Primo Levi is among the most read and most resonant witnesses to the greatest human disaster of a disastrous age. He created more powerful images, more mind-sustaining turns of phrase through which to think about these matters than any other writer. The 'drowned and the saved', for example: that appallingly stark, Darwinian division between those who managed to secure a few extra grams of food for themselves, or respite from labour, or shelter from the cold, or friendship, and those who ended 'on the bottom', the 'Muselmänner', whom a pitiless system had reduced to the merely biological, the already dead whom everyone shunned. Or 'the chemistry examination', in which the starving prisoner, wondering what it would be like to be in the mind of his well-fed examiner, Dr Pannwitz, looks at him 'as if across an aquarium between two beings who live in different worlds. If he could explain that look he would have explained the essence of the great insanity of the third Germany.'

LRB 5 September 2002 | PDF Download