The Drowned and the Saved: Primo Levi and Paul Steinberg in Dialogue

"Speak, you also," Paul Celan wrote: "speak as the last, / have your say." ¹ The English translation of Paul Steinberg's Auschwitz autobiography, which came out in 2000, borrows Celan's line, and is called Speak You Also. ² Celan's line makes very particular sense for Steinberg's work because Steinberg is responding, fifty years after his experience of Auschwitz, to Primo Levi's characterization of him as "Henri" in If This Is A Man. ³ Since Levi died in 1987, and Steinberg in 1999, we are in the curious situation today of reading what is in effect a dialogue between two dead men who knew each other at Auschwitz and seem to have reacted rather differently to the intense and testing experience of the Lager, or death camp. Levi included the brilliant and beautiful character Henri in his own autobiographical work as an example of some of the profound corruption of human nature that the Lager produced or developed. Steinberg spent decades avoiding Holocaust writing but recognized himself in Levi's rendition when a friend, many years after, persuaded him to read If This Is A Man. Speak You Also is Steinberg's story, the book he was unable to write until fifty years after the events recorded in it, and a book that was prompted at least in part by Levi's characterization of him. It is not clear that the two men ever wrote or spoke to each other after the war. Reviewing Steinberg's book for the New York Times in October 2000, Martin Arnold cites Steinberg's editor's uncertainty on this matter: Riva Hocherman said "that Steinberg's family believes that finally there was correspondence between Levi and Steinberg. Either the family could not find it or has declined to make it public." ⁴

Whether or not Steinberg and Levi did in fact enter into personal dialogue, the public domain includes only these two texts published some forty years apart and dealing with their parallel experiences of the Holocaust and their time together at Auschwitz. Myram Anissimov compares Steinberg's original, French text, Chronique d'ailleurs, with Levi's If This Is a Man both for corroboration of particular incidents and to demonstrate the differences between their responses. ⁵ However, I would like to bring these two texts more precisely into conversation with each other. Their relationship is unusual in that it is so entirely textual; Steinberg claims not to remember Levi at Auschwitz, and Levi does not include, or seem to remember, Steinberg in the chemistry lab that was so crucial to the survival of both men. ⁶ Whereas many such autobiographical works corroborate each other's testimony to the whole experience of the concentration camps, these two are unusual for their relation to each other. Certainly, by engaging with Levi's story, Steinberg bears witness to it. More remarkably, Steinberg testifies for himself before the judgment that Levi's narrative pronounces on Henri, thereby extending the moral and philosophical dimensions of both narratives. Not least, Steinberg sets up an exchange between their two texts, which develops that emergence of full narrative to which related stories contribute in a public forum.

Levi's exploration of the nature of evil in the Lager includes its dehumanizing effects on those who suffered it and survived. His examination of Henri implicitly accuses Steinberg of failing this ultimate test of humanity; Henri survives, but at significant human cost. "I know that Henri is living today," Levi writes. "I would give much to know his life as a free man, but I do not want to see him again" (L 106). I am interested that Levi's curiosity, mingled with no wish to see Henri again, is less like his discussion of other inmates and more like his discussion of various members of the Gestapo and their silent accomplices, such as Pannwitz, head of the chemistry lab at the Buna plant...