by Primo Levi
“I went to the tannery: I wanted to know when, where, on what schedule, on what days they emptied the vats. They sent me away rudely, but I returned two days later with the doctor from the Health Department; well, the biggest of the tanning vats they emptied every week, the night between Monday and Tuesday! They didn’t want to tell me what it contained, but you know perfectly well, organic tanning agents are polyphenols, there is no ion-exchange resin that can contain them, and what a polyphenol can do to silver bromide even you who are not in the business can imagine. I got a sample of the tanning bath, went to the experimental laboratory, and tried to atomize a 1:10,000 solution in the darkroom where a sample of radiographic paper was exposed. The effect could be seen a few days later: the paper’s sensitivity had disappeared, literally. The head of the laboratory couldn’t believe his eyes: he told me he had never seen an inhibitor so potent. We tried with increasingly diluted solutions, the way homeopaths do: with solutions of about one part per million, bean-shaped spots were obtained, which appeared only after two months. The bean effect, the Bohneffekt, had been reproduced exactly. In the end, it was clear that a few thousand molecules of polyphenol, absorbed by the fibers of the overalls during washing, and carried in flight from the overall to the paper by a tiny, invisible hair, were enough to cause a spot.”
The other diners were chatting noisily around us about children, holidays, and salaries; we ended by retreating to the bar, where we gradually became sentimental and promised each other to renew a friendship that in fact had never existed. We would stay in touch, and would collect for each other stories like this, in which obtuse matter displays a cunning inclined to the bad, to obstruction, as if it were rebelling against the order dear to man: like the reckless outcasts in a novel who, thirsting more for the ruin of others than for their own triumph, arrive from the ends of the earth to cut short the adventure of the good heroes.
13. In The Betrothed, Alessandro Manzoni recounts how the plague was introduced into Milan by the lansquenets coming from Germany and Switzerland; the first such mercenaries who died were deliberately ignored by the authorities.
Vanadium
A paint is by definition an unstable substance: in fact, at a certain point in its career, it has to turn from a liquid to a solid. This has to happen at the right moment and in the right place. The opposite case can be unpleasant or dramatic: it can happen that a paint solidifies (we say, brutally, “separates”) during its sojourn in the warehouse, and then the product is thrown away; or that the base resin solidifies during synthesis, which, in a reactor of ten or twenty tons, can tend toward the tragic; or, instead, that the paint doesn’t harden at all, even after its application, and then it becomes a laughingstock, because a paint that doesn’t “dry” is like a gun that doesn’t shoot or a bull that doesn’t inseminate.
In many cases, the oxygen in the air has a role in the process of hardening. Among the various tasks, vital or destructive, that oxygen can accomplish, what interests us paint makers most is its capacity to react with certain small molecules, such as those in some oils, and to create bridges between them, transforming them into a compact and therefore solid network: that, for example, is how linseed oil “dries” in the air.
We had imported a batch of resin for paints, in fact one of those resins that solidify at ordinary temperatures by simple exposure to the atmosphere, and we were worried. Tested by itself, the resin dried normally, but after it was ground with a certain (irreplaceable) type of lampblack, the capacity to dry diminished until it vanished; we had already set aside several tons of black enamel that, in spite of all the corrections attempted, remained sticky indefinitely after it was applied, like a lugubrious flypaper.
In cases like these, before formulating accusations you have to proceed cautiously. The supplier was W., a large and respectable German manufacturer, one of the limbs left when, after the war, the Allies dismembered the omnipotent I.G. Farben: people like this, before admitting their guilt, throw on the scale pan all the weight of their prestige and their full delaying capacity. But there was no way to avoid the controversy: the other batches of resin behaved well with that same batch of lampblack, the resin was of a special type, which only W. produced, and we were bound by a contract, and absolutely had to continue to supply that black enamel, without missing deadlines.
I wrote a polite letter of complaint, setting forth the main points of the issue, and a few days later a response arrived: it was long and pedantic, suggested obvious stratagems that we had already adopted without result, and contained a superfluous and deliberately obscure explication of the mechanism of the oxidation of resin; it ignored our urgency, and on the essential point said only that the obligatory tests were under way. There remained nothing to do but order another batch immediately, urging W. to test with particular care the behavior of the resin with that type of lampblack.
Along with the confirmation of the last order came a second letter, almost as long as the first, and signed by the same Doktor L. Müller. It was a little more relevant than the first, recognizing (with much circumspection and many reservations) the justness of our grievance, and containing a suggestion less obvious than the preceding ones: “ganz unerwarteterweise,” that is, in a completely unexpected way, the gnomes of their laboratory had found that the disputed batch was cured by the addition of 0.1 percent of vanadium naphthenate—an additive that, until that moment, had never been heard of in the world of paints. The unknown Dr. Müller invited us to verify the assertion immediately; if the effect was confirmed, this observation would enable both sides to avoid the irritations and uncertainties of an international controversy and reexportation.
Müller. There was a Müller in a preceding incarnation of mine, but Müller is a very common name in Germany, like Molinari in Italy, of which it is the exact equivalent. Why continue to think about it? And yet, rereading the two letters with their extremely ponderous sentences, stuffed with technical terms, I couldn’t silence a doubt, of the sort which can’t be set aside, which squirm inside you like worms. But really, there must be two hundred thousand Müllers in Germany, forget it and think about the paint that has to be fixed.
. . . and then, suddenly, there returned to my eye a peculiarity of the last letter that had escaped me: it wasn’t a typing mistake; it had been repeated twice. He had written naptenat, not naphthenat, as he should have. Well, of the encounters I had in that now remote world I preserve pathologically precise memories; and that other Müller, in an unforgotten laboratory permeated by cold, hope, and fear, said beta-Naptylamin, rather than beta-Naphthylamin.
The Russians were at the gates, and two or three times a day the Allied planes arrived to batter the factory of Buna: no window was unbroken, and there was a shortage of water, steam, and electricity; but the order was to start producing Buna rubber, and the Germans do not question orders.
I was in a laboratory with two other specialist prisoners, like the educated slaves whom the rich Romans imported from Greece. Work was as impossible as it was useless: our time was almost entirely spent taking apart the equipment at every air-raid alarm and putting it back together at the all-clear. But orders are not questioned, and every so often some inspector advanced upon us through the ruins and the snow to make sure that the work of the laboratory was proceeding according to instructions. Sometimes it was a stone-faced SS officer, at other times an old soldier from the Territorial units, as frightened as a mouse, at still other times a civilian. The civilian who appeared most often was called Doktor Müller.
He must have been fairly important, because everyone greeted him first. He was a tall, corpulent man, around forty, with an aspect rather coarse than refined; with me he had spoken only three times, and all three with a timidity rare in that place, as if he were ashamed of something. The first time, only about matters of work (about the amount of the naptilamina, in fact); the second time he had asked me why my beard was so long, and I had answered that none of us had a razor, indeed not even a handkerchief, and that
our beard was shaved officially every Monday; the third time he had given me a clear, typewritten note that authorized me to be shaved on Thursdays as well, and to get from the Effektenmagazin a pair of leather shoes, and he had asked, addressing me formally, “Why do you look so troubled?” I, who at that time thought in German, had concluded to myself, Der Mann hat keine Ahnung, the man has no idea.
Duty first. I hastened to inquire among our usual suppliers for a sample of vanadium naphthenate, and realized that it wouldn’t be easy: the product wasn’t manufactured regularly, it was prepared in small quantities and only to order; I ordered it.
The return of that “pt” had thrown me into a violent agitation. To find myself settling accounts, man to man, with one of the “others” had been my most vivid and permanent desire of the post-Lager period. It had been appeased only in part by letters from my German readers: they didn’t satisfy me, those honest and generic declarations of regret and solidarity on the part of people I had never seen, whose other side I didn’t know, and who probably weren’t implicated except sentimentally. The encounter I was waiting for, with such intensity that I dreamed it (in German) at night, was an encounter with someone from that place, someone who had disposed of us, who had not looked us in the eye, as if we didn’t have eyes. Not out of revenge: I am no Count of Monte Cristo. Only to restore the balance, and to say “So?” If this Müller was my Müller, he wasn’t the perfect antagonist, because in some way, maybe only for a moment, he had had pity, or even just a rudiment of professional solidarity. Maybe still less: maybe he had only resented the fact that that strange hybrid of colleague and instrument, who was also, after all, a chemist, frequented a laboratory without the Anstand, the decorum, that a laboratory requires; but the others around him had felt not even this. He wasn’t the perfect antagonist: but, as we all know, perfection is one of those things which are recounted, not experienced.
I got in touch with the representative of W., with whom I was fairly friendly, and asked him to discreetly investigate Dr. Müller. How old was he? What did he look like? Where had he been during the war? The answer was not long in arriving: the age and aspect coincided, the man had worked first at Schkopau, to get training in the technology of rubber, then at the Buna works, in Auschwitz. I got his address, and sent him, from private citizen to private citizen, a copy of the German edition of If This Is a Man, along with a letter in which I asked if he was really the Müller of Auschwitz, and if he remembered “the three men of the laboratory”; well, if he would forgive the brutal intrusion, the return from the void, I was one of the three, in addition to being the client concerned with the resin that wouldn’t dry.
I prepared to wait for the response, while on the business side, like the oscillation of an enormous, very slow pendulum, the exchange of chemical-bureaucratic letters about the Italian vanadium, which did not work as well as the German, continued. Would you therefore send us, please, as a matter of urgency, the specifications of the product, and deliver to us by air 50 kg, whose cost you will deduct, etc. On the technological level the matter seemed well on its way, although the fate of the defective batch of resin wasn’t clear: keep it, with a discount on the price, or reexport it at the expense of W., or resort to arbitration; meanwhile, in customary fashion, we threatened each other, in turn, to have recourse to legal means, gerichtlich vorzugehen.
I continued to wait for the “private” response, which was almost as irritating and nerve-racking as the business dispute. What did I know of my man? Nothing: in all probability he had obliterated everything, deliberately or not; my letter and my book were for him a rude and irksome intrusion, a clumsy invitation to stir up a sediment by now settled, an attack on the Anstand. He would never respond. Too bad: he was not a perfect German, but do perfect Germans exist? or perfect Jews? They are an abstraction: the passage from the general to the particular always has in store some stimulating surprises, when the partner without definition, larva-like, takes shape before you, little by little or in a single stroke, and becomes the Mitmensch, the fellow man, with all his thickness, tics, anomalies, and inconsistencies. Now almost two months had passed: the response would never arrive. A pity.
It arrived dated March 2, 1967, on fine paper with a letterhead in vaguely Gothic characters. It was an opening letter, brief and reserved. Yes, the Müller of Buna was indeed he. He had read my book, recognized with emotion persons and places; was happy to know that I had survived; asked for information about the other two “men in the laboratory,” and so far there was nothing strange, since they had been named in the book. But he also asked about Goldbaum, whom I had not named. He added that he had reread, in the circumstances, his notes on that period: he would like to discuss them in a hoped-for personal meeting, “useful to me, to you, and necessary for the purposes of overcoming that terrible past” (im Sinne der Bewältigung der so furchtbaren Vergangenheit). He declared, finally, that among all the prisoners he had met at Auschwitz, it was I who had made the strongest and most enduring impression on him. That might well be a blandishment: from the tone of the letter, and especially from that phrase on “overcoming,” it seemed that the man expected something from me.
Now it was up to me to respond, and I felt embarrassed. There: the enterprise had succeeded, the adversary was hooked; he was before me, almost a fellow paint maker, he wrote, like me, on letterhead, and he even remembered Goldbaum. He was still quite shadowy, but it was clear that he wanted from me something like absolution, because he had a past to overcome and I did not: I wanted from him merely a discount on the bill for a defective resin. The situation was interesting but not typical: it coincided only in part with that of the criminal before the judge.
In the first place: in what language should I respond? Certainly not in German; I would make ridiculous mistakes, which my role did not permit. Better always to fight on the home field: I wrote in Italian. The two men of the laboratory had died, I didn’t know where or how; so, too, Goldbaum, of cold and hunger, during the evacuation march. As for me, he knew the main things from the book, and from the business correspondence on vanadium.
I had many questions for him: too many, and too heavy for him and for me. Why Auschwitz? Why Pannwitz? Why children gassed? But I felt that it was not yet the moment to cross certain lines, and I asked only if he accepted the judgments, implicit and explicit, of my book. If he thought that I.G. Farben had employed slave labor of its own accord. If he knew at the time about the “facilities” of Auschwitz, which swallowed up ten thousand lives a day seven kilometers from the facilities for Buna rubber. Finally, since he referred to his “notes on that period,” would he send me a copy?
Of the “hoped-for encounter” I did not speak, because I was afraid of it. Pointless to look for euphemisms, to speak of shame, disgust, reluctance. Fear was the word: as I did not feel myself a Monte Cristo, so I did not feel myself a Horatius-Curiatius; I didn’t feel capable of representing the dead of Auschwitz, and neither did it seem reasonable to see in Müller the representative of the executioners. I know myself: I do not possess polemical quickness, the adversary distracts me, interests me more as a man than as an adversary, I listen to him and risk believing him; contempt and the proper judgment come to me later, on the stairs, when they are no longer any use. It suited me to continue by letter.
On the business side Müller wrote that the fifty kilos had been sent, and that W. had confidence in a friendly settlement, etc. Almost simultaneously the letter I had been expecting arrived at home: but it was not what I had been expecting. It wasn’t a model letter, a paradigm. At this point, if my story were invented, I would have been able to introduce only two types of letter: one humble, warm, Christian, from a redeemed German; one vile, arrogant, icy, from a stubborn Nazi. Now, this story is not invented, and reality is always more complex than invention: rougher, less combed, less rounded. Rarely does it lie on a flat surface.
The letter was eight pages long and contained a photograph that startled me. The face was that face: aged, an
d yet ennobled by a clever photographer, I felt it high above me uttering those words of casual and momentary compassion: “Why do you look so troubled?”
It was obviously the work of an inexpert writer: rhetorical, half sincere, full of digressions and excessive praise, moving, pedantic, and clumsy: it challenged any summary, global judgment.
He attributed the facts of Auschwitz to Man, without differentiating; he deplored them, and found consolation in the thought of other men cited in my book, Alberto, Lorenzo, “against whom the weapons of darkness were blunted”: the phrase was mine, but repeated by him it sounded to me hypocritical and false. He told his story: “initially drawn in by the general enthusiasm for Hitler’s regime,” he had joined a nationalist student association, which shortly afterward had been incorporated officially into the SA;14 he had obtained a discharge, and commented that “even this was therefore possible.” In the war, he had been mobilized in the anti-air corps, and only then, confronting the ruins of the cities, had he felt “shame and contempt” for the war. In May of ’44 he had been able (like me!) to assert his qualifications as a chemist, and had been assigned to the I.G. Farben Schkopau factory, of which the factory at Auschwitz was an enlarged copy. At Schkopau he had trained a group of Ukrainian girls in the laboratory work; in fact I had met them at Auschwitz, and had been unable to make sense of their peculiar familiarity with Dr. Müller. He had been transferred to Auschwitz, with the girls, only in November 1944: the name Auschwitz, at that time, had no meaning, not for him or for his acquaintances; yet, upon his arrival, he had had a brief meeting with the technical director (presumably the engineer Faust), who had warned him that “the Jews in Buna were to be assigned only to the most menial jobs, and compassion was not tolerated.”