In ITM, Levi's explicit goals are to
provide an account of his time at the Lager and to examine the state-of-mind
that permeated throughout the Lager. In the preface, Levi claims that
his text is an “account of atrocities” (ITM
9). The term “account” here suggests a history, or a story based on true
events, a suggestion informed by Levi's conclusion to the preface, “It seems to
me unnecessary to add that none of the facts are invented” (10).
Our
expectation is that part of this text's goal is to tell us what happened. But,
the goal of the account, Levi continues, is not to spread knowledge about the
death camps or to create new accusations against anyone involved in the camps
(9); so, although the account tells a factual story, Levi considers the
transmission of the facts themselves unimportant. This claim does not suggest
that Levi finds little importance in facts themselves. He justifies the lack of
importance of facts in his text by claiming that “this book of mine adds
nothing to what is already known to readers throughout the world on the disturbing
question of the death camps” (9, my emphasis). His text, in other words, presupposes
a certain knowledge of the facts of the Lager, which suggests that facts are
important, but only as one of many steps that will eventually lead to Levi’s
ultimate goals.
What
this effect is for Levi is more ambiguous. He claims that “[the text] should be
able…to furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human
mind” (9). But, Levi does not explain which human mind one will be able to
study: the victim's or the perpetrator's. At first, one might argue that Levi
is obviously thinking of the victim here, since the text itself is a memoir of
his time as a victim. Yet, as the preface continues, this conclusion becomes
less obvious.
Levi includes one example of an aspect of the human mind; “many
people – many nations – can find themselves holding more or less wittingly,
that 'every stranger is an enemy'” (9). When this notion becomes “a major
premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager” (9).
Again, these lines can be read in two ways. Either a) as soon as we hold the
notion that 'every stranger is an enemy,' no matter what other notions we may
hold, we will eventually create something analogous to the National Socialist
Lagers, or b) if we choose any aspect of our lives and combine it with the
notion that 'every stranger is an enemy,' we see what that aspect would be like
in the Lager (i.e. if we combine the desire for possessions with the notion,
then we will expect people to fight over possessions, either to retain their
own or acquire another stranger's, a situation that appears in the Lager [Levi,
ITM 37]). Thus, this claim can be read either about the perpetrators
or about the victims. Levi concludes this paragraph by claiming that, “Here is
the product of a conception of the world carried rigorously to its logical
conclusion; so long as the conception subsists, the conclusion remains to
threaten us. The story of the death camps should be understood by everyone as a
sinister alarm-signal” (9).
This conclusion sheds a confusing light on the
notion of whose mind is at stake. If we interpret the rest of the paragraph as
looking solely at the victim's mind, then the alarm-signal is only alerting
us to a psychological phenomenon: what happens when the notion “every stranger
is an enemy” is combined with all other aspects of one's life. But, this
conclusion is absurd, since what “threatens” us is not the state-of-mind of the
victims, but of the perpetrators. If only one alarm signal exists after
witnessing the Lager, it must be the alarm that something like it could
happen – that it did happen and might happen again.[1]
Thus, although Levi's text concentrates on the experiences and states of mind
of the Lagers' victims, it is also interested in the states of mind of the
Lagers' perpetrators. This reading also makes sense, and develops a more
sinister air, given Levi's conclusion in DS’s
“The Gray Zone” that “[National Socialism] degrades its victims and makes them
similar to itself” (DS 68). In this
reading, the aspects of the human mind that led to the Lager are the same as
those that existed within the Lager, with the important exception that the
former were chosen, while the latter were imposed.[2]
Thus, Levi's stated goal in ITM is to examine both.
[1] This notion becomes more evident in Levi's
later text, DS, in which one of his main goals is to determine whether
something like the concentration camp could ever happen again (DS 20-1), where we have a duty to think
about the issues of the Lager precisely because it could (53).
[2] This exception is one of Levi's main points
in “The Gray Zone” (DS 48).
