Reappraisals

by Tony Judt

  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, who were swept away in his defeat, and who 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 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 Czesław Miłosz 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

  This essay first appeared in the New York Review of Books in 1999 as a review of Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist by Myriam Anissimov. Ms. Anissimov took offense at some of my comments on her book: Her response— and my reply—were published in the New York Review of Books, vol. 46, no. xiii, August 1999.

  NOTES TO CHAPTER II

  1 Levi left no suicide note, but he was known to be depressed. His death is widely regarded as deliberate, but some uncertainty remains.

  2 “I soldati passavano come un gregge disfatto,” Levi in La Repubblica, September 7, 1983, quoted in Claudio Pavone, Una Guerra Civile: Saggio storico sulla moralità nella Resistenza (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991), 16. See also “Gold,” in Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), 130; “Arsenic,” in The Periodic Table, 170.

  3 See Levi’s interview with Risa Sodi in Partisan Review 54, no. 3 (1987), 356; and Giuseppe Grassano, Primo Levi, Il Castoro (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1981), quoted in Myriam Anissimov, Primo Levi (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1999), 257.

  4 The main works by Levi in English are Survival in Auschwitz (first published by the Orion Press, 1959); The Reawakening (New York: Touchstone, 1995); The Periodic Table (New York: Schocken Books, 1984); The Monkey’s Wrench (New York: Penguin, 1995); If Not Now, When? (New York: Penguin, 1995); Moments of Reprieve: A Memoir of Auschwitz (New York: Penguin, 1995); The Mirror Maker (London: Abacus, 1997); The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989); Other People’s Trades (New York: Summit, 1989).

  5 See Giulio Einaudi, “Primo Levi e la casa editrice Einaudi,” in Primo Levi as Witness, ed. Pietro Frassica (Florence: Casalini Libri, 1990), 31-43; and Levi in Ferdinando Camon, Conversations with Primo Levi (Marlboro, VT: Marlboro, 1989), published in Italian as Autoritratto di Primo Levi (Padua: Edizioni Nord-Est, 1987), 51.

  6 The only sustained element of metaphor, or at least of literary indulgence, in Levi’s writing is the repeated allusion to the odyssey of Ulysses. The mnemonic significance in Survival in Auschwitz of the Canto of Ulysses from Dante’s Inferno is famous: “Think of your breed: for brutish ignorance / Your mettle was not made; you were made men, / To follow after knowledge and excellence.” But Ulysses is everywhere—after the showers, when the Blockälteste, “like Polyphemus,” touches everyone to see if they are wet; in the Katowice camp, where Russian soldiers “took pleasure in food and wine, like Ulysses’ companions after the ship had been pulled ashore”; in the “cyclopean, cone-shaped gorge” where Levi searched for nickel; and in an infinity of allusions of style and form, notably in the invocation of lost companions, drowned and saved alike. See Survival in Auschwitz, pp. 103, 133; The Reawakening, p. 60; “Nickel,” in The Periodic Table, p. 64. See also the thoughtful chapter by Victor Brombert, “Primo Levi and the Canto of Ulysses,” in In Praise of Antiheroes: Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature 1830-1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 115-138.

  7 “The Story of Avrom,” in Moments of Reprieve, 81. Among the Italian virtues
that Levi prized highly was a relative unconcern for national or ethnic difference: “‘Italy is an odd country,’ Chaim said . . . ‘but one thing is certain, in Italy foreigners aren’t enemies. You’d think the Italians are more enemies to one another than to foreigners . . . it’s strange, but it’s true.’” (If Not Now, When?, p. 323).

  8 In the story “Arsenic” Levi is quite specific about one character, the client who comes to seek chemical analysis of some poisoned sugar: He spoke “excellent Piedmontese with witty Astian tones” (The Periodic Table, p. 170). Asti is a small town just forty miles from Turin, distant enough to give its speech a multitude of subtle local identifying marks of its own.

  9 Calvino is quoted by Anissimov, Primo Levi, p. 300; for moderation as a Piedmontese virtue, see Primo Levi’s interview with Roberto di Caro in L’Espresso, April 26, 1987, also cited by Anissimov, p. 401. See also “Gold” and “Potassium” in The Periodic Table, pp. 51, 127; for “a mysterious city,” see Camon, Conversations with Primo Levi, p. 75 (afterword to U.S. edition).

  10 See “Iron,” in The Periodic Table, p. 41; Primo Levi and Tullio Regge, Dialogo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 19.

  11 “Potassium,” The Periodic Table, p. 60.

  12 The Reawakening, p. 97; Primo Levi, interview in La Stampa, June 5, 1983, quoted by Anissimov, Primo Levi, p. 357.

  13 Primo Levi, “Dello scrivere oscuro,” Opere (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1997), vol. 2, p. 677; “A un giovane lettore,” Opere, vol. 2, p. 847. See also his troubled comments on Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” in “La ricerca delle radici,” Opere, vol. 2, p. 1513: “Scrivere è un trasmettere; che dire se il messagio è cifrato e nessuno conosce la chiave?” (“To write is to transmit; but what if the message is coded and no one knows the key?”) On Levi’s critics see Domenico Scarpa, “Un anno di Primo Levi” in La Rivista dei Libri, May 1998, p. 35.

  14 See Survival in Auschwitz, pp. 29-30, 51.

  15 See The Reawakening, pp. 99, 204; “Iron,” The Periodic Table, p. 48.

  16 See The Monkey’s Wrench, pp. 139, 143, 146. See also Levi, “L’avventura tecnologica,” in Opere, vol. 2, pp. 1444-1452.

  17 Contrast the contemporary Jewish population of Greece, 76,000; of the Netherlands, 140,000; or of France, 350,000. For Mussolini’s motives in introducing the Race Laws, see Gene Bernardini, “The Origins and Development of Racial Anti-Semitism in Fascist Italy,” Journal of Modern History, no. 3 (September 1977): 431-453.

  18 On the history of Italian Jews under Fascism see Susan Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); for details of deportations from Turin, see Liliana Picciotto Fargion, “Gli ebrei di Torino deportati: notizie statistiche (1938-1945),” in L’ebreo in oggetto: L’applicazione della normativa antiebreica a Torino, 1938-1943, ed. Fabio Levi (Turin: Silvio Zamorani, 1991), 159-190.

  19 See Camon, Conversations with Primo Levi, p. 68; Survival in Auschwitz, p. 12; “Hydrogen” and “Zinc” in The Periodic Table, pp. 24, 34-35.

  20 See, e.g., Fernanda Eberstadt, “Reading Primo Levi,” in Commentary 80, no. 4 (October 1985), who finds much of his work “fastidious” and “insubstantial” (p. 47); also Levi’s comments to Risa Sodi in “An Interview with Primo Levi,” pp. 355-366.

  21 The Monkey’s Wrench, p. 52. On the concept of “shadowing,” and the problem of reading literature “backshadowed” by the Holocaust, see the sensitive and insightful remarks of Michael André Bernstein, notably in Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

  22 Furio Colombo, “Introduction,” in Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust, p. x.

  23 Giuliana Tedeschi in Nicola Caracciolo, Uncertain Refuge: Italy and the Jews During the Holocaust (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 121. Levi is quoted from L’Eco dell’educazione ebraica, in Anissimov, Primo Levi, p. 273.

  24 Moments of Reprieve, prologue. For the Italian original see Levi, Opere, vol. 2, p. 576. Nedo Fiano is in Caracciolo, Uncertain Refuge, p. 69.

  25 See If Not Now, When?, p. 295; Survival in Auschwitz, p. 82; The Reawakening, p. 16; Moments of Reprieve, p. 118.

  26 The Drowned and the Saved, pp. 83-84.

  27 Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (New York: Penguin, 1976); Jean Améry, Par-delà le crime et le châtiment: Essai pour surmonter l’insurmontable (Arles: Actes Sud, 1995); Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960); Jorge Semprún, Literature or Life (Viking, 1997).

  28 Anissimov, Primo Levi, p. 5; “Carbon,” in The Periodic Table, p. 232.

  29 For Rumkowski, see Moments of Reprieve, p. 127; for Dr. Müller, see “Vanadium,” in The Periodic Table, pp. 221-222.

  30 “Io pensavo che la vita fuori era bella . . . ” (“I was thinking that life outside was beautiful”), Opere, vol. 1, p. 160. Contrast the testimony of Franco Schönheit, in Alexander Stille, Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism (New York: Summit, 1991), p. 347: “Certainly these are experiences, but always absurd experiences. How can you learn something from an experience of this kind? That’s part of the reason I never talk with my children about it; those experiences teach nothing. They belong to a world of the impossible, totally outside the sphere of ordinary humanity.”

  31 The Reawakening, “Afterword,” pp. 210, 222; contrast the report that Levi and Leonardo de Benedetti drew up in 1945 at the request of the Soviet authorities in Katowice, which describes gas chambers, crematoria, and disease in unadorned detail. It was later published in Italy in the journal Minerva Medica. See Opere, vol. 1, pp. 1331-1361.

  32 See Anissimov, Primo Levi, p. 288; Survival in Auschwitz, pp. 15, 128, 135-136.

  33 The Drowned and the Saved, pp. 168, 182, 203; Primo Levi, “Buco Nero di Auschwitz,” La Stampa, January 22, 1987.

  34 The Reawakening, pp. 25-26.

  CHAPTER III

  The Jewish Europe of Manès Sperber

  The conventional history of Europe in the twentieth century begins with the collapse of continental empires in the course of World War I. From Lenin’s revolution in 1917 there arose a vision that in time came to seem the only alternative to the descent into Fascism of much of the civilized world. Following the heroic struggles of World War II and the defeat of Fascism, the choice for thinking people seemed to lie between Communism and liberal democracy; but the latter was polluted for many by its imperialist ambitions, by the self-serving character of its democratic proclamations. Only at the end of the century, in our own day, has Communism, too, lost its last shreds of credibility, leaving the field to an uncertain liberalism shorn of confidence and purpose.

  That is the history of our century, as it seemed, and seems, to many in its time; and only in retrospect, and slowly, have its deeper and more convoluted patterns and meanings been unraveled and acknowledged, by scholars and participants alike. But there is another history of our era, a “virtual history” of the twentieth century, and it is the story of those men and women who lived through the century and also saw through it, who understood its meaning as it unfolded. There were not many of them. They did not need to wait for 1945, or 1989, to know what had happenedand what it had meant, to see beyond the illusions. For various reasons, they saw across the veil earlier. Most of them are now dead. Some of them died young, paying dearly for their disquieting perspicacity. A strikingly large number of these clear-sighted voyagers through the century were Jews, many from East-Central Europe.

  Manès Sperber was one of them. He is not very well known in the English-reading world; he wrote mainly in German, occasionally in French. His major work of fiction, Like a Tear in the Ocean, which appeared in 1949, is a very long, semiautobiographical roman à clef and not widely read. Its subject matter is a little like that of the early novels of André Malraux: It dissects the thoughts and the actions of small groups of intellectuals, revolutionaries, and conspirators adrift in the century. Unlike Malraux, h
owever, Sperber was never attracted to “historic personalities” of the Left or the Right. Indeed, the elegiac mood of his book, and its intellectual tone, is more reminiscent of Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon or Victor Serge in The Case of Comrade Tulayev, two other ex-Communists obsessed with their former allegiance.

  But Sperber was an influential man in his day. He was a member of that brilliant fellowship of exile in postwar Paris that included Czesław Miłosz, Kot Jelenski, Ignazio Silone, Boris Souvarine, François Fejtö, and Arthur Koestler. From 1946 he held a strategic editorial position at Calmann-Levy, the French publishing house, where he published in French some of the most significant writing from German-speaking Central Europe. He was also, with Koestler, Raymond Aron, Michael Polanyi, Edward Shils, and Stephen Spender, one of the animators of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the 1950s. It has been suggested that he and Koestler drew on their Comintern experience at the Berlin meeting of 1950, when the official justification and description of the Congress for Cultural Freedom was being drawn up. While others discussed and argued interminably, Sperber and Koestler put forward a preprepared text and got it voted through. If so, this would make Sperber one of the founding fathers of cold war liberalism, which is a bit misleading, since he also remained a lifelong friend of the non-Communist left. He even served with Raymond Aron and André Malraux, in 1945, in the latter’s short-lived Ministry of Information, a “ministry of all the talents” intended to assist in the postwar recovery of French cultural and intellectuallife; and he co-wrote, with Koestler and Albert Camus, an influential pamphlet against the death penalty.