Correspondence

Hans Jürgen Fröhlich introduced himself to Levi as the author of a radio review of Ist das ein Mensch?, which Levi himself considered the “friendliest and most complete” review his book had yet received in Germany (Letter 067 dated March 16, 1962). The review aired on April 1, 1962 on the German broadcaster NDR (Norddeutscher Rundfunk), headquartered in Hamburg, during the program Das Buch meiner Wahl (The book of my choice).

The text was sent to Levi on March 12, 1962 on thirteen sheets of onionskin paper, a carbon copy of the typewritten original: most likely, it is a rough draft of the review that aired on the radio a few weeks later. The review alternates between the voices of two radio hosts, one reading long excerpts from Levi’s book, beginning with the poem that serves as the book’s epigraph, and the other, Fröhlich himself, commenting, introducing and linking the excerpts.

Fröhlich regarded Levi’s book as one of the best about concentration camps published so far, and he praised the editors for having chosen to print it directly as a pocket paperback, thereby making it accessible to a broad range of readers, including the young. The goal of the review was to give listeners an overall idea of the contents of the book, dwelling in particular on its originality compared to other books about concentration camps. According to Fröhlich, the book is “written without an ideological, political, or religious conception as its foundation. It is the work of an intellectual humanist with no dogmatic ties, using his own common sense to shed light on the dark, irrational web of human aberration and cruelty” (this and the following quotes are taken from Letter 066, which Primo Levi himself translated into Italian).

Fröhlich’s focus was primarily on the work’s character as a psychological examination of human beings “reduced to their primal form – literally naked, starving, freezing, and deprived of every human right.” According to Fröhlich, the concentration camped served Levi as an “extreme model”: Levi was not so much interested in compiling “a list of atrocities and persecutions,” as in understanding human nature, starting from this extreme observation point.

This review is especially interesting for the use Levi made of it. Firstly, the document is preserved in his private archive in duplicate copy: the one Fröhlich sent to him, held together with the correspondence between the two men, and a second version that was perhaps sent to him by the German radio broadcaster later on. This second copy has a series of passages underlined by hand and a handwritten note by Levi (who, next to the word “Aufschub”, drew a question mark followed by the Italian translation of the term, “dilazione” [“postponement”]).

Levi’s particular interest in the review is also confirmed by the simple fact that he translated it almost in its entirety, and that the handwritten pages of the translation are held in his archive along with the correspondence. No doubt, this was initially a “reading translation” for Levi, that is, a translation whose aim was to help him fully understand a text written in a language that was not immediately comprehensible to him. But it also bears witness to Levi’s great interest in everything revolving around his book in Germany, an interest that, during those same years, was taking concrete form as a well-defined editorial project, as scholarship has demonstrated (cf. Mayda 1963, p. 5; Mengoni 2023, pp. 57 and ff.).

In his first letter, along with which he sent Levi his review, Fröhlich announced that he was about to go on a trip, and that he would be passing through Turin. He immediately took the opportunity to suggest that he and Levi meet, an encounter that probably took place between April 12 and 20, 1962. The two men, along with an acquaintance of Fröhlich’s and an interpreter (but the two latter figures might also be the same person), discussed the state of health of German society and democracy, the persistence of antisemitism and Fascism, and the reluctance on the part of Germans to deal with certain topics tied to the country’s Nazi past. The discussion was also continued by mail over the following months. Fröhlich had a pessimistic point of view on the contemporary political scene, whereas Levi appeared to be more moderate. On May 11, 1962 (Letter 069), he wrote:

I am not as optimistic as your traveling companion, either; and yet I must admit that my pessimism is a few shades lighter than yours. / You say you no longer see the possibility of a “third way” between left and right. I believe it worth mustering up the courage to recognize that there is such a way, and it is more or less the one that, with different nuances and accents, the German, Italian, and French governments are currently following. It is not the way we would prefer, but we are far from 1938 Berlin, and also from 1962 Madrid. The air we breathe today, where you are and where I am, is heavy and not very clean, but it is not full of tension: the current state of things, which is not very exciting, seems destined to last quite some time.

This cautious optimism was destined to change substantially over the course of the 1970s.

The two men, however, also talked about literature, telling each other about their future projects. Over time, their correspondence increasingly came to resemble an exchange between authors: Levi sent Fröhlich a chapter from the new book he was writing (“Il Greco” [“The Greek”] from La Tregua [The Truce]), and Fröhlich, after undertaking to having the chapter read on the radio or at least having it published in a magazine (konkret), in turn sent Levi the manuscript of a play of his, entitled Vier Wände. Fröhlich also mentioned a play by Hans Henny Jahnn (1894-1959), which he was translating. Jahnn was another author from Hamburg who belonged to the movement headed by Kurt Hiller, with whom he had collaborated on the magazine Zwischen den Kriegen, and who had recently died. However, Jahnn’s manuscript does not appear to have ever been sent to Turin (neither the original nor a translation), and the reviews Cases prepared for Einaudi, which were negative, cannot be linked to Levi’s mediation (Cases 2013, pp. 215-16 and 425-26).

More than once over the course of their correspondence, Fröhlich stated his interest in translating short texts from Italian into German or from German into Italian, cases in point being Jahnn’s play and the chapter “Il Greco” (“The Greek”) from La Tregua (The Truce, Letter 071). He does not appear to have finished these translations, but what is certainly interesting is Fröhlich’s enthusiasm for Italian language and literature, and Italy in general.

In September 1962, after returning from his summer holidays, Levi read the manuscript of Vier Wände, and found it “well-constructed and persuasive;” once again, his interest was focused on what he could gather from that text about German society: “on the whole, it seems to aptly reconstruct a somewhat Ibsen-esque atmosphere that pervaded Germany, ‘year zero,’ and perhaps still does today” (Letter 72 dated September 4, 1962). The play takes place in two acts, literally within the four walls of the Bosco home, and the protagonists are the widow and the three children of the deceased Leonard Bosco, a successful author. One year after Bosco’s death, the female members of the family re-enact the last dinner their father took part in, sparking the wrath of Gregor, the only male offspring. On the one hand, Gregor is following in his father’s footsteps, in search of literary success; on the other, he clearly has a score to settle with the man, and after a series of violent tirades against his sisters and his mother, he ends up committing a delayed, symbolic patricide by sacrificing the dog his father loved so much.

This play, with its bourgeois setting, clearly portrays the wounds of a complicated relationship with the past and with the previous generation, which might be the reason for Levi’s interest in the play. In fact, Levi proposed the manuscript to Einaudi, but it was turned down (Levi received the formal rejection only in June 1964; cf. Archivio storico Giulio Einaudi editore, held at the State Archive of Turin, section Corrispondenza con autori e collaboratori italiani, fasc. 114, inc. 1711/1, Levi Primo).

The correspondence continued throughout 1964, in a nonstop exchange of news. Starting in February of that year, Levi wrote in English and Fröhlich replied in German. Their second encounter in Turin took place in the spring (Letter 082 written in April 1964) and was characterized by discussions that centered more on literature and their respective works in progress than on the historical and political situation. Over the following months and years, their letters became less frequent.

A few longer and more significant letters were exchanged in April 1967. Fröhlich wrote to Levi again because he was working on a novel set in Turin. It was based on Cesare Pavese’s life, and had a number of historical elements as a backdrop: firstly, Friedrich Nietzsche’s stay in Turin; secondly, an episode from the Italian Resistance in which eight partisans were executed by firing squad on April 5, 1944 at the Martinetto shooting range on Corso Svizzera. Fröhlich was familiar with the episode because, during his previous stay in Turin (April 5 and 6, 1964), he had read a commemorative newspaper article about it on the occasion of the 20^th anniversary of the executions. Fröhlich told Levi about his project and his intention to return to the city to conduct further research on site (Letter 85; however, the book never saw the light, at least not in that guise; many ideas and much material gathered on that occasion came together in Engels Kopf, the experimental novel he published in 1971).

Levi replied by describing his own ongoing projects: during those weeks, he was busy working on the draft of a treatment of La Tregua (The Truce) for a motion picture that was supposed to be directed by Mario Monicelli, but was never made.

Their third and final meeting took place in 1969, again in Turin. This was followed by a seven-year hiatus in their correspondence, and their final letters were only sporadic. In February 1976, Fröhlich wrote to Levi again because he wanted to propose Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table) to Fischer Verlag. Among other topics, he told Levi about Engels Kopf, his 1971 novel, and revealed that Levi himself is mentioned in it. Levi replied that his curiosity was so piqued about the fact “that I have become a character in your novel” (Letter 090 dated March 2, 1976) that he immediately ordered a copy. We do not know what impression the novel made on Levi, and it is not even certain whether he did, in fact, procure a copy. Two years later, in 1978, Levi, too, made himself into a character of his own novel The Wrench.

Nonetheless, it is perhaps symptomatic that the apparitions of the Turinese friend in Engels Kopf might, in fact, be evocations of a presence-absence: the novel’s protagonist, young Friedrich Peschek, lives in Turin and is unsuccessfully trying to complete a tourist guidebook of the city. He has an acquaintance, a friend, there: “Lieber Doktor Levi.” He repeatedly wishes to write letters to him, he imagines the sentences he would use, he makes mental notes of his resolution. His various, often abortive attempts at letter-writing reflect a habit that is also evident in Fröhlich’s actual correspondence with Levi: Fröhlich’s archive (held at the Deutsches Literatur Archiv in Marbach) holds carbon copies on onionskin paper of various drafts of the same letter, and it is not always possible to establish with certainty whether one of them (and if so, which) was actually sent (see Letters 65 and 66, Letter 75, and Letters 82 and 83).

In the literary version, Fröhlich plays with this aspect of his own nature, ironically saddling the protagonist with a series of writing attempts that failed, or were not completed, since eventually both the tourist guidebook and the letters to Doktor Levi remain largely ungeschrieben, unwritten (Fröhlich 1971, pp. 40, 144, 160, 289). As a confirmation of Fröhlich’s poetics of the unfinished (Fritz 2000, p. 3), it is no coincidence that the novel begins with a chapter that is programmatically entitled “Anfänge, lauter Anfänge” (“Beginnings, nothing but beginnings”) and concludes with an overtly experimental strategy, in which the space of the narration and History is relegated to the margins of the written page: significantly, in the novel’s finale the description of the historical events at the Martinetto shooting range is relegated to the footnotes (Fröhlich 1971, pp. 289-340).

All Letters