the drowned and the saved the gray zone summary

But the members of the SS were there voluntarily; they chose to engage in atrocities. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 12. 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. . Despite some of his comments about Muhsfeldt, I believe Levi's answer must be negative because of the importance of free will. Even though his first book Se questo un uomo -published in English as Survival in Auschwitz -did not sell well when first published by De Silva in 1947 (2,500 copies published, of which 600 remained unsold and were eventually destroyed by the 1966 flood in Florence), it . Yet, in his final work, The Drowned and the Saved, Levi painted a radically different picture of the Holocaust. However, Lang insists, and I agree, that Levi emphatically does NOT include perpetrators in the gray zone. For this reason, Levi insists that we examine the actions of the Sonderkommandos. thissection. Given an apparent choice between life and death, a person cannot be blamed for choosing life.31 While many moralistsKantians in particularmight disagree with this claim, it is clear that Melson's argument begins with Levi's original notion and attempts to expand it to Jews living on false papers. In her next section, Horowitz compares the portrayal of female collaborators to that of men in Marcel Ophuls's films The Sorrow and the Pity and Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie. But regardless of their actions Jews were condemned. For instance: Levi's innocuous Kapo is replaced by one who beats not as incentive, warning, or punishment, but simply to hurt and humiliate. Non-victims such as Muhsfeldt had moral responsibility and deserved to be prosecuted for their actions. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 1, The Memory of the Offense Summary & Analysis Primo Levi This Study Guide consists of approximately 34 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Drowned and the Saved. All of these unusual conditions, together with the fact that no selection took place when the prisoners were finally transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau in July 1944, meant that a much larger number of prisoners survived here than in other such camps. This means the act must be performed out of a sense of duty as opposed to one's own inclinations. Gerhard L. Weinberg, Gray Zones in Raul Hilberg's work, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 75. . Themes Style Quotes Topics for Discussion. 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. In his epilogue, Todorov further distinguishes between the teleological and the intersubjective. Throughout the book, Levi returns to the motif of the Gray Zone, which was occupied by those prisoners who worked for the Nazis and assisted them in keeping the other prisoners in line. Levi identifies the common impulse to tell the story of "events that for good or evil have marked [one's] entire existence" (149). The doctor revived her and explained to Muhsfeldt what had happened. He is careful to make clear from the outset that unusual external events contributed to the large number of survivors. Each man imprisoned alongside Levi will remember his experience a little differently, and although there will be universal truths and memories that are substantiated by a number of people, as time passes, memories can become less sharp and less defined. Todorov distinguishes between heroic and ordinary virtue. Some historians believe that Levi committed suicide, overwhelmed by a penetrating sense of guilt at having survived an experience that killed so many. 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. The Nazis were not trying to coerce their victims into any form of action. Indeed, as we know, many did make such choices. Levi postulates that the Nazi concentration camp system resulted in a massive "biological and social experiment." . Despite this concession, Rubinstein rejects Levi's characterization of Rumkowski as a resident of the gray zone. Lang explains this point first by demonstrating that, as I argued earlier, Levi rejects Kant's Categorical Imperative: Kant's critics have argued that neither life nor ethics is as simple as he implies, and Levi is in effect agreeing with this. David Patterson, Nazis, Philosophers, and the Response to the Scandal of Heidegger, in Roth, Ethics, 119. it draws from a suspect source and must be protected against itself" (34). Our moral yardstick had changed [while in the camps]" (75). This condition did not apply to perpetrators or bystanders. Using lies and coercion they led thousands of victims to a horrible death. This is not the same as the Golden Rule, which states that one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.2 The Golden Rule suggests that we are motivated to treat others well by self-interestthat is, by the desire to be treated well ourselves. In certain ways, this distinction mimics the distinction between the consequentialist and the deontologist. Only the drowned could know the totality of the concentration camp experience, but they cannot testify; hence, the saved must do their best to render it. Robert Melson's Choiceless Choices: Surviving on False Papers on the Aryan Side also usefully expands Levi's original concept of the gray zone, applying it to Jews living on false papers. Melson describes the experiences of his own parents as they managed to obtain falsified identity papers allowing them to evade the Nazis throughout the war. I do not believe so. He concludes that Levi's desperate attempt to understand the perpetrators led to his suicide. John Roth. Yet, they viewed the members of the Sonderkommandos as colleagues, as accomplices in their horrific crimes, fellow murderers. The woman's guardian angel discovers that she once gave a beggar a small onion, and this one tiny act of kindness is enough to rescue her from Hell. The Gray Zone; a difficult moral location inhabited by prisoners who worked for the Nazis. 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. Is Browning's discussion an appropriate use of Levi's gray zone? Melson describes his parents feelings of guilt at their inability to save his maternal grandparents from death in the ghetto; after the war, his mother suffered from depression and required electroshock treatments to deal with her guilt. Whom does Levi mean to include within the gray zone's boundaries? However, as I have argued, Levi does not intend to permanently include perpetrators in the gray zone. Do perpetrators who are not victims belong in the gray zone? 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. How should we judge the moral culpability of the members of these special squads? Rumkowski chose compliance in the hope that he would be able to save some of the victims. because of the constant imminence of death there was no time to concentrate on the idea of death" (76). 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. In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi titles his second chapter The Gray Zone. Here he discusses what he calls National Socialism's most demonic crime: the attempt to shift onto othersspecifically the victimsthe burden of guilt, so that they were deprived of even the solace of innocence.1 He is referring here specifically to the Sonderkommandosthe special squads chosen by the SS at Auschwitz to perform horrendous tasks. In my view, perpetrators and bystanders did not face extenuating circumstances sufficient to justify their inclusion in Levi's gray zone. I agree that we need more precise ways to speak about areas of collaboration and complicity during World War II. In the entire book, he mentions it only twice. He has also written numerous essays on issues in aesthetics, ethics, Holocaust studies, social philosophy, and metaphysics. Death and destruction were the only absolutes in this moral universe. After giving brief historical accounts of Jewish cooperation with rulers and of Rumkowski's specific actions, Rubinstein rejects Gandhi and Arendt's claim that had Jews simply refused to cooperate in any way with the Nazis, many fewer would have been killed. 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. Summary In a seminal 1986 essay, Primo Levi coined the term the "Grey Zone" to describe the morally ambiguous world inside Auschwitz concentration camp, where the clear-cut victim/perpetrator binary broke down. Her father urged her to move to Paris, saying: No one will know. Yet, he argues, his parents feelings of guilt and shame should not be confused with moral blame for their behavior. Sometimes villagers would feel sorry for the prisoners and tell them how the war was progressing. Hirsch asks, Would Todorov wish to argue that the social regimen (if it can be called that) created by the Germans throughout the Konzentrationslager system is what he would consider a normal social order?51 Patterson goes much further, claiming that good and evilin the eyes of Arendt and Todorov, as well as the Nazisare matters either of cultural convention for the weak or of a will to power for the strong. With regards to the premises of their thinking, Arendt and Todorov are much closer to the Nazis than they are to the Jews.52 While I reject such hyperbole as inflammatory, I do agree with Hirsch and Patterson that Todorov's claim that the entire German population could be located in the gray zone is a misuse of Levi's terma misuse that undermines our ability to properly assign moral responsibility. Some scholars argue against this interpretation of Kant, claiming that he does not intend the Categorical Imperative to apply when dealing with agents of an illegitimate government such as that imposed by the Nazis.3 I find these arguments intriguing, but in the end I reject this interpretationas do, I believe, most scholars of Kant. Read the Study Guide for The Drowned and the Saved The Drowned and the Saved essays are academic essays for citation. suicide is an act of man and not of the animal . The Drowned and the Saved presents a thematic treatment of the Holocaust, revealing the how it is remembered, forgotten, and stereotyped by surviving victims, the perpetrators, and subsequent generations. Here Todorov allies himself with Kant's deontological approach, essentially re-stating Kant's second formulation of the Categorical Imperative. . First, as Levi makes clear, even full-time residents of the gray zone such as Rumkowski are morally guilty; we can and we should see that. One of the key things that was done to the prisoners was completely dehumanizing them. Indeed, the last lines of The Drowned and the Saved make Levi's position on this issue explicit: Let it be clear that to a greater or lesser degree all [perpetrators] were responsible, but it must be just as clear that behind their responsibility stands that great majority of Germans who accepted in the beginning, out of mental laziness, myopic calculation, stupidity, and national pride the beautiful words of Corporal Hitler, followed him as long as luck and the lack of scruples favored him, were swept away by his ruin, afflicted by deaths, misery, and remorse, and rehabilitated a few years later as the result of an unprincipled political game.55. While there is no question that Wilczek used his power to gain advantages for himself and for members of his family, Browning points out that he also used his influence with a factory manager named Kurt Otto Baumgarten in ways that benefitted the entire community. This is not to say that the people saved were those who most deserved to be savedprobably quite the opposite. Todorov presents himself as an admirer of Primo Levi, and in this book he refers to or quotes from Levi on forty-six of his two hundred and ninety-six pages. Using these false papers, the Melsons were able to survive the war. For example, is the random beating of a prisoner by a guard the same as the beating of a fellow prisoner by a starving and dying man who wants his last piece of bread? 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. 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. Rubinstein maintains that Levi saw all people as centaurstorn between two natures. . Within a week, he disappears as some prisoner in the Work Office switches his . Browning singles out Jeremiah Wilczek, a former gangster who connived his way into a leadership position in the Lagerrat (camp council) and Lagerpolizei (camp police). Each individual is so complex that there is no point in trying to foresee his behavior, all the more in extreme situations; nor is it possible to foresee one's own behavior" (60). . This memoir goes far beyond a recapitulation of the concentration camp experience. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 6, The Intellectual in Auschwitz Summary & Analysis. Rubinstein simply does not accept that Rumkowski's will was genuinely good no matter how much suffering he claimed to have endured. 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. "Coming out of the darkness, one suffered because of the reacquired consciousness of having been diminished . 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. While Levi tells us that Muhsfeldt was executed after the war, and contends that this execution was justified, he does suggest that Muhsfeldt's hesitationno matter how momentarywas morally significant. The situation of the victims was so constrained that they truly reside in the gray zone, a place too horrific to allow for the use of the usual ethical procedures for evaluating moral culpability. Again, my reading of Levi places only victims in the gray zone. He describes situations in which inmates chose to sacrifice themselves to save others, as well as small acts of kindness that kept others going even when it would have been easier to be selfish. 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. This is a problem when it comes to painting a broad picture of something that has happened to a large group of people. Primo Levi. 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. Heller's parents suggest that she, too, should keep quiet. In this chapter Levi also discusses why inmates did not commit suicide during their incarceration:" . Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth, Prologue: The Gray Zones of the Holocaust, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, xviii. Their heads were shaved, their clothing taken and replaced with identical striped shirt and pants that looked similar to pajamas. His . Bystanders also had meaningful choices. 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. Todorov dismisses Primo Levi's disgust with his own acts of selfishness in the camp as a form of survivors guilt. In my view, what is at stake here is the possibility of ethics in a world misconstrued as a universal gray zone. Important as all these topics may be, I argue that to fold them into Levi's notion of the gray zone dilutes the moral force of his position. There are various ways in which they were able to do this, not least, starving them and working them to the point of exhaustion. In that story, an evil old woman dies and goes to Hell. Berel Lang, Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 125. In his book The Question of German Guilt, first published in German in 1947 and in English-language translation in 1948, Karl Jaspers suggests a framework for evaluating German responsibility. 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. The next subject that he introduces is the way in which the Nazis broke the will of the prisoners. The Nazis victims did not choose to be victims, and they could not choose to stop being victims. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), 119. Levi details how prisoners learned new ways of communication, especially between those who did not share a common language. Even more important, the camps remained under factory management throughout their existence. He survived the experience, probably in part because he was a trained chemist and as such, useful to the Nazis. While these analyses are admittedly simplistic, they are sufficient to indicate my point that the acts of the Sonderkommandos would be difficult to justify using traditional moral theories. He discusses some of the ways in which the expression has been misappropriated and misunderstoodand why this matters. This violates the second formulation of the Categorical Imperative, which requires that we always treat others as ends in themselves and never as means (to survival, in this instance). Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team, http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/rumkowski.html (accessed March 16, 2016). They therefore used prisoners to police other prisoners; these men would receive more rations and sometimes access to privileges. Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 299. Yet, as we have seen with Todorov, it has become common to expand Levi's gray zone to include non-victims. 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). 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. It is as objective and real as its two principled and more commonly recognized alternatives. 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 ). Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. This Study Guide consists of approximately 34 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Drowned and the Saved. Sander H. Lee is Professor of Philosophy at Keene State College in New Hampshire. It seems to me that Levi views the Hobbesian world of the Lager as so insane, so far removed from the niceties of everyday reality, that we do not have the moral authority to judge the actions of its victims. It degrades its victims and makes them similar to itself, because it needs both great and small complicities. SS ritual dehumanizes newcomers and veterans treat them as competitors. Once the victims were dead, Sonderkommando members removed and collected all items considered to be of value (including clothing, hair, and gold teeth). We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make yourown. The text of the speech is available at http://www.datasync.com/~davidg59/rumkowsk.html (accessed May , 2016). The point of the Rising was to make a statement to the world, to die for something noble: To the hero, death has more value than life. Levi claims that only those willing to engage in the most selfish actions survived while the most moral people died: The saved of the Lager were not the best, those predestined to do good, the bearers of a message: what I [saw] and lived through proved the exact contrary. The teleological action, like the consequentialist action, is taken to accomplish a purpose. She argues, as did Gandhi, that had Jewish leaders simply refused to cooperate with the Nazis, many fewer Jews would have been killed: after all the Nazis did not have enough men to drag every Jew from his or her home to the camps. Using bribery and payoffs (including the extortion of sexual favors from female prisoners), Wilczek became a Jewish Fhrer comparable to, and, some would say, even more immoral than Chaim Rumkowski. The photo was taken surreptitiously from Crematorium V. USHMM, courtesy Pastwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Owicimiu. The average life expectancy of Sonderkommando members was approximately three months. In all of these respects, there is relevance for those who work with individuals who are seriously ill or disabled, and in a larger sense, the book forces consideration of the many and ongoing instances of man's inhumanity to man. 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).
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