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Answering Auschwitz: Primo

Levi's Science and Humanism
after the Fall
a
Judith Woolf
a
University of York
Published online: 19 Nov 2012.

To cite this article: Judith Woolf (2012) Answering Auschwitz: Primo Levi's Science
and Humanism after the Fall, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 17:5, 671-672, DOI:
10.1080/1354571X.2012.718593

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2012.718593

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 Book reviews

Stanislao G. Pugliese (ed.) (2011) Answering Auschwitz: Primo Levi’s Science and
Humanism after the Fall (New York: Fordham University Press), 315 pp., ISBN
9780823233588, $65.00, hard cover, ISBN 9780823233595, $25.00, soft cover

Answering Auschwitz: Primo Levi’s Science and Humanism after the Fall is in many ways
an exemplary contribution to Primo Levi studies. Its editor, Stanislao G. Pugliese,
himself a distinguished Italianist, has gathered together an interestingly varied team
of contributors whose fields of expertise include not only Italian and Jewish studies
but also social science, philosophy and theology. As well as essays considering
aspects of Levi’s life and work, there are wider reflections on the Holocaust to
which his writings open the door. For the Italianists among its readers, the book
offers critical assessments of some of Levi’s comparatively neglected texts, as well as
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illuminating accounts of his political allegiances before deportation and his later
relationship with both the State of Israel and the Turin Jewish community.
However, while there is much to admire in Answering Auschwitz, there is inevitably
also much to debate, and the issues which I should like to consider here, none of
them confined to this thought-provoking book, are Levi’s science, Levi’s death, and
Levi’s attitude to the sommersi, the prisoners his English translators have labelled the
drowned.
Despite the book’s subtitle, none of its contributors are scientists, and much of the
focus is on Levi as a science fiction writer. One exception is Jonathan Druker’s essay,
‘Levi and the Two Cultures’, in which he claims that Levi ‘delights in Mendeleev’s
periodic table because it makes order out of chaos’, although

as a device for categorizing and normalizing material, it is also consonant with the
mentality exhibited by social engineers like the Nazis, who tried to perfect and purify
peoples through education, medicine, and psychology, but also with biology,
medicine, and eugenics. (pp. 105–6)

Druker does not attempt to explain what he calls ‘Mendeleev’s schema’, dismissing it as
‘an effort to organize and rationalize material reality [which] is known to be imperfect
even by novice students of chemistry’ (p. 105), so it is important to point out that what
is being compared to the perversion of eugenics practised by ‘social engineers like the
Nazis’ is, in Eric R. Scerri’s words, a table which ‘reflects the natural order of things in
the world and, as far as we know, the whole universe’ (p. xix), and which is as
fundamental not only to chemistry but, in its modern form, to atomic physics as
Darwin’s theory of evolution is to biology. The idea that, because the Nazis falsely used
the word science to sanitize genocide, science itself should be regarded as ‘fallen’ has
become a commonplace of Holocaust studies, but it is one that could do with being
reconsidered.
Levi’s critics and biographers have long been obsessively concerned with the
circumstances of his death, and Timothy Pytell, in his essay ‘After Auschwitz: What Is a
Good Death?’, sums up in a sentence the, to my mind, questionable thinking which
underlies this preoccupation: ‘no matter how we view suicide, a person’s death
necessarily becomes the capstone that ‘‘backshadows’’ the entire existence of the
deceased’ (p. 67). While that may be true of Levi’s fellow prisoner Jean Améry, whose
troubled journey towards a willed suicide Pytell usefully explores, this only highlights

671
 Book reviews

the extent to which Améry himself chose to make his own death the goal and purpose of
his life. As far as we know, Levi made no such choice. If we grant the inherent
improbability of a rational scientist planning to commit suicide by throwing himself
from a third floor landing down a narrow stairwell largely blocked by a lift-shaft – an act
as likely to result in devastating injury as instant death – then we are left with two
possibilities: a violent, momentary impulse in which the balance of the mind was
disturbed or, as Diego Gambetta has plausibly suggested, a literal loss of balance as Levi,
dizzy from a recent operation, leaned over the handrail to call down to the concierge
who had just left him. Pytell’s attempt to combine these two possibilities into the
quantum hypothesis that ‘Levi might have created his own ‘‘free death’’ . . . making his
death a ‘‘riddle’’ capable of a nebula of explanations, by investing it with a dialectic
tension of ‘‘unintended/intent’’’ (p. 84) succeeds only in creating a philosophical fiction
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rather than casting new light on an event about which we will never know the truth,
and which Levi himself can only have comprehended in his last few terrible seconds, if at
all.
A more recent and far more troubling development in Levi studies is the idea that
his account, in If This is a Man, of how fellow inmates viewed the sommersi – those
prisoners psychologically destroyed by that ‘offence’ for which ‘our language lacks
words . . . the demolition of a man’ (p. 32) – should in fact be read as Levi’s own
considered judgement on ‘the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection’ (p. 92).
Joseph Farrell, in his essay ‘The Humanity and Humanism of Levi’, suggests that Levi
considered ‘the mussulmano’ as ‘beyond the pale, outside the remit of ethical
requirements, undeserving of humane consideration and, crucially, deprived of the
dignity that a humanist philosophy would accord to all humankind’ (p. 92). A little
close reading is enough to absolve Levi of this repugnant idea, which would place him
in the dock alongside his oppressors rather than in the witness box, although, sadly,
combating it is likely to prove a far harder task. In If This is a Man, Levi not only shows
us that, under the brutal and degrading conditions of the Lager, where ‘the struggle to
survive is without respite’ and ‘everyone is desperately and ferociously alone’ (p. 94),
compassion was a weakness no prisoner could afford, he also prefaces the book with a
poem asking his readers to consider whether a man who labours in the mud and dies
for a yes or a no, a woman without hair or name or the strength any longer to
remember, should be regarded as fully human. It is unlikely that he wants us to answer
that they are ‘outside the remit of ethical requirements’ because a barbaric power has
deprived them of ‘the dignity that a humanist philosophy would accord to all
humankind’ (p. 92).

References
Levi, Primo (1987) If This is a Man and The Truce, tansr. Stuart Woolf, London: Abacus.
Scerri, Eric. R. (2011) The Periodic Table: A Very Short Introductio, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Judith Woolf
University of York
ª 2012 Judith Woolf
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2012.718593

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