by Primo Levi
It’s a disappointment. His status is that of a “colonial volunteer”; the discipline is not inhuman, but the uniform is ridiculous, the service demanding, the British refuse to deploy the “native” troops in combat, and his feeling of guilt increases. Maybe it is only at this point that the “fortune” mentioned in the title comes into play: Vittorio speaks Italian well and the Intelligence Service selects him as a radio announcer. He is authorized to move out of the barracks and rent a room in Jerusalem.
This is a decisive step, and even more decisive is the encounter with a woman, the first one in his life. Berenika stands out among the thousands of scalene characters that make this a memorable book; she is described with a delicate and steady hand and the sober elegance of a great writer. She is twenty, but adult, and in fact mature. She was nourished on Freud and Marx, rejects sentiment, and has sex with the aseptic ease of a nurse: she offers her body to those in need as if she were dispensing medicine. There is no love: love is “a sort of spiritual crime” at a time when entire nations are dying. Only at the end of the episode do we learn that Berenika, a German Jew, was raped by the Nazis in Germany in 1937. For this reason she is “unable to love, only to render some service.”
With this, and with another vivid, grieving female character, the story ends at the dawn of freedom, in 1945, against a Yugoslav backdrop of unspeakable horror. But there is no conclusion; rather, we are left wondering about the future and reflecting on the past. Israel is probably the most complex and dramatic country in the world. This book, written with the modesty of one who confesses and the honesty of one who bears witness, is an essential aid to understanding its excesses, its achievements, and its problems.
Tuttolibri, June 15, 1985
1. Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew: An Italian Story, by Dan Vittorio Segre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
With the Key of Science
We don’t choose our relatives but we do choose our friends and traveling companions. I was bound to Italo Calvino by a subtle yet deep tie. We were almost the same age, and, having both emerged from the defining experience of the Resistance, were first recognized as writers at the same time, in the same (for us memorable) review by Arrigo Cajumi, in these columns, which paired his Path to the Spiders’ Nest with my If This Is a Man. We were both naturally shy, and never spoke at length: it wasn’t necessary. A hint, a brief reference to our respective “works in progress,” and the understanding was immediate.
Not just understanding: I owe a lot to Italo. When he was an editor at the Einaudi offices in Turin, it was natural for me to turn to him. To me he was like a brother, more than that, like an older brother, although he was four years younger. In contrast to me, he was an expert at his job: he had it in his blood. A spiritual son of Pavese, he had inherited his editorial expertise, his rigor, and his quick and vigorous judgment. Italo’s tips and his advice were never vague or superfluous.
We had other ties as well. With two scientists for parents, Italo, alone in the Italian environment, had an appetite for science. He cultivated it; he fed on it as a learned and inquisitive amateur, and relied on it for his later books. Nature and science were for him one and the same thing: science as a lens by means of which to see nature more clearly, as a key to get to its heart, as a code to decipher it. Nothing in his character is lyrical or idyllic, and yet he was a great poet of nature, sometimes in the negative, as when he described its absence from cities. Only half ironic, he would say that he envied my decades of experience as a chemist, in laboratories and factories. We discussed and shared vague and ambitious projects for a mediating and revealing literature, straddling the “two cultures,” sharing in both. He came closer than I did to this goal, endowed as he was with a wide and varied culture and an acquaintance with many of the greatest intellectuals of our time. An admirer and student, in Paris, of Raymond Queneau, he recently invited me to review with him some difficult passages of the Italian translation of Petite cosmogonie portative.1 For me, that turned out to be a spiritual feast: I was fascinated by his acumen as a philologist, to which my modest technical experience could add very little.
His premature death leaves a painful void. He was at the height of his powers, and had too many things to say, things that were his and his alone, and which nobody else will ever be able to express in that way of his, so difficult to imitate: both nimble and sharp, never predictable, never gratuitous; sometimes playful, never easy, never content with the surface of things.
La Stampa, September 20, 1985
1. Published in English, in part, as A Pocket Cosmogony.
Foreword to Commandant of Auschwitz
by Rudolf Höss1
Usually, those who agree to write the foreword for a book do so because they like the book: it is pleasant to read, of a high literary quality, elicits sympathy, or at least admiration, for its author. This book stands at the opposite extreme. It is filled with atrocities described with shocking bureaucratic obtuseness. Reading it is oppressive, its literary quality is inferior, and its author, in spite of his efforts to defend himself, appears as he is, a foolish thug, verbose, uncouth, arrogant, and at times a plain liar. Yet this autobiography of the commandant of Auschwitz is one of the most instructive books ever published. It describes with precision a human journey that, in its own way, is illustrative. In an environment different from the one where he happened to grow up, Rudolf Höss would have become a gray, ordinary civil servant, dutiful and order-loving—at most a careerist with modest ambitions. Instead, step by step, he became one of the greatest criminals in history.
We survivors of the National Socialist Lagers are often asked, especially by young people, a characteristic question: Who were “those on the other side,” what were they like? Is it possible that they were all evil, that one could never see a spark of humanity in their eyes? This book gives a clear answer to this question. It shows how easy it is for goodness to yield to evil, first besieged and then submerged by it, while surviving in grotesque little islands: a normal family life, love of nature, a Victorian morality. Precisely because the author is uncultured, he can’t be suspected of a colossal and skillful falsification of history: he wouldn’t be capable of it. Indeed, although in his pages mechanical reversions to Nazi rhetoric surface, along with lies large and small and attempts at self-justification and embellishment, they are so naïve and transparent that even the most clueless reader can recognize them without difficulty. They stand out in the fabric of the story like flies in milk.
In short, this book is a largely truthful autobiography. It is the autobiography of a man who was not a monster, nor did he become one even at the peak of his career, when by his orders thousands of innocents were killed at Auschwitz every day. I mean that we can believe him when he says that he never took pleasure in inflicting pain and death: he was not a sadist; there is nothing Satanic in him. (On the other hand, we can recognize some Satanic traits in his portrait of Eichmann, his peer and friend. Eichmann, however, was much more intelligent than Höss, and we get the impression that Höss believed some of Eichmann’s boasts that don’t stand up to serious scrutiny.) Höss was one of the worst criminals ever, but he was made of the same substance as any bourgeois from any country. His fault, which was embedded neither in his genetic makeup nor in his German birth, lies in his inability to resist the pressure put on him by a violent environment, even before Hitler’s rise to power.
To be fair, we must admit that the young man had a bad start. His father, a tradesman, is a “fanatical Catholic” (but beware: in Höss’s vocabulary, and generally in the Nazi vocabulary, this adjective always has positive connotations) and wants him to become a priest. At the same time, however, he imposes on Höss a strict military-style education, without any consideration for his talents or inclinations. It is understandable that Höss feels no love for his parents and grows up aloof and introverted. Orphaned at an early age, he goes through a religious crisis, and at the outset of the Great War has no hesitation, as his moral universe
is by now reduced to a single constellation: Duty, Fatherland, Comradeship, Bravery. He joins as a volunteer, and at the age of seventeen is dispatched to the wild Iraqi front. He kills, is wounded, and feels he has become a man, which is to say a soldier: to him the terms are synonymous.
War (everywhere, but especially in a defeated and humiliated Germany) is a very bad school. Höss does not even try to return to a normal life; in the terrible climate of postwar Germany he enlists in one of the many Volunteer Corps, whose duties are essentially repressive, is involved in a political assassination, and is sentenced to ten years in jail. Prison life is harsh, but suits him well. He is no rebel; he likes discipline and order, and he even likes serving his sentence; he is an exemplary prisoner. He displays proper feelings: he accepted the violence of war because it had been ordered by Authority, but he is disgusted by the spontaneous acts of violence of his fellow inmates. This is one of his recurrent themes: order is necessary, in everything; directives must come from above, are good by definition, and must be followed without question but conscientiously; initiative is permitted only for the purpose of carrying out orders more efficiently. Friendship, love, and sex are suspect; Höss is a loner.
After six years, he is granted an amnesty and finds work in an agricultural community. He marries, but admits that he never succeeded, either then or later, when he would have most needed it, to communicate intimately with his wife. This is when the trap opens before him: he receives an offer to join the SS, and he accepts, lured by the “prospect of a career that advances rapidly” and by the “financial advantages that go with it.” And this is the point where he lies to the reader for the first time: “Reading Himmler’s call to join the SS and serve in the concentration camps, I had not thought for a moment about the true nature of these camps. . . . It was a completely unknown concept, and I had no idea of it.” Come on, Commandant Höss, lying requires greater mental agility. We are in 1934, Hitler is already in power, and has always spoken plainly. The new meaning of the word “Lager” is already familiar; only a few know exactly what happens there, but everybody knows that they are places of terror, and horror—and much more is known in SS circles. The “concept” is anything but “unknown,” it is already cynically exploited by the propaganda of the regime: “If you don’t behave, you’ll end up in the Lager” is an almost proverbial saying.
In fact, Höss’s career advances rapidly. His prison experience is an asset. His superiors rightly consider him a specialist and reject his halfhearted requests to be sent back among the troops. One service is as good as the other, the enemy is everywhere, at the borders and within; Höss should not feel demeaned. He consents; if his duty is to be a torturer, he will be a diligent torturer: “I must confess that I fulfilled my duties conscientiously and carefully, without any regard for the prisoners, that I was strict and often harsh.” No one doubts that he was harsh. But to say, as he does, that behind his “mask of stone” an aching heart was concealed is an indecent and childish lie.
On the other hand, his repeated assertion that, once you were inside the system, it was difficult to get out is not a lie. There was no risk of death or even harsh punishment, but getting out was objectively difficult. Serving in the SS included an intensive and skillful “reeducation” that flattered the recruits’ ambition. These, mostly ignorant, frustrated outcasts felt valued and exalted. The uniform was elegant, the pay was good, the power almost limitless, impunity guaranteed; today they were the masters of Germany and tomorrow (according to one of their hymns) of the entire world. At the outset of the Second World War, Höss is already Schutzhaftlagerführer at Sachsenhausen, which is no small thing, yet he deserves a promotion and accepts with surprise and delight the appointment to commandant. He is going to a new camp, still under construction, far from Germany, near a small Polish town called Auschwitz.
Höss is truly an expert; I say this without irony. At this point his pages become frenzied and passionate. As he writes, a Polish court has already sentenced him to death; this punishment, too, comes from an authority and must therefore be accepted, but that is no reason to forgo describing his finest hour. Höss writes a real treatise on city planning; he lectures us, for his knowledge must not be lost, his legacy must not be wasted. He teaches us how to plan, build, manage a concentration camp so that it works well, reibungslos, notwithstanding the ineptitude of subordinates and the blindness of superiors, disagreeing with one another, who send him more trains than the camp can take in. Isn’t he the commander? Well then, let him find a solution. Here Höss becomes heroic. He seeks the reader’s admiration, praise, even sympathy: he sacrificed everything for his Lager, days and nights of rest, family love. The Inspectorate does not support him, does not send him the necessary supplies, to the point that Höss, the model civil servant, must “literally steal the amount of barbed wire most urgently needed. . . . After all, I had to take care of my interests!”
He is less convincing when he rises to lecturer on the sociology of the Lager. With righteous loathing he condemns the fighting among prisoners: what rabble, they know neither honor nor solidarity, the great virtues of the German people. But a few lines later he lets slip the admission that “these fights were deliberately promoted and encouraged by the management of the camp,” that is, by him. He describes with professional arrogance the different categories of prisoners, interspersing the old contempt with jarring expressions of hypocritical, retrospective compassion. Political detainees were better than common criminals and Gypsies (“They were . . . my favorite prisoners”) better than the homosexuals; Russian prisoners of war were like animals, and he never liked the Jews.
It’s precisely on the topic of the Jews that the false notes become more strident. There is no conflict here; Nazi indoctrination does not collide with a new and more humane vision of the world. To put it in simple terms, Höss has not understood anything, has not left behind his past; he is not cured. When he says (and he says it often), “Now I realize . . . now I understand that . . . ,” he is a blatant liar, like almost all of today’s political pentiti, and like all those who express regrets with words rather than with deeds. Why does he lie? Maybe he wants to leave behind a better image of himself; maybe simply because the judges, who are his new superiors, told him that the correct opinions are not the old ones but others.
It’s precisely the topic of the Jews that shows how much Goebbels’s propaganda influenced Germany and how difficult it is, even in an individual as compliant as Höss, to wipe out its effects. Höss acknowledges that in Germany Jews were “rather” persecuted, but he hastens to add that their arrival en masse was ruinous for morale in the Lager. Jews, as everybody knows, are rich, and with money you can bribe anybody, even the extremely honest SS officers. But the puritanical Höss (who in Auschwitz had taken a prisoner as a lover, and had tried to get rid of her by sending her to her death) disagrees with the pornographic anti-Semitism of Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer. This publication “did a lot of damage; it didn’t help serious anti-Semitism at all.” That’s not surprising, since, Höss ventures to say, “it was written by a Jew.” It was the Jews who spread (Höss doesn’t dare to say “made up”) the news about German atrocities, and they should be punished for this, but the virtuous Höss also disagrees with his superior Eicke,2 who would like to stop the leak by using the clever system of collective punishment. The campaign against the atrocities, Höss believes, “would have continued even if hundreds or thousands of people had been shot”; the italics of that even if, a gem of Nazi logic, are mine.
In the summer of 1941, Himmler informs him “personally” that Auschwitz will be something different from a penitentiary. It is to become “the greatest extermination center of all time”: let Höss and his collaborators find the best way to go about it. Höss does not raise an eyebrow; this is an order like any other, and orders must not be questioned. Some experience had already been gained in other camps, but mass machine-gunning and toxic injections are not suitable, something more rapid and relia
ble is necessary. Most of all, “bloodbaths” should be avoided, because they demoralize those who carry them out. After the bloodiest actions, some SS killed themselves, while others would get methodically drunk; something aseptic, impersonal was needed to safeguard the soldiers’ mental health. Collective asphyxia with engine exhaust fumes is a good start, but needs improvement. Höss and his deputy have the bright idea of trying Zyklon B, the poison used to kill rats and roaches, and that works well. After a test carried out on nine hundred Russian prisoners, Höss feels “greatly encouraged”: the mass execution is successful, in terms of both quantity and quality—no blood, no traumas. There is a fundamental difference between machine-gunning naked people at the edge of a ditch they have dug themselves and throwing a little box of poison in an air duct. Höss’s highest ambition is fulfilled as his professionalism is demonstrated; he is the best technician of the slaughter. His envious colleagues are defeated.
The most repugnant pages of the book are those where Höss describes in detail the brutality and indifference with which the Jews charged with the removal of the corpses performed their task. These pages contain an obscene indictment, a charge of conspiracy, as if those wretches (weren’t they also “following orders”?) could take the blame for those who had created them and given that assignment. The crux of the book, and its least credible lie, is where Höss, faced with the killing of children, writes, “I felt such immense pity that I would have liked to disappear from the face of the earth, and yet I was not allowed to show any emotion.” Who would have prevented him from “disappearing”? Not even Himmler, his supreme boss, who, in spite of Höss’s respect, appears in these pages as both a demiurge and a pedantic, inconsistent, and intractable idiot.