Primo Levi, the Misunderstanding

Primo Levi may be considered the witness par excellence, according to the criteria laid down by Jean Norton Cru regarding the testimonies of the Great War of 1914: “a just mind of great intellectual probity,” a narrative that is “honest, restrained, moderate” and seeks only to make the truth prevail.¹ He himself insists on the absence of literary elaboration in Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man / Survival in Auschwitz), on the immediate and spontaneous character of his writing, which confers on the text the status of pure testimony. “…when I wrote it, nearly forty years ago now, I had only one idea in mind, a very precise one, and it really was not to produce a literary work but to bear my witness,”² he says, for example, in 1984. He often admits, to be sure, that his first need was to free himself from the weight of his memories, and that the intention of leaving a testimony came only second. But if writing relieved him, as he says on several occasions, it is also because he is conscious of having fulfilled a mission: “I am at peace with myself, because I have testified, because I opened my eyes and ears sufficiently to be able to recount what I saw in a truthful manner.”³

Unlike all those who suffered from not being listened to upon their return — for example Simone Veil or Pierre Francès-Rousseau — Primo Levi seems to have been able to quench his thirst to recount; when he came back from the Lager, endowed with “a pathological narrative ardor,” he would speak to anyone, on the train, on the bus.⁴ It is perhaps for this reason that the failure of his book did not affect him too greatly, although he discreetly evokes his disappointment in a passage of Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table) (“…I, the discouraged author of a book that seemed to me beautiful but that no one read”⁵). It is known that If This Is a Man was refused by several publishers, then, printed in twenty-five hundred copies by a small publishing house, fell into oblivion. It was only in 1958 that, reissued by Einaudi, it aroused a wide interest. But speaking seems as essential to Primo Levi as writing. “I am a talker,” he says to Camon. “If you shut my mouth, I die.”⁶ He even affirms that most of his books were born as oral narratives, even (and perhaps above all) If This Is a Man. For him speech is an art, in the same way as writing, and there exists also an art of listening. Apparently those around Primo Levi knew this art, since on his return he was able to find “the warmth of an assured meal, the solidity of daily work, the liberating joy of recounting.”⁷ Writing as he presents it is therefore the prolongation of speech, and reciprocally, since Primo Levi never ceased to be the “presenter-commentator of himself,” as he says in the Appendix to If This Is a Man, written in 1976. He accepts invitations to schools, then, having become famous, very numerous interviews and conversations. So to his two trades of chemist and writer he adds a third, that of talker, thanks to which he can specify, explain, nuance, or evoke episodes that he neglected in his book.

Yet Primo Levi’s evolution is paradoxical. In 1963, after the publication of La tregua (The Truce / The Reawakening), he replies to Pier Mario Paoletti, who asks him whether he is finished with the experience of the camps: “Ah yes, not another word. Nothing more. I have said everything I had to say about it. It is completely over.”⁸ It is true that his writing will draw, at least for a time, on other sources. But it is at this moment that he often goes to schools to bear witness, and that conversations begin in which Auschwitz is generally the subject. From 1979 on, as he becomes a public figure and the interviews grow ever more numerous, he increasingly casts doubt on his mission as witness, and almost entirely interrupts his encounters with pupils in schools. In 1976, he spoke of the Nazi massacres as “the central knot of European history in this century,” and noted that the interest of the young was keener than that of the earlier generations, which had compromised themselves with fascism.⁹ Three years later, he announces that he will henceforth no longer accept invitations to schools, for “speaking of Auschwitz is no longer topical.” He refuses to play the survivor all his life, and to write only about Auschwitz: “I want,” he says, “to address myself also to the young generations”;¹⁰ could the young generations have ceased, in three years, to take an interest in Auschwitz? Primo Levi seems to be in contradiction not only with himself, but with his era, since, at the same time, all sorts of works are being published on the subject, new testimonies are being written, interest is reawakening. But in 1983, in Il dovere di memoria (The Duty of Memory), when his interlocutors evoke a “renewal of interest,” Primo Levi seems not to understand, and he shows himself at once surprised and skeptical when he is told that “many people are speaking today for the first time.”¹¹ To be sure, he is perhaps quite simply weary of always answering the same questions. But we must take his doubts seriously, for they prompt us to question ourselves on the status of testimony, as he himself did in various conversations, and above all in his last book, I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved).

The very use of the word “witness” is problematic. In principle, the “witness” is exterior to the facts he recounts. One will call a “witness,” for example, the person present at the scene of an accident, not the victim or the party responsible for it. In a war, the witnesses are possibly the journalists present. It is true that the media call upon the “testimonies” of the actors and the victims, which allows certain official information to be rectified or cast into doubt, but which also poses the problem of veracity. No testimony is reliable in itself, but the one who is a party to the matter is moreover pleading his own cause. If historians have accustomed us to the critique of testimony, the media, and notably television, tend on the contrary to reinforce our credulity. It is difficult, when one sees a person “in flesh and blood” recount what he lived through, to cast doubt on his word. It has a force of conviction far greater than any document, above all when it is a matter of suffering. How to tell an individual who affirms “I was there” that what he recounts is false, or at the least partial and subjective? In her book L’ère du témoin (The Era of the Witness), Annette Wieviorka reports a certain unease among historians faced with the witnesses of the camps. How, on the one hand, not to do injury to suffering and to personal memory, and, on the other, to reestablish the rights of critical thought, which were precisely annihilated in the totalitarian system?

The term testimony also has a juridical signification, and it is, as Annette Wieviorka shows, the Eichmann trial that inaugurates the era of the witness. In a trial, in principle, one distinguishes the victim from the witnesses; here, the victims of the concentrationary system testify both for themselves and for all those who died; on the other hand, testimony, even if it must be truthful, is not neutral — it is for the prosecution or for the defense. In the case of the camps in particular, testimony constitutes either an accusation or a justification. Of this juridical dimension of his testimony Primo Levi is well aware, since he speaks of If This Is a Man as an act of accusation, whose addressees were the Germans, “because they were one of the parties to the trial.”¹²

The task is therefore double: to testify for… and to testify against… For whom? For those who did not see, who did not want to know or to believe (and this is what Primo Levi reproaches the majority of Germans with), for the following generations too. This “mission” Primo Levi never truly renounced, since he says in 1986, regarding his last book, “I wish to show that these things belong to a recent past.”¹³ But “to testify for” has another meaning. It is also to speak in the place of someone, to make oneself the spokesman of those who could not express themselves, to tell their suffering and their death, to ensure that they do not disappear completely. Now this status of spokesman, which gave meaning to the survival of the survivor, is ambiguous and a source of painful interrogations. To speak in the place of another — is this not to take his place, to usurp it, to be a forger, a parasite? The witness is a survivor, therefore by definition a privileged person; and the idea appears that the “true witnesses” are those who died, that it required more strength to keep silent than to speak, and that this silence was morally perhaps more dignified. Is it not a weakness to give in to a selfish need for inner liberation, to seek to unload onto others the weight of suffering? Is it not to go against what is for Primo Levi the fundamental moral principle, not to increase the quantity of evil that is in the world? He recounts that his own children never accepted that he speak to them of Auschwitz, and affirms that one must understand them, for “the survivor is disturbing and tiresome… He revives suffering, he wants to inflict his sufferings, he wants to dominate the other by inflicting his sufferings on him, and that can be bothersome.”¹⁴ The reasons for testifying are therefore not always pure, and Primo Levi discovers a new avatar of Ulysses in the person of the witness: “I often think that Ulysses, when he arrives at the home of the king of the Phaeacians, spends his first night recounting his adventures… He thus conquers, by recounting, an a posteriori glory, and we are like him, we seek to build ourselves a glory, adorning ourselves, so to speak, with this experience.”

To testify against… means to pursue the struggle against Nazism and its will to make even the memory of its victims disappear, to go against the lie, the will to efface the past, denialism; but also against the deformation of memory linked to memory itself. “Out of a need for truth” and “to go against rhetoric,” says Primo Levi in 1986 when asked why he took up the theme of the camps again: “We need monuments, commemorations (…) But there must be a counter-chant, a commentary in prose to the lyrical flights of rhetoric.”¹⁵ Out of a concern for truth, he invites us in his last book to be wary of memory, for it is not only forgetting that deforms memories, it is also the repetition of the narrative. Memory tends to become stereotyped, to produce clichés. What one has recounted and written comes to interpose itself between the present and the past, forming what Primo Levi calls a “prosthesis-memory,” an “artificial memory.” To this is added all that the witness has read or heard, and that he no longer distinguishes from his own experience. Hannah Arendt already remarked on this regarding the witnesses called at the Eichmann trial: how could they distinguish what had happened to them sixteen or twenty years earlier from what they had read, heard, or imagined since?¹⁶ Primo Levi poses the problem at the moment when his last book is in project: “…I would have to recount things seen thirty-five years ago. But am I really sure that they are truthful, and am I bound to recount truthful facts, or could I not, for example, arrange them as I please, or even invent new ones?”¹⁷ To be sure, the duty of the witness is to be truthful, and to hold to what he really saw and lived: “I speak only of what I saw with my own eyes,” says Primo Levi. But sometimes he affirms that his singular story constitutes at the same time “a universal testimony of what man can inflict on man,”¹⁸ and sometimes he seems to doubt it: “The accounts of the people who came back from the concentration camps have no general value. Each survivor represents an exception, a miracle, a being with a particular destiny.”¹⁹ Moreover, each camp is different from the others — Monowitz, for example, is not Auschwitz; this is why Primo Levi says he involuntarily deformed reality: “I thought I was writing the authentic history of the experience of the concentration camp, whereas, in reality, I was writing the history of my camp, and only of mine.”

Finally, in the same conversation, in 1985, he confesses to having constructed a legend around If This Is a Man by claiming that he had written it without a plan, in one go, without premeditation. Writing is never spontaneous, he acknowledges; there is always in writing (and even in oral narrative) a reinvention of reality: “…this book is full of literature.” The reflection on memory and on testimony that Primo Levi conducts in The Drowned and the Saved therefore led him to call into question the status of his first book. He shows himself ever more ambivalent toward it, going so far as to say in 1986, at the very moment when he hands over The Drowned and the Saved to Einaudi: “I maintain with If This Is a Man a relationship that is almost one of competition, because it is a book that lasts, despite the years. And if, on the one hand, that pleases me, it also represents a challenge. I often wonder, indeed, whether I shall ever manage to write another book like that one.”²⁰

With that mixture of probity and taste for exactness that characterizes him, Primo Levi goes as far as it is possible in the questioning of himself. But it happens to him also, and rightly so it seems to us, to question himself on what is expected of witnesses. Is there not a fundamental misunderstanding, which has substituted itself for the initial desire not to hear, and which goes on worsening? Such, at least, is the sentiment he reports, notably in the little book entitled The Duty of Memory. This work is the transcription of a conversation with two historians, Anna Bravo and Federico Cereja, which took place in 1983 and was published only after Primo Levi’s death. One experiences a strange unease in reading it, so much does it appear as the illustration of the misunderstanding of which Primo Levi speaks. On several occasions, it is the interviewer who affirms and Primo Levi must content himself with approving, reduced to the role of illustration of a theory that he visibly does not share, or else to the role of “living document,” against which another witness, Henri Bulawko, rebels.²¹ He is interrupted, he is contradicted without ceremony (“No!”, “Careful, that’s not it!”). The misunderstanding sometimes takes a comic turn when the interviewer employs, regarding the deportees, the expression “loss of identity.” Primo Levi’s irony is manifest, both in his false naïveté (“What does losing one’s identity mean?”) and in his attitude as a diligent pupil (“Yes, I understand”), and in his final commentary (“I perhaps said it in other terms, less technical than that of ‘loss of identity’”). His interlocutor, full of pedagogical good will, seems in no way to perceive this irony, and does not see either how much he betrays the thought and the style of an author who always mistrusted ready-made formulas. The misunderstanding is at its height when it comes to the problem of transmission. While Primo Levi casts doubt on the value of testimony and on the role of education, his interlocutor, totally insensitive to his arguments and sure of being right, contents himself with affirming his own conviction: “I believe that the transmission of testimonies is always important.” Yet the unease expressed by Primo Levi is quite real, and would have deserved that a little more importance be granted to it. He reports his experience in the schools, the aggressiveness of certain pupils (“Why do you keep coming to tell us your story…?”) and his incapacity to answer them; his feeling that his books have aged; he speaks also of what most ill at ease puts him, the questions of a religious or metaphysical type that are regularly posed to him.

Now we feel an analogous unease in reading Ferdinando Camon’s Conversations avec Primo Levi (Conversations with Primo Levi). Wholly given over to his religious interpretations, the latter does not really listen to what his interlocutor says, diverts its meaning, going so far as to speak in his place: “(these things)… in my view, you say them. You say them through my mouth.”²² The conversation ended with the sentence “There is Auschwitz, therefore there cannot be a God,” and Primo Levi added in pencil “I find no solution to the dilemma, I seek it, but do not find it.” Camon, against all evidence, claims that the expression “I seek it” comes after “I do not find it,” and he interprets it in his own manner; Primo Levi would thus be indicating to us “that the search does not stop at the fact of not finding, and that the final conclusion is therefore not this fact, but the search itself, which continues.”²³ A strange remark, for the formula in Italian being “La cerco, ma non la trovo,” it is indeed “I do not find it” that ends the text. But what Camon suggests is clear: just as the Germans absolutely must have become Nazis because “ill-baptized,” Primo Levi must be in search of God. One thinks of the “believing friend” who inflicted great suffering on him by affirming that he had been “elected” and thus saved by God in order to be able to testify.

The problem is that the camp-survivor witness appears to possess (and in a sense does possess) a knowledge inaccessible to the common run of mortals, a knowledge almost supernatural: he has crossed Hell and returned from it, he knows what extreme suffering is but he survived, he is therefore a kind of “revenant,” and as such he can tell us what death is, what evil is, whether God exists… Prophetic gifts are attributed to him, he is there to deliver messages to us, to help us orient ourselves in the present and the future. It is thus that the Spielberg foundation, which proposes to make the “history” of the Shoah by interviewing all the survivors, asks them to end the interview with a message intended for the following generations.²⁴ It happens to Primo Levi to compare himself to Tiresias, the man who had an experience that no human being can normally have, and who, on account of this knowledge, was deprived of sight while receiving the gift of second sight: “I too had stumbled, long ago, upon gods who were quarreling; I too had crossed serpents on my path, and this encounter had made me change condition by giving me a strange gift of expression.”²⁵ Yet the idea of delivering messages is wholly foreign to him, and even fills him with horror: “It is a word I detest, because it leaves me perplexed, because it dresses me in clothes that are not mine, and that belong even to a human type I mistrust: the prophet, the vates, the seer.”²⁶ The only “message” delivered in The Drowned and the Saved is, moreover: “We must refine our discernment, beware of prophets and enchanters…”²⁷

But Annette Wieviorka rightly remarks that not all witnesses can have the rigor and the exigency of Primo Levi, and that it is difficult to resist the desire to give the young “history lessons” or moral lessons. I shall take as an example the visit, in a suburban lycée where I taught, of two former deportees from Mauthausen. It was at the time of the Gulf War, and one of the two gentlemen, well-intentioned, launched into a virulent pacifist speech. The history teacher protested violently, the pupils took the side of the “witness” by accusing the teacher of censoring his remarks, part of the room had to be evacuated, and our witnesses, dismayed, remained virtually mute. To be sure, I have had more positive experiences, but always in a context where the pupils had read, had prepared questions, even if a place was left for improvisation. To obtain the witness’s word and to know how to listen to it is no easy thing, when one wishes to avoid the usual stereotypes. If we have recourse to him, it is because we do not want the history of the camps and of the Shoah to become an object of study like any other, with off-putting figures that have to be learned; we do not want, as Horst Krüger says, the curtain of history to fall again and the children to learn all that in class with the same lack of enthusiasm and the same boredom as a poem by Schiller.²⁸ Insofar as there remain survivors — that is to say, persons who lived and still live this history in their flesh — it seems to us that it belongs to them and that we must give them the word so that they do not become mere “numbers” again. The refusal of testimony, after all, is the basis of denialism, and the historian himself cannot work solely from archives and official documents. As Jean Norton Cru said regarding war, “without the ‘general,’ there could be no history. But the general is constituted of the multitude of particular facts. To treat of the general without consulting those who acted, suffered, lived in the detail of the particular facts, is to attempt to conceive and to recount the dream that a war of staff officers would be.”²⁹ The intellect alone, “without the help of the senses and the flesh,” cannot make us know cold, misery, fear, the horror of dying. But conversely, to wish to make of history a simple juxtaposition of testimonies is purely and simply to negate it. The intellect alone is perhaps fearsome when it comes to human sufferings, but the reign of pure emotion is no less so. One of the reasons for Primo Levi’s unease faced with the young is their “emotive participation, sometimes violent, which has nothing historical about it.”

Must one say, like Anne-Lise Stern, that “every pedagogy of horror cannot avoid pushing toward the production of jouissance”?³⁰ Compassion, horror, indignation do not go without a certain pleasure, above all when one has the certainty of dealing with absolute evil, even as in the present the criteria of good and evil often seem quite blurred. Each has the feeling, through identification with the witness, of being on the side of the good, and the story does not end so badly, since the wicked are vanquished. I am no doubt caricaturing, but it is true that in regard to the “richness of lived experience,” critical thought and reflection appear quite thankless, in both senses of the term. It is nonetheless what a discipline like history must teach pupils. Annette Wieviorka thinks that testimony must not replace the lesson, but that both are necessary. The problem is that testimony will always appear more “true” than the lesson. This means that one must learn to reflect on what a testimony is, on the way in which history is made, on the role of “memory-troubler”³¹ of the historian — things of which the pupils too often have no idea.

In a general way, we expect too much of the witness, and something other than what he can give us; not only history lessons, but lessons in life, answers to all the questions we may pose ourselves concerning the present and the future. This is why Primo Levi’s doubts seem to us justified, and his reflection on the limits of testimony exemplary. If he is not a prophet, he is a thinker in the true sense of the term: a man for whom a life without examination, without critical thought, is not worth living.

Notes