Since Levi was one of those saved, he is "in permanent search of a justification . "The Drowned and the Saved Summary". Under Bentham's Utilitarian Principle, one should act to bring the greatest amount of pleasure to the greatest number of people while inflicting the least amount of harm to the least number of people. According to this story a 16-year-old girl miraculously survived a gassing and was found alive in the gas chamber under a pile of corpses. He states that for Levi, just as there is an objective line between good and evil, there exists the same status for an area between the two.5 He explains Levi's notion of the gray zone by first clarifying the ways in which the term is most often misunderstood: The gray zone is NOT reserved for ethical judgments in which it is difficult to decide whether good or evil dominates.6 The purpose of the gray zone is not to label so-called hard cases. While Levi acknowledges that these exist, not all hard cases are in the gray zone and not all moral situations in the gray zone are hard cases.7. Berel Lang, Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 125. Levi emphasizes that the tendency to think in binary terms--good/evil, right/wrong--overlooks important characteristics of human behavior, and dangerously oversimplifies: " . It degrades its victims and makes them similar to itself, because it needs both great and small complicities. Horowitz tells us that when Heller's memoirs appeared in the 1990s, she was condemned by many in the Jewish community and caught in a gender-specific double-bind: if Heller did not love Jan then she prostituted herself; if she did love him, then she consorted with the enemy., Heller's aunt also suffered sexual violationshe was raped by a German soldierbut she chose to keep it secret from all but a few close relatives. She asserts that Rumkowski acted as the Fhrer of d, noting that he went so far as to mint coins with his image on them.14, In his essay Gray into Black: The Case of Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski, Richard Rubinstein presents a scathing critique of Levi's decision to place Rumkowski in the gray zone. From this perspective, perhaps Hitler was the only German who was not in the gray zone.47, In his second mention of the gray zone, Todorov praises Levi's description of life in the camps as an accomplishment unparalleled in modern literature. He admires Levi's rejection of Manicheanism whether in reference to groups (Germans, the Jews, the kapos, the members of the Sonderkommandos) or individuals. Levi tells us that a certain Hans Biebow, the German chief administrator of the ghetto . Even with the show of force the Germans would display, they often lacked the necessary personnel in camps to keep control of the sheer number of prisoners kept there. 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. Individual motivations are many, and collaborators may be judged only by those who have resisted such coercion. when writing The Drowned and the Saved, he was moved to admit that "this man's solitary death, this man's death which had been reserved for him, will bring him glory, not infamy." 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. In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi does not explicitly discuss the conditions faced by women in the camps. Despite some of his comments about Muhsfeldt, I believe Levi's answer must be negative because of the importance of free will. When those pleas were denied, he returned to his office and committed suicide, leaving a note that said: I can no longer bear all this. Again, my reading of Levi places only victims in the gray zone. For it assigns moral standing to a position that had been otherwise pushed aside in a way that denied any means of judging it in ethical terms and which is indeed no less categorical than the two more commonly recognized alternatives.11. One nature is rationally moral while the other is animalistic and amoral. Kant posits that a moral act first requires good will (similar to good intentions). In his landmark book The Drowned and the Saved (first published in 1986), Primo Levi introduced the notion of a moral "gray zone." The author of this essay re-examines Levi's use of the term. The Nazis victims did not choose to be victims, and they could not choose to stop being victims. 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. Indeed, a deontologist would argue that the uprising did not cleanse the rebels of the moral stain from the thousands of murders in which they were already complicit. Using these false papers, the Melsons were able to survive the war. Using lies and coercion they led thousands of victims to a horrible death. While I would agree that circumstances varied in the zones of German domination and some bystandersfamilies with young children to protect, for examplecould not have been expected to act heroically, I would still contend that their circumstances were not sufficiently dire to justify their inclusion in Levi's gray zone. The gray zone is NOT reserved for what Lang calls suspended judgmentsthose made through the lens of moral hindsight. Some argue that we have no right to judge the actions of people who could not have known what we know today. Yes, they lived under a totalitarian government that violated their rights and restricted their choices. The camps of Starachowice were very much like those described by Levi. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. As Rubinstein agrees that Rumkowski was a victim, the primary disagreement between Levi and Rubinstein may be over the question of whether that victimhood is sufficient to place someone outside our moral jurisdiction. For example, he seemingly agrees with Levi's assessment of the members of the Sonderkommandos, who also compromised morality for the sake of short-term survival. The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi - Preface summary and analysis. "Letters from Germans" summarizes his correspondence with Germans who read his earlier books. Ethics commonly distinguishes between deontologists and consequentialists. Deontologists, among them Immanuel Kant and the twentieth-century philosopher W.D. 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. Privilege is born and spreads where power is in few hands, and power tolerates a zone where masters and servants diverge and converge. . " The photo was taken surreptitiously from Crematorium V. USHMM, courtesy Pastwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Owicimiu. I would argue that it is appropriate to expand Levi's zone beyond Auschwitz so long as its population is made up only of victims. Thus, Rumkowski created in the ghetto a caricature of the totalitarian German state.46 Ignoring Levi's distinction between victims and perpetrators, between those who had viable choices and those whose meaningful choices had been destroyed, Todorov sees the gray zone as permeating the entire totalitarian German state: everyone had his or her freedom limited by people higher up in the hierarchy. 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. In the anthology Ethics After the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses, both David Hirsch and David Patterson attack Todorov's positionespecially his refusal to view perpetrators as moral monsters simply because they lived in a totalitarian society. The individual was whittled away and soon the part of every man that was a human was taken away as well. These events were beyond the control of the Jewish prisoners and, probably, unknown to most of them. In the concentration camp, says Levi, it was usually "the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the 'gray zone,' the spies" who survived ["the saved"] while the others did not ["the drowned"] (82). I believe that the most meaningful way to interpret Levi's gray zone, the way that leads to the greatest moral insight, requires that the term be limited to those who truly were victims. Do perpetrators who are not victims belong in the gray zone? 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. For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription. While Horowitz does not examine the conditions that prisoners faced in the camps, she does, in my view, legitimately expand the gray zone to include female victims in ways that further our understanding of Levi's primary moral concerns. Levi's intent in introducing his notion of the gray zone is to say that it is, while Rubinstein argues that it is not. For instance: Levi's innocuous Kapo is replaced by one who beats not as incentive, warning, or punishment, but simply to hurt and humiliate. Ross, hold that the moral worth of an act is intrinsic to the act itself, while consequentialists, including Utilitarians Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, believe that the moral worth of an act lies primarily in its consequences. thissection. To say that Muhsfeldt, for that brief instant, was at the gray zone's extreme boundary does not mean that perpetrators and bystanders deserve the same moral consideration and leniency that Levi demands for those who were condemned to live in horrific conditions as they awaited their seemingly inevitable deaths. In this chapter Levi also discusses why inmates did not commit suicide during their incarceration:" . His invocation of the gray zone is meant to insulate those victims from ordinary moral judgments, since it is unfair to apply traditional standards to people whose choices were so limited. Clearly, Jews and members of other groups chosen for extermination (e.g., Roma) must be included. 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 ). The corpses were then taken to the crematoria to be burned. Rubinstein simply does not accept that Rumkowski's will was genuinely good no matter how much suffering he claimed to have endured. It seems to me that a defender of Levi could respond to Rubinstein by arguing that Levi did not attempt to justify or excuse Rumkowski. everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Drowned and the Saved. In the eyes of the Nazis, nothing a Jew could do would stop him or her from being a Jew, and thereby slated for inevitable destruction. 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. However, Lang insists, and I agree, that Levi emphatically does NOT include perpetrators in the gray zone. 99, 121, 155), his focus is not on issues of gender. For example, he tells the story of a Mrs. Tennenbaum, who obtained a pass that allowed the bearer to avoid deportation for three months. I agree that we do need more ways of speaking with precision about regions of collaboration and complicity during World War II.57 However, with Levi and Lang, I oppose moral determinismthe belief that in the contemporary world almost no one can be held completely responsible for his or her acts, and that the job of ethics, in the face of post-modern relativism, is to understand why people commit acts of immorality without condemning them for doing so. Privilege defends and protects privilege. One may absolve those who are heavily coerced and minimally guilty: functionaries who suffer with the masses but get an extra (read more from the Chapter 2, The Gray Zone Summary), Get The Drowned and the Saved from Amazon.com. For example, in her memoir Strange and Unexpected Love, Fanya Heller describes her relationship as a teenager with a uniformed Ukrainian with the right to grant or take her life. As the repeated urging of her parents to be nice to Jan reminds us, love was a viable currency in the genocidal economy.33 While Heller suggests that her relationship was uncoerced and that she and Jan were able to create their own private and contained world, removed from the horrors outside of it, there was no chance that the affair would continue after the war, much less that she and Jan would marry. Sometimes villagers would feel sorry for the prisoners and tell them how the war was progressing. Famously, in his speech Give Me Your Children, Rumkowski begged the Jews of the d ghetto to comply with a German order to hand over their children aged 10 and under in order to save as many adults as possible.13, Hannah Arendt attacked Rumkowski as a traitor and believed that, had he lived, he should have been put on trial as though he were a Nazi war criminal. Alan Rosenberg and Gerald E. Myers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 224. "Useless Violence" (5) gives examples of how the Nazis tormented their prisoners with "stupid and symbolic violence.". He reassures us that morality survived the evil of the Holocaust: Morality cannot disappear without a radical mutation of the human species. In other words, intersubjective morality is intrinsic to human nature. She memorized the details of their lives and eventually was able to deceive a parish priest into creating duplicates. He acknowledges that, using consequentialist tactics of sacrificing the weak and powerless (e.g., children) in order to save the maximum number, Rumkowski did in fact save more lives than he would have if he had instead followed the path of Czerniakw. Order our The Drowned and the Saved Study Guide, teaching or studying The Drowned and the Saved. In the latter film, a female collaborator Francoise Hemmerle is portrayed as evil, while her male counterpart, Armand Zuchner, is described simply as an idiot. Horowitz contends that this demonization of female collaborators is widespread and gender-based. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), 119. 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. In Kant's view, one should do one's duty no matter the consequences. Given his belief that humanity's moral nature is immutable, and that many people chose to display ordinary virtue and act intersubjectively even in the camps, he can have little use for Levi's notion of the gray zone. The Drowned and the Saved, however, was written 40 years later and is the work of memory and reflection not only on the original events, but also on how the world has dealt with the Holocaust in the intervening years. Not affiliated with Harvard College. This is not to say that the people saved were those who most deserved to be savedprobably quite the opposite. Levi also describes the additional suffering of those who were cut off from all communication with friends and family. Toggle navigation . will review the submission and either publish your submission or providefeedback. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss thenovel. While it is certainly possible to disagree with Melson's use of the concept of the gray zone, it is worth considering. Lang uses the following quotation to demonstrate Levi's staunch refusal to identify himself with perpetrators such as the infamous Eric Muhsfeldt: I do not know whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. Levi wonders about the nature of these men and considers whether their "survival of the fittest" mentality is the natural reaction to being imprisoned in a death camp where they might be killed at any moment. Primo Levi has been well known in Italy for many years. dition the "gray zone." A zone where there exist gray, ambiguous persons who, "contaminated by their oppressors, unconsciously strove to identify . 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. 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. 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. Using traditional Western moral philosophy, it would be difficult not to condemn them. Some might argue that we should not allow Primo Levi to own the term gray zone. The gray zone is NOT reserved for good people who lapse into evil or for evil people who try to redeem themselves through an act of goodness. At the camps, prisoners were not permitted to communicate with those on the outside, although sometimes they did, when their particular work detail was working outside the camps, in villages nearby. Here Todorov allies himself with Kant's deontological approach, essentially re-stating Kant's second formulation of the Categorical Imperative. They take Levi's willingness to include Muhsfeldt at the extreme boundary of the gray zone (in his moment of hesitation in deciding whether to kill the girl) as license to exponentially expand the gray zone into areas that Levi does not mention. Our moral yardstick had changed [while in the camps]" (75). However, as a deontologist, Kant believes moral acts should be motivated by a sense of duty, never by a calculation of self-interest. 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). Unable to pay the fee, Melson's mother tricked them into showing her their papers. Print Word PDF This section contains 488 words Read the Study Guide for The Drowned and the Saved, Will the Barbarians Ever Arrive? In other words, Levi is making a normative argument against the right to judge, not an ontological claim about the possibilities of moral action. It is instrumental in nature and judged solely by its result. The prisoners were to an equal degree victims. In my view, what is at stake here is the possibility of ethics in a world misconstrued as a universal gray zone. The Drowned and the Saved Irony These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. It existed before he used it, and is useful in distinguishing between the types of behavior engaged in by members of various groups within Nazi Germany. Part of my disagreement with Petropoulos and Roth returns us to Levi's discussion of SS-man Eric Muhsfeldt. 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. Fundamental to his purpose is the fear that what happened once can happen (and in some respects, has happened) again. 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.

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