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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
66 of 68 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Thoughtful, intelligent, meaningful, and universal.,
By
This review is from: The Drowned and the Saved (Paperback)
"The Drowned and the Saved" is the final book of Primo Levi (1919-1987), a Jewish-Italian chemist who survived the death camp of Auschwitz, and turned to authorship in his later years. This book is a group of a half-dozen related essays, each exploring a specific aspect of Levi's view of the Holocaust's causes and effects.He begins with the concept of "good faith", wondering whether believing a lie excuses it. He notes that oppressors lie to save themselves from believing they are evil, and victims lie to save themselves from believing they suffer. He explores the moral zone between black and white, noting that anybody can be a tough killer or a foolish victim: we are all tyrants and victims in our own way. He examines survivor's guilt, and reflects on the roles of luck versus blessing in life, and discusses the ways humans need communication to survive, including the way victims bend language to disguise their intentions, and tyrants twist it to cause confusion among their victims. He tries to distinguish between rationalized evil and collective madness. He believes the spirit and mind can be injured just as the body can, and wonders how a person's perspective plays a role in their survival and psychological health. He describes the various stereotypes people hold when they imagine the stories of those who lived through WWII, e.g., the romantic hero, the evil Nazi, the prisoner who always plots escape, and so on, but explains why they are rough and inaccurate. Each chapter is like a conversation with an intelligent and qualified author. It is thoughtful, and a pleasure to read. It reflects on psychological and historical themes which are important not only to our understanding of the Holocaust, but also more generally human nature. (It appears to be a rumination on subjects discussed in his other books, collected and summarized briefly here.) It is for this reason that the book is successful. It considers the Holocaust in particular, but its themes are actually deeper and more universal. "Letters from Germans", the penultimate chapter, is the book's most powerful, noticeably demonstrating the tension between his memory of that time period, and the memory of various Germans, in their own words. He especially berates those who believe they are doing the right thing by speaking out in shame and guilt over theit past, perhaps attacking them a bit harshly, but certainly with justification. The last chapter, "Conclusion", is its weakest. In the opinion of this reviewer, it over-generalizes, and tries to apply retrospective analysis to the world's future. It also calls for unwarranted conclusions, unrelated to the preceding chapters, and perhaps contradicts itself. Luckily it is brief, and does not detract from the excellence of the prior explorations. (For example, he says war is unecessary, and mankind can settle all conflicts around a table, but only as long as we are in good faith. He then calls Hitler a buffoon, implying he cannot be taken in good faith. He next says we need not have good faith to negotiate if we are all equally in fear of war, but this sounds like he is saying war is necessary after all, even if only to remind us there are punishments for negotiation in bad faith!) Despite its conclusion (which many readers will probably enjoy, despite this reviewer's belief it over-reaches), the book is an intelligent and even-handed, but personal assessment of the Holocaust, written in an engaging and intelligent style, with brevity and wit. At 200 pages, it is easy to read. Packed with philosophy and insight, it is worth the investment.
38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Primo Levi's Enduring Considerations of Auschwitz,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Drowned and the Saved (Paperback)
The Drowned and the Saved is the haunting last-word meditation of the late Primo Levi on his Auschwitz camp experience. Describing his 1987 work as a collection of "considerations" rather than distinct memories, the thoughtful Levi nevertheless attempts to maintain--as much as possible--the spirit of the Auschwitz truth inevitably eroded, enhanced, or otherwise altered by the passage of 40 years and the flaws of memory: He writes in the first chapter ("The Memory of the Offense") that this later work is still considerably informed by and in concert with the substantial Holocaust literature of the "submerged" (i.e, the perished) and the "saved" that has accumulated since the publication of his 1947 memoir Survival in Auschwitz. But Levi writes, the submerged are the true, albeit lost, witnesses. Only imperfect witness of the monstrous Holocaust experience is available from the saved, like himself. In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi provides a discerning and articulate exposition of the psychological and sociological peculiarities of the Auschwitz camp--ideas virtually unexplored in popular literature and movies. Throughout the work, he discusses the collective responsibility of nonvictims (in his view, the entire German population) and of the moral dilemmas that arose in a horribly victimized, imprisoned community that was wildly pluralistic (in nationality, language, religion, education, trade, and individual personality). (Tensions between the disparate concepts of collective and individual responsibilities are mostly implicitly explored and not fully crystallized, however, by the author.) Levi explains the complex hierarchy and moral "gray zone" among Auschwitz prisoners who severely compromised humanitarian considerations for fellow inmates and supported the camp's illogical infrastructure to improve survival. Deep anguish befell the unfortunate intellectual who attempted to make sense of his utterly nonsensical existence. In "Shame," "Communicating," and "Useless Violence," Levi expatiates the Nazi perpetration of its systematic dehumanization, from the moment of transport to complete demoralization entrenched shortly after arrival. The explanation is necessary for the contemporary reader to understand later the feelings of absurdity (or even offense) aroused in the Auschwitz survivor when faced with the external world's disbelief that escape and revolt were not often thought of, much less attempted. In Auschwitz, escape and revolt did occur, to be sure, but infrequently and more often among the better fed and less severely victimized prisoners who were multilingual (most were imprisoned in a foreign country). And failed attempts were invariably countered by the SS's extremely public and vicious brands of individual and general punishment. Levi concludes his reflective work by presenting selected letters from ignorant and/or apologetic Germans after publication of his 1947 memoir (which the reader is advised to read beforehand). Finally Levi warns of the repetition of a kind of Auschwitz, if the core memory of it and the German responsibility for it are not maintained. But even Levi's reflective considerations of this peculiar historical hell are difficult, if not impossible, for the contemporary reader without direct connection to the Holocaust to know fully or hold onto. Periodic re-reading of Levi's writing is therefore recommended.
65 of 71 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The real thing,
By
This review is from: The Drowned and the Saved (Paperback)
How can I begin?Primo Levi died in spring 1987, in a still unclear accident (someone say a suicide) in his Turin house - few hundred yards from where I lived at the time, and not far away from where I'm writing now. I don't really know if he really killed himself (he didn't leave any note, and staircase rail was low, very low) but I know that his last book ("The Drowned And The Saved") is a book that trasceend any human notion of absolute, unblinking truth. Primo Levi was a men obsessed by truth. He lived trough one of the most extreme experience a XX century's man could live - one year in Auschwitz. After coming back home, he resume is life as a chemistry expert (he was the director of a small company). He became a writer almost by chance. He was urged to tell the truth about the Holocaust - not the trascendental, nobilitating, almost religious experience movies like "Schindler's List" had make us believe, but something horrible, degrading, a donward spiral in a world where only the worst survive - and the best, the good people, the one deserving survival, die. It called it "the grey zone". It wrote that he came back because he was lucky, because he compromised with the lager system (altrough what saved him was only being a chemistry graduate in a death camp that needed chemistry experts to produce synthetic rubber). He tried, in the mosth unflinching and direct way, to tell the world that being an Auschwitz survivor wasn't a badge of goodness. Actually, it was exactly the reverse. In "If This Is A Man" (his memories of Auschwitz), he wrote about his experience in a neutral, documentary style. Thirty years laters, he returned (for the first and last time) on the subject. And what he did was writing a small, focused, terryfing insight in something he tried to understand in his whole life: how was possible? How did someone get out of it? Will it happen again? Primo Levi was an optimist, but he was a realist too. He basically believed in his fellow humans. But he could get away with the inner feeling that the very existence of Auschwitz was - basically - a contradiction of everything that's worth in life, a cancer that had contamitated everything that had come afterward - the drowned AND the saved, the butchers AND the victims. Nothing is spared, nothing is kept in the background: betrayal, collaboration, compromise, degradation, evil, the gray reality of Auschwitz. "The Drowned And The Saved" is the wall against whom any "negationist" lie simply vaporise - you can't deny it, you can't downplay it. It's a technical book on the killing joke humanity did on itself, and Primo Levi, without laughing, admitted that the joke was on him. Simply - he didn't changew the rules of the game when he felt it was going to lose it.
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