“Consider If This Is a Person”: Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, and the Political Significance of Auschwitz

Primo Levi asks his readers to consider whether those who live comfortable lives have some meaningful connection to those who suffered in Auschwitz. He suggests that discovering such a connection is, paradoxically, both improbable and imperative. Alternatively, Hannah Arendt argues that the thoughtlessness of the perpetrators and the suffering of the victims in the camps amount to meaningless banalities. For her, totalitarianism is an attack on humanness as such and the best response to it is to practice a different, more human type of politics. However, Levi’s paradox shows us that thoughtlessness is an insufficient diagnosis of the Nazi bureaucrat and that our relationship to those who suffer cannot be separated from politics or the question of what it means to be human. Instead, the essential political question after Auschwitz is whether or not those who suffer are part of the human community.