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One of the speakers on the third day of the International symposium “New Voices on Primo Levi” was Franco Baldasso, a Ph.D. candidate in Italian Studies at NYU. In his early thirties, Franco is already a recognized expert on Primo Levi and has written a book on the Italian author, “Il Cerchio di Gesso. Primo Levi narratore e testimone” (The Chalk Circle.

Primo Levi Narrator and Witness). Franco Baldasso (NYU) has also been the editor in chief of the literary magazine Daemon for the past six years.
 

He presented his paper “A loaded gun. Primo Levi and the Germans after the camp” within the panel “Quest and Judgment: Reading Primo Levi in German”
 

We asked him to further discuss some of the points he touched on during the debate, and also about his personal and professional experience as a researcher on Levi.
 

The great difference between “If this is a man” and “The Truce” is that in the latter the writing is much more “free”, Levi himself says so. The Truce represents a period of freedom (both in the author’s life, and in the world since it is the time period that separates World War II and the Cold War). In the book, in which he recalls his trip throughout “post-Nazi” Europe, not only do we witness a new approach of Levi towards humanity, but we also read about some meetings he had during his journey that become greatly relevant to him from a retrospective point of view also. One of the persons he meets is a disabled child of about 2-3. Born in Auschwitz, he became in Levi’s eyes the “product” of Auschwitz, the symbol of a humanity destroyed by Nazism.
 

During his trip throughout Europe, he also goes to Germany. When he stops in

Munich, that’s when he pronounces the words I quote at the beginning of the paper. They represent a fundamental moment, the one in which Levi starts talking about Auschwitz from the point of view of its cultural impact on people. 
 

Yes, despite what the Austrian Jewish survivor Jean Améry sustains by calling him “The forgiver”, Levi never forgave them. There actually are a few passages in “The Truce” in which he judges the German people with comments that I would define as ferocious, filled with anger. In the short story “Angelica Farfalla” (1966) (Angelic Butterfly), as an example, he gives a description of Germany after Nazism that is incredibly brutal. “It smells like piss and sauerkraut, it is the quintessence of Germany”. Levi was a middle-class person; he would have never used these terms if he had forgiven the Germans.
 

One of the most significant moments of my trip was my visit to the House of the Wannsee Conference, the place where Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, and other hierarchs of the Nazi party projected the “final solution”. There is a permanent exhibit there, with documents and evidence about the Holocaust, and in the last room declarations and statements of several survivors from the concentration camps were on display.  Among them I found one by Primo Levi. I thought that this said a lot about his ability to share his experience to a wide audience, even if German.
 

I must say that people of my age in Germany do not know much about Levi, and they mostly come to know his works through those of the great philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Moreover, even though researchers recognize Levi for the important ethical message he carries on, I could not find too many academic works focused on him as a writer more than as a witness. I believe that this is also because Germans are ashamed of their past, it’s difficult for them to talk about it.
 

Fortunately, aside from Levi there are other authors, witnesses of the Holocaust, that young Germans read. One of them is Imre Kertesz, a Hungarian writer who survived Auschwitz as a young man and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. Since in Hungary it was not possible to write about the Holocaust until 1989, his books are much more “philosophic”:  they are not empirical stories of a single person’s experience, but are focused on broad reflections and thoughts on the whole historical period. That is why with no doubt one of the main reasons he sells 500.000 copies in Germany, and young people are keener to read him. They know that it is impossible to forget the past, and it’s unfair too, but they also feel the need to escape from this sort of “persecution”. Kertesz talks about it in different terms, and I believe it makes it easier for them to approach the subject

Levi is a very difficult character to depict in a movie script. Although apparently simple and linear, every gesture he makes, every word he writes hides in itself an infinite number of reasonings. In this particular case, Rosi deliberately cut and changed many passages of Levi’s “The Truce”, damaging in many ways his message and the memory of his experience.

I do believe that cinema could be a good means to introduce Levi to younger people. But instead of fiction and movies, I would show them the numerous video-interviews that Levi himself did with the Italian National Broadcasting System, RAI. They would discover the “real” Levi: aside from being a writer, a chemist, and a survivor, he was an extremely pleasant and also, why not, fun person to talk to.
 

My classes are very heterogeneous, and sometimes my students do not even know much about the period of the Second World War. So I generally ask them to read one of Primo Levi’s works, without telling them anything about the author. It’s a way I have to introduce them to a piece of history using Primo Levi more as a very linear and clear narrator than as a witness. As you can see, his works are great educational tools too.
 

Primo Levi has always been very conscious about the dangers related to imprecise translations. When he first decided to have “Se questo è un uomo” translated into German (lately, in "The Drawned and the Saved", he recognized that the Germans were the real recipients of his book) he had the hardest time finding a translator he could trust, somebody he was sure would not omit or change the meaning of one single word he wrote. He finally was introduced to Heinz Reidt who did a great job according to Levi himself.

However, he had problems with him too. Levi was in fact so meticolous when it came to language that he wanted the German translation to be written in “Lager Jargon”, that particular German that was spoken in the camps. Reidt refused to do that, it being  too much of a harsh and crude idiom, but he still did a great job, and the German translation is actually considered much better than the English and French one.
 

Since Primo Levi is a very secular writer, and is far from every form of religious extremism, the translation of his most famous book can become an important tool to stimulate a debate on the Jewish Holocaust in Arabian and Muslim countries. I consider it a great sign of civility and perhaps a step forward for the development of a deeper dialogue among the peoples of those countries.