Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved: From Testimony to Historical Judgment

Primo Levi: From Testimony to HistoricalJudgment 47 PRIMO LEVI'S SURVIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ AND THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED: FROM TESTIMONY TO HISTORICAL JUDGMENT by Jonathan Druker Jonathan Druker holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and currently teaches Italian at the University of Georgia. Introduction This essay traces Primo Levi's gradual development from concentration camp survivor and witness to historical and moral arbiter of the Holocaust. As one long committed to wider public recognition and comprehension of the Holocaust, Levi's perception of his role as a survivor-writer evolved with the passage of time and the historicization of the events. There are dramatic differences in content and rhetorical structure between his early and late Holocaust texts .which raise important questions about the relationship of survivor writing to post-Holocaust history. What effect does evolving historical perception, an intellectualized form of memory, have on the process of writing about the Holocaust? And how, if at all, do survivorwriters like Levi, as opposed to professional historians, respond to the illegitimate but nonetheless menacing challenges of Holocaust revisionism ?l In the following discussion of Levi's two most important Holocaust works, I hope to offer some preliminary answers to these questions. 'For lhorough, up-to-date discussions of the history and current trends of revisionism, see both Deborah E. Lipstadr, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Free Press, 1993), and Pierre Vidal-Naquet,Assassins o/Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 48 SHOFAR Summer 1994 Vol. 12, No.4 Levi's first book, Survival in Auschwitz, is a memoir describing a brutal year in captivity from February 1944 to January 1945. Written in 1946, immediately after the end of the War and at a time when the details and dimensions of the Holocaust were not widely known, Survival in Auschwitz is an unadorned, emotionally restrained recitation of the facts. The book adheres to the details of Levi's own experience, avoiding secondhand information and unsupported generalizations about the larger meanings of the events. There is the occasional philosophical or moral meditation, often moving, but always brief, always subordinate to the narration of the actual happenings. Written in 1985, The Drowned and the Saved is a product of our era, a time when the Holocaust is often cast as the central moment of our century. This book, his last, is an intense meditation on the moral and historical significance of the events he described so precisely in his first. He offers the reader closely reasoned assessments of the participants' motives and moral responsibilities as well as an analysis of the Holocaust's place in human history. As strongly as Survival in Auschwitz strives for credibility in the face of the incredible, The Drowned and the Saved seeks to articulate the Holocaust's importance for today and tomorrow. In its entirety, Levi's Holocaust writing, so different in these two volumes which frame his literary career like bookends, may be divided into two distinct phases: testimony and judgment . In commenting upon the texts in greater detail, I aim to identifY the stylistic and rhetorical strategies that characterize each phase, as well as to discover the divergent objectives these strategies are meant to achieve. The type of critical investigation of Holocaust writing I am proposing may have the effect of separating the texts from the experiences that prompted the survivors to write in the first place. We must be vigilant, therefore, to see that literary analysis does not obscure the reality these works attempt to represent, even though in our efforts to understand their functioning we have no choice but to approach the texts with the tools of criticism. Speaking of survivor testimony, Levi himself remarked: "Beyond the pity and indignation these recollections provoke, they should also be read with a critical eye" (DS, p.16).2 'LeVi's translated works and interviews are designated herein with the follOWing abbreviations: The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1988) (= DS); Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Macmillan 1961) (= SA); The Reawakening, trans. Stuart Woolf, "Afterword" trans...