After the publication of John Gross’ review of Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved in the “weekday” New York Times on January 5, 1988, Irving Howe’s review of the book appeared the following Sunday, in the New York Times Book Review. Given the very format of the Review, Howe was by definition able to delve at length into Levi’s biography and origins as a writer, and draw upon the book’s text to discuss the “world” described by Levi – the world physical; the world psychological; a world inexpressible but consequently demanding expression – of existence in Germany’s concentration camp system.
In the conclusion of his review, Howe makes passing reference to the book’s brevity. This is true: it’s not that long in terms of measured length, but its power, attributable to Levi’s literary skill in confronting personal experiences and historical events – the nature of which can neither be captured in words nor by accepted “wisdom” – is inversely related to its size.
Howe’s review also includes a portrait of Levi by a photographer surnamed “Giansanti”.
“…Levi sternly rejects the cant of those high-minded folk who in the name of universal guilt blur the distinction between murderers and victims. “I do not know and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. I know that the murderers existed.””
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The Utter Sadness of the Survivor
By Irving Howe
THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED
By Primo Levi.
Translated by Raymond Rosenthal.
203 pp. New York:
Summit Books. $17.95.
The New York Times Book Review
January 10, 1988
Photograph by Giansanti (Sygma)
TO the vast literature on the Holocaust, this modest little book forms no more than a footnote. But it’s a precious footnote – a series of ripe meditations about the experience of Auschwitz, where the Italian-Jewish writer Primo Levi worked as a slave laborer during the Second World War.
Shortly before his suicide last April, Primo Levi remarked that in writing about “the tragic world” of the camps he hoped to avoid the frayed rhetoric of pathos or revenge; he chose instead to “assume the calm, sober language of the witness.” His new and final book, in Raymond Rosenthal’s lucid translation, employs exactly that language: humane, disciplined and, in its final impact, utterly sad.
Born in 1919, Primo Levi grew up in a cultivated middle-class Jewish family in Turin. As a youth he knew very little about Jewishness: it seemed “a cheerful little anomaly”‘ for someone living in a Catholic country. Young Levi trained to become a chemist, and would in fact work at that profession for most of his life. All might have gone smoothly, in pleasant bourgeois fashion, but for a sudden blow which disrupted his life and career in the late 1930’s: Mussolini, the brutal clown who ruled Italy, began to copy the anti-Semitic obscenities of his friend Hitler.
Levi’s life was torn apart, his mind opened up. He learned about the tiny nuclei of anti-Fascists in Milan and in 1934, after laboring at various nondescript jobs, he joined a group of partisans in the hills of Piedmont. Betrayed by an informer, the group was soon captured and Levi, questioned by the Fascist police, admitted to being a Jew, “partly out of fatigue but partly out of a sudden … surge of haughty pride.” In February 1944 he was handed over to the Nazis and shipped off to Auschwitz in a “railroad convoy [that] contained 650 persons; of these 525 were immediately put to death.” It was only Levi’s skill as a chemist, plus a measure of luck, that enabled him to live through the ordeal of Auschwitz.
After his liberation Levi wrote two books, now acknowledged classics, about his imprisonment in the camps: “Survival in Auschwitz” (1947) (the Italian title was “Se Questo E un Uomo” or “If This Is a Man”) and “The Reawakening” (1963) (“La Tregua” or “The Truce”). These summonings of memory reveal a touch of the scientist’s training in precise description: they are also notable for delicacy of style. “The Drowned and the Saved,” while a smaller work, represents Levi’s concluding effort to understand an experience that, as he had himself often indicated, must finally seem beyond the reach of human understanding: an evil so vast, systematic and sadistic that no available theory about the nature of evil can cope with it.
About the death camps Levi asks: “Were we witnessing the rational development of an inhuman plan or a manifestation (unique in history and still unsatisfactorily explained) of collective madness? Logic intent on evil or the absence of logic?” His answer, necessarily, is: both.
The “apotheosis of the German race,” that corrupt fantasy with which the Nazis soiled the imagination of so many of their countrymen, prepared the ground for “the Final Solution,” while the madness with which the Nazi leaders infected their followers enabled the SS to perform mass murders. Logic and anti-logic, ideology and insanity, rationality and sadism: all came together as Hitler led the scum of the earth to power. Yet it should also be remembered that the bohemian hooligans, demi-intellectuals and street thugs who formed the Nazi cadres were able to draw on a powerful tradition of German big business, and found sustenance in a popular demonology that had long encrusted European Christianity.
One of Levi’s most striking chapters, entitled “Useless Violence,” details the cruelty of the camp overlords which seemingly had no purpose other than, perhaps, the pleasure that can come to some human beings from tormenting others. With his gift for the exact detail, Levi describes this “useless violence” – from the terrors of the train transports to the humiliations of strip-pings, beatings, endless roll calls, tattoos and torture. It turns out, however, that from the Nazi point of view this “useless violence” was not quite useless. Asked by an interrogator, “Considering that you were going to kill them all … what was the point of the humiliations, the cruelties?” the former commandant of the Treblinka camp, Franz Stangl, answered: “To condition those who were to be the material executors of the operations.” (In plain English, that meant those who would man the gas chambers.) As Levi puts it, “Before dying the victim must be degraded, so that the murderer will be less burdened by guilt.” This was “the sole usefulness of useless violence.”
Nazi logic was clear. Systematically to dehumanize both guards and prisoners meant to create a realm of subjugation no longer responsive to the common norms of civilized society; and from this very process they had set in motion, the Nazis could then “conclude” that indeed Jews were not human. The Nazi enterprise drew upon, it could not be undertaken without, sadism; but at least among the leaders it was to be distinguished from commonplace sadism. It rested upon an abstract rage, the most terrible of all rages.
Bravely, without flinching, Levi confronts the consequences of this Nazi logic: that the dehumanization of the victims had to be enacted by the victims themselves, within their own ranks. In a troubling sentence he writes: “It is naive, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system” such as the Nazis created in the camps “sanctifies its victims: on the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.”
Step by step Levi shows how the humiliating stratification within the camps depended on a series of small “privileges” – small, but often making the difference between life and death. There was the “ritual entry” by which a new prisoner was dazed into submission. There were the little “jobs” which gave a minority of prisoners a bit of extra nourishment. There were the “better” jobs occupied by “low-ranking functionaries, a picturesque fauna: sweepers, kettle washers, night watchmen, bed smoothers (who exploited to their minuscule advantage the German fixation about bunks made up flat and square), checkers of lice and scabies, messengers, interpreters, assistants’ assistants. In general, they were poor devils like ourselves who worked full time like everyone else but who for an extra half-liter of soup were willing to carry out these … functions.” Such prisoners could be “coarse and arrogant, but they were not regarded as enemies.”
Moral judgment becomes more “delicate” with regard to those who occupied seemingly more advantageous positions: the barracks chiefs; the clerks, sometimes complicit in dreadful things, sometimes manipulating SS officers to soften a blow or spare a life; and the Kapos of labor battalions, brutes with the power of life and death over fellow prisoners.
Who became a Kapo? Common criminals. Political prisoners “broken by five or ten years of sufferings.” “Jews who saw in the particle of authority being offered them the only possible escape from ‘the final solution.’“ And finally, grimly, “power was sought by the many among the oppressed who had been contaminated by their oppressors and unconsciously strove to identify with them.”
Levi hesitates to judge, dealing compassionately with the “gray cases,” those wretched prisoners who worked for and, if they could, against the Nazis. Even with regard to the Sonderkommandos (the details assigned to dispose of corpses in the gas chambers), Levi tries to maintain a balance of response that may be beyond human capacity: “I believe that no one is authorized to judge them, not those who lived through the [camp] experience and even less those who did not.” And indeed, since most of these poor creatures also ended in the gas chambers, what is the point of judging them? The 20th century has taught us there are situations so extreme that it becomes immoral to make moral judgments about those who have had to confront them.
AT the same time, Levi sternly rejects the cant of those high-minded folk who in the name of universal guilt blur the distinction between murderers and victims. “I do not know and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. I know that the murderers existed.”
Primo Levi’s little book offers more of value, especially a discussion of the shame and guilt felt by survivors of the camps. Let me, however, turn to Levi’s concluding essay, in which he recounts the correspondence he conducted with a number of Germans who read his early books about the camps and then troubled to write him. These were by no means the worst of the Germans; quite the contrary. Yet one grows a little sick at reading their pleas of extenuation, sometimes their whining evasions. Of course these correspondents don’t defend the Nazis, but rarely do they confront the crucial question: How was it possible that so many Germans could vote for and then yield themselves to the Nazis?
With unruffled dignity Levi answers his correspondents, pointing out, for example, that the claim of “not having known” is often impossible to believe; that anti-Semitism, far from being a Nazi invention, was deeply imbedded in German culture; and that there are clear cases of complicity – “no one forced the Topf Company (flourishing today in Wiesbaden) to build the enormous multiple crematoria…”
Whoever has come under the sway of Primo Levi’s luminous mind and lovely prose will feel pained at the realization that we shall not be hearing from him again. At a time when the Holocaust, like almost everything else in our culture, has been subjected to the vulgarity of public relations, Primo Levi wrote about this most terrible event with a purity of spirit for which we can only feel grateful. This was a man.
Both in the Same Trap
I intend to examine here the memories of extreme experiences, of injuries suffered or inflicted….
Here, as with other phenomena, we are dealing with a paradoxical analogy between victim and oppressor, and we are anxious to be clear: both are in the same trap, but it is the oppressor, and he alone, who has prepared it and activated it, and if he suffers from this, it is right that he should suffer; and it is iniquitous that the victim should suffer from it, as he does indeed suffer from it, even at a distance of decades. Once again it must be observed, mournfully, that the injury cannot be healed: it extends through time, and the Furies, in whose existence we are forced to believe, not only rack the tormentor… but perpetuate the tormentor’s work by denying peace to the tormented.
From “The Drowned and the Saved.”
Irving Howe has most recently co-edited “The Penguin Book of Modern Jewish Verse.”