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