Alan Rosenberg and Gerald E. Myers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 224. Using traditional Western moral philosophy, it would be difficult not to condemn them. 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. John Roth. Victims would do better psychologically to hate their oppressors and leave the understanding to non-victims: One almost regrets Levi's commitment to his project of understanding the enemy (for his sake, not for ours: as readers we are only enriched by his accomplishment). (199). Sonja Maria Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, eds., Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 177. Despite this concession, Rubinstein rejects Levi's characterization of Rumkowski as a resident of the gray zone. Beyond that, there is the sense that "each one of us (but this time I say 'us' in a . 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. The Drowned and the Saved was Levi's last book; he died after completing the essays that comprise it. Their heads were shaved, their clothing taken and replaced with identical striped shirt and pants that looked similar to pajamas. On the other hand, in choosing to take his own life without revealing to the community the fate that awaited it, without exhorting people to fight back, Czerniakw acted with dignity but without real concern for others.41. On the Grey Zone. Michael Rothberg - Centro Primo Levi New York Primo Levi. Gerhard L. Weinberg, Gray Zones in Raul Hilberg's work, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 75. In his epilogue, Todorov further distinguishes between the teleological and the intersubjective. In this chapter he considers also whether religious belief was useful or comforting, concluding that believers "better resisted the seduction of power [resisted collaborating]" (145) and were less prone to despair. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. Yet, as we have seen with Todorov, it has become common to expand Levi's gray zone to include non-victims. I suffer because of your anguish, and I don't know how I'll survive thiswhere I'll find the strength to do so.21 But Rubinstein does not find this apparent agonizing to be credible: This speech exemplifies Rumkowski's mindset and modus operandi. Read Argumentative Essays On The Drowned And The Saved - Primo Levi and other exceptional papers on every subject and topic college can throw at you. 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. If one passed the Nazis genetic test, one's choices did make a difference. Bystanders also had meaningful choices. 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. Most survivors come from the tiny privileged minority who get more food. 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. The doctor revived her and explained to Muhsfeldt what had happened. Indeed, as we know, many did make such choices. Survivors simplify the past for others to understandstark we/they, friend/enemy, good/evil divisionsbut history is complex. He is the author of Woody Allen's Angst: Philosophical Commentaries on His Serious Films (2013); Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed: Anguish, God and Existentialism (2002); and Rights, Morality, and Faith in the Light of the Holocaust (2005). She memorized the details of their lives and eventually was able to deceive a parish priest into creating duplicates. We who are not in that zone have no right to judge those whose meaningful choices had been taken away by the Nazis. 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. One nature is rationally moral while the other is animalistic and amoral. . The prisoners would find intricate ways of communicating with each other outside of the guards' hearing and at night they would talk whilst crammed by the hundred into their tiny huts. Read the Study Guide for The Drowned and the Saved, Will the Barbarians Ever Arrive? Heroes such as Colonel Okulicki of the Polish Home Army choose to fight and die for principles that usually are abstractions (such as the idea of the Polish nation). Do perpetrators who are not victims belong in the gray zone? The special squads fare no better under a consequentialist approach to ethics. She uses this story to illustrate her contention that Jewish tradition demands of women that they give up their lives rather than submit to rape. They saw what was going on around them and, despite the possible effects of propaganda, they had the capacity to recognize the Nazis actions as evil. But regardless of their actions Jews were condemned. However, as a deontologist, Kant believes moral acts should be motivated by a sense of duty, never by a calculation of self-interest. The moral action par excellence is caring.43. For this reason, Levi insists that we examine the actions of the Sonderkommandos. Rumkowski chose compliance in the hope that he would be able to save some of the victims. Privilege is born and spreads where power is in few hands, and power tolerates a zone where masters and servants diverge and converge. I will argue that Tzvetan Todorov commits this last fundamental error with his claim that all people living in totalitarian societies reside in the gray zone. The rejection of relativism and the defense of ethics are fundamental to the comprehension and proper application of Levi's notion. For example, he tells the story of a Mrs. Tennenbaum, who obtained a pass that allowed the bearer to avoid deportation for three months. Argumentative Essay On The Drowned And The Saved - Primo Levi . 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. Furthermore, Levi states: If I were a judge, even though repressing what hatred I may feel, I would not hesitate to inflict the most severe punishment or even death on the many culprits who still today live undisturbed on German soil or in other countries of suspect hospitality; but I would experience horror if a single innocent were punished for a crime he did not commit.50 Todorov's misinterpretation of Levi makes it possible for others to include non-victims in the gray zone, a mistake that I believe diminishes the value of an otherwise useful distinction and opens the door to a form of moral relativism that I believe Levi would abhor. Are there different kinds of violence? In his recent book Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life, Berel Lang argues that Levi opposes this view. 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. The Question and Answer section for The Drowned and the Saved is a great While they may have traveled there in a special railway car, once they arrived they were Jewish victims no different from the rest. : Scapegoating in the Writings of Coetzee and Primo Levi, View Wikipedia Entries for The Drowned and the Saved. 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. First published in Italy in 1986. To an extent apparently unsurpassed by any other Nazi-appointed Jewish leader, he was the Fhrer of his tiny kingdom for much of his reign, a role he appears at times to have savored.22. 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. Her father urged her to move to Paris, saying: No one will know. This Study Guide consists of . The SS would never have played against other prisoners, as they considered themselves far superior to the average inmate. The fact that they may have had a few more choices and that making those choices saved more prisoners does not change their status any more than the status of the rebelling Sonderkommandos of 1944 would have changed had they somehow miraculously survived the war. "Communicating" (4) deals with the emotional and practical consequences of not being able to understand the German commands of the captors, or the conversation of the mostly German speaking prisoners (Levi was Italian but spoke some German). The Nazis victims did not choose to be victims, and they could not choose to stop being victims. Had they liberated it in 1942 instead of January 1945, Rumkowski might have been credited with saving thousands of lives: What if Joseph Stalin's hopes of a decisive victory in early 1942 had been realized, and, as a result, the ghettos of Vilna, Kovno, d, and perhaps even Warsaw, as well as many others had been liberated in the spring or summer of 1942? Todorov distinguishes between heroic and ordinary virtue. This is not to say that the people saved were those who most deserved to be savedprobably quite the opposite. I will show that certain misuses of the term travel far from Levi's original intention and become part of a relativistic challenge to contemporary ethics. As head of the Judenrat (Jewish Council), Rumkowski chose the utilitarian approach to his dilemma: he hoped that by working with the Nazis, and proving to them that the d ghetto was so productive that it was worth maintaining, he could save as many Jewish lives as possible. 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. In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi argues that it is unfair to judge the victims of genocide using moral tools that are appropriate to normal, everyday life. This memoir goes far beyond a recapitulation of the concentration camp experience. Those who survived were able to remind themselves in small ways every day that they were still human. Not affiliated with Harvard College. 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. The Drowned and the Saved - Preface Summary & Analysis - www.BookRags.com A Jew could choose to commit suicide, or to comply, and those choices did have moral ramifications. There is some evidence to suggest that he bribed Baumgarten to arrange the removal of the sadistic camp commandant Willi Althoff, and to have the Ukrainian guards moved outside the camp fence. Or, Primo Levi'S Ending - Jstor He outlines the coercive conditions that cause people to become so demoralized that they will harm each other just to survive. Once the victims were dead, Sonderkommando members removed and collected all items considered to be of value (including clothing, hair, and gold teeth). 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. . Survival in Auschwitz Chapter 9, The Drowned and the Saved Summary 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.
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