Some might respond that the members of these special squads had no choice because the Nazis forced them to act as they did. The Drowned and the Saved Irony These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. Primo Levi's Gray Zone : Implications for Post-Holocaust Ethics The Drowned and the Saved Irony | GradeSaver 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. 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. Certainly some of them could have chosen to be martyrs or rescuers. 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). Still others are willing to defend Rumkowski. 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. It degrades its victims and makes them similar to itself, because it needs both great and small complicities. The Drowned and the Saved study guide contains a biography of Primo Levi, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Bystanders also had meaningful choices. 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. 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. 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). The project is more than admirable, but the former victim may not be the most suitable person to carry it out. Better for them to hate their enemies.49. This is what makes him a deontologist rather than a consequentialist. You'll be clean, I promise you.34 While the actions of male victims are accepted as guiltless ones coerced by what Lawrence Langer calls choiceless choices (e.g., Heller's grandfather gave up his wife to save himself), women have been judged by a harsher standard that condemns forbidden sexual contact. 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. This Study Guide consists of . Levi's account of Henri is part of his extended analysis of "the drowned and the saved," those who will go under (Dante's "sommersi") and those who can survive. and although he feels compelled to bear witness, he does not consider doing so sufficient justification for having survived. In the face of the actions of an Oskar Schindler, a Raoul Wallenberg, or the inhabitants of the village of Le Chambon, how can bystanders honestly contend that they were forced to do nothing? 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. Once again, the Nazis most demonic crime was to coerce victims into the role of perpetrator, to force Jews to participate in the humiliation and murder of their fellow Jews. . 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. Again, my reading of Levi places only victims in the gray zone. everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Drowned and the Saved. 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. Those who were not victims did have meaningful choices: they could choose not to engage in evil. Even so, Melson contends that his parents should be located at the outer edges of the gray zone because they, too, were forced to make choices that should not be judged according to everyday standards of moral behavior.30 For example, his parents initially asked friends to give them their identification papers so they could move to a different part of Poland and live there under the friends identities. 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). I agree that we need more precise ways to speak about areas of collaboration and complicity during World War II. The Gray Zone Chapter 3, Shame Chapter 4, Communicating . While Levi does not say that Muhsfeldt's moment of hesitation is enough to purge him of his guilt (he still deserved to be executed as a murderer), Levi does say that it is enough, however, to place him, too, although at its extreme boundary, within the gray band, that zone of ambiguity which radiates out from regimes based on terror and obsequiousness.25 I agree with Lang's conclusion that Levi decides on balance that Muhsfeldt does not belong there and concurs in the verdict of the Polish court which in 1947 condemned him to death for the atrocities he had taken part in.26 Levi believes that this was right. He goes on to say: It is not difficult to judge Muhsfeldt, and I do not believe that the tribunal which punished him had any doubts.27, No tribunal could have absolved him, nor, certainly, can we absolve him on the moral plane. Examining the actions of people in extreme situations, including inmates of camps such as Auschwitz, Todorov concludes that horrific conditions did not destroy individuals capacities for acts of ordinary virtue, but instead strengthened them. Within a week, he disappears as some prisoner in the Work Office switches his . Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. The situation of the victims was so constrained that they truly reside in the gray zone, a place too horrific to allow for the use of the usual ethical procedures for evaluating moral culpability. 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. . Rubinstein maintains that Levi saw all people as centaurstorn between two natures. It is as objective and real as its two principled and more commonly recognized alternatives. For them, all Jews were condemned by genetics; there was literally nothing a Jewish person could do or say to escape annihilation. As in all the other chapters of his book, Levi discusses the complexity of these situations. 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. The teleological action, like the consequentialist action, is taken to accomplish a purpose. This choice could lead to a secular salvation.15. Browning singles out Jeremiah Wilczek, a former gangster who connived his way into a leadership position in the Lagerrat (camp council) and Lagerpolizei (camp police). For this reason, Levi insists that we examine the actions of the Sonderkommandos. Whom does Levi mean to include within the gray zone's boundaries? Print Word PDF. Using traditional Western moral philosophy, it would be difficult not to condemn them. Yet, he argues, his parents feelings of guilt and shame should not be confused with moral blame for their behavior. Robert Melson, Choiceless Choices: Surviving on False Papers on the Aryan Side, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 106. 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. However, Lang insists, and I agree, that Levi emphatically does NOT include perpetrators in the gray zone. Collaboration springs from the need for auxiliaries to keep order as German power is overtaxed, and the desire to imitate the victor by giving orders. In my opinion it is. To me, it seems clear that Levi does not include the guards, much less all Germans, in that zone. Levi postulates that the Nazi concentration camp system resulted in a massive "biological and social experiment." In his book The Question of German Guilt, first published in German in 1947 and in English-language translation in 1948, Karl Jaspers suggests a framework for evaluating German responsibility. The text of the speech is available at http://www.datasync.com/~davidg59/rumkowsk.html (accessed May , 2016). 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. In his recent book Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life, Berel Lang argues that Levi opposes this view. This is not the same as the Golden Rule, which states that one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.2 The Golden Rule suggests that we are motivated to treat others well by self-interestthat is, by the desire to be treated well ourselves. The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi | LibraryThing Willingly or not, we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto the lords of death reign, and close by the train is waiting.29. The historian Gerhard Weinberg cautions us to remember that Rumkowski did not know when the Soviets would arrive to liberate the d ghetto. "Coming out of the darkness, one suffered because of the reacquired consciousness of having been diminished . . " He quotes Moses Maimonides, who wrote: If they should say, Give us one of you and we will kill him and if not we will kill all of you, the Jews should allow themselves to be killed and not hand over a single life.16 Yet Rubinstein's condemnation of Rumkowski is not based only on the latter's willingness to sacrifice some for the sake of the rest. 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. . 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. "The Drowned and the Saved Summary". While Levi tells us that Muhsfeldt was executed after the war, and contends that this execution was justified, he does suggest that Muhsfeldt's hesitationno matter how momentarywas morally significant. 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. Order our The Drowned and the Saved Study Guide. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 7, Stereotypes Summary & Analysis Indeed, Todorov builds his new morality on his observations of the inherent goodness that remains in individuals even in the worst of conditions. The saved are those who learn to adapt themselves to the new environment of Auschwitz, who quickly learn how to "organize" extra rations, safer work, or fortuitous relationships with people in authority. In her essay, Sexual Abuse and Holocaust Literature, S. Lillian Kremer states: Although male writers such as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi convey the effect of starvation and primitive sanitary facilities on their protagonists strength, health, and feelings of powerlessness, they do not address the aesthetic reactions and procreational anxieties dominant in women's writing.36 Horowitz thus does a service by drawing our attention to the specific ways in which the gray zone was even more complicated for female victims than it was for their male counterparts. Later in the essay, Rubinstein states that Rumkowski's Give me your children speech indicates that he was under no illusions concerning the fate of the deportees. Perhaps the most difficult and controversial use of the notion of the gray zone appears in Levi's discussion of SS-Oberscharfhrer Eric Muhsfeldt. In this chapter Levi also discusses why inmates did not commit suicide during their incarceration:" . The Drowned and the Saved Metaphors and Similes | GradeSaver 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. At the beginning of his book, Todorov tells us that his interest in comparing the events of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the 1944 Warsaw Rising is motivated by his belief that: they did indeed shed light upon the present.37 He repeats this assertion in the book's epilogue and adds: What interested me is not the past per se but rather the light it casts upon the present.38 Indeed, the purpose of his book is clearly to articulate a post-Holocaust ethics based on insights he develops through his examination of life in totalitarian societies. 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). The Drowned and the Saved essays are academic essays for citation. 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. Individual motivations are many, and collaborators may be judged only by those who have resisted such coercion. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. With his emphasis on caring, Todorov adds a dash of Heidegger, Levinas, and Buber into the mix. He is careful to make clear from the outset that unusual external events contributed to the large number of survivors. Yet, in his final work, The Drowned and the Saved, Levi painted a radically different picture of the Holocaust. Bulgarian-born philosopher Tzvetan Todorov has written extensively about moral issues relating to the Holocaust, perhaps most famously in his book Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. David Patterson, Nazis, Philosophers, and the Response to the Scandal of Heidegger, in Roth, Ethics, 119. . Most survivors come from the tiny privileged minority who get more food. Chapter 3, " Shame," is, in my opinion, the most profound and moving section of the book. (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1999), 102. The case of Wilczek substantiates Weinberg's point in that the Starachowice camp operated until comparatively late in the war, and as a result, Wilczek succeeded in saving hundreds of lives. Sometimes villagers would feel sorry for the prisoners and tell them how the war was progressing. Does Levi really mean to suggest in this haunting passage that we all exist in the gray zone nowthat none of us deserves to be judged morally because our current situation is indistinguishable from that of the Jewish victims in the ghettos and death camps? In the prologue to the 2006 anthology Gray Zones, editors Jonathan Petropoulos and John Roth acknowledge that while Levi spoke of the gray zone in the singular his analysis made clear that this region was multi-faceted and multi-layered. They go on to say: Following Levi's lead, we thought about the Holocaust's gray zones, the multitude of ways in which aspects of his gray-zone analysis might shed light both on the Holocaust itself and also on scholarship about that catastrophe.53 They list a number of gray zones, including: ambiguity and compromise in writing and depicting Holocaust history; issues of identity, gender, and sexuality during and after the Third Reich; inquiries about gray spacesthose regions of geography, imagination, and psychology that reflect the Holocaust's impact then and now; and dilemmas that have haunted the pursuit of justice, ethics, and religion during and after the Holocaust.54. Todorov dismisses Primo Levi's disgust with his own acts of selfishness in the camp as a form of survivors guilt. The photo was taken surreptitiously from Crematorium V. USHMM, courtesy Pastwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Owicimiu. He survived the experience, probably in part because he was a trained chemist and as such, useful to the Nazis. Indeed, the primary purpose of the concept of the gray zone is to point out the morally dubious actions of many of the Jewish victims. 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. Yes, they lived under a totalitarian government that violated their rights and restricted their choices. (And when they refused to collaborate, they were killed and immediately replaced.). The Nazis victims did not choose to be victims, and they could not choose to stop being victims. The Drowned and the Saved - jstor.org Levi identifies the common impulse to tell the story of "events that for good or evil have marked [one's] entire existence" (149). 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. It follows immediately after an extended description of Elias the dwarf, whom Steinberg also remem-bers as extraordinary. He concludes that Levi's desperate attempt to understand the perpetrators led to his suicide. Rubinstein is careful to examine the meaning of Levi's terminology as it appeared in the original Italian. . dition the "gray zone." A zone where there exist gray, ambiguous persons who, "contaminated by their oppressors, unconsciously strove to identify . The average life expectancy of Sonderkommando members was approximately three months. In the entire book, he mentions it only twice. Members of these special squads received marginally better provisions of food and other supplies than most camp inmates, yet they knew thatlike all other prisonersthey were doomed. Using Kant's criteria, it seems clear that the actions of the special squads were immoral. He sees Rumkowski as an example of Anna Freud's concept of identification with the aggressor.17 Rumkowski did not simply comply with the Nazi orders so as to save liveshe thought like a Nazi and acted like one. 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. A chemist by profession and a writer by compulsion, Levi, an Italian Jew forced to become Prisoner 174517 in a Nazi death camp, refused afterward to have his tattoo erased; for forty years, he wore. Primo Levi was imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. Browning concludes that such strategies of alleviation and compliance, while neither heroic nor admirable, without doubt saved Jewish lives that otherwise would have been lost. Soon after the war ended, he wrote several books about his experience. Death and destruction were the only absolutes in this moral universe. Some might argue that we should not allow Primo Levi to own the term gray zone. Yet, Todorov's interpretation of the moral situation of prisoners in the camps is quite different from Levi's as I understand it. 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. Read the Study Guide for The Drowned and the Saved, Will the Barbarians Ever Arrive? Even though his first book Se questo un uomo -published in English as Survival in Auschwitz -did not sell well when first published by De Silva in 1947 (2,500 copies published, of which 600 remained unsold and were eventually destroyed by the 1966 flood in Florence), it .