“trading punches” is an experience I do not have, as far back as I can go in memory; nor can I say I regret not having it. . . . go[ing] down onto the battlefield. . . . was and is beyond my reach. I admire it, but I must point out that this choice, protracted throughout his post-Auschwitz existence, led [Amery] to such severity and intransigence as to make him incapable of finding joy in life, indeed of living. Those who “trade blows” with the entire world achieve dignity but pay a very high price for it because they are sure to be defeated.
Remarkably, Levi concludes: “Amery’s suicide, which took place in Salzburg in 1978 [i.e., nine years before Levi’s leap into the stairwell], like other suicides allows for a nebula of explanations, but, in hindsight, that episode of defying the Pole offers one interpretation of it.”
This observation—that the rage of resentment is somehow linked to self-destruction—is, in the perplexing shadow of Levi’s own suicide, enigmatic enough, and bears returning to. For the moment it may be useful to consider that Primo Levi’s reputation—rather, the grave and noble voice that sounds and summons through his pages—has been consummately free of rage, resentment, violent feeling, or any overt drive to “trade blows.” The voice has been one of pristine sanity and discernment. Levi has been unwilling to serve either as preacher or as elegist. He has avoided polemics; he has shrunk from being counted as one of those message-bearers “whom I view with distrust: the prophet, the bard, the soothsayer. That I am not.” Instead, he has offered himself as a singular witness—singular because he was “privileged” to survive as a laboratory slave, meaning that German convenience, at least temporarily, was met more through the exploitation of his training as a chemist than it would have been through his immediate annihilation as a Jew; and, from our own point of view, because of his clarity and selflessness as a writer. It is selfless to eschew freely running emotion, sermonizing, the catharsis of anger, when these so plainly plead their case before an unprecedentedly loathsome record of criminals and their crimes. Levi has kept his distance from blaming, scolding, insisting, vilifying, lamenting, crying out. His method has been to describe—meticulously, analytically, clarifyingly. He has been a Darwin of the death camps: not the Virgil of the German hell but its scientific investigator.
Levi himself recognizes that he has been particularly attended to for this quality of detachment. “From my trade,” he affirms in The Drowned and the Saved,
I contracted a habit that can be variously judged and defined at will as human or inhuman—the habit of never remaining indifferent to the individuals that chance brings before me. They are human beings but also “samples,” specimens in a sealed envelope to be identified, analyzed, and weighed. Now, the sample book that Auschwitz had placed before me was rich, varied, and strange, made up of friends, neutrals, and enemies, yet in any case food for my curiosity, which some people, then and later, have judged to be detached. . . . I know that this “naturalistic” attitude does not derive only or necessarily from chemistry, but in my case it did come from chemistry.
Whatever its source—chemistry, or, as others have believed, a lucent and humane restraint—this “naturalistic” approach has astonished and inspired readers and critics. Irving Howe speaks of Levi’s “unruffled dignity” and “purity of spirit,” James Atlas of his “magisterial equanimity.” Rita Levi-Montalcini, a recipient of the 1986 Nobel Prize in medicine and a fellow Turinese, devotes an epilogue in her memoir, In Praise of Imperfection, to Levi’s “detachment and absence of hatred.” You, she addresses Levi, have “come out of the most atrocious of all experiences with an upright forehead and a spirit pure.”
A temperament so transparent, so untainted, so unpolemical (indeed, so anti-polemical)—so like clear water—has, however, also provided a kind of relief, or respite, for those who hope finally to evade the gravamen of Levi’s chronicle. The novelist Johanna Kaplan sets it out for us: “Oh, that? Oh, that again?. . . Because by now, after all the powerful, anguished novels. . . ., after all the simple, heartrending documentary accounts, the stringent, haunting historians’ texts, the pained and arduous movies—that shocking newsreel footage. . . . after all the necessary, nightmare lists of involuntary martyrology, by now our response to the singular horrific barbarity of our time is—just the tiniest bit dutiful.” This desire to recoil may describe all of us; and yet we—some of us—drag through these foul swamps, the documents, the films, the photos, the talks, the tales, the conferences, year after year, taking it in and taking it in: perhaps because we are dutiful, perhaps because the fury of outrage owns us, more likely because we are the children of mercy and will not allow the suffering to recede into mere pastness, a time not ours, for which we are not responsible. We press on with the heartsick job of assimilating the imagination of savagery because in some seizure of helplessly belated justice we want to become responsible for the murdered. In short, guilt: in one form or another we are wounded by conscience. Either, as Jews, we were not there with the others who stood in for us as victims, or, as Christians, we were too much there, represented by the familiar upbringing of the criminals, with whose religious inheritance we have so much in common. Guilt in our absence, guilt in our presence. Jewish guilt; Christian guilt; English, French, Italian, Croatian, Ukrainian, American guilt. Guilt of the Germans whose patriotism gave birth to the criminals. Guilt of the Irish and the Swedes who hid behind neutrality. Guilt over zeal, guilt over apathy.
All of this Levi as naturalist skirts. He appears to have nothing to do with any of it. He is not in favor of a generalized anguish. His aim has been to erect a principled barrier against any show of self-appointed fanaticism, from any direction. Book after book has shied away from the emotive accusatory issues. Above all, Levi is careful not to blur victim and victimizer. He is wary of the sentimentalizers, preeners, hypothesizers: “I do not know,” he writes, “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 not a murderer. . . . to confuse [the murderers] with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity.” He is a stringent taxonomist, on the side of precision: the crimes and the criminals have an identifiable habitation and name. This may be one reason—it is not the only one—it has been possible to read Levi with soul’s pain (how could this be otherwise?), but without guilt. It is not that Levi absolves; rather, he mutes the question of absolution—a question always in the forefront for messengers as radically different from each other as, say, Elie Wiesel and Raul Hilberg. Hilberg’s investigations in particular, coolly data-obsessed as they are, have erased the notion of “bystander” status in Nazi Germany. Levi has devoted himself less to social history and psychological motivation than to the microscope, with its exactingly circumscribed field of vision. Society-as-organism is not the area under his scrutiny, as it is for Hilberg; neither is suffering as metaphor, as with Wiesel’s emblematic mourning madmen.
The advantage, for many of Levi’s readers, has been—dare one say this?—a curious peacefulness: the consequence of the famous “detachment.” Levi is far from being a peaceful witness, but because he has not harassed or harangued or dramatized or poetized or shaken a fist or shrieked or politicized (a little of the last, but only a little), because he has restricted himself to observation, notation, and restraint, it becomes alarmingly easy to force him into a false position. If it was futile for him to plead, as he once did, “I beg the reader not to go looking for messages,” it is nevertheless disconcerting that of all the various “lessons” that might have been drawn from Levi’s penetrations, the one most prevalent is also the coarsest and the most misleading: uplift. Rarely will you come on a publisher’s jacket blare as shallow as the one accompanying The Drowned and the Saved: “a wondrous celebration of life . . . a testament to the indomitability of the human spirit and humanity’s capacity to defeat death through meaningful work, morality and art.” Contemptible puffery, undermining every paragraph of the text it osten
sibly promotes; and if it is designed to counter “Oh, that? Oh, that again?” then it is even more contemptible. Celebration of life? Defeat of death? Meaningful work? Morality? Art? What callousness, what cravenness, before the subject at hand! In the Lager world, Levi tells us again and again, “work” was pointless, and deliberately so, in order to intensify torment; morality was reduced to staying alive as long as possible, and by any means; and art was non-existent. Applied to a place where murder claimed daily dominion, “celebration of life” can only be a mockery, or—if that phrase is meant to describe Levi’s intent as witness—a double mockery: his intent is to let us see for ourselves the nature, extent, and depth of the German crime.
Yet “celebration of life,” that falsifying balm, is hardly untypical of the illusory—or self-deluding—glow of good feeling (or, at worst, absence of bad feeling) that generally attaches to Levi’s name. Of the scribes of the Holocaust, Levi appears to be the one who least troubles, least wounds, least implicates, the reader. A scientific or objective attitude will inform, certainly, but declines any show of agitation. What we have had from Levi, accordingly, is the portrait of a psychological oxymoron: the well-mannered cicerone of hell, mortal horror in a decorous voice. “Amery called me ‘the forgiver,’” Levi notes. “I consider this neither insult nor praise but imprecision. I am not inclined to forgive, I never forgave our enemies of that time. . . . because I know no human act that can erase a crime; I demand justice, but I am not able, personally”—here again is this insistent declaration of refusal—“to trade punches or return blows.” All the same (untenable as he might consider it), Levi is widely regarded, if not quite as “the forgiver,” then as the survivor whose books are, given their subject matter, easiest to take; one gets the impression (and from Levi’s own pages) that he has been read in Germany far more willingly than have some others. He writes, as his countrywoman remarked, in the “absence of hatred.”
And so it has seemed until this moment. The Drowned and the Saved reveals something else. It is a detonation, all the more volcanic because so unexpected. Yet “detonation” is surely, at least from Levi’s point of view, the wrong word: concussion is an all-of-a-sudden thing. In The Drowned and the Saved, the change of tone is at first muted, faint. Gradually, cumulatively, rumble by rumble, it leads to disclosure, exposure—one can follow the sizzle flying along the fuse; by the last chapter the pressure is so powerful, the rage so immense, that “detachment” has long given way to convulsion. What was withheld before is now imploded in these pages. The Drowned and the Saved is the record of a man returning blows with all the might of human fury, in full knowledge that the pen is mightier than the fist. The convulsions of rage have altered the nature of the prose, and—if we can judge by Levi’s suicide—the man as well. Almost no one, interestingly, has been disposed to say of Levi’s final testimony that it is saturated in deadly anger—as if it would be too cruel to tear from him the veil of the spirit pure. It may be cruel; but it is Levi’s own hand that tears away the veil and sets the fuse.
The fuse is ignited almost instantly, in the Preface. “No one will ever be able to establish with precision how many, in the Nazi apparatus, could not not know about the frightful atrocities being committed, how many knew something but were in a position to pretend they did not know, and, further, how many had the possibility of knowing everything but chose the more prudent path of keeping their eyes and ears (and above all their mouths) well shut.” Here is the heralding of the indictment that will emerge: it is the German people whom Levi subjects to judgment, which may account for his rarely shrinking from the use of “German,” where, nowadays, “Nazi” is usually the polite, because narrower, term. In the Preface also may be found the single most terrible sentence ever offered on the issue of what is variously called “restitution,” “changed attitudes,” “the new generation,” and all the rest: “The crematoria ovens themselves were designed, built, assembled, and tested by a German company, Topf of Wiesbaden (it was still in operation in 1975, building crematoria for civilian use, and had not considered the advisability of changing its name).” Had not considered the advisability of changing its name: this applies equally to Krupp, notorious for slave labor, and, in its most celebrated incarnation, to Hitler’s “people’s car,” the ubiquitous Volkswagen, driven unselfconsciously by half the world. (An un-selfconscious irony, by the way, that Levi, or his admirable translator, should fall into the phrase “civilian use,” meaning, one supposes, the opposite of official governmental policy—i.e., ordinary funerals employing cremation. But who else other than “civilians” were annihilated in the Lager?)
When Levi comes to speak of shame, it is nevertheless not the absence of shame among Germans he invokes, though he condemns the “complicity and connivance” of the “majority of Germans” just before and during the Hitler years; rather, it is the loss of shame in the victims of the Lager, dispossessed of any civilizing vestige, reduced to the animal. The Lager “anus mundi” dominated “from dawn to dusk by hunger, fatigue, cold, and fear,” “ultimate drainage site of the German universe,” was a condition without reciprocity, where you sought to succor and relieve only yourself, to take care of yourself alone. Shame returned with the return of freedom, retrospectively. In the “gray zone” of Lager oppression, contaminated victims collaborated with contaminating persecutors. Arrival at Auschwitz meant “kicks and punches right away, often in the face; an orgy of orders screamed with true or simulated rage; complete nakedness after being stripped; the shaving off of all one’s hair; the outfitting in rags,” and some of these depredations were conducted by fellow victims appointed as functionaries. Again and again Levi emphasizes the diminishment of every human trait, the violated modesty, the public evacuation, the satanically inventive brutality, the disorientation and desperation. He describes the absolute rule of “small satraps”—the common criminals who became Kapos; the wretched Bettnachzieher, whose sole job was to measure the orderliness of straw pillows with a maniacal string and who had the power to punish “publicly and savagely”; the overseers of the “work that was purely persecutory”; the “Special Squads” that operated the crematoria for the sake of a few weeks more of life, only to be replaced and thrown into the fire in turn. These squads, Levi explains, “were made up largely of Jews. In a certain sense this is not surprising, since the Lager’s main purpose was to destroy Jews, and, beginning in 1943, the Auschwitz population was 90–95 percent Jews.” (Here I interrupt to remind the reader of William Styron’s choice in Sophie’s Choice, wherein we are given, as the central genocidal emblem of Lager policy in those years, a victim who is not a Jew.*) “From another point of view,” Levi continues, “one is stunned by this paroxysm of perfidy and hatred: it must be the Jews who put the Jews into the ovens; it must be shown that the Jews, the subrace, the submen, bow to any and all humiliation, even to destroying themselves.” Levi admits that merely by virtue of his having stayed alive, he never “fathomed [the Lager] to the bottom.” The others, the “drowned,” he maintains, those who went down to the lees of suffering and annihilation, were the only true fathomers of that perfidy and hatred.
Levi’s reflections appear to be fathomings enough. The Drowned and the Saved is much less a book of narrative and incident than it is of siftings of the most sordid deposits of the criminal imagination—the inescapable struggle of a civilized mind to bore through to the essence and consequence of degradation and atrocity. Levi is not the first to observe that “where violence is inflicted on man it is also inflicted on language,” though he may be among the first to inform us of the life-or-death role of language in the Lager. Simply, not to understand German was to go under at once: “the rubber truncheon was called der Dolmetscher, the interpreter: the one who made himself understood to everybody.” Levi had studied some German at the university to prepare himself as a chemist. He learned more in Auschwitz—grotesquely distorted barbarisms which he deliberately held on to years later, “for the same reason I have never had the tatt
oo removed from my left arm.” As for the tattoo itself—“an autochthonous Auschwitzian invention,” “gratuitous, an end in itself, pure offense,” “a return to barbarism”—Levi, a secular Jew, is careful to note that Leviticus 19:28 forbids tattooing “precisely in order to distinguish Jews from the barbarians.” Even newborn babies, he reports, were tattooed on arrival in Auschwitz.
All this, and considerably more, Levi gathers up under the chilling heading of “Useless Violence,” which he defines as “a deliberate creation of pain that was an end in itself.” What else was the purpose of the vindictive halt of a boxcar of Jews at an Austrian railroad station, where, while the guards laughed, “the German passengers openly expressed their disgust” at “men and women squatting wherever they could, on the platforms and in the middle of the tracks”? What else was the purpose of emptying out nursing homes filled with elderly sick people already near death and hauling them off to Auschwitz to be gassed? Or forcing grown men to lap up soup like dogs by depriving them of spoons (of which there were tens of thousands at Auschwitz)? Or using human ash from the crematoria to make “gravel” paths for the SS village that ruled the camp? Or selling human hair to the German textile industry for mattress ticking? Or locking human beings into decompression chambers “to establish at what altitude human blood begins to boil: a datum that can be obtained in any laboratory at minimum expense and without victims, or even can be deduced from common tables”?
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