Levi does not spare himself: "This very book is drenched in memory . it draws from a suspect source and must be protected against itself" (34). Levi profiles Rumkowski not because he believes that his actions were justified, but precisely because he believes that they were not. I reject this view on moral grounds, and I will show that Levi does so as well. Primo Levi was imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. A Jew could choose to commit suicide, or to comply, and those choices did have moral ramifications. But regardless of their actions Jews were condemned. But he then goes further in marking a place for judgments that are not bound to either of the traditional categories but still remain within the bounds of ethics itself. Sara R. Horowitz, The Gender of Good and Evil: Women and Holocaust Memory, Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 165. Levi clearly opposes the view that ethics should seek merely to understand perpetrators of immoral acts without condemning or punishing them. The Drowned and the Saved - New York University On Amazon.com one reviewer of Todorov's Hope and Memory was inspired to claim that Levi talks about a Gray Zone inside which we all operate. Only through deathwhether one's own or that of othersis it possible to attain the absolute: by dying for an ideal one proves that one holds it dearer that life itself.39, Todorov prefers ordinary virtue, an act of will that affirms one's dignity while demonstrating concern for others. The Drowned and the Saved Summary - www.BookRags.com It is instrumental in nature and judged solely by its result. Lawrence L. Langer, The Dilemma of Choice in the Deathcamps, in Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time, ed. But the members of the SS were there voluntarily; they chose to engage in atrocities. First, Starachowice was able to meet Himmler's conditions for using Jewish labor in that their work was directly linked to the war effort. Lang explains this point first by demonstrating that, as I argued earlier, Levi rejects Kant's Categorical Imperative: Kant's critics have argued that neither life nor ethics is as simple as he implies, and Levi is in effect agreeing with this. Members of Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando burn bodies of gassed prisoners outdoors, August 1944. Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 299. From this perspective, perhaps Hitler was the only German who was not in the gray zone.47, In his second mention of the gray zone, Todorov praises Levi's description of life in the camps as an accomplishment unparalleled in modern literature. He admires Levi's rejection of Manicheanism whether in reference to groups (Germans, the Jews, the kapos, the members of the Sonderkommandos) or individuals. (And when they refused to collaborate, they were killed and immediately replaced.). The project is more than admirable, but the former victim may not be the most suitable person to carry it out. Better for them to hate their enemies.49. This means the act must be performed out of a sense of duty as opposed to one's own inclinations. The fact that they may have had a few more choices and that making those choices saved more prisoners does not change their status any more than the status of the rebelling Sonderkommandos of 1944 would have changed had they somehow miraculously survived the war. The Drowned and the Saved, however, was written 40 years later and is the work of memory and reflection not only on the original events, but also on how the world has dealt with the Holocaust in the intervening years. The prisoners were to an equal degree victims. Using lies and coercion they led thousands of victims to a horrible death. The Drowned and the Saved Summary and Study Guide | SuperSummary universal sense) has usurped his neighbor's place and lived in his stead" (81-82). For it assigns moral standing to a position that had been otherwise pushed aside in a way that denied any means of judging it in ethical terms and which is indeed no less categorical than the two more commonly recognized alternatives.11. Argumentative Essay On The Drowned And The Saved - Primo Levi Do perpetrators who are not victims belong in the gray zone? Privilege is born and spreads where power is in few hands, and power tolerates a zone where masters and servants diverge and converge. Since Levi was one of those saved, he is "in permanent search of a justification . Order our The Drowned and the Saved Study Guide, teaching or studying The Drowned and the Saved. Levi argues therefore that, while we should think seriously about the different choices made by people such as Czerniakw and Rumkowski, we ultimately have no right to condemn them. Would not those who had been trying to keep the Jews of the ghettos alive as long as possible subsequently have been hailed for their efforts?24, Yet Weinberg's argument fails as a justification for placing Rumkowski into Levi's gray zone, for as Lang asserted, the gray zone is NOT reserved for suspended judgmentsthose made through the lens of moral hindsight.. To resist it requires a truly solid moral armature, and the one available to Chaim Rumkowski, the d merchant, together with his whole generation, was fragile.28, Levi concludes his chapter with a poetical comparison of Rumkowski's situation to our own: Like Rumkowski, we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility. when writing The Drowned and the Saved, he was moved to admit that "this man's solitary death, this man's death which had been reserved for him, will bring him glory, not infamy." We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. In his book The Question of German Guilt, first published in German in 1947 and in English-language translation in 1948, Karl Jaspers suggests a framework for evaluating German responsibility. The Drowned and the Saved was Levi's last book; he died after completing the essays that comprise it. Levi uses the example of a soccer game played between the SS and the members of the Sonderkommandos. The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi | LibraryThing Again, my reading of Levi places only victims in the gray zone. Todorov presents himself as an admirer of Primo Levi, and in this book he refers to or quotes from Levi on forty-six of his two hundred and ninety-six pages. I will show that certain misuses of the term travel far from Levi's original intention and become part of a relativistic challenge to contemporary ethics. Non-victims such as Muhsfeldt had moral responsibility and deserved to be prosecuted for their actions. Alan Rosenberg and Gerald E. Myers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 224. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 1, The Memory of the Offense Summary & Analysis Primo Levi This Study Guide consists of approximately 34 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Drowned and the Saved. This choice could lead to a secular salvation.15. I would argue that it is appropriate to expand Levi's zone beyond Auschwitz so long as its population is made up only of victims. It follows immediately after an extended description of Elias the dwarf, whom Steinberg also remem-bers as extraordinary. He is the author of Woody Allen's Angst: Philosophical Commentaries on His Serious Films (2013); Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed: Anguish, God and Existentialism (2002); and Rights, Morality, and Faith in the Light of the Holocaust (2005). Sometimes villagers would feel sorry for the prisoners and tell them how the war was progressing. Her sacrifice directly benefitted anotherher daughter. In other words, Levi is making a normative argument against the right to judge, not an ontological claim about the possibilities of moral action. Print Word PDF This section contains 555 words Melson describes his parents feelings of guilt at their inability to save his maternal grandparents from death in the ghetto; after the war, his mother suffered from depression and required electroshock treatments to deal with her guilt. Under Bentham's Utilitarian Principle, one should act to bring the greatest amount of pleasure to the greatest number of people while inflicting the least amount of harm to the least number of people. I believe that the most meaningful way to interpret Levi's gray zone, the way that leads to the greatest moral insight, requires that the term be limited to those who truly were victims. Adam Czerniakw, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto, adopted the opposite approach. The photo was taken surreptitiously from Crematorium V. USHMM, courtesy Pastwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Owicimiu. Levi begins it by discussing a phenomenon that occurred following liberation from the camps: many who had been incarcerated committed suicide or were profoundly depressed. As Levi reminds us, Rumkowski and his family were killed in Auschwitz in August 1944. In that story, an evil old woman dies and goes to Hell. He sees Rumkowski as an example of Anna Freud's concept of identification with the aggressor.17 Rumkowski did not simply comply with the Nazi orders so as to save liveshe thought like a Nazi and acted like one. SS ritual dehumanizes newcomers and veterans treat them as competitors. In his epilogue, Todorov further distinguishes between the teleological and the intersubjective. Levi details how prisoners learned new ways of communication, especially between those who did not share a common language. Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth, Prologue: The Gray Zones of the Holocaust, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, xviii. A special camp was built to house the prisoners and the managers were able to pay the SS for the inmates labor. The drowned, meanwhile, are those who do not organize, who pass their time thinking of home or complaining, and who quickly perish. Primo Levi: The Drowned, the Saved, and the "Grey Zone" Morality was transformed. Despite some of his comments about Muhsfeldt, I believe Levi's answer must be negative because of the importance of free will. It is as objective and real as its two principled and more commonly recognized alternatives. thissection. In the latter film, a female collaborator Francoise Hemmerle is portrayed as evil, while her male counterpart, Armand Zuchner, is described simply as an idiot. Horowitz contends that this demonization of female collaborators is widespread and gender-based. He describes situations in which inmates chose to sacrifice themselves to save others, as well as small acts of kindness that kept others going even when it would have been easier to be selfish. The Drowned and the Saved - jstor.org The problem of the fallibility of memory, the techniques used by the Nazis to break the will of prisoners, the use of language in the camps and the nature of violence are all studied. Chapter 1, "The Memory of the Offense," dissects out the vagaries of memory, rejection of responsibility, denial of unacceptable trauma and out and out lying among those who were held to account by tribunals as well as among the victimized. While I would agree that circumstances varied in the zones of German domination and some bystandersfamilies with young children to protect, for examplecould not have been expected to act heroically, I would still contend that their circumstances were not sufficiently dire to justify their inclusion in Levi's gray zone. Each individual is so complex that there is no point in trying to foresee his behavior, all the more in extreme situations; nor is it possible to foresee one's own behavior" (60). Rubinstein is careful to examine the meaning of Levi's terminology as it appeared in the original Italian. In his landmark book The Drowned and the Saved (first published in 1986), Primo Levi introduced the notion of a moral "gray zone." The author of this essay re-examines Levi's use of the term. As in all the other chapters of his book, Levi discusses the complexity of these situations. Indeed, the last lines of The Drowned and the Saved make Levi's position on this issue explicit: Let it be clear that to a greater or lesser degree all [perpetrators] were responsible, but it must be just as clear that behind their responsibility stands that great majority of Germans who accepted in the beginning, out of mental laziness, myopic calculation, stupidity, and national pride the beautiful words of Corporal Hitler, followed him as long as luck and the lack of scruples favored him, were swept away by his ruin, afflicted by deaths, misery, and remorse, and rehabilitated a few years later as the result of an unprincipled political game.55.