The Periodic Table

by Primo Levi

  The other dinner guests around us were talking noisily about children, vacations, salaries. We ended up by going off to the bar, where gradually we became sentimental and promised each other to renew a friendship that actually had never existed between us. We would keep in contact, and each of us would gather for the other more stories like this one, in which stolid matter manifests a cunning intent upon evil and obstruction, as if it revolted against the order dear to man: like those reckless outcasts, thirsting more for the ruination of others than for their own triumph, who in novels arrive from the ends of the earth to thwart the exploits of positive heroes.

  VANADIUM

  Varnish is an unstable substance by definition: in fact, at a certain point in its career it must turn from a liquid into a solid. But this must occur at the right time and place. If it doesn’t, the effects can be unpleasant or dramatic: it can happen that a varnish hardens (we say brutally “monkeys”) during its sojourn in the warehouse, and in that case the merchandise must be thrown out; or that the base resin hardens during the synthesis, in a ten- or twenty-ton reactor, which amounts to a tragedy; or even that the varnish does not harden at all, even after application, and then one becomes a laughingstock, since varnish that doesn’t dry is like a gun that doesn’t shoot or a bull that can’t impregnate. In many cases the oxygen in the air plays a part in the hardening process. Among the various exploits, vital or destructive, which oxygen can perform, we varnish makers are interested above all in its capacity to react with certain small molecules such as those of certain oils, and of creating links between them, transforming them into a compact and therefore solid network. That is how, for example, linseed oil dries in the open air.

  We had imported a shipment of resin for varnishes, indeed one of those resins which harden at an ordinary temperature by simple exposure to the atmosphere, and we were worried. Tested by itself, the resin dried as expected, but after having been ground up with a certain (irreplaceable) kind of lampblack, its ability to dry fell off to the point of disappearing: we had already set aside several tons of black paint which, despite all attempts to correct it, after application remained indefinitely sticky, like lugubrious flypaper.

  In cases like these, before formulating accusations, one must proceed cautiously. The supplier was W., a large and respectable German company, one of the large segments into which, after the war, the Allies had dismembered the omnipotent IG-Farben: people like this, before admitting their guilt, throw on the scales all the weight of their prestige and all their ability at wearing you down. But there was no way to avoid the controversy: other shipments of resin behaved well with that same batch of lampblack, the resin was a special type that only W. produced, and we were bound by contract and absolutely had to continue supplying that black paint, without missing any due dates.

  I wrote a well-mannered letter of protest, setting forth the terms of the problem, and a few days later the answer came: it was long and pedantic, advised obvious expedients and procedures which we had already adopted without result, and contained a superfluous and deliberately confused description of the mechanism of the resin’s oxidation: it ignored our need for immediate action, and on the essential point simply stated that the relevant tests were under way. There was nothing left for us to do but immediately order another shipment, urging W. to check with particular care the resin’s behavior with that kind of lampblack.

  Together with the confirmation of this last order a second letter arrived, nearly as long as the first, and signed by the same Doktor L. Müller. It was a trifle more to the point than the first, recognized (with many qualifications and reservations) the justness of our grievance, and contained a piece of advice less obvious than the previous: “ganz unerwarteterweise,” that is, in a completely unexpected fashion, the gnomes of their lab had discovered that the protested shipment was cured by the addition of 0.1 percent of vanadium naphthenate—an additive that until then had never been heard of in the world of varnishes. The unknown Dr. Müller urged us to check immediately on the truth of their statement; if the effect was confirmed, their observation could avoid for both parties the annoyances and hazards of an international dispute.

  Müller. There was a Müller in my previous incarnation, but Müller is a very common name in Germany, like Molinari in Italy or Miller in English, of which it is an exact equivalent. Why continue to think about it? And yet, rereading the two letters with their heavy, lumbering phrasing encumbered with technical jargon, I could not quiet a doubt, the kind that refuses to be pushed aside and rasps slightly within you, like termites. Oh, come now, there must be two hundred thousand Müllers in Germany, forget it and think about the varnish that has to be corrected.

  ... and then, all of a sudden, there rose before my eyes a detail of the last letter which had escaped me: it was not a typing mistake, it was repeated twice; it said “naptenate,” not “naphthenate” as it should be. Now I conserve pathologically precise memories of my encounters in that by now remote world: well, that other Müller too, in an unforgotten lab full of freezing cold, hope, and fear, used to say “beta-Naptylamin” instead of “beta-Naphthylamin.”

  The Russians were knocking at the door, two or three times a day Allied planes came to shake apart the Buna plant: there was no water, steam, or electricity; not a single pane of glass was intact; but the order was to begin producing Buna rubber, and Germans do not discuss orders.

  I was in a laboratory with two other skilled prisoners, similar to those educated slaves that the rich Romans imported from Greece. To work was as impossible as it was futile: our time was almost entirely spent dismantling the apparatus at every air-raid alarm and putting them together again at the all-clear. But as I said, orders are not discussed, and every so often some inspector burrowed through the rubble and snow all the way to us to make sure that the lab’s work proceeded according to instructions. Sometimes an SS with a stone face would come, at other times a little old soldier from the local militia who was timid as a mouse, and at other times still a civilian. The civilian who appeared most often was called Dr. Müller.

  He must have been a person of some authority because everybody saluted him first. He was a tall, corpulent man of about forty, more coarse than refined in appearance. He had spoken to me only three times, and all three times with a timidity rare in that place, as if he were ashamed of something. The first time only about the work (the dosage of the “Naptylamin,” in fact); the second time he had asked me why I had so long a beard, to which I had replied that none of us had a razor, in fact not even a handkerchief, and that our beards were shaved officially every Monday; the third time he had given me a note, written neatly on a typewriter, which authorized me to shave also on Thursday and to be issued by the Effektenmagazin a pair of leather shoes and had asked me, addressing me formally, “Why do you look so perturbed?” I, who at that time thought in German, had said to myself, “Der Mann hat keine Ahnung” (This fellow hasn’t got an inkling).

  Duty first. I hastened to track down among our usual suppliers a sample of vanadium naphthenate, and found out that it wasn’t easy: the product was not in regular production, was prepared only in small quantities and only on order; I put through an order.

  The return of that “pt” had thrown me into a state of violent agitation. To find myself, man to man, having a reckoning with one of the “others” had been my keenest and most constant desire since I had left the concentration camp. It had been met only in part by letters from my German readers: they did not satisfy me, those honest, generalized declarations of repentance and solidarity on the part of people I had never seen, whose other face I did not know, and who probably were not implicated except emotionally. The encounter I looked forward to with so much intensity as to dream of it (in German) at night, was an encounter with one of them down there, who had disposed of us, who had not looked into our eyes, as though we didn’t have eyes. Not to take my revenge: I am not the Count of Montecristo. Only to reestablish the right proportions, and to say, “Well?
” If this Müller was my Müller, he was not the perfect antagonist, because in some way, perhaps only for a moment, he had felt pity, or just only a rudiment of professional solidarity. Perhaps even less: perhaps he had only resented the fact that the strange hybrid of colleague and instrument that after all was a chemist frequented a laboratory without the Anstand, the decorum, that the laboratory demands; but the others around him had not even felt this. He was not the perfect antagonist: but, as is known, perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.

  I got in touch with W.‘s representatives, whom I knew quite well, and asked him to look with discretion into Dr. Müller: How old was he? What did he look like? Where had he been during the war? The answer was not long in coming: his age and appearance coincided, the man had worked first at Schkopau to get experience in rubber technology, then at the Buna factory near Auschwitz. I obtained his address and sent him, from one private person to another, a copy of the German edition of If This Is a Man, with an accompanying letter in which I asked him if he was really the Müller of Auschwitz, and if he remembered “the three men of the laboratory”; well, I hoped he would pardon this crude intrusion and return from the void but I was one of the three, besides being the customer worried about the resin that did not dry.

  I began to wait for the reply, while on the company level there continued, like the oscillation of an enormous, very slow pendulum, the exchange of chemico-bureaucratic letters concerning the Italian vanadium that did not work as well as the German. Would you please in the meantime be so kind as to send us urgently the specifications of the product and ship to us by air freight 50 kilograms, whose cost you will deduct, etc.? On the technical level the matter seemed set on the right course, but the fate of the defective shipment was not clear: to hold on to it at a discount, or return it at W.’s expense, or ask for arbitration. Meanwhile, as is the custom, we threatened each other with legal action, “gerichtlich vorzugehen.”

  The “private” reply still kept me waiting, which was almost as irritating and nerve-racking as the company dispute. What did I know about my man? Nothing—in all probability he had blotted everything out, deliberately or not; for him my letter and my book were an ill-mannered and irksome intrusion, a clumsy invitation to stir up a by now well settled sediment, an assault on Anstand. He would never reply. A pity: he was not a perfect German, but do perfect Germans exist? Or perfect Jews? They are an abstraction: the transition from the general to the particular always has stimulating surprises in store, when the interlocutor without contours, ghostly, takes shape before you, gradually or at a single blow, and becomes the Mitmensch, the co-man, with all his depth, his tics, anomalies, and incoherences. By now almost two months had passed: the reply would no longer arrive. Too bad.

  It arrived dated March 2, 1967, on elegant paper headed with vaguely Gothic characters. It was a preliminary letter, brief and reserved. Yes, the Müller of Buna was indeed he. He had read my book, recognized with emotion persons and places; he was happy to know that I had survived; he asked for information about the other two “men of the laboratory,” and up to this point there was nothing strange, since they were named in the book: but he also asked about Goldbaum, whom I had not named. He added that he had reread, for the occasion, his notes on that period: he would gladly discuss them with me in a hoped-for personal meeting, “useful both to myself and to you, and necessary for the purpose of overcoming that terrible past” (“im Sinne der Bewältigung der so furchtbaren Vergangenheit”). He declared at the end that, among all the prisoners he had met at Auschwitz, I was the one who had made the strongest and most lasting impression, but this could well be flattery: from the tone of the letter, and especially from that sentence about “overcoming,” it seemed that the man expected something from me.

  Now it was up to me to reply, and I felt embarrassed. You see, the undertaking had succeeded, the adversary was snared; he was there before me, almost a colleague varnish maker, he wrote like me on paper with a letterhead, and he even remembered Goldbaum. He was still quite blurred, but it was obvious that he wanted from me something like an absolution, because he had a past to overcome and I didn’t: I wanted from him only a discount on the bill for the defective resin. The situation was interesting but atypical: it coincided only in part with that of the reprobate hauled before a judge.

  First of all: In what language should I reply? Certainly not in German; I would have made ridiculous mistakes, which my role did not permit. Better always to fight on your terrain: I wrote to him in Italian. The two men of the laboratory were dead, I did not know where or how; the same for Goldbaum, who died of cold and hunger during the evacuation march. As for me, he knew the essentials from my book, and from my business correspondence about the vanadium.

  I had many questions to ask him: too many, and too heavy for him and for me. Why Auschwitz? Why Pannwitz? Why the children in the gas chambers? But I felt that it was not yet the moment to go beyond certain limits, and I asked him only whether he accepted the judgments, implicit and explicit, of my book. Whether he felt that IG-Farben had spontaneously taken on the slave labor force. Whether he knew then about Auschwitz’s “installations,” which devoured ten thousand lives a day only seven kilometers away from the Buna rubber plant. And finally, since he had talked about his “notations of that period,” would he send me a copy?

  About the “hoped-for meeting” I said nothing, because I was afraid of it. No point in having recourse to euphemisms, to talk about shyness, disgust, reticence. Fear was the word: just as I didn’t feel myself to be a Montecristo, so I didn’t feel myself to be Horatius-Curiatius. I did not feel capable of representing the dead of Auschwitz, nor did it seem to me sensible to see in Müller the representative of the butchers. I know myself: I do not possess any polemical skill, my opponent distracts me, he interests me more as a man than as an opponent, I take pains to listen and run the risk of believing him; indignation and the correct judgment return later, on the way downstairs, when they are no longer of any use. It was best for me to stick to writing.

  Müller wrote to me on the company level that the fifty kilos had been shipped, and that W. was sure of a friendly settlement, etcetera. Almost simultaneously there arrived at my house the letter I expected; but it was not what I expected. It was not a model letter, paradigmatic: at this point, if this story were invented, I would have been able to introduce only two kinds of letters: a humble, warm, Christian letter, from a redeemed German; a ribald, proud, glacial letter from an obdurate Nazi. Now this story is not invented, and reality is always more complex than invention: less kempt, cruder, less rounded out. It rarely lies on one level.

  The letter was eight pages long and contained a photograph that shook me. The face was that face: grown old and at the same time ennobled by a skillful photographer; I could hear him again high above me pronounce those words of distracted and momentary compassion: “Why do you look so perturbed?”

  It was visibly the work of an inept writer: rhetorical, sincere only by half, full of digressions and farfetched praise, moving, pedantic, and clumsy: it defied any summary, all-encompassing judgment.

  He attributed the events at Auschwitz to Man, without differentiation; he deplored them and found consolation in the thought of the other men spoken of in my book, Alberto, Lorenzo, “against whom the weapons of the night are blunted”: the phrase was mine, but repeated by him it struck me as hypocritical and jarring. He told his story: “dragged initially along by the general enthusiasm for Hitler’s regime,” he had joined a nationalistic student league, which soon after was by mandate incorporated in the SA; he had managed to be discharged and observed that “this too was therefore possible.” When the war came he had been mobilized in the antiaircraft corps, and only then, confronted by the ruins of the city, had he experienced “shame and indignation” about the war. In May of 1944 he had been able (like me!) to have his status as a chemist recognized, and he had been assigned to the Schkopau factory of IG-Farben, of which the plant at Aus
chwitz was an enlarged copy: at Schkopau he had trained a group of Ukrainian girls for work in the lab, girls whom in fact I had met again in Auschwitz and whose strange familiarity with Dr. Müller I could not then explain. He had been transferred to Auschwitz together with the girls only in November 1944: at that time the name of Auschwitz did not have any significance, either for him or his acquaintances; on his arrival, he had had a brief introductory meeting with the technical director (presumably Engineer Faust), who warned him that “the Jews in Buna must be assigned only the most menial tasks, and compassion was not tolerated.”

  He had been assigned to work directly under Dr. Pannwitz, the man who had put me through a peculiar “state exam” to ascertain my professional abilities. Müller made it clear that he had a very low opinion of his superior, and informed me that the man had died of a brain tumor in 1946. It was he, Müller, who had been in charge of the organization of the Buna lab; he stated that he had known nothing about that exam, and that he himself had chosen us three specialists, and me in particular; according to this information, improbable but not impossible, I was therefore in debt to him for my survival. He affirmed that he had had a relationship with me almost of friendship between equals; that he had conversed with me about scientific problems and had meditated, on this occasion, on what “precious human values are destroyed by other men out of pure brutality.” Not only did I not remember any such conversations (and my memory of that period, as I have said, is excellent), but against the background of disintegration, mutual distrust, and mortal weariness, the mere supposition of them was totally outside reality, and could only be explained by a very naive ex post facto wishful thinking; perhaps it was an incident he told a lot of people and did not realize I was the one person in the world who could not believe it. Perhaps in good faith he had constructed a convenient past for himself. He did not remember the two details about the shaving and the shoes, but he remembered others, similar and, in my opinion, quite plausible. He had heard about my scarlet fever and had worried about my survival, especially when he learned that the prisoners were being evacuated on foot. On January 26, 1945, he had been assigned by the SS to the Volkssturm, the tatterdemalion army of rejects, old men, and children who were supposed to block the Soviet advance. Luckily, he had been saved by the aforementioned technical director, who had authorized him to run off to a rear area.