Just as he does in the preface to ITM, in the preface to DS, Levi
makes explicit the purposes of his text: “this book,” he claims,
means to contribute to the clarification of
some aspects of the Lager phenomenon which still appear obscure. It also sets
itself a more ambitious goal, to try to answer the most urgent question…How
much of the concentration camp world is dead and will not return, like slavery
and the dueling code? How much is back, or is coming back? What can each of us
do so that in this world pregnant with threats at least this threat will be
nullified?
(DS 20-1)
We see here three purposes: similar to the
concept of an “account” above, the text attempts to give facts about the Lager,
though here the concern is with the transmission of knowledge, whereas
in ITM, Levi claimed that it was not; the text attempts to answer a
descriptive question of whether “the concentration camp world” has/will return;
and the text attempts to answer a normative question about how to keep that
world from returning. We also know that Levi considers the latter two more
urgent and ambitious goals.
Yet,
DS differs from ITM because the goals expressed in the preface
are expressed toward the end of the preface rather than in the beginning, such
that the process through which Levi reaches these goals helps us to understand
them. The preface begins with the topic of the complications with finding “the
truth about the Lagers” (19). The initial complications include the silence of
the Germans (both those working at the camps and those knowing about the camps'
existence) as well as the fact that most of the victims who survived and spoke
were privileged in the camps (hence their survival) and thus never had experienced
the worst aspects of the Lager (12, 15, 17). Moreover, as time has passed, Levi
claims, many of the victims and perpetrators have died, and those who live,
with time, have stylized their memories, made them simpler and easier for the
world (and/or themselves) to swallow (19-20). It is Levi's normative push to
emphasize the complicated nature of the Lager (“one must beware of
oversimplifications” [20]) that leads him to the claims about the purpose of
his text. This sequence suggests that the text is a response to
oversimplification of the camp world, such that its purposes are subsumed under
the larger purpose of desimplifying it.
The
first purpose of DS that we saw above
(to spread knowledge about the Lager) makes sense given the above reading. One
could read all of Levi's essays in DS as
attempting to disprove common, simple assumptions about the Lager, from “The
Memory of the Offense,” which complicates the assumption that memoirs of the
Lager are unstylized, to “The Gray Zone,” which complicates the assumption that
the binary victim/perpetrator is identical to that of innocent/guilty, to
“Shame,” which complicates the assumption that leaving the Lager is a purely
positive experience, etc. In each of these, the assumption is not entirely
discarded (memory is still important; victims are still different from
perpetrators), but made more complicated and more in tune with the reality (for
Levi) of the Lager. Thus, the additional aspects of the Lager that Levi invokes
are aspects that serve to complicate the oversimplifications of perceptions of
the Lager.
It
is possible to subsume the last two purposes (answering questions about whether
the Lager will return and how to prevent it) under the notion of
desimplification as well, but such a reading ignores the urgency of these
questions in-and-of themselves. One might argue that Levi's goals in
approaching these questions are to complicate the growing assumption that the
Lager is an element of the past that will not return and the apathetic
assumption that if the Lager is returning, there is nothing to be done
about it. On the other hand, although Levi does criticize a similar
apathetic assumption in DS's conclusion,[1]
this idea of desimplification is relatively unsupported in the text. Because
the desimplification of the notion that we cannot help prevent the return of
the Lager is made at the end of the text, alongside the answer to Levi's other
question (whether the Lager will return: “It happened, therefore it is going to
happen again: this is the core of what we have to say” [199]), it makes more
sense to argue that all of Levi's other desimplifications (because they come
earlier in the text) serve to show that the questions of whether the Lager will
return (which is answered at the end) and how we can work to prevent it (which
is never answered explicitly) are not questions with simple answers.
Although
Levi does not provide an explicit answer to the question of how we can work to
prevent the Lager, the entire text of DS
can be read as various attempts to answer it. These attempts fall into two
general categories: the act of testimony, so that the Lager is not forgotten,
and the desimplification of the Lager world. The first of these categories
permeates through the text, from the preface and the first essay (“The Memory
of the Offense”), in which memory (and specifically testified memory) is one of
the explicit topics, to every other chapter, in which Levi uses his own
testimony to both drive his concerns and exemplify his points. For example, in
the essay “Communication,” Levi argues against the notion of incommunicability
with the example of the Lager, in which communication is as close to impossible
as it can be, and yet is necessary for survival.[2]
Levi begins his discussion of communication by claiming that “I have never
liked the term incommunicability...first of all because it is a
linguistic horror, and secondly for more personal reasons” (88, emphasis in
source). Thus, when he spends the majority of the essay looking at the ways in
which communication was important and yet difficult in his experience at the
Lager, we see that his personal experience, that which he recounts, is both the
cause of his “personal reasons” for disliking the term “incommunicability”
(because it ignores the complications that he has experienced) and also the
reasoning behind rethinking our notion of communicability. Levi's testimony
both drives his dislike of the idea of incommunicability (and thus the need for
the essay in the first place) and exemplifies the problem with it. His
testimony, therefore, itself functions to desimplify common conceptions about
the Lager.
Desimplification,
in turn, is the process opposed to the existence of the Lager. Bryan Cheyette
argues that we should read Levi as showing ambiguity when dealing with issues
of the Lager (an idea similar to desimplification). He makes this argument
based on the assumption that ambiguity is opposed to the systematic thinking
that sees only black and white (not gray) that is the thinking that underscores
Fascism (Cheyette 278-9). Thus, by examining the ambiguity of the Lagers (by
desimplifying them), Levi promotes thinking directly opposed to their creation.
Levi's acts of testimony and desimplification are examples of how one works to
prevent the Lagers' return and thus they implicitly answer the question of how
we work against this return: we desimplify ours and others' thinking.
[1] He argues against the assumption that
violence is necessary for society and thus that there is nothing we can do
about it (200).
[2] On impossibility: “I find it imperative to
intervene precisely when I hear people talking about failed or impossible
communication. 'You should have experienced ours'” (DS 89). On necessity: “Knowing German meant life” (95) and “Not to
suffer from [failed or limited communication], to accept the eclipse of the
word, was an ominous symptom: it signaled the approach of definitive
indifference” (101). On the contradictory nature of communication, and more
generally language, in Levi see my discussion below (p. 54-5).
