If This is a Man, 1958 version

In April1955 Levi began an article entitled “Anniversary” with these words:

The early 1950s were the years when the memory of the extermination was the scarcest. They are the years of a silence about the extermination as part of history. This is the silence that the article, “Anniversary,” denounces as the result of a “guilty conscience.” Levi was stricken with a feeling of defeat during most of the decade after the war. Except for the article, “Anniversary” and for a few brief book reviews, no writings of his appeared in public for the eight years after the summer of 1950.

Nevertheless, this situation did not stop Levi from conducting his literary work. He kept on composing verse poems, even though rarely, and above all, he basted together, as it were, his first short stories about craft work and factory work, which were to become “Titanium” and “Sulphur” in The Periodic Table. Significantly, he came up with stories unusual in the Italian literary panorama of those years Written in 1946, his first story was published December 19 1948 in the Roman newspaper, L’Italia Socialista, which emerged from the diaspora of the by-then dissolved political group, the Partito d’azione. The title was “The Mnemagogues.” This word is a neologism coined by Levi, meaning “conductors (or arousers) of memories.” The word alludes to odors, which have the power to arouse memories in the story. “The Mnemagogues” was to appear in Levi’s first collection of fantasy stories, published by Einaudi under the pseudonym Damiano Malabaila in 1966. One of the first examples of science fiction, this was an atypical kind of science fiction that Levi engaged in even before the Italian term  for it,  fantascienza, was coined. 

Other stories of the same kind followed “The Mnemagogues.” Some were narrative, others theatrical, some finished, and others drafts.  These included “Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge” and “The Sixth Day,” which were to become parts of the Natural Histories. Apparently,²Lina Zargani, “Il sistema periodico,” interview with Primo Levi (Spring 1975), Lettera internazionale, XXIII, 93, 3rd quarter 2007; now, with text revised in relation to PL’s original typescript, in Opere complete III, Conversazioni, interviste, dichiarazioni (2018), 913-16. Levi drafted one of the first versions of his story dedicated to his Jewish- Piedmontese ancestors, what would become “Argon,” which was to appear in The Periodic Table. He wrote the first episodes about his journey home from Auschwitz. In 1949 he also published a short story, also atypical, about the partisan guerrilla war, Fine del Marinese [Marinese’s finish],  which appeared in the August-September insert of the Florentine journal, Il Ponte, dedicated al Piemonte.

Thus the eleven years between 1948 and 1958 are years of silence and disappointment in the civic realm, but they are also years of writing of the most varied kinds, writing that Levi started at the same time as his work on If This is a Man. These writings for the moment might have then been incomplete or unpublished. They might have not been channeled into any define literary project. Yet, they were to find their places after, perhaps, twenty or thirty years, as occurred with “The Mnemagogues” and “Argon..”

Levi kept on working full time as a chemist of paints. In April 1948 he changed jobs. Moving from Montecatini-Duco, he was hired by Siva, Società italiana vernici e affini, which was first located in Turin and then in 1953 moved to Settimo Torinese. In his free time, he expanded his activity as a writer and did not limit himself at all, as we have just seen, to memoirs and texts of witnessing.

Nor was his hope abandoned of giving a second life – and a wider distribution – to If This is a Man in spite of the remaining copies of the book that were lying in the warehouse of the publisher, La Nuova Italia. In 1952 Levi petitioned Einaudi for the second time. He was working intensely for its scientific editions, Edizioni Scientifiche (ESE), as consultant and translator. At this time it was the director of this department, Paolo Boringhieri, who took the initiative to encourage the publication of a work that was not directly pertinent to his field, an initiative that was to remain unique in his career. In fact, the minutes of the Einaudi editorial board of July 16 and 23 1952 read like this:

These editorial minutes are documents where there are no extra words. In 1952 Einaudi publishers had matured in its acknowledgement that Levi’s books was a bel libro, a beautiful book. It was the concern about its market value that influenced the decision not to publish.  By 1952, the wave of publications about Nazism and the extermination of the Jews had not yet begun either in Europe or in any way in Italy, a wave that was to hit a few years later.

Levi let his pessimism come through in his article, “Anniversary.” Nevertheless, he countered this through underlining his obstinate need to bear witness to and, above all, to understand Auschwitz. Around the middle of the 1950s, the climate began to change. In 1954 Einaudi itself published The Diary of Anne Frank with a preface by Natalia Ginzburg. In 1955 it published the Franco-Russian historian Léon Poliakov’s Bréviaire de la haine  in a translation by Primo’s sister, Anna Maria Levi, entitled   Il nazismo e lo sterminio degli ebrei. [Harvest of Hate: the Third Reich and the Jews is the title of English translation.]  Also in 1955, the newly founded publisher, Feltrinelli included Lord Russell of Liverpool’s The Scourge of the Swastika among its first publications.

Thus Primo Levi felt encouraged enough to propose his “first-born” book to Einaudi for the third time. Finally, this time he was successful. The contract was dated July 11 1955 and the book was slated to be published within the year, but Einaudi was about to go through a serious financial crisis and so had to put off the publication of If This is a Man more than once. The book, however, changed its look over the course of those years.

Between the end of 1947 and the beginning of  1958, Levi had enough time available to think over his first work. Nevertheless, he decided not to upset the way the book was set up.  The most detailed comparison between the two versions to date⁴Giovanni Tesio, “Su alcune giunte e varianti di «Se questo è un uomo»” (1977), in Id., Piemonte letterario dell’Otto-Novecento. Da Giovanni Faldella a Primo Levi (Roma: Bulzoni, 1991), pp. 173–96; Note ai testi,  Opere complete I,  1460-79.  reveals that, even though we cannot call the 1958 version a reworking, If This is a Man-1947 can be considered a work in itself. As such, in fact, it was reprinted at the beginning of  the  new 2-volume Einaudi edition of Levi’s Opere complete in 2016,  edited by Marco Belpoliti.

Einaudi finally began to act on the publication of If This is a Man in 1958. Primo Levi delivered his personal copy of the 1947 De Silva edition to the publisher (the one with a dedication to his wife). He had worked on this copy, adding integrations and retouches, assigning each of them a number in consecutive order. He almost never made corrections involving style. However, he made many short and long additions. He did this in pencil or pen on the pages themselves of the original editions. Sometimes he typed these on strips of paper, which he glued to the text at the points where they had to be inserted. Sometimes he typed these on regular sheets of paper, which he interpolated between pages in the De Silva edition.

Readers of the 1958 Einaudi version can already find conspicuous additions in the first chapter, “The Journey.” The later opening page includes a self-portrait of the author and his arrival at the camp in   Fossoli. There are other new passages later on in this chapter: the portrait of the little girl, Emilia,  and Levi’s consideration on the dignity of those who are being sent off to a certain death. The new and ending of this chapter can disconcert readers with its pages on the SS petty thief, a   “Charon” in lowercase letters, who tried to get his hands on the last possessions of the deportees for his personal profit. In the next chapter, “On the Bottom,” Levi added the scene of the tattooing of his internment number and the episode of the icicle forbidden for no reason – Hier ist kein warum [there is no why here]. There were also the additions of the band playing the fanfare, “Rosamunda” / “Roll out the Barrel” and of the encounter with the boy,  Schlome. In the chapter,  “Our Nights” the first three pages are new. They serve to connect to the preceding chapter, but they also contain the first appearance of Alberto, a friend of Levi’s in symbiosis with him. There is a physical and moral description of him. This character, Alberto, took on a more nuances besides his more assiduous presence on the scene of the story.

In general, the first chapters are the ones that were subject to the most numerous and longest authorial interventions. One exception is in the later chapter, “The Last One,” which again concerns Alberto.  The three survival stratagems of the two friend-accomplices are new, including the one involving files. Thus picaresque and dramatic pages coexist in the 1958 version of this chapter. However, the most noticeable novelty in the 1958 edition is the brief chapter that Levi wedged in between “On the Bottom” and  “Ka-Be”; its title is significant – “Initiation” – and its contents are balanced between an essay and a story. This insertion gives the book a new overall balance. In If This is a Man-1958 there are 17 chapters and the crucial chapter, “The Drowned and the Saved” became the ninth chapter at the exact center of the book.  This, as we remember, was the book title that Levi had proposed to the publisher De Silva.  Hence the chapter dealing with the inmates who survived by force or slyness rises to the position at the book’s center of gravity. How fit it is that these pages resonate with the pages on “gray zone” in a work that was to have the exact same title The Drowned and the Saved (Einaudi, 1986), this after four decades of new reflections.

If This is a Man was published by  Einaudi as number 232 of the non-fiction essay series, Saggi.  Its printing run ended on May 9 1958 and its inside flap featured an unsigned piece by Italo Calvino, which he adapted from his 1948 review. (See the link to this file on If This is a Man-1947 on this site.) On the cover Bruno Munari designed a many layered figure with bands of various colors (prevalently darkish) that crisscross and come together, suggesting the bars of a prison.  It is no surprise that the work took its place in a series prevalently dedicated to non-fiction. Over the course of the years, the  Einaudi Saggi series also the featured Carlo Levi’s two major works – Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945) and L’Orologio [the clock] (1950) – and the already mentioned The Diary of Anne Frank as well as some books closer to the narrative than to the essay, such as Mario Soldati’s America primo amore [America, first love] (1945) and Ernest  Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon (1947). However, the detail about the number of copies printed deserves notice – just 2,000 copies, 500 less than the original De Silva edition. Einaudi’s cautiousness turned out to be excessive because the work quickly sold out. However, readers had to wait until March 1960 for another printing. From that point on, the run of If This is a Man never stopped anymore, neither in Italy and nor beyond.

Once the new Einaudi edition appeared, Primo Levi began to work with Stuart J. Woolf, a young historian of Jewish origin, who had come down to Turin from Oxford in 1956. Levi met him at the house of Leonardo De Benedetti, the friend of his who was his fellow traveler on the way back from Auschwitz. Woolf was the fiancé of De Benedetti granddaughter. Levi met Woolf two nights a week in his home for about a year, discussing the English version in detail. In fall 1959, If This Is a Man was published with Woolf’s translation by Orion Press, a small New York publisher. In 1960 it was published in the United Kingdom by André Deutsch of London.⁵Stuart Woolf, “Tradurre Primo Levi,” Belfagor, LXIV, 6, 30 November 2009, pp. 699-705; Stuart J. Woolf, Translator’s Afterword, in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, ed. Ann Goldstein, Liveright, New York 2015, I, pp. 195-205.

At first, the title Se questo è un uomo was translated literally into English. Two years later in 1961, the American publisher decided to change it. The paperback reprint was published by Collier (New York). The new title was Survival in Auschwitz and the subtitle that served as synthesis and slogan was The Nazi Assault on Humanity. The publisher’s motivation is crystal clear. Already at that time the word Auschwitz inserted in the title would guarantee broader readership. In addition, the happy ending implicit in “survival” would be more promising for good sales.

Now, many decades later, it would be of little use to contest that Survival in Auschwitz is wrong as a title and as a label inspired by that optimism that Europeans tend to consider typical of the American character. That title really missed the mark, but it may be useful to understand why it is also somehow justifiable. Although it is the product of one man’s limited experience,  Se questo è un uomo is meant to talk about “man” in general – i.e. the human being of any time and of all times. On the other hand, Survival in Auschwitz alludes to a quality that Americans (and they are not the only ones) think the Italians have – the ability to “get by,” a talent expressed by the virtually untranslatable verb arrangiarsi. Perhaps it was this aspect that went beyond this single book to induce such an editorial manipulation during a period when Italian literature, film, figurative art and design were experiencing a particularly positive reception in the United States.

In France there was a more serious manipulation of Levi’s text, a translation of which was published by Buchet-Castel (Paris) in 1961 with the title, J’étais un homme – “I was a man.” The text was misunderstood and rearranged in many points, often egregiously. Levi managed to have the translation withdrawn from sales. It was only at the beginning of 1987 the book, with the title Si c’est un homme (“If this is a man”), returned to the French readership in a new translation published by Julliard (Paris).

It was the German translation of Se questo è un uomo that Primo Levi was looking forward to more than anything else. German was the language of the torturers, the language in which the events happened. In 1986 Levi reconstructed what sparked what happened:

These passages come from the beginning of “Letters from Germans,” the eighth and last of the  chapters that make up The Drowned and the Saved, Levi’s work of all-inclusive reconsideration. The letters that the title of the chapter alludes to are those that Levi was to receive after his first book was published in German. The event that leads to this result, as well as its co-protagonist, the translator Heinz Riedt, both deserve to be described.

Heinz Riedt presented himself to Primo Levi with a letter in excellent Italian dated August 13 1959, informing him that the publisher Fischer (Frankfurt) had assigned him to translate Se questo è un uomo into German.

The same age as Levi, Riedt was the son of a Protestant diplomat from Rhineland-Palatine. His mother, a Catholic, came from an aristocratic Dutch family with branches in France. He lived between Naples and Palermo from the time when he was two to when he was twelve years old. He then went back to Germany to study in a school run by Benedictines. Drafted into the Nazi army in 1940, he was assigned to work as an interpreter in the negotiations over the Franco-German armistice. He was repelled by this assignment and found a doctor who certified for him a medical discharge for illness. In this way, he was able to move to Italy to study Political Science at the University of Padua, where he began his studies with a scholarship in 1941. Among his teachers there were the young philosopher of law, Norberto Bobbio and the Latinist Concetto Marchesi, who was also a militant in the clandestine communist party.

After the September 8 1943 armistice, Riedt joined Giustizia e Libertà [justice and freedom], the same partisan band and pollical group that Primo Levi had joined in those same months. Riedt did not engage in combat but in liaison, propaganda, and hostage exchanges. Almost no one knew his identity. When the war ended, he was offered Italian citizenship but preferred to return to West Germany. There, despite his partisan militancy, he was subjected to the accusation of having betrayed his country, the Germany of Hitler. He was also denied membership in the communist party,  a membership that he had never requested, by the way.  He moved to East Berlin (at a time when the wall had not yet been built), but received his mail at the address of his father in law in West Berlin. He was allowed to go on vacation in Bavaria once a year.

Riedt was an expert scholar of Italian, a translator of  Ruzante and Goldoni. Between August 1959 and May 1960, the Levi-Riedt correspondence took on the shape of a real working language workshop, consisting in 19 letters punctuated by a meeting in Germany. In “Letters from Germans,” Levi explained what his purpose was during those months:

Levi called for acoustic fidelity in this translation while it was a work in progress. He wanted to impose a kind of German – the readers’ native language – that they were not able to understand entirely, a German that sounded like a foreign language to their ears. He wanted the deformed and degraded German language at Auschwitz to correspond to the moral deformation and degradation that the concentration camp had inflicted on its torturers as well as its victims. The German title of the book was to help him. It  was a case where the language of the translation offered unexpected resources, turning out to convey broader meaning than the original language. In fact, Ist das ein Mensch? literally means Is that a human being? Mensch is a broader category than uomo, man.

Levi desired to provoke his German readers with a sensation of dissonance and acoustic alienation. This would rise out of the fact that the German reproduced in Ist das ein Mensch? was almost the same as ordinary German. German speakers would be struck more by the similarity between the camp slang –   Lagerjargon – and their native language than by the gap separating them. The German readers of 1961 would notice that Nazism was there not so far away and that it would take very little for them to fall for it or fall for it again. The way that Auschwitz sounded so near in Levi’s pages would be a warning to them that danger was always near.

Ist das ein Mensch? was published by Fischer with Heinz Riedt’s translation in November 1961. Levi received the first copies along with the first letter that a German reader sent him. The writer was Wolfgang Beutin, a young historian and sociologist that was active in the Social Democratic Party. This was the start of a correspondence that was to keep on going with several dozen German readers that would come together, accompanied by Levi’s comments in the already-mentioned “Letters from Germans,” the last chapter of The Drowned and the Saved in 1986.⁹For a comprehensive reconstruction of this, see Martina Mengoni, Primo Levi e i Tedeschi (Torino: Einaudi, 2017), now in Lezioni Primo Levi, eds. Fabio Levi & Domenico Scarpa (Milano: Mondadori, 2019), pp. 415-95.

If This is a Man is a book that went along transforming itself even beyond the 1947 and 1958 versions. As we have seen, Levi was something more than a witness of Auschwitz. He was a writer who confronted events and the types of language needed to tell the stories of these events. To varying degrees,  Levi knew several languages, dialects, jargons of specialists, and popular slangs. He worked for years as a specialized technician. He was a translator of scientific tracts as well as, privately, of poems and verses. After the definitive edition of his first book was published by a prestigious publisher like Einaudi, he took up a third craft, in addition to those of chemist and writer, the craft of narrating his concentration camp experiences to young people in school, conversing with them and answering their questions.

 Levi was no stranger to the mass media. He knew how the media functioned technically and he knew how the media could give him a chance to express himself. From the 1960s on, his reflections on the physical facts and the meaning of Auschwitz kept on evolving, never ceasing. These reflections passed through the mass media, which had already introduced his first work.

 In 1962 a Canadian English-language radio station (CBC) submitted an adaptation of If This is a Man to Levi, which he liked so much that he worked out a radio play for the Centro di Produzione Rai, the national radio network in Turin. The play was recorded outdoors in Brozolo,  a village in hills near Turin and was broadcast ono Rai’s Terzo Programma April 24 1964. It was directed by Giorgio Bandini, among the first in Italy to stage Samuel Beckett. The actor who played the role of Alberto (stage name, Pieralberto Marché, born Marchesini) suggested that Levi also write a theatrical version of his book. Levi let himself be persuaded, but only halfway. Marché would prepare a story line and Levi would intervene in the second phase.

It turned out that Levi’s intervention was as innovative as it was massive. The theatrical version of If this is a Man was a work that was still more different than the 1947 and 1958 editions of the novel. The spaces dedicated to some of the characters changed and episodes that did not appear in the original novel were added. Most of all, the focus of the script was the topic of communicating, one that twenty years later would become the title and the focus of a chapter in The Drowned and the Saved.

Written by Levi and Marché, the adaptation of If This is a Man for the theater was a new episode in the “curious and instructive” story, as Levi put it in his text notes,¹¹ Primo Levi, Nota, in Se questo è un uomo, versione drammatica di Pieralberto Marché e Primo Levi [dramatic version] (Torino: Einaudi, 1966), pp. 5-8; also in Opere complete I, 1195-97, cf. 1195.  which was unfolding around his debut novel. Scheduled for November 9 1966 at the Teatro Metastasio in Prato, its first performance was slated to close the Rassegna internazionale dei Teatri Stabili, the international review of theater companies. In those years, this was one of the major events in experimental theater. However, it had to be cancelled because of the flood that devastated Florence on November 4. Its premiere, instead, took place at the Teatro Carignano in Turin on 19 November 19. Directed by Gianfranco De Bosio. The cast members included actors from theater companies in Austria, France, Israel Poland and Hungary. Its 53 actors were of seven different nationalities. The following year, If This is a Man won the IDI Saint-Vincent prize as the best text of the 1966 theatrical season.¹²There is a thorough iconographic and textual documentation on this performance in  Album Primo Levi, pp. 221-23 & 250-51.

The theatrical adaptation of If This is a Man was published by Einaudi in a special little volume. In the preface, Levi compared himself for the first time in public to a famous character from English literature:

In 1973 Einaudi published an edition of If This is a Man for middle schools (for c.11-14-year-old students) with a presentation and notes by the author. Levi added a short bibliography of “general works on National Socialism and the Jewish question.” In addition, there were two maps. The first showed Nazi Germany with its 1938 borders and its concentration camps. According to the caption, “As you can see, numerous camps were found in the territories occupied during the Second World War.” The second map showed “the Auschwitz area and the camps that depended administratively on Auschwitz.” (The borders of Germany were those of 1939.)¹⁴The Prefazione 1972 ai giovani and the authors notes are reprinted in Opere complete I, 1407-21; the maps are reproduced in Album Primo Levi, pp. 150-51.

In 1976 Levi added another appendix to the school edition, where he answered some of the most common questions that his readers asked him, above all students in the schools where he went to talk about his experiences. Beginning in 1979, this appendix was included in all the editions of the work. This 1976 appendix can be considered one of the centers of reflection around which the The Drowned and the Saved, his last book, was growing. Another center of reflection was his “first-born” book, which he had never stopped thinking about. When the Australian writer  Germaine Greer asked him to speak about the literary quality of If This is a Man, Levi let himself go and confessed:

The “and so forth” in the conclusion encompasses a catalogue of sources, the most important being Dante’s Comedy and the Bible (the Old Testament and a surprising number of quotations from the Gospels). The ideal guide for this investigation is the annotated  Einaudi edition (2012) of If This is a Man edited by Alberto Cavaglion.

Therefore If This is a Man is a book that tells the story of an experience of universal interest written against a background of a culture that was equally vast, and not only a literary culture. So, it is no surprise that, 50 years after the end of the Second World War in 1995, the Times Literary Supplement included it in a list of the 100 most important books published in the world after 1945. There are only three Italian titles. Besides Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks there is also The Drowned and the Saved. Reading over the list, we can notice that If This is a Man was placed among the books of the 1950s without taking into account its first edition in 1947.¹⁶Massimo Bucciantini and Domenico Scarpa discuss these circumstances in Esperimento Auschwitz. Presentazione della seconda Lezione Primo Levi, Salone del Libro, Torino, May 12 2011.

Less than 3 years after the end of the Second World War, Primo Levi had known how to tell the story of Auschwitz to the entire world with an unrepeatable balance of attention and cultural force, of empathy and distance. We often hear it said that the horrors of the concentration camps were unspeakable and undescribable without taking into consideration how much more can be and has been said – something that readers worldwide are privy to thanks to the works of Levi – thanks to the density of his meanings; thanks to the heritage of his characters, actions, and images; and thanks to the range of his moral propositions that surprise and unnerve, which we can never finish extracting from those pages that are so deceptively clear. So far, If This is a Man  has been translated into 40 languages.