The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  The woman talked and talked, in a subdued tone, as if she were afraid the others would hear. Innaminka understood that she was unhappy, that someone had behaved badly toward her, that this someone was, or had been, her man, that this event had occurred a short time ago, perhaps that very evening: but nothing more than that. Since he, too, was unhappy, he felt sympathetic toward the woman, and for the first time that evening he stopped wishing that the reception would soon be over; instead he hoped that the woman would continue to caress him and, in particular, that her hands would go lower and run lightly and knowingly along the mighty muscles of his tail and his thighs, of which he was even prouder than of his white triangle.

  This, however, was not to be. The woman continued to caress him, but with increasing distraction, paying no attention to his shivers of pleasure, and continuing all the while to complain about certain human troubles of hers that seemed to Innaminka not to amount to much—to one man instead of another man whom she would have preferred. Innaminka thought that, if this was how things stood, the woman would do better to caress this second man instead of him; and that maybe that was exactly what she was doing; and furthermore that she was beginning to bore him, given that for at least a quarter of an hour she had been repeating the same caresses and the same words. In short, it was clear that she was thinking of herself and not of him.

  Suddenly a man sprang out of the seething crowd, grabbed the woman’s wrist, jerked her to her feet, and said something very unpleasant and brutal to her. He then dragged her away and she followed, without giving Innaminka so much as a farewell glance.

  Innaminka had had enough. From his observation post he stretched up as high as he could, straightening his back and raising himself on his hind legs and tail as on a tripod, to see if anyone was starting to leave. He didn’t want to attract attention by being the first. But as soon as he caught sight of an elegant elderly couple making the rounds to say their goodbyes and heading toward the cloakroom, Innaminka took off.

  He negotiated the first few meters slinking between the legs of the guests, below the level of breasts and stomachs; he stayed low, supported alternately on his hind legs and on his front legs with the help of his tail. But when he was near the table, which by now had been cleared, he noticed that the floor on either side of the table was clear, too, and so he jumped right over it, feeling his lungs fill effortlessly with air and with joy. With a second leap he was at the head of the stairs: rushing, he miscalculated the distance and landed off balance on the top steps. There was nothing for it but to descend that way, like a sack, half crawling and half rolling. But as soon as he reached the ground floor he hopped to his feet. Under the expressionless gaze of the doorman, he took a deep, voluptuous breath of the damp, grimy night air and immediately set off along Via Borgospesso, no longer in a rush, with long, happy, elastic leaps.

  La Stampa, January 22, 1977

  Movies and Swastikas

  Do we really have to watch them all, before we can take a position? Meaning, all the movies on whose posters a naked woman appears against the background of a swastika? I don’t think so, and, besides, the phenomenon shows no sign of diminishing. It’s a classic path: you begin with a clever cultural forgery, an artifact of average quality such as The Night Porter, go down a couple of steps to the questionable craft of Salon Kitty, and then the doors are flung wide open to the cheap brands, to the phalanx of Nazi-porn movies.

  From movie producers, of course, we can’t expect much. For the most part they’re nothing but myopic wheeler-dealers: they’re happy if they get a hit every three or four years and pay their bills (if it goes well), and they don’t care about anything else. Many of them actually live off porn movies; it’s sad, but there’s nothing much to do about it. Porn movies are a sure deal: easy to make, cheap, and profitable, because they have a faithful audience, made up of the shy, the inhibited, and the frustrated, young and old.

  In the short term, there is nothing to do about it: to invoke censorship means relying on inept and corrupt judges, and giving new life to a dangerous mechanism. Censorship already exists, but it confiscates only intelligent movies, even though they’re controversial at times; obscene movies, as long as they’re idiotic, pass muster.

  What to do? The best thing would be a boycott by the audience: sensible sex education in the schools should lead to some results, but it will take a generation. For the moment there’s nothing to do but resign oneself.

  But please, Mr. Producers, leave the women’s Lagers alone. They are not a subject for you, or even for your most faithful customers, who don’t need much to be satisfied; they want images of women-objects, since they can’t have them in flesh and blood, but they don’t care about the context. The most demanding of them may wish to witness, free or almost, the spectacle of the tortured virgin, but that the villain is a Nazi, rather than a Saracen, or a Philistine, or a Carthaginian, is, for them, a minor detail: one is the same as the other, as long as the substance is there.

  No, the women’s Lagers are not indispensable; you can leave them alone with no loss to yourselves. Besides, the subject is not congenial to your boorish directors. Giuliana Tedeschi, who was there, said it well: they weren’t second-rate sex theaters; there was suffering, yes, but in silence, and the women weren’t beautiful and didn’t arouse desire. Rather, they aroused infinite compassion, like defenseless animals.

  As for the SS, most of them weren’t monsters, idiotic lechers, or perverted dandies: they were functionaries of the State, more pedantic than brutal, effectively indifferent to the daily horror in which they lived, and which they appeared to get used to quickly, partly because, in agreeing to oversee the Lagers, they avoided being sent to “cover themselves with glory” on the Russian front. In short, they weren’t elegant, stylized beasts but vulgar, cowardly little men. If they had accepted that grim job they must have been mentally crippled, inhibited, and crude—like your customers. I have often thought that they would have liked your porno swastikas.

  La Stampa, February 12, 1977

  Letter to Lattanzio:1 “Resign”

  Dear Mr. Minister,

  I am an Auschwitz survivor, and so I am well acquainted with Nazism: I know it from the inside, and for its men, alive and dead, I feel a profound revulsion. Including Kappler: in the face of what he did (especially the macabre trick of the gold of Rome), all excuses, it seems to me, become futile. He “only” carried out orders: it’s true, but he carried them out willingly, and, after all, by the sole fact of requesting to enlist in the SS, he consciously put himself in the position of obeying without question. Others were more guilty than he, as Giorgio Bocca has pointed out: it’s true, like him they should have served a life sentence; only a distracted or distorted justice could absolve them or condemn them to lesser punishment. Kappler is ill: he should have been treated, and in fact he was, but no judicial order absolves the sick; faced with the list of his victims, did Colonel Kappler take care to make sure that none of them were sick? He was repentant: but to be satisfied with verbal declarations of repentance from a man like that is so ingenuous that not even an ingenuous person like me would believe it, and in fact I didn’t believe it, and the facts confirmed that I was right.

  I therefore feel revulsion for Kappler, I would not be disposed to forgive him, if I had the power to do so, and I believe that prison was the right place for him. That said, I’d like to note that his escape doesn’t add anything to his guilt: it’s natural for a prisoner to attempt to flee, and anyone who has been a prisoner (justly or unjustly) knows that. On the other hand, his escape adds a heavy burden to your responsibility, Mr. Minister. The Kappler case was discussed just recently: it hadn’t been forgotten. You had certainly given or confirmed orders for his custody, but you can’t not know that even a corporal, when his orders are not carried out, can’t get away with saying “But I gave them.” A corporal or a general is punished; not a minister—a minister resigns.

  Resign, Mr. Minister: even if you feel innocent. Resign
out of mercy, decency, charity to the country, to your party, to yourself. The most serious disease, among the many that afflict us, is the rejection of responsibility: show, or pretend to, that you know it, and that you know that in any hierarchy the responsibility of the subordinate doesn’t absorb that of his superior. Resign, soon and discreetly; don’t miss this opportunity to restore your own dignity and that of the State.

  La Stampa, September 8, 1977

  1. Vito Lattanzio, the minister of defense, had to resign in 1977 after the war criminal Herbert Kappler, who had been the head of the Gestapo in Rome, escaped from a prison hospital.

  The Germans and Kappler

  With Herbert Kappler safely hidden in the heart of the Federal Republic of Germany, and with Lattanzio just as safely glued to a seat, any seat, it doesn’t matter which, it is legitimate to think that the bocce are now still, and that the cloud of dust that arose, or was deliberately kicked up, is bound to settle. At this point, to the many considerations that were made about the escape from the Celio prison, I would like to add one, and connect it to a memory of mine.

  In the Auschwitz Lager, the Jews were the great majority: between 90 and 95 percent, depending on the period. Next to the Jews, and nominally subjected to the same discipline and the same regimen, there were also some “Aryans” labeled as common criminals (their badge was a green triangle) or political prisoners (red triangles); the latter were almost all German or Austrian. All the German-speaking greens and reds held a position, however low; in reality, none of them followed the fate of the Jews and the non-German-speaking prisoners. I remember only one red German who had no position: he was a Social Democrat, a small, puny man and frankly not very bright. I’m not sure what post he was offered, but he had the courage and the dignity to refuse it; yet he was the only one. It’s likely that this wasn’t an order from Berlin. It must have been a local, discretionary initiative, undertaken instinctively by the officials of the Lagers, but substantially in accord with the spirit of the country as it was then: German blood, which manifested itself in the language, had to be favored. This instinct was so strong that even the Jewish prisoners, if they were German speakers, sometimes had an easier life, that is to say they had a slightly lower probability of dying. Compared with belonging to the German nation, as attested by the language, all else became secondary, including the category of criminal, or even political adversary.

  Such was the spirit of Germany at the time. It would be foolish to refuse to admit that in both Germanys of today many things have changed: but the first reactions of public opinion and of the German press (of the Federal Republic of Germany; of the German Democratic Republic we know nothing) lead one to think that that spirit has not changed. The lost war, millions of dead, the country divided, the occupation, the hunger and cold of ’45 and ’46 taught the Germans quite well that an adventure with the radical right doesn’t pay, and in fact there is no German equivalent of the Italian Fascist Party. But all this does not seem to have taught them, or at least not all of them, that a German is a human being worth neither more nor less than any other human being.

  The indignation at the refusal to pardon Kappler last November and the unseemly rejoicing at his “repatriation” on August 15 were too widespread to refer to Kappler the Nazi, Kappler the sick man, Kappler the SS officer: they referred clearly to Kappler the German. It was not his sojourn in prison that wounded public opinion but, rather, his sojourn in an Italian prison. There are a certain number of German war criminals who are to this day held in German prisons: I don’t think I am wrong in predicting that if one of them escaped (but it’s unlikely that this would occur: they are better jailers than we are), the fact would be judged by German public opinion with much less indulgence, and the local Lattanzio would fall within hours.

  It is not a neo-Nazi Germany that applauded the initiative of Ms. Anneliese Kappler1; it is the self-righteous and legalistic Germany, the same one that wasn’t National Socialist but offered Nazism a warm womb, fertile and welcoming. Like a reagent, and beyond the cautious official responses, the Kappler case revealed how deep the bond of blood and soil is among the German people, to this day.

  Ha Keillah 3, no. 1 (October 1977)

  1. Kappler’s wife, a nurse, helped him escape from the Italian military hospital where he was being treated for cancer.

  Exported Words

  A stimulating and curious book was published recently, more valuable than the title seems to promise (Giacomo Elliot,1 Let’s Speak Itanglian, Rizzoli). Itanglian, as defined by the author, is the Italian-English, or rather Italian-American, jargon that is rapidly spreading in various circles, and especially in the circle in which the author seems to be at home, that of “management,” of company management, and, even more specifically, in companies active in the more advanced technological fields. In fact, an entire chapter of the book, presented in the form of a well-thought-out glossary, is devoted to “words that come from EDP,” where EDP is an Itanglian abbreviation that means “electronic data processing.”

  Let it be clear that the author’s intentions are very far from those of a purist, and in my view there is absolutely nothing to object to on this point. To demand that a “kit” be called, instead, a scatola di montaggio or a cassetta degli attrezzi would be foolish as well as useless: linguistic economy has its laws, and where a single syllable says more and better than seven, the purist can merely raise the white flag. Not so, the author correctly notes, when the foreign term is used for other reasons, for example to make oneself seem important, or to deliberately obscure one’s thought: in these cases, its use is to be deplored, and its linguistic vitality is questionable.

  The battle of the purist is a desperate battle of defense: it is so today, with the advance of Itanglian, and always has been, in every century and every country, when it has sought to oppose the irruption of new words that were necessary supports to new cultures, concepts, or objects. In most European languages, terms of obvious Italian origin are still in use to this day—“bank” (banca), “discount” (sconto), “reduction” (ribasso), “net” (netto), “percent” (percento), “dividend” (dividendo), and so on—and this is an enduring homage to the entrepreneurship (and the linguistic creativity) of Tuscan and Lombard bankers of the seventeenth century, who were so well-known that at the time, in London, “Lombard” was a synonym for banker.

  In the same manner, the prestige that the arts in Italy, and especially music, enjoyed in the sixteenth century has to this day an echo in words that, not translated, have become part of all languages, like “cupola,” “chiaroscuro,” “adagio,” “crescendo,” etc. The irruption of Itanglian into our technological language is a strictly analogous phenomenon. It is not, in itself, an illness; it’s only a symptom. It is, however, the symptom of a grave illness: today’s technology originates and develops elsewhere; the meager creativity of our language signals the low level of creativity in our technology. It signals that, in this field, Italy is “acculturated,” and not just linguistically.

  We know little about the author of this singular book, at least so far—in fact, nothing, except for the note on the back flap, which is suspect, and which (if I may employ here an Itanglian term that escaped the author himself) has the air of being “forged.” But judging from the things he says, and the way he says them, he is certainly an amiable man, witty and civilized, and has a long and varied experience. Some of his observations—for example, his disapproval of the “humanistic” contempt in which administrative and bookkeeping techniques are held here in Italy—in times like these refresh the blood like a breath of oxygen; it’s so rare now to be reminded that to create well-being it’s necessary to create wealth, and that to create wealth it’s necessary to work and administer well!

  Equally useful is the diagnosis of certain corporate illnesses that one reads as a comment on and clarification of the term “controller.” It bears witness to the author’s long and intelligent militancy in industry and its compatibility with his varied
and lively cultural background, which resonates in a prose that is always consummately clear and often elegant.

  The single Itanglian words that are presented are defined, clarified, and commented on in different keys. Some with purely didactic intent, so that the term can be understood, used appropriately, and not flaunted for exhibitionist purposes (e.g., “real time”); others with more or less evident ironic intent. In fact, it’s exactly this subtle, at times scarcely noticeable modulation of irony that confers on the text a peculiar taste, bringing it closer to classics like Swift and Butler. To what extent must we take seriously the recurring statement, repeated also on the jacket, that Itanglian “is useful for your career”? The naïve or hurried reader runs the risk of convincing himself that knowledge and public and frequent use of this jargon truly are necessary, even sufficient, in order to become a great manager, whereas in reality, of course, things are different. But precisely: it is typical of the best irony to be ironic about itself, canceling out or imperceptibly blurring its own borders, in order to provoke in the reader a persistent and healthy doubt.

  But even apart from this subtle derisive intent, the book could and should remain within reach of many people, laymen or specialists, purely for its qualities as a glossary and a guide. Unless there are unpredictable changes, for still more decades advanced technology will continue to flow in the direction in which, unfortunately, it is flowing today, and will enrich our language with new terms—terms that will immediately become necessary, and which, nonetheless, official dictionaries will never accept, or will accept only belatedly. As a consequence, there will yet again blossom that vital linguistic phenomenon by means of which metaphors emerge from the arts, so apt that they find an immediate welcome and become part of the lexicon. At one time, the arts were few, and they were fertile matrices—for instance, the mill and the stable, which, in addition to countless proverbs, have given us, respectively, “to sift” (vagliare, winnow) and “brake” (freno, bit).