by Primo Levi
M.S. from Frankfurt says nothing about himself and looks for cautious distinctions and justifications: this, too, is symptomatic.
You write that you do not understand the Germans. . . . As a German who feels the horror and the shame, and who will until the end of his days be aware that the horror happened by means of the people of his country, I feel implicated in your words and wish to reply to them.
I, too, cannot understand men like the Kapo who wiped his hands on your shoulder, and Dr. Pannwitz and Eichmann, and all the others who carried out their inhuman orders without any sense that a person cannot escape responsibility by hiding behind that of others. Who as a German cannot feel distress at the fact that so many of the German people were the lackeys of a criminal system . . . and that all this was possible first because of the large number who were so willing?
But are these people “the Germans”? . . . And can we speak in general of “the Germans,” “the English,” “the Italians,” or “the Jews” as a single entity? You mentioned exceptions to “the Germans,” whom you do not understand. . . . I thank you for these words, but I ask you to please remember that countless Germans . . . suffered and died in the fight against injustice. . . .
I hope with all my heart that many of my fellow citizens will read your book so that we do not become complacent and apathetic, but rather remain aware of how low a man falls when he becomes the torturer of his fellow man. Then your book will have contributed to this never happening again.
I replied to M.S. with dismay: the same dismay, for that matter, that I felt in replying to all these polite, civil correspondents, members of the population that had exterminated mine (and many others). Essentially, it was the same perplexity of the dogs studied by neurologists, who were conditioned to react in one way to a circle and in another to a square. When the square was rounded and started to look like a circle, the dogs were paralyzed or showed signs of neurosis. I wrote to him, in part:
I agree with you: it is dangerous, it is illegitimate, to talk about the “Germans” or any other people as a single, undifferentiated entity, and to lump together all individuals in a judgment. Yet I do not feel I can deny that a spirit of the people exists (otherwise it would not be a people). Deutschtum, italianità, and hispanidad are all the sum of traditions, customs, history, language, and culture. Anyone who does not feel this spirit—which is national in the best sense of the word—does not fully belong to his people, and, worse, does not fit into human civilization. For example, while I find no sense in the syllogism “All Italians are passionate; you are Italian; therefore you are passionate,” I do think it is legitimate, within limits, to expect one specific collective behavior rather than another from the Italian people as a whole, or from the Germans, etc. There may well be individual exceptions, but in my opinion a cautious, probable expectation is possible. . . .
Let me be honest with you. Among the generation of people who are older than forty-five, how many Germans are truly aware of what took place in Europe in the name of Germany? Judging from the baffling outcomes of several trials, I fear they are few: together with sorrowful and compassionate voices, I hear others that are discordant, strident, too proud of the power and wealth of today’s Germany.
I.J., from Stuttgart, is a social worker. She writes:
That you were able to write without letting an implacable hatred of us Germans seep through . . . is extraordinary and should make us feel ashamed of ourselves. I wish to thank you for this. Unfortunately there are many among us who refuse to believe that we Germans really did commit these inhuman horrors against the Jewish people. Of course, this denial stems from many different motives, maybe even the simple fact that the intellect of the average citizen is incapable of believing that such unfathomable evil among us “Western Christians” is possible.
It is good that your book has now been published in German translation, so that some young people will be enlightened. . . . It could also perhaps be put in the hands of some older people, which would, however, require, in what you call our “sleeping Germany,” a certain civic courage.
I wrote back to her:
Many people are amazed that I do not feel hatred toward the Germans, and they should not be. In reality, I do understand hatred, but only ad personam. If I were a judge, although I would repress the hatred I might feel inside, I would not hesitate to impose the heaviest penalties, or even death, on the many guilty individuals who are still living today undisturbed on German soil or in countries with suspect hospitality. But I would be horrified if even a single innocent person were to be punished for a crime he did not commit.
W.A., a doctor, writes from Württemberg:
For us Germans, who bear the heavy weight of our past, and—God knows!—our future, your book is more than a deeply distressing account: it is help. For this guidance I thank you. I have no excuses to offer. I believe that guilt—and first this guilt—is not easy to expiate. . . . Much though I may try to disassociate myself from the evil spirit of the past, I am still a member of this population, which I love, and which in the course of the centuries has produced in equal measure works of noble peace and others of diabolical danger. In the convergence of all the periods of our history, I know I share in the greatness and the guilt of my people. I thus stand before you as an accomplice to the fate that befell you and your people.
W.G. was born in Bremen in 1935. He is a historian and a sociologist, and an active member of the Social Democratic Party:
At the end of the war I was still a child. I cannot shoulder any of the blame for the massive crimes committed by the Germans, yet I feel ashamed of these crimes. I hate the criminals under whom you and your companions suffered, and I hate their accomplices, many of whom are still alive. You write . . . that you cannot understand the Germans. . . . If you mean to refer to the criminals and their accomplices, I cannot understand them, either. . . . But I hope that I would be capable of fighting them should they appear again. I have spoken openly of shame. By this I mean the feeling that what the Germans did then should never have been done and should never have been approved of by other Germans.
Things became more complicated with H.L., a student from Bavaria. She first wrote to me in 1962. Her letter was singularly alive, free of the leaden gloom that characterized almost all the other letters, even the best intentioned. She believed that I was expecting “an echo” especially from important people, officials, not from a girl, but she felt “implicated, as an heir and accomplice.” She is satisfied with the education she is getting at school, and with what she has been taught about the recent history of her country, but she is not sure “that one day the excessiveness typical of the Germans will not erupt again, in another guise and aimed at other targets.” She deplores the fact that her peers reject politics “as something dirty.” She rebelled in a “violent and unruly” manner against a priest who spoke ill of the Jews, and against her Russian teacher, a Russian woman, who blamed the Jews for the October Revolution and considered Hitler’s massacres to be a just punishment. In those moments, she felt “an unspeakable shame at belonging to the most barbarian of peoples.” “All mysticism or superstition aside,” she is convinced “that we Germans will not escape the just punishment for what we have done.” In some way, she feels authorized, indeed obligated, to state “that we, the children of a guilt-ridden generation, are fully aware of it, and we will try to alleviate the horrors and suffering of yesterday to prevent them from being repeated tomorrow.”
Since she seemed like an intelligent correspondent, open-minded and “new,” I wrote to her asking for more specific information about the situation in Germany (it was the Adenauer era). As for her fear of a collective “just punishment,” I tried to convince her that a punishment, if it is collective, cannot be just, and vice versa. She sent me by return mail a postcard in which she said that my questions would require some research and asking me to be patient, adding that she would reply more thoroughly as soon as possible.
Twenty days later,
I received a twenty-three-page letter from her: a doctoral thesis, almost, compiled thanks to a frenetic series of interviews with people by telephone and by mail. So this nice girl also had a propensity for Masslosigkeit, the same excessiveness—albeit for good purposes—she had criticized in others. She apologized with a comic sincerity: “I had little time, and so many things that I could have said more succinctly have remained the way they were.” Since I am not masslos, I will limit myself to summarizing, and to quoting the passages that seem most significant:
I love the countryside where I grew up, I adore my mother, but I cannot look at the German as a particular type with any pleasure: maybe because he still seems too marked by those qualities that in the recent past were so floridly displayed. But also perhaps because what I hate in him is that part of myself that is like him.
She answered one of my questions about school by saying (and documenting) that the entire teaching staff had been passed through the sieve of “denazification” demanded by the Allies, but that it had been conducted in an amateurish way and widely subverted. There was no other way to approach it: otherwise they would have had to bar an entire generation from teaching. In the schools, recent history was taught, but there was little talk about politics. The Nazi past was touched on occasionally, in tones that varied; a few teachers took pride in it, a few concealed it, even fewer declared themselves immune to it. A young teacher told her:
The students are very interested in this period, but they immediately start to protest if you speak to them about Germany’s guilt. Many indeed state that they have had enough of the mea culpas from the press and from their teachers.
H.L. comments:
From the young people’s resistance to the mea culpas you can see that for them the problem of the Third Reich still appears just as unresolved, “annoying,” and typically German as it was for all those before them who experienced it. Only when this is no longer so will people sit up and take notice in horror.
Elsewhere, in speaking about her own experience, H.L. writes (quite plausibly):
The teachers did not evade the problems; on the contrary, they illustrated Nazi propaganda methods through newspapers of the period. They related how, as youths, they had joined the new movement uncritically and enthusiastically: the young people’s assemblies, the sports organizations, and such. We students attacked them harshly, and wrongly, to my thinking today: can anyone reproach them for having less foresight into the situation than the grown-ups? And would we, in their place, have been any better at recognizing the Satanic methods by which Hitler won over young people for his war?
Note: this is the same justification that T.H. of Hamburg adopted. For that matter, no witness of the time has denied Hitler’s truly diabolical power of persuasion, which also helped him in his political contacts. It is acceptable from young people, who understandably try to exonerate the entire generation of their parents, but not from their compromised and falsely repentant elders, who try to limit the guilt to a single man.
H.L. sent me many other letters, to which I had ambivalent reactions. She described her father, a restless, shy, and sensitive musician who died when she was a child: was she looking for a father in me? She wavered between documentary gravity and childish fantasy. She sent me a kaleidoscope, and along with it she wrote:
I have also constructed a clear image of you: you are the one who, having escaped a horrifying destiny (forgive my boldness), wanders about our country, still a foreigner, as in a bad dream. And I think I should sew you a garment like the one the heroes wear in legends to protect you from every danger.28
I did not recognize myself in this image, but I did not tell her. I answered that such garments cannot be given to others: each person has to weave them and sew them for him- or herself. H.L. sent me Heinrich Mann’s two Henry IV novels, which I have unfortunately never found the time to read. I sent her the German translation of The Truce, which in the meantime had been published. In December 1964, from Berlin, where she had moved, she sent me a pair of gold cuff links, which she had commissioned from a girlfriend who was a goldsmith. I didn’t have the heart to send them back to her. I thanked her but asked her not to send me anything else. I sincerely hope I did not offend this innately kind person. I hope she understood the reason for my defense. Since then I have heard nothing from her.
I have left to the end my exchange of letters with Hety S., of Wiesbaden, who is my age, because it represents a self-contained episode in both quality and quantity. My “HS” file is fatter than the one where I keep all the other “letters from Germans.” Our correspondence went on for sixteen years, from October 1966 to November 1982. It contains, in addition to about fifty of her letters (which are often four or five pages long) and my replies, carbon copies of an at least equal number of letters that she wrote to her children, her friends, other writers, publishers, local government offices, newspapers or magazines, of which she thought it was important to send me a copy, plus newspaper clippings and book reviews. Some of her letters were “circulars”: half of the page is a photocopy that is the same for various correspondents, the rest, blank, is filled in by hand with more personal news or questions. Hety wrote to me in German and did not know Italian. At first I answered her in French, then I realized it was hard for her to understand, and for a long time I wrote to her in English. Later, with her amused consent, I wrote to her in my shaky German, in duplicate. She would send one copy back to me, with her “reasoned” corrections. We met only twice: at her house, during a quick business trip I took to Germany, and in Turin, during an equally hurried vacation of hers. The meetings were not important: the letters matter much more.
Her first letter was also inspired by the question of “understanding,” but it had an energetic and vigorous tone that distinguished it from all the others. My book had been given to her by a common friend, the historian Hermann Langbein, but very late, when the first edition had already sold out. As cultural commissioner for a regional government, she was trying to have it reprinted immediately, and she wrote to me:
You will certainly never succeed in understanding “the Germans”: not even we Germans are able to. So much happened in those years that should never have happened, at any price. For a great many Germans it really led to us forever losing what Germany used to mean to us—terms like “Fatherland” are extinct. . . . What we nevertheless cannot allow ourselves is to forget all this. Books like yours, which in such a humane way recall the inhumane, are for precisely this reason so important to the younger generation. . . . Perhaps you do not fully realize how many things a writer reveals about himself—and therefore about people in general. This is precisely what confers weight and value on every chapter of your book. What moved me most were your experiences in the Buna laboratory. So that is how it must have looked when the “free men” encountered the “prisoners.”
A little later, she tells the story of a Russian prisoner who delivered coal to her basement in the fall. Speaking to him was forbidden: she slipped food and cigarettes into his pockets, and to thank her he would shout, “Heil Hitler!” By contrast, she was not forbidden to speak with a young French woman “volunteer” worker. (Germany must have been such a maze of hierarchies and differential prohibitions in those years! Even the “letters from Germans,” especially hers, say much more than initially appears.) She used to pick the woman up from her camp, bring her to her house, and even take her to concerts. In the camp, the girl was not able to wash herself very well and she had lice. Hety did not dare to tell her: she felt uncomfortable and was ashamed of her discomfort.
I replied to her first letter saying that my book had indeed produced an echo in Germany, but from the Germans who least needed to read it. I had received letters of repentance from the innocent, not from the guilty. The guilty, understandably, kept quiet.
In the letters that followed, Hety (I’ll call her this for the sake of simplicity, although we never did become that familiar) slowly provided me with a portrait of herself in her indirect
way. Her father, an education specialist by profession, had been a Social Democratic activist since 1919. In 1933, the year that Hitler came to power, he immediately lost his job; this was followed by random searches and economic hardship. The family had to move to a smaller house. In 1935, Hety was expelled from high school because she refused to join the Hitler Youth Organization. In 1938, she married an engineer from I.G. Farben (hence her interest in the Buna laboratory), with whom she immediately had two children. After the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt on Hitler, her father was deported to Dachau, and her marriage entered a difficult period because her husband, while not registered in the party, could not tolerate having Hety endanger herself, him, and the children to “do what had to be done,” namely, to bring a little food every week to the gates of the camp where her father was a prisoner:
He considered all our efforts to be absolutely senseless. . . . Once the family got together to discuss whether there were any possible ways of helping our father, and if so what were they. He said very simply, “Don’t waste your time: you’ll never see him again.”
When the war was over, her father did return, but he was reduced to a skeleton (he died a few years later). Hety, who was very close to him, felt it was her duty to carry on his activities in the revived Social Democratic Party. Her husband objected, they quarreled, and he asked for and obtained a divorce. His second wife was a refugee from eastern Prussia29 who, through the two children, maintained decent relations with Hety. Once, when they were talking about her father, Dachau, and the Lagers, she told her:
Don’t be angry with me if I can’t bear to hear or to read about these things of yours—when we had to flee, we experienced something so dreadful; and the worst part of it is that we had to take the same road on which the Auschwitz prisoners had been evacuated earlier—the road was bordered by dead bodies. I would like to forget those images and I cannot: I continue to dream about this road and about those mounds along the sides.