by Primo Levi
The German government doesn’t seem to realize the subversive potential represented by this renewed presence of the Nazi poison in the body of the country, both because of the contagion directed at terrorist groups recruited from the new generation, and because of the radicalization of groups that declare themselves nominally to be left wing.
Confronted with this intolerable situation, the anti-Fascist organizations of Europe have launched an appeal from Brussels, supported by eighty-four associations of ex-deportees, partisans, resistance fighters, and victims of the SS from twenty-one countries (including Israel and the countries of the Eastern bloc), to request the dissolution of the SS veterans associations, according to the terms of the constitution of West Germany.
An exclusive international committee, on which Italy is represented by the National Association of Former Deportees (ANED), has in addition decided to call for a big protest march, on Saturday, April 22, in Cologne, at which, naturally, thousands of German anti-Fascists will also be present: in fact, this initiative (the first to gather all the European anti-Fascists on German soil) is not intended to assume an antagonistic character; rather, it is intended to recognize the merits of those among the German people who were able to maintain faith in the democratic ideal through the Nazi darkness, paying a heavy tribute in blood for their conviction.
But there is also a proposal to remind the current German government of the promises formulated time and again by all the chancellors and all the presidents of West Germany, namely, that never again, and in no form, would Nazism be reborn on German soil, inviting those responsible to concrete political and legislative action.
The anti-Fascists don’t ask for sanctions against individual SS veterans, but demand that their associations be eliminated from the life of the country, that they no longer have a voice, can no longer pollute the new generations with their “messages.” No European has forgotten that the massacres of Marzabotto, Boves, Lidice, Oradour, the Ardeatine Caves were the work of the SS, or that the SS were assigned to the management of the labor camps, from which they gained fantastic advantages, and of the extermination camps, with their abominable equipment and their millions of dead. SS survivors must stop boasting about these exploits.
La Stampa, April 2, 1978
Everyone Must Understand Who the
Red Brigades Are
Amid the proliferation of hypotheses, and at the end of almost two months of anguish, the tragedy that began on March 16 has reached its conclusion.1 It’s too early to predict the consequences of what happened: we all share a deep distress, which nevertheless shouldn’t be confused with despair. We are distressed because of the unprecedented cruelty and the impunity with which the kidnapping came to an end, and because of the darkness that surrounded it. Let’s not forget: our country has been groping in this same darkness since 1969, and we have been unwlling or unable to shed light on it. Behind all this, one catches a glimpse of a cynical and merciless game that started in Dallas and that we may never be able to understand. We are also distressed because of the inefficiency of the response and the incompetence displayed in confronting the mad yet lucid arrogance of the Red Brigades.
But it’s not too early to try to draw some lessons from what happened. It was a mistake to let our many wounds fester without responding with timely and organic measures; to forgo justice by relying on oblivion; to set the arrogance of power against the urge to clean house. These are faults and mistakes not just of our institutions but of all of us citizens, in that we didn’t exercise, or we didn’t exercise well, our right to control from below; in that we often shrugged our shoulders in the face of transgressions; in that, when patience ran out, we believed that it was easier to destroy than to heal.
Now we have to confront a very different arrogance. It is to be hoped that the Red Brigades, because of the same inhuman coldness with which they continue in their crimes, have revealed their true nature to the few who had perceived them as comrades in arms. They are not the heirs of the workers’ movement; they have nothing to do with it, not in the way they operate and even less so in their language.
The content of their messages elicits surprise more than revulsion. Instead of the quiet self-assurance of someone who follows an idea, we find the exaltation of the megalomaniac and the monomaniac, encouraged by bloody exploits and unconcerned with any civilized discussion of different opinions, which they ridicule. In the absurd hypothesis that they prevailed, there is no doubt that the country would be submerged by a tide of barbarianism without precedent in modern history, even more odious, perhaps, than that of the “not yet forgotten Nazi SS,” to which they dare compare the police force.
La Stampa, May 10, 1978
1. On March 16, 1978, Aldo Moro, the president of the Christian Democratic Party, a former prime minister, and a promoter of a political “compromise” with the Communist Party, was kidnapped by the left-wing terrorist group the Red Brigades. His body was found in the trunk of a parked car on a Roman street on May 9, 1978.
Remembrance of Azelia Arici
It would be difficult to say how many people, not only in Turin, will be saddened by the death of Azelia Arici.1 Her former students can be counted in the thousands, and to these should be added the many others she taught, until a few months ago, at gatherings that were more like nimble conversations than like lessons, in which she sought to continue, beyond her official teaching, to be a guide to anyone who wished to update and refresh his knowledge of Italian and other literatures.
It couldn’t have been easy for her to succeed Augusto Monti in his position at the D’Azeglio High School, at a time when every teacher had to submit to the bitter humiliation of obedience to fascism: Professor Arici fulfilled her task with unforgettable dignity, never yielding to the prevailing rhetoric but, rather, cultivating and promoting a repulsion toward rhetoric, a diligent critical vigilance, which permeated her teaching and was, in essence, a “resistance” ahead of its time. Many recall her as severe in putting down nonsense or an empty theme, but they also recall her distress and her anger when a student she respected was given a bad grade by the commission for graduation exams.
Up until the moment when illness took away the faculty of expressing herself, and despite her advanced age, she preserved an astonishing youthfulness of spirit, an eager desire for new things to see and to learn, a never satisfied curiosity, which drove her to long and uncomfortable journeys in the years in which many tend to give in to weariness. In recent times she had finished the revision of her celebrated translation of the complete works of Tacitus, an undertaking that would dismay a far younger person. To us, her former students, her memory remains near above all for her lively and agile conception of culture, and for her capacity to transmit and enrich it, with a sensitivity and a human warmth that over the years became increasingly refined.
La Stampa, July 7, 1978
1. This was preceded by a paragraph in italics: “Azelia Arici died last Tuesday. She was eighty-three. She had been hospitalized since April. She left precise wishes. Among others that the announcement of her death should be made after the funeral.” [Editor’s note in the Italian edition.]
A World That Hitler Canceled
The news that Isaac Bashevis Singer has won the Nobel Prize must please even those who have read just one of his many books. As usual, and in keeping with its nature, the prize acknowledges someone who has devoted his life to writing, and who has been able to write for everyone: two qualities that are clearly recognizable in Singer.
In almost all of his writings, Singer sticks to his mother tongue, Yiddish, and to his roots in Galicia, both of which are remote and practically unknown to the average Italian reader. Nevertheless, his stories and novels are printed by the tens of thousands in Italy and are read by young and old, by the cultured and by the unsophisticated.
The reason for this enduring success is to be found in the honesty of Singer’s writing, which is never pretentious, never cluttered with preciousness or mannerisms,
and in the nineteenth-century richness of his imagination, which absorbs and transfigures everything: the great political and social movements that shake Central Europe at the beginning of our century; popular fairy tales that are ingenuous, witty, and strange, and seem to float up from the contained community of a Polish village toward the low, gloomy skies painted by Chagall; the wind of the Enlightenment, blowing in decades late to revive (and threaten) the age-old stability of the shtetl; the holy and cheerful eccentricity of Hasidic preaching; and a completely earthy sensuality that erodes and overflows the banks of a strict code.
But one cannot read Singer’s books without heartache, because the varied, gay, and sorrowful world that he describes doesn’t exist anymore. It was destroyed by Hitler’s barbarity, which, in a few years, wiped out a whole culture and a civilization, an event unique in modern history. Reading again the saga The Family Moskat, or the unforgettable story (in Gimpel the Fool) of the widow who lies with the devil, grows fond of him, nurses him when he is sick, always refusing to recognize him as the village tramp, we cannot escape the oppressive feeling of someone who digs with apprehensive compassion among the ruins of a buried city.
La Stampa, October 6, 1978
It Started with Kristallnacht
It’s not likely that many young people have read or heard about what happened in Germany exactly forty years ago. Hitler, who had come to power in January 1933, wasted no time in distinguishing himself and his regime. After two months, he had established Dachau, the first Lager, which was to be followed by many others, intended to eliminate and terrorize the political adversaries of Nazism; eight months later, he began to exclude Jews from government jobs and the cultural life of the country.
Nazism, like all absolute powers, needed an anti-power, an anti-state on which to unload the blame for all the troubles, present and past, real or presumed, that afflicted the German people. The Jews, defenseless and perceived by many as “other,” were the ideal anti-state, the focus for the nationalistic and Manichean excitement promoted by Nazi propaganda.
In September 1935, the regime promulgates the Nuremberg Laws, which define in maniacal detail who is to be considered a Jew, a half-Jew, or a quarter-Jew, and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. This is followed by a hail of legal abuses, some cruel, others intended to humiliate, which reflect the official thesis of Nazism: the Jews are a shadowy universal power, Satan’s incarnation, but here in Germany, in our hands, they are ridiculous and powerless.
From the age of six they have to wear the yellow star on their chests. They can sit only on public benches marked “nur für Juden”; all men must be called Israel and all women Sarah; their cows are not permitted to be mounted by the communal bull. In April 1938, the Jews’ property is assessed, in June businesses belonging to them; this is the prologue to their total exclusion from economic life.
Young Germans are injected with a visceral hatred, a physical repugnance toward the Jew, destroyer of the world and its order, guilty of all crimes. The majority of German Jews feel deeply German and react to this massive propaganda by withdrawing into a dignified forbearance: they are reduced to a marginal life, of misery, sadness, and fear. Already many terrorist acts have been carried out, an obvious consequence and interpretation of the hate propaganda. These are, however, isolated events; the Nazis now need a pretext to move from individual initiatives to organized terror, and the pretext is soon found.
In October 1938, some ten thousand Jews of Polish nationality are brutally expelled from Germany. Men, women, and children are obliged to camp in a no-man’s-land, in wretched conditions, while they wait for Poland to let them in. The son of one of the refugees, Herschel Grynszpan, some time ago found refuge in Paris. Just seventeen years old, he is a mystic and a fanatic: he feels that he has been appointed to take revenge, and on November 7 he kills the first German he meets, a counselor at the German embassy in Paris. It’s the trigger that the Nazis were waiting for, the confirmation of their thesis of the “international Jewish conspiracy” against Germany, and the response is immediate. The scenario and the script have been ready for a long time; the show can start immediately.
In the night of November 9–10 the pogrom is unleashed throughout Germany. Some 7500 Jewish shops and warehouses are laid waste and looted, 815 of them completely destroyed; 195 synagogues suffer the same fate; thirty-six Jews are killed, and twenty thousand, chosen from among the most affluent, are arrested. Initially the aggressors wear uniforms, but then they are hastily sent home to change into civilian clothes: they misunderstood their orders, the indignation must spring from the people, it must be “spontaneous.”
Everywhere, the police look on: the firemen intervene only when fires threaten “Aryan” buildings or property. Individual officials concoct local variations on the theme. In Krumbach, near Augsburg, Jewish women are dragged to the synagogue and forced to take from the Ark the scrolls of the Law and trample on them. While committing this sacrilege they must sing; those who refuse are killed.
In Saarbrücken, the Jews are ordered to carry straw into the temple, sprinkle it with gasoline, and set it ablaze. Some “indignant” demonstrators go beyond the program and indulge in personal looting; the police intervene but the judges will send everybody home with laughable sanctions. This is not the case for the zealots (or brutes) who have raped Jewish women: they are expelled from the Party and severely punished, not because of the violence inflicted on their victims but for having contaminated themselves by violating the sacred law of blood.
The destruction rages for several more days; at the end of the “crystal week” the streets of all the cities are covered with the shards of shattered shopwindows. This damage alone amounts to five million marks, and it is covered by insurance. Will it be paid? Göring’s solution is simple: the insurance companies will pay the Jews, but the state will intervene and confiscate everything.
In conclusion, the Union of Israelite Communities is ordered to pay a fine of one billion marks. It’s the same repulsive mixture of violence, mockery, and fraud that we find five years later, in Rome, with the macabre hoax of the fifty kilograms of gold that the Jews are to hand over to Kappler to avoid deportation. A few days later, the hunt for men (and women, the ill, and children) is set off and more than a thousand Roman Jews are deported to the death camps.
Shirer, who witnessed this outburst of barbarity, may be right in recognizing in it “the warning signs of a fatal weakening that ultimately would cause the catastrophic downfall of the dictator, his regime and his country,” and seeing it as the first indication of Hitler’s megalomania, a disease that never fails to strike those who, on a large or small scale, exercise power without control.
Kristallnacht opened the eyes of many, notably those of the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, who at last, but too late, was persuaded that Hitler was not a gentleman you could make deals with. Unfortunately, this event did not open everybody’s eyes, either in Germany or in Italy: had it done so, the world would have been spared the horrors of the Second World War, and maybe today we would live in a better society.
La Stampa, November 9, 1978
Jean Améry, the Philosopher-Suicide
The dreadful episode of the People’s Temple, the collective suicide of nine hundred followers of a mystic-satanic sect, is incomprehensible. It may remain so forever, if “to comprehend” means to look for motives. After all, every human action contains a hard core of incomprehensibility: if it weren’t so, we would be able to foresee what our neighbor will do. This doesn’t happen, and maybe it’s for the better. Understanding the reasons for a suicide is particularly difficult, since, in general, the victim himself isn’t conscious of them, or provides himself and others with explanations that are intentionally or unintentionally distorted.
News of the massacre at Jonestown was reported by the papers at the same time as another, much less sensational event: the suicide of Jean Améry, a bad-tempered and solitary philosopher, which is, on t
he other hand, easy to understand and can teach us a lot. Jean Améry was not his original name: it’s a pseudonym, or, rather, a new name, that the young Austrian scholar Hans Mayer chose, to show that he was forced to give up his native identity. Hans has Christian and Jewish forebears, but he is Jewish enough to be defined as such by the Nuremberg Laws. Still, he is totally assimilated: in his home they celebrated Christmas, and his recollection of his father, who died in the First World War, is not of a wise bearded Jew but of an officer of the Imperial Royal Army, in the uniform of a Tyrolean Kaiserjäger.
When the Nazis descend on Austria, Hans flees to Belgium and becomes Jean. But in 1940 Hitler’s tide submerges Belgium, too, and Jean, a shy and introverted intellectual who is conscious of his dignity, joins the Belgian resistance. He does not serve in it for long. He soon falls into the hands of the Gestapo, and is asked to reveal the names of his comrades and commanders; otherwise he will be tortured. He is no hero: if he knew names he would speak, but he doesn’t know them. His hands are tied behind his back and he is suspended by his wrists with a pulley. After a few seconds his arms are dislocated and turn upward, straight behind his back. His torturers persist, lashing his hanging body mercilessly, but Jean knows nothing, he can’t take refuge even in betrayal. He recovers but, as he is “legally” Jewish, he is sent to Auschwitz-Monowitz, where he lives through eighteen more months of terror.