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. Their heads were shaved, their clothing taken and replaced with identical striped shirt and pants that looked similar to pajamas. See Helga Varden, Kant and Lying to the Murderer at the Door One More Time: Kant's Legal Philosophy and Lies to Murderers and Nazis, Journal of Social Philosophy 41 no. . Adam Czerniakw, Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Czerniakow.html (accessed March 16, 2016). In the anthology Ethics After the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses, both David Hirsch and David Patterson attack Todorov's positionespecially his refusal to view perpetrators as moral monsters simply because they lived in a totalitarian society. . 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. . . The Drowned and the Saved study guide contains a biography of Primo Levi, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 3, Shame Summary & Analysis Copyright 1999 - 2023 GradeSaver LLC. 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. As Lang points out, Levi acknowledged that it might be interesting to compare the actions of ordinary people who chose to become perpetrators with immoral acts committed by victims. To say that Muhsfeldt, for that brief instant, was at the gray zone's extreme boundary does not mean that perpetrators and bystanders deserve the same moral consideration and leniency that Levi demands for those who were condemned to live in horrific conditions as they awaited their seemingly inevitable deaths. 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. To an extent apparently unsurpassed by any other Nazi-appointed Jewish leader, he was the Fhrer of his tiny kingdom for much of his reign, a role he appears at times to have savored.22. David H. Hirsch, The Gray Zone or The Banality of Evil, in Ethics After the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses, ed. It seems to me that a defender of Levi could respond to Rubinstein by arguing that Levi did not attempt to justify or excuse Rumkowski. According to this story a 16-year-old girl miraculously survived a gassing and was found alive in the gas chamber under a pile of corpses. 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. Are there different kinds of violence? . As Rubinstein agrees that Rumkowski was a victim, the primary disagreement between Levi and Rubinstein may be over the question of whether that victimhood is sufficient to place someone outside our moral jurisdiction. 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. Themes Style Quotes Topics for Discussion. This is not a novel but more of an essay The Drowned and the Saved is an attempt at an analytical approach. The drowned, meanwhile, are those who do not organize, who pass their time thinking of home or complaining, and who quickly perish. The individual was whittled away and soon the part of every man that was a human was taken away as well. Her sacrifice directly benefitted anotherher daughter. Gerhard L. Weinberg, Gray Zones in Raul Hilberg's work, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 75. Examining the actions of people in extreme situations, including inmates of camps such as Auschwitz, Todorov concludes that horrific conditions did not destroy individuals capacities for acts of ordinary virtue, but instead strengthened them. The last part of the book consists of letters between Germans and Levi' they ask questions about his experiences and his feelings about his captors, and he answers honestly, describing his ordeal and stating clearly what he sees. 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). The words "gray zone, useless violence and shame" pay special attention to the inmates who had survived the initial selection and continued increasing their chances of survival. The saved are those who learn to adapt themselves to the new environment of Auschwitz, who quickly learn how to "organize" extra rations, safer work, or fortuitous relationships with people in authority. Most survivors come from the tiny privileged minority who get more food. They therefore used prisoners to police other prisoners; these men would receive more rations and sometimes access to privileges. . These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss thenovel. Finally, Horowitz quotes Jean Amry, who says of torture: It is like a rape, a sexual act without the consent of one of the two partners.35. Levi postulates that the Nazi concentration camp system resulted in a massive "biological and social experiment." At the beginning of his book, Todorov tells us that his interest in comparing the events of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the 1944 Warsaw Rising is motivated by his belief that: they did indeed shed light upon the present.37 He repeats this assertion in the book's epilogue and adds: What interested me is not the past per se but rather the light it casts upon the present.38 Indeed, the purpose of his book is clearly to articulate a post-Holocaust ethics based on insights he develops through his examination of life in totalitarian societies. The Drowned and the Saved was Levi's last book; he died after completing the essays that comprise it. He states that for Levi, just as there is an objective line between good and evil, there exists the same status for an area between the two.5 He explains Levi's notion of the gray zone by first clarifying the ways in which the term is most often misunderstood: The gray zone is NOT reserved for ethical judgments in which it is difficult to decide whether good or evil dominates.6 The purpose of the gray zone is not to label so-called hard cases. While Levi acknowledges that these exist, not all hard cases are in the gray zone and not all moral situations in the gray zone are hard cases.7. Sara R. Horowitz does important work in examining the role of gender in the experiences of women caught in the gray zone. While one may disagree specifically with his way of making these distinctions or the conclusions he reaches in each of these areas, I believe that this approach is much more useful than the multiplication and stretching of Levi's gray zone in ways that were clearly unintended. Sander H. Lee is Professor of Philosophy at Keene State College in New Hampshire. In "The Gray Zone" (2) Levi challenges the tendency to over-simplify and gloss over unpleasant truths of the inmate hierarchy that inevitably developed in the camps, and that was exacerbated by the Nazi methodology of singling some out for special privileges. On the Grey Zone. Michael Rothberg - Centro Primo Levi New York The Drowned and the Saved Summary and Study Guide | SuperSummary Written by people who wish to remain anonymous Subjectivity and irony The irony of subjectivity comes through loud and clear in this account of Nazi concentration camps. Instead of the teleological and the intersubjective, one can speak of the world of things and the world of persons, object and subject relations, cosmos and anthropos, I and thou, and so forth.42 Having alluded to Martin Buber, Todorov makes clear that he prefers the profound joy of the intersubjective action that expresses, he believes, both the rational and the caring aspects of our fundamental human nature: The accounts I have read of life in the camps convince me that the moral action is always one that the individual takes on himself (the moral action is in this sense subjective) and [is] directed towards one or more individuals (it is personal, for when I act morally I treat the other as a person, which is to say he becomes the end of my action). In 'The Grey Zone', the second chapter and the longest essay in the book, Levi acknowledges the human need to divide the social field into 'us' and 'them . Soon after the war ended, he wrote several books about his experience. Lawrence L. Langer, The Dilemma of Choice in the Deathcamps, in Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time, ed. . Order our The Drowned and the Saved Study Guide. Knowing her daughter would never agree to deprive her mother of such protection, Mrs. Tennenbaum asked her to hold the pass for a moment; then she went upstairs and killed herself. 1. Why does Primo Levi think it was so difficult to "be moral" in the Primo Levi's Gray Zone : Implications for Post-Holocaust Ethics The Drowned and the Saved ( Italian: I sommersi e i salvati) is a book of essays by Italian - Jewish author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi on life and death in the Nazi extermination camps, drawing on his personal experience as a survivor of Auschwitz ( Monowitz ). In his epilogue, Todorov further distinguishes between the teleological and the intersubjective. The Drowned and the Saved Summary - www.BookRags.com The prisoners would find intricate ways of communicating with each other outside of the guards' hearing and at night they would talk whilst crammed by the hundred into their tiny huts. The text of the speech is available at http://www.datasync.com/~davidg59/rumkowsk.html (accessed May , 2016). Horowitz tells us that when Heller's memoirs appeared in the 1990s, she was condemned by many in the Jewish community and caught in a gender-specific double-bind: if Heller did not love Jan then she prostituted herself; if she did love him, then she consorted with the enemy., Heller's aunt also suffered sexual violationshe was raped by a German soldierbut she chose to keep it secret from all but a few close relatives. Even in the worst of circumstances (Auschwitz), it cannot be extinguished. The Gray Zone; a difficult moral location inhabited by prisoners who worked for the Nazis. But there are extenuating circumstances: an infernal order such as National Socialism exercises a frightful power of corruption, against which it is difficult to guard oneself. It is instrumental in nature and judged solely by its result. Chapter 7, "Stereotypes," addresses those who question why many concentration camp inmates or ghetto inhabitants did not attempt to escape or rebel, and why many German Jews remained in Germany during Hitler's ascendance. Even more important, the camps remained under factory management throughout their existence. Counterfeiting in more ways than one, they illustrate what Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi called "the grey zone of collaboration." In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi says of his Holocaust experience, "the enemy was all around but also inside[;] the 'we' lost its limits." The Counterfeiters, then, is about the complexity of defining the "we . . . 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. Is all violence created equal? In the concentration camp, says Levi, it was usually "the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the 'gray zone,' the spies" who survived ["the saved"] while the others did not ["the drowned"] (82). The moral action par excellence is caring.43. The special squads fare no better under a consequentialist approach to ethics. The photo was taken surreptitiously from Crematorium V. USHMM, courtesy Pastwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Owicimiu. thissection. The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi - Google Books Chapter 9, The Drowned and the Saved Summary The first-person narrator becomes a "we" as Levi steps into the classic researcher role, observing from a vantage point in the future looking back at the past. In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi does not explicitly discuss the conditions faced by women in the camps. Rubinstein is careful to examine the meaning of Levi's terminology as it appeared in the original Italian. IN HIS MUCH-DISCUSSED CHAPTER "The Gray Zone" from The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi recounts the disturbing story of the morally corrupt Judenrat leader of the Lodz ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski, whose willing collaboration with the Nazis nonetheless failed to save him from the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Instead, as some seem to suggest, the job of ethics, in the face of postmodern relativism, is to understand why people commit acts of immorality, without condemning them for doing so or demanding their punishment. In The Gender of Good and Evil: Women and Holocaust Memory, she explores the images of good and evil associated particularly with women under Nazism, as these shape our perception of the Holocaust.32. He compares this episode to the story told by the character Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov. As Berel Lang clearly states, the concept of The Gray Zone applies to morally charged conduct in a middle ground between good and evil, right and wrong, where neither side of these pairs covers the situation and where imposing one side or the other becomes itself for Levi a moral wrong.56 Levi speaks above all of the situation of Holocaust victims, whose choices were fundamentally choiceless. He outlines the coercive conditions that cause people to become so demoralized that they will harm each other just to survive. In the entire book, he mentions it only twice. The gray zone is NOT reserved for what Lang calls suspended judgmentsthose made through the lens of moral hindsight. Some argue that we have no right to judge the actions of people who could not have known what we know today. While it is true that the victims did have choices, and Levi acknowledges that it is important to study those choices, in the end he argues that we must not judge the victims as we do the perpetrators. Chapter 2, The Gray Zone Summary and Analysis Survivors simplify the past for others to understandstark we/they, friend/enemy, good/evil divisionsbut history is complex. We are neither angels nor demons but ordinary human beings comprising both good AND evil. http://www.amazon.com/review/R3GSXXVIVI3IV5/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0691096589&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books (accessed March 16, 2016). His exploration of what he called the "gray zone" drew attention to the space between the poles of good and evil and to the moments of blurring between victims and perpetrators. The Holocaust calls into question the very possibility of ethics. The Nazis developed a world for their intended targets where their annihilation was the only focus. I agree that we need more precise ways to speak about areas of collaboration and complicity during World War II. He suggests that Levi strove to understand the Germans not as monsters, but as ordinary people caught up in a totalitarian hell in which no one could be held morally responsible for his or her acts, no matter how brutal. Unlike the Spanish Inquisition, or even the authorities of George Orwell's 1984, the Nazis did not torture to change the beliefs or behaviors of their victims. This condition did not apply to perpetrators or bystanders. 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. In Kant's view, one should do one's duty no matter the consequences. The next subject that he introduces is the way in which the Nazis broke the will of the prisoners. Those who were not victims did have meaningful choices: they could choose not to engage in evil. Primo Levi is right to demand from us greater moral courage. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), 119. The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi | LibraryThing These events were beyond the control of the Jewish prisoners and, probably, unknown to most of them. Morality was transformed. The gray zone is NOT reserved for good people who lapse into evil or for evil people who try to redeem themselves through an act of goodness. The Nazis victims did not choose to be victims, and they could not choose to stop being victims. For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription. The historian Gerhard Weinberg cautions us to remember that Rumkowski did not know when the Soviets would arrive to liberate the d ghetto. 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. Do perpetrators who are not victims belong in the gray zone? The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi - Google Books By the end of his life survivor Primo Levi had become increasingly convinced that the lessons of the Holocaust were destined to be lost as. The inequalities between them were just too great. He survived the experience, probably in part because he was a trained chemist and as such, useful to the Nazis. Chapter 3, " Shame," is, in my opinion, the most profound and moving section of the book. It degrades its victims and makes them similar to itself, because it needs both great and small complicities. "Letters from Germans" summarizes his correspondence with Germans who read his earlier books. I know that murderers existed and that to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is a precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth.9, Having drawn on Levi's discussion to make clear what the gray zone is not, Lang goes on to say what it is: In contrast to these alternatives, the concept of the Gray Zone applies to morally charged conduct in a middle ground between good and evil, right and wrong, where neither side of these pairs covers the situation and where imposing one side or the other becomes itself for Levi a moral wrong.10. (199). Given his belief that humanity's moral nature is immutable, and that many people chose to display ordinary virtue and act intersubjectively even in the camps, he can have little use for Levi's notion of the gray zone. Browning examines the strategies used by Jewish prisoners to survive; he finds, not surprisingly, that those willing to exploit the corruption of the German guards and managers had the best chance. The case of Wilczek substantiates Weinberg's point in that the Starachowice camp operated until comparatively late in the war, and as a result, Wilczek succeeded in saving hundreds of lives. and although he feels compelled to bear witness, he does not consider doing so sufficient justification for having survived. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 5869. Indeed, Todorov builds his new morality on his observations of the inherent goodness that remains in individuals even in the worst of conditions. I agree that we do need more ways of speaking with precision about regions of collaboration and complicity during World War II.57 However, with Levi and Lang, I oppose moral determinismthe belief that in the contemporary world almost no one can be held completely responsible for his or her acts, and that the job of ethics, in the face of post-modern relativism, is to understand why people commit acts of immorality without condemning them for doing so. because of the constant imminence of death there was no time to concentrate on the idea of death" (76). With his emphasis on caring, Todorov adds a dash of Heidegger, Levinas, and Buber into the mix. On the few occasions when he mentions women (pp. Rubinstein quotes an American Orthodox rabbinical ruling that, while it is permissible for a soldiers to eat pork when no other food is available, they must not lick the bones (Lecht nicht die bayner).18 He concludes that for Rumkowski the gray zone had turned black.19. Indeed, as we know, many did make such choices. We who are not in that zone have no right to judge those whose meaningful choices had been taken away by the Nazis. Himmler's November 1943 decision to liquidate labor camps did not extend to Starachowice. The intersubjective act, on the other hand, establishes a relationship between two or more individuals. One can give these two categories different names. Search for other works by this author on: 2016 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, From a Holocaust Survivors Initiative to a Ministry of Education Project: Fredka Mazia and the First Israeli Youth Journeys to Poland 19651966, Artwork That Helps Frame History: Toward a Visual Historical and Sociological Analysis of Works Created by Prisoners from the Terezin Ghetto, About the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Hannah Arendt, Berel Lang, and the True Meaning of the Gray Zone, Richard Rubinstein, Gerhard Weinberg, and the Case of Chaim Rumkowski, Morally Questionable Expansions of Levi's Gray Zone, Receive exclusive offers and updates from Oxford Academic, Copyright 2023 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
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