The Periodic Table

by Primo Levi

  To my question about IG-Farben he answered curtly that, yes, it had employed prisoners, but only to protect them: actually, he put forward the (insane!) opinion that the entire Buna-Monowitz plant, eight square kilometers of giant buildings, had been constructed with the intention of “protecting the Jews and contributing to their survival,” and that the order not to have compassion for them was “eine Tarnung” (“camouflage”). Nihil de principe, no accusation against IG-Farben: my man was still an employee of W., which was its heir, and you do not spit into your own dish. During his brief sojourn at Auschwitz he “had never gained knowledge of any proviso that seemed aimed at the killing of Jews.” Paradoxical, offensive, but not to be excluded: at that time, among the German silent majority, the common technique was to try to know as little as possible, and therefore not to ask questions. He too, obviously, had not demanded explanations from anyone, not even from himself, although on clear days the flames of the crematorium were visible from the Buna factory.

  A little before the final collapse he had been captured by the Americans and locked up for a few days in a camp for prisoners of war that he, with unwitting irony, described as being “primitively equipped”; just as at the time of our meeting in the lab, so now as he wrote, Müller apparently continued not to have an inkling—“keine Ahnung.” He had returned to his family at the end of June 1945. And this, substantially, was the content of his notations, which I had asked to see.

  He perceived in my book an overcoming of Judaism, a fulfillment of the Christian precept to love one’s enemies, and a testimony of faith in Man, and he concluded by insisting on the necessity of a meeting, in Germany or Italy, where he was ready to join me when and where I wished: preferably on the Riviera. Two days later, through company channels, a letter arrived from W. which, surely not by chance, bore the same date as the long private letter, and also the same signature; it was a conciliatory letter, they recognized that the fault was theirs, and declared themselves open to any proposal. They implied that all is well that ends well; the incident had brought to light the virtues of vanadium naphthenate, which from now on would be incorporated directly into the resin for all customers.

  What to do? The Müller character was “entpuppt,” he had come out of his chrysalis, he was sharply defined, in perfect focus. Neither infamous nor a hero: after filtering off the rhetoric and the lies in good or bad faith there remained a typically gray human specimen, one of the not so few one-eyed men in the kingdom of the blind. He did me an undeserved honor in attributing to me the virtue of loving my enemies: no, despite the distant privileges he had reserved for me, and although he had not been an enemy in the strict sense of the word, I did not feel like loving him. I did not love him, and I didn’t want to see him, and yet I felt a certain measure of respect for him: it is not easy to be one-eyed. He was not cowardly, or deaf, or a cynic, he had not conformed, he was trying to settle his accounts with the past and they didn’t tally: he tried to make them tally, perhaps by cheating a little bit. Could one ask much more from an ex-SA? The comparison, which so many times I had the opportunity to make, with other honest Germans met on the beach or in the factory, was all in his favor: his condemnation of Nazism was timid and evasive, but he had not sought justifications. He sought a colloquy: he had a conscience, and he struggled to soothe it. In his first letter he had spoken of “overcoming the past,” “Bewältigung der Vergangenheit”: I later found out that this is a stereotyped phrase, a euphemism in today’s Germany, where it is universally understood as “redemption from Nazism”; but the root wait that it contains also appears in the words that express “domination,” “violence,” and “rape,” and I believe that translating the expression with “distortion of the past” or “violence done to the past” would not stray very far from its profound meaning. And yet this taking shelter in commonplaces was better than the florid obtuseness of the other Germans: his efforts to overcome were clumsy, a bit ridiculous, irritating and sad, and yet decorous. And didn’t he get me a pair of shoes?

  On my first free Sunday I set about, full of perplexity, preparing a reply as sincere as possible, balanced and dignified. I made a draft: I thanked him for having taken me into the lab; I declared myself ready to forgive my enemies, and perhaps even to love them, but only when they showed certain signs of repentance, that is, when they ceased being enemies. In the opposite case, that of the enemy who remains an enemy, who perseveres in his desire to inflict suffering, it is certain that one must not forgive him: one can try to salvage him, one can (one must!) discuss with him, but it is our duty to judge him, not to forgive him. As to the specific judgment on his behavior, which Müller implicitly asked of me, I tactfully cited two cases known to me of his German colleagues who in their actions toward us had done something much more courageous than what he claimed to have done. I admitted that we are not all born heroes, and that a world in which everyone would be like him, that is, honest and unarmed, would be tolerable, but this is an unreal world. In the real world the armed exist, they build Auschwitz, and the honest and unarmed clear the road for them; therefore every German must answer for Auschwitz, indeed every man, and after Auschwitz it is no longer permissible to be unarmed. I did not say a word about the meeting on the Riviera.

  That same evening Müller called me on the telephone from Germany. The connection was bad, and in any event by now it is no longer easy for me to understand German on the telephone: his voice was labored and seemed broken, his tone tense and agitated. He announced that for Pentecost, within six weeks, he would come to Finale Ligure: Could we meet? Taken unawares, I said yes. I asked him to let me know beforehand the details of his arrival and put aside my now superfluous draft.

  Eight days later I received from Mrs. Müller the announcement of the unexpected death of Doktor Lothar Müller in his sixtieth year of life.

  CARBON

  The reader, at this point, will have realized for some time now that this is not a chemical treatise: my presumption does not reach so far—“ma voix est foible, et même un peu profane.” Nor is it an autobiography, save in the partial and symbolic limits in which every piece of writing is autobiographical, indeed every human work; but it is in some fashion a history.

  It is—or would have liked to be—a micro-history, the history of a trade and its defeats, victories, and miseries, such as everyone wants to tell when he feels close to concluding the arc of his career, and art ceases to be long. Having reached this point in life, what chemist, facing the Periodic Table, or the monumental indices of Beilstein or Landolt, does not perceive scattered among them the sad tatters, or trophies, of his own professional past? He only has to leaf through any treatise and memories rise up in bunches: there is among us he who has tied his destiny, indelibly, to bromine or to propylene, or the -NCO group, or glutamic acid; and every chemistry student, faced by almost any treatise, should be aware that on one of those pages, perhaps in a single line, formula, or word, his future is written in indecipherable characters, which, however, will become clear “afterward”: after success, error, or guilt, victory or defeat. Every no longer young chemist, turning again to the verhàngnisvoll page in that same treatise, is struck by love or disgust, delights or despairs.

  So it happens, therefore, that every element says something to someone (something different to each) like the mountain valleys or beaches visited in youth. One must perhaps make an exception for carbon, because it says everything to everyone, that is, it is not specific, in the same way that Adam is not specific as an ancestor—unless one discovers today (why not?) the chemist-stylite who has dedicated his life to graphite or the diamond. And yet it is exactly to this carbon that I have an old debt, contracted during what for me were decisive days. To carbon, the element of life, my first literary dream was turned, insistently dreamed in an hour and a place when my life was not worth much: yes, I wanted to tell the story of an atom of carbon.

  Is it right to speak of a “particular” atom of carbon? For the chemist there exist some doubts,
because until 1970 he did not have the techniques permitting him to see, or in any event isolate, a single atom; no doubts exist for the narrator, who therefore sets out to narrate.

  Our character lies for hundreds of millions of years, bound to three atoms of oxygen and one of calcium, in the form of limestone: it already has a very long cosmic history behind it, but we shall ignore it. For it time does not exist, or exists only in the form of sluggish variations in temperature, daily or seasonal, if, for the good fortune of this tale, its position is not too far from the earth’s surface. Its existence, whose monotony cannot be thought of without horror, is a pitiless alternation of hots and colds, that is, of oscillations (always of equal frequency) a trifle more restricted and a trifle more ample: an imprisonment, for this potentially living personage, worthy of the Catholic Hell. To it, until this moment, the present tense is suited, which is that of description, rather than the past tense, which is that of narration—it is congealed in an eternal present, barely scratched by the moderate quivers of thermal agitation.

  But, precisely for the good fortune of the narrator, whose story could otherwise have come to an end, the limestone rock ledge of which the atom forms a part lies on the surface. It lies within reach of man and his pickax (all honor to the pickax and its modern equivalents; they are still the most important intermediaries in the millennial dialogue between the elements and man): at any moment—which I, the narrator, decide out of pure caprice to be the year 1840—a blow of the pickax detached it and sent it on its way to the lime kiln, plunging it into the world of things that change. It was roasted until it separated from the calcium, which remained so to speak with its feet on the ground and went to meet a less brilliant destiny, which we shall not narrate. Still firmly clinging to two of its three former oxygen companions, it issued from the chimney and took the path of the air. Its story, which once was immobile, now turned tumultuous.

  It was caught by the wind, flung down on the earth, lifted ten kilometers high. It was breathed in by a falcon, descending into its precipitous lungs, but did not penetrate its rich blood and was expelled. It dissolved three times in the water of the sea, once in the water of a cascading torrent, and again was expelled. It traveled with the wind for eight years: now high, now low, on the sea and among the clouds, over forests, deserts, and limitless expanses of ice; then it stumbled into capture and the organic adventure.

  Carbon, in fact, is a singular element: it is the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance: but its promotion, its entry into the living world, is not easy and must follow an obligatory, intricate path, which has been clarified (and not yet definitively) only in recent years. If the elaboration of carbon were not a common daily occurrence, on the scale of billions of tons a week, wherever the green of a leaf appears, it would by full right deserve to be called a miracle.

  The atom we are speaking of, accompanied by its two satellites which maintained it in a gaseous state, was therefore borne by the wind along a row of vines in the year 1848. It had the good fortune to brush against a leaf, penetrate it, and be nailed there by a ray of the sun. If my language here becomes imprecise and allusive, it is not only because of my ignorance: this decisive event, this instantaneous work a tre—of the carbon dioxide, the light, and the vegetal greenery—has not yet been described in definitive terms, and perhaps it will not be for a long time to come, so different is it from that other “organic” chemistry which is the cumbersome, slow, and ponderous work of man: and yet this refined, minute, and quick-witted chemistry was “invented” two or three billion years ago by our silent sisters, the plants, which do not experiment and do not discuss, and whose temperature is identical to that of the environment in which they live. If to comprehend is the same as forming an image, we will never form an image of a happening{13} whose scale is a millionth of a millimeter, whose rhythm is a millionth of a second, and whose protagonists are in their essence invisible. Every verbal description must be inadequate, and one will be as good as the next, so let us settle for the following description.

  Our atom of carbon enters the leaf, colliding with other innumerable (but here useless) molecules of nitrogen and oxygen. It adheres to a large and complicated molecule that activates it, and simultaneously receives the decisive message from the sky, in the flashing form of a packet of solar light: in an instant, like an insect caught by a spider, it is separated from its oxygen, combined with hydrogen and (one thinks) phosphorus, and finally inserted in a chain, whether long or short does not matter, but it is the chain of life. All this happens swiftly, in silence, at the temperature and pressure of the atmosphere, and gratis: dear colleagues, when we learn to do likewise we will be sicut Deus, and we will have also solved the problem of hunger in the world.

  But there is more and worse, to our shame and that of our art. Carbon dioxide, that is, the aerial form of the carbon of which we have up till now spoken: this gas which constitutes the raw material of life, the permanent store upon which all that grows draws, and the ultimate destiny of all flesh, is not one of the principal components of air but rather a ridiculous remnant, an “impurity,” thirty times less abundant than argon, which nobody even notices. The air contains 0.03 percent; if Italy was air, the only Italians fit to build life would be, for example, the fifteen thousand inhabitants of Milazzo in the province of Messina. This, on the human scale, is ironic acrobatics, a juggler’s trick, an incomprehensible display of omnipotence-arrogance, since from this ever renewed impurity of the air we come, we animals and we plants, and we the human species, with our four billion discordant opinions, our milleniums of history, our wars and shames, nobility and pride. In any event, our very presence on the planet becomes laughable in geometric terms: if all of humanity, about 250 million tons, were distributed in a layer of homogeneous thickness on all the emergent lands, the “stature of man” would not be visible to the naked eye; the thickness one would obtain would be around sixteen thousandths of a millimeter.

  Now our atom is inserted: it is part of a structure, in an architectural sense; it has become related and tied to five companions so identical with it that only the fiction of the story permits me to distinguish them. It is a beautiful ring-shaped structure, an almost regular hexagon, which however is subjected to complicated exchanges and balances with the water in which it is dissolved; because by now it is dissolved in water, indeed in the sap of the vine, and this, to remain dissolved, is both the obligation and the privilege of all substances that are destined (I was about to say “wish”) to change. And if then anyone really wanted to find out why a ring, and why a hexagon, and why soluble in water, well, he need not worry: these are among the not many questions to which our doctrine can reply with a persuasive discourse, accessible to everyone, but out of place here.

  It has entered to form part of a molecule of glucose, just to speak plainly: a fate that is neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, which is intermediary, which prepares it for its first contact with the animal world but does not authorize it to take on a higher responsibility: that of becoming part of a proteic edifice. Hence it travels, at the slow pace of vegetal juices, from the leaf through the pedicel and by the shoot to the trunk, and from here descends to the almost ripe bunch of grapes. What then follows is the province of the winemakers: we are only interested in pinpointing the fact that it escaped (to our advantage, since we would not know how to put it in words) the alcoholic fermentation, and reached the wine without changing its nature.

  It is the destiny of wine to be drunk, and it is the destiny of glucose to be oxidized. But it was not oxidized immediately: its drinker kept it in his liver for more than a week, well curled up and tranquil, as a reserve aliment for a sudden effort; an effort that he was forced to make the following Sunday, pursuing a bolting horse. Farewell to the hexagonal structure: in the space of a few instants the skein was un
wound and became glucose again, and this was dragged by the bloodstream all the way to a minute muscle fiber in the thigh, and here brutally split into two molecules of lactic acid, the grim harbinger of fatigue: only later, some minutes after, the panting of the lungs was able to supply the oxygen necessary to quietly oxidize the latter. So a new molecule of carbon dioxide returned to the atmosphere, and a parcel of the energy that the sun had handed to the vine-shoot passed from the state of chemical energy to that of mechanical energy, and thereafter settled down in the slothful condition of heat, warming up imperceptibly the air moved by the running and the blood of the runner. “Such is life,” although rarely is it described in this manner: an inserting itself, a drawing off to its advantage, a parasitizing of the downward course of energy, from its noble solar form to the degraded one of low-temperature heat. In this downward course, which leads to equilibrium and thus death, life draws a bend and nests in it.