{"id":4647,"date":"2020-06-24T18:24:15","date_gmt":"2020-06-24T18:24:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/printed-matter\/?p=4647"},"modified":"2020-06-24T18:26:26","modified_gmt":"2020-06-24T18:26:26","slug":"never-again-what","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/primolevicenter.org\/printed-matter\/never-again-what\/","title":{"rendered":"Never Again What?"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the Hard Questions Primo Levi\u2019s Still Asking<\/h3>\n
\n Giacomo Lichtner<\/a>\r\n\t \t\t
\n
Giacomo Lichtner is Associate Professor of History and Film at Victoria University of Wellington and serves on the board of the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand. He is the author of Film and the Shoah in France and Italy<\/em> (2008, 2015) and Fascism in Italian Cinema Since 1945: the Politics and Aesthetics of Memory<\/em> (2013).<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

One hundred years ago Primo Levi was born in Turin, the first-born son of a middle-class Jewish-Italian family. They were turbulent years but Italian Jews were well-integrated and patriotic, and Primo led a sheltered early life, developing a love of mountaineering, geology, chemistry, literature and language in the fertile milieu of Turin\u2019s secular, self-confident bourgeoisie. He was 19 in 1938, when Italy issued racial laws to discriminate against its Jews: a precocious chemistry student, Levi would be allowed to complete his degree while his younger siblings were expelled from state schools. In 1943, after Italy\u2019s armistice provoked a brutal German occupation, Levi joined the Resistance and it was while fighting in his cherished Alps that Levi was arrested by Italian militias.<\/p>\n

On February 22, 1944, Levi was deported to Auschwitz, where he would survive until the Soviet liberation of the camp on January 27, 1945. A warm and humble man, he resented any suggestion that his experience was somehow paradigmatic, or that he held some greater clarity than other survivors. Yet Levi\u2019s post-war writings remain fundamental reading, especially his 1947 Auschwitz memoir If This Is a Man. Through his own story, that work still now conveys with an empathetic yet clinical eye the historical, social and economic prerogatives that define the Holocaust as a modern genocide.<\/p>\n

Today, populism is resurgent and fascism once again seeks bourgeois legitimacy. Across the world, the language and tropes of antisemitism find new ways to insert themselves into public discourse. Racists seek to shore up their intolerance with a perfunctory condemnation of the Holocaust as absolute evil, even as they stoke up xenophobia, separate families at the border, turn a blind eye to murder and let migrants drown. The ongoing relevance of Levi\u2019s work is not its ecumenical lesson against intolerance\u2014in the vein of Anne Frank\u2019s diary for instance\u2014but rather its ability to draw out the contradictory essence of dehumanization and resilience while remaining specific, precise and historically grounded. It tells us that \u201cremembering\u201d is ephemeral and insufficient, because the Holocaust happened once but the struggle carries on.<\/p>\n

A book that was initially dismissed and rediscovered by the wider public only in 1958, has long become a canonical text. On the occasion of his centenary, here are ten reasons to re-read and re-consider the sensitivity, rage and understated greatness of If This is a Man.<\/p>\n

I.<\/p>\n

Or may your house fall apart, may illness impair you, may your offspring avert their faces from you. The last three lines of \u201cShema,\u201d Levi\u2019s 1946 poem that serves as an epigraph to his memoir, are a biblical curse. While the poem is often celebrated for its commitment to \u201cconsider\u201d and \u201cmeditate on\u201d the deep traumas of totalitarianism, the final curse gives it the aggressive and desperate urgency that define it.<\/p>\n

\u201cShema\u201d is a subversion of the fundamental tenet of Jewish theology: \u201cShema Israel, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Ehad\u201d\u2014Hear O Israel, God is your Lord, God is one. Levi substitutes the commandment to remember the faith in a monotheistic God with the commandment to reflect on the dehumanizing essence of the Holocaust, at all times. It is a threat of multiple historicities: in 1946 it conveyed the urgency of the necessity to speak\u2014and the fear of not being heard\u2014that haunted many survivors; with the line \u201cmay your offspring avert their faces from you,\u201d it foresaw the generational backlash of the 1970s, when the next generation of Europeans did indeed take to task the hypocrisies and collective silences that had enabled the continent\u2019s economic and political rebirth; and today, when truth is contested and memory routinely politicized, it continues to hold a fundamental relevance in reminding us that historical memory is not only the matter of memorial days, plaques and platitudes, but a constant effort.<\/p>\n

What is the unknown price of the compromises we make daily? The sign of the ongoing relevance of Levi\u2019s curse is that when Francesco Rosi adapted Levi\u2019s The Truce for the screen in 1997, he omitted these lines from the final scene, seeking to retain the poignancy of the poem without its final turn. From the pages of his work Levi still challenges us not to be soothed by memory and not to seek catharsis in the empty rhetoric of \u201cnever again\u201d: never again what?<\/p>\n

II.
\nIt was my good fortune to have been deported to Auschwitz only in 1944, after the German government had resolved to lengthen the life expectancy of condemned inmates to address the increasing shortage of labor, allowing significant improvements in living conditions and suspending temporarily the arbitrary killing of individuals.<\/p>\n

The first words of Levi\u2019s brief preface, which he added to the later editions of his memoir. It is astonishing, and no doubt jarring to many, that the first words of any Holocaust memoir should refer to luck. Yet survivors\u2019 unwillingness to see their survival as a \u201ccredit,\u201d which might somehow disparage the victims, makes luck a more common referent than we might think. In Levi\u2019s case certainly, that single sentence performs multiple invaluable historical and narrative tasks.<\/p>\n

First, it immediately identifies the exceptionalism of survival in the context of genocide. Second, it places Levi\u2019s story into a time and place\u2014Auschwitz after the war had turned but before the mass deportation of half a million Hungarian Jews. Third, it introduces Levi as a witness, interested in factual accuracy over rhetoric. Fourth, it foreshadows a key theme of the book\u2014the difficulty to comprehend the Holocaust with the language and taxonomy of \u201cnormal\u201d life. This will later crystallize in two of the most famous moments of the book. First, in the German guard\u2019s response \u201chier ist kein warum\u201d (\u201chere there is no why\u201d), and then in the French prisoner\u2019s reminder (carved for good measure at the bottom of his bowl) \u201cne pas chercher \u00e0 comprendre\u201d (\u201cdon\u2019t try to understand\u201d).<\/p>\n

Today, populism is resurgent and fascism once again seeks bourgeois legitimacy.<\/p>\n

But most of all, Levi\u2019s \u201cluck\u201d introduces a wholesale rejection of meaning, and especially of any overarching philosophical, political or religious frameworks to explain Auschwitz. As a scientist, Levi is not afraid of explanation, even actively seeking it in human psychology and social mores, but like many who followed his footsteps he is afraid that to explain the Holocaust will be to explain it away\u2014he shies away from offering peace where he can see only a truce, or closure where he has found none.<\/p>\n

*
\nIII.
\nMuch was then said and done amongst us; but of those things it is fitting that no memory should endure.<\/p>\n

Thus Levi draws a veil over the dawn that follows the last night at the Fossoli transit camp, before deportation to Auschwitz. Although in the camp every day would feel as a death sentence, the last night at Fossoli carries a different kind of foreboding, more violent for the sudden realization of what will happen. Levi leaves us an indelible record of the tension between the instinctive reaction to wail and recall and despair and pre-emptively mourn, and the equally instinctive reaction to attend to daily needs, which don\u2019t cease to exert their urgency: \u201cWould you not feed your children today if you knew that tomorrow they will die?\u201d he asks.<\/p>\n

But when faced with the extreme intimacy of the last night of the condemned (\u201csuch a night that one knew that human eyes should not witness it and survive\u201d), Levi delineates a limit that remains a contested border. It is a limit of representation shared by many cultures, that demands pity, respect, timor dei, that causes to avert one\u2019s eyes before death. But it is also a subtler limit to the commitment to remember, encapsulated in the Talmudic oxymoron that there are moments that should neither be remembered nor forgotten: the voices of the dead are their own and to share them is to mediate them, to appropriate them even. Levi was throughout his life extremely sensitive to any suggestion that he may have survived in order to \u201cspeak\u201d for those who did not. How then does one recapture the perspectives of the victims in the history of a genocide?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

IV.
\nThus died Emilia, who was three years old \u2026 During the journey in the cattle car her father and mother had managed to give her a bath in a zinc bowl, with lukewarm water that the degenerate German machinist had allowed to draw from the engine dragging us to our death.<\/p>\n

First of many references to dignity as Resistance. Levi\u2019s reflection of dehumanization is also inherently a reflection on humanity and the resilience of the human spirit in the face of totalitarian terrorism. In keeping with the ethical markers set out earlier, and also consistently with most survivors, Levi conveys only generally the horror of the three-day journey to Auschwitz in a cattle car.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an instinctive mark of respect for those who perished during the journey, those\u2014almost all\u2014who were to be gassed upon arrival, and those who had to endure the sensory assault of the deportation train, the details of which are now well-documented but not to be relayed in haste. The deportation trains and its corollaries (the Greek cargo ships, Polish trucks, death marches \u2026) worked as liminal spaces between the outside world and the \u201cconcentrationary universe,\u201d but they also worked as extensions of the sites of genocide, be they the fields, forests and ravines of Eastern Europe, or the gas chambers. This adds to the gut-wrenching image Levi chooses to single out, of parents preserving the semblance of normality for their child. It is a decision that foregrounds humanity but also the ambiguities of deception, which should defy simplistic explanation. The job of life occupied the condemned: \u201cIf they were to kill you tomorrow along with your child, would you not feed them today?\u201d The power of Levi\u2019s compassion remains that it tests the reader by being consistently as authentic as it is uncompromising.<\/p>\n

*
\nV.
\nWe are slaves, devoid of every right, exposed to every form of insult, doomed to almost certain death, but we retain one power and we must defend it because it our last: the faculty to refuse our consent.<\/p>\n

Levi regrets not remembering verbatim the lesson in Jewish morality and Hapsburg discipline of former Sgt. Steinlauf, the prisoner who chastises Levi early in the memoir for not washing properly with cold, dirty water in the camp\u2019s abysmal latrine complex. This is one of a series of encounters that help Levi trace the death camp as a battlefield of humanity, between human resilience and dehumanization.<\/p>\n

Against all odds, Levi learns early in his camp experience that holding on to one\u2019s humanity requires a super-human effort to maintain dignity, integrity and to not succumb or attempt to rationalize the aberrant ethical codes of the camp. Such is Levi\u2019s revulsion for the inhumanity he witnesses that he instinctively rejects what seems to him a naive and inadequate statement of resistance. It is telling of Levi\u2019s self-effacement that he considered obsolete in himself the kind of ordinary resistance he celebrated in little Emilia Levi\u2019s parents. His desire to err on the side of self-deprecation is how one should explain this contradiction, because ultimately Levi\u2019s memoir proves that he applied Steinlauf\u2019s simple moral code, and he certainly looked to it with more warmth and kinship than to any other framework of meaning and conduct he encountered at Auschwitz.<\/p>\n

*
\nVI.
\nThe wooden hut, crammed with suffering humanity, is filled with words, memories, and another kind of pain. The Germans call this pain \u201cheimweh\u201d: it is a beautiful word; it means \u201chome-sickness.\u201d<\/p>\n

A reference to Dante\u2019s Inferno, where damned former lovers Paolo and Francesca regret that \u201cthere is no greater pain than to remember the happy time in wretchedness.\u201d With this devastating analysis, Levi encapsulates a quintessential historical truth of the Holocaust: the barracks bring no respite from the dehumanizing existence of the camp, or rather bring a brief physical respite designed further to alienate.<\/p>\n

The break from work and beatings allows nostalgia and the realization that \u201cthere is no possible return,\u201d even in the unlikely event of survival\u2014\u201dour spirit extinguished well before our anonymous death,\u201d writes Levi. This is part of a recurring theme in the book, which reveals the pain of identity and even of dreams. Levi recalls the Italian Jews briefly trying to establish regular meetings before their deteriorating bodies and dwindling numbers caused them to stop the pretense of any bond other than the shared doom of the h\u00e4ftling (prisoner).<\/p>\n

Racists seek to shore up their intolerance with a perfunctory condemnation of the Holocaust as absolute evil, even as they stoke up xenophobia.<\/p>\n

This is not to say that solidarity was impossible at Auschwitz: its history brims with inspiring examples, including in Levi\u2019s own relationship with a handful of comrades, and especially Alberto. But from his doubly alien perspective as a Western, secular Jew, Levi sees solidarity with wonder, as an exceptional and discrete event, not the stuff of civilized organization and social belonging.<\/p>\n

*
\nVII.
\nIf I were God I would spit Kuhn\u2019s prayer into the dirt.<\/p>\n

With a few shattering words spat out of the page Levi concludes his description of the mass selection for execution of October 1944: one of the spared, a Hungarian Jew named Kuhn, recites the Birkat Hagomel, the prayer of thanks for a danger averted, while condemned inmates await their turn to the gas chambers. Levi\u2019s normally detached, unjudgemental prose comes into its own on the rare occasions when Levi departs from it: pages and pages of restrained emotion suddenly bestow extraordinary power to Levi\u2019s condemnation of piety, of the very notion of God in a place like Auschwitz. We can take it further: this is a violent rebellion against the concept of survival as an all-consuming, individualistic, hollow, ephemeral endeavor for the inmates, which prefigures what would later be known as survivor guilt.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

VIII.
\nWith neither hatred nor scorn, Alex wipes his hand on my shoulder, and he would be quite surprised if someone were to tell him that by that action today I judge him.  <\/p>\n

One of Levi\u2019s most famous contribution to Holocaust studies is the concept of \u201cgray zone,\u201d which he first posited in the chapter of If This is a Man entitled \u201cThe Drowned and the Saved,\u201d and then developed in the eponymous 1987 book. The term defines the complex and multifaceted buffer zone between good and evil in a totalitarian context designed to annihilate, but also to corrupt.<\/p>\n

In this instance, Levi sits a surreal exam with Dr. Pannwitz, a German engineer, for a coveted job in the Auschwitz chemical lab (\u201che addresses me as Sie: Dr. Pannwitz has no sense of humor,\u201d and later, in the lab, \u201che calls us monsieur, which is ridiculous and bewildering\u201d). The author is escorted to and from the interview by Alex, his group\u2019s Kapo, who touches some grease and wipes his hand on Levi\u2019s shirt. That gesture of unthinking disrespect is etched in Levi\u2019s memory with the clarity of a moment that has a node of its own in the brain\u2019s mental map. Alex is an inmate too, yet his act reveals a man who has bought into the racial and social hierarchy of the camp, and the specific sub-humanity of Jewish prisoners. It is far from the most hateful or violent action by a fellow inmate Levi would have witnessed, yet it holds questions of universal relevance about the habituation to cruelty and indifference produced by a society that normalizes injustice.<\/p>\n

*
\nIX.
\n\u201cUntil the sea had closed over us.\u201d<\/p>\n

The chapter of the Canto of Ulysses brings to the fore Levi\u2019s constant intertextual reference to Dante\u2019s Divine Comedy, and in particular to its first part, the Inferno. It recounts Levi\u2019s brief respite from scrubbing underground diesel tanks with his crew to fetching the daily soup ration with Jean, a young French prisoner. As Levi struggles to recall and translate Dante\u2019s infernal encounter with Ulysses\u2014condemned as a fraudulent advisor for his role in leading his sailors astray\u2014he realizes that Auschwitz has changed its meaning forever.<\/p>\n

Ulysses\u2019 curiosity, restlessness and arrogance emerge as quintessential human traits that contain the seeds of resistance to alienation. Where Ulysses and Dante had bonded as fellow travelers trying to go beyond human limitations, Levi and Jean form a fleeting connection in the effort to remember and understand. Ulysses\u2019 words to his reluctant sailors are Dante\u2019s words to his readers, and finally Levi\u2019s own words to himself and to Jean: \u201cconsider your sowing \/ you were not made to live like brutes \/ but to follow virtue and knowledge.\u201d While the moment cannot last, and the \u201chollow seas\u201d once again overwhelm the castaways, Levi\u2019s fragments of Dante manage to illuminate the gradual subversion of the ancient Greeks\u2019 concept of hubris.<\/p>\n

The hubris of Odysseus destroying Poseidon\u2019s statue in Troy, or of the suitors partying at Penelope\u2019s court, becomes in the late Middle-Ages the Christian, unforgivable hubris of Ulysses chasing the ends of the Earth. Then it morphs further, into the systematic, industrial hubris of modernity, only climaxing in the German illusion of invincibility. Something that had once signaled insufficient deference to divine designs or the desire to eschew human limitations became a lust to replace divinity itself. In the face of Nazi hubris, Ulysses\u2019 thirst for knowledge seems not only innocent, but the antidote to totalitarianism\u2019s destruction of independent, critical thinking.
\nX.
\nCharles took off his cap. I was sorry not to have a cap.<\/p>\n

With elegant circularity, the closing words of the book are as understated as its incipit. After the German guards hurriedly abandoned the camp, Levi survived ten days in a room of the Auschwitz hospital block, alongside sufferers of dysentery and typhus, and desperate survivors scavenging for food in a freezing camp that had suddenly no guards, but also no infrastructure to distribute rations, generate heat or bury the dead.<\/p>\n

Levi notices the trappings of humanity re-emerging: sharing food, storytelling, rejoicing in work\u2026 solidarity: the distant memory of a familiar social structure taking form. Unlike the image popular culture privileges, of gates thrown down and triumphant masses, there are no heroics, no liberation in the liberation of Auschwitz. This was indeed the case, to the point that Soviet camera operators had to stage the liberation three days later, on January 30. That was Stalin\u2019s kind of realism after all: reality as it ought to be. Levi\u2019s liberation is reality as it was: a new chapter marked by a chance encounter with cautious Soviet soldiers finding Levi and his friend Charles burying a body in the frozen Polish ground, and Levi\u2019s regret not to be able to tip his cap at the liberators. It is an ending that captures the unadorned brilliance of this book by refusing catharsis, for both the author and the reader.<\/p>\n

Consider that this has been then, or may our children avert their faces from us.<\/p>\n

William Kentridge, Smoke, Ashes, Fable. More Sweetly Play the Dance<\/em><\/a>, 2015<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the Hard Questions Primo Levi\u2019s Still Asking   One hundred years ago Primo Levi was born in Turin, the first-born son of a middle-class Jewish-Italian family. 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