JERUSALEM – My parents and I arrived in Tel Aviv a few months before World War II began. The rest of our extended family – three of my grandparents, my mother’s seven siblings, and my five cousins – remained in Poland. They were all murdered in the Holocaust.
I have visited Poland many times, always accompanied by the presence of the Jewish absence. Books and articles of mine have been translated into Polish. I have lectured at the University of Warsaw and Krakow’s Jagiellonian University. I was recently elected an external member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. Though my knowledge of the Polish language is scant, the country’s history and culture are not foreign to me.
For these reasons, I recognize why Poland’s government recently introduced legislation on historical matters. But I am also furious.
The Poles understandably view themselves primarily as victims of the Nazis. No country in occupied Europe suffered similarly. It was the only country that, under German occupation, had its government institutions liquidated, its army disbanded, its schools and universities closed. Even its name was wiped off the map. In a replay of the eighteenth-century partitions of Poland by Russia and Prussia, the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact led to the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in the wake of the German invasion. No trace of Polish authority remained.
The total destruction of the Polish state and its institutions made Poland an ideal location for the German extermination camps, in which six million Polish citizens – three million Jews and three million ethnic Poles – were murdered. Everywhere else in German-controlled Europe, the Nazis had to deal, sometimes in an extremely complicated way, with local governments, if only for tactical reasons.
This is why Poland is right to insist that the camps not be called “Polish extermination camps” (as even US President Barack Obama once mistakenly referred to them). They were German camps in occupied Poland.
But the current Polish government is making a serious mistake by trying to criminalize any reference to “Polish extermination camps.” Only non-democratic regimes use such means, rather than relying on public discourse, historical clarification, diplomatic contacts, and education.
The government’s proposed legislation goes even further: it makes any reference to ethnic Poles’ role in the Holocaust a criminal offense. It also refers to what it calls “historical truth” regarding the wartime massacre of Jews in the town of Jedwabne by their Polish neighbors.
When the historian Jan Gross published his study establishing that Poles, not Germans, burned alive hundreds of Jedwabne’s Jews, Poland naturally suffered a major crisis of conscience. Two Polish presidents, Aleksander Kwaśniewski and Bronisław Komorowski, accepted the findings and publicly asked for the victims’ forgiveness. As Komorowski put it, “even in a nation of victims, there appear to be murderers.” Now, however, the authorities claim that the issue must be re-examined, even calling for the mass graves to be exhumed.
The government’s views and ideology are an internal Polish matter. But if it seeks to gloss over or deny problematic aspects of Polish history, even those who identify with Poland’s pain may raise questions that, in recognition of Poles’ terrible suffering, have until now been largely overlooked. These questions are neither trivial nor directed at the behavior of individuals. They implicate national decisions.
The first question concerns the timing of the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944. The Poles justly point out that the Red Army, which had reached the Vistula, did not help the Polish fighters and actually let the Germans suppress the insurgency unimpeded – one of Stalin’s most cynical moves.
But why did the Polish underground (Armia Krajowa, or Home Army), controlled by the Polish government-in-exile in London, strike at this moment, when the Germans were already retreating, eastern Poland was already liberated, and the Red Army was about to liberate Warsaw itself? The official Polish explanation is that the uprising against the Germans was also a pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union, intended to ensure that Polish, not Soviet, forces liberated Warsaw.
That may explain (though obviously not justify) the Soviets’ refusal to help the Poles. Yet questions linger: Why did the Home Army wait more than four years to rise against German occupation? Why did it not disrupt the systematic extermination of three million Jews, all Polish citizens, or strike during the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943?
One sometimes hears arguments about how many guns the Home Army sent – or did not send – to the fighters in the ghetto. But that is not the question. The German suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising took weeks; on the “Aryan side,” Poles saw and heard what was happening – and did nothing.
We cannot know the outcome had the Home Army joined the Jews – not only in Warsaw but throughout occupied Poland, where it had prepared thousands of its members for a possible uprising. What is certain is that the Nazi SS would have found it more difficult to liquidate the ghetto; moreover, joining what was considered a “Jewish uprising” would have been powerful proof of solidarity with Polish Jews. The key point is that highlighting the moral dimension of the decision to start an uprising to prevent the Soviets from liberating Warsaw, while ignoring the failure to act to prevent the murder of three million Polish Jews and join the ghetto uprising, can be legitimately questioned.
This raises another long-suppressed question. By March 1939, the British and French governments knew that appeasing Hitler had failed: after destroying Czechoslovakia, Nazi Germany was turning against Poland. That spring, Britain and France issued a guarantee to defend Poland against a German invasion.
At the same time, the Soviet Union proposed to the British and the French a united front against German aggression toward Poland – the first attempt to develop a Soviet-Western anti-Nazi alliance. In August 1939, an Anglo-French military delegation traveled to Moscow, where the head of the Soviet delegation, Defense Minister Kliment Voroshilov, asked the Western officers a simple question: would the Polish government agree to the entry of Soviet troops, which would be necessary to repel a German invasion?
After weeks of dithering, the Polish government refused. As a Polish government minister reportedly asked: “If the Soviet Army enters Poland, who knows when they would leave?” The Anglo-French-Soviet talks collapsed, and a few days later the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed.
One can understand the Polish position: on regaining independence in 1918, Poland found itself in a brutal war with the Red Army, which was poised to occupy Warsaw. Only French military support helped repel the Russians and save Poland’s independence. In 1939, it appeared that Poland feared the Soviet Union more than it feared Nazi Germany
No one can know whether Poland would have avoided German occupation had it agreed to the Red Army’s entry in the event of an invasion, much less whether WWII or the Holocaust might have been prevented. But it is reasonable to maintain that the government made one of the most fateful and catastrophic choices in Poland’s history. In one way or another, its stance made the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact possible, and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising brought about the city’s near-total destruction.
In no way should this be viewed as an attempt to blame the victim. The moral and historical guilt belongs to Nazi Germany and, in parallel, to the Soviet Union. But if the current Polish government wishes to revise history, these broader issues must also be addressed. A nation and its leaders are responsible for the consequences of their decisions.
Recently, I visited POLIN, the Jewish museum in Warsaw, initiated by then-President Kwaśniewski. I was deeply impressed not only by the richness and presentation of the materials, but also by the sophistication and historical integrity underlying the entire project: without the Jews, the exhibition made clear, Poland would not be Poland.
Yet the museum also shows the darker side of this intertwined history, especially the emergence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of Roman Dmowski’s radical nationalist and anti-Semitic Endecja party. A non-Jewish friend who accompanied me said: “Now is the time to build a Polish museum with a comparable standard.”
Shlomo Avineri will be attending this year’s Forum 2000 conference, The Courage to Take Responsibility, which will be held in Prague, Czech Republic, October 16-19.
JERUSALEM – Ein paar Monate vor Beginn des Zweiten Weltkriegs kamen meine Eltern und ich in Tel Aviv an. Der Rest der Familie und Verwandte – drei meiner Großeltern, die sieben Geschwister meiner Mutter und fünf meiner Cousins – blieben in Polen. Sie alle wurden im Holocaust ermordet.
Ich habe Polen viele Male besucht, immer begleitet von allgegenwärtiger jüdischer Abwesenheit. Von mir verfasste Bücher und Artikel wurden ins Polnische übersetzt. Ich unterrichtete an der Universität von Warschau und an der Jagiellonen-Universität in Krakau. Kürzlich wurde ich zu einem externen Mitglied der Polnischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und Künste gewählt. Trotz meiner spärlichen Kenntnisse der polnischen Sprache sind mir Geschichte und Kultur des Landes nicht fremd.
Aus diesen Gründen verstehe ich, warum die polnische Regierung jüngst Gesetze für historische Angelegenheiten verabschiedete. Aber ich bin auch wütend.
Die Polen betrachten sich verständlicherweise in erster Linie als Opfer der Nazis. Kein Land im besetzten Europa litt in ähnlicher Weise. Polen war das einzige Land, in dem unter deutscher Besatzung Regierungsinstitutionen sowie Armee aufgelöst und Schulen und Universitäten geschlossen wurden. Sogar der Landesname wurde von der Landkarte gelöscht. Wie eine Neuauflage der Teilungen Polens durch Russland und Preußen im 18. Jahrhundert führte der deutsch-sowjetische Nichtangriffspakt aus dem Jahr 1939 im Gefolge der deutschen Invasion zur sowjetischen Besetzung Ostpolens. Von polnischer Staatsmacht blieb keine Spur.
Die totale Zerstörung des polnischen Staates und seiner Institutionen ließen das Land zu einem idealen Ort für die deutschen Vernichtungslager werden, in denen sechs Millionen polnische Bürger – drei Millionen Juden und drei Millionen ethnische Polen – ermordet wurden. Überall sonst in dem von Deutschland kontrollierten Europa mussten sich die Nazis, wenn auch nur aus taktischen Gründen, in manchmal überaus komplizierter Art und Weise mit lokalen Regierungen auseinandersetzen.
Aus diesem Grund beharrt Polen zurecht darauf, dass diese Lager nicht als „polnische Vernichtungslager“ bezeichnet werden sollen (wie es sogar US-Präsident Barack Obama einst fälschlicherweise tat). Es handelte sich um deutsche Lager im besetzten Polen.
Mit ihrem Versuch, jeden Verweis auf „polnische Vernichtungslager“ zu kriminalisieren, begeht die derzeitige polnische Regierung jedoch einen schweren Fehler. Lediglich undemokratische Regime bedienen sich derartiger Methoden anstatt sich auf den öffentlichen Diskurs, historische Klarstellung, diplomatische Kontakte und Bildung zu verlassen.
Der Gesetzesentwurf der Regierung geht sogar noch weiter: darin wird nämlich jeder Verweis auf die Rolle ethnischer Polen im Holocaust zu einer Straftat gemacht. Hinsichtlich des während des Krieges in der Stadt Jedwabne an Juden von deren Nachbarn verübten Massakers bezieht sich die Regierung außerdem auf die von ihr so bezeichnete „historische Wahrheit“.
Als der Historiker Jan Gross seine Studie veröffentlichte, in der er darlegte, dass nicht Deutsche, sondern Polen hunderte Juden aus Jedwabne bei lebendigem Leib verbrannten, löste dies in Polen natürlich eine veritable Gewissenkrise aus. Zwei polnische Präsidenten – Aleksander Kwaśniewski und Bronisław Komorowski – akzeptierten die Erkenntnisse aus dieser Arbeit und baten die Opfer öffentlich um Vergebung. Komorowski formulierte, dass es „sogar in einer Nation der Opfer offenbar Mörder gibt.” Mittlerweile allerdings behaupten die Behörden, die Angelegenheit müsse erneut untersucht werden und sie fordern sogar die Exhumierung der Leichen aus den Massengräbern.
Ansichten und Ideologie der Regierung sind eine innere Angelegenheit Polens. Wenn man allerdings versucht, problematische Aspekte der polnischen Geschichte unter den Teppich zu kehren oder zu leugnen, werden auch diejenigen, die sich mit dem Schmerz Polens identifizieren, möglicherweise Fragen aufwerfen, die in Anerkennung der schrecklichen Leiden der Polen bislang weitgehend übersehen wurden. Diese Fragen sind weder trivial noch an das Verhalten von Einzelpersonen geknüpft. Es geht dabei vielmehr um nationale Entscheidungen.
Die erste Frage betrifft den zeitlichen Ablauf des Warschauer Aufstandes im August 1944. Die Polen verweisen mit Recht darauf, dass die Rote Armee, die bereits an der Weichsel stand, den polnischen Kämpfern nicht zu Hilfe kam und die Deutschen den Aufstand praktisch ungehindert niederschlagen ließ – einer der zynischsten Schritte Stalins.
Aber warum schlug der von der polnischen Exilregierung in London kontrollierte polnische Untergrund (die Armia Krajowa oder Heimatarmee) ausgerechnet in dem Moment zu, als sich die Deutschen bereits auf dem Rückzug befanden, Ostpolen bereits befreit war und die Rote Armee kurz vor der Befreiung Warschaus stand? Die offizielle polnische Erklärung lautet, dass der Aufstand gegen die Deutschen auch ein Präventivschlag gegen die Sowjetunion war, womit gewährleistet werden sollte, dass nicht sowjetische, sondern polnische Truppen Warschau befreiten.
Das mag vielleicht erklären (wenn auch offensichtlich nicht rechtfertigen), warum sich die Sowjets weigerten, den Polen zu Hilfe zu kommen. Dennoch bleiben Fragen: Warum wartete die Heimatarmee über vier Jahre, um sich gegen die deutsche Besatzung zu erheben? Warum wurde nichts gegen die systematische Vernichtung von drei Millionen Juden unternommen, bei denen es sich allesamt um polnische Staatsbürger handelte oder warum schlug man nicht während des jüdischen Aufstandes im Warschauer Ghetto im April 1943 zu?
Manchmal hört man Argumente darüber, wie viele Waffen die Heimatarmee an die Kämpfer im Ghetto schickte – oder nicht schickte. Das ist allerdings nicht die Frage. Die Niederschlagung des Aufstandes im Warschauer Ghetto durch die Deutschen dauerte Wochen; auf der „arischen Seite“ hörten und sahen die Polen was geschah – und sie taten nichts.
Wir können nicht wissen, was geschehen wäre, hätte sich die Heimatarmee den Juden angeschlossen – nicht nur in Warschau, sondern im gesamten besetzten Polen, wo man tausende Armeeangehörige auf einen möglichen Aufstand vorbereitete. Sicher ist allerdings, dass es für die SS schwieriger geworden wäre, das Ghetto zu liquidieren. Außerdem wäre es ein starkes Zeichen der Solidarität mit den polnischen Juden gewesen, hätte man sich den als „jüdisch“ bezeichneten Aufstand angeschlossen. Der entscheidende Punkt ist: die Hervorhebung der moralischen Dimension der Entscheidung, einen Aufstand zu beginnen, um die Sowjets an der Befreiung Warschaus zu hindern und gleichzeitig außer Acht zu lassen, dass man untätig blieb, als es darum ging, den Mord an drei Millionen polnischer Juden zu verhindern, darf berechtigterweise in Frage gestellt werden.
Das wirft eine weitere lange Zeit unterdrückte Frage auf. Im März 1939 wussten die britische und die französische Regierung, dass die Appeasement-Politik gegenüber Hitler gescheitert war: nach der Zerstörung der Tschechoslowakei, wandte sich Nazi-Deutschland gegen Polen. In diesem Frühling gaben Großbritannien und Frankreich eine Garantie ab, Polen gegen eine deutsche Invasion zu verteidigen.
Gleichzeitig schlug die Sowjetunion den Briten und Franzosen eine geeinte Front gegen die deutsche Aggression gegenüber Polen vor – der erste Versuch, eine Allianz der Sowjets und des Westens gegen die Nazis zu bilden. Im August 1939 reiste eine englisch-französische Delegation nach Moskau, wo der Vorsitzende der sowjetischen Delegation, Verteidigungsminister Kliment Woroschilow, den westlichen Vertretern eine simple Frage stellte: würde die polnische Regierung dem für die Zurückschlagung einer deutschen Invasion notwendigen Einsatz sowjetischer Truppen auf ihrem Territorium zustimmen?
Nach wochenlangem Hin und Her, verweigerte die polnische Regierung ihre Zustimmung. Ein polnischer Regierungsminister meinte angeblich: „Wer weiß, wann die Sowjetarmee im Falle eines Einsatzes in Polen wieder abzieht.“ Die Gespräche zwischen Briten, Franzosen und Sowjets scheiterten und ein paar Tage später wurde der deutsch-sowjetische Nichtangriffspakt unterzeichnet.
Man kann die polnische Position verstehen: nach Wiedererlangung der Unabhängigkeit im Jahr 1918 fand sich Polen in einem brutalen Kampf mit der Roten Armee wieder, die darauf aus war, Warschau zu besetzen. Nur mit militärischer Unterstützung Frankreichs gelang es, die Russen zu zurückzuschlagen und Polens Unabhängigkeit zu sichern. Im Jahr 1939 schien es, als ob Polen die Sowjetunion mehr fürchtete als Nazi-Deutschland.
Niemand weiß, ob die deutsche Besetzung Polens zu verhindern gewesen wäre, wenn Polen dem Einsatz der Roten Armee im Falle einer Invasion zugestimmt hätte und noch viel weniger kann gesagt werden, ob der Zweite Weltkrieg oder der Holocaust hätten verhindert werden können. Dennoch kann man vernünftigerweise behaupten, dass die Regierung eine der verhängnisvollsten und katastrophalsten Entscheidungen in der polnischen Geschichte traf. Auf die eine oder andere Weise ermöglichte ihre Haltung den deutsch-sowjetischen Nichtangriffspakt und der Warschauer Aufstand 1944 führte zur fast vollständigen Zerstörung der Stadt.
Keinesfalls soll dies als Versuch betrachtet werden, dem Opfer die Schuld zuzuweisen. Die moralische und historische Schuld gilt Nazi-Deutschland und parallel dazu der Sowjetunion. Wenn die derzeitige polnische Regierung allerdings die Geschichte einer Überprüfung unterziehen möchte, müssen auch diese allgemeineren Fragen beantwortet werden. Eine Nation und ihre Führung sind verantwortlich für die Folgen ihrer Entscheidungen.
Kürzlich besuchte ich POLIN, das auf Initiative des damaligen Präsidenten Kwaśniewski errichtete jüdische Museum in Warschau. Ich war tief beeindruckt, nicht nur von der Vielfalt und der Präsentation der Ausstellungsstücke, sondern auch von der Differenziertheit und historischen Integrität, die dem gesamten Projekt zugrunde liegen: ohne Juden, so stellt die Ausstellung klar, wäre Polen nicht Polen.
Doch das Museum zeigt auch die dunklere Seite dieser verflochtenen Geschichte, insbesondere die Entstehung der radikal nationalistischen und antisemitischen Endecja-Partei Roman Dmowskis im späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert. Ein nicht-jüdischer Freund, der mich begleitete, sagte: „Jetzt ist es Zeit, ein polnisches Museum vergleichbaren Standards zu errichten.“
O swoich okupacyjnych losach uparcie milczał, ale w „Edenie“, „Powrocie z gwiazd“, „Głosie Pana“ czy nawet w „Solaris“ i „Niezwyciężonym“ zaszyfrował straszne wspomnienia.
Wydawało się, że jego biografia nie skrywa zagadek. Udzielił dwóch wywiadów rzek, napisał książkę autobiograficzną, wyszło kilka tomów jego korespondencji oraz wspomnienia Tomasza Lema, jego syna; do tego dochodzą inne wywiady i teksty wspomnieniowe.
Tymczasem sam wielokrotnie się przekonywałem o tym, że opisane w tych wspomnieniach fakty nie zgadzają się nawet na najprostszym, chronologicznym poziomie. Banalny przykład to data powojennej repatriacji Lemów do Krakowa. W wielu miejscach jest to rok 1946, Lem rzeczywiście to sugerował, choć po bliższym zbadaniu tej kwestii widać, że jego wypowiedzi były wieloznaczne.
Agnieszka Gajewska dotarła do wielu nieznanych dotąd dokumentów pozwalających na rozstrzygnięcie takich kwestii. Ustaliła dokładną datę repatriacji: 17 lipca 1945 r. Odtworzyła też drzewo genealogiczne rodziców pisarza, tym samym wujkowie i ciotki, wspominani przez Lema, nagle zyskali imiona i dokładne daty narodzin i zgonu. Datę zgonu dopełnia zwykle 1941 albo 1942 rok. I tutaj dochodzimy do prawdziwej przyczyny, dla której Lem o swojej młodości opowiadał tak nieprecyzyjnie: nie chciał mówić publicznie o swoim żydowskim pochodzeniu, a więc w konsekwencji także o męczeńskiej śmierci jego rodziny w czasie Holocaustu. Z autobiograficznych tekstów można wywnioskować, że wychowywany był po katolicku i dopiero podczas wojny uświadomiono mu, że jest Żydem. I znowu – trochę to prawda, a trochę nieprawda.
Samuel Lem i Sabina z domu Wolner, rodzice pisarza, uważali się za Polaków pochodzenia żydowskiego. Wzięli ślub w synagodze i uczestniczyli w życiu żydowskiej społeczności Lwowa. Samuel należał także wraz ze swoim bratem Fryderykiem do towarzystwa wspierania młodzieży żydowskiej w zdobywaniu wyższego wykształcenia (tzw. Towarzystwa Rygoryzantów).
Stanisław Lem w polskim gimnazjum uczestniczył w zajęciach z religii mojżeszowej. Na maturze dostał z niej taką samą ocenę jak ze wszystkich innych przedmiotów: bardzo dobrą. Wszystkie te fakty Gajewska ustaliła na podstawie dokumentów wyszperanych w lwowskich i krakowskich archiwach – odpisu świadectwa dojrzałości Lema, życiorysu jego ojca dołączonego do podania o pracę, archiwów lwowskiej gminy żydowskiej itd.
Lem wiedział więc, że coś go łączy z tymi krewnymi i przyjaciółmi ojca, którzy opowiadali się za syjonizmem i przeciwko asymilacji. Ale nie musi to być sprzeczne z tym, że uważał się za Polaka.
Sformułowania typu „Polak wyznania buddyjskiego“ czy „Polak wyznania protestanckiego“ nie budzą w nas sprzeciwu. Dlaczego mamy taki problem z „Polakiem wyznania mojżeszowego“? Gajewska swoją książką dotyka kapitalnego, szerszego problemu: braku dobrej narracji na temat dwudziestowiecznych losów polskich zasymilowanych Żydów. Na hasło „Żydzi na kresach II Rzeczypospolitej“ przywołujemy zwykle te same klisze skojarzeń – trochę „Skrzypka na dachu“, trochę Lejzorka Rojtszwańca. Jacyś dziwnie ubrani ludzie posługujący się niezrozumiałym językiem, których egzotyczny, niepojęty świat przepadł podczas wojny.
Za mało polscy dla jednych, dla drugich za bardzo
A przecież nawet wśród ofiar Holocaustu tacy Żydzi stanowili mniejszość. Większość to byli ludzie dokładnie tacy sami jak Polacy wyznania rzymskokatolickiego. I dopiero terror obu okupantów, przede wszystkim Hitlera, ale i Stalin nie był tu bez winy, sztucznie wyodrębnił, zdehumanizował i wyciął ze wspólnej pamięci tę grupę.
Szczególnie jest to przykre w przypadku Lwowa. Polska pamięć o tym mieście rozpięta jest między dwiema skrajnościami. Jedną jest wizja przedwojennego Lwowa jako miasta przede wszystkim polskiego, w którym ewentualne mniejszości pojawiały się gdzieś na drugim planie. Drugą i równie fałszywą skrajnością jest mit Austria felix – o wielokulturowym raju, w którym przedstawiciele najrozmaitszych narodów żyli szczęśliwie pod sprawiedliwym panowaniem Habsburgów, a potem w II Rzeczpospolitej. Nie było to oczywiście takie piekło, jakie zgotowali we Lwowie Stalin i Hitler, ale nie był to także raj, raczej czyściec pełen nieustających konfliktów. W obu tych fałszywych wizjach nie ma miejsca dla Lema i jego rodziców. Do tej pierwszej byli za mało polscy, do tej drugiej za bardzo, ani to Orlęta Lwowskie, ani Tewje Mleczarz.
Historia zasymilowanych Żydów na Kresach pozostała właściwie do dzisiaj nieopowiedziana. Jak celnie zauważył prof. Bartoszewski, gdyby Lem zapełnił tę lukę i opowiedział historię swojej rodziny konwencjonalną prozą, miałby Nobla w kieszeni.
Stanisław Lem w swojej pracowni. Kraków, 1993 r. (Fot. Wojciech Druszcz / AG)
Powody, dla których tego nie zrobił, są niestety oczywiste. Lem w swoim życiu (1921-2006) miał wiele okazji do zaobserwowania, że w Polsce pytanie o czyjeś żydowskie pochodzenie rzadko zadawane jest bona fide. W jego długim życiu to pytanie zadawali przedwojenni narodowcy, okupacyjni szmalcownicy, peerelowscy moczarowcy, a w wolnej Polsce znów narodowcy (w 2002 r. LPR zaatakowała go za „promowanie cywilizacji śmierci“).
Nie znaczy to jednak, że tego w ogóle nie opowiedział. Jeśli odtworzymy okupacyjne dzieje Lema tak drobiazgowo jak Agnieszka Gajewska, możemy zauważyć, jak wiele w jego powieściach jest zaszyfrowanych wątków autobiograficznych. I nie chodzi tu tylko o realistyczny opis wojny w „Szpitalu Przemienienia“ i jego kontynuacji „Wśród umarłych“, którą Lem zabronił potem wznawiać, ale także o powieści pozornie czysto fantastyczne, jak „Eden“, „Powrót z gwiazd“, „Głos Pana“ czy nawet „Solaris“. W „Głosie Pana“ pojawia się np. przedziwna retrospekcja profesora Rappaporta, który cudem uchodzi życiem z jakiejś masakry w ruinach płonącego więzienia w nienazwanym mieście Europy Wschodniej. Dziś wiadomo, że to był tzw. pogrom więzienny urządzony we Lwowie 1 lipca 1941 r. tuż po wkroczeniu wojsk niemieckich. Wycofujący się Rosjanie wymordowali więźniów politycznych w lwowskich więzieniach, takich jak Brygidki położone tuż przy kamienicy Lemów. Ukraińscy nacjonaliści liczyli na przychylność nowego okupanta i chcieli się mu przypodobać, zorganizowali więc „spontaniczny“ pogrom Żydów. Prosto z ulicy zgarniano ludzi, których bojówkarze z jakiegoś powodu uznali za Żydów. Wśród nich – Stanisława Lema.
Ofiary pogromu poddawano pośpiesznej selekcji. Część zabijano od razu drągami, rozbryzgi krwi sięgały drugiego piętra. Młodych zapędzono do wynoszenia zwłok z lochów. Wieczorem Niemcy nagle przerwali egzekucję. Nielicznych ocalonych puszczono wolno. Wśród nich – Lema. Nigdy o tym doświadczeniu nie napisał wprost, ale w „Edenie“ i w „Niezwyciężonym“ mamy makabryczne opisy wynoszenia częściowo rozłożonych zwłok ze statku kosmicznego. W „Edenie“ – opis obozu zagłady na innej planecie przypominający tzw. obóz janowski we Lwowie, a w „Niezwyciężonym“ ofiary ataku nanorobotów, które – jeśli pominąć fantastycznonaukowe didaskalia – zachowują się jak więźniowie obozu zagłady w ostatnich chwilach życia.
Głównym bohaterem „Powrotu z gwiazd“ jest Hal Bregg, astronauta, który ma biologicznie 39 lat, a Ziemię opuścił, gdy miał ich 18. Jest to odpowiednio wiek Lema piszącego tę powieść i Lema obserwującego upadek polskiego Lwowa. Za sprawą einsteinowskiej dylatacji czasu, gdy Bregg badał odległe gwiazdy, na Ziemi minęło półtora stulecia. Nie rozumie więc społeczeństwa, które zastał – a społeczeństwo nie rozumie jego i traumatycznych wspomnień z kosmosu, które są alegorią wspomnień samego Lema z okupacji. Lekarz, do którego Bregg się zgłasza ze swoimi problemami psychologicznymi – będący, jak zauważa Gajewska, sobowtórem Samuela Lema – mówi mu, żeby zachował te wspomnienia dla siebie. Opowiadając o nich współczesnym ludziom, tylko pogłębi swoją izolację.
To głównie wspomnienia o śmierci innych astronautów. Dzielą się na trzy rodzaje. Z jednymi po prostu urwała się łączność. Inni ginęli na jego oczach. Najgorsze są wspomnienia tych, którzy, zanim zginęli, błagali o pomoc, a Bregg nie mógł nic dla nich zrobić.
Podobnie było z krewnymi i przyjaciółmi Lema. Od jednych po prostu przestawały przychodzić wiadomości, tak jak od brata jego matki Marka Wolnera. Zginął on prawdopodobnie w kolejnym pogromie, tzw. petlurowskim, 26 lipca 1941 r., ale to są ustalenia współczesnych historyków. Matka Lema do końca życia miała nadzieję, że brat się gdzieś odnajdzie. Lem wspominał, że jej uporczywe wracanie do tego tematu sprawiało mu przykrość. On sam błędnie przypuszczał, że wuj zginął 2 lipca tego roku w tzw. rzezi profesorów.
Niektórzy ginęli na jego oczach. Jeszcze inni prosili go o pomoc, ale Lem – tak jak Hal Bregg – nie mógł narażać siebie i swoich rodziców, dla których był jedyną szansą na ocalenie. Jako blondyn z „aryjskim wyglądem“ mógł w miarę bezpiecznie chodzić po ulicach z fałszywymi papierami.
Kiedy Tomasz Fiałkowski poruszył okupacyjną tematykę, rozmawiając z pisarzem przy okazji wywiadu rzeki „Świat na krawędzi“, został poproszony, by więcej o to nie pytać. Lem powiedział, że poruszanie tych kwestii przypłaca bezsennymi nocami. Stanisław Bereś z kolei wspomina, że pracując z nim nad wywiadem rzeką „Tako rzecze Lem“, zbywany był wymijającymi anegdotkami, a gdy próbował rozmówcę docisnąć – ten demonstracyjnie zdejmował aparat słuchowy (pisarz miał problemy ze słuchem, od kiedy w 1944 r. eksplodował blisko niego pocisk artyleryjski).
Na szczęście Lem zaszyfrował swoje wspomnienia w książkach, a Agnieszka Gajewska odnalazła klucz do tego szyfru. Dla miłośników „Solaris“ jej książka to lektura obowiązkowa. Powinni ją poznać także ci wszyscy, którzy dostrzegają lukę w narracji o losie zasymilowanych Żydów na Kresach. To jest część polskiej historii.
Agnieszka Gajewska „Zagłada i gwiazdy. Przeszłość w prozie Stanisława Lema“
Ein Tagebuch aus Privatbesitz belegt: Spätestens im August 1942 wusste eine Schweizer Ärztemission über den Massenmord an den Juden Bescheid, und zwar in den grässlichsten Details.
Von Christoph Mörgeli
Lebenslanges Schweigen: Schweizer Kardiologe Robert Hegglin (2.v.r.) auf Rotkreuz-Mission in Deutschland, 1945.Bild: zVg
Der ansonsten so beherrschte Arzt gab sein Missfallen durch lautes Pfeifen kund. Robert Hegglin, renommierter Internist und Kardiologe aus Zürich, sass im Publikum, als sich sein Luzerner Kollege Rudolf Bucher Anfang 1944 in einem öffentlichen Vortrag über die deutschen Gräuel in Osteuropa entsetzte. Der Referent bezeichnete jene, die davon wussten und trotzdem schwiegen, gar als «Landesverräter».
Am nächsten Tag verwahrte sich Sanitätshauptmann Hegglin gegen solche Vorwürfe und erinnerte Oberleutnant Bucher an das schriftlich gegebene Offiziersehrenwort, über das Gesehene an der Ostfront zu schweigen. Die Schweizer Ärztemissionen seien Teil der unparteiischen Rotkreuz-Idee; da sei kein Platz für «Nebengedanken, insbesondere politischer Art». Der Nutzen der Vorträge bei einigen, welche die Zeichen der Zeit noch nicht verstanden hätten, stehe in keinem Verhältnis zur «schweren Einbusse, die wir vor allem im Ausland erleiden». Tatsächlich enthielten die Vorträge von Rudolf Bucher Übertreibungen und Ungenauigkeiten. Hegglin wies im Briefwechsel, in den sich sogar ein Rechtsanwalt einschaltete, speziell den Vorwurf zurück, die Schweizer Ärztemission habe an der Ostfront nur deutsche Patienten betreuen dürfen; er selber habe auch russische Kriegsgefangene und lettische Zivilisten behandelt.
Befürchtungen nach Aktenfund
Damals wie später gehörte die viermalige Entsendung einer Ärzte- und Schwesternmission im Rahmen des deutschen Überfalls auf die Sowjetunion zu den umstrittensten Themen der Geschichte der Schweiz im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Nicht die humanitären Aktionen zwischen 1941 und 1943 unter dem Patronat des Roten Kreuzes an sich waren problematisch, wohl aber das politische Motiv, die gemischte Finanzierung durch Exportwirtschaft und Bund sowie die Unterstellung unter deutsche Militärgerichtsbarkeit.
Die Idee zu den Schweizer Ärztemissionen dürfte im Frühjahr 1941 am Jahreskongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Chirurgie in Berlin entstanden sein. Sowohl Ferdinand Sauerbruch, der sich als Freund der Schweiz verstand und acht Jahre lang in Zürich gelehrt hatte, wie auch der deutschfreundliche Chirurg und Divisionär Eugen Bircher nahmen später für sich in Anspruch, die Initialzündung gegeben zu haben. Zur Frage der Finanzierung zog man Peter Vieli bei, früher Diplomat und jetzt Generaldirektor der Schweizerischen Kreditanstalt. Nach und nach wurden immer höhere Stellen eingeweiht, auf Seiten der Schweiz General Henri Guisan und Aussenminister Marcel Pilet-Golaz, auf deutscher Seite Staatssekretär Ernst von Weizsäcker und Generaloberstabsarzt Siegfried Handloser, Chef der Wehrmachtssanität.
Die Schweizer Ärztemission verfolgte nicht nur humanitäre Ziele, sondern sollte auch das bedrohliche Hitlerdeutschland auf dem Höhepunkt seiner Macht besänftigen. Im Bundeshaus und im Armeehauptquartier herrschten schwere Bedenken hinsichtlich eines deutschen Einmarschs wegen der alliiertenfreundlichen Parteinahme der Schweizer Presse und wegen des Aktenfunds von La Charité-sur-Loire durch die Deutschen, der weitgehende Absprachen von General Guisan mit Frankreich belegte.
Die Schweizer Wirtschaft befürchtete angesichts der gespannten Lage Exportprobleme und bezahlte für alle vier Ärztemissionen 650 000 Franken gegenüber 550 000 Franken, die der Bund beisteuerte. Eine problematische Motivierung bildete auch der ausgeprägte Anti-Bolschewismus des Schweizer Bürgertums, welches teilweise einen Sieg des nationalsozialistischen Deutschland gegen die Sowjetunion mehr erhoffte als einen Sieg Russlands, der doch im Interesse der Westalliierten lag.
Auch schadete der Akzeptanz der Ärztemissionen, dass mit dem germanophilen Eugen Bircher eine ausgesprochen umstrittene Persönlichkeit die Leitung der ersten Delegation erhielt, die von Oktober 1941 bis Januar 1942 dauerte. Die erste Ärztemission fiel also genau in jene Monate, in denen die militärische Niederlage Deutschlands an der Ostfront besiegelt wurde. Eine zweite Mission führte von Januar bis April 1942 nach Warschau, eine dritte – hier beschriebene – in die lettischen Städte Riga und Daugavpils (Dünaburg) sowie ins russische Pskow (Pleskau). Die vierte Schweizer Ärztemission weilte vom November 1942 bis März 1943 in Krakau.
Gerechterweise muss erwähnt werden, dass die neutrale Schweiz Grossbritannien und Frankreich ebenfalls Ärzte- und Schwesterndelegationen anbot, dort aber auf kein Interesse stiess. Wenn die Schweizer an der Ostfront der Gerichtsbarkeit der deutschen Wehrmacht unterstellt wurden, so entsprach dies zwar durchaus dem damaligen Völkerrecht, insbesondere der Genfer Konvention von 1929. Die Unterordnung verdient aber insofern Kritik, als sich die Schweiz an der Ostfront vertraglich mit einem verbrecherischen Regime eingelassen hat, das im «Unternehmen Barbarossa» einen Vernichtungskrieg führte und dabei jede Menschlichkeit preisgab.
«Äusserst penible Judenfrage»
Der aus dem zugerischen Menzingen stammende Robert Hegglin war 1942 Oberarzt an der Medizinischen Klinik des Universitätsspitals Zürich und hatte Dienst im Regimentsstab von Oberst Gustav Däniker geleistet, der 1941 wegen einer defätistisch-anpasserischen Denkschrift entlassen wurde («Wir bilden uns merkwürdigerweise sehr viel darauf ein, als ‹Querschläger› durch ein neues Europa zu fliegen»).
Auch Robert Hegglin, später international bekannter Ordinarius und Poliklinikdirektor in Zürich, fühlte sich dem deutschen Kulturraum eng verbunden, wurde aber durch seine Eindrücke an der Ostfront mehr als nur irritiert. Zeitlebens sprach er niemals über das dort Gesehene und Gehörte, nicht einmal im engsten Familienkreis. Hegglin hat aber während seiner Mission ein Tagebuch geführt und dabei das Erlebte bemerkenswert nüchtern und sachbezogen geschildert. Der Autor hielt verschiedene Prognosen über den Kriegsverlauf fest, schätzte die Personen ein und erfasste das Atmosphärische. Ein nahes Kriegsende, geschweige denn ein deutscher Sieg schien Hegglin überhaupt nicht wahrscheinlich. Im Klima von politischer Diktatur und von Repressionen gegen die offene Meinungsäusserung vermochte er die Vorteile der Freiheit in Denken, Glauben und Forschen erst richtig zu ermessen.
Am 12. August 1942 vertraute Robert Hegglin seinem Tagebuch an: «Es muss noch eine Frage gestreift und besprochen werden, welche zwar äusserst penibel ist, aber in einem objektiven Bericht nicht fehlen darf: die Judenfrage. Es kann – nach den mir vorliegenden Berichten von deutschen Soldaten, Offizieren und Letten – keinem Zweifel unterliegen, dass in der Umgebung von Riga seit der deutschen Besetzung nahezu 100 000 Juden erschossen worden sind. Die Angaben schwanken zwischen 40 000 und 90 000. Judenerschiessungen sind auch in allen andern grösseren Orten in Lettland vorgenommen worden, und zwar werden diese Erschiessungen nicht nur an einheimischen Juden hier vorgenommen, sondern es werden offenbar hierher vor allem Juden aus dem Reich gebracht und hier erschossen.»
Die Zahl von 100 000 Ermordeten in Lettland entspricht erstaunlich exakt den Befunden der Geschichtswissenschaft. Robert Hegglin fährt in seinem Tagebuch mit der Präzision des medizinischen Diagnostikers weiter: «Nach dem Bericht eines lettischen Arztes, dessen Freund bei der lettischen Polizei ist und der selbst bei den Erschiessungen aktiv beteiligt ist, werden Letten in die lettische Polizeimannschaft gezwungen. Nachdem sie die üblichen Gehorsamkeitserklärungen abgegeben haben, werden sie aufgefordert, an den Erschiessungen teilzunehmen. Weigern sie sich, so werden sie selber wegen Unzuverlässigkeit umgebracht. Es sollen an einem Tag bis 1000 Erschiessungen vorgenommen worden sein. Die Juden schaufeln ihr Massengrab offenbar selbst, werden dann aufgefordert, sich nackt auszuziehen, wobei gut organisiert Ringe und Kleider an verschiedenen Orten abgegeben werden müssen – so erzählt dieser Lette. Dann erfolgt die Erschiessung durch Maschinenpistolen oder auch Nackenschuss. Die Erschiessung wird an Männern, Frauen und Kindern in gleicher Weise durchgeführt.»
Der Tagebuchautor vernahm von Augenzeugen weitere grausliche Details des Holocaust: «Es soll auch vorgekommen sein, dass die Erschiessungen nicht korrekt durchgeführt wurden. So erzählt der Lette von zwei Mädchen, die abends aus dem Grab gestiegen seien, da sie nur leicht verletzt waren, und die in einem benachbarten Bauernhof Zuflucht suchten. Noch schaurigere Berichte habe ich von Dünaburg gehört. Man erzählt dort, dass es im Massengrab noch gebrüllt habe, als man begann, das Grab zuzudecken. Wie es sich mit der Ausschmückung dieser Erschiessungen verhält, weiss ich nicht. Absolute Tatsache aber dürfte sein, dass hier in Lettland Tausende von Juden von Letten (unter deutschem Befehl) erschossen worden sind.»
Robert Hegglin zog aus den glaubhaft geschilderten Gräueltaten im Tagebuch die entschiedensten Konsequenzen: «Dass es gegenüber diesen Massnahmen unsererseits nur schärfste Ablehnung geben kann, dürfte zweifellos sein. Die Deutschen machen es einem moralisch denkenden Menschen schwer, sich für sie einzusetzen. Haben sie diese blutigen Schandtaten tatsächlich notwendig? Dann sind sie auch nicht berufen, die Herren Europas zu werden.»
«Schwanensee», SS-Einladung
Von einem geradezu irrealen Kontrast zu den Massenmorden zeugt der nächste Tagebucheintrag Hegglins, der eine Aufführung von Tschaikowskis «Schwanensee» in Riga betrifft: «Ausgezeichnetes Ballett. Die Musik hat mir ebenfalls sehr gut gefallen.» Es seien vom General bis zum einfachsten Landser alle Wehrmachtsgrade im Publikum gesessen. «Zweimal erhaschte ich eine Welle von bestem Parfüm. Diese Duftwelle erweckte lebhafteste Erinnerungen an Paris und schöne Zeiten.»
Kurz darauf besuchte Robert Hegglin ein Lazarett mit 800 Gefangenen. Äusserlich sah «alles hervorragend nett» aus, denn die deutschen Bewacher zogen vor den Schweizer Besuchern eine nicht leicht zu durchschauende Show ab. Doch Hegglin entging nicht, dass er klinisch vor allem Wasseransammlungen sah: «Nach dem Bild muss es sich zweifellos um Hungerödeme handeln.» Er entsann sich nicht, jemals Menschen von einer solchen Magerkeit gesehen zu haben: «Sie waren buchstäblich nur Haut und Knochen.» Die Oberschwester aber log, es würden täglich 350 Gramm Brot und Eintopfgerichte abgegeben. Gleichzeitig kursierten im Lazarett glaubwürdige Gerüchte über Kannibalismus: Es werde ein Handel mit Menschenfleisch getrieben, wobei die Hungernden speziell für Lebern und Nieren viel bezahlten.
Am 26. August 1942 weilte Robert Hegglin an einer Abendgesellschaft des obersten Polizeichefs von Lettland, des SS-Oberbrigadeführers Walther Schröder. Verständnis für die besondere Lage der Schweiz war bei den versammelten Norddeutschen nicht auszumachen. Man politisierte in erstaunlicher Offenheit und nahm Hegglin gar nicht als Ausländer wahr. Einig waren sich die Anwesenden, dass der Krieg gegen Grossbritannien «ein Unglück und Wahnsinn» sei. Die Deutschen hofften auf einen Separatfrieden, denn es müsse darum gehen, den «russischen Koloss» zu erledigen. Alle beteuerten, sie seien «im Grunde auch Demokraten» und ihr Land sei keineswegs eine Diktatur. Dies ermunterte Hegglin, einen Toast auf die Demokratie anzubringen. Über den SS-Gastgeber notierte der Schweizer: «Die Züge des Mannes sind zweifellos brutal, auch wenn er recht gemütlich sein kann. Ich musste immer wieder daran denken, dass dieser Mann die Juden hier, mittelbar jedenfalls, auf dem Gewissen hat.»
Kriegführung von äusserster Brutalität
Gestartet waren die «Ostfrontfahrer» in Bern, wo sich 29 Ärzte, 30 Krankenschwestern und 19 Krankenwärter nebst Chauffeuren besammelt hatten. Nach einem Empfang in der militärärztlichen Akademie in Berlin im Beisein von Ferdinand Sauerbruch und dem Schweizer Botschafter Hans Frölicher («nicht besonders imponierend») ging’s im langsamen Lazarettzug nach Riga. Dort übernahm Robert Hegglin eine Station für innere Krankheiten mit 200 Betten, wo er zu seiner Befriedigung «Infektionskrankheiten en masse» zu sehen bekam: Malaria, Flecktyphus, Bauchtyphus, Ruhr, Scharlach und Diphtherie. Die dort beschäftigten russischen Kriegsgefangenen assen «die Abfälle der Diätküche». Der Krieg – so viel wurde Hegglin sofort klar – wurde «ohne Pardon geführt». Es gab kaum noch Gefangene, dafür unmenschliche Verstümmelungen.
Die russischen Soldaten verharrten tagelang bewegungslos im Sumpf, um plötzlich mitten in den Stellungen der vorrückenden Deutschen loszuschlagen. Anderseits verrieten sie ihren Standort oft durch das Geschrei politischer Einpeitscher oder gegenseitige Anfeuerungsrufe. Propagandareden aus scheppernden Lautsprechern riefen die Deutschen zur Kapitulation auf. Befreiendes Lachen vernahm Hegglin nicht, die Stimmung im Lazarett war gedrückt, Grossmäuler, die mit Heldentaten prahlten, sah er nie. Die Verwundeten mussten zuerst entlaust werden und warteten nackt inmitten von Bergen schmutziger Kleider, assen etwas und liessen sich von lauten Radioklängen mit süss-sentimentalen Schlagern betäuben.
Die Tragik der Deutschen schien Robert Hegglin ungeheuerlich. Eine Niederlage bedeute wohl das Ende ihrer nationalen Existenz, ein Sieg aber dauernde Unterdrückung «der persönlichen Sphäre und des Persönlichkeitswerts» bis «ins Unerträgliche». Der Schweizer Arzt befürchtete den Untergang des bürgerlichen Menschen und die Herrschaft der unkultivierten Masse. Als besonders «unklar» beurteilte Hegglin die Äusserungen der deutschen Militärpfarrer, die doch wissen mussten, dass der Sieg des Nationalsozialismus religiösen Nihilismus und damit das Ende ihrer christlichen Botschaft bedeuten würde. Politisch erhofften sich die einheimischen Letten einen Sieg Deutschlands über die Sowjets, danach aber einen Sieg der Angloamerikaner über die Achsenmächte: «Also eine Einstellung, die man auch bei uns in der Schweiz finden kann.» Bei Gesprächen mit Deutschen, Russen und Letten erschreckte Hegglin der völlige Materialismus, das Abstumpfen der Gefühle, eine tiefe Freudlosigkeit und der Verlust wirklicher Liebesbindungen.
Ausflug ins besetzte Russland
Zu den Höhepunkten von Hegglins Ärztemission gehörte eine viertägige Reise zu den vorgeschobenen Schweizer Sanitätseinrichtungen im lettischen Dünaburg und im russischen Pleskau. Bei der Fahrt im verdunkelten Abteil des Nachtzuges gewann er ein genaueres Bild der deutschen Frontsoldaten. Ihre Haltung war «in jeder Hinsicht militärisch». Sie unterhielten sich offen über Dienstliches und schimpften über Vorgesetzte, vermieden aber jedes Wort über Politik. Das Gelände wurde topfeben, und Hegglin sah von weitem als Wahrzeichen der stark zerstörten russischen Stadt Pleskau die grünen Kuppeln des orthodoxen Domes an der Welikaja: «Ich empfand es als ein höchst merkwürdiges Gefühl, den Fuss auf den Boden jenes Russland zu setzen, von dem wir während zwanzig Jahren nichts Genaueres erfahren konnten.»
Die Schweizer Mission war auf drei deutsche Kriegslazarette verteilt, doch herrschte erhebliche Missstimmung, da es zu wenig Arbeit gab und «die Kompetenzen gegenüber schlechter ausgebildeten, aber arroganten deutschen Kollegen nicht überall scharf abgegrenzt waren». Tatsächlich fanden im Sommer 1942 im nördlichen Frontabschnitt relativ wenige Kampfhandlungen statt.
Die Wehrmacht belagerte Leningrad, war aber durch heftige sowjetische Gegenangriffe seit längerem in die Defensive geraten. «Wunderbar» erschienen Hegglin die etwa dreissig Ju-88-Flugzeuge, die zweimal täglich majestätisch zur Landung ansetzten; man könne sich in deren Gewissenhaftigkeit und Genauigkeit «richtig verlieben».
An einem warmen Sommernachmittag nahm die ganze «Schweizerkolonie» ein Bad in der Welikaja – «alles überstrahlt von der gleichen lieben Sonne, wie sie auch in unseren Bergen leuchtet». Im Fluss planschte auch der frühere Divisionskommandant und nunmehrige Nationalrat Eugen Bircher. Als Bircher später in einem Flugzeug sass, meinte Hegglin über den Aargauer Chirurgen: «Dieser biedere, gutgläubige Schweizerkopf passt irgendwie schlecht zu den Köpfen der Luftwaffen-Offiziere, die scharf gemeisselt und hart sind.»
Im zu siebzig Prozent zerstörten Dünaburg besuchte Robert Hegglin die Schweizer Missionsmitglieder, traf allerdings auf eine ausgesprochen schlechte Stimmung. Auch dort gab es nicht genügend Kranke und Verletzte, so dass «die Deutschen, welche selbst nicht genügend beschäftigt waren, die Schweizer als Eindringlinge betrachteten».
Robert Hegglin hat seine persönlichen Eindrücke während seiner Ärztemission in der knappen Freizeit auf 165 grosszügig beschriebenen Seiten festgehalten. Das Manuskript beginnt am 17. Juni 1942 und bricht am 10. September 1942 abrupt ab – sechzehn Tage vor Ende der Mission. Es scheint unwahrscheinlich, dass der Autor seine Aufzeichnungen vorzeitig eingestellt oder verloren hat. Weit eher denkbar ist, dass Hegglin den Schluss für die Überlieferung an die Nachwelt als ungeeignet beurteilte und die entsprechenden Seiten vernichtete. Hat er sich zu negativ über Nazideutschland ausgelassen? Oder hat er ein zu positives Bild der Deutschen gemalt, zu dem er nach dem Krieg nicht mehr stehen wollte? Denkbar wäre auch, dass er das Getto von Riga und die dort herrschenden entsetzlichen Zustände gesehen und beschrieben hat.
Nachweislich geärgert hat sich Robert Hegglin nach seiner Rückkehr über Details, die angesichts des fast unmittelbar erlebten Holocaust als beschämend banal erscheinen. Der Sanitätshauptmann erhob beim stellvertretenden Schweizer Rotkreuz-Chefarzt Beschwerde über die Uneinheitlichkeit der Spezialuniform der Ärztemission, besonders bei «Kopfbedeckung, Schuhen und Strümpfen der Krankenschwestern». Dringlich empfahl er seinen Vorgesetzten, «die Mütze der Ärzte mit dem Bändeli durch eine Lösung mit zwei Knöpfen zu ersetzen».
Die Bevölkerung erfuhr bis 1945 nichts von den vernichtenden Vorgängen in den Konzentrationslagern der Nazis. Gewisse Kreise waren aber schon früher informiert.
Von Christoph Mörgeli
Mit dem Ostfeldzug begann im Juni 1941 der Massenmord an der jüdischen Bevölkerung. Anfang 1942 beschlossen hohe Exponenten der NS-Regierung und der SS die Deportation von Europas Juden in den Osten, um sie dort systematisch umzubringen. Dies geschah anfänglich durch Massenerschiessungen, dann auch durch Abgase und seit März 1942 in Gaskammern von Vernichtungslagern.
Die Schweizer Bevölkerung vernahm erst nach Kriegsende vom eigentlichen Holocaust. Sogar Jean Rudolf von Salis, der bei Radio Beromünster während des Zweiten Weltkriegs regelmässig über die aktuelle Lage referierte und zu den bestinformierten Zeitgenossen gehörte, erhielt erst im Mai 1945 Kenntnis von den Vorgängen in den Konzentrationslagern.
Die Behörden in Bundesbern wurden allerdings schon wesentlich früher gewarnt. Franz Rudolf von Weiss, Schweizer Generalkonsul in Köln, schrieb im November 1941 an die Fremdenpolizei und an das Politische Departement über bevorstehende Judendeportationen nach Minsk. Die Gestapo verhindere jede Auswanderung von Juden, damit nichts «von den letzten unmenschlichen, von vielen Deutschen scharf verurteilten Massnahmen durchsickert». Mitte Mai 1942 schickte von Weiss «streng vertraulich» sogar Fotografien – etwa von der «Entladung deutscher Güterwagen von den Leichen erstickter Juden» – an Brigadier Roger Masson, Chef des Nachrichtendienstes.
Der in Zürich tätige Industrielle Eduard Schulte aus Breslau informierte im Juli 1942 jüdische Persönlichkeiten in der Schweiz über die systematische Vernichtung von Juden. Gerhart M. Riegner, Vertreter des Jüdischen Weltkongresses in Genf, erhielt so Kenntnis von den Vernichtungsplänen und leitete sie ab dem 8. August 1942 an die Westalliierten weiter. Auch einzelne Mitarbeiter der Schweizer Ärztemissionen machten ihre Erfahrungen öffentlich, was zu scharfen deutschen Interventionen führte. Was die der Zensur unterworfene Presse betrifft, so schrieb die SP-Tageszeitung La Sentinelle am 12. August 1942: «Man ist dabei, eine Rasse systematisch auszurotten.» Im Herbst 1942 erwähnten Schweizer Zeitungen «Todestransporte» von Juden Richtung Osten.
«Ernsthafte Nachteile»
Robert Jezler von der Polizeiabteilung im Justizdepartement legte Bundesrat Eduard von Steiger Ende Juli 1942 einen Bericht vor, laut dem eine Rückweisung «kaum mehr zu verantworten» sei.
Doch der Bundesrat beschloss am 4. August 1942 das Gegenteil, im Wissen, dass den Betroffenen daraus «ernsthafte Nachteile (Gefahr für Leib und Leben) erwachsen könnten». Die Landesregierung wollte den Juden den Status von politischen Flüchtlingen nicht gewähren und änderte diesen Entscheid offiziell erst im Juli 1944.
Mimo upływu 70 lat trwają spory wokół pogromu Żydów w Kielcach. Zaczynają się od samej terminologii wydarzeń z 4 lipca 1946 r.: pogrom kielecki, tzw. pogrom, mord bandycki, wydarzenia kieleckie, zajścia antyżydowskie, prowokacja.
Słownikowa definicja pogromem nazywa zbiorowe, gwałtowne wystąpienia jednej grupy ludności przeciw drugiej, wiążące się z prześladowaniem mniejszości narodowych i religijnych. W ich zakres wchodzą: zabójstwa, gwałty, pobicia, niszczenie dobytku, rabunek. Wydarzenia w Kielcach mieszczą się w definicji pogromu. Grupa atakowana była narodowości żydowskiej i przeciwko niej występowali Polacy (inna grupa ludności). Charakter wydarzeń opisuje przymiotnik „gwałtowny”, a w ich przebiegu znajdujemy rabunek, pobicia, zabójstwa.
Prezydent w rocznicę pogromu kieleckiego: nie ma miejsca na antysemityzm
W wolnej Polsce nie ma miejsca na uprzedzenia, rasizm, ksenofobię, antysemityzm – powiedział w poniedziałek prezydent Andrzej Duda w Kielcach, podczas obchodów 70. rocznicy pogromu kieleckiego. „Nie ma usprawiedliwienia dla antysemickiej zbrodni“ – zaznaczył.
Seit 20 Jahren lädt der Bundestag zum Jahrestag der Befreiung von Auschwitz durch die Rote Armee einen Gastredner ein, den Abgeordneten die Leviten zu lesen: Warum der Holocaust ein singuläres Ereignis war, warum wir niemals vergessen dürfen, welche Verbrechen „im Namen des deutschen Volkes“ begangen wurden und weshalb wir alles dafür tun müssen, dass sich „so etwas“ nicht wiederholt.
Von den 21 Festrednern, die bis jetzt vor dem Bundestag gesprochen haben, waren zehn Juden und Jüdinnen, u. a. Elie Wiesel, Simone Veil, Marcel Reich-Ranicki; zehn „Holocaust-Überlebende“ wie Imre Kertész und Bronislaw Geremek bzw. ehemalige „Häftlinge“ wie Jorge Semprún und Ernst Cramer, eine sensible Unterscheidung, die vermutlich darauf beruht, dass nicht jedes KZ als „Vernichtungslager“ deklariert war, weswegen nicht jeder „Häftling“ automatisch ein „Überlebender“ ist. Fünfmal ergriff ein amtierender bzw. ehemaliger Bundespräsident das Wort, einmal durfte es ein Sprecher der Sinti und Roma sein.
Die Liste der Festredner ist also in sich ausgewogen, wenn man einmal davon absieht, dass kleinere Opfergruppen unberücksichtigt blieben: Die Homosexuellen, die Behinderten, die Zeugen Jehovas. Das Vernichtungsprogramm der Nazis war eben so umfassend, dass man nicht aller Betroffenen gedenken kann.
Eine Verbeugung vor dem Leben
In diesem Jahr wurde die Festrede von Ruth Klüger gehalten, einer in Wien geborenen 84 Jahre alten Schriftstellerin, die das verkörpert, was den Juden und dem Judentum am meisten übel genommen wird: Den Willen zum Leben. Dementsprechend heißt ihre 1992 erschienene Autobiografie „Weiter leben. Eine Jugend“. Ruth Klüger hat nicht nur Auschwitz überlebt, sondern auch das „Überleben“ gemeistert, etwas, woran andere Überlebende – Jean Améry, Paul Celan, Joseph Wulf – zerbrochen sind.
Foto: dpa/Kay NietfeldSachsens Ministerpräsident Stanislaw Tillich (CDU), Bundespräsident Joachim Gauck und Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel (CDU) applaudieren Ruth Klüger während der Gedenkveranstaltung für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus
So war auch ihre Rede am 27. Januar eine Verbeugung vor dem Leben mit allen seinen Grausamkeiten und Unberechenbarkeiten. Aber nicht nur das. Die Sätze, die in der Öffentlichkeit am häufigsten zitiert und mit dem größten Lob bedacht wurden, hatten einen aktuellen Bezug. Ihre Haltung zu Deutschland, sagte Frau Klüger, habe sich in den letzten Wochen gewandelt: Von Verwunderung zur Bewunderung. Der Grund dafür sei die Art gewesen, wie Angela Merkel die vielen Flüchtlinge aufgenommen habe. Der Satz „Wir schaffen das“ sei ein „schlichter und heroischer“ Slogan gewesen.
Auch Klüger wäre lieber mit „Refugees Welcome“ begrüßt worden
Dass eine Überlebende des Holocaust, die Deutschland von seiner schlimmsten Seite kennengelernt hat, die neue deutsche Gastfreundschaft und Hilfsbereitschaft bewundert, ist mehr als verständlich. Auch Ruth Klüger hätte es sich lieber gewünscht, mit „Refugees Welcome“-Rufen begrüßt zu werden als von brüllenden SS-Wachen an der Rampe von Auschwitz.
Dennoch hinterlässt ihre Rede ein G’schmäckle. Faktisch hat Ruth Klüger eine historische Verbindung zwischen den in Deutschland verfolgten und aus Deutschland vertriebenen Juden und den heute nach Deutschland strömenden Flüchtlingen gezogen. Ja, Deutschland hat aus seiner Geschichte gelernt. Und indem die Kanzlerin mit einer schlichten und zugleich heroischen Geste die Grenzen aufmachte, beglich sie quasi eine alte Schuld. Sie machte an den Schutzsuchenden wieder gut, was ein früherer Kanzler an den Juden verbrochen hatte. Angela Merkel hat Deutschland entschuldet. Und eine Überlebende des Holocaust bescheinigte ihr, das Richtige getan zu haben. Nicht im Feuilleton der „Zeit“ oder auf Arte, sondern im Herzen der Republik, im Deutschen Bundestag. Wenn Angela Merkel für ihr Tun und Treiben jemals ein wasserdichtes moralisches Alibi brauchte, sie hat es am 27. Januar 2016, dem 71. Jahrestag der Befreiung von Auschwitz, bekommen.
Pomp für Ruhani in Rom und Paris
Die ganze Geschichte wird noch makabrer, wenn man den Hintergrund berücksichtigt, vor dem sie spielt. Während in Berlin mit gewohnter Routine zum Widerstand gegen das Dritte Reich aufgerufen wurde, besuchte der iranische Präsident Ruhani, der nur deswegen als „gemäßigt“ gilt, weil seine Widersacher noch extremer sind, Italien und Frankreich, wo er mit all den Ehren empfangen wurde, die einem Staatsoberhaut zustehen. Das war mehr als nur eine Frage des Protokolls. Um Ruhanis „religiöse Gefühle“ nicht zu verletzen, wurden ein paar „nackte“ antike Statuen in den Kapitolinischen Museen in Rom mit Stellwänden verkleidet.
Auch in Paris gab es einen großen Bahnhof, während man in Berlin ein wenig verschnupft darüber war, dass der Iraner einen Bogen um die deutsche Hauptstadt machte. Hätte man ihn dort mit dem gleichen Pomp empfangen wie in Rom und Paris? Oder hätte man die Gelegenheit genutzt, dem hohen Gast einige unkommode Fragen zu stellen? Zum Beispiel, was er denn von dem Internationalen Holocaust-Karikaturen-Wettbewerb halte, zu dem die Organisatoren der Teheraner Cartoon Biennale zum dritten Mal aufgerufen haben? Oder ob der Bericht von Amnesty International stimme, wonach mindestens 49 Jugendliche in den Todeszellen iranischer Gefängnisse sitzen und auf ihre Hinrichtung warten? Unter ihnen einige, die wegen „Feindschaft gegen Gott“ verurteilt wurden. Oder wann der Iran aufhören werde, die Hamas und die Hisbollah zu unterstützen, die ganz Palästina von der „zionistischen Besatzung“ befreien möchten?
Das geht so weiter, bis 1000 Jahre vorbei sind
Das wären Fragen gewesen, die zum Jahrestag der Befreiung von Auschwitz gepasst hätten, wenn das Gerede von „den Lehren von Auschwitz“ eben kein leeres Gerede wäre. Wenn man es ernst meinen würde mit dem „Nie wieder!“ und dem „Wehret den Anfängen!“ Und dem „Kampf gegen das Unrecht“, den man hier und heute führen müsse, um eine Wiederholung der Geschichte zu verhindern.
Und so wird es wohl weitergehen, mindestens noch 917 Jahre, bis die 1000 Jahre, die der Führer 1933 seinem Volk versprochen hat, endlich vorbei sein werden.
Magnum PhotosPrimo Levi, Turin, 1985; photograph by René Burri
To the Editors:
Tim Parks’s engaging review of The Complete Works of Primo Levi [NYR, November 5] is satisfying on a number of levels, but I was disheartened to see the piece bookended by the “suicide.” Parks’s phrase that Levi “threw himself down the stairwell to his death” is not, in any case, an accurate way to describe a tumble over a railing. But the larger issue is that thoughtful and important people close to Levi, who first thought it was a suicide, have reconsidered the event. These people include his cardiologist and friend David Mendel, his lifelong friend Nobel laureate Rita Levi Montalcini, and Fernando Camon. Levi was in a whirl of activities—he’d scheduled an interview for the following Monday, he was considering the presidency of the publishing house Einaudi, he’d just submitted a novel, and that very morning he mailed a plan-filled letter. Add to that the tight dimensions of the stairwell, a railing lower than his waist, recovery from surgery (lowered blood pressure), the number of people who survived Auschwitz and did not kill themselves, and a number of other factors, and the suicide doesn’t make sense.
It has been a useful symbol for critics and other writers to hold on to as they imagine the why and how, but it is grossly unfair to the man and to his work. If this crutch is removed, his material can be examined in fresh light—an examination that he deserves.
I hope the editors of The New York Review will help discourage the story, which, in the cycling of Internet sites, already holds a terrifically strong grip. I would strongly urge you to see this 1999 essay, “Primo Levi’s Last Moments” by Diego Gambetta.
Carolyn Lieberg
Washington, D.C.
Tim Parks replies:
“1987—April 11: Levi dies, a suicide, in his apartment building in Turin.”
I quote not from a rogue website but from the author chronology provided in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, the book under review. These words, in turn, are a translation of the chronology prepared by Il Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi in Turin, the most authoritative source of information on Levi; they were actually written by Ernesto Ferrero, for many years Levi’s editor at Einaudi, a close friend who knew the author well and spoke to him regularly right through to the end.
The three biographers—Ian Thomson, Carole Angiers, and Myriam Annissimov—who worked intensely on Levi’s life, interviewing most of those who knew him, all speak of his suicide as fact. The police on the scene concluded that the death could only have been suicide, this for the simple reason that one does not take a “tumble over a railing” in a Turin apartment block. The Turin law court that heard the evidence surrounding the death agreed and gave its verdict accordingly. In any event it is unthinkable that Levi, a cautious man, would have brought up children and maintained his infirm mother in a building where one could simply tumble over bannisters.
Diego Gambetta’s Boston Review article, to which Carolyn Lieberg refers me, is an extended exercise in wishful thinking, sometimes disingenuous (as when it claims, for example, that the biographies do not back up their claim that the death was suicide, or omits to mention the family’s immediate acceptance of the suicide verdict, or suggests that the height of the railing was abnormally low), sometimes plain wrong, as when it claims that Levi never wrote in favor of suicide. In the story “Heading West” (published in 1971, but interestingly republished shortly before the suicide in 1987), he sympathetically describes a remote tribe who refuse a drug that will put an end to an epidemic of suicides. The chief of the tribe writes, and they are the final words of the story, that the tribe’s members “prefer freedom to drugs, and death to illusion.” Freedom is always a positive word for Levi.
As early as 1959 Levi had written to his German translator, Heinz Reidt, that “suicide is an act of will, a free decision.” In 1981 when Levi’s German teacher, Hanns Engert, hanged himself, Levi was asked to sign a petition claiming it was murder. But the evidence was so overwhelming that he refused: “Hanns killed himself,” he said. “Suicide is a right we all have.”
This brings us to the moral issue at stake here. Levi was a sworn enemy of denial in all its forms. In If This Is a Man he is dismayed when at Auschwitz his friend Alberto convinces himself that his father, just “selected,” will not actually be sent to the gas chambers. It is a renunciation of reality, of sanity. Later, he would be equally dismayed that Alberto’s parents continued to deny the obvious truth that their son had died in the march away from Auschwitz, preferring to believe that he was somehow safe and well in Russia. In The Drowned and the Saved Levi attacks all attempts to find solace in pieties and “convenient truths,” in particular the notion that Auschwitz victims, himself included, were somehow sanctified by their experience, their courage and goodness becoming almost a consolation for the awfulness of what had happened: “It is disingenuous, absurd and historically false,” he writes, “to argue that a hellish system such as National Socialism sanctifies its victims.”
Given that Levi’s instinct was always to encourage the reader to confront the hardest of facts and not take refuge in any comfort zone, we owe it to him to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence of the way he died. His suicide does not diminish his work or his dignity. He was not obliged to his readers to behave in a reassuring way or protect the illusions they had built around his person. “In my work I have portrayed myself…as…well-balanced,” he remarked. “However, I’m not well-balanced at all. I go through long periods of imbalance.”
Whatever his reasons for doing what he did, and clearly in the last months of his life he oscillated between deep depression and rare moments of enthusiasm for new projects, Levi was a free man, exercising “a right we all have.” “He’s done what he’d always said he’d do” were reportedly his wife’s words on returning home to discover what had happened.
Take the delicate case of Primo Levi, the Holocaust survivor who combined the careers of writer and professional chemist. Until recently I had only read Levi’s three most renowned works, his two great war memoirs, If This Is a Man and The Truce, and then The Periodic Table, a series of autobiographical pieces exploring the author’s relationships in the light of his work as a chemist. My response—many years ago—was in line with that of most of the articles I had read on the author, which tend to hagiography. The story of Auschwitz in If This Is a Man is so overwhelming, Levi’s humanity and healthy bewilderment in the face of the surreal collective cruelty of the Nazi camps so resolute and right that one cannot help but admire the book. The Truce, in contrast, is full of positive energy and optimism, describing Levi’s experiences in Russian refugee camps after Auschwitz and up to the moment of his repatriation and return to his home town of Turin, while The Periodic Table is clearly the work of an older, more determinedly sophisticated writer. Neal Ascherson’s 1985 review in The New York Review sets out the typical reader reaction: “a wonderful store of irony, of humor and observation,” Ascherson calls it, coming out of Levi’s work not as “a supervisor … in some enormous multi-national concern, but a struggling freelance chemist….a sort of packman-chemist, an alchemist on the road.
How different things begin to look when one tackles the almost three thousand pages of The Collected Works and browses the long chronology of Levi’s life offered in the first of these three hefty volumes, as I have just done for a review essay.
The first surprise is the dates: If This Is a Man (1947), The Truce (1963), The Periodic Table (1975). What was Levi doing in the years in between? On the road with his chemistry? No, from 1948 to 1975 he worked for the same locally-based paint and chemical company, first as a chemist, then as technical director and later (when he was writing The Periodic Table) as general manager. So Ascherson had got an entirely skewed and romanticized view of Levi’s working life. But this was hardly his fault. It’s the view The Periodic Table suggests. So was Levi unhappy, one wonders, with his long managerial career?
The next curiosity is that while there are no publications in the eighteen years between the first two books, between The Truce and The Periodic Table there are two collections of short stories that no one ever mentions: Natural Histories (1966) and Flaw of Form (1975). Reading through them, I’m astonished at the fall-off in performance. It’s not that they are badly written, but there is a frivolity, a childishness almost, that strives for but never quite achieves comedy. Essentially, these are science fiction pieces in which the twin fears of sexual experience and invasive impersonal power structures play out in a wide variety of paranoid fantasies, but without the urgency or commitment that might really involve us. They are, as it were, at once frightened and complacent. “Little transgressions,” Levi called them. Why was he writing this stuff?
The question pushed me to look at a proper biography. Obscurely, I felt that if I could understand the inspiration behind the short stories, I might learn something new about the memoirs. Here again there were surprises. Ian Thomson’s Primo Levi: A Life (2003) offers a wealth of facts, some of the most important of which are not in the chronology offered by the new Collected Works. For example, a number of the details in the three auto¬biographical works are distorted or invented. Thomson lists these details and I pondered them. It seemed that Levi tended to make his close companions less cultured and educated, but more vital and enterprising, than they actually were, such that they become foils for the cautious and highly educated Levi; they are not as smart as he is, but admirably courageous, and above all free. However, doing this involved inventing details that the people in question found insulting, or just plain false.
What is most surprising in the biography, though, and barely hinted at in The Collected Works, is the intense monotony and eventually chronic unhappiness of Levi’s domestic life, his deep depressions and profound pessimism. Aside from the two-year parenthesis that was Auschwitz and the Russian refugee camps, he spent his whole life in the same Turin apartment in the company of his mother, to whom he was intensely attached. After the war, the still virgin Levi married in very short order the virgin Lucia Morpurgo, but rather than set her up in a new home, Levi brought her, against her wishes, into the apartment with his mother and sister, bringing up two children in an atmosphere fraught with frustration and resentment. Meantime, Levi, who desperately wished to leave his office job for a literary career but feared he wouldn’t make it, spent much of his free time corresponding with Auschwitz survivors and establishing intimate but non-sexual relations with other women, and in general, stayed out of his home absolutely as much as possible.
But is this information “important” or even useful when we read a great book like If This Is a Man? Though his mother was absolutely central to Levi’s life, she barely gets a mention in his autobiographical work, nor is there any projection of her that one can see in the fiction. Surely the book is the book is the book and that’s that. The rest, gossip.
None of us can read a story without relating it to the knowledge and experience we bring to it. When we read Levi’s memoir our reaction is conditioned by what we already know about the Holocaust, about fascism, about Judaism. The story stands in relation to the things we know. That, after all, is the main reason for including a life chronology at the beginning of The Collected Works; the facts of the life condition, or inform, our response. Returning to the celebrated works equipped with the rich context of the extended biography, I began to notice things I hadn’t really seen before. “If, from inside the Lager,” Levi writes at one point of If This Is a Man, “a message could have seeped out to free men, it would have been this: Be sure not to tolerate in your own homes what is inflicted on us here.”
What can Levi mean? Surely not that there may be beatings and gas chambers and forced labor in our homes. The comment comes immediately after a reflection that the deprivations of Auschwitz have forced him to acknowledge how little he really lived when he was a free man. Is Levi suggesting that one’s manhood can be challenged as profoundly in the domestic environment as in the camps? Toward the end of The Truce, with Levi now in sight of home after his long travels, he offers a reflection that at once explains the book’s curious title and throws the whole narrative into a new perspective:
We knew that on the thresholds of our homes, for good or for ill, a trial awaited us, and we anticipated it with fear. … Soon, even tomorrow, we would have to join battle, against still unknown enemies, within and outside us. … Although the months just passed, of wandering at the edge of civilization, were harsh, they now seemed to us a truce, an interlude of unlimited openness, a providential gift of destiny, never to be repeated.
Never to be repeated! Writing almost twenty years after that truce, Levi appears to be telling us that this had been his one experience of real freedom. A page later the book ends with the author safely home, but dreaming that he is again back “in the Lager, and nothing outside the Lager was true.” Home and the camps are bizarrely superimposed.
Realizing only now how frequently notions of freedom and imprisonment occur throughout Levi’s work, I began to suspect that the small changes to the facts that Levi makes in his memoirs are driven by a desire for freedom. His commitment to bearing witness to the truth of Auschwitz was becoming a kind of straitjacket, something people expected of him, imposed almost. He was also expected to behave in a proper fashion, receiving warnings from the Turin synagogue when it became known he was flirting with a woman journalist. Was writing about the imprisonment of Auschwitz becoming itself a kind of prison? The short stories are largely frivolous perhaps because Levi yearned for the freedom of frivolity; many of those who knew him report his occasionally infantile behavior (“My impression was of a child trapped in a man’s body,” said one close associate). But the short stories did not bring him the respect that the memoirs did and Levi wanted both the freedom and the respect.
In the later works it’s easy to see Levi searching in every way for a freedom of expression that will nevertheless carry the weight of the memoir; the books, that is, become part of his search for a modus vivendi, one that will allow him both to stay home with mother and feel courageous and free and be respected and admired. This is particularly the case with If Not Now, When? Levi’s only novel, where an alter ego in the guise of a Russian Jew becomes an anti-Nazi partisan, successfully fighting and killing and seducing women, being simultaneously, as it were, free and good, committed to the right cause but not trapped in it. This is wishful thinking and in fact the story is unconvincing from start to finish.
The picture of this man deeply conflicted between the imperatives of freedom and the fear of disappointing his nearest and dearest inevitably influences the way I come to his last book, written in the early Eighties. Levi’s mother was now an invalid. His wife’s mother was blind. Whenever he left home for a day or two he was extremely anxious about them. He was on anti-depressants. Philip Roth, the writer Fulvio Tomizza, and the great German publisher Michael Kruger all found Levi “pathetic,” even “excruciatingly pathetic.”
It was in this miserable atmosphere, in his sixties now, that Levi turned away from the freedoms he had been looking for in fiction and went back to Auschwitz, this time in a moral essay of ferocious reflection, without any suspect details. The book is called The Drowned and the Saved and is remarkable for its sense of exasperation, its masochism almost. As I note in my review, Levi sometimes seems more determined to insist that Auschwitz survivors were degraded and contaminated and that all “the best” inevitably died, than to explore the psyche of the Nazi torturers. He seeks, that is, in every way to break down the consoling image of the sanctified survivor, the image he himself had become trapped in.
It is hard not to feel how this stands in relation to Levi’s domestic situation and general feeling of entrapment. He goes back to Auschwitz as so many of his readers wanted, but claims the freedom to tell them things they don’t want to hear. Meanwhile he was frequently referring to his mother and mother in law as “the drowned” and “like Auschwitz victims,” a comparison that made any “betrayal” (putting his mother in a home, for example) unthinkable, while simultaneously confirming that Levi himself felt he was somehow still in prison.
Nothing of what I said here diminishes Levi or his writing. Great works come out of great psychological intensity, in his case great suffering, great frustration. Why insist, then, in offering a sanitized, optimistic version of an author’s life, as if his work might be the less if we acknowledged his difficulties? Isn’t this, in the end, precisely the kind of denial that Levi fought against? Even the way the chronology of The Collected Works acknowledges Levi’s suicide is anodyne and vague, as if hoping the fact might go away: “April 11 [1987] Levi dies, a suicide, in his apartment building in Turin.”
In fact, Levi threw himself down the stairwell of the building he had lived in all his life. “Suicide is an act of will, a free decision,” he had written years before to his German translator. “Either you die or your mother dies,” the editor Agnese Incisa, a Jewish female friend of Levi’s, put it to him a few days before his death. In any work of fiction the symbolism of Levi’s suicide would be clear enough and amply commented. The household becomes the instrument of death; using it to kill himself he simultaneously frees himself from its imprisoning grip. It was the drama he had never quite put in his books.
edited by Ann Goldstein, with an introduction by Toni Morrison
Liveright, three volumes, 2,910 pp., $100.00
Sergio del Grande/Mondadori Portfolio/Getty ImagesPrimo Levi in his studio, Turin, 1981
Primo Levi was born in 1919 on the fourth floor of an “undistinguished” apartment block in Turin and aside from “involuntary interruptions” continued to live there in the company of his mother until in 1987 he threw himself down the stairwell to his death. The longest interruption was from September 1943 to October 1945 and would provide Levi with the core material for his writing career: it involved three months on the fringe of the partisan resistance to the German occupation, two months in a Fascist internment camp, eleven months in Auschwitz, and a further nine in various Russian refugee camps.
In 1946, aged twenty-seven, despite working full-time as a chemist, Levi completed his account of his time in a concentration camp. Now widely considered a masterpiece, If This Is a Man was turned down by Turin’s main publishing house, Einaudi, in the person of Natalia Ginzburg, herself a Jew whose husband had died in a Fascist prison. It was also rejected by five other publishers. Why?
Even before his return, Levi had been overwhelmed by the need to tell what had happened. Prior to Auschwitz he had not felt that Jewishness was central to his identity. Like most Italian Jews, the Levis had long been assimilated with little to distinguish them from other Italians. The introduction of the Race Laws in 1938, which discriminated against Jews in public education and excluded them from regular employment, thus created a predicament for Levi that went far beyond the problem of completing his degree in chemistry and finding a job. It was a threat to his identity. Who was he if not an ordinary Italian like his fellow students? The question “what is a man?” that would echo throughout his work was never an abstract consideration but a matter of personal urgency.
Until September 1943 it had been possible for Levi to live in “willful blindness,” to get around the rules, graduate, and find work unofficially; but with the Italian capitulation to the Allies and the German occupation of Italy this was no longer an option. Jews were being rounded up. Many were fleeing to the Americas. Levi’s insecurity at this time was compounded by the death of his father in 1942, making Primo, at twenty-three, responsible for the well-being of his mother and younger sister. His father had been something of a womanizer whose betrayals of their mother were common knowledge.
Here too there was a question of manhood: Levi himself had yet to have anything more than “bloodless female friendships,” was believed by his companions to be terrified of women, and feared that he was “condemned to a perpetual male solitude.” He nursed his self-esteem with adventurous chemistry experiments and arduous mountain climbing in the Alps above Turin, and it was to the mountains that he fled in September 1943, taking his mother and sister with him and renting rooms in a small resort hotel near the Swiss border.
Was he a Jew on the run or a partisan? The Swiss border was closed. German forces were approaching. The would-be rebels with whom Levi eventually associated were poorly organized and quickly infiltrated by a Fascist spy; the only shots fired in anger were those that served to execute two younger members of the band who had gone on a drinking and looting spree that put the safety of the others at risk. How far Levi was involved in this killing is largely the subject of Sergio Luzzatto’s mistitled new book, Primo Levi’s Resistance.1 There was no resistance. To Levi’s dismay his sister had taken his mother from the hotel on December 1 to find refuge back in Piedmont. On December 9 the two undisciplined band members were dispatched with shots to the back. By the time Levi was arrested on December 13 he was utterly demoralized and disoriented. Warned that to confess to being a partisan would mean certain death, he opted for the lesser evil of admitting his Jewishness.
The reader coming to If This Is a Man today brings with him a great deal of knowledge about the Holocaust and in most cases is free of any direct personal involvement in the war. Readers in Turin in 1947 were not so well informed and their own intense war experiences were very much on their minds. The book opens, in first person, with a curious mixture of coolness and portentousness. “I cultivated a moderate and abstract sense of rebellion,” Levi remarks, and declares that given his half-heartedness as a partisan the “sequence of events” leading to his arrest were “justified.” The tone changes abruptly when he talks about the collective experience, in the internment camp, of being told that all Jews were to be dispatched to Germany the following day:
Night came, and it was such a night one knew that human eyes would not witness it and survive…. Many things were then said and done among us; but of these it is better that no memory remain.
Today it is easy to imagine the young Levi searching for a voice, a manner, that would allow him to tell his tale without being overwhelmed by it and at the same time compel the reader’s attention. Prior to studying chemistry he had been educated at a prestigious liceo classico in Turin; he knew his Dante and Manzoni and brought frequent references from them to his text, to enrich it, to get across a sense of extremity and profundity. But having lived through twenty years of fascism the literary establishment in postwar Turin were sworn enemies of all grandiloquence, which they tended to associate with inauthenticity; in their defense it has to be said that If This Is a Man is most powerful when it is most straightforward.
The difficulty in finding a voice for what had happened was intimately linked to the experience itself and the question of what it means to be human. Many inmates of Auschwitz, Levi tells us, experienced the same dream: they would be back home trying to tell their story—the hunger, the cold, the beatings, the selections—but all too soon they would realize that their loved ones were not listening. “They are completely indifferent…as if I were not there.”
Why this refusal to listen? The worst aspect of the camp, Levi tells us, was that it “was a great machine to reduce us to beasts.” The victim was systematically brought down morally to the level of his torturers. Prisoners were encouraged to fight one another, for the possession of a spoon, for sufficient space to sleep, to get the easier jobs, to avoid emptying the slop cans:
One had to…strangle all dignity and kill all conscience, to enter the arena as a beast against other beasts…. Many were the ways devised and put into practice by us in order not to die…. All implied a grueling struggle of one against all….
To give up this struggle was to become an obvious candidate for the gas chamber, one of
an anonymous mass…of non-men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to truly suffer. One hesitates to call them living; one hesitates to call their death death….
In her introduction to this three-volume collection of Levi’s works, Toni Morrison remarks how “the triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction glows virtually everywhere in Levi’s writing.” These are heartening words but they are not true. Rather Levi tells us about human identity crushed and corrupted by unspeakable evil; his work is powerful because it squares up to that reality. “The personages in these pages are not men,” he tells us; everybody in the camp, torturers and tortured alike, was “paradoxically united in a common inner desolation.”
To tell this harrowing story was to confess to one’s own degradation. It wasn’t attractive. This anguish explains the strange shifts of tone throughout If This Is a Man, in particular the moments when Levi addresses us defensively with the didactic “we”:
We now invite the reader to contemplate the possible meaning in the Lager of the words “good” and “evil,” “just” and “unjust”; let each judge,…how much of our ordinary moral world could survive on this side of the barbed wire.
The rejections of his book must have come to Levi as confirmation of his recurrent nightmares. Fortunately in the meantime there was love. Levi had started dating Lucia Morpurgo in early 1946. She was a year younger than he; both were virgins. Crucially, Lucia was happy to listen to Levi’s story in all its terrible detail. “I felt myself become a man again,” he later wrote. Eventually his memoir was published by a tiny publishing house in October 1947, a month after Levi and Lucia had married.
René Burri/Magnum PhotosPrimo Levi, Turin, 1985
Levi had been cautious, diligent, and prone to depression before his deportation and continued to be so after his return. Anxious about money, he quickly found a job as a chemist, briefly allowed himself to be seduced away from it into a freelance enterprise with a fearless friend, then in 1948, with his wife pregnant, he knuckled down to serious long-term employment with SIVA, a paint and chemical factory. Whether out of genuine financial difficulties or because he was in thrall to his mother, he did not move out of the family home but brought his wife to live there, against her will. Arguments, incomprehension, and resentments ensued.
On the other hand, Levi was quite changed. Auschwitz had humiliated and degraded him, but it had taught him a great deal; he was “more mature and stronger.” After the Germans had abandoned the camp he and other inmates had behaved with great resourcefulness to stay alive until the Russians arrived. During the long return through various refugee camps he had practiced all his newly learned survival skills. So if the experience had initially stripped him of his manhood, it eventually led to a new confidence.
Writing about Auschwitz he had published a book; talking about Auschwitz he had found a wife. His identity was now inextricably bound up with Auschwitz and for the remainder of his life Levi would spend a great deal of time tracking down people he had known there and corresponding at length with survivors. His children Lisa Lorenza and Renzo were both named after the Italian worker Lorenzo Perrone, who had regularly brought Levi food at Auschwitz and thus helped to save his life. It was “our finest hour,” he would say of the last days at the camp. He referred to Auschwitz as his “university,” an “adventure,” a “rite of passage.”
It was in this more positive mood in 1961, with recognition now growing for his first book, that Levi at last began to write a sequel. The Truce thus opens with the last days in Auschwitz, then tells of the confusion and vitality of refugee camps in Poland and the Ukraine, followed by an interminably roundabout return to Italy by train. The tone is immediately more literary than If This Is a Man:
In those days and in those places…a high wind blew over the face of the Earth: the world around us seemed to have returned to a primal Chaos, and was swarming with deformed, defective, abnormal human examples; and each of them was tossing about, in blind or deliberate motion, anxiously searching for his own place, his own sphere, as the cosmogonies of the ancients say, poetically, of the particles of the four elements.
The pleasure of The Truce lies in Levi’s account of his returning health and the dramatis personae of idiosyncratic companions and extravagant Russian soldiers involved in every kind of ruse, scam, and jam. In particular there is Cesare,
a child of the sun, a friend of the whole world. He didn’t know hatred or scorn, he was as varying as the sky, joyful, sly, and ingenuous, reckless and cautious, very ignorant, very innocent, and very civilized.
Supremely shrewd, Cesare will buy, “fix,” and resell absolutely anything—broken pens, ragged shirts, fish bloated with injections of water—always at a profit, and make love to any woman who crosses his path. However, the tone of The Truce is so charmingly literary and some of the stories so far-fetched that the reader begins to wonder how much is documentary and how much fiction. In fact, though recognizably based on a certain Lello Perugia, Cesare’s antics are very much inflated, sometimes invented, and Perugia was furious with the way he had been presented. It would have been a “much more important” book, Perugia protested, if Levi had “got [his] facts right.”
Why did Levi do this? There had already been some curious fact-twisting in If This Is a Man. Here a close friend, Alberto Dalla Volta, is described as having no German, a crucial factor in the struggle for survival at Auschwitz, when in fact his German was excellent, far better than Levi’s. In his meticulously researched biography Ian Thomson glosses this with the remark that “Levi, like most writers, made life seem more interesting than it is.”2 Leaving aside whether we agree with this, it’s hard to see how describing Alberto as less well educated than he was or, in a later book, speaking of another dead friend as coming from a “peasant” family when he didn’t could enhance our interest in works that command our attention above all for their documentary status.
Two impulses seem to be at work. Thomson notes Levi’s tendency to form friendships with men less intellectual than himself, but also less fearful, more energetic, and extrovert. There was a tradeoff: the timid Levi could enjoy mountaineering adventures and female company beside his lively companions while they benefited from his superior knowledge. Many of the “changes” in these books shift the relationships described toward this preferred model, Levi’s close associates becoming at once more animated and less cultured than perhaps they were. Throughout The Truce, Levi seems to be the only sober figure hanging back from a wild postwar promiscuity, at one point declining an invitation to indulge himself with “twenty large girls…blond, rosy creatures, with…placid, bovine faces.”
Related to these descriptions of joyously uninhibited companions was Levi’s lifelong thirst for freedom and difficulty achieving it. Work at SIVA soon became a prison. With the constant tension between wife and mother, home was also a prison. The Truce takes its title from the reflection, in the closing pages, that the interlude between Auschwitz and the return to responsible life in Turin had been, for all its harshness, a period of respite and freedom, of “unlimited openness,” before the need once again “to join battle, against still unknown enemies, within and outside us.” The memoir closes with Levi at home but dreaming that he is back in Auschwitz and that nothing is real outside the oppression of imprisonment.
Levi was committed to bearing witness, but lifelong adhesion to the same appalling story is constricting. In a later work he speaks of a man who pesters him with a manifestly fabricated version of his war heroics; but Levi admits to envying the “boundless freedom of invention, of one who has broken down the barriers and is now master of constructing the past that most pleases him.”
After completing The Truce Levi allowed himself the liberty of writing Natural Histories, a series of lighthearted sci-fi stories published to general critical disappointment in 1966. Each piece offers a smart idea, ironic and potentially alarmist—a society duped into believing that people need to wear heavy armor to avoid a deadly virus, a telephone network that develops its own intelligence and makes and interrupts calls as it pleases, a country where the duties of literary censorship are assigned to barnyard hens.
What is striking about all Levi’s fiction is that despite the frequent references to sexual problems—a female spider discussing her consumption of males, a wise centaur torn apart by sexual desire who experiences “in the form of anxiety and tremulous tension” any sexual encounter that occurs in his vicinity—there is no attempt to dramatize however obliquely or discreetly what might have been the reality of Levi’s domestic life, or to explore the many intimate but sexless friendships he was now in the habit of forming with women. To one of these friends, the German Hety Schmitt-Maas, Levi would confess his frustration with marriage and sense of entrapment, but nothing of this emerges in the fiction. The better stories in the later and looser collections are always returns to the wartime period and Auschwitz.
Another story collection, Flaw of Form, followed Natural Histories, before Levi returned to memoir in 1975 with The Periodic Table. The breakthrough here was to use his experience and knowledge as a chemist to provide the frame or cover for intriguing explorations of earlier relationships. Each chapter recalls some episode that features a different chemical substance whose qualities are allowed to take on a quiet symbolism. In a Fascist jail Levi speaks to a man who worked panning for gold, not just in order to sell it, but for the love of engraving and hammering it, and above all “to live free”; a job that involves extracting phosphorous from plants brings Levi into contact with the charming Giulia, who despite her imminent marriage may or may not be a possible lover; a problem with a paint that won’t dry due to defective materials from a German supplier brings Levi into contact with the chemist who supervised his work in Auschwitz.
Crucial to The Periodic Table is that Levi knows everything about chemistry and we know very little. Many of the situations are presented as puzzles that Levi solves or sometimes fails to solve, but always with a wry panache. Again and again the material world appears as a canny guardian of secrets, requiring patience, caution, practicality, and knowledge, but not in the end intractable. By comparison human relationships are even more mysterious and definitely less susceptible to the qualities Levi displays. He is unable to challenge the flirtatious Giulia, afraid of meeting the Auschwitz chemist and disturbed that the man seems to be asking him for a forgiveness he is not ready to grant.
Levi had been concerned that his books might be admired more for their wartime witness than their literary achievement. The brilliance of The Periodic Table settled any doubts about his writerly credentials, though again there were complaints of distortion. In particular, it was not true that Levi had come into contact with the German chemist through his work; he had tracked his man down through Hety Schmitt-Maas, who was upset by how negatively Levi presented him in his book, since the German had been one of the few to give him some help at the camp.
With the success of The Periodic Table, Levi finally felt sufficiently confident to resign from SIVA. He was fifty-eight. Free from routine responsibilities, he produced in quick succession The Wrench (1978) and If Not Now, When? (1982). Both draw on the writer’s special knowledge for their authority and both present themselves as fiction, free from the constraints of bearing witness. In the short stories of The Wrench Tino Faussone, a hugely energetic, incorrigibly womanizing engineer, intensely familiar with pylons, rigs, boilers, and the like, tells the more intellectual narrator of his adventures around the globe with every kind of dramatic technical problem. Having complained of his own thirty years of “forced labor,” Levi now celebrated work, or at least work as experienced by one of his typical foils, a man of boundless energy and freedom who basks in the sure knowledge of his immense practical competence.
If Not Now, When?, Levi’s only novel, covers the same time period and territory as The Truce, telling the story of a Russian Jew who joins a band of Jewish partisans to fight the Germans; they make their way to Italy whence they hope to move on to Palestine and the nascent state of Israel. In Primo Levi’s Resistance Sergio Luzzatto observes how much this novel draws on Levi’s own unhappy partisan experience, transforming it into something effective and triumphant. The hero, Mendel, a watchmaker, a man who can mend a radio and is prone to philosophic reflection (“Mendel is me,” Levi said in an interview), boldly bears arms, engages in any number of skirmishes, finds himself a woman, then betrays her with another (though he now immediately feels trapped and threatened by her), and even executes a spy:
Ulybin handed the rifle to Mendel, without a word.
“You want me to…?” Mendel stammered.
“Go on, yeshiva bocher,” Ulybin said. “He can’t walk, and if they find him, he’ll talk….”
Mendel felt bitter saliva fill his mouth. He took a few steps back, aimed carefully, and fired.
Levi had spent much time researching Yiddish Eastern Europe and the exploits of Jewish resistance fighters whose war efforts he wished to celebrate. “It’s important that there be Jewish partisans,” Mendel observes: “only if I kill a German will I manage to persuade other Germans that I am a man.” However, the novel’s dialogue comes across as wooden, the action is hardly credible, and those who knew Levi’s previous work could not fail to see elements of fantasy and wishful thinking. Shortly after the book was published, Israel invaded Lebanon and Levi found himself alternately praised and criticized for promoting militant Zionism, something that could not have been further from his mind.
Constantly afraid that he would run out of subject matter or succumb to Alzheimer’s, Levi stepped up production in his later years. Some two thirds of the almost three thousand pages of The Complete Works were written after he left his managerial job. Most of the writing was made up of articles and stories published in the Turin newspaper La Stampa and then poems that plumb Levi’s darker moods: spared the duty of providing narrative content, the poems make for stronger reading than the stories. On the occasion of his wife’s sixtieth birthday he wrote her this gloomy message:
Be patient, my impatient lady,
Pulverized and macerated, flayed,
Who flay yourself a little every day…
Please, accept these fourteen lines;
They’re my rough way of telling you you’re loved,
And that I wouldn’t be in the world without you.
A year later he wrote “Arachne,” spoken by a female spider who weaves a web from “a thousand spinning teats”:
I’ll sit in the center
And wait for a male to come,
Suspicious but drunk with desire,
To fill my stomach and my womb…
Terrified of spiders since earliest childhood, Levi made a huge copper spider and hung it on his balcony. Warned by the Jewish community that people were gossiping about his relationship with a certain woman journalist, he immediately refrained from seeing her. He visited hundreds of schools to talk about Auschwitz yet protested that he didn’t want to be labeled as a Jewish writer. Yearning to travel, he complained that his women prevented him from “going anywhere.” His mother had never given him a “single kiss or caress,” he confided to a journalist in 1982. “I’ve known some Jewish sons,” remarked Philip Roth after meeting him, “but Levi’s filial duty and devotion was stronger than anything I’d ever seen. There was a pathetic edge to it.” Levi was on antidepressants.
It was in this unhappy state that Levi chose to return to his core material in The Drowned and the Saved (1986), a book that must rank as one of the most powerful and upsetting attempts at moral analysis ever undertaken. The story of Auschwitz, Levi begins, “has been written almost exclusively by people who, like me, did not plumb the depths. The ones who did never returned, or if they did their capacity for observation was paralyzed by pain and incomprehension.” “Those who were ‘saved’ in the camps were not the best of us”; rather they “were the worst: the egotists, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators…. The best all died.”
In unsparing detail Levi draws on other concentration camp memoirs to consider the facts in all their complexity and awfulness. The Sonderkommandos, he remarks, were “an extreme case of collaboration,” Jews induced to lead other Jews into the gas chambers, “remove the corpses…extract gold teeth from their jaws; shear off the women’s hair.” Again and again the surreal collective cruelty of the Nazi regime is examined in relation to its effect on its victims; the constant denuding of victims, the crazy obsession with bed-making and roll calls, the habit of forcing inmates to defecate in the open and very close to each other, and so on.
At every point, Levi’s enemy is denial in all its forms. “The intrinsic horror of this human condition…has imposed a kind of constraint on all testimony,” he warns. On both sides of the divide people don’t want to remember, they exploit slippages in memory to establish a comfort zone, and artists offer portrayals that aestheticize or indulge in consolatory pieties. The whole book conveys a sense of the enormity of the task of keeping alive the truth of just how evil Auschwitz was.
No sooner had Levi committed suicide in 1987 than attempts were being made to defend his work from his life, his death rather, as if admirers were afraid that by killing himself he might have undermined the positive side of his witness. This is largely the subject of Berel Lang’s Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life,3 which considers the interminable speculation about whether Levi’s motives for suicide had more to do with Auschwitz or his chronic domestic unhappiness.
Whatever the truth, the views Lang records tell us more about the speculators’ own anxieties than about Levi. Levi’s best writing was about his life, about questions of freedom and survival, so it is inevitable that once we are aware of his suicide, it will always be there when we read him. On the other hand it is hard to see why this should detract from his remarkable achievement, if only because there is no place in his writing, at least that I can find, where Levi suggests that life is likely to end well, nothing that his suicide, as it were, contradicts. If anything the contrary.
I would like to call attention to two mistakes made by Mr. Tony Judt in his long review of my biography of Primo Levi [NYR, May 29].
The Italian translation of my book has not yet been published. It is planned for next fall, and so cannot have been the subject of mixed reviews, as Mr. Judt claimed in his article. Several articles have been written in Italy on the French version of my book (among others by Cesare Cases, René de Ceccatty, Hector Bianciotti, and Fabio Gambaro in L’Espresso) and they were favorable, except the one in La Rivista dei Libri, co-published by The New York Review. Contrary to what Mr. Judt wrote, the French critics have been unanimously favorable (in Le Monde, L’Express, Le Figaro, Télérama, Le Nouvel Observateur, Libération).
Much of the information in the article that you published was taken from my book, as well the drawing of Primo Levi by his friend Mr. Eugenio Gentili Tedeschi, who kindly loaned it to me.
In fact, some Italian critics have reproached me for revealing that Natalia Ginzburg gave a negative opinion of Levi’s first manuscript when she was adviser to the publishing house of Einaudi and also for revealing that her successors turned the manuscript down for more than eleven years, during which time they published Robert Antelme’s The Human Race. Unfortunately this is the truth. At the time, Levi’s text was not considered important in literary circles but only as testimony.
These Italian critics and Tony Judt have taken advantage of the small mistakes (in names and dates) appearing in the original French edition of my book in order to deny me (“a stranger to the Italian world”) the right to write about Levi. These mistakes were the publisher’s who, despite my many warnings, prepared the manuscript too hastily. It was reprinted within two weeks, and many of the mistakes were corrected, and Livre de Poche’s paperback version has almost no mistakes.
I should point out that the English and American versions are much shorter than the original, and that the forthcoming translations in German, Italian, and Japanese will present the full, original text of my book.
Myriam Anissimov
Paris, France
Tony Judt: replies:
The Italian edition of Myriam Anissimov’s book has yet to appear; I stand corrected. But Ms. Anissimov protests too much. Since she concedes in her letter that her book was full of mistakes, and even warns us that the new paperback edition is not entirely free of them (which I didn’t know), I don’t understand why she takes such offense at my allusion to the matter. And if, as she claims, Italian critics have exploited these mistakes to “deny” her the right to write about Levi, she can hardly be surprised to find me describing their response as “mixed.” As it happens I have not seen any critic so much as hint that Levi was privileged terrain, off-limits to outsiders; but I do recall at least one utterly devastating review (Domenico Scarpa, in La Rivista dei Libri, April 1997, pp. 41-43) that called attention to Anissimov’s many, many errors.
Ms. Anissimov did not “reveal” that it was Natalia Ginzburg who recommended rejection of Levi’s first book; this was quite widely known, not least to Levi himself. (See Opere, Vol. 1 [Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1997], p. lxxxiii, where Ginzburg is cited by Levi in this connection.) Einaudi’s long hesitation before finally publishing Levi in 1958 has also been discussed in print (I cited the accounts by Giulio Einaudi and Levi in my review). What Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist does reveal is the author’s uncertain grasp of its subject and his context—perhaps that is why some doubt has been expressed as to Ms. Anissimov’s suitability as a biographer of Levi. If Ms. Anissimov is so very sensitive to such criticism it may be that French reviewing practice has accustomed her to an easier ride—though she should know that the welcome accorded her book in Paris represented belated amends for previous French neglect of Primo Levi himself; she thus benefited from the reflected glow of her subject’s improved local standing. As to my part in all this, Ms. Anissimov may rest assured that I have no wish to deny her access to Levi or anything else—I’m an outsider here myself. But I can read Anissimov, I can read Levi, and I can see for myself that the one does not do the other justice. That’s just my opinion, of course, but I’m confirmed in it by Ms. Anissimov’s letter.
by Myriam Anissimov, Translated from the French by Steve Cox
Overlook, 452 pp., $37.95
1.
Primo Levi was born in Turin in 1919, in the apartment where he would live for most of his life and where he killed himself in April 1987. 1 Like many Jewish families in the region, the Levis had moved from the Piedmontese countryside to Turin in the previous generation, and were culturally assimilated. Primo grew up under Fascism, but it was only with the imposition of the Race Laws, in 1938, that this had any direct impact upon him. He studied chemistry at the university in Turin, with the help of a sympathetic professor who took him on notwithstanding the regulations excluding Jews, and afterward found work of a sort in various establishments willing to take on a Jewish chemist in spite of his “race.”
With the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, everything changed. For a brief, confusing interlude Italy lay suspended between the Allies, who had occupied Sicily and the far south, and the Germans, who had not yet invaded from the north. But in September the Italian occupying army in France straggled back through Turin, “a defeated flock” in Levi’s words, followed shortly after by the inevitable Germans, “the gray-green serpent of Nazi divisions on the streets of Milan and Turin.” Many of Levi’s Jewish contemporaries from Turin were already involved in the resistance movement Giustizia e Libertà (whose local leadership, until his arrest, had included “my illustrious namesake” Carlo Levi, the future author of Christ Stopped at Eboli), and after the German invasion Primo Levi joined them. He spent three months with the armed resistance in the foothills of the Alps before his group was betrayed to the Fascist militia and captured on December 13, 1943.2
Levi, who declared his Jewish identity, was sent to the transit camp at Fossoli di Carpi and thence, on February 22, 1944, he was transported to Auschwitz with 649 other Jews, of whom twenty-three would survive. Upon arrival Levi was stamped number 174517 and selected for Auschwitz III-Monowitz, where he worked at the synthetic rubber plant owned by I.G. Farben and operated for them by the SS. He stayed at Auschwitz until the camp was abandoned by the Germans in January 1945 and liberated by the advancing Red Army on January 27. For the next nine months he was swept from Katowice, in Galicia, through Byelorussia, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria, Germany, and finally home to Turin in a picaresque, involuntary odyssey described in La tregua (The Reawakening).
Once back in Turin he took up the reins of his “monochrome” life, following the twenty-month “Technicolor” interlude of Auschwitz and after. Driven by an “absolute, pathological narrative charge”3 he wrote Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man), a record of his experiences in Auschwitz. The book found hardly any readers when it appeared in 1947. Primo Levi then abandoned writing, married, and began work for SIVA, a local paint company where he became a specialist, and international authority, on synthetic wire enamels. In 1958 the prestigious Turin publishing house Einaudi republished his book, and—encouraged by its relative success—Levi wrote La tregua, its sequel, which appeared in 1963. Over the next decades Levi gained increasing success and visibility as a writer, publishing Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table) and La chiave a stella (The Monkey’s Wrench), two collections of short pieces; Se non ora, quando? (If Not Now, When?), a novel about Jewish resistance in wartime Europe; Lilit e altri racconti (Moments of Reprieve), further recollections and vignettes of his camp experience; a variety of essays and poems; and regular contributions to the culture pages of La Stampa, the Turin daily. In 1975 he left SIVA and devoted himself to writing full-time. His last book, I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved), was published in 1986, the year before his death. A small esplanade in front of the Turin synagogue on Via Pio V was named after him in April 1996.4
The fate of Levi’s books, in Italian and in translation, is instructive. When he took Se questo è un uomo to Einaudi in 1946 it was rejected out of hand by the publisher’s (anonymous) reader, Natalia Ginzburg, herself from a prominent Turinese Jewish family. Many years later Giulio Einaudi claimed to have no knowledge of the reasons for the book’s rejection; Levi himself laconically ascribed it to “an inattentive reader.”5 At that time, and for some years to come, it was Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, not Auschwitz, that stood for the horror of Nazism; the emphasis on political deportees rather than racial ones conformed better to reassuring postwar accounts of wartime national resistance. Levi’s book was published in just 2,500 copies by a small press, owned by a former local resistance leader (ironically, in a series dedicated to the Jewish resistance hero and martyr Leone Ginzburg, Natalia Ginzburg’s husband). Many copies of the book were remaindered in a warehouse in Florence and destroyed in the great flood there twenty years later.
La tregua did better. Published in April 1963, it came in third in the national Strega Prize competition that year (behind Natalia Ginzburg’s Lessico famigliare…), brought renewed attention to his first book, and began Levi’s rise to national prominence and, eventually, critical acclaim. But his foreign audience was slow in coming. Stuart Woolf’s translation of Se questo è un uomo was published in Britain in 1959 as If This Is a Man, but sold only a few hundred copies. The US version, with the title Survival in Auschwitz (which captures the subject but misses the point), did not begin to sell well until the success of The Periodic Table twenty years later. La tregua was published here under the misleadingly optimistic title The Reawakening, whereas the original Italian suggests “Truce” or “Respite”; it is clear as the book ends that for Levi his months of wandering in the eastern marches of Europe were a kind of “time out” between Auschwitz-as-experience and Auschwitz-as-memory. The book closes with the dawn command of Auschwitz, “Get up!”—“Wstawach!”
German translations followed in time, and Levi eventually gained an audience in the Federal Republic. French publishers, however, avoided Levi for many years. When Les Temps Modernes published extracts from Se questo è un uomo, in May 1961, it was under the title “J’étais un homme” (“I was a man”), which comes close to inverting the sense of the book. Gallimard, the most prestigious of the French publishing houses, for a long time resisted buying anything by Levi; only after his death did his work, and his significance, begin to gain recognition in France. There, as elsewhere, the importance of Levi’s first book only came clearly into focus with the (in some countries posthumous) appearance of his last, The Drowned and the Saved. Like his subject, Primo Levi remained at least partially inaudible for many years.
In one sense, Primo Levi has little to offer a biographer. He lived an unremarkable professional and private life, save for twenty months, and he used his many books and essays to narrate and depict the life that he did lead. If you want to know what he did, what he thought, and how he felt, you have only to read him. As a result, any retelling of his “life and works” risks ending in a self-defeating effort to reorder and paraphrase Levi’s own writings. And that is just what Myriam Anissimov has done in her new account of Levi, which has already appeared in French and Italian to mixed reviews. Some mistakes of fact in the Italian and French editions have been cleared up, and the English translation, while unexciting, is readable and contains much information. But Anissimov’s prose is uninspired and mechanical. Her lengthy narrative of his life is a choppy mix of long excerpts and rewordings from Levi himself interspersed with clunky and inadequate summaries of “context”: Italian Jewry, Fascist race laws, the postwar Italian boom, 1968 in Turin, and the publishing history of his books. Some of the background material seems to have been inserted at random, as though the author had come upon a misplaced file card and inserted its contents, then and there, into the text.
Worse, the author somehow fails to explain to the reader just why Primo Levi is so very interesting. She alludes to the distinctive quality of his prose style and is rightly critical of reviewers and specialists for their failure to appreciate him; but she has little feel for just those features of Levi’s writings that make him stand out, both in contemporary Italian literature and in Holocaust memoirs. An ironist and a humorist who travels playfully back and forward across an extended keyboard of themes, tones, and topics, Primo Levi is presented in this account as an optimistic, assimilated Italian Jew brought low by the tragedy of Auschwitz. This is roughly comparable to describing Ulysses, Levi’s favorite literary figure and alter ego, as an old soldier on his way back from the wars who encounters a few problems en route. Not false, but hopelessly inadequate.6
2.
Primo Levi had various identities and allegiances. Their overlapping multiplicity did not trouble him—though it frustrated his Italian critics and perplexes some of his readers in the American Jewish community—and he felt no conflict among them. In the first place, he was Italian, and proud of it. Despite the country’s embarrassing faults, he took pride in it:
It often happens these days that you hear people say they’re ashamed of being Italian. In fact we have good reasons to be ashamed: first and foremost, of not having been able to produce a political class that represents us and, on the contrary, tolerating for thirty years one that does not. On the other hand, we have virtues of which we are unaware, and we do not realize how rare they are in Europe and in the world.7
Like most Italians, though, Levi was first of all from somewhere more circumscribed—in his case, Piedmont. This is a curious place, a small corner of northwest Italy squeezed up against the Alps; the homeland of the Savoy royal family, Italian laicism, and, in Turin, its austere, serious capital city, the headquarters of Fiat. Parts of what used to be Piedmontese territory are now French, and the local dialect is permeated with French or almost-French words and phrases. Levi, like most Piedmontese, was immensely proud of his region of origin, and that sentiment suffuses his writings. The “dazzling beauty” of its mountains, lakes, and woods is referred to more than once—for Levi was an enthusiastic amateur climber and much of Piedmont is Alpine or pre-Alpine terrain. The distinctive dialect of the region plays a part in Levi’s writing—as it did in his life, for Lorenzo Perrone, the bricklayer from Fossano who saved him in Auschwitz, was recognized there by Levi thanks to his Piedmontese speech. A number of the characters in Levi’s writings use local dialect, and in both The Monkey’s Wrench and The Periodic Table he apologizes for the difficulty of capturing the cadences of their conversation in the written word.8
The Piedmontese are famously reserved, restrained, private: in short, “un-Italian.” Italo Calvino wrote of the “Piedmontese eccentricity” in Levi’s “science fiction” tales; Levi, who thought that he was credited with altogether too much wisdom by his readers, was nonetheless willing to concede that he did possess the distinctive quality of “moderation…that is a Piedmontese virtue.” And his roots in Turin, “a mysterious city for the rest of Italy,” played a part in his fate, too. The Turinese, he writes, don’t leave: “It is well known that people from Turin transplanted to Milan do not strike root, or at least do it badly.” Should his family have got away while they could—to somewhere else in Italy, to Switzerland, to the Americas? Not only would it have been difficult and expensive, and required more initiative than he or his family possessed, but the very idea of leaving home did not cross their minds: “Piedmont was our true country, the one in which we recognized ourselves.”9
The constraint and correctness of Primo Levi’s Piedmont are duplicated and reinforced by his vocation, the “sober rigor” of chemistry. The decision to study science was shaped in part, under Fascism, by the fact that it “smelled” good—in contrast to history or literary criticism, warped and degraded by ideological or nationalist pressure. But Levi the student was also drawn to the chemist’s calling:
The nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conqueror of matter…. I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility.
Moreover, the chemist must perforce describe the world as it is, and the precision and simplicity of this requirement seems to have conformed closely to Levi’s own distaste for gloss, for commentary, for excess of any kind. “I still remember Professor Ponzio’s first chemistry lesson, from which I got clear, precise, verifiable information, without useless words, expressed in a language that I liked enormously, also from a literary point of view: a definite language, essential.”10
In chemistry, moreover (as in climbing), a mistake matters—a point made with casual emphasis in the story “Potassium,” where the young apprentice chemist Levi mistakes potassium for its near neighbor sodium and sets off an unexpected reaction:
One must distrust the almost-the-same (sodium is almost the same as potassium but with sodium nothing would have happened), the practically identical, the approximate, the or-even, all surrogates, and all patchwork. The differences can be small but they lead to radically different consequences, like a railroad’s switch points; the chemist’s trade consists in good part in being aware of these differences, knowing them close up and foreseeing their effects. And not only the chemist’s trade” [emphasis added].11
Chemicals appear frequently in Levi’s writing, and not just in The Periodic Table. Sometimes they are subjects in their own right, sometimes they serve as metaphors for human behavior, occasionally as illuminating analogies. Dr. Gottlieb, in The Reawakening, is described as emanating intelligence and cunning “like energy from radium.” But the impact of his training upon his writing is most obvious in Levi’s distinctive style. It has a taut, tight, distilled quality; contrasted with the florid, experimental, syntactically involuted writing of some of his contemporaries and commentators, it has the appeal of medieval plainsong. This was no accident—“I have always made an effort to move from dark to clear, like a filtration pump that sucks in cloudy water and expels it clarified, if not sterile.”12
In an essay “On Obscure Writing,” Levi castigates those who can’t write in a straightforward way: “It is not true that disorder is required in order to describe disorder; it is not true that chaos on the written page is the best symbol of the extreme chaos to which we are fated: I hold this to be a characteristic error of our insecure century.” And in an open letter, “To a Young Reader,” Levi reminds his audience that textual clarity should never be mistaken for unsophisticated thinking. Levi’s style did not endear him to professional critics; until the late Seventies “in the eyes of critics he remained an appealing, worthy, but uninfluential outsider in the world of literature.”13
Levi’s style is not just simple, it is unerringly precise; he modeled Survival in Auschwitz on the weekly production report used in factories. All of that book and some of his other writing is in an urgent, imperative present tense, telling the reader what must be known: “It has to be realized that cloth is lacking in the Lager.” The force of Levi’s testimony, like the appeal of his stories, comes from this earthy, concrete specificity. When men left Ka-Be (the “infirmary” of Auschwitz III) their pants fell down, they had no buttons, their shoes hurt: “Death begins with the shoes….” The very density of the detail, the point-by-point reconstruction of how men worked and how they died—this is what gives the narrative its power and its credibility.14
The same is true of Levi’s many accounts of individuals, which glide imperceptibly forward from description to analogy, from analogy to juxtaposition and thence to judgment. Of “the Moor,” one of the Italians at Auschwitz, he writes: “It was quite clear that he was possessed by a desperate senile madness; but there was a greatness in his madness, a force and a barbaric dignity, the trampled dignity of beasts in a cage, the dignity that redeemed Capaneus and Caliban.” Of ruined Munich, where Levi wandered the streets when his train stopped on its interminable journey back to Italy: “I felt I was moving among throngs of insolvent debtors, as if everybody owed me something, and refused to pay.” Of “Cesare” (Lello Perugia, his Italian companion on the journey home): “Very ignorant, very innocent and very civilized.” In The Periodic Table Levi writes that “today I know that it is a hopeless task to try to dress a man in words, make him live again on the printed page.” But he does.15
It is the detail in Levi’s writing that is doing the narrative work, and the moral work too. Like Albert Camus, he has a feel for the “thingness” of experience. He was well aware that this could cause discomfort to some modern readers. In The Monkey’s Wrench he is gently ironic as he heaps on the technical description: since there just are no synonyms, the reader “must be brave, use his imagination or consult a dictionary. It may be useful for him anyway, since we live in a world of molecules and ball-bearings.” The emphasis on work in many of his stories was no accident—a number of the writers and novels he most admired deal explicitly with the honor and autonomy that come from skilled labor; “Faussone,” the composite protagonist of The Monkey’s Wrench, is a Conradian character drawn in part on Renaud, the skipper in Roger Vercel’s novel Remorques, which Levi openly acknowledged as one of his influences. Levi himself identified with skilled work, saying “I’ve always been a rigger-chemist.” In “The Bridge” he goes further and explicitly states that being good at your job and taking pleasure from it constitutes if not the highest, then at least “the most accessible form of freedom.”16 The cynical inscription over the gates of Auschwitz held a special resonance for Primo Levi: he truly believed that work makes you free.
3.
Primo Levi was Piedmontese, a chemist, a writer—and a Jew. Were it not for Hitler, this last would have been a matter of near indifference to him. Jews in Italy had been present since before the destruction of the Second Temple (in 70 AD); and with the exception of the Roman Jews, whose ghetto had only been abolished upon the liberation of Rome in 1870, they were virtually assimilated into the general population. Even the Sephardic Jews of Piedmont, relatively “recent” arrivals, could trace their origins to the fifteenth-century expulsions from Spain (as their names, often drawn from the towns in France where they had lived en route to Italy, suggest), while the earliest recorded permission for Jews to settle in Turin dates from 1424. There had indeed been a ghetto system in Piedmont, established in the early eighteenth century (rather late by European standards), and the Savoyard monarchy was not always benevolent toward the Jews. But following the emancipation decrees of March 1848 their situation rapidly improved, and with the coming of liberal Italy Jews entered without difficulty into the mainstream of Turinese and Italian life. The country had a Jewish prime minister, and Rome a Jewish mayor, before 1914. There were Jewish generals in the army, fifty of them during World War I. Even the Fascist Party had a significant share of the Jewish population among its members (and a Jewish finance minister as late as 1932).
To be sure, there was anti-Semitism—especially in Trieste, where it was inherited from Austrian rule. And however cynical or even ambivalent Mussolini himself felt about the Race Laws, these cut deep into the self-confidence of the Italian Jews. But the significant Jewish presence in the Italian anti-Fascist resistance owed more to deep traditions of free-thinking liberalism than to any sense of Jewish victimhood. In any case, there were not many Jews. Even by West European standards the Jewish population of Italy was small: just 33,000 in a population of nearly 35 million in 1911, increased to 57,000 by 1938, thanks to the annexation of Trieste, new “racial” definitions, and the presence of some 10,000 foreign Jewish refugees from Nazism. The largest concentration of Jews was to be found in Rome (about 12,000 in the 1931 census); there were fewer than 4,000 in Turin, where they made up about 0.5 percent of the local population. 17
The Jews of Italy suffered badly during the eighteen months of German occupation, though not as badly as Jews elsewhere. Nearly seven thousand Italian Jews died in deportation; but the rest survived the war, a better rate than in most of the rest of Europe. In part this is because the Holocaust came late to Italy (not that this helped the Jews of Hungary); in part because the Jews of Italy were so scattered and well integrated; and in some measure because they found support and sustenance among their fellow Italians, with the usual dishonorable exceptions. From Turin, just 245 Jews were deported, most to Auschwitz: twenty-one returned after the war, Primo Levi among them.18
Thanks to the war, Primo Levi’s Jewishness moved to the center of his being: “This dual experience, the racial laws and the extermination camp, stamped me the way you stamp a steel plate. At this point I’m a Jew, they’ve sewn the star of David on me and not only on my clothes.” This was in part a result of his encounter for the first time with other Jews—the Libyan Jews at Fossoli (exhibiting “a grief that was new for us”) and the Ashkenazim in Auschwitz. Jewishness posed difficulties for Levi, and not just because he had no religion; his concern with work, with Homo faber—man the maker—made him peculiarly sensitive to the etiolated, overintellectual qualities of Jewish life: “If man is a maker, we were not men: we knew this and suffered from it.” It also explains his initial enthusiasm for the Zionist project in its innocent, agrarian incarnation. But the very difference of Jews was also their virtue. In “Zinc” he sang the praises of “impurity,” in metals and in life, the impurity which the Fascists so abhor with their longing for sameness, that impurity “which gives rise to changes, in other words, to life…. I too am Jewish…. I am the impurity that makes the zinc react.”19
Levi found it embarrassing and constricting to be treated “just as a Jew,” as he was by many in the US; predictably he has been criticized by some in the American Jewish community for the insufficiencies and partial quality of his Jewish identity.20 But he was not inhibited about writing and speaking as a survivor, bearing witness and obeying the distinctively Jewish exhortation to remember. All of his writing is shadowed by his experience in Auschwitz—you cannot read anything by Levi without prior knowledge of that experience, for he assumes it in the reader and expects it. His first and last books are devoted to it. In The Periodic Table it is omnipresent, even in stories unrelated to that past, but which at unexpected moments suddenly twist back to it. In The Monkey’s Wrench the point is made explicitly, following his explanation to Faussone of the story of Tiresias: “In distant times I, too, had got involved with Gods quarreling among themselves; I, too, had encountered snakes in my path, and that encounter had changed my condition, giving me a strange power of speech.”21
As a survivor, Levi’s trajectory was quite representative. At first, people didn’t want to listen to him—Italians “felt purified by the great wave of the anti-Fascist crusade, by participation in the Resistance and its victorious outcome.”22 Giuliana Tedeschi, another Italian survivor of Auschwitz, had a comparable experience—
I encountered people who didn’t want to know anything, because the Italians, too, had suffered, after all, even those who didn’t go to the camps…. They used to say, “For heaven’s sake, it’s all over,” and so I remained quiet for a long time.
In 1955 Levi noted that it had become “indelicate” to speak of the camps—“One risks being accused of setting up as a victim, or of indecent exposure.” Thus was confirmed the terrible, anticipatory dream of the victims, during and after the camps: that no one would listen, and if they listened they wouldn’t believe.23
Once people did start to listen, and believe, the other obsession of the survivor began to eat away at Levi—the shame, and guilt, of survival itself, made worse in his case by the embarrassment of fame. Why should he, Levi, have survived? Had he made compromises that others had refused? Had others died in his place? The questions are absurd, but they crowd in upon Levi’s later writings, obscurely at first, openly toward the end. In the poem “Il superstite” (“The Survivor,” February 1984), their implications are explicit:
Stand back, leave me alone, submerged people,
Go away. I haven’t dispossessed anyone, Haven’t usurped anyone’s bread. No one died in my place. No one. Go back into your mist. It’s not my fault if I live and breathe, Eat, drink, sleep and put on clothes.
The guilt of the survivor—for surviving, for failing to convey the depths of others’ suffering, for not devoting every waking hour to testimony and recall—is the triumphant legacy of the SS, the reason why, in Nedo Fiano’s words, “At bottom I would say that I never completely left the camp.”24
The shame of not being dead, “thanks to a privilege you haven’t earned,” is tied to Levi’s central concern and the title of his first book: What does it mean to reduce a person to “an emaciated man, with head drooped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of thought is to be seen”? Levi, like other surviving witnesses, was ashamed of what he had seen, of what others had done; he felt “the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man’s crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist….” That, too, is how he explained the death of Lorenzo Perrone, the bricklayer working outside Auschwitz who had saved him but had been unable to live, as the years passed, with the memory of what he had seen: “He, who was not a survivor, had died of the survivors’ disease.”25
As a survivor, then, Levi was tragically typical; as a witness to the Holocaust he was not. Like all such witnesses, of course, he wrote both to record what had happened and to free himself from it (and was driven forward by the sense that he was doomed to fail on both counts). And like all survivors, his testimony is by definition partial: “We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses…. We are…an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications, or their attributes or their good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it, or they returned mute.”26 In Levi’s case he survived Auschwitz through good health (until the end, when his fortuitous sickness kept him in the infirmary and off the final death march), some knowledge of German, his qualifications as a chemist, which gave him indoor work during the final winter, and simple luck. Others have similar stories.
Levi knew little of the political organization among some of the prisoners. He did not benefit from protekcja, privileges and favor from other prisoners. His view of the camp as an accumulation of isolated “monads,” rather than a community of victims, is contested by others (though not by all). But it is not for these reasons that Levi is a distinctive and unique witness to the Holocaust, perhaps the most important. It is because he writes in a different key from the rest; his testimony has a fourth dimension lacking in anything else I have read on this subject. Tadeusz Borowski is cynical, despairing. Jean Améry is angry, vengeful. Elie Wiesel is spiritual and reflective. Jorge Semprun is alternately analytical and literary. Levi’s account is complex, sensitive, composed. It is usually “cooler” than the other memoirs—which is why, when it does suddenly grow warm and glow with the energy of suppressed anger, it is the most devastating of them all.27
Where some have tried to draw meaning from the Holocaust, and others have denied there is any, Levi is more subtle. On the one hand, he saw no special “meaning” in the camps, no lesson to be learned, no moral to be drawn. He was revolted at the notion, suggested to him by a friend, that he had survived for some transcendental purpose, been “chosen” to testify. The romantic idea that suffering ennobles, that the very extremeness of the camp experience casts light on quotidian existence by stripping away illusion and convention, struck him as an empty obscenity; he was too clearheaded to be seduced by the thought that the Final Solution represented the logical or necessary outcome of modernity, or rationality, or technology.
Indeed, he was increasingly drawn to pessimism. The revival of “revisionism,” the denial of the gas chambers, depressed him intensely and toward the end of his life he began to doubt the use of testimony, feeling the “weariness of a man who kept on having to repeat the same thing.” The near-pornographic exploitation of human suffering—in Liliana Cavani’s film The Night Porter, for example—brought him close to despair. His only resource to ward off the enemies of memory was words. But “the trade of clothing facts in words,” he wrote, “is bound by its very nature to fail.”28
And yet there was something to be gleaned from the camps: “No human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis….” The offense against humanity was ineradicable and could return—indeed, it is never absent. But in his first book and his last, Levi has something—not redemptive, but essential—to say about the human condition. In “The Gray Zone,” the most important chapter of The Drowned and the Saved, Levi brings into focus a theme he has intimated in various earlier works: the infinite gradations of responsibility, human weakness, and moral ambivalence that have to be understood if we are to avoid the pitfall of dividing everything and everybody into tidy poles: resisters and collaborators, guilty and innocent, good and evil. Chaim Rumkowski, the “king” of the Lodz ghetto, was part of “a vast zone of gray consciences that stands between the great men of evil and the pure victims.” So was “Dr. Müller,” Levi’s overseer in the Auschwitz chemical laboratory and future correspondent: “Neither infamous nor a hero: after filtering off the rhetoric and the lies in good or bad faith there remained a typically gray human specimen, one of the not so few one-eyed men in the kingdom of the blind.”29
Just as it is too reassuringly simple to treat the camps as a metaphor for life, thereby according to the SS a posthumous victory, so we should not compartmentalize Auschwitz as a black hole from which no human light can emerge. The importance of language—that we can communicate and we must communicate, that language is vital to humanity and the deprivation of language the first step to the destruction of a man—was enforced within the camp (words were replaced by blows—“that was how we knew we were no longer men”); but it can be applied outside. For life outside is beautiful, as Levi notes in Survival in Auschwitz, and human identity is multifold, and evil does exist and goodness too, and much in between. There is no meaning in all this, but it is true and has to be known and made known.30
Levi’s dispassionate capacity to contain and acknowledge apparently contradictory propositions frustrated some of his critics, who accused him of failing to condemn his tormentors, of remaining altogether too detached and composed. And the idea of a “gray zone” worried some who saw in it a failure to exercise judgment, to draw an absolute moral distinction between the murderers and their victims. Levi resisted this criticism. It is true that his early writings were deliberately cool and analytical, avoiding the worst horrors lest readers prove incredulous—“I thought that my account would be all the more credible and useful the more it appeared objective and the less it sounded overly emotional.” And Levi certainly preferred the role of witness to that of judge, as he would write many years later. But the judgments, albeit implicit, are always there.31
To Jean Améry, who suggested that Levi was a “forgiver,” he replied that “forgiveness is not a word of mine.” But then, as he acknowledged, his experience had been different from that of Améry, an Austrian Jew in the Belgian resistance who was captured and tortured before being sent to Auschwitz (and who would take his own life in 1978). Levi was no less obsessed with the Germans, but sought, he insisted, to understand them, to ask how they could do what they had done. Yet Améry’s suggestion was pertinent, and it speaks to the astonishing exercise of self-control in Levi’s writings; for there can be no doubt that he had very, very strong feelings indeed about Germans, and these began to come out toward the end of his life. In Survival in Auschwitz there are already references to “the curt, barbaric barking of Germans in command which seems to give vent to a millennial anger.” Germans are addressed in the vocative—“You Germans you have succeeded.” And there are hints of collective condemnation: “What else could they do? They are Germans. This way of behaviour is not meditated and deliberate, but follows from their nature and from the destiny they have chosen.”32
By the time he came to write The Drowned and the Saved, Levi was less inhibited. Survival achieved its goal, he claims, when it was finally translated into German. “Its true recipients, those against whom the book was aimed like a gun, were they, the Germans. Now the gun was loaded.” Later he writes that the “true crime, the collective, general crime of almost all Germans of that time, was that of lacking the courage to speak.” And the book ends with an unambiguous accusation of collective responsibility against those Germans, “the great majority” who followed Hitler, were swept away in his defeat, and have “been rehabilitated a few years later as the result of an unprincipled political game.” And while he was careful to insist that blanket stereotyping of Germans both was unjust and explained nothing, Levi took pains to emphasize again and again the specificity of the Holocaust, even when compared to the crimes of other dictators or the Soviet camps.33
Primo Levi, then, could judge and he could hate. But he resisted both temptations; the very space that he preserved between the horrors he had witnessed and the tone he used to describe them substitutes for moral evaluation. And, as Czeslaw Milosz wrote of Albert Camus, “he had the courage to make the elementary points.” The clarity with which he stripped down his account of the essence of Evil, and the reasons why that account will endure and why, in spite of Levi’s fears, the SS will not be the ones to dictate the history of the Lagers, are exemplified in this excerpt from The Reawakening, where Levi is describing the last days of a child who had somehow survived in Auschwitz until the Russians arrived:
Hurbinek was a nobody, a child of death, a child of Auschwitz. He looked about three years old, no one knew anything of him, he could not speak and he had no name; that curious name, Hurbinek, had been given to him by us, perhaps by one of the women who had interpreted with those syllables one of the inarticulate sounds that the baby let out now and again. He was paralysed from the waist down, with atrophied legs, thin as sticks; but his eyes, lost in his triangular and wasted face, flashed terribly alive, full of demand, assertion, of the will to break loose, to shatter the tomb of his dumbness. The speech he lacked, which no one had bothered to teach him, the need of speech charged his stare with explosive urgency: it was a stare both savage and human, even mature, a judgement, which none of us could support, so heavy was it with force and anguish….
During the night we listened carefully: …from Hurbinek’s corner there occasionally came a sound, a word. It was not, admittedly, always exactly the same word, but it was certainly an articulated word; or better, several slightly different articulated words, experimental variations on a theme, on a root, perhaps on a name.
Hurbinek, who was three years old and perhaps had been born in Auschwitz and had never seen a tree; Hurbinek, who had fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain his entry into the world of men, from which a bestial power had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm—even his—bore the tattoo of Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed. Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine.34
Giorgio Agamben warnt vor der Bio-Macht und bagatellisiert den Holocaust
Die Unterscheidung zwischen »bloßem Leben« und »gutem Leben« ist ein bekannter Topos der Kulturkritik. Dem »tierischen« Dasein jener, deren Existenz sich im Zyklus von Arbeit und Konsum erschöpft, wird ein »höheres« Leben entgegengehalten, das sich im öffentlichen Raum entfaltet. Folie dieser Unterscheidung ist die antike Dichotomie von »Oikos« und »Polis«, die dem Haus als Ort reproduktiver Tätigkeit den Markt als Sphäre politischen Handelns gegenüberstellt.
1958 leitete Hannah Arendt daraus in Vita activa eine Verteidigung der Öffentlichkeit ab, die gegen »Privatinteressen« aller Art zu schützen sei. Erst als Bürger sei der Mensch wirklich »Mensch«, in der Haushaltssphäre dagegen bloßes Gattungswesen. Die moderne Massengesellschaft jedoch sei gerade durch ein Übergreifen des »Oikos« auf die »Polis« geprägt. Das herrschende Nützlichkeitsdenken erlaube keine Initiative jenseits von Arbeit und Konsum und ersetze Politik durch Ökonomie und Verwaltung. Alles Handeln werde wie in einem behavioristischen Experiment zum »Sich-Verhalten«. Subjekt dieses Prozesses sei nicht der Bürger, sondern, wie Arendt kryptisch schreibt, »das Leben selbst«.
Zwanzig Jahre später legte Michel Foucault in Sexualität und Wahrheit sein Konzept der »Bio-Macht« vor, das es erlaubt, Arendts These von der Verschränkung von »Politik« und »bloßem Leben« jenseits biologistischer Klischees zu reformulieren. »Leben« ist für Foucault, anders als für Arendt, kein vorpolitisches Phänomen, sondern selbst Knotenpunkt politischer Strategien. Kennzeichnend für die Bio-Macht ist nicht, daß sie den Bürger zum »Animal laborans« macht, sondern daß sie durch Sexualhygiene, Geburtenkontrolle und statistische Erfassung »Leben« als politische Kategorie erst erzeugt. Während die Institutionen der »Disziplinarmacht« (Schule, Militär, Gefängnis) auf einzelne Körper zugreifen, um sie zu »dressieren«, richtet sich die Bio-Macht auf »das Leben« insgesamt; ihr Objekt ist weniger der Körper des Individuums als der »Volkskörper«. Deshalb hat Foucault in seinen späten Vorlesungen den Rassismus als Basis jeder Form von »Bio-Politik« ausgemacht. Auf Arendt hat er sich dabei nie bezogen. Das Zentrum ihres Werks, die Frage nach der Struktur der Konzentrationslager, bleibt bei Foucault ausgespart.
Dieses Defizit zu beheben, hat sich der Debord-Schüler und Benjamin-Herausgeber Giorgio Agamben in seinen Büchern Homo sacer und Mittel ohne Zweck vorgenommen, die nun auf Deutsch vorliegen. Die Euphorie, mit der Homo sacerhierzulande rezipiert wird (eine Ausnahme ist der Beitrag von Niels Werber in der Juli-Ausgabe des »Merkur«), dürfte indes weniger auf die Brillanz des Autors als auf die Beliebtheit seiner an Heidegger geschulten, raunend-prophetischen Diktion zurückzuführen sein. Anders als Foucault verhandelt Agamben nämlich das »historisch-politische Schicksal des Abendlandes«. Das KZ mutiert dabei zum »Nomos der Moderne«: »Wir alle leben«, wie Andreas Platthaus begeistert in der »FAZ« paraphrasiert, »in der Welt des Lagers«, dessen »grausame Logik in alle Gesellschaften nach Auschwitz eingesickert ist«.
Derlei Formulierungen, in denen Auschwitz zur Metapher für alle möglichen Formen von Repression und Kontrolle wird, sind keine Ausrutscher. Vielmehr ist der Nachweis, daß »das Lager« die geheime Matrix der westlichen Demokratien bilde, Fluchtpunkt von Agambens Überlegungen. Zunächst rekonstruiert er »die Logik der souveränen Macht«, die durch Abspaltung des »Lebens« von seinen »Lebensformen« so etwas wie »nacktes«, auf seine Faktizität reduziertes Leben erst produziert. Das dabei entstehende Machtverhältnis bezeichnet Agamben heideggerianisch als »Bann«. In den modernen Gesellschaften würden nicht nur einzelne Gruppen oder Klassen, sondern tendenziell alle Bürger zu virtuell »Verbannten«, über die beliebig verfügt werden könne.
In Absetzung gegen Batailles Begriff des Heiligen zeigt Agamben, daß das »nackte Leben« identisch ist mit dem »heiligen Leben« des »Homo sacer«. Scharf wendet er sich gegen den aus Religionsgeschichte und Psychoanalyse bekannten Topos von der »Ambiguität des Heiligen«, das »schmutzig« und »rein« zugleich sei. In Wahrheit sei »sacer« keine religiöse, sondern eine rechtliche Kategorie. Sie bezeichne ein Leben, das »straflos getötet werden kann, aber nicht geopfert werden darf«, ein »vogelfreies« Leben also: »Souverän ist die Sphäre, in der man töten kann, ohne einen Mord zu begehen und ohne ein Opfer zu zelebrieren, und heilig, das heißt tötbar, aber nicht opferbar, ist das Leben, das in diese Sphäre eingeschlossen ist.«
In der Moderne sei der »Ausnahmezustand«, den die Macht herstellt, um bestimmte Gruppen in den Bereich des »nackten Lebens« einzuschließen, zur Regel geworden. Damit wird ein Gedanke, der bei Benjamin zur Kennzeichnung faschistischer Herrschaft dient, so verwässert, daß er zur Beschreibung der gesamten Conditio humana im 20. Jahrhundert taugt. Nicht nur befürwortet Agamben die totalitarismustheoretische These einer Strukturidentität nazistischer und sowjetischer Lager, er entdeckt auch »Berührungspunkte von Massendemokratie und totalitären Staaten«. Letztlich seien »Massendemokratie« und »Totalitarismus« sogar nur zwei »Organisationsformen« derselben, global agierenden »Bio-Macht«.
Hat man einmal diese Perspektive eingenommen, findet man überall potentielle Konzentrationslager: »Ein Lager ist dann sowohl das Stadion von Bari, in dem 1991 die italienische Polizei illegale albanische Einwanderer zusammenpferchte, als auch das Wintervelodrom, das den Behörden von Vichy als Sammelstelle für Juden diente, und die zones d’attente auf den Flughäfen Frankreichs, in denen Ausländer zurückgehalten werden, die die Anerkennung des Flüchtlingsstatus beanspruchen.« All diese Orte definieren, auch in formalen Demokratien, einen Raum des »Ausnahmezustandes«, worin »alles möglich ist«: »Jedes Mal, wenn eine solche Struktur geschaffen wird, befinden wir uns virtuell in der Gegenwart eines Lagers, unabhängig von der Art der Verbrechen, die da verübt werden.« Von da aus ist es nicht allzu weit zu der Behauptung, Massentierhaltung sei ein »Holocaust« an Hühnern und Gänsen.
Wohlgemerkt: Agamben gilt als Vordenker der italienischen Linken, seine Bücher werden bei Tute Bianchi und mittlerweile auch in Deutschland rege rezipiert. Tatsächlich ist seiner These, wonach die Grenzziehung zwischen »lebenswertem« und »nacktem Leben« ein brisanter politischer Akt sei, angesichts aktueller Genetik- und Euthanasiedebatten einiges abzugewinnen. Auch seine Analyse der »Sozialhygiene«-Konzepte der Nazis, in denen »Politik«, »Polizei« und »Medizin« verschmelzen, ist stichhaltig. Aber all das ist bekannt und in den Studien von Ernst Klee sehr viel materialreicher belegt worden. Auch Agambens Deutung des Konzentrationslagers als extremste Variante »souveräner Macht«, die die Grenze zwischen Leben und Tod aufhebe, fügt der funktionalistischen Analyse, die Wolfgang Sofsky in Die Ordnung des Terrors entwickelt hat, nichts Wesentliches hinzu.
Weshalb der Holocaust sich in einer bestimmten historischen Konstellation in Deutschland ereignen konnte; was den eliminatorischen Antisemitismus der Nazis vom »üblichen« Antisemitismus und von Rassismus und Xenophobie unterscheidet – das kann Agamben nicht erklären. Statt dessen verziert er seine Untersuchung, die er in Absetzung zu historisch-materialistischen Studien »ontologisch« nennt, mit einem metaphysischen Bombast, der »das Lager« als »Daseinsweise« der Moderne erscheinen läßt.
Damit ist er Heidegger, auf den er sich beruft und der in ähnlich pauschaler Weise »die Technik« zum daseinsmäßigen Weltübel aufblähte, näher als Foucault, dessen mikroanalytischer Blick ihm abgeht. Nirgends fragt Agamben, ob es Unterschiede zwischen »Asylantenheimen«, »Arbeitslagern« und »Vernichtungslagern« gibt. Statt dessen wird unter dem Blick seines »philosophischen Suchscheinwerfers« (»FAZ«) jedes Polizeirevier zum potentiellen KZ und jeder Flüchtling zum potentiellen »Juden«. Entgegen Agambens Intention haben seine Texte daher objektiv eine Entlastungsfunktion. Wenn das Lager ein »biopolitisches Paradigma der Moderne« ist, war Auschwitz nur die extremste Erscheinungsform eines ominösen abendländischen »Nomos«. Kein Wunder, daß diese These von »FAZ« bis »Taz« konsensfähig ist.
Giorgio Agamben: Homo sacer. Die souveräne Macht und das nackte Leben. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/Main 2002, 212 Seiten, 10 Euro
Ders.: Mittel ohne Zweck. Noten zur Politik. Diaphanes Verlag, Freiburg/Berlin 2001, 152 Seiten, 16,80 Euro
Magnus Klaue rezensierte in KONKRET 8/02 den Briefwechsel zwischen Adorno und Elisabeth Lenk
edited by Ann Goldstein, with an introduction by Toni Morrison
Liveright, three volumes, 2,910 pp., $100.00
Sergio del Grande/Mondadori Portfolio/Getty Images Primo Levi in his studio, Turin, 1981
Primo Levi was born in 1919 on the fourth floor of an “undistinguished” apartment block in Turin and aside from “involuntary interruptions” continued to live there in the company of his mother until in 1987 he threw himself down the stairwell to his death. The longest interruption was from September 1943 to October 1945 and would provide Levi with the core material for his writing career: it involved three months on the fringe of the partisan resistance to the German occupation, two months in a Fascist internment camp, eleven months in Auschwitz, and a further nine in various Russian refugee camps.
In 1946, aged twenty-seven, despite working full-time as a chemist, Levi completed his account of his time in a concentration camp. Now widely considered a masterpiece, If This Is a Man was turned down by Turin’s main publishing house, Einaudi, in the person of Natalia Ginzburg, herself a Jew whose husband had died in a Fascist prison. It was also rejected by five other publishers. Why?
Even before his return, Levi had been overwhelmed by the need to tell what had happened. Prior to Auschwitz he had not felt that Jewishness was central to his identity. Like most Italian Jews, the Levis had long been assimilated with little to distinguish them from other Italians. The introduction of the Race Laws in 1938, which discriminated against Jews in public education and excluded them from regular employment, thus created a predicament for Levi that went far beyond the problem of completing his degree in chemistry and finding a job. It was a threat to his identity. Who was he if not an ordinary Italian like his fellow students? The question “what is a man?” that would echo throughout his work was never an abstract consideration but a matter of personal urgency.
Until September 1943 it had been possible for Levi to live in “willful blindness,” to get around the rules, graduate, and find work unofficially; but with the Italian capitulation to the Allies and the German occupation of Italy this was no longer an option. Jews were being rounded up. Many were fleeing to the Americas. Levi’s insecurity at this time was compounded by the death of his father in 1942, making Primo, at twenty-three, responsible for the well-being of his mother and younger sister. His father had been something of a womanizer whose betrayals of their mother were common knowledge.
Here too there was a question of manhood: Levi himself had yet to have anything more than “bloodless female friendships,” was believed by his companions to be terrified of women, and feared that he was “condemned to a perpetual male solitude.” He nursed his self-esteem with adventurous chemistry experiments and arduous mountain climbing in the Alps above Turin, and it was to the mountains that he fled in September 1943, taking his mother and sister with him and renting rooms in a small resort hotel near the Swiss border.
Was he a Jew on the run or a partisan? The Swiss border was closed. German forces were approaching. The would-be rebels with whom Levi eventually associated were poorly organized and quickly infiltrated by a Fascist spy; the only shots fired in anger were those that served to execute two younger members of the band who had gone on a drinking and looting spree that put the safety of the others at risk. How far Levi was involved in this killing is largely the subject of Sergio Luzzatto’s mistitled new book, Primo Levi’s Resistance.1 There was no resistance. To Levi’s dismay his sister had taken his mother from the hotel on December 1 to find refuge back in Piedmont. On December 9 the two undisciplined band members were dispatched with shots to the back. By the time Levi was arrested on December 13 he was utterly demoralized and disoriented. Warned that to confess to being a partisan would mean certain death, he opted for the lesser evil of admitting his Jewishness.
The reader coming to If This Is a Man today brings with him a great deal of knowledge about the Holocaust and in most cases is free of any direct personal involvement in the war. Readers in Turin in 1947 were not so well informed and their own intense war experiences were very much on their minds. The book opens, in first person, with a curious mixture of coolness and portentousness. “I cultivated a moderate and abstract sense of rebellion,” Levi remarks, and declares that given his half-heartedness as a partisan the “sequence of events” leading to his arrest were “justified.” The tone changes abruptly when he talks about the collective experience, in the internment camp, of being told that all Jews were to be dispatched to Germany the following day:
Night came, and it was such a night one knew that human eyes would not witness it and survive…. Many things were then said and done among us; but of these it is better that no memory remain.
Today it is easy to imagine the young Levi searching for a voice, a manner, that would allow him to tell his tale without being overwhelmed by it and at the same time compel the reader’s attention. Prior to studying chemistry he had been educated at a prestigious liceo classico in Turin; he knew his Dante and Manzoni and brought frequent references from them to his text, to enrich it, to get across a sense of extremity and profundity. But having lived through twenty years of fascism the literary establishment in postwar Turin were sworn enemies of all grandiloquence, which they tended to associate with inauthenticity; in their defense it has to be said that If This Is a Man is most powerful when it is most straightforward.
The difficulty in finding a voice for what had happened was intimately linked to the experience itself and the question of what it means to be human. Many inmates of Auschwitz, Levi tells us, experienced the same dream: they would be back home trying to tell their story—the hunger, the cold, the beatings, the selections—but all too soon they would realize that their loved ones were not listening. “They are completely indifferent…as if I were not there.”
Why this refusal to listen? The worst aspect of the camp, Levi tells us, was that it “was a great machine to reduce us to beasts.” The victim was systematically brought down morally to the level of his torturers. Prisoners were encouraged to fight one another, for the possession of a spoon, for sufficient space to sleep, to get the easier jobs, to avoid emptying the slop cans:
One had to…strangle all dignity and kill all conscience, to enter the arena as a beast against other beasts…. Many were the ways devised and put into practice by us in order not to die…. All implied a grueling struggle of one against all….
To give up this struggle was to become an obvious candidate for the gas chamber, one of
an anonymous mass…of non-men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to truly suffer. One hesitates to call them living; one hesitates to call their death death….
In her introduction to this three-volume collection of Levi’s works, Toni Morrison remarks how “the triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction glows virtually everywhere in Levi’s writing.” These are heartening words but they are not true. Rather Levi tells us about human identity crushed and corrupted by unspeakable evil; his work is powerful because it squares up to that reality. “The personages in these pages are not men,” he tells us; everybody in the camp, torturers and tortured alike, was “paradoxically united in a common inner desolation.”
To tell this harrowing story was to confess to one’s own degradation. It wasn’t attractive. This anguish explains the strange shifts of tone throughout If This Is a Man, in particular the moments when Levi addresses us defensively with the didactic “we”:
We now invite the reader to contemplate the possible meaning in the Lager of the words “good” and “evil,” “just” and “unjust”; let each judge,…how much of our ordinary moral world could survive on this side of the barbed wire.
The rejections of his book must have come to Levi as confirmation of his recurrent nightmares. Fortunately in the meantime there was love. Levi had started dating Lucia Morpurgo in early 1946. She was a year younger than he; both were virgins. Crucially, Lucia was happy to listen to Levi’s story in all its terrible detail. “I felt myself become a man again,” he later wrote. Eventually his memoir was published by a tiny publishing house in October 1947, a month after Levi and Lucia had married.
Levi had been cautious, diligent, and prone to depression before his deportation and continued to be so after his return. Anxious about money, he quickly found a job as a chemist, briefly allowed himself to be seduced away from it into a freelance enterprise with a fearless friend, then in 1948, with his wife pregnant, he knuckled down to serious long-term employment with SIVA, a paint and chemical factory. Whether out of genuine financial difficulties or because he was in thrall to his mother, he did not move out of the family home but brought his wife to live there, against her will. Arguments, incomprehension, and resentments ensued.
On the other hand, Levi was quite changed. Auschwitz had humiliated and degraded him, but it had taught him a great deal; he was “more mature and stronger.” After the Germans had abandoned the camp he and other inmates had behaved with great resourcefulness to stay alive until the Russians arrived. During the long return through various refugee camps he had practiced all his newly learned survival skills. So if the experience had initially stripped him of his manhood, it eventually led to a new confidence.
Writing about Auschwitz he had published a book; talking about Auschwitz he had found a wife. His identity was now inextricably bound up with Auschwitz and for the remainder of his life Levi would spend a great deal of time tracking down people he had known there and corresponding at length with survivors. His children Lisa Lorenza and Renzo were both named after the Italian worker Lorenzo Perrone, who had regularly brought Levi food at Auschwitz and thus helped to save his life. It was “our finest hour,” he would say of the last days at the camp. He referred to Auschwitz as his “university,” an “adventure,” a “rite of passage.”
It was in this more positive mood in 1961, with recognition now growing for his first book, that Levi at last began to write a sequel. The Truce thus opens with the last days in Auschwitz, then tells of the confusion and vitality of refugee camps in Poland and the Ukraine, followed by an interminably roundabout return to Italy by train. The tone is immediately more literary than If This Is a Man:
René Burri/Magnum Photos Primo Levi, Turin, 1985
In those days and in those places…a high wind blew over the face of the Earth: the world around us seemed to have returned to a primal Chaos, and was swarming with deformed, defective, abnormal human examples; and each of them was tossing about, in blind or deliberate motion, anxiously searching for his own place, his own sphere, as the cosmogonies of the ancients say, poetically, of the particles of the four elements.
The pleasure of The Truce lies in Levi’s account of his returning health and the dramatis personae of idiosyncratic companions and extravagant Russian soldiers involved in every kind of ruse, scam, and jam. In particular there is Cesare,
a child of the sun, a friend of the whole world. He didn’t know hatred or scorn, he was as varying as the sky, joyful, sly, and ingenuous, reckless and cautious, very ignorant, very innocent, and very civilized.
Supremely shrewd, Cesare will buy, “fix,” and resell absolutely anything—broken pens, ragged shirts, fish bloated with injections of water—always at a profit, and make love to any woman who crosses his path. However, the tone of The Truce is so charmingly literary and some of the stories so far-fetched that the reader begins to wonder how much is documentary and how much fiction. In fact, though recognizably based on a certain Lello Perugia, Cesare’s antics are very much inflated, sometimes invented, and Perugia was furious with the way he had been presented. It would have been a “much more important” book, Perugia protested, if Levi had “got [his] facts right.”
Why did Levi do this? There had already been some curious fact-twisting in If This Is a Man. Here a close friend, Alberto Dalla Volta, is described as having no German, a crucial factor in the struggle for survival at Auschwitz, when in fact his German was excellent, far better than Levi’s. In his meticulously researched biography Ian Thomson glosses this with the remark that “Levi, like most writers, made life seem more interesting than it is.”2 Leaving aside whether we agree with this, it’s hard to see how describing Alberto as less well educated than he was or, in a later book, speaking of another dead friend as coming from a “peasant” family when he didn’t could enhance our interest in works that command our attention above all for their documentary status.
Two impulses seem to be at work. Thomson notes Levi’s tendency to form friendships with men less intellectual than himself, but also less fearful, more energetic, and extrovert. There was a tradeoff: the timid Levi could enjoy mountaineering adventures and female company beside his lively companions while they benefited from his superior knowledge. Many of the “changes” in these books shift the relationships described toward this preferred model, Levi’s close associates becoming at once more animated and less cultured than perhaps they were. Throughout The Truce, Levi seems to be the only sober figure hanging back from a wild postwar promiscuity, at one point declining an invitation to indulge himself with “twenty large girls…blond, rosy creatures, with…placid, bovine faces.”
Related to these descriptions of joyously uninhibited companions was Levi’s lifelong thirst for freedom and difficulty achieving it. Work at SIVA soon became a prison. With the constant tension between wife and mother, home was also a prison. The Truce takes its title from the reflection, in the closing pages, that the interlude between Auschwitz and the return to responsible life in Turin had been, for all its harshness, a period of respite and freedom, of “unlimited openness,” before the need once again “to join battle, against still unknown enemies, within and outside us.” The novel closes with Levi at home but dreaming that he is back in Auschwitz and that nothing is real outside the oppression of imprisonment.
Levi was committed to bearing witness, but lifelong adhesion to the same appalling story is constricting. In a later work he speaks of a man who pesters him with a manifestly fabricated version of his war heroics; but Levi admits to envying the “boundless freedom of invention, of one who has broken down the barriers and is now master of constructing the past that most pleases him.”
After completing The Truce Levi allowed himself the liberty of writing Natural Histories, a series of lighthearted sci-fi stories published to general critical disappointment in 1966. Each piece offers a smart idea, ironic and potentially alarmist—a society duped into believing that people need to wear heavy armor to avoid a deadly virus, a telephone network that develops its own intelligence and makes and interrupts calls as it pleases, a country where the duties of literary censorship are assigned to barnyard hens.
What is striking about all Levi’s fiction is that despite the frequent references to sexual problems—a female spider discussing her consumption of males, a wise centaur torn apart by sexual desire who experiences “in the form of anxiety and tremulous tension” any sexual encounter that occurs in his vicinity—there is no attempt to dramatize however obliquely or discreetly what might have been the reality of Levi’s domestic life, or to explore the many intimate but sexless friendships he was now in the habit of forming with women. To one of these friends, the German Hety Schmitt-Maas, Levi would confess his frustration with marriage and sense of entrapment, but nothing of this emerges in the fiction. The better stories in the later and looser collections are always returns to the wartime period and Auschwitz.
Another story collection, Flaw of Form, followed Natural Histories, before Levi returned to memoir in 1975 with The Periodic Table. The breakthrough here was to use his experience and knowledge as a chemist to provide the frame or cover for intriguing explorations of earlier relationships. Each chapter recalls some episode that features a different chemical substance whose qualities are allowed to take on a quiet symbolism. In a Fascist jail Levi speaks to a man who worked panning for gold, not just in order to sell it, but for the love of engraving and hammering it, and above all “to live free”; a job that involves extracting phosphorous from plants brings Levi into contact with the charming Giulia, who despite her imminent marriage may or may not be a possible lover; a problem with a paint that won’t dry due to defective materials from a German supplier brings Levi into contact with the chemist who supervised his work in Auschwitz.
Crucial to The Periodic Table is that Levi knows everything about chemistry and we know very little. Many of the situations are presented as puzzles that Levi solves or sometimes fails to solve, but always with a wry panache. Again and again the material world appears as a canny guardian of secrets, requiring patience, caution, practicality, and knowledge, but not in the end intractable. By comparison human relationships are even more mysterious and definitely less susceptible to the qualities Levi displays. He is unable to challenge the flirtatious Giulia, afraid of meeting the Auschwitz chemist and disturbed that the man seems to be asking him for a forgiveness he is not ready to grant.
Levi had been concerned that his books might be admired more for their wartime witness than their literary achievement. The brilliance of The Periodic Table settled any doubts about his writerly credentials, though again there were complaints of distortion. In particular, it was not true that Levi had come into contact with the German chemist through his work; he had tracked his man down through Hety Schmitt-Maas, who was upset by how negatively Levi presented him in his book, since the German had been one of the few to give him some help at the camp.
With the success of The Periodic Table, Levi finally felt sufficiently confident to resign from SIVA. He was fifty-eight. Free from routine responsibilities, he produced in quick succession The Wrench (1978) and If Not Now, When? (1982). Both draw on the writer’s special knowledge for their authority and both present themselves as fiction, free from the constraints of bearing witness. In the short stories of The Wrench Tino Faussone, a hugely energetic, incorrigibly womanizing engineer, intensely familiar with pylons, rigs, boilers, and the like, tells the more intellectual narrator of his adventures around the globe with every kind of dramatic technical problem. Having complained of his own thirty years of “forced labor,” Levi now celebrated work, or at least work as experienced by one of his typical foils, a man of boundless energy and freedom who basks in the sure knowledge of his immense practical competence.
If Not Now, When?, Levi’s only novel, covers the same time period and territory as The Truce, telling the story of a Russian Jew who joins a band of Jewish partisans to fight the Germans; they make their way to Italy whence they hope to move on to Palestine and the nascent state of Israel. In Primo Levi’s Resistance Sergio Luzzatto observes how much this novel draws on Levi’s own unhappy partisan experience, transforming it into something effective and triumphant. The hero, Mendel, a watchmaker, a man who can mend a radio and is prone to philosophic reflection (“Mendel is me,” Levi said in an interview), boldly bears arms, engages in any number of skirmishes, finds himself a woman, then betrays her with another (though he now immediately feels trapped and threatened by her), and even executes a spy:
Ulybin handed the rifle to Mendel, without a word.
“You want me to…?” Mendel stammered.
“Go on, yeshiva bocher,” Ulybin said. “He can’t walk, and if they find him, he’ll talk….”
Mendel felt bitter saliva fill his mouth. He took a few steps back, aimed carefully, and fired.
Levi had spent much time researching Yiddish Eastern Europe and the exploits of Jewish resistance fighters whose war efforts he wished to celebrate. “It’s important that there be Jewish partisans,” Mendel observes: “only if I kill a German will I manage to persuade other Germans that I am a man.” However, the novel’s dialogue comes across as wooden, the action is hardly credible, and those who knew Levi’s previous work could not fail to see elements of fantasy and wishful thinking. Shortly after the book was published, Israel invaded Lebanon and Levi found himself alternately praised and criticized for promoting militant Zionism, something that could not have been further from his mind.
Constantly afraid that he would run out of subject matter or succumb to Alzheimer’s, Levi stepped up production in his later years. Some two thirds of the almost three thousand pages of The Complete Works were written after he left his managerial job. Most of the writing was made up of articles and stories published in the Turin newspaper La Stampa and then poems that plumb Levi’s darker moods: spared the duty of providing narrative content, the poems make for stronger reading than the stories. On the occasion of his wife’s sixtieth birthday he wrote her this gloomy message:
Be patient, my impatient lady,
Pulverized and macerated, flayed,
Who flay yourself a little every day…
Please, accept these fourteen lines;
They’re my rough way of telling you you’re loved,
And that I wouldn’t be in the world without you.
A year later he wrote “Arachne,” spoken by a female spider who weaves a web from “a thousand spinning teats”:
I’ll sit in the center
And wait for a male to come,
Suspicious but drunk with desire,
To fill my stomach and my womb…
Terrified of spiders since earliest childhood, Levi made a huge copper spider and hung it on his balcony. Warned by the Jewish community that people were gossiping about his relationship with a certain woman journalist, he immediately refrained from seeing her. He visited hundreds of schools to talk about Auschwitz yet protested that he didn’t want to be labeled as a Jewish writer. Yearning to travel, he complained that his women prevented him from “going anywhere.” His mother had never given him a “single kiss or caress,” he confided to a journalist in 1982. “I’ve known some Jewish sons,” remarked Philip Roth after meeting him, “but Levi’s filial duty and devotion was stronger than anything I’d ever seen. There was a pathetic edge to it.” Levi was on antidepressants.
It was in this unhappy state that Levi chose to return to his core material in The Drowned and the Saved (1986), a book that must rank as one of the most powerful and upsetting attempts at moral analysis ever undertaken. The story of Auschwitz, Levi begins, “has been written almost exclusively by people who, like me, did not plumb the depths. The ones who did never returned, or if they did their capacity for observation was paralyzed by pain and incomprehension.” “Those who were ‘saved’ in the camps were not the best of us”; rather they “were the worst: the egotists, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators…. The best all died.”
In unsparing detail Levi draws on other concentration camp memoirs to consider the facts in all their complexity and awfulness. The Sonderkommandos, he remarks, were “an extreme case of collaboration,” Jews induced to lead other Jews into the gas chambers, “remove the corpses…extract gold teeth from their jaws; shear off the women’s hair.” Again and again the surreal collective cruelty of the Nazi regime is examined in relation to its effect on its victims; the constant denuding of victims, the crazy obsession with bed-making and roll calls, the habit of forcing inmates to defecate in the open and very close to each other, and so on.
At every point, Levi’s enemy is denial in all its forms. “The intrinsic horror of this human condition…has imposed a kind of constraint on all testimony,” he warns. On both sides of the divide people don’t want to remember, they exploit slippages in memory to establish a comfort zone, and artists offer portrayals that aestheticize or indulge in consolatory pieties. The whole book conveys a sense of the enormity of the task of keeping alive the truth of just how evil Auschwitz was.
No sooner had Levi committed suicide in 1987 than attempts were being made to defend his work from his life, his death rather, as if admirers were afraid that by killing himself he might have undermined the positive side of his witness. This is largely the subject of Berel Lang’s Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life,3 which considers the interminable speculation about whether Levi’s motives for suicide had more to do with Auschwitz or his chronic domestic unhappiness.
Whatever the truth, the views Lang records tell us more about the speculators’ own anxieties than about Levi. Levi’s best writing was about his life, about questions of freedom and survival, so it is inevitable that once we are aware of his suicide, it will always be there when we read him. On the other hand it is hard to see why this should detract from his remarkable achievement, if only because there is no place in his writing, at least that I can find, where Levi suggests that life is likely to end well, nothing that his suicide, as it were, contradicts. If anything the contrary.
1 Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy (Metropolitan, to be published in January 2016). ↩
Aliki Keplicz—APPrinceton University professor Jan T. Gross looks on during a meeting with readers in Warsaw on Jan. 22, 2008
The Warsaw Prosecutor’s Office received 125 complaints about the article
Polish prosecutors in Warsaw commenced a libel probe against Polish-born Yale professor Jan T. Gross on Thursday after he alleged that Poles killed more Jews than Germans during World War II.
Gross made the comments in an opinion piece published Sept. 13 that was then picked up by German newspaper Die Welt. His statements were based on research carried out by the Polish Institute of National Memory and the Polish Academy of Science.
In the piece, Gross lamented the reluctance of Eastern European countries like Poland, Slovakia and Hungary to accept refugees, saying that much of their hesitation could stem from residual intolerance carried over from World War II. Recent reports say that Poland plans to receive around 5,000 refugees on top of the 2,000 that it has already accepted.
According to onet.pl, the Warsaw Prosecutor’s Office received 125 complaints about the article. A spokesman for Poland’s Foreign Ministry, Marcin Wojciechowski, has also condemned Gross’s comments as “historically untrue, harmful and insulting to Poland.”
Jan Gross first came to prominence in Poland with his 2001 book, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, which details a 1941 massacre of Jews in a Polish town carried out by locals, rather than Nazi forces. The book eventually inspired the 2012 Polish film, Aftermath, which was banned in some Polish theaters over its controversial content.
The Warsaw native faced earlier defamation claims over two of his other books, Fear and Golden Harvest, the Guardian reports.
Recent polls indicate that anti-Semitism is still prevalent in Poland, a predominantly Roman Catholic and culturally homogenous nation of some 50 million.
Much writing by Holocaust survivors does not quite tell a tale, but Levi had a powerfully narrative imagination.Credit Photograph by Jillian Edelstein / Camera Press / Redux
Primo Levi did not consider it heroic to have survived eleven months in Auschwitz. Like other witnesses of the concentration camps, he lamented that the best had perished and the worst had survived. But we who have survived relatively little find it hard to believe him. How could it be anything but heroic to have entered Hell and not been swallowed up? To have witnessed it with such delicate lucidity, such reserves of irony and even equanimity? Our incomprehension and our admiration combine to simplify the writer into a needily sincere amalgam: hero, saint, witness, redeemer. Thus his account of life in Auschwitz, “If This Is a Man” (1947), whose title is deliberately tentative and tremulous, was rewrapped, by his American publisher, in the heartier, how-to-ish banner “Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity.” That edition praises the text as “a lasting testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit,” though Levi often emphasized how quickly and efficiently the camps could destroy the human spirit. Another survivor, the writer Jean Améry, mistaking comprehension for concession, disapprovingly called Levi “the pardoner,” though Levi repeatedly argued that he was interested in justice, not in indiscriminate forgiveness. A German official who had encountered Levi in the camp laboratory found in “If This Is a Man” an “overcoming of Judaism, a fulfillment of the Christian precept to love one’s enemies, and a testimony of faith in Man.” And when Levi committed suicide, on April 11, 1987, many seemed to feel that the writer had somehow reneged on his own heroism.
Levi was heroic; he was also modest, practical, elusive, coolly passionate, experimental and sometimes limited, refined and sometimes provincial. (He married a woman, Lucia Morpurgo, from his own class and background, and died in the same Turin apartment building in which he had been born.) For most of his life, he worked as an industrial chemist; he wrote some of his first book, “If This Is a Man,” while commuting to work on the train. Though his experiences in Auschwitz compelled him to write, and became his central subject, his writing is varied and worldly and often comic in spirit, even when he is dealing with terrible hardship. In addition to his two wartime memoirs, “If This Is a Man” and “The Truce” (first published in 1963, and renamed “The Reawakening” in the United States), and a final, searing inquiry into the life and afterlife of the concentration camp, “The Drowned and the Saved” (1986), he wrote realist fiction—a novel about a band of Jewish Second World War partisans, titled “If Not Now, When?” (1982)—and speculative fiction; also, poems, essays, newspaper articles, and a beautifully unclassifiable book, “The Periodic Table” (1975).
The publication of “The Complete Works of Primo Levi” (Liveright), in three volumes, represents a monumental and noble endeavor on the part of its publisher, its general editor, Ann Goldstein, and the many translators who have produced new versions of Levi’s work. Although his best-known work has already benefitted from fine English translation, it’s a gift to have nearly all his writing gathered together, along with work that has not before been published in English (notably, a cache of uncollected essays, written between 1949 and 1987).
Primo Levi was born in Turin, in 1919, into a liberal family, and into an assimilated, educated Jewish-Italian world. He would write, in “If This Is a Man,” that when he first learned the name of his fateful destination, “Auschwitz” meant nothing to him. He only vaguely knew about the existence of Yiddish, “on the basis of a few quotes or jokes that my father, who worked for a few years in Hungary, had picked up.” There were around a hundred and thirty thousand Italian Jews, and most of them were supporters of the Fascist government (at least until the race legislation of 1938, which announced a newly aggressive anti-Semitism); a cousin of Levi’s, Eucardio Momigliano, had been one of the founders of the Fascist Party, in 1919. Levi’s father was a member, though more out of convenience than commitment.
Levi gives ebullient life to this comfortable, sometimes eccentric world in “The Periodic Table”—a memoir, a history, an essay in elegy, and the best example of his various literary talents. What sets his writing apart from much Holocaust testimony is his relish for portraiture, the pleasure he takes in the palpability of other people, the human amplitude of his noticing. “The Periodic Table” abounds with funny sketches of Levi’s relatives, who are celebrated and gently mocked in the chapter named “Argon,” because, like the gas, they were generally inert: lazy, immobile characters given to witty conversation and idle speculation. Inert they may have been, but colorless they are not. Uncle Bramín falls in love with the goyish housemaid, declares that he will marry her, is thwarted by his parents, and, Oblomov-like, takes to his bed for the next twenty-two years. Nona Màlia, Levi’s paternal grandmother, a woman of forbidding remoteness in old age, lives in near estrangement from her family, married to a Christian doctor. Perhaps “out of fear of making the wrong choice,” Nona Màlia goes to shul and to the parish church on alternate days. Levi recalls that when he was a boy his father would take him every Sunday to visit his grandmother. The two would walk along Via Po, Levi’s father stopping to pet the cats, sniff the mushrooms, and look at the used books:
My father was l’Ingegnè, the Engineer, his pockets always bursting with books, known to all the salami makers because he checked with a slide rule the multiplication on the bill for the prosciutto. Not that he bought it with a light heart: rather superstitious than religious, he felt uneasy about breaking the rules of kashruth, but he liked prosciutto so much that, before the temptation of the shop windows, he yielded every time, sighing, cursing under his breath, and looking at me furtively, as if he feared my judgment or hoped for my complicity.
From an early age, Levi appears to have possessed many of the qualities of his later prose—meticulousness, curiosity, furious discretion, orderliness to the point of priggishness. In primary school, he was top of his class (his schoolmates cheered him on with “Primo Levi Primo!”). As a teen-ager at the Liceo D’Azeglio, Turin’s leading classical academy, he stood out for his cleverness, his smallness, and his Jewishness. He was bullied, and his health deteriorated. His English biographer Ian Thomson suggests that Levi developed a sense of himself as physically and sexually inadequate, and that his subsequent devotion to robust athletic pursuits, such as mountaineering and skiing, represented a self-improvement project. Thomson notes that, in later life, he recalled his mistreatment at school as “uniquely anti-Semitic,” and adds, “How far this impression was coloured by Levi’s eventual persecution is hard to tell.” But perhaps Thomson has it the wrong way round. Perhaps Levi’s extraordinary resilience in Auschwitz had something to do with a hardened determination not to be persecuted again.
On the basis of the first chapter of “The Periodic Table” alone, you know that you are in the hands of a true writer, someone equipped with an avaricious and indexical memory, who knows how to animate his details, stage his scenes, and ration his anecdotes. It is a book one wants to keep quoting from (true of all Levi’s work, except, curiously, his fiction). With verve and vitality, “The Periodic Table” moves through the phases of Levi’s life: his excited discovery of chemistry, as a teen-ager; classes at the University of Turin with the rigorous but not unamusing “Professor P.,” who scornfully defies the Fascist injunction to wear a black shirt by donning a “comical black bib, several inches wide,” which comes untucked every time he makes one of his brusque movements. Levi admires the “obsessively clear” chemistry textbooks that his teacher has written, “filled with his stern disdain for humanity in general,” and recalls that the only time he was ever admitted to the professor’s office he saw on the blackboard the sentence “I do not want a funeral, alive or dead.”
Throughout, there are wittily pragmatic, original descriptions of minerals, gases, and metals, as in this description of zinc: “Zinc, zinco, Zink: laundry tubs are made of it, it’s an element that doesn’t say much to the imagination, it’s gray and its salts are colorless, it’s not toxic, it doesn’t provide gaudy chromatic reactions—in other words, it’s a boring element.” Levi writes tenderly about friends and colleagues, some of whom we encounter in his other writing—Giulia Vineis, “full of human warmth, Catholic without being rigid, generous and disorderly”; Alberto Dalla Volta, who became Levi’s friend in Auschwitz and seemed uncannily immune to the poisons of camp life: “He was a man of strong goodwill, and had miraculously remained free, and his words and actions were free: he had not lowered his head, had not bowed his back. A gesture of his, a word, a laugh had liberating virtues, were a hole in the stiff fabric of the Lager. . . . I believe that no one, in that place, was more loved than he.”
The most moving chapter in “The Periodic Table” may be the one titled “Iron.” It recalls a friend, Sandro, who studied chemistry with Levi, and with whom he explored the joys of mountain climbing. Like many of the people Levi admired, Sandro is physically and morally strong; he is painted as a headstrong child of nature out of a Jack London story. Seemingly made of iron, and bound to it by ancestry (his forebears were blacksmiths), Sandro practices chemistry as a trade, without apparent reflection; on weekends, he goes off to the mountains, to ski or climb, sometimes spending the night in a hayloft.
Levi tastes “freedom” with Sandro—a freedom perhaps from thinking, the freedom of the conquering body, of being on top of the mountain, of being “master of one’s destiny.” Sandro is a powerful presence on the page; aware of this, Levi plays his absence against his presence, informing us, in a beautiful lament at the end of the chapter, that Sandro was Sandro Delmastro, that he joined the military wing of the Action Party, and that in 1944 he was captured by the Fascists. He tried to escape, and was shot in the neck by a raw fifteen-year-old recruit. The elegy closes thus:
Today I know it’s hopeless to try to clothe a man in words, make him live again on the written page, especially a man like Sandro. He was not a man to talk about, or build monuments to, he who laughed at monuments: he was all in his actions, and when those ended nothing of him remained, nothing except words, precisely.
The word becomes the monument, even as Levi disowns the building of it.
One of the most eloquent of Levi’s rhetorical gestures is the way he moves between volume and silence, appearance and disappearance, life and death. Repeatedly, Levi tolls his bell of departure: these vivid human beings existed, and then they were gone. But, above all, they existed. Sandro, in “The Periodic Table” (“nothing of him remained”); Alberto, most beloved among the camp inmates, who died on the midwinter death march from Auschwitz (“Alberto did not return, and of him no trace remains”); Elias Lindzin, the “dwarf” (“Of his life as a free man, no one knows anything”); Mordo Nahum, “the Greek,” who helped Levi survive part of the long journey back to Italy (“We parted after a friendly conversation; and after that, since the whirlwind that had convulsed that old Europe, dragging it into a wild contra dance of separations and meetings, had come to rest, I never saw my Greek master again, or heard news of him”). And the “drowned,” those who went under—“leaving no trace in anyone’s memory.” Levi rings the bell even for himself, who in some way disappeared into his tattooed number: “At a distance of thirty years, I find it difficult to reconstruct what sort of human specimen, in November of 1944, corresponded to my name, or, rather, my number: 174517.”
In the fall of 1943, Levi and his friends formed a band of anti-Fascist partisans. It was an amateurish group, poorly equipped and ill trained, and Italian Fascist soldiers captured part of his unit in the early hours of December 13th. Levi had an obviously false identity card, which he ate (“The photograph was particularly revolting”). But the action availed him little: the interrogating officer told him that if he was a partisan he would be immediately shot; if he was a Jew he would be sent to a holding camp near Carpi. Levi held out for a while, and then chose to confess his Jewishness, “in part out of weariness, in part also out of an irrational point of pride.” He was sent to a detention camp at Fòssoli, near Modena, where conditions were tolerable: there were P.O.W.s and political prisoners of different nationalities, there was mail delivery, and there was no forced labor. But in the middle of February, 1944, the S.S. took over the running of the camp and announced that all the Jews would be leaving: they were told to prepare for two weeks of travel. A train of twelve closed freight cars left on the evening of February 22nd, packed with six hundred and fifty people. Upon their arrival at Auschwitz, more than five hundred were selected for death; the others, ninety-six men and twenty-nine women, entered the Lager (Levi always preferred the German word for prison). At Auschwitz, Levi was imprisoned in a work camp that was supposed to produce a rubber called Buna, though none was actually manufactured. He spent almost a year as a prisoner, and then almost nine months returning home. “Of six hundred and fifty,” he wrote in “The Truce,” “three of us were returning.” Those are the facts, the abominable and precious facts.
There is a Talmudic commentary that argues that “Job never existed and was just a parable.” The Israeli poet and concentration-camp survivor Dan Pagis replies to this easy erasure in his poem “Homily.” Despite the obvious inequality of the theological contest, Pagis says, Job passed God’s test without even realizing it. He defeated Satan with his very silence. We might imagine, Pagis continues, that the most terrible thing about the story is that Job didn’t understand whom he had defeated, or that he had even won the battle. Not true. For then comes an extraordinary final line: “But in fact, the most terrible thing of all is that Job never existed and is just a parable.”
Pagis’s poem means: “Job did exist, because Job was in the death camps. Suffering is not the most terrible thing; worse is to have the reality of one’s suffering erased.” In just this way, Levi’s writing insists that Job existed and was not a parable. His clarity is ontological and moral: these things happened, a victim witnessed them, and they must never be erased or forgotten. There are many such facts in Levi’s books of testament. The reader is quickly introduced to the principle of scarcity, in which everything—every detail, object, and fact—becomes essential, for everything will be stolen: wire, rags, paper, bowl, a spoon, bread. The prisoners learn to hold their bowls under their chins so as not to lose the crumbs. They shorten their nails with their teeth. “Death begins with the shoes.” Infection enters through wounds in the feet, swollen by edema; ill-fitting shoes can be catastrophic. Hunger is perpetual, overwhelming, and fatal for most: “The Lager is hunger.” In their sleep, many of the prisoners lick their lips and move their jaws, dreaming of food. Reveille is brutally early, before dawn. As the prisoners trudge off to work, sadistic, infernal music accompanies them: a band of prisoners is forced to play marches and popular tunes; Levi says that the pounding of the bass drum and the clashing of the cymbals is “the voice of the Lager” and the last thing about it he will forget. And present everywhere is what he called the “useless violence” of the camp: the screaming and beatings and humiliations, the enforced nakedness, the absurdist regulatory regimen, with its sadism of paradox—the fact, say, that every prisoner needed a spoon but was not issued one and had to find it himself on the black market (when the camp was liberated, Levi writes, a huge stash of brand-new plastic spoons was discovered), or the fanatically prolonged daily roll call, which took place in all weathers, and which required militaristic precision from wraiths in rags, already half dead.
“Business is terrible.”
Many of these horrifying facts can be found in testimony by other witnesses. What is different about Levi’s work is bound up with his uncommon ability to tell a story. It is striking how much writing by survivors does not quite tell a story; it has often been poetic (Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Yehiel De-Nur), or analytical, reportorial, anthropological, philosophical (Jean Améry, Germaine Tillion, Eugen Kogon, Viktor Frankl). The emphasis falls, for understandable reasons, on lament, on a liturgy of tears; or on immediate precision, on bringing concrete news, and on the attempt at comprehension. When Viktor Frankl introduces, in his book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” the subject of food in Auschwitz, he does so thus: “Because of the high degree of undernourishment which the prisoners suffered, it was natural that the desire for food was the major primitive instinct around which mental life centered.” Along with this scientific mastering of the information comes something like a wariness of narrative naïveté: such writers frequently move back and forth in time, plucking and massing details thematically, from different periods in and outside the camps. Surely, Frankl’s rhetoric calmly insists, “this material did not master me; I master it.” (This gesture can be found even in some Holocaust fiction: Jorge Semprún, who survived Buchenwald, enacts such a formal freedom from temporality in his novel “The Long Voyage”; the book is set on the train en route to the camp, but breaks forward to encompass the entire camp experience.)
Levi’s prose has a tone of similar command, and in his last book, “The Drowned and the Saved,” he became such an analyst, grouping material by theme rather than telling stories. Nor did he always tell his stories in conventional sequential fashion. But “If This Is a Man” and “The Truce” are powerful because they do not disdain story. They unfold their material, bolt by bolt. We begin “If This Is a Man” with Levi’s capture in 1943, and we end it with the camp’s liberation by the Russians, in January, 1945. Then we continue the journey in “The Truce,” as Levi finds his long, Odyssean way home. Everything is new, everything is introduction, and so the reader sees with Levi’s disbelieving eyes. He introduces thirst like this: “Will they give us something to drink? No, they line us up again, lead us to a huge square.” He first mentions the now infamous refrain “The only way out is through the chimney” thus: “What does it mean? We’ll soon learn very well what it means.” To register his discoveries, he often breaks from the past tense into a diaristic present.
The result is a kind of ethics, when the writer is constantly registering the moral (which is to say, in this case, the immoral) novelty of the details he encounters. That is why every reader who has opened “If This Is a Man” feels impelled to continue reading it, despite the horror of the material. Levi seems to join us in our incomprehension, which is both a narrative astonishment and a moral astonishment. The victims’ ignorance of the name “Auschwitz” tells us everything, actually and symbolically. For Levi, “Auschwitz” had not, until this moment, existed. It had to be invented, and it had to be introduced into his life. Evil is not the absence of the good, as theology and philosophy have sometimes maintained. It is the invention of the bad: Job existed and was not a parable. Levi registers the same astonishment when first hit by a German officer—“a profound amazement: how can one strike a man without anger?” Or when, driven by thirst, he breaks off an icicle only to have it snatched away by a guard. “Why?” Levi asks. To which comes the answer “Hier ist kein warum” (“Here there is no why”). Or when Alex the Kapo, a professional criminal who has been given limited power over other prisoners, wipes his greasy hand on Levi’s shoulder, as if the other man were not a man. Or when Levi, who was fortunate enough to be chosen to work as a chemist, in the Buna laboratory, comes face to face with his chemistry examiner, Dr. Pannwitz, who raises his eyes to glance at his victim: “That look did not pass between two men; and if I knew how to explain fully the nature of that look, exchanged as if through the glass wall of an aquarium between two beings who inhabit different worlds, I would also be able to explain the essence of the great insanity of the Third Reich.”
Levi frequently emphasized that his survival in Auschwitz owed much to his youth and strength; to the fact that he understood some German (many of those who didn’t, he observed, died in the first weeks); to his training as a chemist, which had refined his habits of curiosity and observation, and which permitted him, in the last months of his incarceration, to work indoors, in a warm laboratory, while the Polish winter did its own fatal selection of the less fortunate; and to other accidents of luck. Among these last were timing (he arrived relatively late in the progress of the war) and what seems to have been a great capacity for friendship. He describes himself, in “The Periodic Table,” as one of those people to whom others tell their stories. In a world of terminal individualism, in which every person had to fight to live, he did not let this scarred opportunism become his only mode of survival. He was wounded like everyone else, but with resources that seem, to most of his readers, unfathomable and mysterious he did not lose the ability to heal and to be healed. He helped others, and they helped him. Both “If This Is a Man” and “The Truce” contain beautiful portraits of goodness and charity, and it is not the punishers and sadists but the life-givers—the fortifiers, the endurers, the men and women who sustained Levi in his struggle to survive—who burst out of these pages. Steinlauf, who is nearly fifty, a former sergeant in the Austro-Hungarian Army and a veteran of the Great War, tells Levi, severely, that he must wash regularly and keep his shoes polished and walk upright, because the Lager is a vast machine that exists to reduce its victims to beasts, and “we must not become beasts.”
Above all, there is Lorenzo Perrone, a mason from Levi’s Piedmont area, a non-Jew, whom Levi credited with saving his life. The two met in June, 1943 (Levi was working on a bricklaying team, and Lorenzo was one of the chief masons). For the next six months, Lorenzo smuggled extra food to his fellow-Italian and, even more dangerous, helped him send letters to his family in Italy. (As a “volunteer worker” for the Reich—i.e., a slave laborer—Lorenzo had privileges beyond the dreams of any Jewish prisoner.) And as crucial as the material support was Lorenzo’s presence, which reminded Levi, “by his natural and plain manner of being good, that a just world still existed outside ours. . . . Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man.”
You can feel this emphasis on moral resistance in every sentence Levi wrote: his prose is a form of keeping his boots shined and his posture proudly upright. It is a style that seems at first windowpane clear but is actually full of undulating strategies. He is acclaimed for the purity of his style and sometimes faulted for his reticence or coldness. But Levi is “cold” only in the way that the air is suddenly cold when you pull slightly away from a powerful fire. His composure is passionate lament, resistance, affirmation. Nor is he so plain. He is not afraid of rhetorical expansion, particularly when writing forms of elegy. “If This Is a Man” is shot through with sentences of tragic grandeur: “Dawn came upon us like a betrayal, as if the new sun were an ally of the men who had decided to destroy us. . . . Now, in the hour of decision, we said to each other things that are not said among the living.” He loves adjectives and adverbs: he admired Joseph Conrad, and sometimes sounds like him, except that, while Conrad can throw his modifiers around pugilistically (the heavier the words the better), Levi employs his with tidy force. The Christian doctor whom Nona Màlia married is described as “majestic, bearded, and taciturn”; Rita, a fellow-student, has “her shabby clothes, her firm gaze, her concrete sadness”; Cesare, one of those morally strong, physically vital men who sustain Levi in time of need, is “very ignorant, very innocent, and very civilized.” In Auschwitz, the drowned, those who are slipping away into death, drift in “an opaque inner solitude.”
This is a classical prose, the possession of a civilized man who never expected that his humane irony would have to battle with its moral opposite. But, once the battle is joined, Levi makes that irony into a formidable weapon. Consider these words: “fortune,” “detached study,” “charitably,” “enchantment,” “discreet and sedate,” “equanimity,” “adventure,” “university.” All of them, remarkably, are used by Levi to describe aspects of his experiences in the camp. “It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944.” This is how, with scandalous coolness, he begins “If This Is a Man,” calmly deploying the twinned resources of “fortuna” in Italian, which combines the senses of good fortune and fate. In the same preface to his first book, Levi promises a “detached study” of what befell him. The hellish marching music of the camp is described as an “enchantment” from which one must escape. In “The Drowned and the Saved,” Levi describes a moment of crisis when he knows he is about to be selected to live or die. He briefly wavers, and almost begs help from a God he does not believe in. But “equanimity prevailed,” he writes, and he resists the temptation. Equanimity!
In the same book, he includes a letter he wrote in 1960 to his German translator, in which he announces that his time in the Lager, and writing about the Lager, “was an important adventure that has profoundly modified me.” The Italian is “una importante avventura, che mi ha modificato profondamente,” which Raymond Rosenthal’s original translation, of 1988, follows; the new “Complete Works” weakens the irony by turning it into “an ordeal that changed me deeply.” For surely the power of these impeccable words, as so often in Levi, is moral. First, they register their contamination by what befell them (the “adventure,” we think, should not be called that; it must be described as an “ordeal”); and then they dryly repel that contamination (no, we will insist on calling the experience, with full ironic power, an “adventure”).
In the same spirit of calmly rebellious irony, “If This Is a Man” ends almost casually, like a conventional nineteenth-century realist novel, with cheerful news of continuity and welfare beyond its pages: “In April, at Katowice, I met Schenck and Alcalai in good health. Arthur has happily rejoined his family and Charles has returned to his profession as a teacher; we have exchanged long letters and I hope to see him again one day.” That emphasis on resistance makes its sequel, “The Truce,” not merely funny but joyous: the camps are no more, the Germans have been vanquished, and gentler life, like a moral sun, is returning. There may be nothing more moving in all of Levi’s work than a moment, early in “The Truce,” when, after the months in Auschwitz, a very sick Levi is helped down from a cart by two Russian nurses. The first Russian words he hears are “Po malu, po malu!”—“Slowly, slowly!”; or, even better in the Italian, “Adagio, adagio!” This soft charity falls like balm on the text. (But „Pomalu“ (not „Po malu“) is polish, not russian.
In russian it would be: медленно/medlenno, or: тихо / ticho, or постепенно / postepenno. Note: JSB)
Saul Bellow once said that all the great modern novelists were really attempting a definition of human nature, in order to justify the continuation of life and of their craft. This is preëminently true of Primo Levi, even if we feel, at times, that it is a project thrust upon him by fortune. In some respects, Levi’s vision is pessimistic, because he reminds us “how empty is the myth of original equality among men.” In Auschwitz, the already strong prospered—because they were physically or morally tougher than others, or because they were less sensitive, and greedier and more cynical in the will to live. (Jean Améry, who was tortured by the S.S. in Belgium, averred that even before pain we are not equal.) On the other hand, Levi is no tragic theologian. He did not believe that the “pitiless process of natural selection” that ruled in the camps confirmed man’s essential brutishness. The philosopher Berel Lang, in one of the best recent inquiries into Levi’s work, argues that this moral optimism makes him a singular figure. Lang says that Levi can be turned into neither a Hobbesian (for whom the camps would represent the ultimate state of nature) nor a modern Darwinian (who must struggle to explain pure altruism, except as camouflaged biological self-interest). For Levi, Auschwitz was exceptional, anomalous, an unnatural laboratory. “We do not believe that man is fundamentally brutal, egoistic, and stupid in his conduct once every civilized institution is taken away,” Levi writes forthrightly. “We believe, rather, that the only conclusion to be drawn is that in the face of driving need and physical privation many habits and social instincts are reduced to silence.”
In normal existence, Levi argues, there is a “third way” between winning and losing, between altruism and atrocity, between being saved and being drowned, and this third way is in fact the rule. But in the camp there was no third way. It is this apprehension that expands Levi’s understanding for those caught in what he called the gray zone. He places in the gray zone all those who were morally compromised by some degree of collaboration with the Germans—from the lowliest (those prisoners who got a little extra food by performing menial jobs like sweeping or being night watchmen) through the more ambiguous (the Kapos, often thuggish enforcers and guards who were themselves also prisoners) to the utterly tragic (the Sonderkommandos, Jews employed for a few months to run the gas chambers and crematoria, until they themselves were killed). The gray zone, which might be mistaken for the third way, is an aberration, a state of desperate limitation produced by the absence of a third way. Unlike Hannah Arendt, who judged Jewish collaboration with infamous disdain, Levi makes a notable attempt at comprehension and tempered judgment. He finds such people pitiable as well as culpable, because they were at once grotesquely innocent and guilty. And he does not exempt himself from this moral mottling: on the one hand, he firmly asserts his innocence, but, on the other, he feels guilty to have survived.
Levi sometimes said that he felt a larger shame—shame at being a human being, since human beings invented the world of the concentration camp. But if this is a theory of general shame it is not a theory of original sin. One of the happiest qualities of Levi’s writing is its freedom from religious temptation. He did not like the darkness of Kafka’s vision, and, in a remarkable sentence of dismissal, gets to the heart of a certain theological malaise in Kafka: “He fears punishment, and at the same time desires it . . . a sickness within Kafka himself.” Goodness, for Levi, was palpable and comprehensible, but evil was palpable and incomprehensible. That was the healthiness within himself.
On the morning of April 11, 1987, this healthily humane man, age sixty-seven, walked out of his fourth-floor apartment and either fell or threw himself over the bannister of the building’s staircase. The act, if suicide, appeared to undo the suture of his survival. Some people were outraged; others refused to see it as suicide. The implication, not quite spoken, was uncomfortably close to dismay that the Nazis had won after all. “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later,” Elie Wiesel said. Yet Levi was a survivor who committed suicide, not a suicide who failed to survive. He himself had seemed to argue against such morbidity, in his chapter on Jean Améry in “The Drowned and the Saved.” Améry, who killed himself at the age of sixty-five, said that in Auschwitz he thought a great deal about dying; rather tartly, Levi replied that in the camp he was too busy for such perturbation. “The business of living is the best defense against death, and not only in the camps.”
Many contemporary commentators knew little or nothing about Levi’s depression, which he struggled with for decades, and which had become desperately severe. In his last months, he felt unable to write, was in poor health, was worried about his mother’s decline. In February, he told his American translator Ruth Feldman that his depression was, in certain respects, “worse than Auschwitz, because I’m no longer young and I have scant resilience.” His family was in no doubt. “No! He’s done what he’d always said he’d do,” his wife wailed, when she heard what had happened. In this regard, one could see Levi as a survivor twice over, first of the camps and then of depression. He survived for a very long time, and then chose not to survive, the terminal act perhaps not at odds with survival but continuous with it: a decision to leave the prison on his own terms, in his own time. His friend Edith Bruck, herself a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau, said, “There are no howls in Primo’s writing—all emotion is controlled—but Primo gave such a howl of freedom at his death.” This is moving, certainly, and perhaps true. Thus one consoles oneself, and consolation is necessary: like much suicide, Levi’s death is only a silent howl, because it voids its own echo. It is natural to be bewildered, and it is important not to moralize. For, above all, Job existed and was not a parable. ♦
psychosputnik 