Correspondence

by Alice Gardoncini and Martina Mengoni, translation by Gail McDowell

“Caro amigo,

ich wende mich heute mit einem grossen Anliegen an Sie”.

“Caro amigo,

I write you today to ask a huge favor.”

This is how the correspondence between Primo Levi and Hermann Langbein began, on December 13, 1960. The year before, Levi had received the news that a German translation of Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man), which Einaudi had republished in 1958, was to be released in Germany. This led to a long correspondence with the translator. The German version had already been completed, but the book had not yet been published. In the meantime, in Vienna, Langbein was gathering testimonies for the editorial project Auschwitz. Zeugnisse und Berichte, an anthology of Accounts by former prisoners of the concentration and extermination camp that the International Auschwitz Committee(Internationales Auschwitz Komitee, acronym IAK) intended to publish on the occasion of the important trial that was to be held in Frankfurt. This is why Langbein decided to write to Levi, as well: “I consider it essential that the Italian-language literature about Auschwitz, too, be represented in this book.” (Letter 1, December 13, 1960).

 “I look forward (...) to working with you again,” Langbein continued in his first letter to Levi. It is a sign that the two were already acquainted, even though, until that point, there is no written trace of their first contact, nor of their first encounter. But it is possible – in fact, highly probable – that they had met in Turin in early April 1959, through the mediation of Leonardo De Benedetti.

The first contact between Langbein and De Benedetti, a doctor from Turin who was deported with Primo Levi and was a good friend of his, date back to at least 1955, when De Benedetti received a circular letter from the International Committee, which was in the process of being founded. The letter is conserved in the Langbein fund at the Austrian State Archives in Vienna. In that same folder, it is accompanied by a long typewritten list of names, drawn up on four sheets of paper with the letterhead “Dott. Leonardo De Benedetti” and undated. It is a list of Italian former deportees, primarily (but not only) from Turin, and the third name on the list is Primo Levi’s. It cannot be established when it was sent, nor is there any other trace of correspondence with De Benedetti until 1959; that same year De Benedetti also deposited a lawsuit in his own name against Joseph Mengele, “upon the request of the INTERNATIONAL AUSCHWITZ COMMITTEE,” now published in the posthumous collection Così fu Auschwitz (Auschwitz Testimonies 1945-1986, Levi – De Benedetti 2015, pp. 54-58).

It is therefore possible that Langbein had contacted Levi already back when he received the list of names; unfortunately, no letter dated prior to 1960 is retained in their respective archives.

Already in 1957, the year it was founded, the International Auschwitz Committee had organized an international competition for the commemorative monument of Auschwitz-Birkenau (which was only completed in the spring of 1967, Simoncini 2012). This initiative, along with the “Antologia Auschwitz,” had become one of Langbein’s two major commitments as a member of the Committee. In 1959, the third meeting of the commission was scheduled to be held in Rome on May 11-12: during those same months, Lionello Venturi, an antifascist art historian, had become the new president of the jury awarding the prize.

Since Langbein had to travel to Italy in early April to set up the meeting, De Benedetti invited him to spend two days in Turin and participate in an assembly at the headquarters of the ANED, the National Association of Italian political deportees from Nazi concentration camps, on the evening of April 4, 1959 (Letter from Leonardo De Benedetti to Hermann Langbein dated March 17, 1959, Austrian State Archives of Vienna). Primo Levi may have participated in that meeting, since he was not only a friend of De Benedetti’s, but also directly involved in the association’s activities, as is brought out by his participation in the national congress organized in November 1959 at Palazzo Madama, where he gave a speech entitled “Arbeit macht frei” (CW II, 1134-1135, Maida 2014).

One month later, in May 1959, Langbein wrote to De Benedetti calling Primo Levi “notre ami commun:” an expression that might be emphatic but confirms that they had met. Moreover, the first letter Langbein wrote to Levi, a year and a half later, begins with that linguistic error, “amigo,” [for “amico”] which was to remain unchanged throughout their ensuing correspondence. Only many years later did Levi find the affectionate courage to write to him, by hand and between parentheses (on a postcard dated August 24, 1972): “Caro amico (“amigo” is Spanish!)” (Letter 32).

This event marked the beginning of a correspondence that would last until Levi’s death and, over the years, took the form of a continuous bulletin of reciprocal updates. It is clear that, following their respective experiences at Auschwitz, Primo Levi and Hermann Langbein were active on the same front, fighting against a shared enemy with a double face: on the one hand, the oblivion of Nazi persecution and crimes; on the other, the resurgence of fascist and antisemitic ideologies in Europe and throughout the world. Langbein, for his part, was a combatant (he had been deported for the first time during the Spanish Civil War, in which he had enlisted as a volunteer, and had spent six years in German prisoner-of-war camps) and he considered himself as such his whole life long. After the war (in his case, the wars), his weapons became data, documents, and testimonies, and the enormous archive he left is clear proof of this fact. His instruments were also, and above all, his relations with others, which took form in long epistolary chains, true periodical communications he wrote in various languages and sent throughout Europe and to Israel; and in the international committees of survivors, which he never tired of creating, animating, and putting in contact with one another.

Levi followed this frenetic activity with admiration and respect. He collaborated when he could, supplying the names and addresses of potential Italian contacts (for the most part, witnesses, but also publishers); he reviewed the material his friend sent him; and lastly, he made every effort to translate and make Langbein’s work known in Italy.

The first letters that Levi and Langbein exchanged regarded, for the most part, the anthology about Auschwitz, and were of an editorial and organizational nature. Right from the start, Langbein told Levi about the complicated situation of his political friction with the International Auschwitz Committee, which had taken a pro-Soviet turn and was progressively demoting him. For his part, Levi supported him and gave his full support to the “Antologia Auschwitz” project, which despite everything, was making progress, and for which they eventually chose two chapters from If This Is a Man: “The Last One” and “The Story of Ten Days,” to which was added – on Levi’s request – the poem that opens the book, “Shemà.”

In the meantime, Ist das ein Mensch? (Levi 1961) was published in West Germany, translated by Heinz Riedt; Langbein wrote to Levi that he had finally read his book in its entirety (“I have read [it] in German,” Letter 10, December 5, 1961), and that he had personally published a review of the book in the daily Neues Österreich: “Levi,” wrote Langbein, “who, in his own country, is a chemist, with this disturbing book has shown to be a superb writer.” In the same review, he made a point of announcing that the last chapter of the book, “The Story of Ten Days,” would appear in the anthology about Auschwitz, an editorial project intended “for the younger generations of Austrian and German readers” (“Die letzten Tagen der Un-Menschheit,” Neues Österreich, January 6, 1962).

And just a few months later, in the summer of 1962, Levi received his first complimentary copies of Auschwitz.Zeugnisse und Berichte. He was very satisfied with the result, so much so that he wrote to Langbein: “I was struck by the solemnity and dignity of the work, and especially by the precision of the cross-references contained in the final Notes. The book can only do honor to its publishers, and by reflection to all our Auschwitz comrades.” (Letter 16, August 25, 1962).

Between 1963 and 1972, Levi and Langbein communicated less often but they continued to exchange news, including the release of the German translation of La tregua (The Truce, Levi 1964) and a series of celebrations organized by the international committees. As a backdrop to their conversations were the Auschwitz war crime trials: not only the one in Frankfurt, but also the Bosshammer Trial and the attempt to organize a big Auschwitz Trial in Vienna, as well (see the relative Insight). To this end, Levi sent the names and addresses of possible witnesses against Johann Schindler; Langbein tried to contact them, but the investigation was obstructed by the magistrature and by the difficulty of locating witnesses, as Langbein never tired of repeating: “I continue to look for witnesses, because the higher-ups rarely murdered with their own hands (and those are the only cases in which indictment and conviction are easy), and the adjutants usually stood behind the commanders, and so remained anonymous to the prisoners” (Letter 28, April 22, 1972).

Although the correspondence in this decade seems to have become increasingly less frequent, the two were still in contact in other ways as well: in 1967, they both participated in the epistolary network that was created by Hety Schmitt-Maass, a librarian and journalist from Wiesbaden, and an enthusiastic reader of If This Is a Man. Through her ex-husband, who was a chemist, she perseveringly managed track down Ferdinand Meyer, the chemical engineer who had worked in the laboratory at the Buna Werke at Monowitz III (a subcamp of Auschwitz) during the months in which Levi was forced to work there. Levi never mentioned him in If This Is a Man but it was the beginning of Levi’s first and only epistolary encounter, more than twenty years later, with someone who, at the time, was “on the other side.” This exceptional find sparked an intense exchange of letters: Schmitt-Maass and Langbein, as well as the Austrian philosopher Jean Améry, received copies of the letters that Levi and Meyer exchanged, and they all commented on them with the others (cf. Correspondence HSM; correspondence Meyer). Langbein and Schmitt-Maass met Ferdinand Meyer in person, but Levi was unable to, and later recounted this epistolary experience, transfiguring it and transforming it into literature, in the chapter “Vanadio” from Il Sistema periodico (“Vanadium,” The Periodic Table), which was published by Einaudi in 1975.

In 1972, their correspondence started to become more intense and more intimate; on April 11, after two years of silence, Levi wrote to Langbein once again, addressing his friend with the more confidential and informal pronoun “tu” (Letter 27, April 11, 1972). It was an important occasion: through the mediation of Schmitt-Maass, Levi had just read a summary of Menschen in Auschwitz, the book on which Langbein had been working since the mid-1960s and which was about to be published by Europa Verlag. It was a life’s work: drawing not only on the vast bibliography about Auschwitz of the previous decade, but also and above all, on depositions, documents from the trials, and direct memories gathered over the years, Langbein wrote what, with cautious understatement, could be called “a kind of sociological study of Auschwitz” (Letter 28, April 22, 1972); however, according to Levi (who, in 1984, wrote the preface for the Italian edition), the book was the most complete summa of “everything one might wish to know about the Lager” (Levi 1984, CW III, 2671-2674).

The book originated from the broad-ranging and privileged observation point onto the Lager that Langbein had acquired, despite himself, during his years of imprisonment at Auschwitz, as the assistant and clerk of the SS doctor Eduard Wirths. However, its development was the result of the years before, during and after the important Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. The book’s socio-anthropological approach and collected tone are actually the result of a detachment Langbein had long sought but only achieved after the five years of judiciary procedures:

This study has had a long gestation period; the first outline is dated January 30, 1962, but I kept hesitating. It took the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt to dispel my doubts about whether I already had the necessary detachment from my experiences to present them objectively. In Frankfurt I faced Josef Klehr, an SS medic who had just been arrested. I knew all about his heinous deeds. At that time, in the fall of 1960, all my painful memories returned, and for a long time I was haunted by the impressions made by that encounter. Five years later, at the conclusion of the big Auschwitz trial, at which Klehr was one of the defendants and which I attended as an observer, especially of Klehr’sconduct, I no longer regarded that man as the omnipotent terror of the prison infirmary but as an aged, extremely crude criminal who defended himself ineptly. When I became aware of this transformation, I dared to set to work, and in February 1966 I began to study the sources. (Langbein, People in Auschwitz, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill & London: 2004, pp. 5-6)

For Levi, it was an important book, not easy but decisive for the reflections on Auschwitz that were being rekindled during the mid-1970s. In the foreword to Presser’s Notte dei girondini (The Night of the Girondists), which Levi translated into Italian for Adelphi in 1976, he wrote:

It’s not a coincidence that precisely in these past years, in Italy and abroad, books have been published like Menschen in Auschwitz, by Hermann Langbein (not yet translated into Italian), and Into That Darkness, by Gitta Sereny. There are many signs that the time has come to explore the space that separates the victims from the executioners, and to do so with a lighter hand, with a less murky spirit, than has been the case, for example, in some recent popular films. Only a Manichean rhetoric can assert that that space is empty; it is not, it is scattered with vile, miserable, or pathetic characters (who occasionally possess all three qualities at once), and it is indispensable that we know them if we want to know the human species, if we want to know how to defend our souls when a similar trial returns. (CW II, pg. 1222)

This passage already contains, implicit but evident, the concept of the gray zone, which Levi would elaborate in The Drowned and the Saved (Mengoni 2021, 143) and which was the result of all of readings but also of epistolary encounters (such as the one with Ferdinand Meyer), and of the historico-political climate of the early 1970s. While in Italy and Europe the first alarming signals of a return of fascism were beginning to surface, Levi considered Langbein’s book an antidote and an essential political tool. For this reason, he did everything he could to bring the book to Italy; the entire editorial history of the book’s translation emerges through their correspondence. Einaudi, which at first seemed interested, almost immediately dropped the proposal; Feltrinelli, too, which had optioned the rights and with which Langbein had collaborated in the early 1960s (cf. Biography), stepped back. Thus, in 1974, Levi involved the publishing house Mursia, which agreed to translate the book provided that substantial cuts be made (Letter 42, February 15, 1974). But negotiations proceeded slowly, time was passing, and in the meantime Levi added a chapter of Menschen in Auschwitz to his personal anthology of fundamental books, La ricerca delle radici (In Search of Roots), which Einaudi published in 1981. The passage he chose is the book’s conclusion, which Levi personally translated. In the foreword, Levi wrote that Langbein’s book “is a book that is dear to me, one that seems to me to be fundamental, and that I should have liked to have written myself” (Levi, The Search for Roots, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago: 2002, pg. 207).

Uomini ad Auschwitz (People of Auschwitz) was published by Mursia only in 1984, in an abridged version, and with a foreword by Primo Levi.

As time went by, Levi and Langbein accumulated a series of missed encounters: in 1965 in Düsseldorf, at an event organized by a new, non-party-affiliated international committee conceived and created by Langbein, the International Committee of the Camps; in 1970, in Brussels, at the celebration of the 25^th anniversary of the Liberation; in July 1974, in Berlin, at the meeting of international committees that had been called to organize the celebrations of the following year (Letter 38, December 28, 1973); and lastly in 1976, at Riva del Garda, at a convention of the ANEI (National Association of Former Internees in Nazi Lagers). It was always Levi who, primarily for work reasons or personal commitments, was unable to participate at these appointments with the former deportees.

In the 1980s, the right occasion finally presented itself for a meeting in person. The ANED (National Association of Italian political deportees from Nazi concentration camps) organized two conferences in Italy – in Turin, to boot: one at Palazzo Lascaris on October 28-29, 1983 (ANED 1984) and the other, three years later, on November 21-22, 1986 (ANED 1988). Shortly after the first event, Levi wrote to his friend Hermann on October 31, 1983, “I hope you are satisfied with the Conference. I do not have a great deal of experience with conferences, but my impression is that everything went quite well, without too much rhetoric or too many repetitions. In my opinion, your account and that of Miss [Anna] Bravo were the best. | I hope you are back home safely in Vienna, and I am happy to have seen you again in good health and very active as always” (Letter 57, October 31, 1983).

In the meantime, Levi had retired and written his first true novel, Se non ora quando? (If Not Now, When?), and he recounted the adventure to his friend (Letter 54, January 6, 1982). Langbein, for his part, continued his commitments with schools and committees. His most recent project sprang from the overlapping of these two obligations: major documentary, scientific and bibliographical research on the gas chambers, with the goal of fighting the wave of denialism that was spreading throughout Europe (Letter 53, December 30, 1981). The research turned into a book, Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas. Eine Dokumentation (Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas), edited by the historian and former deportee Eugen Kogon and the prosecutor Adalbert Rückerl(Langbein 1986). Levi also partly contributed to the project, sending his friend a detailed revision of the chapter on the chemical composition of Zyklon B: “I am sure you will understand the reason for my meticulousness: it is because our adversaries are meticulous and do not give up the fight, and when facing them it would not be pleasant to be taken by surprise, or even to have to endure their criticism” (Letter 57, October 31, 1983).

During the final decade, the correspondence between Levi and Langbein became less frequent, and yet the letters also became longer and more personal because, basically, they are concerned with the different ways each of them continued to bear witness. If, for Langbein, his activities in schools had become more important, for Levi, writing was the fulcrum. By then it had become a full-time occupation, even though he confessed to his friend that he was having more and more difficulty understanding and making himself understood by the younger generations: “You have remained loyal and active and continue to visit schools; I must admit that I no longer feel like it. It is becoming increasingly difficult for me to find a common language with young people nowadays. They are (rightly) concerned with completely different matters, mainly unemployment and inadequate schooling. They ask if I am religious—and if not, why—which leaves me at a loss. | I prefer to express myself in writing. A collection of 9 essays will be published a few months from now. I hope it will interest you” (Letter 63, March 28, 1986). It was Levi’s last letter, in German, and it contains a long report of the fortunes (and misfortunes) of his books abroad and a detailed outline of the book he was working on, and for which Langbein himself had been so important: The Drowned and the Saved.

All Letters