Primo Levi in a Post-Truth World
Communication Still Matters
By John Foster
Primo Levi was the bearer of an obscene wisdom.
Obscene because it was acquired by surviving eleven months in Auschwitz, a place that has justly become a metonym for human depravity.
Levi’s postwar writings are some of the most important of the 20th century, containing profound and powerful insights about the human condition. But it was knowledge and wisdom gained at a terrible cost and for the sake of his humanity.
It would have been better if he had never been put in the position to learn it.
Levi’s survival was very much against the odds, although that could be said of practically any survivor of Auschwitz since the camp fed daily on huge tranches of human flesh. He was slight and unassuming.
The Jews of Italy formed a community outside the circuits of Eastern European Jewry and thus were suspect because they did not speak Yiddish. Of the 650 Italian Jews who were transported to Auschwitz in February 1944, only 20 are known to have survived.
But Levi did have some advantages. The Nazis needed chemists to work in the synthetic rubber plant that they were trying to build at the Monowitz subcamp.
A specialist in organic chemistry, Levi managed to obtain work in the labs of the Buna-Werke, which was safer and less strenuous and provided opportunities to acquire items that could be traded for food.
This, of course, did not guarantee his survival, since in Auschwitz, there was no way to obtain such a guarantee. But it did improve his odds.
Levi also knew some German. Not much, by his own admission, just enough to understand some of the German arcana in his chemistry textbooks. He later referred to this as his Wortschatz, a term generally translated as “vocabulary” but literally means (as Levi noted) “treasury of words”.
This it certainly was for Levi, who was able to use this to facilitate his survival.
In an essay in The Drowned and the Saved entitled “Communication,” Levi wrote of his distaste for the term “incommunicability” that had become so prominent in cultural studies and some branches of philosophy in the 1970s.
“According to a theory that was very fashionable in those years,” Levi wrote, “‘incommunicability’ is inevitable, a life sentence innate in the human condition, especially in industrial society. We are monads, incapable of reciprocal messages or capable only of incomplete messages that are false upon departure and misunderstood upon arrival.”
Here, Levi is rebelling against the post-structuralist obsession with language, which simultaneously bounced everything into the linguistic realm and denigrated the capacity of language to fulfil the function of communication.
Levi’s experiences in the universe of the concentration camps showed both the importance of communication and the catastrophic consequences of its failure.
Those who entered the camps with a working knowledge of German had a distinct advantage. This was the code in which those directly responsible for life and death communicated with each other and with the prisoners beneath them.
If the orders emitted by the SS and their proxies were not immediately understood, the consequences could be immediately catastrophic. Some understood. Others didn’t. The latter were much less likely to survive.
Likewise, the interactions among the prisoners were shaped by the languages of the camp. Auschwitz, as Levi and others have noted, was a Nazi-run Babel in which speakers of a dozen European languages were compelled to find ways to interact.
Levi notes that the lingua franca (so to speak) was Yiddish until Hungarian displaced it as half a million Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in the last months of the war.
Like most Italian Jews, Levi was completely unfamiliar with Yiddish. Yet he did pick some of it up. Yiddish is closely related to German, with which Levi became increasingly familiar, and that was his point of entry.
Also, in If This is a Man, we find him noting that Elias, one of the more interesting characters in the camp, spoke “the surly, deformed Yiddish of Warsaw”.
One of the most moving sections in Levi’s entire oeuvre is the chapter of If This is a Man entitled “The Canto of Ulysses.” In it, Levi accompanies a young French prisoner (Jean) to get the midday meal for their work crew.
Jean has expressed the desire to learn Italian. Levi attempts to teach him by quoting passages from memory of Dante’s Inferno.
Still, Levi is thwarted in this attempt at communication because of the inherent linguistic barrier between them and the faultiness of his memory.
Yet even under these horrific circumstances, Levi remains committed to the power of art as mediated through language to forge connections between human beings. The experience is intense for Levi, although it is unclear how his interlocutor experiences it.
When they finally reach their destination, Levi finishes with a final, moving quote from Dante: “And over our heads, the hollow seas closed up.”
Why, then, should we be interested in the question of communication or Levi’s thoughts on the topic?
We live in an era of fraught communication. It’s not that it doesn’t happen, but it has become infinitely more complex than one might have believed in the era when positivism tried to reduce all philosophical problems to questions of precise definition.
The current era is often described as “post-truth,” which is a misnomer. There are things that are demonstrably true and things that are false.
What has changed is a political willingness to act as if this distinction no longer mattered. Information is one thing, and truth is another.
In one sense, communication is simply the passing of information from one person to another. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be true.
At no time in this planet’s history has more information flowed than what we’re witnessing today. It shouldn’t be any surprise that it would get weaponised.
The lesson of the present is that the concerns about the impossibility of communication voiced by another European Jew, Jacques Derrida, and other philosophers in the high era of poststructuralism, were overblown. Following the Holocaust, it’s not hard to understand why.
Yet, that’s why it’s essential to return to the event to understand how other victims of the Nazi genocide got it right.
For Levi, the implications of the difference between valid and invalid communication could be painfully and immediately evident: a new source of food acquired, a beating avoided, etc.
It was about survival. But, as he was also well aware, there were systems of information that were much more arcane.
Concentration camps were awash in rumour and speculation, unsurprisingly, given the limited capacity of the inmates to acquire information from the outside.
Is there a theory of communication to be derived from Levi? It may be that an underlying goodwill grounds human communication. We may get things wrong and repeat what’s already been said, as Derrida argued, but the effort matters.
The fundamental truth of the concentration camp system was that it was meant to reduce human beings to a Hobbesian struggle of all against all, and it was not unsuccessful in doing so.
Still, Primo Levi’s writings contain repeated moments in which the possibility of communication among people under threat endures.
Please support The Battleground. Subscribe to our free newsletter and make a donation to ensure our continued growth and independence.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.