With so much happening here and elsewhere, it might seem odd to take the time to remember the late Italian writer and Auschwitz survivor, Primo Levi (1919-1987), who would have turned 100 yesterday. I think it’s an opportunity to take stock of our individual responsibility for these disturbing times.
Levi witnessed hell and wrote about it. He is the 20th century’s Jules Verne of the journey to the centre of the Inferno. He was one of a cohort of 650 to enter the camp but one of the only three to survive. He said he was lucky to have been sent to Auschwitz only in 1944 (though captured the previous year) since by then a labour shortage led the Nazis to decide to lengthen the prisoners’ lifespan.
Levi said he carried his tattooed concentration-camp number like a virus. Paul Celan’s poem, Death Fugue, was sutured to his soul like a graft. To remember, for him, was different from retaining memories. Remembering was active attention.
His memoir, If This Is A Man, takes the reader into the life of the prisoners. There were the long sleepless nights, punctuated by nightmares and the stench of the men in the bunks around you.
Through the night men got up to relieve their stomachs of the slop they had eaten during the day. Buckets were rapidly filled up, they needed to be emptied, and inevitably some of the contents spilled on to skeletal feet with broken skin and open wounds.
Even in such a hell, you could hope for small blessings. An upper bunk meant you didn’t have another man’s feet above your face.
During the day, the search for food, any morsel, was continuous. Levi wrote that his habit for searching the ground before him endured after the end of the war.
Several factors helped Levi survive. His advanced training as a chemist got him a job in a laboratory. He could exchange purloined equipment, like pipettes, for food (although he contracted a near-fatal scarlet fever from a dead man’s soup ration). There was also sheer luck. But he also attributed great importance to never forgetting that the walking skeletons around him, with cavernous bellies and hollowed-out eyes, were persons.
Tiny gestures, like smiles and kind deeds, made all the difference for survival. Levi never forgave the Germans for what they did; but he also did not forget the one German laboratory assistant who used to speak to him.
Levi resented anyone who equated the Soviet gulags with the extermination camps, reminding people that the death rate of the former was 30 per cent while less than 10 per cent survived the Nazi camps, whose purpose was to wipe out an entire people, not simply to punish them.
This extreme experience gives authority to Levi’s warning that fascism could easily creep back, on tiptoe, into our way of life. He doesn’t say so glibly.
All but one of Levi’s novels are a blend of fiction and memoir. But his short fiction is a series of ingenious explorations of how ‘friendly fascism’ could creep back into liberal affluent societies.
Late in life, Levi wondered if his work had any affinity with that of Franz Kafka. It’s amazing that he needed to ask. Kafka explored the delegation of personal responsibility to political bureaucracy. Levi explored that same question – the delegation of one’s reason to functionaries – in relation to the bureaucracy of science and industry.
For Levi, the most profound, creative acts begin with the practices of everyday life
There’s something else. When Kafka wrote Metamorphosis, the story of a man who becomes a cockroach, he wrote with humorous compassion about how things felt for the man. Levi would have been quite capable of writing such a story with compassion for the cockroach.
In his stories, science is a trade. Scientists are not eccentric geniuses but functionaries, employees or budding entrepreneurs. One story is about how full employment is reached by harnessing bees and butterflies into the economy. In another, a scientific hobbyist clones his wife and then – to solve the problems of a dual life – himself.
A third story shows how humanitarian aid – a river of milk is poured from the air over a devastated area – ends up causing more damage than the original catastrophe.
In a fourth, a telephone exchange takes on a life of its own and begins to connect people at random. A party game goes quietly wrong when a group of friends use a machine that produces a three-dimensional object that symbolises the personality of each.
It doesn’t take much effort to see, in such stories, prophetic satires of UN humanitarian missions, facial recognition infrastructure and internet silos.
But what’s really interesting here is not how much Levi was able to discern the shape of the unfolding future. It’s how he was able to see that authoritarian creep could happen in societies enjoying a consumer boom.
It did not depend on nationalism per se. It could happen in a society where knowledge was so widespread, that science was like carpentry, a DIY activity.
It did not need to begin with how work was organised. Just as dangerous could be a society based on play, where recreation was seen as a suspension of one’s reason.
Above all, the destruction of a human community did not need to begin with the indifferent treatment of other people. Indifference towards any living creature and the environment – indeed, a cavalier attitude towards any experimentation – could be the trigger.
Levi liked to remind readers that he entered Auschwitz an unbeliever, and left unchanged in his convictions. But, precisely because he believed that humanity was simply part of nature (and not also part of the supernatural), he believed that any irresponsible dabbling with the rest of nature would have profound moral consequences for how we respect, or discount, that part of nature we call humanity.
That is why for him the most profound, creative acts begin with the practices of everyday life. Looking at the faces of the people we talk to, smiling at strangers, saying please and thank you, helping displaced people find their place: such acts do not just recognise the dignity of others. They literally save us from the hells we are always on the point of making.
ranierfsadni@europe.com