by Primo Levi
He had been placed directly under Doktor Pannwitz, the one who had subjected me to a curious “state examination” to determine my professional capacities: Müller seemed to have a very low opinion of his superior, and told me that he had died in 1946 of a brain tumor. He, Müller, was in charge of the organization of the laboratory at Buna: he declared that he had known nothing of that exam, and that it was he who had chosen us three specialists, and me in particular; according to this information, improbable but not impossible, I should therefore have been indebted to him for my survival. With me, he declared, he had had relations almost of friendship between equals; he had talked to me about scientific problems, and had meditated, in this situation, on what “precious human values were destroyed by other men out of pure brutality.” Not only did I not remember any conversations of the sort (and my memory of that period, as I’ve said, is very good) but merely to imagine them, against that background of ruin, mutual distrust, and mortal exhaustion, was completely outside reality, and explicable only by a very ingenuous posthumous wishful thinking; perhaps it was a situation that he recounted to many, and didn’t realize that the only person in the world who could not believe it was me. Maybe, in good faith, he had constructed for himself a comfortable past. He didn’t remember the two details of the beard and the shoes, but he remembered others, equivalent and, in my opinion, plausible. He had known about my scarlet fever, and had been worried about my survival, especially when he learned that the prisoners were evacuated on foot. On January 26, 1945, he had been assigned by the SS to the Volkssturm, the ragtag army of men unfit for military service, old people, and children that was supposed to resist the Soviet advance: the technical director mentioned above had, happily, saved him, authorizing him to escape behind the lines.
To my question about I.G. Farben he responded emphatically that yes, he had hired prisoners, but only to protect them: indeed, he formulated the (crazy!) opinion that the entire Buna-Monowitz factory, eight square kilometers of cyclopean plants, had been constructed with the intention of “protecting the Jews and helping them to survive,” and that the order not to have compassion for them was eine Tarnung, a mask. Nihil de principe, no accusation against I.G. Farben: my man was still dependent on W., which was its offspring, and you don’t spit on the plate you eat from. During his brief stay at Auschwitz, he “had never learned of any unit that seemed designed for the killing of the Jews.” Paradoxical, offensive, but not to be ruled out: at that time, among the silent German majority, it was a common technique to try to know as little as possible, and therefore not to ask questions. He, too, evidently, had not asked anyone for explanations, not even himself, although the flames of the crematorium, on clear days, were visible from the Buna factory.
Shortly before the final collapse, he had been captured by the Americans and held for several days in a camp for prisoners of war that, with involuntary sarcasm, he described as having “primitive facilities”: just as at the time of our encounter in the laboratory, Müller, even now as he was writing, continued to have keine Ahnung, no idea. He had returned to his family at the end of June 1945. The contents of his notes, which I had asked to know, were substantially this.
He perceived in my book an overcoming of Judaism, a fulfillment of the Christian precept to love one’s enemies, and a testimony to faith in Man, and he concluded by insisting on the necessity of our meeting, in Germany or Italy, where he was ready to come when and where I pleased: preferably the Riviera. Two days later, through business channels, a letter arrived from W. that, certainly not coincidentally, bore the same date of the long private letter, in addition to the same signature; it was a conciliatory letter, recognizing the company’s fault and declaring it agreeable to any offer. We were given to understand that every cloud has a silver lining: the incident had brought to light the virtue of vanadium naphthenate, which from now on would be incorporated directly into the resin, for whatever client it was intended.
What to do? The character Müller had entpuppt, had come out of the chrysalis, was sharp, in focus. Neither wicked nor heroic: with the rhetoric and the lies, in good or bad faith, filtered out, he remained a typically gray human specimen, one of the not few one-eyed men in the kingdom of the blind. He gave me undeserved credit by attributing to me the virtue of loving my enemies: no, notwithstanding the long-ago privileges he had secured for me, and although he wasn’t an enemy in the strict sense of the term, I did not feel that I loved him. I didn’t love him, and didn’t wish to see him, and yet I felt a certain measure of respect for him: it’s not easy to be one-eyed. He wasn’t a coward or deaf or a cynic, he hadn’t adapted, he drew up his accounts with the past and the accounts didn’t balance: he tried to balance them, and maybe he cheated a little. Could one ask much more of a former SA? The comparison, which I had had many occasions to make, with other honest Germans met on the beach or in the factory, was completely in his favor: his condemnation of Nazism was timid and periphrastic, but he had not looked for excuses. He was looking for a conversation: he had a conscience, and he did his best to keep it quiet. In his first letter he had spoken of “overcoming the past,” Bewältigung der Vergangenheit: I learned later that this is a stereotype, a euphemism of the Germany of today, where it is universally understood as “redemption from Nazism”; but the root walt, which is contained in it, appears also in words that mean “domination,” “violence,” and “rape,” and I think that translating the expression as “distortion of the past,” or “violence done to the past,” would not be so far from its deepest sense. And yet this escape into clichés was better than the florid obtuseness of other Germans: his efforts at overcoming were clumsy, slightly ridiculous, irritating, and sad, yet decent. And hadn’t he procured for me a pair of shoes?
On the first free Sunday, full of misgivings, I prepared to write a response as sincere, balanced, and dignified as possible. I wrote a draft: I thanked him for having brought me into the laboratory; I declared myself ready to forgive my enemies and maybe even to love them, but only when they showed sure signs of repentance—that is, when they ceased to be enemies. In the opposite case, of the enemy who remains such, who persists in his desire to create suffering, certainly he should not be forgiven: one can try to redeem him, one can (one must!) discuss with him, but it is our duty to judge him, not forgive him. As for a specific judgment of his behavior, which Müller implicitly asked for, I discreetly cited two cases known to me of his German colleagues who had done something much more courageous on our behalf than what he claimed. I admitted that not everyone is born a hero, and that a world in which all were like him, that is, honest and defenseless, would be tolerable, but that is an unreal world. In the real world armies exist, they build Auschwitz, and the honest and defenseless smooth the way for them. Therefore every German must answer for Auschwitz, indeed, every man; and after Auschwitz we are not permitted to be helpless. Of the meeting on the Riviera I did not say a word.
That very night Müller called me on the telephone from Germany. There was some disturbance on the line, and, besides, it’s no longer easy for me to understand German on the telephone: his voice was labored and as if broken, the tone excited. He announced that in six weeks, at Pentecost, he was coming to Finale Ligure: could we meet? Caught unprepared, I said yes; I asked him to let me know at the proper time the details of his arrival, and set aside the now superfluous draft.
Eight days later I received from Frau Müller the announcement of the unexpected death of Dr. Lothar Müller, in his sixtieth year of life.
14. Sturmabteilung, or storm troopers: the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.
Carbon
The reader will have been aware for some time now that this is not a chemistry treatise: my presumption does not reach so far, “ma voix est foible, et même un peu profane.” Nor is it an autobiography, except in the partial and symbolic limits within which every piece of writing—in fact every human work—is an autobiography: but history it surely is in some way. It is, or would have liked t
o be, a micro-history, the history of an occupation and its defeats, victories, and sufferings, such as everyone wishes to recount when he feels close to the end of the arc of his career, and art ceases to be long. If, as a chemist, having reached this point in life, you have before you the chart of the Periodic Table, or the monumental indexes of Beilstein or Landolt, do you not see scattered there the sad shreds or the trophies of your own professional past? You have only to leaf through any treatise, and the memories rise in clusters; among us are those whose destiny has been bound, indelibly, to bromide or propylene or the -NCO group or glutamic acid. Every student of chemistry, confronting any treatise, should be aware that on one of those pages, perhaps in a single line or formula or word, is written his future, in characters that are indecipherable but will become clear “later”—after success or error or failure, victory or defeat. Every chemist who is no longer young, reopening that same treatise to the verhängnisvoll page, is stricken by love or revulsion, rejoices or despairs.
So it happens, then, that every element says something to someone (something different to each), like the valleys or beaches visited in youth. We must perhaps make an exception for carbon, because it says everything to everyone; that is, it’s not specific, just as Adam is not specific as an ancestor, unless you can find today (why not?) the chemist-stylite who has devoted his life to graphite or diamonds. And yet it is precisely with carbon that I have an old debt, contracted in days that were momentous for me. My first literary dream was addressed to carbon, the element of life, and was persistently dreamed in a time and place where my life was not worth much: I wanted to tell the story of a carbon atom.
Can we speak of “a particular” carbon atom? For the chemist, there exists some doubt, because as of now (1970) techniques are not known that would allow us to see, or anyway isolate, a single atom; no doubt exists for the narrator, who therefore gets ready to narrate.
For hundreds of millions of years, then, our character, bound to three atoms of oxygen and one of calcium, has been lying in the form of calcareous rock; he already has a long cosmic history behind him, but we’ll ignore that. For him time does not exist, or exists only in the form of lazy variations in temperature, daily and seasonal, since, for the success of this story, his position is not too far from the ground’s surface. His existence, whose monotony one cannot think of without horror, is a remorseless alternation of heat and cold, that is, of oscillations (always at the same frequency) that are a little closer together or a little farther apart: for him, who is potentially alive, a prison worthy of the Catholic inferno. Up to here, therefore, the tense that suits him is the present, which is the tense of description, rather than one of the past tenses, which belong to the storyteller: he is frozen in an eternal present, scarcely touched by the modest tremors of thermal agitation.
But, precisely for the success of the storyteller, who in a different situation would have ended the story, the calcareous bed that the atom is part of lies on the surface. It lies within reach of man and his pick (praise to the pick and its more modern equivalents: they are still the most important intermediaries in the millennial dialogue between man and the elements): at an ordinary moment, which I the narrator decide, purely arbitrarily, is in the year 1840, a strike of the pick detached him and started him off toward the lime kiln, hurling him into the world of things that change. He was baked, so that he separated from the calcium, which remained so to speak with its feet on the ground and met a less brilliant destiny that we will not recount; he, still firmly rooted in two of the three previous companion oxygens, came out through the chimney and took the path of air. His story, which had been motionless, became turbulent.
He was picked up by the wind, flattened against the soil, lifted up to ten kilometers. He was inhaled by a falcon, and descended into its hardworking lungs but did not penetrate its rich blood, and was expelled. He was dissolved three times in seawater, once in the water of a tumbling stream, and again was expelled. He traveled with the wind for eight years, now high, now low, over the sea and in the clouds, above forests, deserts, and boundless expanses of ice; then he fell into captivity and his organic adventure.
Carbon is, in fact, a singular element: it’s the only one that can bind with itself in long stable chains without great expense of energy, and for life on earth (the only one we know so far) long chains are precisely what is necessary. Therefore carbon is the key element of a living substance: but its progress, its entrance into the living world, is not easy, and must follow a fixed and intricate path, which has been elucidated (and still not definitively) only in recent years. If the transformation of carbon into organic compounds didn’t take place around us daily, on the scale of billions of tons a week, wherever the green of a leaf appears, it would fully deserve to be called a miracle.
Then, in the year 1848, the atom we’re talking about, accompanied by his two satellites, which kept him in a gaseous state, was carried by the wind along a row of vines. He had the good fortune to graze a leaf, penetrate it, and be bound to it by a ray of sun. If my language here becomes imprecise and allusive, it’s not only because of my ignorance: this decisive event, this instantaneous three-way accomplishment, of carbon dioxide, light, and vegetable green, has not up to now been described in conclusive terms, and perhaps will not be for a long time still, it is so different from that other “organic” chemistry which is the cumbersome, slow, and ponderous work of man; and yet this refined, rapid chemistry was “invented” two or three billion years ago by our silent sisters the plants, which do not experiment and do not discuss, and whose temperature is identical to that of the environment they live in. Making an image may be useful to understanding, but we’ll never make an image of a happening whose scale is a millionth of a millimeter, whose timing is a millionth of a second, and whose actors are in their essence invisible. Every verbal description will be deficient, and one as good as another: so let the following serve.
He enters the leaf, colliding with innumerable other (but here useless) molecules of nitrogen and oxygen. He adheres to a large and complicated molecule that activates him, and simultaneously receives the crucial message from the sky, in the dazzling form of a package of solar light: in an instant, like an insect that is a spider’s prey, he is separated from his oxygen, combined with hydrogen and (it is believed) phosphorus, and finally inserted into a chain, whether long or short doesn’t matter, but it’s the chain of life. All this happens rapidly, in silence, at the temperature and pressure of the atmosphere, and it’s free: dear colleagues, when we learn to do likewise we will be sicut Deus, and will have solved the problem of hunger in the world.
But there is more, and worse, to our shame and that of our art. Carbon dioxide, that is, the aerial form of carbon that we have up to now been talking about: this gas, which constitutes the primary material of life, the permanent store that every growing thing draws on, and the ultimate destiny of all flesh, is not one of the principal components of air but, rather, a ridiculous scrap, an “impurity,” thirty times less abundant than argon, which no one notices. The air contains 0.03 percent: if Italy were the air, the only Italians qualified to build life would be, for example, the fifteen thousand inhabitants of Milazzo, in the province of Messina. This, on the human scale, is an ironic feat of acrobatics, a juggler’s trick, an incomprehensible display of omnipotence and arrogance, since it is from this constantly renewed impurity in the air that we come: we animals and plants, and we human species, with our four billion discordant opinions, our millennia of history, our wars and shames and nobility and pride. Besides, our very presence on the planet becomes laughable in geometric terms: if all of humanity, around 250 million tons, were distributed like a covering of a homogeneous thickness over all the lands above sea level, the “stature of man” would not be visible to the naked eye—the thickness obtained would be around sixteen-thousandths of a millimeter.
Now our atom is inserted: he forms part of a structure, in the architectural sense; he becomes related and bound to fi
ve companions, so identical to him that only the fiction of the story allows me to distinguish them. It’s a beautiful ring-shaped structure, which, however, is subject to complicated exchanges and balances with the water it’s dissolved in: because by now it is dissolved in water, rather, in the sap of the vine, and this—to be dissolved—is the obligation and privilege of all substances that are destined (I was about to say “desire”) to be transformed. If someone wanted to know why a ring, and why hexagonal, and why soluble in water, well, he had better resign himself: these are among the few questions that our knowledge can respond to with a discourse that is persuasive and accessible to all but out of place here.
He has joined a molecule of glucose, just to clarify: a destiny in the middle, neither fish nor fowl, which prepares him for his first contact with the animal world but does not authorize him for higher responsibility, which is to join a protein structure. He traveled, therefore, at the slow pace of vegetable juices, from the leaf through the leaf stalk and the stem to the trunk, and from there descended to an almost ripe cluster of fruit. What followed is relevant to winemakers; to us it’s of interest only to explain that he escaped (to our benefit, because we wouldn’t know how to put it in words) alcoholic fermentation, and reached the wine without changing his nature.
It’s the fate of wine to be drunk, and the fate of glucose to be oxidized. But it wasn’t oxidized right away: its drinker kept it in his liver for more than a week, peacefully curled up in a ball, as reserve nourishment for an unexpected effort: an effort that he was compelled to make the following Sunday, chasing a horse that had turned skittish. Farewell to the hexagonal structure; in the space of a few instants the ball was unwound and became glucose again, which was carried by the flow of blood to a muscle fiber in the thigh and there brutally broken into two molecules of lactic acid, the sad herald of fatigue. Only later, a few minutes afterward, could the panting of the lungs obtain the oxygen necessary to patiently oxidize the lactic acid. Thus a new molecule of carbon dioxide returned to the atmosphere, and a parcel of the energy that the sun granted to the leaf stem passed from the state of chemical energy to that of mechanical energy and then settled into the slothful condition of heat, imperceptibly warming the air shifted by the run and the blood of the runner. “That’s life,” although it’s rarely described that way: an insertion, a descent to its own advantage, a parasite on the downward path of energy, from its noble solar form to the degraded state of low-temperature heat. On this downward path, which leads to equilibrium, that is, to death, life draws a curve and nests in it.