The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  From the first installments I could see that, in truth, my “political” suspicions were unfounded: my partner was as much an enemy of the Nazis as I, and no less indignant. My linguistic suspicions remained, however. As I mentioned in the chapter on communication, the German that my text required, especially in the dialogue and the quotations, was much more coarse than his. A man of letters, who had had a refined upbringing, he was familiar with barracks German (he had done a few months of military service, after all), but he could not help ignoring the degraded, often satanically ironic jargon of the concentration camps. Each of our letters contained a list of proposals and counterproposals, and at times a fierce argument broke out over a single word, such as the example I have given earlier.24 Our general pattern was as follows: I would indicate to him a thesis suggested by my auditory memory, which I have described elsewhere; he would counter with the antithesis “That’s not good German, today’s readers won’t understand it”; I would object, “That’s exactly how they said it down there”; and in the end we would arrive at a synthesis, that is, a compromise. Experience later taught me that translation and compromise are synonymous, but at the time I was obsessed by a scruple for hyperrealism. I did not want the book, especially in its German guise, to lose any of the harshness, any of the violence done to language, that I had worked so hard to replicate in the original Italian. In a certain sense, it was not so much a translation as a restoration: what he was creating, and what I wanted, was a restitutio in pristinum, a translation back into the language in which the events had taken place and to which they belonged. Rather than a book, it had to be a tape recording.

  The translator understood quickly and clearly, and the result was a translation that was excellent in every respect. I could judge its fidelity for myself, and its style was later praised by all the reviewers. The question of a preface arose. The publisher, Fischer, asked me to write one myself. I hesitated and then said no. I felt a confused restraint, a repugnance, an emotional block that stifled the flow of ideas and of writing. I was being asked, in other words, to follow the book—a bearing of witness—with a direct appeal to the German people: a plea, a sermon. This would have required me to raise my voice, climb up on the podium, go from being a witness to being a judge or preacher, propose theories and interpretations of history, separate the saints from the sinners, and shift from writing in the third person to writing in the second. All these tasks were beyond me, and I would have gladly assigned them to others, perhaps to the readers themselves, German and not.

  I wrote to the publisher that I did not feel capable of drafting a preface that would not pervert the nature of the book, and I proposed an indirect solution: to preface the text, by way of an introduction, with a passage from the letter I had written to the translator in May of 1960, at the end of our laborious collaboration, to thank him for his work. I reproduce it here:

  . . . And thus we have finished. I am glad, and satisfied with the result, and grateful to you, and at the same time a little sad. You see, this is the only book I have written, and now that we have finished transplanting it into German I feel like a father whose son has come of age and leaves, and no longer needs his care.

  But it’s not just this. You may have already noticed that the Lager, and writing about the Lager, was an ordeal that changed me deeply; it has given me maturity and a reason to live. Perhaps it is presumption, but here, today, I, 174517, can speak to the Germans through you, remind them of what they did, and say to them, “I am alive, and I would like to understand you so that I can judge you.”

  I don’t think a man’s life necessarily has a specific purpose, but 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” to the Kapo who wiped his hand on my shoulder, to Dr. Pannwitz, to the men who hanged the Last One [these are all characters in If This Is a Man], and to their heirs.

  I am sure that you have not misinterpreted me. I have never harbored any hatred toward the German people, and, if I had, I would be cured of it now that I have come to know you. 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. Now, something that one does not understand becomes a sore point, a sharp pain, a permanent itch that asks to be satisfied. 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 and to soothe this itch.

  The publisher accepted my proposal, and the translator agreed enthusiastically, so this page constitutes the introduction to all the German editions of If This Is a Man; indeed, it is read as an integral part of the text. I was made aware of this as a result of the “nature” of the echo I mention in the last lines.

  This echo materialized in some forty letters written to me by German readers in the years 1961–64: in other words, during the crisis that led to the building of the wall that still divides Berlin today, and is one of the points of greatest friction in today’s world—the only place, along with the Bering Strait, where the Americans and the Russians face each other directly. All these letters reflect a careful reading of the book, but they all respond, try to respond, or deny that a response can be made to the question implied by the last sentence of my letter, namely whether it is possible to understand the Germans. Other letters have come to me, a few at a time, in the years that followed, coinciding with reprints of the book, but the more recent they are the blander they are. The people who write today are the children and the grandchildren. The trauma isn’t theirs, it wasn’t lived in the first person. They express vague solidarity, ignorance, and detachment. For them, that past is truly past, hearsay. They are not specific to Germany: with some exceptions, their writings could be confused with the letters I continue to receive from their Italian contemporaries, so I will not consider them in this sampling.

  The first letters, the ones that matter, are almost all from young people (who declare themselves as such, or who appear to be so from their texts), with the exception of one that was sent to me in 1962 by Mr. T.H., of Hamburg, which I cite first because I am in a hurry to be rid of it. I will translate the main passages, trying to preserve their clumsiness:25

  Dear Mr. Levi,

  Your book is the first story by an Auschwitz survivor that has come to our knowledge. My wife and I were deeply moved by it. Now, since, after all the horrors you have lived through, you are addressing yourself once again to the German people “to understand,” “to stir up an echo,” I dare hope for a reply. But it will be little more than an echo: no one can “understand” things like this! . . .

  The man who is without God is to be feared: he has no restraint, no control! And so another passage from Genesis 8:21 is more appropriate: “For the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth,” which is explained and proved today by Freud’s tremendous psychoanalytic discoveries in the field of the unconscious, of which I am sure you are aware. In every era there have been moments when “all hell broke loose,” uncontrollably and senselessly: persecutions of Jews and Christians, the extermination of entire populations in South America, of the Indians in North America, of the Goths in Italy under Narses, the horrendous persecutions and massacres during the French and Russian Revolutions. Who could “understand” all this?

  But you must be expecting a specific answer to the question of why Hitler came to power and why we did not subsequently shake off his yoke. Well, in 1933 . . . all the moderate parties disappeared and the only choice left was between Hitler and Stalin, the National Socialists and the Communists, whose numbers were almost equal. We knew the Communists from the various big revolts after the First War. Hitler seemed suspect to us, it’s true, but clearly the lesser evil. At first we didn’t realize that all his fancy words were lies and treason. In foreign p
olicy, he had one success after another. Every state maintained diplomatic relations with him, and the Pope was the first to conclude a concordat with him. Who could have suspected that we were mounting [sic] a criminal and a traitor? In the end, no guilt can be assigned to the betrayed: only the traitor is guilty.

  And now the more difficult question, his senseless hatred of the Jews. Well, this hatred was never popular. Germany was rightly considered the country most friendly toward Jews in the world. Never, from the beginning to the end of the whole period of Hitler’s rule, as far as I know or have read, was a single case of spontaneous outrage or aggression against Jews heard of. Always and only (extremely dangerous) attempts at providing help.

  And now the second question. It is not possible to rebel in a totalitarian state. The whole world was unable to help the Hungarians.26 . . . There was certainly no way we could resist by ourselves. You mustn’t forgot that, in addition to all the battles of the resistance, on one day alone, July 20, 1944, thousands and thousands of officers were executed. It was not just a “small gang,” as Hitler later called it.

  My dear Mr. Levi (I allow myself to address you thus because anyone who has read your book cannot but be fond of you), I have no excuses, no explanations. The guilt weighs heavily on my poor betrayed and misguided people. Take comfort in the life that has been restored to you, in peace, and in your beautiful homeland, which I, too, know. Dante and Boccaccio are on my bookshelf, too.

  Faithfully yours,

  T.H.

  Probably without informing her husband, Frau H. added the following laconic lines, which I also translate literally:

  When a people realizes too late that it has become a prisoner of the devil, some psychic alterations are the consequence:

  1.It brings out the evil in man. The result is the Pannwitzes and the Kapos who wipe their hands on the backs of the helpless;

  2.On the other hand, it appears there was also an active resistance against injustice, which sacrificed itself and its family [sic] to the suffering, but without visible success.

  3.What is left is the large mass of those who, to save their lives, keep their mouths shut and abandon their endangered brother.

  This we recognize as our sin before God and mankind.

  I have often thought about this strange couple. He sounds like a typical specimen of the bulk of the German middle class: a Nazi who was opportunistic rather than fanatical, repenting when it was opportune to repent, stupid enough to believe that he could make me believe his simplified version of recent history, and to dare to cite the retaliation of Narses against the Goths.27 She was a little less hypocritical than her husband but more sanctimonious.

  I replied in a long letter, perhaps the only angry letter I have ever written. I wrote that no church offers indulgence to the Devil’s disciples or accepts as a justification blaming the Devil for one’s sins. That a person has to answer for his sins and errors, otherwise every trace of civilization would disappear from the face of the Earth, as in fact it did disappear during the Third Reich. That his electoral data were infantile: in the general elections of November 1932—the last free elections—the Nazis had actually won 196 seats in the Reichstag, but at the same time the Communists won 100 seats and the Social Democrats—who were hardly extremists, and were in fact detested by Stalin—won 121. And, above all, that on my bookshelf, next to Boccaccio and Dante, I keep a copy of Mein Kampf, written by Adolf Hitler many years before he came to power. That evil man was not a traitor: he was a coherent fanatic with extremely clear ideas that he never changed or concealed. Anyone who voted for him had certainly voted for his ideas. Everything is already there in his book: blood and soil, living space, the Jew as the eternal enemy, the Germans who embody “the loftiest humanity on Earth,” and the explicit treatment of other countries as instruments for German domination. This was more than just “fancy words.” Hitler may have said other things as well, but these he never denied.

  As for the German resisters, they deserve to be honored, but, truth be told, the conspirators of July 20, 1944, took action a little too late. In closing, I wrote:

  The most outrageous statement you make regards the unpopularity of anti-Semitism in Germany. It was the foundation of the “Nazi” discourse, from its beginnings. It was of a mystical nature: the Jews could not be “the people chosen by God,” since the Germans were. There isn’t a single page or speech by Hitler in which hatred of the Jews is not repeated obsessively. It was not marginal to Nazism: it was its ideological core. So I ask: how could the people “most friendly toward Jews” vote for the party and acclaim the man who called the Jews the primary enemies of Germany, and whose principal political goal was “to strangle the Jewish hydra”?

  As for spontaneous outrages and aggressions, your sentence itself is outrageous. Given the millions of deaths, it seems pointless and vile to discuss whether it was a case of spontaneous persecutions. For that matter, the Germans have little inclination for spontaneity. But may I remind you that no one obliged the German industrialists to hire starving slaves except their own desire for profit; that no one forced the Topf company (which is flourishing in Wiesbaden today) to build the enormous multiple crematoriums of the concentration camps; that maybe the SS were ordered to kill Jews, but enlistment in the SS was voluntary; and that I myself found in Katowice, after the liberation, stacks and stacks of forms authorizing German heads of household to pick up, free of charge, clothing and shoes for adults and for children from the Auschwitz warehouses. Did no one wonder where so many children’s shoes had come from? And did you never hear talk of a certain Kristallnacht? Or do you think that every single crime committed that night was imposed by law?

  There were attempts to help, I know, and I know they were dangerous; just as, having lived in Italy, I know “that it is not possible to rebel in a totalitarian state”; but I know there are thousands of ways, far less dangerous, to express solidarity with the oppressed, that these were frequent in Italy, even after the German occupation, and that in Hitler’s Germany they were put into action all too rarely.

  The other letters are very different and depict a better world. I have to point out, however, that not even the best intentions to absolve would allow me to consider them a “representative sample” of the German people of that time. In the first place, my book was published in twenty or thirty thousand copies, and was therefore read by perhaps one in a thousand citizens of the Federal Republic. Some probably bought it by chance, others because they were to some extent predisposed—sensitized, permeable—to the impact with events. Of these readers, only about forty, as I mentioned, decided to write to me.

  In forty years of experience, I have become quite familiar with a singular character, the reader who writes to the author. Such a person can belong to one of two very distinct groups, one agreeable, the other annoying; intermediate cases are rare. Those in the first group give joy and teach. They have read the book carefully, often more than once. They have loved and understood it, sometimes better than the author. They say that they have been enriched by it and clearly explain their judgment and sometimes their criticisms. They thank the author for his work and often explicitly exempt him from a reply. The second type irritate you and waste your time. They flaunt their merits and parade them before you; they often have a manuscript in a drawer, and insinuate their intention to climb up the book and the author as ivy does a tree. Sometimes they are even children or adolescents writing on a dare, a wager, to get an autograph. My forty German correspondents, to whom I dedicate these pages with gratitude, all belong (with the exception of the aforementioned Mr. T.H., who is a case in himself) to the first group.

  • • •

  L.I. is a librarian in Westphalia; she admits to having had a violent temptation to close the book halfway through, “to escape the images it evokes,” but she immediately felt ashamed of this selfish and cowardly impulse. She writes:

  In your preface you express the wish to understand us Germans. Believe us when we tell y
ou that we do not understand ourselves or what we did. We are guilty. I was born in 1922, in Upper Silesia, and grew up not far from Auschwitz, but at the time I really did not know anything—please do not take this as a cheap excuse but as fact—about the atrocious things that were happening right nearby. Yet, at least until the outbreak of the war, I would occasionally run into people with the Jewish star and I did not invite them into my house, I did not provide them with the hospitality I would have shown others, I did not intervene on their behalf. For this I am guilty. The only way I can live with my terrible thoughtlessness, cowardice, and selfishness is through Christian forgiveness.

  She also mentions that she belongs to Action Reconciliation Services for Peace (Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste), an evangelical association of young people who spend their vacations abroad, rebuilding the cities most heavily damaged by the German war (she has been to Coventry). She says nothing about her parents, which is symptomatic. Either they knew and didn’t tell her; or they didn’t know, and so they had never talked to the people who certainly did know about “down there,” the railway men on the trains, the warehousemen, the thousands of German workers in the factories and mines where the slave laborers were worked to death: anyone, in short, who hadn’t covered his eyes with his hands. I repeat: the true, collective, general crime of almost all the Germans of that period was that they did not have the courage to speak.