The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Ten years ago, the scenario changed. Various voices, both timid and authoritative, were raised in warning that it would be difficult to continue to carry on indefinitely like this: ever upward, yes, but on all fronts? and how far? Hadn’t the time come for worldwide stocktaking, and for curbing, if not consumption, at least waste, artificially induced needs, and air, water, and soil pollution? In the fall of 1973, the entire world was convinced, suddenly and brutally, that that time had come; it happened within a few days, on the occasion of the “small” Yom Kippur War, between Egypt and Israel. Oil, the main source of energy for all industrialized countries, raw material for thousands of by-products, tacitly considered inexhaustible, might, instead, be lacking for a while, because of someone’s arbitrary and autonomous decision. Further, if you looked more closely, oil could even disappear forever within a few decades; or, more precisely, it would certainly disappear through depletion of the oil fields. This sudden awareness of a deadline, possibly deferrable but unavoidable, was positive from many points of view, because it clarified for everybody the need to resolve, in an intelligent way and on a global scale, many problems that had been piling up. An alarm went off, the oil will run out, it’s already running out, and with it will end the epoch of low-cost energy, the belle époque of thoughtless waste, of floods of gasoline barely more expensive than mineral water. And sooner or later, like oil, many metals whose consumption is growing exponentially at the expense of limited resources will also run out. In other words, we realized that we have been wonderfully ingenious in the short term, in resolving maybe complex, but temporary and marginal problems, while we have been incredibly shortsighted in the case of major problems, which extend in space and time and on which depends no less than the survival of our civilization, or even of our species.

  Thus, a new blow was inflicted on the Enlightenment concept of progress. Already at the start of this century, with the first worldwide conflict, talk about progress had begun to be wary: progress, yes, but only scientific and technical, certainly not moral, and maybe not even cultural and artistic. Today, even scientific and technological progress is questioned by some thinkers, and many non-thinkers: the Industrial Revolution has caused two worldwide, bloody wars, from chemistry came dynamite, from Einstein and Fermi came Hiroshima, from weed killers came Seveso,1 from tranquilizers came the thalidomide tragedy, from dyes comes cancer. Enough, let’s stop, let’s go back.

  Well, it’s impossible to go back, or it would be possible only at the cost of a massacre of unprecedented proportions. Going back to the beginning would mean reopening the door to epidemics and infant mortality, abandoning the production of chemical fertilizers, and thus reducing agricultural production by a half to two-thirds, and condemning to hunger hundreds of millions of people, in addition to those who go hungry already. Today, humanity finds itself in a critical and new situation, so complex that it would be naïve to propose to resolve it by a single general method. We can’t continue to “progress” indiscriminately, but neither can we stop or go back on all fronts. We have to confront individual problems one by one, with honesty, intelligence, and humility: this is the delicate and formidable task of the experts of today and tomorrow, and it is the topic of this book.

  More than a chemistry digest, the book is, in my view, a small guide to practical behavior. It’s both useful and necessary for the many serious technical problems confronting us to be removed from the sphere of emotions and vested interests and laid out with competence and sincerity. Not always—in fact, rarely—does the book propose a solution. Sometimes, a balanced analysis of the data shows that the problem doesn’t exist, or that it does exist but that the solution can be found only through disproportionately expensive research, or, again, that the truth can drown in a sea of contradictory experimental data, as in the case of the “saccharin mess.”2 Of course, that is an extreme case, since saccharin is characterized by limited and poorly defined advantages and disadvantages. Different, and more universal, is the problem of food additives, since we are all consumers of food and by now the majority of human beings eat food that has been in some way tampered with or preserved. Some additives are useful or even indispensable, like those which protect food from going bad, safely and for an extended period of time. Others, like dyes, satisfy purely commercial requirements; in other words they fulfill fake needs created by habit and publicity—it wouldn’t be at all impossible to get used to eating gray salami and colorless jams (that is, of a “natural” color). But while such innovations would certainly be logical, “consumer resistance has so far been decisive.” If only the same propaganda tools that are used to promote totally futile and sophisticated expectations were mobilized against the use of worthless additives! Indeed, in the light of the careful and intelligent ecological assessment promoted by this book, to say worthless is tantamount to saying harmful; when there is no benefit, the presumption, however small, of harmfulness must be made. By way of example, take the case of the nitrates and nitrites that, for centuries, have been added to brighten up the color of sausages and that recently have been suspected of causing the development of cancer through the complex and unsuspected transformations they undergo inside the body.

  Equally sensitive is the subject of drugs. That every drug is potentially a poison was known to Hippocrates, and it is confirmed by the semantic ambivalence of the Greek word. We learn that “between 3 and 5 percent of hospitalizations in the United States are a consequence of a negative reaction to a drug,” and that there is great uncertainty about what happens when a patient is given two or more drugs whose compatibility and mutual interaction are basically unknown to the health practitioner (or even the pharmacologist). And what about the case, extremely frequent these days, of a patient taking drugs without a prescription, based on hearsay or the experience of others? Risks and benefits have to be evaluated with intelligence and competence, outside any emotional consideration. In most cases, however, this evaluation is way beyond the capacity of the layman, and we are all laymen; it’s already an achievement that each one of us may become an expert on a single one of the innumerable problems confronting us. But it’s difficult to overcome emotional considerations. The press and the mass media are bombarding us with a growing amount of information that is imprecise, distorted, full of gaps, often poorly understood by its disseminators, and almost always contaminated by special interests or prejudiced ideologies.

  The subject of tobacco is typical, and is thoroughly addressed by the book. While the general awareness that “smoking is unhealthy” is growing, it’s useful to read in no uncertain terms that, for instance in the Federal Republic of Germany, tobacco earns nine billion marks for the state each year, but it also imposes social costs of twenty billion marks, for treating diseases caused directly or indirectly by smoking; or to read that tobacco is responsible for four times as many deaths as road accidents.

  It’s very hard to judge the toxicity of chemical elements, whose traces are present (and have been forever: the sea contains almost all of them, but now their concentrations have increased and new ones have appeared) in our environment and in our food. We have known for a long time that arsenic and selenium are “toxic,” that they are harmful or deadly if absorbed in high quantities; but what does “high” mean? Only the most modern and sophisticated methods of chemical analysis have made it possible to determine that, on the contrary, in very small doses, both substances are necessary or at least useful: arsenic as a growth factor and selenium as an antagonist of mercury. Further, the dosages at which they (and probably also other elements or composites) are useful differ greatly from species to species, and presumably from individual to individual. It would therefore be wise to reduce their presence in the environment, but it would be foolish to eliminate them altogether. Where is the demarcation line between wisdom and ignorance?

  The author notes that the pinnacle of uncertainty and confusion is reached with the question of energy. Yet this, intertwined with all the other problems we face today, in
cluding political ones, is the problem of problems, the key to our survival, before which all other questions should pale: Energy or Extinction is the menacing title of a book by Fred Hoyle that is cited here. It’s also the problem that finds us least well prepared, because what seems to be the most plausible solution, that is, relying on nuclear energy, isn’t backed, like the others, by the experience of decades or centuries. It goes beyond the confines of traditional physics and chemistry, and it comes up against entrenched habits and unsettling mental associations: to many people, plutonium is Pluto, and the atom is Hiroshima. The “two faces” alluded to in the title of this book, the risks and the benefits, are both disguised and masked, and are marred by the enormous financial interests in play; even among the experts there is no unanimity on an objective assessment. Yet the problem can’t be set aside. An energy shortage would cause a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions, and the solution to the problem can’t be left to the next generation, making it pay for our lack of foresight. But to solve the problem we need, once again, intelligence, knowledge, and honesty.

  From all the considerations above, and from the many other vital topics addressed in this book, the clear necessity emerges, the moral obligation, not to be gullible, impulsive, and ignorant. Today more than ever we need to be prepared, and never more than today have schools, at least in Italy, been so unprepared to prepare us: we must welcome all those who, like Caglioti, intend to make up for these shortcomings. The obstacles in front of us can’t be overcome with cheers or boos, with demonstrations or marches; realism and trust in human reason are needed, as there are no other suitable tools. If we oppose a necessary and urgent decision, we must be able to propose an alternative and better one. If we speak about “new models of development,” we must know what this expression means. In a word, we need to know: not to surrender to enthusiasts or catastrophists, and not to satisfy ourselves and others with words.

  Beneath the technical information and quantitative data, which are justifiably substantial, a silent current of wisdom, desire to educate, and moral tension flows through this book. It doesn’t lay out solutions, but through its approach teaches us the most appropriate mind-set for finding them; everyone can discover here matters to ponder, and it is to be hoped that it will be selected and promoted as a school textbook.

  Foreword to Luciano Caglioti, I due volti della chimica (The Two Faces

  of Chemistry) (Milan: Mondadori, 1979)

  1. An industrial accident causing the release into the atmosphere of toxic dioxin occurred in Seveso, near Milan, on July 10, 1976.

  2. In the 1970s, studies showed a link between saccharin and bladder cancer in rats.

  Afterword to the New German Edition of

  If This Is a Man

  Someone wrote long ago that books, like human beings, have a destiny of their own, which is unpredictable, different from what we expected or wished for them. This book, too, has had a strange destiny. Its birth certificate is remote in time: it can be found on a page of the book, where one reads “Dann nehme ich Bleistift und Heft und schreibe, was ich niemandem zu sagen vermochte” (“Then I take my pencil and notebook and write what I could never tell anyone”). Our need to tell was so strong that I had begun to write the book, while things were still happening, in that freezing wartime German laboratory, full of prying eyes, although I knew that I could never keep those furtively scribbled notes, that I would have to throw them away immediately, because if they were found on me it would cost me my life.

  But I wrote the book as soon as I returned to Italy, in the space of a few months: the memories burned so fiercely inside me. The manuscript was rejected by several of the big publishers, and accepted in 1947 by a small publishing house; 2500 copies were printed, then the publisher closed down and the book fell into oblivion, maybe because, in that harsh postwar period, people had no desire to return in memory to the painful years that had just ended. It took on new life only in 1958, when it was reprinted by Einaudi, and since then the interest of the public has been constant. The book has been translated into seven languages, adapted for the radio and the theater, and in Italy has been reprinted many times, including in a school edition, with footnotes.

  In Germany it appeared for the first time in 1961, published by Fischer. The publisher asked me to write a special preface for German readers. The request disconcerted me. I was too little acquainted with the new Germany and my potential readers, I didn’t know what language to use, I didn’t want to impose myself as preacher or as judge, and it seemed to me that the facts recounted provided their own commentary. I agreed with the publisher to publish as a preface an excerpt from the letter that I had written to the book’s translator to thank him for his work. The excerpt includes the following:

  If I think of my own life and the purposes I have set for myself, there is only one among them that I can identify consciously and precisely: to bear witness, to make my voice heard by the German people, to “talk back.” . . .

  I am sure that you have not misinterpreted me. I have never harbored any hatred toward the German people. . . . I cannot understand, I cannot bear to see a man judged not for who he is but for the group he happens to belong to. . . .

  But I can’t say that I understand the Germans. . . . I hope that this book will have some kind of echo in Germany: not only because of my ambitions but also because the nature of this echo will perhaps allow me to understand the Germans better.

  This hope of mine was only partly fulfilled. The German edition sold out quickly, but there were no important reviews. On the other hand, I received a large number of letters from German readers, mostly young, and this made me think that my book must have roused a certain interest. I noticed an odd fact: all these letters were inspired by a single sentence in the preface, the one just cited, about wishing to “understand the Germans better.” The young people, reflecting, wondered why it was so difficult to understand what happened in the Third Reich; some said that they themselves didn’t understand their country, others made a distinction (“I can’t understand those Germans”), still others claimed to “hate themselves as Germans and what is German in them.” Only one (but probably he is not young) attempted a justification, clumsy and conventional: “In every era there have been moments when ‘all hell broke loose,’ uncontrollably and senselessly.”

  A confusing picture: but scarcely ten years had passed since the end of the war, and, besides, it was evident that the segment of public opinion represented by these thirty or forty readers was highly selective, far from constituting an “average sample” of the Germany of that time. Now this book, which I wrote thirty-three years ago, heads toward a new incarnation and a new adventure. Yet again I feel reluctance, and almost shame (the shame of Auschwitz, the shame that every man should feel in the face of the fact that other men conceived and built Auschwitz), in presenting it to the German reader, and at the same time I feel a painful curiosity: this second German edition will be read by a new generation, freed to a great extent from the guilt feelings of their fathers, open to all European influences, more receptive but at the same time more ignorant of their past, perhaps even more indifferent.

  Yet again, I hope that a response, or many, perhaps contradictory responses, will come to me from that country, to which I feel paradoxically bound by an unquenchable thirst to understand. It seems to me that I perceive in the criminal tragedy of the Third Reich a unique event that is an example and a symbol, but whose meaning has not yet been made clear. Perhaps one can read in it the warning of a greater catastrophe that looms over all humanity, and that can be averted only if all of us, truly, succeed in understanding the past, thus draining it of its threat.

  Afterword to the new German edition of If This Is a Man,

  published by Fischer Verlag in 1979

  What a Big Mess in Moscow, in 1917

  It’s unfortunate that good manners prevent the reviewer from revealing to the reader the subject of this unusual book, by Roberto Vacca.1 Suffice it to say th
at pokazuka, the Russian word that appears in the title, means “monstrous fraud,” “masquerade,” or some such, and that the fraud in question is no less than the Soviet regime—seen synchronously, in its obscure financial tangles, and diachronically, starting from the October Revolution and the Moscow trials—reinterpreted for the reader in a reckless and mocking way.

  In the first episode, the author says that the book “is not intended to insult or defame any individual or any country; rather, it is meant to be, almost exclusively, an entertainment.” I allow myself, respectfully, to read that “almost” as if it were written in bold, and to note that while the entertainment is there, acrobatic, on every page, the book has more to offer.

  Unfortunately, we are getting used to pokazuka, to fraud as a tool of governance, also, and especially, in Italy: we can choose from a vast range of examples. Didn’t the blackout campaign of last fall emit a vague odor of pokazuka? It’s therefore good that someone should put us on the alert, preferably with the gentle prod of political satire. If we have to beware of idols, we must learn to mistrust all idols, our own and those of others, near and far.

  To ascribe the political decline of the Soviet Union to the gnomes of Zurich is an elegant paradox that brings to mind G. K. Chesterton. However, there is no paradox in “the thousands, maybe millions of people who were deported, imprisoned, humiliated just because they were sincere revolutionaries, true democrats . . . all those who never learned the truth and are dead.”

  But Vacca is not a man to linger in mourning for the gods who failed and in morose contemplation of futures not realized.