leopoldstadt district to Sperber.

The Manès-Sperber-Prize for Literature (Manès-Sperber-Preis für Literatur) was established in 1985 by the then Austrian Ministry of Art and Culture in honour of Sperber, with Siegfried Lenz winning the inaugural prize. As of 2025 it is worth €10,000.

Awards

1967 Remembrance Award from the World Federation of Bergen-Belsen Associations
1971 Literature Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts
1971 Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, 1st class
1973 Hanseatic Goethe Prize
1973 Honorary doctorate from the Sorbonne, in Paris
1974 Literary Prize of the City of Vienna
1975 Georg Büchner Prize
1977 Franz Nabl Prize
1977 Grand Austrian State Prize for Literature
1979 Prix Européen de l'essai Charles-Veillon
1979 Buber Rosenzweig Medal
1983 Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels
1983 Ring of Honour of the City of Vienna (Ehrenring der Stadt Wien)