Reviewing a new biography of chemist and writer Primo Levi, William Giraldi attempts to understand how the man could stoically survive the Holocaust yet ultimately cut his own life short:
Levi had a difficult time fully trusting the chrysalis of civilization after Auschwitz. He was a man of
unflinching probity who never succumbed to the cutthroat Hobbesian conception of human striving, or to that toxic strain of bitterness which contaminated and ultimately ended the writer Jean Améry (also a Shoah survivor and suicide). But there is sometimes in Levi’s work the itchy suspicion that the hell could happen again, or that it never really ended. Beneath that unperturbed and almost placid prose creeps a fatalism, a capitulation before the vastitude and depravity of what he named “the demolition of man.” The stupefied silence before this vastitude and depravity is part of why his work remains ever pregnant and never born, because “our language lacks words to express this offense.”
Vivian Gornick reaches a similar conclusion:
What Levi would never understand was the willing remove of the Germans from their fellow humanity. The ability to look—for years on end—at a human being and see not a person but a thing became and remained for Levi the crime of crimes. Yet for this, he very nearly blamed not the Germans but life itself. After all, if thousands upon thousands of people were capable of not seeing themselves in others, could this capacity be anything other than innate? Life itself, he concluded, was to be pronounced guilty for having made possible such a monstrous divide within the human organism. This pronouncement became the unyielding indictment—enlarged upon many times in books, essays and stories—that made Primo Levi one of the greatest of the Holocaust writers.
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