by Primo Levi
There, I have given a glimpse of my workshop. I’d like to add that my model for writing is the “report” that is written in the factory at the end of the week. Clear, essential, comprehensible to everyone. It would seem to me an extreme discourtesy to the reader to offer him a “treatise” that he cannot understand. That is not to say that the language of my subconscious is the same as that of the reader’s. But I believe that it is right to give him the largest quantity of information and emotion possible.
I am also indebted to my profession for what makes a man mature, that is, achievement and failure, to succeed and not to succeed, the two experiences of adult life—the expression isn’t mine, it’s Pavese’s—that are necessary in order to grow. For the chemist who works in a laboratory, both are necessary, and the committed chemist knows them both: to make mistakes and to correct them, to take blows and to return them, to confront a problem and resolve it or to emerge defeated and immediately resume the battle.
Thus my chemist, too, has a long symbolic shadow: measuring himself against matter, through success and failure, he is like Conrad’s sailor, who measures himself against the sea. He is also like a primitive hunter. In the evening, when he draws the structural formula of the molecule that he has to build tomorrow, he celebrates the same propitiatory rite as the hunter of Altamira who fifty thousand years ago drew on the walls of the caves the moose or bison that he would kill the next day: to take possession and make his antagonist his own. Both are sacral gestures. I am almost certain that the experience of the chemist is the same as the remote history of man, guided by the same intention that led him to start off on the long road that would lead to civilization. That’s all. Here is why—I have said it more than once but I repeat it again today—to anyone who asks, “Why are you a chemist and write?” I answer, “I write because I am a chemist.” I need my profession to communicate experiences.
Transcript of lecture at the Italian Cultural Association, Turin,
November 19, 1976; published in G. Poli and G. Calcagno, Echi di una
voce perduta (Echoes of a Lost Voice) (Milan: Mursia, 1992)
* In English in the original.
1. Aldo Palazzeschi (1885–1974) was an Italian novelist.
Foreword to The Night of the Girondists
by Jacques Presser1
I came across this story by accident, many years ago; I read it and reread it many times, and it stayed with me. Perhaps it’s worth investigating why: there are many reasons that one becomes attached to a book, some rational and easy to decipher, others obscure and deep.
I don’t think it’s a matter of how this story is told. It’s told unevenly, on some pages skillfully, on others with a show of intellectualism, with a literary expertise a little too loaded with cunning and artifice. It is, however, manifestly truthful, point by point, episode by episode (it is confirmed by many other sources, and those who were at Auschwitz found in it the surviving “passengers” of the Westerbork train2), so that, in spite of its novelistic pace, it takes on the character of a document; but its importance doesn’t derive from that alone.
This brief work is among the few that portray with literary dignity Western European Judaism. While there is an abundant and glorious literature of Eastern, Ashkenazi, and Yiddish Judaism, the Western branch, which is deeply integrated into German, French, Dutch, Italian bourgeois cultures and has contributed generously to them, has rarely represented itself. It is a Judaism conditioned by dispersion and is therefore not very uniform; it is so intertwined with the culture of the host country that it famously does not possess a language of its own. It was enlightened during the Enlightenment, romantic during Romanticism, liberal, socialist, bourgeois, nationalist; nevertheless, through all the metamorphoses of time and place, it preserved some characteristic traits, and this book reflects them.
The Western Jew, straining and struggling between the two poles of loyalty and assimilation, is constantly having an identity crisis; equally constant are his neuroses, his adaptability, and his acuity. The figure of the Jew content with his Judaism, for whom his Judaism is enough (the immortal Tevye the dairyman, by Sholem Aleichem), is rare or missing in the West.
This is the story of an identity crisis: the protagonist suffers it with such intensity that he finds himself split in two. In him live the “I” Jacques, assimilated, bound to the land of Holland but not to the Dutch people, a versatile and decadent intellectual, emotionally immature, politically suspect, morally void; and the “I” Jacob, retrieved from the past by the efforts and the example of “Rabbi” Hirsch, who draws strength from his Jewish roots—until then ignored or denied—and sacrifices himself to save from the void that Book which Jacques does not believe in. How many European Jews did not experience this? How many did not find, in a time of need, support and a moral framework precisely in the Jewish culture that in the years of truce had appeared dated and old-fashioned? Hirsch says this to Jacques: barbed wire is wire that binds, and binds solidly. I don’t mean to say that the return to one’s origins is the only path to salvation; but it is certainly one of them.
Another element that adds weight to this story is its lack of restraint. On a few ruthless pages, it almost seems as if the author shared the “Jewish self-hatred” (another aspect of the identity crisis) that the father, Henriques, attributes to his son and his wife, and which gave rise to the many anti-Semitic Jews in Western Europe—for example, [Otto] Weininger, cited in the book and admired by Georg Cohn. To be reminded that a man like Cohn lived and worked in Westerbork stings like a burn and deserves a comment. Similar individuals have existed, and certainly still exist among us in a virtual state. In normal conditions they are not recognizable (Cohn wanted to be a banker), but merciless persecution develops them and brings them to light and to power. It’s naïve, absurd, and historically false to claim that a demonic system like National Socialism sanctifies its victims; on the contrary, it degrades them and dirties them, assimilates them, and all the more willing they are, clean, lacking political or moral backbone. Cohn is detestable, monstrous, and should be punished, but his wrong is the reflection of another, much more serious and general fault.
It’s not a coincidence that precisely in these past years, in Italy and abroad, books have been published like Menschen in Auschwitz, by Hermann Langbein (not yet translated into Italian), and Into That Darkness, by Gitta Sereny.3 There are many signs that the time has come to explore the space that separates the victims from the executioners, and to do so with a lighter hand, with a less murky spirit, than has been the case, for example, in some recent popular films. Only a Manichean rhetoric can assert that that space is empty; it is not, it is scattered with vile, miserable, or pathetic characters (who occasionally possess all three qualities at once) and it is indispensable that we know them if we want to know the human species, if we want to know how to defend our souls when a similar trial returns.
There exists a contagion of evil: the non-man dehumanizes others, every crime radiates outward, proliferates, corrupts consciences and surrounds itself with accomplices won over, through fear or seduction (like Suasso), from the opposing camp. It’s typical of a criminal regime, like Nazism, to weaken and confuse our capacity for judgment. Is he who denounces under torture guilty? Or he who kills in order not to be killed? Or the soldier on the Russian front who dares not desert? Where will we draw the line that cuts in two the empty space I spoke of, and that separates the weak from the wicked? Should Cohn be judged?
Well, the opinion of this book is that Cohn should be judged. His speech on the “sinking ship” is specious, and so is his claim (how many times have we heard it!): “If I didn’t do it, someone worse than me would.” One must refuse; one always can, in any case, perhaps following the path of Miss Wolfson. He who does not refuse (but one must refuse from the beginning, not put one’s hand in the machine) ends up yielding to the temptation of passing to the other side, where he will find, at best, an illusory gratification and a destructive salvation.
Cohn is guilty, but there is an extenuating circumstance. The general consciousness that we should not give in when confronted by violence but resist is a current notion, not of that time but of the period that followed. The imperative of resistance developed with the resistance and with the global tragedy of the Second World War; before that, it was the precious patrimony of a few. Nor is it something that everyone feels even today, but today those who want to understand can understand, and I think that this book can help.
It is not necessarily true that once you feel affection for a book or a person you no longer see its defects. This book has some, and maybe serious ones. The style is uneven, oscillating between emotion and banter; one often has the impression that the author, Presser, is not immune to the literary baroque of his alter ego Henriques and to his frenzy for coming up with quotations, even on his deathbed. At times, in the face of the tragic nature of certain situations, we find complacency where modesty and silence should be expected. In other words, the book is open to debate, and perhaps even scandalous, but it is good that scandals occur, because they provoke discussion and clear consciences.
Foreword to La notte dei Girondini (The Night of the Girondists),
by Jacques Presser (Milan: Adelphi, 1976)
1. Originally published in Dutch in 1957; first published in English the following year as Breaking Point.
2. Westerbork was a large transit camp in the Netherlands; every week trains carrying Dutch Jews departed for Auschwitz and other concentration camps.
3. Menschen in Auschwitz was published in Germany in 1972; an English translation, People in Auschwitz, came out in 2004. Into That Darkness was originally published in English in 1974.
Buffet Dinner
Immediately upon entering through the front door, Innaminka felt uneasy and regretted having accepted the invitation. There was a butler of sorts, with a green sash around his belly, who took people’s coats. Innaminka, whose coat was part of his body, shivered and felt dizzy at the thought that someone might take it from him. But there was more: behind the butler rose a great spiral staircase of beautiful polished black wood, broad and majestic but unmanageable. Unmanageable for him, that is. The other guests mounted it with ease, while he didn’t dare even try. He kept turning in circles, embarrassed, waiting until no one was looking. On level ground he was good, but the length of his hindquarters alone was an obstacle—his feet were more or less twice as long as the stairs were deep. He waited a little more, sniffing at the walls and trying to appear indifferent, and once everyone else was upstairs he endeavored to go up as well.
He tried different methods: grabbing the banister with his front legs, or bending over and trying to climb on all fours, even employing his tail—but actually it was the tail, more than anything else, that got in the way. He ended up climbing clumsily sideways, placing his feet lengthwise on each step, his tail folded ignobly over his back. It took him a full ten minutes.
Upstairs there was a long, narrow room, with a table placed crosswise; there were paintings on the walls, some depicting human or animal forms, others depicting nothing. Along the walls, and scattered around the floor, were bronze or marble figures that Innaminka found pleasing and vaguely familiar. The room was already crowded, but more people kept arriving: the men were in evening attire, the women wore long black dresses and were bedecked with jewels, their eyelids painted green or blue. Innaminka hesitated for a moment and then, sidling along the wall and avoiding abrupt movements, took refuge in a corner. The other guests looked at him with mild curiosity. In passing, he overheard a few casual comments: “He’s pretty, isn’t he?” “. . . no, he doesn’t have one, dear. Can’t you see he’s a male?” “I heard on TV that they are almost extinct. . . . No, not for the fur, which isn’t worth much anyway. It’s because they destroy the crops.”
After a while, the young hostess emerged from a group of guests and came toward him. She was very thin, with large, wide-set gray eyes and an expression between annoyance and surprise, as if someone had brusquely woken her up at that very moment. She told him that she had heard a lot about him, and this Innaminka found hard to believe: maybe it was just a form of greeting, and she said it to all her guests. She asked him if he’d like something to eat or drink: she didn’t seem very intelligent, but she probably had a kind heart, and it was precisely because of her kindness rather than her intelligence that she realized that Innaminka understood her fairly well but could not answer her, and she moved on.
Actually, Innaminka was hungry and thirsty: not to an unbearable degree, but enough to make him uncomfortable. Now, the dinner was one of those melancholy buffet affairs, where you have to choose what you want from a distance, craning between heads and shoulders, find the plates, find the silverware and the paper napkins, get in line, reach the table, serve yourself, and then back away, making sure not to spill anything, either on yourself or on anyone else. Besides, he could see neither grass nor hay on the table: there was a rather appetizing-looking salad, and peas in a brown sauce, but as Innaminka hesitated, debating whether or not to get in line, the one dish and then the other were finished. Innaminka gave up. He turned his back on the table and, proceeding with care through the crowd, tried to return to his corner. He thought with loving nostalgia of his wife, and of his youngest, who was growing up: he was a good jumper and went out to pasture by himself, but now and then he still demanded to return to his mother’s pouch—indeed, he was a little spoiled, and liked to spend the night in that warm darkness.
During his laborious retreat, he encountered several waiters who carried trays and offered glasses of wine and orangeade and canapés that looked tempting. He didn’t even think about taking a glass in the middle of the crowd, while everyone was bumping into him. He gathered up his courage, grabbed a canapé, and brought it to his mouth, but it instantly fell apart in his fingers, so that he had to lick them one by one and then lick his lips and whiskers for a long time. He looked around, suspicious, but no, no one was paying any attention. He crouched in his corner, and to pass the time he began to observe the guests closely, trying to imagine how they would behave, men and women, if they were being chased by a dog. No mistaking it—in those long wide skirts, the women would never get off the ground, and even the swiftest among the men, even with a good running start, wouldn’t be able to jump a third of the distance that he could jump from a standstill. But you can never tell, maybe they were good at other things.
He was hot and thirsty, and at some point he realized with dismay that an increasingly urgent need was growing in him. He thought that it surely must happen to others, too, and for a few minutes he looked around to see how they dealt with it, but it seemed that no one else had his problem. So very slowly he approached a large pot in which a ficus tree grew, and pretending to sniff the leaves he sat astride the pot and relieved himself. The leaves were fresh and shiny and had a nice smell. Innaminka ate a couple and found them tasty but had to stop because he noticed a woman staring at him.
She stared at him and came closer. Innaminka realized that it was too late to pretend that nothing had happened and move away. She was young and had broad shoulders, massive bones, strong hands, a pale face, and clear eyes. To Innaminka, of course, her feet were of primary importance, but the woman’s skirt was so long and her shoes so complicated that he couldn’t get even an idea of their shape and length. For a moment he feared that the woman had noticed the business with the ficus tree and had come to reprimand him or punish him, but he soon realized that it wasn’t so. She sat down on a small armchair beside him and started talking to him sweetly. Innaminka understood hardly anything she said, but at once he felt calmer; he lowered his ears and made himself more comfortable. The woman came even closer and began to caress him, first on the neck and back, then, seeing that he was closing his eyes, under his chin and on his chest, between his front paws, where there is that triangle of white fur that kangaroos are so proud of.