by Primo Levi
It’s very likely then that Levi read De nacht der Girondijnen for the first time in German. In 1976 he presented it to Italian readers with these words: “I came across this story by accident, many years ago; I read it and reread it many times, and it stayed with me.” He had translated it into Italian himself, although he didn’t know Dutch; but he knew German, the language in which he had read it. In his foreword to Presser’s story Levi observes, for the first time, “There are many signs that the time has come to explore the space that separates the victims from the executioners.” Although these words return almost verbatim, ten years later, in the chapter “The Gray Zone” of The Drowned and the Saved, the new definition is not yet there.
The spring of 1974 saw the release of Liliana Cavani’s film The Night Porter, which misunderstood the gray zone in advance, so to speak. In the published screenplay, Cavani recounted that, years earlier, she had spent an entire afternoon talking to Levi: “I had the impression that Levi could, or rather could manage to, speak only about that period of his life, as if in spite of everything he had always remained there.” Levi’s work contradicts that impression, as the reality of the Lagers contradicts Cavani’s film, which Levi called “fine and mendacious.” Presser’s work contained more truth, although it was fiction; Levi suggested it to Einaudi in January 1975, and was rebuffed yet again. He fell back on Adelphi, because Luciano Foà, one of its cofounders, had been editor in chief at Einaudi when, in 1958, the definitive edition of If This Is a Man was published.
The translation of The Night of the Girondists occupied the last months of 1975. When the work was finished, Levi wrote to Gabriella Poli: “The whole time I was gripped by a violent emotion. Westerbork was the camp that the Dutch had set up for Jews who had fled Poland; under the Nazi occupation it became a sorting camp through which the convoys for the east passed. As I worked, I experienced Auschwitz again. And writing the Foreword cost me a great deal. But it’s time to confront even the subjects that are painful. The space between executioners and victims is a gray zone, not a desert.” As far as we know, this passage contains the earliest use of the expression “gray zone.”
Almost four years passed before Levi publicly articulated the new category: in a conversation with Giuseppe Grassano—which took place on September 17, 1979, but was not published until March 1981—he called it the fascia grigia (“gray band”). Between the nouns “band” and “zone” is a connection that goes back to the Greek origin, zōnē, of the Latin zona, meaning “belt” (a synonym for “band,” or fascia) and linked—in Levi’s high school memory—to the poetry of Catullus, who in his Odes uses zona to indicate the band-belt of the beloved: “Tam gratum est mihi quam ferunt puellae / pernici aureolum fuisse malum / quod zonam soluit diu ligatam” (“As pleasing to me as, they say, to the swift girl was the golden apple, which loosed the long-tied belt”). “The space between executioners and victims is a gray zone,” Levi wrote to Poli. And the italics help to advance the hypothesis that the use of the expression zona grigia (gray zone) has a possible origin also in the idiomatic English expression “gray area”: referring to a region with an indeterminate color (moral as well). As he pointed out in the letter to Poli, such a region is not a desert, which would be left blank on a map.
“È tempo di affrontare (It’s time to confront),” Levi writes to Poli. “The time has come to explore,” he repeats, in the Foreword to Presser. Thirty years had passed since the liberation of Auschwitz. The hope was that the public was prepared to listen to more subtle, complex, and disturbing truths. Young people, with fresher minds, immune to the traumas and compromises of the past, would be able to do so. And by now the old should be able to as well, if they were willing to look at their own history calmly. In fact, the year 1975 turned out to be decisive for the future Drowned and Saved. In a letter of March 9 to his cousin Anna Yona, Levi declared his intention to write the story of Chaim Rumkowski, the president of the Lodz Ghetto. (The story appeared in La Stampa on November 20, 1977, under the title “King of the Jews,” and was collected in the fall of 1981 in Lilith and Other Stories.) Although Levi somewhat modified the style to make it suitable for a work of nonfiction, he used it again, in The Drowned and the Saved, where it concludes “The Gray Zone” chapter with a crescendo.
What is crucial is that, in the first draft of the text, in its short story version, Levi articulated, in a complete form, the new theme that was preoccupying him: corrupting—rather than inhuman—regimes like Nazism are endowed with the power “to create a broad band of gray consciences that stands between the potentates of evil and the pure victims: in this band Rumkowski should be placed.” It’s a description and, at the same time, an axiom. And it’s a law of moral science that, in its linguistic aspect, shows us how the word “band” precedes the word “zone,” and even suggests a possible reason for the replacement. Compared with “band,” the word “zone” implies a less uniform coloration and hazier borders: it implies, in other words, a more complex casuistry in the manifestation of evil, and prompts us to sharper attention and more vigilant caution in judging it.
From various hints we can deduce that around 1975 a period of reflection began that led to the writing of The Drowned and the Saved. A disquieting story like Presser’s and a misleading one like the tale brought to the screen by Liliana Cavani are intertwined with the political events of those years, during which, in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, the threat of a new fascism was perceived. Levi denounced it explicitly in the editorial “This Was Auschwitz,” which appeared in La Stampa on February 9, 1975, and again in “To the Visitor,” a text written in the autumn of 1978 that was to be displayed on the Italian Memorial at Auschwitz, and in which the existence of the extermination camps is presented as the extreme and logical result of European fascism (both are in Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1949–1980). Also, in the late seventies the works of Holocaust deniers began to circulate, and Levi wrote several articles combatting their hypotheses. He also wrote an article about the death of a man who became in The Drowned and the Saved the opponent-interlocutor of the chapter “The Intellectual in Auschwitz” (“Jean Améry, the Philosopher-Suicide,” also in Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1949–1980).
From the perspective of today, the year 1975 was decisive for another reason. The school edition of If This Is a Man had appeared three years earlier, but in 1975 Levi decided to write an appendix that would satisfy the curiosity of his readers by answering their recurring questions, especially those of the students he met in the schools: this was his true audience, the one that most excited him and, at the same time, made him anxious. In early 1976 the Appendix was ready. At first it was included only in the school edition, but beginning in 1979 it was printed in all editions of the book, including those meant for general readers. The eight questions and answers that Levi prepared are meant to offer a general historical-
political framework, but they also express his moral life after the book’s publication: the opening two questions concerned the possibility of forgiveness for the executioners (which Levi had no intention of granting), and the German people’s knowledge of their own history. A large part of the Appendix, however, was devoted to those who in The Drowned and the Saved are defined as “stereotypes,” and whom Levi tried here, for the first time, to describe and to analyze with the power of common sense and the precision of historical information.
In the intricate history of The Drowned and the Saved, we can observe certain fundamental ideas, starting with the “gray zone,” an expression that has become so popular, so widespread in every intellectual discipline, that it is by now detached from Levi’s text and—above all—from its original meaning. In the interviews of 1979 in which Levi spoke of his future book, there are two elements that help define the gray zone more precisely. In one of them Levi explains: “There is a theme, having to do with the Lager, that appeals to me and also seems relevant, and that is to look again at the experience after thirty-five years: to see it through my eyes, through
the eyes of the indifferent, through the eyes of the young people who don’t know these things, and also through the eyes of the adversary. It seems to me that it could produce a sociological analysis about which I think I have something personal to say. That is, taking a stand in the face of ambiguity.” In the book that he was thinking about, Levi therefore intended to confront and develop very different, even irreconcilable points of view toward the Lager. Certainly he didn’t mean to declare that they were all equally legitimate: they were, rather, to be carefully distinguished, in such a way that one would arrive at “taking a stand in the face of ambiguity” (italics added). His reasoning continued: “Above all, the most simplistic interpretation should be rejected; that is, on one side the pure oppressor, without doubts, without hesitations, and on the other side the victim sanctified by his role as victim. It’s not like that. The human machine, the human animal is more complicated. There are intermediate stages. Those who have been called torturers were not torturers in a pure state: they were men like us, who took on the role of torturers for some reason. I intend to explain these reasons in a future book.” Analyzing the “intermediate stages” (an illuminating definition, which was not taken up in The Drowned and the Saved) does not mean accepting everything, and absolving everything; it means to understand and make distinctions with the most acute moral attention.
Levi sent a first draft of the essay on the gray zone to his friend Bianca Guidetti Serra on March 19, 1980: “Dear Bianca, this would be the first chapter of the book I am supposed to be writing.” The structure of the book was therefore different, at the time, from what it ultimately became. And it is telling that in the end Levi decided to place the chapter on memory first. The witness of Auschwitz—who, forty years later, returns to discuss the events with the tools of the essayist and (in some passages) the historian—first subjects his principal tool, memory itself, to a rigorous analysis. Only after completing this operation does he go on to examine the theme of “ambiguity.” A first draft of the chapter “The Memory of the Offense” was published in late 1982, in an anthology put out by the Campiello Prize of unpublished writings of five of the prizewinning authors (Levi won first prize that year, for If Not Now, When?).
It has already been said that the germ of the ideas fundamental to The Drowned and the Saved can be traced back to Levi’s first two books. The censors of the German Democratic Republic realized this, in their way, when between 1979 and 1982 they examined If This Is a Man and The Truce to evaluate the advisability of publishing them in Communist East Germany. Authorization was denied. The Truce offered an unorthodox image of Soviet Russia and the Red Army, while the description of the Lager that emerged from both books raised subtle ethical questions rather than presenting two clearly contrasting faces: of victims (noble, heroic, politically aware, ready to resist until death) and torturers (evil and disgusting, without nuances). In fact, the Ministry of Culture had granted a cautious assent to the books’ publication, but asked for a definitive opinion from the Committee of Anti-Fascist Resistance Fighters, an East German organization charged with “safeguarding the tradition of anti-Fascist resistance” and vigilant about the representation of the GDR as a German and anti-Fascist state. Its judgment was extremely negative, mainly because of Levi’s depiction of the role of the political prisoners, the majority of whom behaved toward the Jews as all the other Prominentz did. The committee objected: “An absurd accusation, which denies and slanders the heroic behavior of many political prisoners.” As if that were not enough, Levi ignored the incidents of resistance that occurred in Auschwitz.
Although the political censorship that Levi endured in East Germany appears grotesque, it’s an indication of how disturbing the ideas that he was articulating in The Drowned and the Saved might be elsewhere, too, and not only in Italy. Two more sources of distress and of encouragement that acted on Levi in those years can be pointed out. There is a hint of the first at the start of “Conclusion,” where Levi says that the events of the Lager are, for the young people of the time, “things of their grandparents: distant, blurry, ‘historical.’” The distance, the lack of interest, the incomprehension, even incredulity, that Levi more than once faced in his encounters with schoolchildren had a wearing effect on him, and at times this discouragement even led him to suspend his school visits; then, after an interval, refreshed, he would return to them. But if this was a new source of distress, connected to the present, old, painful memories were also working on him, from the inside.
There is an episode that was not included in If This Is a Man, and which Levi recounts in The Drowned and the Saved, as the culmination of the chapter “Shame.” He discovers some drinking water during an air raid and shares it with a single companion, keeping it hidden from a second. This man much later rebuked Levi for that failure, and Levi was ashamed. Before publishing an account of the incident, Levi had sketched it by allusion in “The Survivor,” a poem dated February 4, 1984. The poem begins with a line from Coleridge, “Since then, at an uncertain hour” (the line that provides the title for the Garzanti collection of Levi’s poems published that year). The crucial allusion (and literary source), however, is not The Rime of the Ancient Mariner but, as in If This Is a Man, the Divine Comedy.
“The Survivor”—a desperate entreaty to the poet’s drowned companions—ends: “Non è mia colpa se vivo e respiro / E mangio e bevo e dormo e vesto panni,” “It’s not my fault if I live and breathe / And eat and drink and sleep and put on clothes.” The reference is to the deepest places of the Inferno: Canto XXXIII, the ninth circle, in the so-called Ptolomea, where the traitors to guests serve their eternal punishment: they lie supine, fixed in an expanse of ice. Frate Alberigo de’ Manfredi di Faenza addresses Dante, a pilgrim in the world of the damned. Like the Ancient Mariner, he, too, wishes to pour out the grief that saturates his heart. He tells the story of the damned soul next to him, Branca Doria, who, in order to take over Logudoro (a region of Sardinia), had his father-in-law, Michele Zanche, killed after inviting him to a banquet. Alberigo reveals that, as soon as a sin of such gravity is committed, the soul of the traitor is removed from his body and descends to Ptolomea, while in its place a demon occupies the body, until the day of natural death. Thus Branca Doria, an infernal being, can still inhabit the Earth, “e mangia e bee e dorme e veste panni”: “and eat and drink and sleep and put on clothes.”
In the nineteen lines of “The Survivor,” Levi intended to refute the suspicion that he had survived in Auschwitz at the expense of others. And the reference to Dante—in which he identifies himself with a man-demon who, already damned, leads a virtual life on Earth, after traitorously taking the life of his neighbor—was probably a deliberate slip on his part. In this poem Levi therefore offered a summary of the chapter “Shame”; and in justifying himself before the mirror of his own conscience he used a line of the Inferno that was equivalent to an atrocious, and undeserved, self-accusation. This contradiction is enough to indicate what it cost him—to use the same word with which he defined the shame that, decades after the episode of the water, he still felt when he was confronted by his companion Daniele—to write The Drowned and the Saved.
The first English edition of The Drowned and the Saved was published in 1988 by Summit Books, New York.
UNCOLLECTED STORIES AND ESSAYS: 1981–1987
Scarcely more than six years separate the start of 1981 and the day of Primo Levi’s death. The uncollected essays of that brief span of time have an aspect completely different from those of the three preceding decades: they are products of a spacious, versatile workshop, overflowing with talent and, at a superficial glance, disorganized. On April 11, 1987, this workshop suddenly lowered its shutter, leaving on its shelves dozens of texts—stories, essays, poems, testimonies, portraits of friends and of other writers, strong opinions on political and historical events—that, if Levi hadn’t died, would certainly have found their place in future books, assembled with care.
We can be sure, for example, that
sooner or later Levi would have published a new collection of poems. For that reason those which appeared after the publication of An Uncertain Hour are placed as a separate section, “Other Poems,” in the 1997 Einaudi edition of the Opere (here, they are in Collected Poems). As for the fiction, some of the stories were already arranged in a series that, in two years at most, would be ready to be published, including the stories on animals that in his last months, and even his last days, Levi wrote for the zoology and ecology monthly Airone.
In Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1981–1987 we find an extension of Other People’s Trades and Stories and Essays (in which, just a few months before his death, Levi had arranged a number of the pieces published in La Stampa). Levi the culturally omnivorous yet refined essayist can be found in pieces like “Our First Ancestors Weren’t Animals” and “The Brute Power” but also in the strange recollection “When They Drank Methanol in the Lager” and in the pieces on Jack London and on Calvino as the translator of Raymond Queneau. These essays document for us Levi the translator into Italian of Kafka’s The Trial (for a series thought up by Giulio Einaudi and entitled Writers Translated by Writers) and the memorialist of two loved and admired figures, Emanuele Artom and Leonardo De Benedetti.