Sara R. Horowitz, The Gender of Good and Evil: Women and Holocaust Memory, Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 165. In the face of the actions of an Oskar Schindler, a Raoul Wallenberg, or the inhabitants of the village of Le Chambon, how can bystanders honestly contend that they were forced to do nothing? (199). In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi titles his second chapter The Gray Zone. Here he discusses what he calls National Socialism's most demonic crime: the attempt to shift onto othersspecifically the victimsthe burden of guilt, so that they were deprived of even the solace of innocence.1 He is referring here specifically to the Sonderkommandosthe special squads chosen by the SS at Auschwitz to perform horrendous tasks. The 'grey zone' is a term coined by the Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi in his essay collection The Drowned and the Saved (1989; originally published in Italian in 1986), the last book he completed before his death. . As in all the other chapters of his book, Levi discusses the complexity of these situations. His exploration of what he called the "gray zone" drew attention to the space between the poles of good and evil and to the moments of blurring between victims and perpetrators. IN HIS MUCH-DISCUSSED CHAPTER "The Gray Zone" from The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi recounts the disturbing story of the morally corrupt Judenrat leader of the Lodz ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski, whose willing collaboration with the Nazis nonetheless failed to save him from the gas chambers of Auschwitz. In 'The Grey Zone', the second chapter and the longest essay in the book, Levi acknowledges the human need to divide the social field into 'us' and 'them . Only through deathwhether one's own or that of othersis it possible to attain the absolute: by dying for an ideal one proves that one holds it dearer that life itself.39, Todorov prefers ordinary virtue, an act of will that affirms one's dignity while demonstrating concern for others. But regardless of their actions Jews were condemned. The Drowned and the Saved - Wikipedia The special squads fare no better under a consequentialist approach to ethics. Despite this concession, Rubinstein rejects Levi's characterization of Rumkowski as a resident of the gray zone. . " The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi - Google Books See Helga Varden, Kant and Lying to the Murderer at the Door One More Time: Kant's Legal Philosophy and Lies to Murderers and Nazis, Journal of Social Philosophy 41 no. It is instrumental in nature and judged solely by its result. Chapter 3, " Shame," is, in my opinion, the most profound and moving section of the book. I will argue that Tzvetan Todorov commits this last fundamental error with his claim that all people living in totalitarian societies reside in the gray zone. This is the essence of Levi's notion of the gray zone. Sander H. Lee is Professor of Philosophy at Keene State College in New Hampshire. Even in the worst of circumstances (Auschwitz), it cannot be extinguished. Members of these special squads received marginally better provisions of food and other supplies than most camp inmates, yet they knew thatlike all other prisonersthey were doomed. Lang uses the following quotation to demonstrate Levi's staunch refusal to identify himself with perpetrators such as the infamous Eric Muhsfeldt: I do not know whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. it draws from a suspect source and must be protected against itself" (34). In his landmark book The Drowned and the Saved (first published in 1986), Primo Levi introduced the notion of a moral "gray zone." The author of this essay re-examines Levi's use of the term. In her final section, titled The Gray Zone, Horowitz examines the moral ambiguities present in stories of Jewish women who survived by trading sexual services for food or protection. This Study Guide consists of approximately 34pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - Browning examines the strategies used by Jewish prisoners to survive; he finds, not surprisingly, that those willing to exploit the corruption of the German guards and managers had the best chance. The rejection of relativism and the defense of ethics are fundamental to the comprehension and proper application of Levi's notion. In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi does not explicitly discuss the conditions faced by women in the camps. Written by people who wish to remain anonymous Subjectivity and irony The irony of subjectivity comes through loud and clear in this account of Nazi concentration camps. The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi - Google Books By the end of his life survivor Primo Levi had become increasingly convinced that the lessons of the Holocaust were destined to be lost as. Throughout the book, Levi returns to the motif of the Gray Zone, which was occupied by those prisoners who worked for the Nazis and assisted them in keeping the other prisoners in line. Todorov dismisses Primo Levi's disgust with his own acts of selfishness in the camp as a form of survivors guilt. My act will prove to everyone what is the right thing to do.12 Here he acted in accordance with the deontological approach, refusing to collaborate with evil no matter what the consequences. Despite some of his comments about Muhsfeldt, I believe Levi's answer must be negative because of the importance of free will. In the anthology Ethics After the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses, both David Hirsch and David Patterson attack Todorov's positionespecially his refusal to view perpetrators as moral monsters simply because they lived in a totalitarian society. For the history of the Golden Rule, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule (accessed March 16, 2016). Some historians believe that Levi committed suicide, overwhelmed by a penetrating sense of guilt at having survived an experience that killed so many. Ross, hold that the moral worth of an act is intrinsic to the act itself, while consequentialists, including Utilitarians Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, believe that the moral worth of an act lies primarily in its consequences. Copyright 1999 - 2023 GradeSaver LLC. Would not those who had been trying to keep the Jews of the ghettos alive as long as possible subsequently have been hailed for their efforts?24, Yet Weinberg's argument fails as a justification for placing Rumkowski into Levi's gray zone, for as Lang asserted, the gray zone is NOT reserved for suspended judgmentsthose made through the lens of moral hindsight.. Themes Style Quotes Topics for Discussion. Those who survived were able to remind themselves in small ways every day that they were still human. It is as objective and real as its two principled and more commonly recognized alternatives. Since Levi was one of those saved, he is "in permanent search of a justification . However, as I have argued, Levi does not intend to permanently include perpetrators in the gray zone. Instead, as some seem to suggest, the job of ethics, in the face of postmodern relativism, is to understand why people commit acts of immorality, without condemning them for doing so or demanding their punishment. Yet, in his final work, The Drowned and the Saved, Levi painted a radically different picture of the Holocaust. Levi does not spare himself: "This very book is drenched in memory . But he then goes further in marking a place for judgments that are not bound to either of the traditional categories but still remain within the bounds of ethics itself. The Grey Zone - OpenEdition The average life expectancy of Sonderkommando members was approximately three months. Rumkowski chose compliance in the hope that he would be able to save some of the victims. Levi believed in free will, in the possibility that each of us could choose to engage in the Jewish activity of tikkun olam (the repair of the world's injustices). These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. Members of Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando burn bodies of gassed prisoners outdoors, August 1944. Levi's intent in introducing his notion of the gray zone is to say that it is, while Rubinstein argues that it is not. Fundamental to his purpose is the fear that what happened once can happen (and in some respects, has happened) again. Using lies and coercion they led thousands of victims to a horrible death. The problem of the fallibility of memory, the techniques used by the Nazis to break the will of prisoners, the use of language in the camps and the nature of violence are all studied. . With his emphasis on caring, Todorov adds a dash of Heidegger, Levinas, and Buber into the mix. Even more important, the camps remained under factory management throughout their existence. How should we judge the moral culpability of the members of these special squads? Horowitz traces the growth of this story, which has been proven false, into a powerful myth immortalized in a popular poem and repeated in certain Jewish religious services. thissection. Rubinstein maintains that Levi saw all people as centaurstorn between two natures. This is not the same as the Golden Rule, which states that one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.2 The Golden Rule suggests that we are motivated to treat others well by self-interestthat is, by the desire to be treated well ourselves. Melson describes his parents feelings of guilt at their inability to save his maternal grandparents from death in the ghetto; after the war, his mother suffered from depression and required electroshock treatments to deal with her guilt. The Nazis developed a world for their intended targets where their annihilation was the only focus. It seems to me that a defender of Levi could respond to Rubinstein by arguing that Levi did not attempt to justify or excuse Rumkowski. The inequalities between them were just too great. In normal moral circumstances, Levi would not hesitate to condemn Rumkowski, but because he was a victim living in nightmarish conditions, we have no right to condemn himalthough we do have an obligation to consider the moral implications of his actions. The Drowned and the Saved - Preface Summary & Analysis. Clearly, Jews and members of other groups chosen for extermination (e.g., Roma) must be included. Hirsch asks, Would Todorov wish to argue that the social regimen (if it can be called that) created by the Germans throughout the Konzentrationslager system is what he would consider a normal social order?51 Patterson goes much further, claiming that good and evilin the eyes of Arendt and Todorov, as well as the Nazisare matters either of cultural convention for the weak or of a will to power for the strong. With regards to the premises of their thinking, Arendt and Todorov are much closer to the Nazis than they are to the Jews.52 While I reject such hyperbole as inflammatory, I do agree with Hirsch and Patterson that Todorov's claim that the entire German population could be located in the gray zone is a misuse of Levi's terma misuse that undermines our ability to properly assign moral responsibility. . Even though his first book Se questo un uomo -published in English as Survival in Auschwitz -did not sell well when first published by De Silva in 1947 (2,500 copies published, of which 600 remained unsold and were eventually destroyed by the 1966 flood in Florence), it . Levi clearly opposes the view that ethics should seek merely to understand perpetrators of immoral acts without condemning or punishing them. In her next section, Horowitz compares the portrayal of female collaborators to that of men in Marcel Ophuls's films The Sorrow and the Pity and Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie. They take Levi's willingness to include Muhsfeldt at the extreme boundary of the gray zone (in his moment of hesitation in deciding whether to kill the girl) as license to exponentially expand the gray zone into areas that Levi does not mention. In the eyes of the Nazis, nothing a Jew could do would stop him or her from being a Jew, and thereby slated for inevitable destruction. Adam Czerniakw, Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Czerniakow.html (accessed March 16, 2016). Another anthology dealing with these issues is Elizabeth Roberts Baer and Myrna Goldenberg, eds., Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003). The Holocaust calls into question the very possibility of ethics. Barbour, Polly. Nor, finally and most fundamentally, is the Gray Zone a place to which all human beingsby the fact of human frailtyare granted access, since that would then enable them conveniently to respond to any moral charge with the indisputable claim that I'm only human.8. These two kinds of virtuethe ordinary and the heroicdiffer with respect to the beneficiaries of the acts they inspire: acts of ordinary virtue benefit individuals, a Miss Tenenbaum, for example, whereas acts of heroism can be undertaken for the benefit of something as abstract as a certain concept of Poland.40 Todorov views Mrs. Tennenbaum's suicide as morally superior to that of Adam Czerniakw, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto. Rubinstein's position here seems to grudgingly accept consequentialism, but only when calculated sacrifices are made in the morally correct frame of mind. Nevertheless, from a consequentialist perspective, Jewish leaders such as Wilczek may have acted morally. They were not Nazis and they were not "one of us" in the eyes of the other prisoners either. The doctor revived her and explained to Muhsfeldt what had happened. Primo Levi's Gray Zone : Implications for Post-Holocaust Ethics Privilege defends and protects privilege. As Berel Lang clearly states, the concept of The Gray Zone applies to morally charged conduct in a middle ground between good and evil, right and wrong, where neither side of these pairs covers the situation and where imposing one side or the other becomes itself for Levi a moral wrong.56 Levi speaks above all of the situation of Holocaust victims, whose choices were fundamentally choiceless. The Drowned and the Saved Irony These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. . "Coming out of the darkness, one suffered because of the reacquired consciousness of having been diminished . Using traditional Western moral philosophy, it would be difficult not to condemn them. "Useless Violence" (5) gives examples of how the Nazis tormented their prisoners with "stupid and symbolic violence.". Rubinstein quotes an American Orthodox rabbinical ruling that, while it is permissible for a soldiers to eat pork when no other food is available, they must not lick the bones (Lecht nicht die bayner).18 He concludes that for Rumkowski the gray zone had turned black.19. everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Drowned and the Saved. Some scholars argue against this interpretation of Kant, claiming that he does not intend the Categorical Imperative to apply when dealing with agents of an illegitimate government such as that imposed by the Nazis.3 I find these arguments intriguing, but in the end I reject this interpretationas do, I believe, most scholars of Kant. (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1999), 102. Survival in Auschwitz Chapter 9. The Drowned and the Saved Summary . The SS never took direct control. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. . The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 6, The Intellectual in Auschwitz Summary & Analysis. On September 4, 1942, Rumkowski delivered his infamous Address at the Time of the Deportation of the Children from d Ghetto.20 Rubinstein quotes Rumkowski as saying, I share your pain. Robert Melson's Choiceless Choices: Surviving on False Papers on the Aryan Side also usefully expands Levi's original concept of the gray zone, applying it to Jews living on false papers. Melson describes the experiences of his own parents as they managed to obtain falsified identity papers allowing them to evade the Nazis throughout the war. She argues, as did Gandhi, that had Jewish leaders simply refused to cooperate with the Nazis, many fewer Jews would have been killed: after all the Nazis did not have enough men to drag every Jew from his or her home to the camps. The Drowned and the Saved Summary and Study Guide | SuperSummary Primo Levi. Berel Lang, Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 125. "Communicating" (4) deals with the emotional and practical consequences of not being able to understand the German commands of the captors, or the conversation of the mostly German speaking prisoners (Levi was Italian but spoke some German). The photo was taken surreptitiously from Crematorium V. USHMM, courtesy Pastwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Owicimiu. Levi tells us that a certain Hans Biebow, the German chief administrator of the ghetto . Todorov distinguishes between heroic and ordinary virtue. He did not suggest that we ignore the moral implications of the actions of the special squads or of Chaim Rumkowski; indeed he insisted that we examine these implications carefully. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 5869. While Levi tells us that Muhsfeldt was executed after the war, and contends that this execution was justified, he does suggest that Muhsfeldt's hesitationno matter how momentarywas morally significant. Counterfeiting in more ways than one, they illustrate what Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi called "the grey zone of collaboration." In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi says of his Holocaust experience, "the enemy was all around but also inside[;] the 'we' lost its limits." The Counterfeiters, then, is about the complexity of defining the "we . The world of the Lager was so insane, so far removed from the niceties of everyday reality, that we do not have the moral authority to judge the actions of its victims. First published in Italy in 1986. Sara R. Horowitz does important work in examining the role of gender in the experiences of women caught in the gray zone. It follows immediately after an extended description of Elias the dwarf, whom Steinberg also remem-bers as extraordinary. Under Bentham's Utilitarian Principle, one should act to bring the greatest amount of pleasure to the greatest number of people while inflicting the least amount of harm to the least number of people. . Abstract. One nature is rationally moral while the other is animalistic and amoral. Non-victims such as Muhsfeldt had moral responsibility and deserved to be prosecuted for their actions. The Holocaust calls into question the very possibility of ethics. While there is no question that Wilczek used his power to gain advantages for himself and for members of his family, Browning points out that he also used his influence with a factory manager named Kurt Otto Baumgarten in ways that benefitted the entire community. While a Kantian might condemn both his motives and his means, consequentialists are primarily interested in results, and the results in this case were more positive than they otherwise would have been. For example, in her memoir Strange and Unexpected Love, Fanya Heller describes her relationship as a teenager with a uniformed Ukrainian with the right to grant or take her life. As the repeated urging of her parents to be nice to Jan reminds us, love was a viable currency in the genocidal economy.33 While Heller suggests that her relationship was uncoerced and that she and Jan were able to create their own private and contained world, removed from the horrors outside of it, there was no chance that the affair would continue after the war, much less that she and Jan would marry. and although he feels compelled to bear witness, he does not consider doing so sufficient justification for having survived. Knowing her daughter would never agree to deprive her mother of such protection, Mrs. Tennenbaum asked her to hold the pass for a moment; then she went upstairs and killed herself. For example, in his essay Alleviation and Compliance: The Survival Strategies of the Jewish Leadership in the Wierzbnik Ghetto and Starachowice Factory Slave Labor Camps (in the Petropoulos and Roth volume), Christopher Browning examines the actions of prisoners in camps that differ from Auschwitz in that a surprisingly large proportion of their inmates survived. In the latter film, a female collaborator Francoise Hemmerle is portrayed as evil, while her male counterpart, Armand Zuchner, is described simply as an idiot. Horowitz contends that this demonization of female collaborators is widespread and gender-based. The Drowned and the Saved - jstor.org As Rubinstein agrees that Rumkowski was a victim, the primary disagreement between Levi and Rubinstein may be over the question of whether that victimhood is sufficient to place someone outside our moral jurisdiction. The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 2, The Gray Zone Summary & Analysis I agree that we do need more ways of speaking with precision about regions of collaboration and complicity during World War II.57 However, with Levi and Lang, I oppose moral determinismthe belief that in the contemporary world almost no one can be held completely responsible for his or her acts, and that the job of ethics, in the face of post-modern relativism, is to understand why people commit acts of immorality without condemning them for doing so. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make yourown. The first subject Levi brooches is the problem with memory; chiefly, it is fallible and it is also subjective. However, Lang insists, and I agree, that Levi emphatically does NOT include perpetrators in the gray zone. In other words, Levi is making a normative argument against the right to judge, not an ontological claim about the possibilities of moral action. His invocation of the gray zone is meant to insulate those victims from ordinary moral judgments, since it is unfair to apply traditional standards to people whose choices were so limited. . " On the Grey Zone. Michael Rothberg - Centro Primo Levi New York According to this story a 16-year-old girl miraculously survived a gassing and was found alive in the gas chamber under a pile of corpses. Levi profiles Rumkowski not because he believes that his actions were justified, but precisely because he believes that they were not. Survival in Auschwitz Chapter 9, The Drowned and the Saved Summary Heroes such as Colonel Okulicki of the Polish Home Army choose to fight and die for principles that usually are abstractions (such as the idea of the Polish nation). Victims would do better psychologically to hate their oppressors and leave the understanding to non-victims: One almost regrets Levi's commitment to his project of understanding the enemy (for his sake, not for ours: as readers we are only enriched by his accomplishment). In his book The Question of German Guilt, first published in German in 1947 and in English-language translation in 1948, Karl Jaspers suggests a framework for evaluating German responsibility. Robert Melson, Choiceless Choices: Surviving on False Papers on the Aryan Side, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 106. Levi's account of Henri is part of his extended analysis of "the drowned and the saved," those who will go under (Dante's "sommersi") and those who can survive. The woman's guardian angel discovers that she once gave a beggar a small onion, and this one tiny act of kindness is enough to rescue her from Hell. The Gray Zone is in that sense beyond or at least outside good and evil but morally significant, at the boundary of those ethical judgments and yet warranting a place of its own within ethics. . Toggle navigation . But, because of the extenuating circumstancesthe ways in which Nazism degraded its victimswe have no right to judge them. Indeed, the last lines of The Drowned and the Saved make Levi's position on this issue explicit: Let it be clear that to a greater or lesser degree all [perpetrators] were responsible, but it must be just as clear that behind their responsibility stands that great majority of Germans who accepted in the beginning, out of mental laziness, myopic calculation, stupidity, and national pride the beautiful words of Corporal Hitler, followed him as long as luck and the lack of scruples favored him, were swept away by his ruin, afflicted by deaths, misery, and remorse, and rehabilitated a few years later as the result of an unprincipled political game.55. I would argue that it is appropriate to expand Levi's zone beyond Auschwitz so long as its population is made up only of victims. Preferably the worst survived, the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the gray zone, the spies.44, Todorov disagrees. He quotes Moses Maimonides, who wrote: If they should say, Give us one of you and we will kill him and if not we will kill all of you, the Jews should allow themselves to be killed and not hand over a single life.16 Yet Rubinstein's condemnation of Rumkowski is not based only on the latter's willingness to sacrifice some for the sake of the rest. Melson acknowledges that his mother's actions were morally dubious: whether she was willing to admit it or not, Melson's mother put the lives of the Zamojskis at risk when she stole their identities. In my view, perpetrators and bystanders did not face extenuating circumstances sufficient to justify their inclusion in Levi's gray zone. (And when they refused to collaborate, they were killed and immediately replaced.). David H. Hirsch, The Gray Zone or The Banality of Evil, in Ethics After the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses, ed. Print Word PDF. In that story, an evil old woman dies and goes to Hell. On the other hand, he did argue that, because of their status as coerced victims, we do not have the moral authority to condemn their actions. The shame and guilt that many feel are absurd but real, and only those who do something extraordinary are beyond the feeling. They could even choose to be rescuers. I do not believe so. However, in expanding the sphere of Levi's zone there lies a form of moral determinisma growing sense that in the contemporary world almost no one can be held completely responsible for his or her acts. He acknowledges that his parents situation, while life-threatening and humiliating, never approached the level of horror and despair faced by Levi and other camp prisoners. The Black, White, and Gray Zones of Schindler's List: Steven Spielberg Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 299. Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team, http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/rumkowski.html (accessed March 16, 2016). The Drowned and the Saved, however, was written 40 years later and is the work of memory and reflection not only on the original events, but also on how the world has dealt with the Holocaust in the intervening years. . He is the author of Woody Allen's Angst: Philosophical Commentaries on His Serious Films (2013); Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed: Anguish, God and Existentialism (2002); and Rights, Morality, and Faith in the Light of the Holocaust (2005). In all of these respects, there is relevance for those who work with individuals who are seriously ill or disabled, and in a larger sense, the book forces consideration of the many and ongoing instances of man's inhumanity to man. The individual was whittled away and soon the part of every man that was a human was taken away as well.

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