Primo Levi

Biography

by Martina Mengoni, translation by Gail McDowell

Early life, Auschwitz, the 1950s

Primo Levi was born in Turin in 1919, in his family home on Corso Re Umberto, where he lived his whole life long. His high school studies were conducted at the Liceo Classico Massimo d’Azeglio, after which he enrolled in Chemistry at the University of Turin and received his degree in 1941. After Italy surrendered to the Allied forces on September 8, 1943, he joined a group of his best friends who were partisan fighters in the Aosta Valley, but ten days later they were intercepted and captured by the Fascists. Levi, a Jew, was sent first to Fossoli and then to Auschwitz, where he arrived in February 1944 and remained for eleven months. After the concentration camp was liberated by the Russians on January 27, 1945, he began a long journey home across central Europe that lasted nine months, arriving in Turin the following October.

After various work experiences, he was hired at SIVA, a paint factory located in Settimo Torinese, and soon became its managing director, a role he maintained until his retirement.

In 1947, the Turin-based publishing company De Silva published Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man), the story of the months he was imprisoned in Auschwitz. In the meantime, Levi had written and was writing other stories, for the most part science fiction: “I mnemagoghi” (“The Mnemagogs”) and “Maria e il cerchio” (“Maria and the Circle”) were both published in 1948 in L’Italia Socialista; “Fine del Marinese" (“The End of Marinese”) was published in 1949 in Ponte; in 1950, L’Unità published “Turno di notte” (“Night Shift”). But for the most part, during the 1950s everybody seemed to have forgotten about Auschwitz. Then, in 1955, Levi received a new contract for Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man), which was republished in 1958 by Einaudi, with major changes. Meanwhile, Levi had married Lucia Morpurgo and become the father of two children, Lisa and Renzo.

The 1960s

In 1963, Einaudi published La tregua (The Truce), the story of Levi’s peregrination from Auschwitz to Turin, passing by way of Ukraine, White Russia, and Romania. The book recounts both adventures and trauma; it is the story of a Europe that had been destroyed, and of the expedients, the encounters, and his newly found curiosity about the world and other people’s stories, all in an atmosphere of suspension and anticipation. The book featured some of the most memorable characters in Levi’s oeuvre: Leonardo, Cesare, the Greek. The book won the first Premio Campiello.

The late 1950s and the early ’60s saw the beginning of two other crucial experiences in Primo Levi’s life: his interventions in schools as a witness of the deportations, an activity he never interrupted, to the point that he called it “his third job;” and, later, his correspondence with his German readers. Se questo è un uomo was published in West Germany in 1961, entitled Ist das ein Mensch?, in Heinz Riedt’s translation. From that moment on, Levi began receiving letters from German readers, intellectuals, and former deportees, as well as from Germans who tried to justify what had happened.

In the meantime, a medley of very different texts and projects continued to come across his desk: speeches about Auschwitz and his concentration camp experience (which, starting in the 1960s, with the trials in Jerusalem and Frankfurt, finally came to the forefront in international public opinion); poetry, science fiction short stories, and stories about factory work; literary and scientific essays; translations. Many of the books he was to publish during the next two decades were already coming into being and taking the shape of individual stories, sketches, short fictions, which temporarily dissatisfied Levi.

In 1966, Storie naturali (Natural Histories) was published under the pseudonym Damiano Malabaila, above all because Einaudi preferred not to associate these new stories with Levi’s Auschwitz experience. In fact, Storie naturali is book of fantasy short stories (or “fantabiological stories,” as Calvino called them). Many of them feature an enterprising American traveling salesman, Simpson, who proposes futuristic machinery to a chemist-author who is curious and an experimenter. There are household appliances that write poetry and beauty measurers, 3D printers that can clone anything (including humans), and virtual reality simulators that can overwrite memories. But this is just part of the book: there are also gloomy stories of German scientific experiments on human and animal test subjects, tapeworms that compose poems for the humans who host them, chickens that work as censors for a totalitarian bureaucracy, and lastly, a council of demons who gather to launch an animal-human being. The book had some success, and Levi wrote new science fiction stories, which he published in 1971 with the title Vizio di forma (Flaw of Form), this time under his own name. Except for one, they were all new, heretofore unpublished short stories; Simpson has disappeared, and the distressing face of the power of science is even more visible, with new and even greater attention paid to the relationship between technology and the environment, progress and ecology.

The 1970s

1975 saw the release of his most famous collection of short stories, Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table): twenty-one short stories, each named after a different chemical element, starting with “Argon,” the vicissitudes of Levi’s JewishPiedmontese ancestors, and ending with “Carbonio” (“Carbon”), the story of an atom that detaches itself from a rock and wanders throughout the world, across time and space. In between, each story marks a stage of Levi’s life, transfigured into literature, with an array of characters and ideal portraits that have mainly been constructed to contrast with the narrating protagonist. The second-to-last story, “Vanadio” (“Vanadium”), retraces his most unusual German correspondence, the one with his former boss at the laboratory in Auschwitz, the German chemical engineer Ferdinand Meyer, who is named Lothar Müller in the story. The correspondence between Levi and Meyer can be read at this portal, here.

In 1978, Levi published La chiave a stella (The Wrench): the protagonist of these stories, which almost have the unity of a novel without ever truly achieving it, is Libertino Faussone, a specialized worker from Piedmont who travels the world assembling cranes, bridges, and derricks. Faussone is an adventurous man who speaks in dialect and recounts his stories to Levi’s alter ego, with whom he discusses the pleasure of plying a trade and the relationship between thinking and doing, the hands and the intellect, deed and tale, action and words.

The 1980s

In the first half of the 1980s, Levi published two other collections of short stories: Lilìt e altri racconti (Lilith, 1981), a composite book divided into three sections (Present Perfect, Present Indicative, and Future Anterior). The first section is a sequence of stories about Auschwitz, but with a much different tone compared to If This Is a Man, whereas the other two sections return to the science fiction-technological vein of Natural Histories and Flaw of Form. The other book is L’altrui mestiere (Other People’s Trades, 1985), a collection of essays in which Levi addresses topics that have always fascinated him: chemistry, but also sociolinguistics, humor, animals, and ethnography. 1981 was also the year his first personal anthology was released, La ricerca delle radici (The Search for Roots), a selection of excerpts from books that were of fundamental importance to him, each with an introduction and commentary written by Levi. In 1982, Levi’s first and only fictional novel was published: Se non ora, quando? (If Not Now, When?), a partisan adventure story with a Western feel, but set in Eastern Europe. In 1984, his collection of poems Ad ora incerta (published in English in Collected Poems) was released. The title refers to a line from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Levi identified with the sailor – who holds the wedding guests “with his skinny hand” and forces them to listen to his story – ever since his return from Auschwitz, when recounting became a fundamental and obsessive need of his.

During those years, Levi also tried his hand as a translator, from at least four languages, even from the Dutch, with La notte dei girondini (The Night of the Girondins) by Jacob Presser, a book-testimony about the camp at Westerbork that Levi translated into Italian in 1976 for Adelphi. In 1983, Levi published his first literary translation, The Trial by Kafka, which inaugurated Einaudi’s series “Scrittori tradotti da scrittori” (“Authors translated by authors”). Over the next two years, Einaudi published his Italian translations of Lo sguardo da lontano (The View from Afar, 1984) and La via delle maschere (The Way of the Masks, 1985) by Claude Lévi-Strauss. This was not the first time Levi dealt with anthropology in this capacity: in 1979, Einaudi had published his translation of Natural Symbols by Mary Douglas.

His final Book

1986 saw the release of Racconti e saggi (The Mirror Maker) and I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved), the book that could be considered Levi’s bravest and most tormented. Even more than If This Is a Man, it was destined to remain a classic of reflections on Auschwitz, power relations among human beings, coercion, post-traumatic shame, the possibility of resisting the allure of privilege, and the fallacies of memory. If read in reverse, from the end to the beginning, this book also reveals its own origins, more than twenty years before. The final chapter is entitled “Letters from Germans” and, in just a few pages, it tells the story behind some of the correspondence that is published on this website, as well as the fabric of networks and relationships that, through this correspondence, Levi was able to interweave his whole life long.

Primo Levi committed suicide on April 11, 1987.

Bibliographical note

A more extensive biography of Levi can be found on the dedicated page of the International Primo Levi Studies Center of Turin. This site also provides a list of his works and a register of all the translations of his opus. The two-volume Opere complete (Complete Works) by Primo Levi was published by Einaudi, edited by Marco Belpoliti, in 2016; a third volume, published in 2018, contains his conversations and interviews, as well as a series of indices of the three volumes edited by Daniela Muraca and Domenico Scarpa. In 2017, the Album Primo Levi, edited by Domenico Scarpa and Roberta Mori, was published. The book retraces Levi’s biography through photographs and documents, most of which had never been published before.

The most in-depth biographies of Levi were written by Ian Thomson and Carole Angier, both of which were published in 2002.

In 2022, Einaudi published Domenico Scarpa’s Bibliografia di Primo Levi ovvero Il primo Atlante, the first bibliography of Levi that surveys not only all of his writings, interviews, and speeches, but also all the correspondence that has been mentioned and published to date.

Correspondence

by Martina Mengoni, translation by Gail McDowell

Writing to Primo Levi, replying to the Germans

After returning to Turin, Levi wrote about the Germans in If This Is a Man, a book published in the fall of 1947 by a prestigious but small publishing house, and which was read by only a small number of people. The Germans had become the characters of a recent memory, set down in writing for the purpose of bearing witness and as therapy. In the following years, Levi married, had two children and found a steady job at a paint factory, Siva. During the 1950s, his Germans became work colleagues he met in Germany and to whom he revealed his pastat Auschwitz, deliberately and in a provocative spirit. At that point, the Germans were no longer the object of his writing; Levi seems to have dismissed the experience of If This Is a Man and the few short stories he continued to write (even his Lager stories) didn’t seem to work.

The German translator

In 1960, the ranks were joined by Heinz Riedt, an “anomalous German” because of his past and his function: thanks to his translation, the Germans oppressors, the Germans-citizens, the Germans-colleagues, and even the Germans-anomalies were able to become readers of his book. On August 13, 1959, Levi received a letter from East Berlin. It was sent to him by Riedt, who was writing on behalf of the publishing house Fischer, with headquarters in Frankfurt. The editor had just purchased the rights to translate If This Is a Man into German. Riedt was presenting himself as the perfect man for the job: he was the same age as the author, an expert Italianist, a scholar and a translator of Goldoni. Moreover, during the early 1940s, Riedt had managed to avoid being drafted into the Wehrmacht; he moved to Padua to further his studies (one of his professors was the Latinist Concetto Marchesi) and he eventually became affiliated with the city’s partisan militia in 1943. After 1945, he returned to Germany but a true career was precluded him by the stigma of having been a deserter in a war fought on the fatherland. Riedt worked on the margins, translating Italian authors for publishers in the Federal Republic, even though he lived in East Berlin.

First readers

One of the very first readers of Ist das ein Mensch?, which appeared in German bookstores in November 1961, was young Wolfgang Beutin, a social democrat, historian, sociologist and author. In 1961, Beutin was twenty-six years old, the same age as Levi when he wrote If This Is a Man. Beutin immediately wrote to him. By an exceptional coincidence, the author received the letter exactly when he received the first copies of the book. Beutin’s letter is the only German letter reproduced in The Drowned and the Saved which also quotes Levi’s reply. It is dated December 10, 1961 and was written in French because Levi did not feel he mastered German sufficiently: “it is just the letter I was waiting for and hoped to receive, and it made me happy. Why? Because you are young, and because you are German.”

German correspondents, German anthologies

Levi was also interested in contemporary German authors. Between 1961 and 1962, a few months after Ist das ein Mensch? was released, he had already created a network of correspondents in West Germany. It included at least two professional authors, Hans Fröhlich and Albrecht Goes. Hans Fröhlich, the host of a radio program, had reviewed If This Is a Man on his program; Levi called it “the most thorough and friendly review my book has received to date in Germany.” Fröhlich tried to have the chapter “The Greek” from The Truce read on the radio even before Levi had published it in Italian. Already a few months before the publication of Ist das ein Mensch?, an editorial project began which, to a certain extent, anticipated Fischer’s and which also involved Levi. It was conceived, organized and conducted in Vienna and Frankfurt by Hermann Langbein. Born in 1912, Langbein had fought with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War; he was interned in France and was still there when Germany occupied the country; he was then sent to Dachau and ultimately to Auschwitz I. There, he was assigned as a Häftling Schreiber to the German Eduard Wirths, the chief doctor at Auschwitz; he also became one of the leaders of the secret resistance movement inside the camp. At the end of the war, Langbein published an account of his experiences at the concentration camp: Die Stärkeren. Ein Bericht aus Auschwitz und anderen Konzentrationslagern (“The Stronger. A Report from Auschwitz and other Concentration Camps”). In 1954, Langbein was one of the founders of the Internationale Auschwitz Komitee (IA K) and became its Secretary General starting in 1960. On December 13, 1960, Langbein wrote Primo Levi a letter in which he explained one of his first projects as Secretary General: Langbein asked Levi to participate in an anthology, a “buch über Auschwitz” with a chapter from If This Is a Man. The beginning of his relationship with Langbein was decisive: Levi began a long-lasting and regular correspondence of mutual esteem with the Austrian historian. And Menschen in Auschwitz, published in 1972, was a crucial book for Levi. In 1964, another chapter from If This Is a Man, “October 1944,” appeared in a Christmas edition which the Dortmund steelworks Hoesch in Dortmund gave to its managers and employees. In Hitler’s Germany, the major industries had given crucial support to the regime. Now, one of those industries had published a volume of Catholic-liberal inspiration about brotherhood, edited by Goes himself. In an atmosphere calling for inclusion and Christian ecumenicalism, Levi had chosen a chapter which ended with the famous sentence, “If I were God, I would spit Kuhn’s prayer out upon the ground.”

“some forty letters”

In 1963, in two different interviews, Levi announced to Giuseppe Mayda and Luigi Silori that Einaudi intended to publish the letters he had received from his German readers; “some forty letters”, he will say in The Drowned and the Saved. This was a non-news item: the Turin-based publishing company never published the book of German letters. And yet, it actually was a news item, too: already back then, to Levi, the letters from his German readers had an editorial dignity and a dignity of content that were independent of the book which had sparked them. Levi did everything he could to publish those letters. He offered them to Kurt Heinrich Wolff, a German who had become a naturalized American citizen. Like Heinz Riedt, he was an “anomalous German.” A Jew, he had escaped from Germany, sought refuge in Italy during the 1930s and finally emigrated to the United States, where he became a professor at Brandeis University. During the early 1950s, Max Horkheimer invited him to participate in the Gruppenexperimente of the Frankfurt School, which had just reopened after the war’s end. He directed two studies: one on how the German population represented itself after the war; the other on the denazification of Germany. These studies, mimeographed in the United States, were never published. Ten years later, in 1963, Wolff received a Fulbright Scholarship in Italy; Levi came into contact with him during those months, probably through his sister Anna Maria and the sociologist Franco Ferrarotti. This is why Levi was willing to entrust his letters from the Germans to him. Just like the publication of a book, its non-publication, too, can change the life and opus of an author. In many later interviews, Levi described If This Is a Man like a memory-prosthesis: his written-down memories tended to superimpose themselves over his remembered memories, and, at the same time, they were objects which had detached themselves from their owner. The non-publication of the ‘letters from Germans’ had the opposite effect: over the course of the years, the correspondence remained closed in its folder, where it continued to exercise its interrogative role, regularly and persistently, and Levi was unable to objectify its meaning through his writing.

The network

In 1965, the editorial projects to publish the letters fell through but what might be Levi’s most important German correspondence had yet to begin. One year later, toward the end of 1966, Levi began to correspond with Hety Schmitt-Maass, a woman his own age; she was a librarian, a journalist in Wiesbaden and, at the time, the councilor for Culture for the State of Hesse. As a child, Hety had been excluded from the state-run schools because of her father’s anti-Nazi position. At a young age, she married a chemist who worked at I.G. Farben, but they later divorced. Levi portraits her in the last chapter of The Drowned and the Saved, titled in fact Letters to Germans:

My “HS” file is fatter than the one where I keep all the other “letters from Germans.” Our correspondence went on for sixteen years, from October 1966 to November 1982. It contains, in addition to about fifty of her letters (which are often four or five pages long) and my replies, carbon copies of an at least equal number of letters that she wrote to her children, her friends, other writers, publishers, local government offices, newspapers or magazines, of which she thought it was important to send me a copy, plus newspaper clippings and book reviews. Some of her letters were “circulars”: half of the page is a photocopy that is the same for various correspondents, the rest, blank, is filled in by hand with more personal news or questions. Hety wrote to me in German and did not know Italian. At first I answered her in French, then I realized it was hard for her to understand, and for a long time I wrote to her in English. Later, with her amused consent, I wrote to her in my shaky German, in duplicate. She would send one copy back to me, with her “reasoned” corrections. We met only twice: at her house, during a quick business trip I took to Germany, and in Turin, during an equally hurried vacation of hers. The meetings were not important: the letters matter much more. (CW, III, 2555-2556)

There are one hundred and ten letters in all, written in four languages over a span of fourteen years. Of the two, Hety was without a doubt the more loquacious letter-writer but Levi also proved to be particularly diligent, dynamic and eager for information. His curiosity was fed by the great quantity of German material Schmitt-Maass provided him over the years. As he himself remembered, there were articles, reviews, reading recommendations, but above all, there were contacts and exchanges with other correspondents which Hety asked Levi to comment on and sometimes participate in. Hety had written an article for a local newspaper which she promptly sent to Levi. It was a book review and one of the books it dealt with was Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne. Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten (“Beyond Guilt and Atonement: Attempts to Come to Terms With by One who was Overcome”) by Jean Améry, which would be translated into Italian only after Levi’s death and entitled Intellettuale ad Auschwitz (“An intellectual in Auschwitz”). Hety also wrote to Améry and sent him a copy of her article, as well. Jean Améry, an Austrian, was born in 1912 and his real name was Hans Mayer. After the Anschluss, young Hans, whose family was Jewish, was forced to flee to Belgium, where he was obliged to change his name. Hans-Jean joined the Belgian resistance but was captured by the Gestapo, tortured and sent first to Auschwitz and then later to Buchenwald and to Bergen-Belsen. After being liberated, he settled in Belgium, where he became a journalist, author and philosopher. He didn’t write a single word about Auschwitz until 1964; then, some of his stories about the Lager were aired on the radio and became very popular. Those radio programs turned into the book, which was published in Germany two years later. After reading Hety’s review, Levi immediately asked her for a copy of Améry’s book, which Hety sent him. Within two months of reading Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, Levi contacted Jean Améry personally [link]. Until today we had ignored its existence, but back in early 1967, Primo Levi, Hety Schmitt-Maass and Jean Améry each corresponded independently with the other two.

The former chief of Buna Laboratory: Ferdinand Meyer

Almost immediately, at the beginning of their correspondence, Levi had asked Schmitt-Maass if it would be possible to track down the German engineering technicians who had worked in the polymerization section at the Buna Works at Auschwitz III - Monowitz; one of them was Doktor Ingenieur Meyer. Hety managed to locate him and she included Primo Levi’s address in the letter she wrote to him. The story of “finding” a German chemist who, like Levi, had worked in the laboratory at Buna might sound familiar: Levi recounted it in “Vanadium,” the penultimate chapter of The Periodic Table. The correspondence between Primo Levi and Ferdinand Meyer can be considered in two ways: we can investigate the relationship through the actual facts — as reported in the letters — and the events he later recounted in “Vanadium.” As an alternative, we can concentrate only on the correspondence, leaving “Vanadium” aside, and analyze the facts as they occurred in 1967, or rather ‘as though’ “Vanadium” didn’t exist. Both these analyses are essential and legitimate, as long as they are kept separate. On March 2, 1967, Meyer wrote to Levi. In a certain sense, Meyer’s letter can be considered the first letter Levi received from a German who actually was “involved” and, furthermore, whom he had met at Auschwitz “on the other side.” It was the feedback he had been waiting for ever since Heinz Riedt had written to him announcing that he had begun to translate If This Is a Man into German.

Note

Text adapted from Martina Mengoni, Primo Levi e i tedeschi - Primo Levi and the Germans, Einaudi 2017, translated by Gail McDowell.

All Letters

Letters by Primo Levi

002. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, December 17, 1960

004. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, February 11, 1961

005. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, April 19, 1961

008. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, October 1, 1961

011. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, December 7, 1961

014. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, January 13, 1962

016. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, August 25, 1962

017. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, November 2, 1963

018. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, July 15, 1964

019. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, February 18, 1965

022. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, December 14, 1969

024. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, January 15, 1970

025. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, July 15, 1970

027. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, April 11, 1972

029. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, April 30, 1972

032. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, August 24, 1972

034. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, September 7, 1972

036. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, November 19, 1972

039. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, January 14, 1974

041. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, February 10, 1974

042. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, February 15, 1974

044. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, April 29, 1974

048. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, September 28, 1974

051. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, April 10, 1976

052. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, March 3, 1979

054. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, January 6, 1982

056. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, October 26, [1983]

057. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, October 31, 1983

058. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, November 3, 1983

060. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, November 24, 1983

063. Primo Levi to Hermann Langbein, March 28, 1986

Letters to Primo Levi

001. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, December 13, 1960

003. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, February 6, 1961

006. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, August 28, 1961

007. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, September 28, 1961

009. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, October 24, 1961

010. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, December 5, 1961

012. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, December 13, 1961

013. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, January 8, 1962

015. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, February 8, 1962

020. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, March 5, 1965

021. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, December 9, 1969

023. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, January 3, 1970

026. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, July 23, 1970

028. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, April 22, 1972

030. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, May 10, 1972

031. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, August 11, 1972

033. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, September 1, 1972

035. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, November 8, 1972

037. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, December 1, 1972

038. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, December 28, 1972

040. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, February 6, 1974

043. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, February 21, 1974

045. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, May 24, 1974

046. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, July 26, 1974

047. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, September 17, 1974

049. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, October 4, 1974

050. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, March 18, 1976

053. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, December 30, 1981

055. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, October 20, 1983

059. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, November 11, 1983

061. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, February 9, 1985

062. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, March 22, 1986

064. Hermann Langbein to Primo Levi, May 10, 1986