The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  It is impossible to defend oneself from such Entwürdigung, such degradation. The whole world sits back and watches impassively. Even the German Jews, almost all of them, submit to the tyranny of the State and feel objectively degraded. The only escape is paradoxical and contradictory: to accept destiny, in this case Judaism, and at the same time to rebel against the imposed choice. For the young Hans, a returning Jew, to be Jewish is simultaneously impossible and obligatory. This is where the rupture begins that pursues him until death and ultimately provokes it. He denies that he possesses physical courage, but he is not lacking in moral courage. In 1938 he leaves his “annexed” homeland and immigrates to Belgium. Thenceforth he will be Jean Améry, a near anagram of his original name. For the sole sake of dignity, he will accept Judaism, but as a Jew “[he will wander] through the world like an invalid suffering from one of those illnesses that do not cause great suffering but definitely have a lethal outcome.” Educated as a German humanist and critic, he struggles to become a French writer (he never succeeds), and in Belgium joins a resistance movement whose actual political prospects are faint. The moral of his life, for which he will pay dearly in material and spiritual terms, has changed: symbolically, at least, it now consists in “returning the blow.”

  In 1940, the tide of Hitler submerges Belgium, too, and in 1943 Jean, who despite his choice has remained a solitary and introverted intellectual, falls into the hands of the Gestapo. He is asked under torture to reveal the names of his comrades and commanders. He is no hero. In his writings, he admits honestly that if he had known who they were he would have talked, but he didn’t know them. They tie his hands together behind his back and hoist him up by his wrists with a pulley. After a few seconds his arms are dislocated and remain turned upward, straight behind his back. The torturers persist, flogging his almost unconscious body fiercely, but Jean knows nothing and cannot take refuge even in betrayal. He recovers, but he has been identified as a Jew, and they ship him to Auschwitz-Monowitz, the same Lager where I, too, was interned a few months later.

  Although we never saw each other again, we did exchange a few letters after liberation, since we recognized or, rather, came to know each other through our respective books. Our memories of the lower depths are very similar in physical details, but they diverge on a curious particular. While I have always maintained that I preserve a complete and indelible memory of Auschwitz, I have forgotten him. He says he remembers me, although he had me confused with Carlo Levi, who was already well-known at the time in France as an émigré and a painter. He even claims that we spent a few weeks in the same barrack, and that he hasn’t forgotten me because there were so few Italians, which made us a rarity; and also because during my last two months in the Lager I was largely able to practice my profession as a chemist, an even greater rarity.

  My essay would like to be simultaneously a summary, a paraphrase, a discussion, and a critique of his cold and bitter essay, which has two titles: “The Intellectual in Auschwitz,” and “At the Mind’s Limits.” His essay is taken from a volume I have wanted to see translated into Italian for many years, which also has two titles: “Beyond Guilt and Atonement” (Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne) and the subtitle “Attempt to Overcome a Defeat” (Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten).

  As the first title indicates, the theme of Améry’s essay is strictly circumscribed. Améry spent time in various Nazi prisons. After Auschwitz, he was held briefly in Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, but his observations are limited to Auschwitz, and for good reason: this is the location of the mind’s limits, the unimaginable. Was being an intellectual in Auschwitz an advantage or a disadvantage?

  We should, of course, begin by defining what is meant by the term “intellectual.” Améry proposes a typical but arguable definition:

  Who is, in the sense of the word that I have adopted, an intellectual or a cultivated man? Certainly not every practitioner of a so-called higher profession; advanced formal training is perhaps a necessary condition, but it certainly is not enough in itself. All of us know lawyers, engineers, doctors, probably even scholars who may be intelligent and perhaps even outstanding in their fields, but whom nonetheless one can hardly designate as intellectuals. An intellectual, as I wish to define him here, is a person who lives within what is a spiritual frame of reference in the widest sense. His realm of thought is an essentially humanist one, that of the liberal arts. He has a well-developed esthetic consciousness. By inclination and ability he tends toward abstract trains of thought. . . . When presented with the cue word “society,” he does not take it in its mundane sense, but rather sociologically. The physical process that produces a short circuit does not interest him, but he is well informed about Neidhart von Reuenthal, the courtly poet of village lyrics.

  I find this definition needlessly restrictive. Rather than a description it is a self-portrait, and, given the context in which it is inserted, I would not exclude a hint of irony: in effect, knowing von Reuenthal, as Améry certainly did, was of little use at Auschwitz. To me it would seem more appropriate for the term “intellectual” to also include, for instance, mathematicians, naturalists, or philosophers of science; and it should also be remarked that the term takes on different shades of meaning in different countries. But there is no reason to split hairs; after all, we are living in a Europe that claims to be united, and Améry’s thoughts still hold even if the concept under discussion can be understood in a wider sense. Nor do I wish to follow in Améry’s footsteps and base an alternative definition on my current situation. (I may be an “intellectual” today, although the word makes me somewhat uneasy. I was certainly not an intellectual then, because of my moral immaturity, my ignorance, and my alienation. If I became one later, I owe it paradoxically to the experience of the Lager.) I would propose extending the term to the person who is cultured independent of his or her profession; whose culture is alive, in that it seeks to renew, grow, and refresh itself; and who does not feel indifference or distaste before any branch of knowledge, although he is obviously unable to cultivate all of them.

  Whatever the case may be, and whatever definition one may choose, it is hard to disagree with Améry’s conclusions. On the subject of labor, which was primarily manual, in the Lager the educated man was generally worse off than the uneducated man. He lacked not only physical strength but also familiarity with the tools and the training that his working- or peasant-class comrades often possessed. To make matters worse, he was tormented by an acute sense of humiliation and destitution. By a sense of Entwürdigung, of lost dignity. I remember clearly my first day of work at the Buna worksite. Even before inscribing in the camp register our convoy of Italians (almost all of whom were either in the professions or shopkeepers), they sent us off temporarily to widen a large trench of clayey soil. They put a shovel in my hands, and I immediately proved to be a disaster: I was supposed to shovel the loosened soil from the bottom of the trench and toss it up to the edge, which by then was more than two meters high. It seems easy and it isn’t: unless you work rhythmically, and with the right momentum, the dirt won’t stay on the shovel. It will fall, and often on the head of the inexperienced digger.

  The “civilian” boss to whom we were assigned was also temporary. An elderly German who appeared to be a good person, he seemed genuinely shocked by our clumsiness. When we tried to explain to him that almost none of us had ever held a shovel, he shrugged his shoulders impatiently: for goodness’ sake, we were prisoners in striped pajamas, and Jews to boot. Everyone has to work, because “Arbeit macht frei”: isn’t that what was written on the gates of the camp? It was no joke: it was the rule. So if we didn’t know how to work, then we had better learn—weren’t we capitalists, after all? It served us right: today it’s my turn, tomorrow, yours. Some of us rebelled and got the first beatings in our career from the Kapos supervising the area; others lost heart; still others (I among them) managed to intuit confusedly that there was no way out, and that the best solution was to learn how to handle a p
ick and shovel.

  Unlike Améry and others, however, I felt only moderately humiliated by manual labor: obviously I was not yet “intellectual” enough. What was wrong with it, anyway? I had a university degree, of course, but that was an undeserved stroke of luck. My family had been wealthy enough to allow me to study. Many boys my age had been digging ditches since adolescence. Wasn’t I in favor of equality? Well, here I had it. I was forced to change my mind a few days later, when my hands and feet were covered with blisters and infections: no, you can’t even improvise being a ditchdigger. I had to quickly learn a few basics that the less fortunate (but the most fortunate in the Lager!) learn in childhood: how to hold tools, move your arms and torso correctly, restrain your exertions and withstand pain, and know how to stop at the brink of exhaustion, even if that meant being slapped and kicked by the Kapos, and sometimes, too, by the “civilian” Germans of I.G. Farbenindustrie. As I have written elsewhere, the beatings were generally not fatal, but collapse was. A well-landed punch contains its own anesthesia, both bodily and spiritual.

  Apart from the hard labor, life in the barracks was more painful for the educated person. It was a Hobbesian existence, an ongoing war of all against all. (I insist: so it was at Auschwitz, capital of the concentration-camp universe, in 1944. In other places or times, the situation might have been better or much worse.) A punch delivered by Authority could be accepted; it was literally a case of force majeure. Unacceptable, instead, because they were unexpected and against the rules, were the blows received from fellow prisoners, to which a civilized man rarely knew how to react. Moreover, dignity could be found in even the most exhausting manual labor, and a person could adapt, maybe by recognizing in it a rough asceticism or, depending on one’s temperament, a Conradian measuring of oneself, a patrolling of one’s own borders. It was much harder to accept the barrack routines: to make your bed in the idiotic perfectionist way I have described in the chapter on useless violence; to wash the wooden floors with damp and filthy rags; to get dressed and undressed on command; to expose your naked body for countless inspections for lice, scabies, and personal hygiene; to assimilate the militaristic parody of “close ranks,” “eyes right,” and “caps off,” before a potbellied SS officer. These routines were genuinely perceived as demeaning, a fatal regression to a desolate childlike state, bereft of teachers and of love.

  Améry/Mayer claims that he, too, was pained by the mutilated language I have described in chapter 4, but he was a German speaker. His suffering was different from that of us speakers of other languages, who were reduced to the condition of deaf-mutes. His suffering, if I may, was more spiritual than physical. He suffered because he was a German speaker, because he was a philologist who loved his language: the way a sculptor would suffer to see one of his statues defaced or mutilated. So in this case the suffering of the intellectual was different from that of the uneducated foreigner. For the foreigner, the German of the Lager was a language he didn’t understand, although his life depended on it. For the intellectual, it was a barbaric jargon that he understood but that flayed his mouth if he tried to speak it. One was a deportee, the other a stranger in his own land.

  On the subject of blows traded between fellow prisoners, in another one of his essays Améry relates a key episode, not without bemusement and retrospective pride, that illustrates his new morality of the Zurückschlagen, the “answering a blow with a blow.” A giant Polish common criminal punched him in the face over nothing. Améry hit him back as hard as he could, not out of an animal reaction but rather out of a reasoned revolt against the upside-down world of the Lager. “My human dignity,” he writes, “lay in this punch to his jaw—and that it was, in the end I, the physically much weaker man, who succumbed and was woefully thrashed, meant nothing to me. Painfully beaten, I was satisfied with myself.”15

  Here I have to admit my absolute inferiority: I have never known how to “answer a blow with a blow,” not because I am an evangelical saint or an intellectual aristocrat but because of my intrinsic inability to do so. Maybe it’s my lack of a serious political education: for there is no political program, even the most moderate, that does not allow for some form of active defense. Maybe it’s my lack of physical courage. If I am facing a natural danger or a disease I can muster some bravery, but I have always been totally bereft of courage when faced by a human being on the attack. Fist-fighting is an experience missing from my life as far back as I can remember. Nor can I say that I mind. This is why my career as a partisan was so short, painful, stupid, and tragic: I was playing someone else’s part. I admire Améry’s reinvention of himself, his courageous decision to leave the ivory tower and enter the fray, but this was and continues to be beyond the scope of my abilities. I admire it, but I cannot help pointing out that this decision, which overshadowed his whole post-Auschwitz life, led him to such severe and intransigent positions that he was unable to find joy in life, in living. A man who gets into fistfights with the whole world regains his dignity but pays a very high price because he is certain of his own defeat. Like every suicide, Améry’s, in Salzburg in 1978, admits a nebula of explanations but, in retrospect, the episode of his taking on the Pole provides one interpretation.

  A few years ago, I learned that in a letter to our common friend Hety S., whom I will speak about shortly, Améry called me “the pardoner.” I don’t consider this an insult or a commendation, but it is inexact. I do not have a tendency to forgive. I have never forgiven any of our enemies from those years nor do I feel inclined to forgive their imitators in Algeria, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, Chile, Cambodia, and South Africa, because I do not know of any human actions that can undo a wrong. I ask for justice, but I am personally incapable of throwing punches or answering a blow with a blow.

  I tried to only once. Elias, the hardy dwarf I wrote about in If This Is a Man and Lilith, was a man who, to all appearances, “was happy in the Lager.” One day, for some reason I do not remember, he grabbed me by the wrists and was insulting me and pushing me against the wall. Like Améry, I felt a surge of pride; aware that I was betraying myself and transgressing a rule handed down to me by countless ancestors who were strangers to violence, I tried to defend myself by giving him a kick in the shins with my wooden clog. Elias howled, not from pain but from wounded dignity. In an instant he had folded my arms over my chest and pushed me to the ground with all his weight. Then he caught me in a chokehold, carefully studying my face with eyes I can remember perfectly, of a pale blue porcelain color, a few inches from my own, staring at me. He squeezed until he could see the signs of unconsciousness approaching; then, without a word, he let go and went on his way.

  Since this confirmation, I have preferred, within the limits of the possible, to delegate punishment, revenge, and retaliation to the laws of my country. It is a choice forced upon me. I know how badly these mechanisms work, but I am what my past has made me, and it is too late for me to change. If I, too, had seen the world collapse on top of me;

  if I had been condemned to exile and the loss of national identity; if I, too, had been tortured until I lost consciousness and more, maybe I would have learned to strike back, and, like Améry, would nurture the resentments to which he devoted a long and painful essay.

  These were the obvious disadvantages of having an education in Auschwitz. But were there not also advantages? If I denied it, I would be unappreciative of the modest (and antiquated) high school and university education I happened to receive. Nor does Améry. An education could be useful: not often, not everywhere, and not for everyone, but sometimes, on rare occasions, as precious as a gemstone, it was useful and you felt as if you’d been lifted off the ground, but with the danger of crashing back down, which would hurt all the more the higher and longer the exaltation lasted.

  Améry tells the story, for example, of a friend of his who studied Maimonides at Dachau. But his friend was a nurse at the clinic, and although Dachau was a very harsh Lager, there was still a library, while at Auschwitz it was dangerous and i
nconceivable to even glance at a newspaper. He also describes one evening, on the march back from work through the Polish muck, trying—and failing—to rediscover in some of Hölderlin’s verses the poetic message that had moved him in happier days. He could remember the verses, they echoed in his ear, but they no longer had anything to say to him. Another time (in the infirmary, typically, after consuming an extra ration of soup: in other words, in a brief respite from hunger), he became almost intoxicated with excitement at remembering the character of Joachim Ziemssen, the fatally ill officer still mindful of his duties, in The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann.

  Education was useful for me. Not always, and sometimes in subterranean and unexpected ways, but it served me and may have saved me. I am rereading, forty years later, the “Canto of Ulysses” chapter of If This Is a Man. It is one of the few episodes whose authenticity I have been able to verify (a reassuring exercise: over time, as I wrote in the first chapter, you begin to doubt your own memory), because the person to whom I was speaking in that episode, Jean Samuel, is among the very few characters in the book who have survived. We have remained friends and have met several times. His memories coincide with mine: he remembers our conversation but, in a manner of speaking, without the same accents or, rather, with the accents in different places. At the time, he was not interested in Dante; he was interested in me, in my naïve and presumptuous attempt, in half an hour and with the soup pole over our shoulders, to transmit to him Dante, my language, and my confused classroom memories. I wasn’t lying and I wasn’t exaggerating when I wrote, “I would give today’s soup to be able to connect ‘than any I had seen’ to the last lines.” I really would have given bread and soup—my life’s blood, in other words—to rescue from the void memories that today, with the secure support of the printed page, I can refresh whenever I like, and free of charge, which makes them seem worth very little.