Answering Auschwitz: Primo Levi's Science and Humanism after the Fall

Chapter 17: Primo Levi’s Correspondence with Hety Schmitt-Maas

c h a p t e r 1 7 Primo Levi’s Correspondence with Hety Schmitt-Maas Ian Thomson On April 11, 1987, more than forty years after his rescue from Auschwitz, Primo Levi fell to his death in the block of flats where he lived in Turin. The authorities pronounced a verdict of suicide. Levi had pitched himself three flights down the stairwell. Not since Pasolini was found murdered on the outskirts of Rome had there been such clamorous coverage in Italy of a writer’s death. ‘‘Italy Mourns the Maestro,’’ ran a representative frontpage headline. Twenty years on, it remains hard for friends and admirers of Levi to reconcile the calm reasonableness of his literary intention—to furnish ‘‘documentation for a quiet study of the human mind’’—with so violent a death. Levi’s chronicle of Auschwitz, If This Is a Man (1948), remains a marvel of luminous precision and poise. Yet there are collective condemnations , colored by the author’s rage, of the German people. At one point the Germans are addressed aggressively in the vocative—‘‘You, Germans, you have succeeded.’’ Any German who had shown Levi a scintilla of humanity in the camp—and there were several—is pointedly omitted. It was only in later life that Levi would investigate the exceptions that defied the stereotype: the good German, the kind kapo. A complicated, difficult man, Levi was noted for his determination to keep secret what he wished to keep secret. He wrote almost nothing of his 212 213 Primo Levi’s Correspondence with Hety Schmitt-Maas immediate family, and other real-life people are often alluded to in his books by their initials only. His late essay collection The Drowned and the Saved (1986) typically contains many elisions and concealments. In one chapter Levi refers to a German admirer of his as ‘‘Mrs. Hety S’’; in the course of her life she wrote a total of fifty-seven letters to Levi, to match his forty-nine to her. She was interested in the moral and material ruins of post-Nazi Europe, and her letters to Levi were typed with great speed and gusto. A number of other survivors and even ex-Nazis were in correspondence with ‘‘Mrs. Hety S’’; her letters were treasured (and carefully collected) by all who received them, including Albert Speer. Who was ‘‘Mrs. Hety S’’? Her former husband had been a chemist for IG Farben, the German chemical giant that operated out of Auschwitz and other camps; but more than that, Levi does not say. In the hope of identifying the mystery correspondent I placed advertisements in a number of European journals and newspapers, asking for information. The response was good. A filmmaker in Holland telephoned to say that Mrs. Hety S’s daughter had given her a copy of the entire correspondence; this was more than I could have hoped for. Hety Schmitt-Maas, the real-life ‘‘Mrs. Hety S,’’ had corresponded with Levi for almost twenty years and was vitally important to him as a writer. Sections of Levi’s books could not have been written without her. From her home in Wiesbaden she put Levi in touch with writer friends and other contacts in Germany, creating an ever-expanding network of correspondence among them. In this way she hoped to counteract Himmler ’s cynical pledge that the destruction of European Jewry would be an ‘‘unwritten page of glory.’’ Hety’s great ambition, she told Levi, was to ‘‘understand’’ the Nazi past. Running to a total of three hundred typewritten pages, and written in both German and Italian, the Primo Levi-Hety Schmitt-Maas correspondence was gold dust to me. Levi’s other biographers had not seen it. I contacted Hety’s daughter, Marianne Felsche, for permission to use the material. To my surprise, she spoke to me of a ‘‘very difficult and obsessive woman,’’ who would bring books on Treblinka and Auschwitz to children ’s tea parties in case she got bored. ‘‘Some things were too important for my mother to dance attendance on a nursery tea,’’ she told me crossly. I was welcome to the correspondence; Felsche even offered to send me a copy of her mother’s unpublished diary, which chronicled Levi’s depressions and domestic unhappiness. 214 Ian Thomson Hety sent her first letter to Primo Levi on October 18, 1966, twenty years after Germany’s defeat. It radiated a...