The Lessons of Primo Levi #4

4/24/09

My preceding three posts have contained entries from my philosophical journal addressing Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved.  Below are entries in my journal for two days, with the original dates of writing, addressing Levi’s earlier book, Survival in Auschwitz.  This post completes the series of entries from my journal devoted to Levi’s work. 

 

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, translated by Stuart Woolin (New York:  Simon and Schuster, Touchstone edition, 1996) p. 44:  “. . . it is in the normal order of things that the privileged oppress the unprivileged:  the social structure of the camp is based on this human law.”  (Cf. The Drowned and the Saved, p. 41.)

P. 60:  recurrent dream he and other prisoners have is of being freed and trying to tell one’s story, but not being heard:  “. . . my listeners do not follow me.  In fact they are completely indifferent:  they speak confusedly of other things among themselves, as if I was not there.  My sister looks at me, gets up and goes away without a word.”

 

Ch. 9 is called “The Drowned and the Saved,” the title of Levi’s last book.  On p. 88, he offers the following characterization of “the drowned,” after remarking that, outside the camps, it is rare to encounter any “drowned”:  to be drowned is to experience a complete exhaustion of all one’s resources, and to come to complete “shipwreck, of total inadequacy in the face of life.”

 

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Levi, Auschwitz, pp. 129-130, tells of fellow prisoner Kuhn, who prays thanks to God after a “selection” that has not selected him.  P. 130:  “Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, nothing at all  in the power of man can ever clean again?”  (Levi adds:  “If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.”)

The Lessons of Primo Levi #3

4/22/09

 The following entry from my philosophical journal, under the date I originally wrote it, continues my reflections on Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved.   In the next post I will turn to Levi’s earlier book, Survival in Auschwitz, to complete this series of entries addressed to his work. 

 

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Levi, p. 196, in one of the citations he gives from Hety S., one of his German correspondents, one for whom he has great respect, on Hety’s visit to  Albert Speer after that later’s release from Spandau:

 He says, and I believe him, that for him the Auschwitz slaughter is a trauma.  He’s obsessed by the question of how he could ‘not want to see or know,’ in short, block everything out.  I do not think he’s trying to find justification; he would like to understand what, for him, too, it is impossible to understand.

It seems to me that Auschwitz being a trauma for Speer too–someone who was never subjected to life in the camps, and who even exploited those who were sent there–is worth reflection.  What does “being a trauma” mean, if even “for him” too Auschwitz “is” a trauma?  Isn’t it only insofar as we can free the notion of trauma from the trappings of what [historian Dominick] LaCapra calls “historical trauma,” and realize that trauma is a structural and structuring or “transcendental” matter [as literary theorist Paul Eisenstein might put it], that we can understand how, even for Speer, it could  be, and indeed was, “a trauma”?

Interestingly, on the next page, ending his discussion of Hety (and all his “letters from Germans,” as his chapter is titled), Levi observes that “among all my German readers she was the only one ‘with clean credentials’ [because of her Social Democratic background and her own biography] and therefore not entangled in guilt feelings.”  Yet it seems to me that, understood as I am currently trying to understand “guilt,” she is the only one who displays a clear and lucid–”authentic,” if one will–sense of guilt.  It is guilt in one way like Speer’s-namely, a refusing to seek to  justify oneself in the face of one’s guilt, but, rather, struggling on and on to assume it, to live it out.

 

A thought that just came, as I continued for a few moments to read more in Levi:  Auschwitz is non-negotiable.

Also:  There is only one trauma, but the names it bears differ (Auschwitz, World War I, “my broken leg,” etc.).

 

In the conclusion to his book, Levi begins by noting that, as the years since the Nazis pass by, the message that he and other survivors of the death camps try to carry becomes harder and harder to deliver, as new issues and problems come along (he mentions, p. 198, “the nuclear threat, unemployment, the depletions of resources, the demographic explosion, frenetically innovative technologies to which [the young] must adjust”:  the new names of trauma, as it were).  Nevertheless–indeed, all the more!–he and others continue to speak and to bear witness.

“We must be listened to,” he writes (p. 199).  “We must be listened to:  above and beyond our personal experience, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected  [Indeed so!], not foreseen by anyone.  [An impossible possibility!]. . . . It happened,  therefore it can happen again:  this is the core of what we have to say.”

It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.  (How like Camus in The Plague!)

Trauma is ever present.

Lest what he says be taken to support the likes of Bush and Cheney, who would make of that an opportunity to inflict more of the same–as would John McCain, for whom 9/11 was seen as an “opportunity,” namely, for doing exactly what he supported Bush in doing:  going to war wherever he wanted, under the banner of the “war on terrorism,” even if those attacked had nothing to do with 9/11–Levi goes on (p. 200) to write:  “It has obscenely been said that there is a need for conflict:  that mankind cannot do without it,” and, “Satan is not necessary:  there is no need for wars or violence, under any circumstances,” and, finally, “Nor is the theory of preventive violence [as in Bush-Cheney's invasion of Iraq] acceptable:  from violence only violence is born. . . . In actuality, many signs lead us to think of a genealogy of today’s violence that branches out precisely from the violence that was dominant in Hitler’s Germany.”  The litany of consequent ills he gives on p. 201 then even pointedly includes the founding of Israel:  “Desperate, the Jewish survivors in flight from Europe after the great shipwreck have created in the bosom of the  Arab world an island of Western civilization, a portentous palingenesis of Judaism, and the pretext for renewed hatred.”

All those ills, including the Nazis themselves, arise from the refusal, in effect, to hear the message that Levi and other survivors have to say, of  the ubiquity of “it,” of trauma.

Here is the ringing last sentence of the book: 

Let it be clear that to a greater or lesser degree all [of the SS and the other perpetrators of various degrees] were responsible, but it must be just as clear that behind their responsibility stands that great majority of Germans who accepted in the beginning out of metal laziness, myopic calculation, stupidity, and national pride the ‘beautiful words’ [as another German correspondent, not Hety, called them in a letter to Levi] of Corporal Hitler, followed him as long as luck and the lack of  scruples favored him, were swept away by his ruin, afflicted by deaths, misery, and remorse, and rehabilitated a few years later as the result of an unprincipled political game.

That last remark shows how the accumulation of guilt does not stop even with the Germans, or with the end of the camps, but continues to be deepened to this day.  Here, the guilt at issue–our universal, transcendental guiltiness itself–is indeed a matter of blame, not just of debt.

The Lessons of Primo Levi #2

4/20/09

The entry below from my philosophical journal is the second one concerning Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved, with the date I originally wrote it.

 

Monday, September 8, 2008

Levi, p. 159, on rebellions throughout history:  “There were a few victorious rebellions, many were defeated. . . .”  But as Dori Laub suggests (see my entry for 8/15/08 [and that I recently posted]), it depends on the criteria one uses for “victory” and “defeat.”  Levi’s sentence ends:  “. . . innumerable others were stifled at the start, so early as not to have left any trace in the chronicles.”  Well, it is precisely because they are “victorious,” perhaps, that they must be stripped from the chronicles whenever possible.  History is written by those in power, for the most part-history as chronicles, at least.  Whether they are the “victors” is, however, debatable.

P. 160:  “The image so often repeated in monuments of the slave who breaks his heavy chains is rhetorical; his chains are broken by comrades whose shackles are lighter and loser.”  Yet his own book recounts how it was the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz who rebelled.  Their chains were indeed “lighter and loser” [than other inmates, and least in one obvious way], but they were themselves still slaves, as his own analysis rightly emphasizes.  He even refers back to this later on this same page.  So his point is really that revolt occurs, as many Marxists taught, not when things are at their very worst, but when a bit of relief comes along:  the pressure-cooker phenomenon, one could say.

The Lessons of Primo Levi #1

April 17, 2009

As last summer was drawing to a close, I began reading some of the texts of Primo Levi, the Auschwitz survivor who’s reflections on the Nazi camps and his experience in them has deep and lasting importance for the effort to think trauma.  Below is the first of a number of entries from my philosophical journal, with the date I originally wrote it, addressing his work.

 

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, translated by Raymond Rosenthal (New York:  Simon and Schuster, 1988; Vintage edition 1989), p. 40, on “the grey zone” (the title of this chapter of the book):

It is naive, absurd and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism sanctifies its victims:  on the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself [reference to the system of privilege wherein some inmates help victimize other inmates, especially the Zugang, the newcomer], and this all the more when they are available, blank, and lacking a political or moral armature.

He goes on to observe that we need to learn how to think of this “grey zone” [wherein the very distinction between perpetrator and victim becomes--very intentionally on the part of the perpetrators--blurred] appropriately, “if we want to know how to defend our souls when a similar test should once more loom before us, or even if we want to understand what takes place in a big industrial factory.”  My emphasis on that last clause, which, I think, is in tension with the preceding “if” clause [namely, "if we want to defend our souls when a similar test should once more loom before us"].  After all, we do not, by what his closing clause says, need to wait for “a similar test” to arise:  it is already here.  Indeed, insofar as the big factory is hardly autonomous, it [the "test"] is already and everywhere present in the age of technology, as Heidegger saw.

What’s more, doesn’t the very endeavor, suggested by his first “if” clause, to  prepare oneself or to defend oneself against such a “test,” end up engendering or aggravating the very thing against which it seeks to defend itself?  Isn’t that very effort at defense what made the system of “privilege” in the camp emerge in the first place?

At any rate, once formed, then it [privilege] defends itself and the system of privilege (!), as he  observes on the next page (41):  “Privilege, by definition, defends and protects privilege.”

 

P. 53:  “Conceiving and organizing the squads [i.e., the Sondercommando] was National Socialism’s most demonic crime. . . . This institution represented an attempt to shift onto others–specifically the  victims–the burden of guilt, so that they were deprived of even the solace of  innocence.”  The same mechanism, in a less brutal manifestation, is present throughout contemporary society. It is essentially what the abuser does to the abused wife, for instance–when he conditions her to believe she “brought it on herself.”

Trauma, Addiction, Resilience and the Like

3/11/09

My philosophical journal from last summer continues with entries on the essays collected in The Unbroken Soul (H. Parens, H. Blum, and S. Akhtar, eds., Lanham, MD:  Jason Aronson, 2008)  In the entry below, with the date of original writing, I begin with a response to something I happened also to read in the New York Times that same day, pertaining to addiction.  Then I return to The Unbroken Soul, above all to a valuable contribution by Henri Parens, one of the editors of the collection and himself a survivor of a concentration camp in Vichy France.

 

Sunday, July 20, 2008

The cover-story of the New York Times Magazine for, today:  “Me and My Girls,” by David Carr, the Times’ media columnist, on his years as “a drug dealer and crack addict” who (in 1989) “found that becoming a parent [of twin girls to a crack-addict mother who lost custody to him eventually] can save your life” (as the blurb on the Magazine’ s cover says).  P. 34, in response to the idea that drugs changed him:  “But drugs, it seems to me, do not conjure demons; they reveal them.”

Applies to all  trauma, at least within limits I have yet to get wholly clear about–not just addiction, which I increasingly see as linked to/rooted in trauma.

 

Ira Brenner, “On Genocidal Persecution and Resilience,” in The Unbroken Soul, pp. 80-81:  “Like resilient sapling trees that have had to grow at unusual angles in order to bypass obstructions to sunlight, those who at a young age endured genocidal persecution have followed their own turning and twisting paths in order to grow.  From chronic psychosomatic disturbances in the very young to characterological disturbances in the older ones, many have bypassed certain developmental tasks but have nevertheless functioned well unless illness, loss, or old age set in.  In addition, their survivor ordeals are indelibly imprinted in their psyches and may repeat themselves in symbolic or in actual scenarios until they die.”

The will to recover:  the making good of the evil.

 

The Unbroken Soul, Henri Parens (camp survivor in Vichy France), “An Autobiographical Study of Resilience:  Healing from the Holocaust,” p. 87:  “Can we adjudge everything that grows vigorously to be resilient [e.g., even rank weeds]?”

Also, same page to the following one (pp.87-88):  Primo Levi’s “characterological depression, biographically proposed by Carole Angier (2002) to be of pre-Holocaust origin, which continued [here he has a note, which I'll get to below] after the Holocaust may have led him to suicide.”  The note he gives [to this passage] (on p.115) is confirmed by my own experience that, when my life is at its worst, my physical health is [often] at its best–or, more directly, by my experience last year when, during my recovery [in hospital and then in rehab] from my [serious] bike accident [on the kind of bike one pedals], I found my allergies and, more pointedly, my seborrhea, to let up, leaving me to focus on my broken bones:  “Remarkable and yet to be explained, according to Janet Maslin, who reviewed Carole Angier’s biography of Prima Levi (New York Times, Thursday, June 13, 2002), Angier believes ‘that Primo Levi was depressed before and after Auschwitz, but not in it.’”  Parens goes on to  cite as well how camp “inmates tended not to develop common colds (despite exposure to severe weather conditions), nor common ailments:  rather, many died of typhoid and of starvation.”  On Levi’s depression, my often made observation that my superego [tends to] let up on me by not making me [somehow act out judgment against myself] so much when my life [is] going poorly strikes a truth, I think, insofar as depression, addiction, etc., have dimensions of self-punishment built in. 

Parens, p. 103:  “For me as well as for others, healing from the Holocaust has left painful scars, but it has also led to much good. . . . Both give evidence of resilience since scars too are evidence of healing.”

 

Page 108, Parens quotes a second time (the first is at the beginning of his essay, on p. 88) a line from Primo Levi’s Survival at Auschwitz (1947/1996, p. 142):  “The comrade of all my peaceful moments . . . –the pain of remembering . . . attacks me like a dog the moment my conscience comes out of the gloom.”  Does this testify more to his survivor guilt, or to the twisting of it by, and in service of, his depression?