Dialoghi

Dialogues

Fabio Levi, Gail McDowell

• Editore: EINAUDI
• Anno: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9788806240998
• eBook ISBN: 9788858431078
• Argomento: Letteratura
• Categoria: Critica letteraria

«Io sono uno che ha bisogno di comunicare molto, se non riesco a comunicare soffro, ho bisogno di parlare o scrivere, avere se possibile una comunicazione ad andata e ritorno». In questa frase, cosí semplice e diretta, si avverte una molteplice urgenza: di esprimersi e di ascoltare trovando interlocutori ovunque, di ogni età, condizione sociale e livello culturale. Primo Levi ha raccontato - di Auschwitz e di molto altro - agli studenti italiani nati nel dopoguerra e ai tedeschi dell'èra post-nazista, ma anche al se stesso di quarant'anni dopo il Lager, in dialoghi che ha saputo costruire con pazienza, schiettezza e intelligenza. Nell'illustrarne trame e intonazioni questa Lezione si rivolge a un sempre rinnovato interlocutore di Levi: il lettore di oggi e di domani.***"I am a person who needs to communicate constantly, who suffers if he cannot communicate. I need to speak and to write, to have a two-way communication, if possible." This sentence, so simple and direct, reveals a multitude of compelling needs: to express himself and to listen, finding interlocutors everywhere, of every age, social condition, and level of culture. Primo Levi spoke - about Auschwitz and much more - to Italian students who were born after WWII, to Germans from the post-Nazi era, and also to the person he had become forty years after the Lager, in dialogues he constructed with patience, straightforwardness, and intelligence. As it illustrates the various weaves and inflections, this Lezione addresses Levi's ever-renewing pool of interlocutors: the readers of today and tomorrow.

Dialogues

1.

The first interlocutors

Levi returned from Auschwitz “deeply troubled.”¹ In 1973, he told a young interviewer:

(...) Throughout the journey in Russia, this impact, this shock, remained in the background a bit. As soon as I returned home, I was very sick for months.²

It seemed almost impossible to him to shake off the weight of the events he had just experienced and to return to everyday normality.

(...) I felt a physical need, an urgent need to recount these things (...). People considered me almost unbalanced because I talked and talked, at the cafeteria, in the evening, and also during the day; some people thought I even talked inappropriately.³

The facts of an atrocious past refused to be transformed into memories: it was as though they were thronging on the threshold of his mind, myriad and disordered, yet vivid and “in color.”⁴

In the extreme conditions of Auschwitz, Levi hadn’t lost the proverbial curiosity of his early years⁵:

(...) Other people and I voraciously stored everything, all the experiences; in fact, we searched them out: we’d interrogate one other to learn each other’s stories.⁶

Plus, that almost spasmodic activity of recording was bolstered by an uncommon sensitivity, which had developed already during his youth, to the moral dimension of human events.

This sensitivity had also been honed, at great cost, in the imminence of his arrest. In The Periodic Table he wrote: starting in 1938 and during the first years of the war, as Jews

(...) they had declared us ‘other,’ and other we would remain; we took sides, but we kept ourselves apart from the stupid, cruel games of the Aryans.⁷

He and his small group of friends in Milan⁸ had learned to gaze on the world in turmoil from the awkward but unaccustomed position of pariahs. Then there was his experience as a partisan fighter, the moment of decision and, finally, of action:

(...) it struck me as the only decent thing a young person my age, in my condition, could do.⁹

But it was a

(...) short, tragic, and also stupid experience because now, with hindsight (…), now I know that it’s not the way it’s done, but you have to remember that I called myself a partisan fighter very early on, in November ‘43, when the Resistance didn’t exist yet.¹⁰

The Resistance which, in retrospect, he would judge on the whole “a necessary, useful, even providential phenomenon,”¹¹ was thus, to him, a learning opportunity in negative, by trial and error – as the chemist would say, accustomed to profit from failed experiments. Even though, in that case, his emotional involvement, his disappointment over his almost immediate arrest, and his feeling of profound “destitution” over the tragic imprudence of his group, were much more devastating than a scientific experiment that didn’t go as planned. In any case, it would prove to be a useful moral support when it came time to face deportation.¹²

Thanks to this acquired experience, after his return, his “first-born book,”¹³ If This Is a Man, took form and was published in 1947. As we know, he had a dual motivation for writing the book:

(...) First of all, it was important to me that I bear witness; I knew I was one of the very few Italians who had survived the extermination camps and it was important to me that I testify as though I were in court.¹⁴

Besides this “civic duty,” the other reason was personal: to free himself from an unbearable weight. “I was healed by writing.”¹⁵

These reasons do not call for a precise interlocutor. The book was written for everybody and for nobody in particular. Then, after a pause which could be defined a convalescence, dedicated primarily to his loved ones, work, chemistry, and a few literary endeavors which would prove to be anything but irrelevant,¹⁶ the moment came for two important discoveries. The first in 1958: that year, thanks to the new edition published by Einaudi, If This Is a Man was “resuscitated” and from that moment on it took on “a life of its own.”¹⁷ That was when the author – as he himself noted – realized that he

(...) had written it (…) for the Germans (…). Because they were the parties in question (…). I felt like a witness. The judges are my readers, but who is the defendant? Nazi Germany, not the Germans, naturally, certain Germans, a good many of them.¹⁸

This was the start of his first true, close dialogue, the one with Heinz Riedt, who translated his Auschwitz story into German: “a frenetic exchange of letters” which lasted until Ist das ein Mensch? was published in 1961, a correspondence between “perfectionists,”¹⁹ who were bonded by their age, their shared anti-fascist experiences, their literary sensitivity, and a convinced, shared objective to “check its fidelity” to the original version of the book, “not only the words but to their innermost meaning.”²⁰

The second discovery occurred in 1959: after the Germans, young people. That year, Palazzo Carignano in Turin hosted an itinerant exhibit about the deportation; the exhibit had been inaugurated in Carpi in 1955. It was an important occasion because, for the first time in Italy, the deportation was publicly discussed independently of the Resistance. Levi recalled: that exhibit was

(...) even dangerously successful, they almost suffocated me. They had invited me to comment on the photographs on display and to talk [about If This Is a Man].

I found myself inundated with questions by young people, even younger than me...

Still now, I remember with some fright that it was my first public appearance; I found myself truly besieged and bombarded with questions.²¹

In that same period, there would be an important consequence to this event: a young “Fascist’s daughter” wrote a letter to the daily “La Stampa” asking if the images on display at Palazzo Carignano were authentic. “[It] is the letter we have been waiting for,”²² replied Levi on the pages of that same newspaper; “No, signorina, there is no way of doubting the truth of those images.” And he clarified:

(...) But the exhibition is addressed not to fathers but to children, and to the children of children, with the aim of demonstrating what reserves of ferocity lie in the depths of the human spirit, and what dangers, today as yesterday, threaten our civilization.²³

First, an unexpected throng had showed up at Palazzo Carignano to listen to his testimony about Auschwitz; then, he began a dialogue with a girl who was born after the war. This is why the next year, in 1960, Levi began the numerous encounters which would occupy him for many years to come in schools throughout Italy.

So far, I have recounted what happened during the first fifteen years after the end of the war along the same lines as Levi himself recounted, with a few inaccuracies, to Carlo Paladini in an interview in 1986.²⁴ During that extended period of time, the interlocutors of the young witness-author slowly came into focus, but with great difficulty. On the whole, the public was distracted or, for various reasons, indifferent and reluctant to listen to him; they expressed incredulity and exasperation about the Lager experience, in particular if the accent was – justly – placed on the annihilation of the Jews.²⁵

In that atmosphere, it was a sign of great sensitivity that Levi was able to maintain his self-control and bear his ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Copertina
• Frontespizio
• Abbreviazioni
• Introduzione
• Dialoghi
• Appendice
• English editions of reference
• Introduction
• Dialogues
• Appendix
• Il libro
• L’autore
• Copyright