The Drowned and the Saved Summary and Study Guide | SuperSummary The next subject that he introduces is the way in which the Nazis broke the will of the prisoners. . Again, some might argue that we should not allow Primo Levi to own the term gray zone. David H. Hirsch, The Gray Zone or The Banality of Evil, in Ethics After the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses, ed. Non-victims such as Muhsfeldt had moral responsibility and deserved to be prosecuted for their actions. 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. Nor, finally and most fundamentally, is the Gray Zone a place to which all human beingsby the fact of human frailtyare granted access, since that would then enable them conveniently to respond to any moral charge with the indisputable claim that I'm only human.8. 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. Primo Levi is right to demand from us greater moral courage. 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. 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. For the history of the Golden Rule, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule (accessed March 16, 2016). The Drowned and the Saved - Preface Summary & Analysis - www.BookRags.com 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. With his emphasis on caring, Todorov adds a dash of Heidegger, Levinas, and Buber into the mix. 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). . . 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. He concludes that Levi's desperate attempt to understand the perpetrators led to his suicide. Alan Rosenberg and Gerald E. Myers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 224. For this reason, Levi insists that we examine the actions of the Sonderkommandos. 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? 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. Thus, the gray zone refers to a reality so extreme that those who have not experienced it have no right to judge. First published in Italy in 1986. Sara R. Horowitz does important work in examining the role of gender in the experiences of women caught in the gray zone. 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. 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. 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. Argumentative Essay On The Drowned And The Saved - Primo Levi Using traditional Western moral philosophy, it would be difficult not to condemn them. The text of the speech is available at http://www.datasync.com/~davidg59/rumkowsk.html (accessed May , 2016). Is Browning's discussion an appropriate use of Levi's gray zone? Levi tells a story from the diaries of Mikls Nyiszli, a Hungarian-Jewish doctor who survived Auschwitz. Still others are willing to defend Rumkowski. Kant would say people always have choices, however; the men should have refused to act immorally even if that refusal resulted in their own immediate death. 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. Read the Study Guide for The Drowned and the Saved The Drowned and the Saved essays are academic essays for citation. This view holds that life has become so complicated and difficult that the job of ethics is no longer to determine the proper course of action and to correctly assign moral responsibility to those who have failed to live up to the appropriate moral standards. Nevertheless, from a consequentialist perspective, Jewish leaders such as Wilczek may have acted morally. The Drowned and the Saved - New York University In my view, perpetrators and bystanders did not face extenuating circumstances sufficient to justify their inclusion in Levi's gray zone. As in all the other chapters of his book, Levi discusses the complexity of these situations. 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 Drowned and the Saved | Books and Culture 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. Chapter 2, The Gray Zone Summary and Analysis Survivors simplify the past for others to understandstark we/they, friend/enemy, good/evil divisionsbut history is complex. The Holocaust calls into question the very possibility of ethics. Primo Levi was imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. 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. 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. Would not those who had been trying to keep the Jews of the ghettos alive as long as possible subsequently have been hailed for their efforts?24, Yet Weinberg's argument fails as a justification for placing Rumkowski into Levi's gray zone, for as Lang asserted, the gray zone is NOT reserved for suspended judgmentsthose made through the lens of moral hindsight.. The historian Gerhard Weinberg cautions us to remember that Rumkowski did not know when the Soviets would arrive to liberate the d ghetto. SS ritual dehumanizes newcomers and veterans treat them as competitors. 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. 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. . 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). It is instrumental in nature and judged solely by its result. He did not suggest that we ignore the moral implications of the actions of the special squads or of Chaim Rumkowski; indeed he insisted that we examine these implications carefully. The first time he states: Between those who are only guards and those who are only inmates stands a host of intermediates occupying what Primo Levi has called the gray zone (a zone that in totalitarian states includes the entire population to one degree or another).45 He then goes on to discuss how prisoner-guards such as the kapos, or by extension Chaim Rumkowski, exert abusive power towards their victims precisely because of their own lack of power in relation to their oppressors. Another anthology dealing with these issues is Elizabeth Roberts Baer and Myrna Goldenberg, eds., Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003). Print Word PDF This section contains 488 words . 1The 'grey zone' is a term coined by the Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi in his essay collection The Drowned and the Saved (1989; originally published in Italian in 1986), the last book he completed before his death. 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. Themes Style Quotes Topics for Discussion. 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. While one may disagree specifically with his way of making these distinctions or the conclusions he reaches in each of these areas, I believe that this approach is much more useful than the multiplication and stretching of Levi's gray zone in ways that were clearly unintended. Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: HarperCollins, 1983), 348. Yet, in his final work, The Drowned and the Saved, Levi painted a radically different picture of the Holocaust. 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). Unlike the Spanish Inquisition, or even the authorities of George Orwell's 1984, the Nazis did not torture to change the beliefs or behaviors of their victims. Even in the worst of circumstances (Auschwitz), it cannot be extinguished. . They were not Nazis and they were not "one of us" in the eyes of the other prisoners either. For them, all Jews were condemned by genetics; there was literally nothing a Jewish person could do or say to escape annihilation. 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. Fundamental to his purpose is the fear that what happened once can happen (and in some respects, has happened) again. Primo Levi has been well known in Italy for many years. The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi - Preface summary and analysis. Primo Levi. Levi tells us that a certain Hans Biebow, the German chief administrator of the ghetto . The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi | LibraryThing Although the Oberscharfhrer, too, was amazed, and hesitated before deciding, ultimately he ordered one of his henchmen to kill the girl; he could not trust that she would refrain from telling other inmates her story. The Grey Zone - OpenEdition We who are not in that zone have no right to judge those whose meaningful choices had been taken away by the Nazis. 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. . Her sacrifice directly benefitted anotherher daughter. Levi uses the example of a soccer game played between the SS and the members of the Sonderkommandos. Are there different kinds of violence? : Scapegoating in the Writings of Coetzee and Primo Levi, View Wikipedia Entries for The Drowned and the Saved. . While some scholars have expanded Primo Levi's term gray zone in appropriate and insightful ways, others have misused it so completely that it is now in danger of losing its essential meaning. Survivors simplify the past for others to understandstark we/they, friend/enemy, good/evil divisionsbut history is complex. Within a week, he disappears as some prisoner in the Work Office switches his . While they may have traveled there in a special railway car, once they arrived they were Jewish victims no different from the rest. For example, he tells the story of a Mrs. Tennenbaum, who obtained a pass that allowed the bearer to avoid deportation for three months.
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