The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Works Cited

  While Levi occasionally provides bibliographic information about the Italian translations of the books he cites, there is no bibliography in the original or successive Italian editions of this book. Here I have listed the texts he mentions, marking with an asterisk the ones that were available in Italian translation at the time he was writing, and providing in parentheses the date of the first edition in the original language.

  Améry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. Translated by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. (1966.)

  Borkin, J. The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben. London: Macmillan, 1978.

  *Döblin, Alfred. Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf. Translated by Eugène Jolas. New York: Viking, 1931. (1929.)

  Geipel, J. Mame Loshen. London: Journeyman, 1982.

  Kogon, Eugen. The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camp System. Translated by Heinz Norden. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1950. (1946.)

  *Langbein, Hermann. People in Auschwitz. Translated by Harry Zohn. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. (1972.)

  Lingens-Reiner, Ella. Prisoners of Fear. London: Victor Gollancz, 1948.

  *Maršálek, Hans. The History of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp. Linz: Austrian Society of Mauthausen Concentration Camp, 1995. (1974.)

  Müller, Filip. Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers. Literary collaboration by Helmut Freitag; edited and translated by Susanne Flatauer. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999. (1979.)

  *Rousset, David. The Other Kingdom. Translated by Ramon Guthrie. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947. (1946.)

  *Sereny, Gitta. Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974.

  *Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956. 2 vols. Translated by Thomas P. Whitney and Harry Willetts. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.

  *———. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Translated by Ralph Parker. New York: Penguin, 1963. (1962.)

  Speer, Albert. Spandau: The Secret Diaries. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Macmillan, 1976. (1975.)

  *Vercors. Les armes de la nuit. Paris: Albin Michel, 1953 (reprint of 1946 Les Éditions de Minuit edition).

  *Wiesenthal, Simon. The Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Memoirs. Edited by Joseph Wechsberg. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.

  Translator’s Afterword

  The Drowned and the Saved, which was first published in 1986, was written over a period of almost ten years. According to Marco Belpoliti, who prepared the two-volume critical edition of Levi’s works (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), the genesis of the book can be traced back to Levi’s translation of Jacob Presser’s novel The Night of the Girondists, in 1975–76 (the original Dutch edition was published in 1957, and the work appeared in English one year later, as Breaking Point). In his foreward Levi touched on the themes he later developed in the chapter “The Gray Zone,” namely, “to explore the space that separates the victims from the tormentors . . . and to do so with a lighter touch and a less troubled spirit than has been the case, for example, in certain movies” (he was referring to The Night Porter, directed by Liliana Cavani).

  Earlier in 1975, Levi had written an appendix for a scholastic edition of If This Is a Man, designed to answer the questions most frequently raised by his student readers, and providing him with another opportunity to revisit the themes of his first work and the polemics it aroused. In November 1977, he published an essay in Turin’s daily newspaper, La Stampa, entitled “Il re dei Giudei” (“The King of the Jews”), telling the story of Chaim Rumkowski, which he republished in Lilith and Other Stories (1981) and used to form the last part of “The Gray Zone.” Belpoliti considers this chapter to be the oldest previously published part of the book, while also pointing out that the idea for the last chapter, “Letters from Germans,” has a much earlier origin, the publication of the German translation of If This Is a Man, in 1961.

  Levi was particularly active in 1979, when, between January and August, he published eleven newspaper articles and a story, all focused on the concentration camps and the extermination of the Jews. This activity was prompted by the attention being generated in Europe by Holocaust deniers, particularly two letters written to Le Monde by Robert Faurisson.

  The Preface of The Drowned and the Saved is taken from a paper that Levi prepared for the 1982 Congress of Jewish Communities. “The Memory of the Offense” was first published under the title “Il Lager e la memoria” (“The Lager and Memory”) in the anthology Il trauma della deportazione (Milan: Mondadori, 1983). He also used this text for a paper at the conference “Il dovere di testimoniare” (“The Duty to Bear Witness”) held in Turin in October 1983.

  Levi weaves these pieces into a sustained narrative not only through the thematic arrangement of the work but also on the strength of the moral authority of his voice and the emotional trajectory he builds. The Preface and opening chapter take up the questions underlying any history of the massacre of the European Jews. Who could believe that human beings were capable of such monstrosity? Can the memories of eyewitnesses and survivors be trusted? And always and insistently, how could this atrocity have been prevented? From there Levi proceeds to pick apart the various questions and objections that had been raised over the years to his earlier accounts of life and death in the Lagers, culminating in his indictment of the Germans in perhaps his most powerful and emotional essay, “Letters from Germans.”

  The author’s shocking death in 1987, a few months after the publication of The Drowned and the Saved, turned this work—already a commentary in many respects on his writing as a whole—into his final statement. Levi seems to have sought out every written or oral document on the Holocaust he could find, whether in English, French, or German, and he reviews them in succession. “Works Cited” lists only the books that he mentions explicitly. I felt no need to include his cherished Italian literary classics, confining myself to an occasional footnote. But the text to which Levi returns most obsessively, especially in the final pages, is his own first work, If This Is a Man.

  A few of the works he surveys, particularly the testimony of the Sonderkommandos, can make for uncomfortable reading, but Levi defies us to judge the authors for the gruesome actions that enabled them to survive. Their raw and brutal style could not be more different from Levi’s, however, and he could not resist an occasional tweak to his translations of quoted passages, such as his substitution of “completo abbattimento” (complete collapse or destruction) for Filip Müller’s “complete anticlimax,” to describe the experience of liberation. It is hard not to see this one word and its departure from its English source as a window into Levi’s own despondency at the time of writing. The realization that he was not always a dispassionate translator of the works he cites—whether such a stance is even feasible or desirable—guided my approach to the translation, leading me, for example, to translate the German letters directly from the original language, where available.

  The greatest challenge in translating Levi’s language is to locate the tipping point between the concrete and the abstract of which he is a master. His style is commonly described as “clinical” or “scientific,” an observation that simply does not hold up to the sheer variety of his works or to the literary ambitions implicit in his emulation, direct and indirect, of the great Italian writers, from Dante to Leopardi to Manzoni. The most difficult words to translate were of course the simplest and the most recurrent. The term “colpa” in Italian can refer to a crime, a sin, a moral or material transgression, and their corollaries, fault and guilt. The colpa of the Germans and senso di colpa of the survivors are intrinsically linked, a bond that is broken when we translate into English. To my sensibility the attempted annihilation of European Jewry is an atrocity that cries out for a word louder than “crime” or “sin,” but colpa is the term that Levi uses
, with characteristic restraint, and I hope that my decision to translate it as the “wrongs” of the Germans conveys his moral authority.

  On the opposite end of the spectrum, the word cultura and its variants (primarily colto, coltivato, and incolto) present a different order of difficulty. In the Italian language, the notion of “culture” can be quite concrete, as a result of a century-old standardized school curriculum that prioritizes (some might say imposes) a shared artistic and literary heritage. A person “of culture” is someone who is educated, well spoken, versed in the classics, art, music, and even decorative, sartorial, and culinary delights. Levi, however, attacks this notion of culture in the chapter “The Intellectual in Auschwitz,” in defense of the prestige of his own education in the sciences. The stakes are even higher with the opposite, the incolto, the uneducated or uncultured person. It is to this lack that Levi attributes the acquiescence of the German people in Hitler’s monstrous design.

  Finally, a word on the title. Levi had originally considered calling his first work I sommersi e i salvati, and eventually adopted it only as a chapter title. The Italian title echoes the Inferno of Dante, particularly the poet’s puzzling use of the word sommersi in Canto XX, line 3. Robert Hollander, in his translation of the Inferno, remarks on “the apparently strikingly inexact word sommersi, which has seemed to many commentators wrong, since the damned are not submerged in water but buried under earth” (New York: Doubleday; 2000; p. 340). Some critics of the previous translation of I sommersi e i salvati have argued for the more literal rendering, “submerged.” I have elected to keep the previous title, with its bitter paradox, for while the “submerged” are indeed the dead, the drowned, the survivors were never completely saved, as Levi attested in his life and work.

  —MICHAEL F. MOORE

  CONTENTS

  There Is No Other Adam in the Neighborhood

  Horseshoe Nails

  Bureau of Vital Statistics

  Let’s See What Has Come True

  Our First Ancestors Weren’t Animals

  Who Has Courage in Jerusalem?

  The Difficult Journey of Truth

  A Rebirth

  The Daring People of the Ghetto

  Barbarians of the Swastika

  A Mysterious Sensibility

  The Pharaoh with the Swastika

  Remembrance of a Righteous Man

  Leonardo De Benedetti

  A Mighty River That Sins by Excess

  Collectors of Tortures

  The Brute Power

  Note on Kafka’s The Trial

  A Park Dedicated to Emanuele Artom

  The Path of a Jewish Writer

  The Summer for a Book

  Asymmetry and Life

  Foreword to Diary of a Jewish Boy During the Second World War by Marek Herman

  Foreword to People in Auschwitz by Hermann Langbein

  Homage to an Unknown Reporter

  Foreword to Jews in Turin

  The Last Christmas of the War

  Can Poetry Get Along with the Computer?

  Why Revisit These Images

  Tell Me If This Is a Fortunate Jew

  With the Key of Science

  Foreword to Commandant of Auschwitz by Rudolf Höss

  Foreword to The Jews of Eastern Europe from Utopia to Revolt

  What Burned in Space

  Letter to the Editor of Commentary

  When They Drank Methanol in the Lager

  The TV Fans from Delta Cep.

  The Plague Has No Borders

  A Small Woman with a Regal Bearing

  The Spider’s Secret

  I Would Prohibit It

  Fra Diavolo on the Po

  Preface to Moments of Reprieve

  Buck of the Wolves

  The Black Hole of Auschwitz

  Nose to Nose: A Date with Love in the Dark

  Adam’s Clay

  Live from Our Intestine: Escherichia Coli

  The Seagull of Chivasso

  The Giraffe in the Zoo

  Love on the Web

  Calvino, Queneau, and the Sciences

  Foreword to Offended Life

  “Our Generation . . .”

  Foreword to Writings in Memory of Daniele Levi

  Foreword to Broken Future by Lidia Beccaria Rolfi and Bruno Maida

  There Is No Other Adam in the Neighborhood

  It’s sad, but can be verified every day: the fact that the same assertion is made by many and for a long time does not prove its validity. For how many centuries did schools teach that worms come from rotted flesh? For how many centuries did doctors maintain that malaria is caused by foul air, and that bloodletting cures all diseases?

  In the same way, the antiquity of the belief in “inhabited stars” does not prove anything about its truth. Both this opinion and its opposite—that life exists only on Earth—have been maintained for millennia with great vigor but with weak arguments. Possibly no other philosophical dilemma has given rise to a dispute of longer duration and hazier substance. The dispute continues still, and will for a long time, because it consists of the repetition of just two opposing arguments, which can be summarized as follows:

  i)The Earth alone is inhabited, because the Earth is the center of the universe. We have reluctantly given up the belief that it is such physically—we have conceded that it orbits around the Sun, that the Sun is not the center of the Galaxy, that it does not make sense to speak of a geometrical center of the universe, yet we continue to believe that the Earth is a privileged place, since it is where we human beings live, and we are privileged because we know good and evil and are the recipients of divine revelation. Indeed, there are no sure signs of extraterrestrial life. It is evident that life does not exist: all the more reason that intelligent life does not exist.

  ii)For reasons of symmetry and economy, other inhabited planets have to exist. Life alone, and in particular conscious life, can be the purpose of creation, and creation cannot be without purpose. A boundless universe in which only tiny Earth harbors life and consciousness would be illogical and wasted. For now, there are no signs of extraterrestrial life, but precursors have been found, if only on our neighbors in the solar system. All the more reason that they will be discovered in the stars, if and when we are able to explore them. Maybe the stars are not innumerable, but certainly they are so numerous that a billion planets could provide a favorable environment for life to take root in, and the progression of life is inexplicable and meaningless if it does not flow into consciousness. Thus it is evident that other forms of intelligence besides ours exist in the cosmos.

  As a matter of fact, in this dispute only one thing is evident—and that is prejudice. Reduced to their true essence, the two arguments could be set forth as follows: “I, man, do not wish to have competitors in creation,” and “I, man, fear solitude and long for a companion and guide.” These viewpoints are subjective and therefore indisputable: they are wishes in the form of beliefs. Now, the leap forward in astronautics in recent years has led to breathtaking results; formulating metaphysical hypotheses on what is at last within reach of our instruments has become a vaguely irritating exercise. Man has stepped on the Moon, analyzed the soil of Mars and the hellish atmosphere of Venus, photographed the volcanoes of Io and the hydrocarbon rain on Titan. The sky has more imagination than we expected, but there are no signs of life either present or past. There is no other Adam, at least in our neighborhood, and not even his most rudimentary ancestor; there are only moderately complex carbon compounds—that is, the clay with which to make him.

  We do not know what things are like farther away, in the stars close and distant, nor do we know whether we will ever know. For now we can say only that extraterrestrial life is possible, and variously probable and desirable according to the emotional and theological prejudices that all of us unconsciously harbor, but it is less evident to us than to our scientist and positivist forefathers.

  Tuttolibri, January 3, 1981 (published on the occasion of
<
br />   the launch into orbit of the satellites Pioneer 10 and 11, which

  carried information on the environment and the nature of man)

  Horseshoe Nails

  A book that is unusual in many ways has just been published, and is for sale in the main bookshops: Luciano Gibelli’s Prima che scenda il buio–Dnans ch’a fàssa neuit (Before Darkness Falls). It’s unusual because it’s bilingual, and printed in parallel text, Italian and Piedmontese; because, in spite of its elegant editorial format, the author published it at his own expense; and above all because it has an unusual subject, which is expressed precisely in the subtitle, “Tools, objects, and things of the past collected so that they will not be forgotten.”

  The book therefore fits into the theoretical frame of Material Culture, a link between anthropology and history, but it makes no claim to any doctrine, to any abstraction, or to any school.

  The author, the fifty-five-year-old Luciano Gibelli, from Canelli, is a gentle enthusiast without academic qualifications. He is an inquiring and rigorous amateur, driven by the desire to ensure the survival, at least in memory, of a civilization that is about to die: the civilization contained in objects that only the oldest among us have had occasion to see, or have heard described by their fathers and grandfathers. Gibelli, resorting mainly to friendly interviews with the old people of towns and villages, rather than to library research, gives us a philologically complete portrait of each object, including its various names, its origin, and its use, along with drawings that he made himself, done carefully to scale, in millimeters.

  Many of these objects he found in Gozzano’s beloved country attics, “where age-old refuse sleeps”;1 others, which could no longer be found but which someone remembered, he reconstructed himself, out of old wood and metal, to see them, feel them in his hands, and try them out. It was an almost religious work, a work of devout patience and refined manual skill; but in it one recognizes also the pious effort of the painter who paints a portrait from memory of a beloved person who has died.