Primo Levi

"Only a profound amazement: how can one hit a man without anger?". I don't know whether it is because I'm currently in the process of reading Weber but on many levels, this seems to be referring to the structure of bureaucracy. Weber writes; "The content of discipline is nothing but the consistently rationalized, methodically trained and exact execution of the received order in which all personal criticism is unconditionally suspended and the actor is unswervingly and exclusively set for carrying out the command". In many ways, this made me think about what happens when rationalization and methodical thinking to its absolute extreme. The ability of the Nazi regime to set up a bureaucracy that was single mindedly devoted to the cause of 'fascism' and the extermination of people is incredible. And there is something to be said about the human capacity for causing suffering. Levi shows that, pushed far enough, the idea of causing pain no longer holds the moral/ethical implications - but more than that, it no longer holds the very real human implications either. This, to me, is incredible.

If This is a Man...

Disclaimer: At times, I may be rambling. I apologize in advance. 

Levi's work, above all, left me thinking about silences. It seems we have discussed them so often in the course of this semester- how they can be useful, how they fail. Yet, this kind of silence is one which we face when we read accounts like Levi's or like Harriet Jacob's. The kind that leave us dumb too. The kind that carry so much weight that they dare not be breached, they cannot be translated. There is an unspeakable- and no matter how hard one tries, it cannot be said. That reality is too painful to be captured.

Are we better off for it?  

Are we protected from that reality? 

Does the silence shield us from that world? 

We read accounts and state that we do not have words to analyze them, we state how "depressing" they are- yet we persist. Yet we must remember. We always come back to that one point- we owe it to them to remember, in whatever way possible. We owe it the ones we have left out. 

For silence is also a luxury of the privileged. It makes us perpetrators. We can afford not to speak, but by not speaking we aid the oppressors. Levi's testimony (narrative and experience just don't seem to fit here) lay out for us what "what man's presumption made of man in Auschwitz". We struggle to comprehend how human beings could do this to each other- and we do not have answers, We do not understand the cold rationality of it all; the systematic way humans are torn from all that defines them as human.

 

Maybe we are not meant to understand. Maybe the structured violence inflicted by those camps was meant to silence. Maybe we do not have the words.

Does that mean we stop trying?

"...that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last the power to refuse our consent. So we must certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must polish our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but for dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die."