Primo Levi: Bridges of Knowledge
By Mirna Cicioni
Berg Publishers, 1995. 222 pp., $29.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
Amongst the 200,000 demonstrators in Milan in 1994 protesting against the inclusion of neo-fascists in the newly elected right-wing Italian government were some who held aloft a banner reading, "174517: lest we forget".
174517 was the number tattooed by the Nazis on the arm of Primo Levi in Auschwitz in 1944. Levi is one of the most admired writers about the slave labour death-camps, widely recognised as skilfully combining the best of historical testimony and literature in a moving indictment about fascism.
The anti-fascist protesters in Milan were some of the millions worldwide who, through Levi's books, have not forgotten the horrors of fascism or written it off as a historical aberration. As Levi succinctly summed up his message, "It happened; therefore it can happen again". His books were intended to help stop fascism from happening again.
This intellectual biography of Levi by Mirna Cicioni, lecturer in Italian studies at La Trobe University, is a critical appraisal of Levi's work — not only of his exceptional achievement as a writer on the Holocaust but as one of the most important Italian writers of the 20th century.
Levi "refused to be frozen into the role of Holocaust witness and writer" and tackled a wide expanse of the human condition — science, work, culture. He was engaged in the literary endeavour of building bridges of tolerance and understanding, and breaking down national and other borders between people — "bridges are the opposite of borders, and borders are where wars start", he wrote.
Levi, born in Turin in 1919, turned to the study of chemistry, with its scientific integrity, in reaction to the lies and ugliness of Mussolini's fascism. Captured as a member of a short-lived resistance group in 1944, Levi's experience of Auschwitz with its program of "extermination through exploitation" led him to write of his experiences in order to sound a warning to others.
The writer Italo Calvino was one of the first to recognise, in 1947, Levi's importance as both artist and historian. Levi's "calm and lucid language", by avoiding sensationalism, made the horror of the bureaucratic and inhuman logic of the camps even more powerful.
The Nazi camps were a grotesque example of the "scientific", bureaucratic, mass oppression which Levi's later works tackled. Large factories, too, could oppress, showed Levi, and his marvellous science-fiction fables concerned the damage that could be caused by "science and technology when divorced from human and moral concerns". His literary output was based on his direct experience of the Monowitz camp in the Auschwitz complex, which supplied slave labour to I-G Farben's rubber industry, an experience which gruesomely alerted Levi to the "social consequences of the application of science for profit".
The Periodic Table, published in 1975, with its stories named after chemical elements, was noted for its technical excellence, its wit and clarity of style and a positive affirmation that human society "has the means, the intelligence and the strength to avert" the gloomy future that his stories speculated on.
The ever-present menace of fascism, however, continually drew Levi back to the Holocaust. Holocaust revisionists were decried for "killing the dead a second time by denying their deaths". One of Levi's most inspiring books — If Not Now, When? (published in 1980) — was based on the exploits of a Russian Jewish partisan unit which escaped from fascist-controlled eastern Europe to Italy. It helped to demolish the stereotype of the Jews as passive victims of the Nazis and is Levi's most memorable example of the victory of hope over despair.
During the '80s, however, Levi's outlook became progressively more pessimistic. The "unerasable and irreparable disfigurements which darken our past and future" loomed ever larger in his vision. Evidence of anti-Semitism in the reviving neo-fascist movements reinforced Levi's view that hatred of Jews was "old and never-to-be-dispelled".
His locus of hope shifted to the Zionist state of Israel. Back in 1967, during the Six-Day War, he had donated blood for Israel but now his "emotional bond" with that state which had been "founded by people like me with a number tattooed on their arm", strengthened. Although he publicly criticised Israel's murderous invasion of southern Lebanon and the massacres of Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila in 1982, he attributed these outrages to the "mistakes" of the regime rather than to the racist and colonialist basis of the state of Israel. In the end he chose silence as a way out of his personal conflict over Zionism.
His last book, The Drowned and the Saved, was his bleakest. Issues were framed more in terms of human nature than political choices. Responsibility for the Holocaust was assigned to all Germans (with few, honourable, exceptions) rather than to fascist politics. Collaboration with Nazism was analysed at a personal level, very acutely and accurately in explaining the individual psychological mechanisms at work in the camps, but which, outside the camps, downplayed the responsibility that Zionism's program of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine had for failing to provide leadership to Jews in politically opposing anti-Semitism.
Levi's thoughts increasingly centred on guilt for not collectively organising camp prisoners, and guilt for succumbing to the camps' Darwinian social principles of individual survival. He also felt shame at surviving when braver folk perished and shame for being a member of the human race which could produce the monsters of fascism. Without direct experience of collective resistance, as in camps like Sobibor and Birkenau with large concentrations of political prisoners and Soviet POWs, Levi's reflections became more pessimistic. In 1987 he committed suicide.
Cicioni's book is a valuable addition to the study of Levi, particularly his non-Holocaust writings. It does, however, have an academic flavour of "lit studies" with its overly intimate focus on semantic analysis. Cicioni can also be a little too accepting of the more pessimistic particularities of Levi's world view.
Levi's books are central to the creation of a world where fascism will be talked about only in the past tense, where science serves humanity and not profit, where understanding breaks down the barriers that divide one country from another and one human being from another.