About LeviNeT

Why the Germans? Levi’s declaration alone is enough to justify this choice; he called them “more interesting.” The interest lay not only in the type of questions these readers asked him, but in the epistolary pact between writers and responders. Those who were “on the other side” decided to write to a victim of Nazi-Fascism and racial extermination, who not only replied, but actually committed himself (not without effort) to dialoguing with them in order to understand, explaining his own point of view and asking for theirs.

Of course, this former deportee was Primo Levi, not only a witness but, above all, an author and, it should be added, an intellectual whose book The Drowned and the Saved was one of the key European books written during the second half of the 20^th century about the mechanisms of macro- and micro-power within a system of concentration camps (it could also be said that it was a book about power relations). After all, this book is the result of the twenty-year-long dialogue of the “network;” one need only read the final chapter, “Letters from Germans,” to realize it. But it becomes even more evident by reading all of the letters, each of which deals with the topics that are addressed in the eight chapters of The Drowned and the Saved: how to keep the memory of Auschwitz alive, and how the younger generations’ perception of it was changing; how to combat the return of Fascism in Europe; which language can best recount that experience; what it means to be an intellectual and to “think” inside the camp; and also, to what extent the feeling of shame at still being alive when others have died matters, and how to judge certain “human specimens” who populated the gray zone that separated the victims from the torturers.

Although there can be no doubt that Levi’s stature held the correspondence together, the opposite line of reasoning is also valid: LeviNeT is, above all, a cross-section of European cultural history over two decades that were both central and dissimilar, the 1960s and ‘70s. It is a peculiar debate about the memory of the extermination and its place in constructing a Europe that was new (after the war) and yet already divided (into two east-west blocks). It is peculiar because it was not held in newspapers or magazines, on the radio or on TV: it was held through correspondence, privately and yet with a passion and a regularity that could be defined “public.” Already in the early 1960s, Levi wanted to publish those letters in book form with Einaudi, but the project fell through. A further element in this regard is the fact that there are almost no intimate letters in these exchanges. The point is that no similar examples exist of such an intense, variegated, and widespread dialogue between a person who suffered persecution and deportation and a large number of citizens of the country which ordered that very persecution and extermination.

The letters published here come from Levi’s private archive, which was opened for this specific research, and from the various European archives of the correspondents, when such exist. Levi’s interlocutors were intellectuals and former deportees, such as the Austrians Hermann Langbein and Jean Améry; former prisoners such as Emil Davidovic (Rabbi Mendi in If This Is a Man); authors such as Albrecht Goes and Hans Jurgen Fröhlich; Hety Schmitt-Maass, a fervent reader, journalist, and politician; and even a Wehrmacht officer, Ferdinand Meyer, who worked at the laboratory of Buna-Monowitz (Auschwitz III), where Levi was pressed into service for a few months during his imprisonment at the camp. Levi never mentioned Meyer in If This Is a Man; years later, he wrote the story “Vanadium” in The Periodic Table about him. There are also roughly forty individual readers, male and female, with whom Levi exchanged one or two letters (sometimes many more): university students, professionals, even fans, almost exclusively from West Germany. In fact, apart from two chapters from Ist das ein Mensch? that were published in the magazine Sinn und Form in early 1961, If This Is a Man was never published in East Germany, despite attempts by Joachim Meinert and Fred Wander (a writer and former deportee, and the author of The Seventh Well) in the early 1980s. This correspondence, too, can be found onLeviNeT. 

And lastly, perhaps the loveliest and most significant correspondence included here is the one with Heinz Riedt, formerly a partisan fighter in Padua alongside Otello Pighin, then a scholar and translator of Carlo Goldoni and Ruzante, as well as of Carlo Emilio Gadda, Italo Calvino, Beppe Fenoglio, Gianni Rodari, Vasco Pratolini, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. It was a correspondence about languages, words, the type of German spoken in the Camp in If This Is a Man, the imaginary paradoxical slang in Natural Histories, intertwined with reflections on Europe and their similar political and partisan experiences in the Action Party, the story of Riedt’s flight from East Berlin, the difficulties of living off intellectual work alone, the editorial relationships between Italy and Germany; and, last but not least, it is the story of a friendship. Levi’s correspondence with Heinz Riedt up until 1968 will also be published in book form by Einaudi.