by Primo Levi
I come to the third variant of the question: Why didn’t you escape “before”? Before the borders were closed? before the trap was set? Here again I have to point out that many people threatened by Nazism and fascism left “before.” They were limited to political exiles or they were intellectuals considered suspect by the two regimes: there are thousands of names, many of them obscure, others eminent, such as Palmiro Togliatti, Pietro Nenni, Giuseppe Saragat, Gaetano Salvemini, Enrico Fermi, Emilio Segrè, Lise Meitner, Arnaldo Momigliano, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Arnold Zweig, Stefan Zweig, Bertolt Brecht, and many others. Not all of them returned home, in a hemorrhage that drained Europe, perhaps irremediably. Their immigration—to England, the United States, South America, and the Soviet Union, but also to Belgium, Holland, and France, where the Nazi tide reached them a few years later: they were blind to the future, as we all are—was neither an escape nor a desertion but, rather, a natural rejoining of potential or real allies in citadels where they could resume the struggle or their creative activity.
But it is also true that, for the most part, the families under threat (first of all, the Jews) stayed in Italy and Germany. To ask why is yet another sign of a stereotypical, anachronistic concept of history, or, to put it simply, of a widespread ignorance and oblivion that tends to increase the further away the events become. The Europe of 1930–1940 was not the Europe of today. It is always painful to emigrate, but then it was even more difficult and more expensive than today. Emigration requires not only a lot of money but also a “bridgehead” in the country of destination—namely, friends or relatives willing to provide guarantees or even hospitality. Many Italians, especially peasants, had emigrated in the previous decades, but they were driven by poverty and hunger, and they had or thought they had a bridgehead. They were often invited, and warmly welcomed, because at the local level there was a shortage of laborers. But leaving the patria, the homeland, was also a traumatic decision for them and for their families.
It would be useful to dwell on the word patria, which is situated conspicuously outside of the spoken language: no Italian, except jokingly, would ever say, “I’m taking the train and returning to the patria.” The term is of recent coinage and its meaning is not unambiguous. There are no exact equivalents for it in other languages, it doesn’t appear, as far as I know, in any of our dialects (a sign of its erudite origins and hypothetical nature), and it has not always had the same meaning in Italy. In fact, depending on the era, it has denoted geographic entities of varying sizes, ranging from the village where a person was born and (etymologically speaking) the place where our fathers (padri) lived, to the whole nation, after Italian Unification, in the 1860s. The rough equivalent for patria in other countries is the hearth or the birthplace. In France (and sometimes in Italy, too) the term has taken on a connotation that is dramatic, polemical, and rhetorical at the same time: la Patrie begins to exist only when it is under threat or disowned.
For a person who is migrating, the concept of patria becomes painful and at the same time tends to fade. Already the poet Giovanni Pascoli, having left the “dolce paese,” his native Romagna (although he didn’t move far), sighed, “io, la mia patria or è dove si vive”—from now on my patria is wherever I live.21 For Lucia Mondella, the heroine of Manzoni’s The Betrothed, the patria is visibly identified with the “jagged peaks” of her mountains rising from the waters of Lake Como. By contrast, in countries and times of intense mobility, such as the United States or the Soviet Union today, the patria is spoken of only in political and bureaucratic terms: because what is the hearth, what is the “land of the fathers” for a citizenry that is always on the move? Many of them do not know nor do they care.
But the Europe of the 1930s was a very different place. Already industrialized, it was still either deeply rural or highly urbanized. “Abroad” was a vague and distant scenario for the vast majority of people, especially the middle class, which was less troubled by need. Faced with the threat of Hitler, the majority of Jews born in Italy, France, Poland, and even Germany, preferred to stay in what they felt was their patria, for the same basic reasons, although with nuances that differed from place to place.
Emigration presented everyone with the same organizational difficulties. These were times of serious international tensions: the European borders, which are almost nonexistent today, were practically closed, while England and the Americas were admitting extremely low quotas of immigrants. Nevertheless, the primary difficulty was of an interior, psychological nature. This is my village, city, region, or nation. I was born here. My forefathers are laid to rest here. I speak the language. I have adopted its customs and its culture, to which I may have contributed. I have paid my taxes, obeyed the laws. I have fought its battles, right or wrong. I have risked my life for its borders and some of my friends or relatives are buried in the war cemeteries. I myself, in deference to current rhetoric, have declared that I am ready to die for my country. I do not wish to nor can I leave. If I must die, I’ll die “in patria”: this will be my way of dying “for the patria.”
It’s obvious that this moral, which is more homespun and domestic than actively patriotic, would not have persisted had the European Jews been able to predict the future. Not that there were no ominous symptoms of the massacre. Hitler had spoken clearly from his first books and speeches: the Jews (and not only the German Jews) were the parasites of humankind, and they had to be eliminated in the same way that harmful insects are eliminated. Nevertheless, as I have said, unsettling conclusions have a difficult life: until the end, until the raids of Nazi (and Fascist) dervishes from house to house, people found a way to deny the signals, ignore the danger, and fabricate the convenient truths that I describe in the first pages of this book.
This phenomenon took place to a larger extent in Germany than in Italy. The German Jews were almost all bourgeois, and they were German: like their “Aryan” quasi-compatriots, they loved law and order. Not only did they not foresee but they were organically incapable of imagining state terrorism, even when it was already upon them. There is a celebrated and pithy line by Christian Morgenstern, a bizarre Bavarian poet (who was not Jewish, despite his last name), that seems relevant here, although it was written in 1910, in the clean, honest, and law-abiding Germany described by Jerome K. Jerome in Three Men on the Bummel: a line that is so German and so packed with meaning that it has become a proverb that cannot be translated but only paraphrased awkwardly:
Nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf
That which should not be, cannot be.
This is the concluding line of an emblematic short poem: Palmström, a dutiful German citizen to the extreme, is hit by a car on a street where traffic is forbidden. He pulls himself up, battered and bruised, and thinks about what happened: if traffic is forbidden, vehicles cannot circulate, which is to say, they do not circulate. Therefore, the accident cannot have happened: it is an impossible reality, an unmögliche Tatsache (the title of the poem). He must have only dreamed it, because, to be precise, “things whose existence is not morally allowed cannot exist.”
We should beware of the wisdom of hindsight and stereotypes. More generally, we should beware of the error of judging eras and places according to the prevailing standards of the here and now: an error that is harder to avoid the more remote they become in space and time. This is why it is so arduous for us nonspecialists to understand Biblical or Homeric texts, or even the Greek and Latin classics. Many Europeans in those years—and not Europeans alone, and not only in those years—acted like Palmström, as they still do, denying the existence of things that should not exist. According to common sense—which Manzoni astutely distinguishes from “good sense”—a man who is threatened readies himself, resists, or flees; but in those years many threats that appear obvious today were veiled by deliberate disbelief, repression, and autocatalytic and freely traded consoling truths.
This raises the inevitable question by way of rebuttal: How safely are we living today, we people of the
end of the century and the end of the millennium? And, more particularly, we Europeans? We have been told, and there is no reason to doubt, that for every human being on the planet a quantity of nuclear explosives has been stockpiled equivalent to three or four tons of dynamite. If only 1 percent of these explosives were to be used, tens of millions of people would die instantly, and there would be horrifying genetic damage to the entire human race, and indeed to all life on the planet, with the possible exception of insects. It is also probable, to say the least, that a third world war—even conventional, even partial—could be fought on our territory, between the Atlantic and the Urals, the Mediterranean and the Arctic. This threat is different from the threats of the 1930s. It is less imminent but greater. Some people would associate it with a historical demonism that is new, still indecipherable, but disconnected (so far) from human demonism. This threat is aimed at everyone and is thus particularly “useless.”
What then? Are today’s fears less or more justified than the fears of those years? We are blind to the future, no less than our forebears. The Swiss and the Swedes have nuclear bomb shelters, but what would the survivors find when they came above ground? Polynesia, New Zealand, Tierra del Fuego, and Antarctica might be left unharmed. It is much easier to get passports and entry visas today than it was then: why don’t we go, why don’t we leave our countries, why don’t we escape “before”?
17. “Ibergekumeneh tsores iz gut tsu dertsailen.”
18. Canto V:121–23.
19. “Swaggering Soldiers” is a reference to Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus.
20. Bobbio (1909–2004) was a legal and political philosopher, best known for his work on the relationship between social equality and individual freedom.
21. From the poem “Ricordi” (“Memories”) in Myricae.
8
Letters from Germans
If This Is a Man is a book of modest dimensions but, like a nomadic creature, it has left behind a long and tangled trail for forty years now. It was first published in 1947, in a printing of 2500 copies, which were welcomed by the critics but only some of which sold: the remaining 600 copies, deposited in Florence in a warehouse for unsold books, were drowned in the flood of the autumn of 1966. After ten years of “apparent death,” the book came back to life when it was accepted by the publisher Einaudi, in 1957. I have often asked myself a useless question: What would have happened if the book had immediately been popular? Maybe nothing in particular: I would have probably continued my humdrum life as a chemist and Sunday writer (and not even every Sunday); or maybe instead I would have let it go to my head and, with who knows how much luck, hoisted the flag of the full-time writer. As I was saying, the question is moot: the business of reconstructing the hypothetical past, the what-ifs, is just as discredited as predicting the future.
Despite this false start, the book found its way. It was translated into eight or nine languages, adapted for the radio and for the theater in Italy and abroad, and discussed in countless schools. One stop on its journey was of crucial importance to me: its translation into German and publication in the Federal Republic of Germany. When, around 1959, I learned that a German publisher (Fischer Verlag) had acquired the translation rights, I was overcome by a violent new emotion, that of having won a battle. I had written those pages without imagining a specific readership; for me, they were things that I had inside, that had invaded me, and that I had to release—to say them, indeed to shout them from the rooftops. But people who shout from rooftops address everyone, and no one, and cry in the desert. With the announcement of that contract, everything changed and became clear to me. I had indeed written the book in Italian, for Italians, for their children, for those who did not know, who did not want to know, who had not yet been born, who, willfully or not, had acquiesced in the offense. But its real audience, those at whom the book was aimed like a gun, was them, the Germans. And now the gun was loaded.
You will recall that only fifteen years had gone by since Auschwitz. The Germans who read me would be “them,” not their heirs. From oppressors or passive spectators they would become readers: I would force them to, I would tie them up in front of a mirror. The time had come to settle accounts, to put my cards on the table. Above all, the time had come to talk. I was not interested in revenge; I had been inwardly satisfied by the (symbolic, incomplete, tendentious) religious pageant of Nuremberg, but it was fine with me for others, the professionals, to handle the very legitimate hangings. It was my job to understand, to understand them. Not the handful of great perpetrators, but them, the people, the ones I had seen up close, the ones from whose ranks the SS soldiers had been recruited, as well as the others, the ones who had believed, or who while not believing had remained silent, who hadn’t mustered the feeble courage to look us in the eyes, to throw us a piece of bread, to whisper a kind word.
I have very clear memories of that time and that climate, and I think I can judge the Germans of those years without prejudice and without anger. Almost all of them, but not everyone, had been deaf, dumb, and blind: a mass of “invalids” huddled around a core of savages. Almost everyone, but not everyone, had been cowardly. At this moment, and with a sense of relief, and to show how far I am from blanket judgments, I would like to relate an episode: it was exceptional, but still it happened.
In November of 1944, we were working, in Auschwitz. With two comrades I was in the chemistry laboratory I have described elsewhere. The air-raid alarm went off, and right away the bombers appeared. There were hundreds of them, and a monstrous air strike seemed imminent. There were some large bunkers in the yard, but they were for the Germans, and we were not allowed in. The uncultivated land between the fences, which was already covered with snow, was supposed to be sufficient for us. All of us, prisoners and civilians alike, hurried down the steps to our respective destinations, but the laboratory chief, a German technician, pulled us Häftlinge-chemists to the side: “You three, come with me.” Dumbstruck, we ran behind him to the bunker, but in the doorway stood an armed guard with a swastika on his armband. He said, “You can come in; the others, get out of here.” The chief replied, “They’re with me: either everyone or no one,” and he tried to force a way in. The two men started punching each other. The guard would have had the best of it, he was stocky, but luckily for everyone the alarm-over sounded: the air raid wasn’t for us—the planes had continued northward. If (another if! How to resist the appeal of the road not taken?), if there had been many more anomalous Germans, capable of this modest courage, the history of the past and the geography of the present would be different.
I didn’t trust my German publisher. I wrote him a letter bordering on insolence, warning him not to remove or change a single word of the text, and making him agree to send me the manuscript of the translation in installments, chapter by chapter, as the work progressed. I wanted to check its fidelity not only to the words but to their innermost meaning. Together with the first chapter, which I found translated very well, I received a letter from the translator, in perfect Italian.22 The publisher had shown him my letter: I had nothing to fear from the publisher, much less from him. He introduced himself: he was the same age as me, had studied for several years in Italy, and in addition to being a translator was also an Italian scholar, an expert on the eighteenth-century playwright Carlo Goldoni. He, too, was an anomalous German. He had been called up, but he was repelled by Nazism. In 1941 he feigned illness, was hospitalized, and managed to spend his putative convalescence studying Italian literature at the University of Padua. When he was declared temporarily unfit for duty, he stayed in Padua, where he came into contact with the anti-Fascist groups of Concetto Marchesi, Egidio Meneghetti, and Otello Pighin.23
The armistice between Italy and the Allied forces came in September 1943, and the Germans, in two days, effected a military occupation of northern Italy. My translator “naturally” joined the Paduan partisans of Justice and Liberty, which fought in the Euganean Hills against the Fascists of the Republic of Salò and ag
ainst his fellow Germans. He had had no doubts, he felt more Italian than German, partisan and not Nazi, but he knew what he was risking: hard labor, danger, suspicion, and discomfort. If he was captured by the Germans (and in fact he had been informed that the SS were on his trail), an atrocious death. In his country, he would have been labeled a deserter or even a traitor.
After the war, he settled in Berlin, which in those years had not yet been divided in two by the wall but was ruled by a complicated joint regime of the four powers (the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France). After his partisan adventure in Italy, he was perfectly bilingual: he spoke Italian without a trace of a foreign accent. He did translations: first Goldoni, because he loved him and knew the dialects of the Veneto region well. For the same reason, he translated the Renaissance playwright Angelo Beolco, also known as Ruzante, who until then had been unknown in Germany. But he also did modern Italian authors such as Carlo Collodi, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Stefano D’Arrigo, and Luigi Pirandello. The work wasn’t paid very well; rather, he was too scrupulous, and therefore too slow, to receive fair pay for his work day. All the same, he never made up his mind to take a job with a publishing house. For two reasons: he loved his independence, and, subtly and indirectly, his political past weighed on him. No one ever told him so openly, but a deserter, even in the ultra-democratic Germany whose capital was Bonn, even in four-power Berlin, was persona non grata.
He was enthusiastic about translating If This Is a Man: the book was well suited to him, confirming and substantiating through contrast his love of freedom and justice. Translating it was a way of continuing his fearless and solitary fight against his troubled country. At the time, both of us were too busy to travel, so a frenetic exchange of letters began between us. We were both perfectionists: he, by professional inclination; I, because although I had found an ally, and a worthy one, I feared that my text would fade, that it would lose expressiveness. It was the first time I had encountered the always burning, never gratuitous adventure of being translated, of seeing my thoughts manipulated, refracted, my words sifted, transformed, or misunderstood, or maybe invigorated through an unexpected resource of the new language.