On Primo Levi, forgiveness and dangers of complacency

Last week I attended a lecture in Salomon Hall on the campus of Brown University. The lecturer was Alvin Rosenfeld whose talk was on Primo Levi, the Italian Jewish chemist caught up in the Nazi Holocaust who managed to survive Auschwitz and write several books about the experience, most notably but not exclusively Survival in Auschwitz. The question Rosenfeld addressed is whether forgiveness is possible for someone who has undergone Auschwitz, specifically whether Levi ever forgave his tormenters. It’s a good question, but it’s insufficient. If we only ask about forgiveness by others of others we ignore the value of history and literature as predictive mirrors of our lives.

I write from memory, not from notes, but my impression is that Levi started out despising Germans, not only Nazis who he saw as microcosms of the whole. The worst Nazi crime was to deny him his humanity by stripping him of reasonable alternatives, of creating a Kafkaesque world. But over time he tried to understand them, even going so far as to learn German so as better to communicate with any Germans who might be so inclined. With the exception of one who died just before a promised meeting, the interviews never took place. In the end, Levi could not forget, could not forgive. Despairing of coming to grips with the destruction of his soul, he may have committed suicide in 1987. He left no note, but Rosenfeld does not doubt that the fall down a flight of stairs was deliberate.

As I listened, I wondered. First I asked myself if is time for those of us who never endured the Nazi horror to forgive, but then my thoughts wandered to a more pressing issue. Suppose we are guilty ones who will be asking our descendents to forgive us. Do we deserve it? Was Walt Kelly right? Have we met the enemy…and he is us? What have we allowed in our name as we have ignored what has been imposed on us and the world by those who claim to reflect darkly our attitudes, in the process perverting our ideals. Nazis took a country that was in the forefront of human cultural development and dragged it down with them into the slime of Auschwitz. Is this Act II of the same crime?

The following Sunday I began my day, as I always do, by opening up Frank Rich’s column in The New York Times. He begins with this broadside “‘Bush lies’ doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves.” He then discusses torture. That’s done in our name, folk, but denied in our name as well. All of which goes to show that George Orwell’s dystopia is alive and well and living in Washington, DC. Rich reminds that the claim is made that we don’t torture we engage in “enhanced interrogation” techniques. We knew that. What we (I) didn’t know is that the term is from the Gestapo who called it Verschärfte Vernehmung which means “enhanced interrogation.” (And who knew that when Richard Nixon was speaking about the “Great Silent Majority” which supported his war on Vietnam he was inadvertently quoting from Homer who referred to the great silent majority as those who have died? I did!) Rich holds our feet to the fire for countenancing Abu Ghraib and now for turning our backs on the scandal of outsourcing to fight our wars in our names so that we don’t pay attention when Blackwater mercenaries indiscriminately kill Iraqi civilians. In our name. He doesn’t even mention the illegal detentions in Guantánamo, but he does compare our methods with those used by American interrogators of Nazi prisoners. “We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” says one. Another “recalled that he ‘never laid hands on anyone’… adding ‘I am proud to say I never compromised my humanity.’”

Rich concludes with this: “Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those good Germans’ who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo.”

Is it time to forgive the Nazis? Levi asked. I ask if it’s time to forgive ourselves. Maybe in the first case the answer is yes; the Nazis are dead. In the second, only if we want to avert our eyes, like the good Germans.