German

 

German Federal Republic

West Germany was the second country where a book by Primo Levi came out. If This is a Man / Ist das ein Mensch? was published by Samuel Fischer in 1961. It was followed by The Truce / Die Atempause (1964) and an anthology from Storie Naturali entitled Die Verdopplung einer schönen Dame und andere Überraschungen ["The Doubling of a Beautiful Woman and Other Surprises"] (1969). Then, there was a gap in publishing until 1986, when Hanser published If Not Now, When? / Wann, wenn nicht jetzt? and The Periodic Table / Das periodische System in 1987. At present almost all of Levi’s writings have been translated into German even though there is no single edition of his collected works and miscellaneous writings. About 60% of his essays and short stories have been translated and anthologized.

The first publisher of Primo Levi was Samuel Fischer, a publisher of Jewish origin who had also published Thomas Mann. The Truce and the short stories of Die Verdopplung were published Wegner. In 1984 Michael Kruger, a literary agent for the Hanser publishing house in Munich, offered Primo Levi to republish all his works with a contract stipulating this publisher’s virtually exclusive rights. From that moment on, most of Primo Levi’s works have been published by Hanser, with annual permissions granted to the paperback series, Dtv.

If This is a Man was translated by Heinz Riedt, a deserter from the Wehrmacht, the German army in the Second World War, who then joined the partisans in the Resistance on the Euganei hills near Venice. "An anomalous German," he was defined by Levi. He checked the faithfulness of the translation chapter by chapter, perhaps with the help of a German lawyer friend, Rudolf Loewenthal [Thomson : 287]. In the end he was very satisfied with Riedt’s translation, as opposed to the translation of The Truce Barbara and Robert Picht, which he did not approve of entirely. He even asked Einaudi to insert a clause in his contracts with German publishers obliging them to use Riedt as translator. He was refused this and so there were a variety of German translators after Riedt and the Pichts. These included Riedt’s student Barbara Kleiner, the poet Moshe Kahn, and an intellectual from the German Democratic Republic, Joachim Meinert.

 

German Democratic Republic

Only two of Levi’s works reached the German Democratic Republic. Die Verdopplung einer schönen Dame ["The Doubling of a Beautiful Woman" from Storie naturali] was published by Reclam in 1972 and The Periodic Table / Das Periodische System was published by Aufbau Verlag in1979, eight years before it was published in the German Federal Republic, but "destroyed by censorship," as Levi put it. In fact, the first German edition of The Periodic Table, translated by Edith Plackmeyer, was subject changed greatly in its many references to life in the Lagers [Thomson : 443]. A similar fate was to touch If This is a Man and The Truce in the early 1980s. Then, after a long series of discussions among their editors, Aufbau Verlag made the first moves towards publishing a volume containing the two works.

In the 1960s there had already been discussions in the two state publishers of translated books, Aufbau and Volk&Welt, on the appropriateness of publishing If This is a Man and The Truce. In 1964, for example, the editor Joachim Meinert, who was later to become a supporter of Levi works, wrote an internal review arguing against publishing The Truce because the image of the Soviet Union did not correspond to "what we want to give out and reinforce" [Mesnard 2008: 113].

By the early 1980s Meinert, who had begun to work for Aufbau, tried to promote the publication of The Truce together with If This is a Man. He thought that "several problematic passages" had to be re-examined [Mesnard 2008: 113], such as those regarding political prisoners, who, instead, should have been defined generically as "detainees." Levi said he was ready to go along with making some modifications in the text [Mesnard 2008: 113]. The permission to publish, the Druckgenehmigungverfahren, was supposed to have arrived in the summer of 1981, but it was not granted until 1982, when it was immediately revoked. A committee of "resistance fighters" judged that If This is a Man was "a monstrous accusation" – directed against the heroic struggle of anti-Fascist combatants of all nations [Mesnard 2008: 114]. This committee of so-called Widerstandkaempfer was a cultural institution that was put in charge of checking new works. The writers of the German Democratic Republic issued a manifesto at their tenth congress in 1987 marking the beginning of a new easing up of censorship and thus the simplification of the procedures for getting new books approved. Thus Aufbau planned to publish a triple volume in 1990 containing If This is a Man, The Truce and The Drowned and the Saved. In the meantime in 1988, Joachim Meinert began to work on a collection of stories from Lilith. None of these projects saw the light of day.

 

"Letters from Germans" - Reception in Germany

In Chapter 8 of The Drowned and the Saved, entitled "Letters from Germans", Primo Levi recounts the reception of If This is a Man in Germany, defining the Germans as "the true recipients" of the book. A great part of the chapter is dedicated to the reactions of some West German citizens who wrote him after reading Ist das ein Mensch? and whom he considered answering. He kept on one of these exchanges for a long time – that with Hety Schmitt-Maas, a librarian from Wiesbaden. Responding to Levi’s request, she put him into contact with Ferdinand Meyer, an engineer who had worked at I.G. Farben at the time of the Lager. Meyer and Levi exchanged six letters [Thomson : 326 - 331] and even made plans to meet each other, but they never met because Meyer died suddenly.