Metaphors of violence and survival: Primo Levi’s philosophy of chemistry

One of the principal dilemmas Holocaust survivors have faced is how to voice the traumatic memories that haunt them. Although in his seminal Language and Silence George Steiner once claimed that “the world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason”, the Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi was an obvious exception in having been able to voice his trauma throughout his life by writing about it and analysing what happened to him. He has left us an oeuvre in which he unceasingly found ways to express his memories of the eleven months he spent in Auschwitz, from February 1944 until his liberation by the Russian Army in January 1945. This article demonstrates how Levi was able to express himself about the trauma he had experienced specifically by employing language and imagery derived from myths such as Tantalus and Homer’s Odyssey, but primarily also through the use of metaphor. Close attention is paid to the role of chemistry in Levi’s life, his philosophy of chemistry, how it influenced his literary career, and how in the face of persistent silence about the Holocaust the use of chemical metaphors in The Periodic Table (1975) provided Levi with a means to translate to himself and the world his harrowing memories of his year in Auschwitz.


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One of the principal dilemmas Holocaust survivors have been struggling with is how to write about what happened to them.Although George Steiner has claimed that "the world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason" (Steiner, 1967, 12), Primo Levi was an exception in having been able to voice his trauma throughout his life.He has left us an oeuvre in which he unceasingly found ways to express his memories of the eleven months he spent in Auschwitz, from February 1944 until his liberation by the Russian Army in January 1945.Levi survived thanks to a number of factors, much of it sheer luck, but above all because he was a skilled chemist.Chemistry saved his life and then later on in his writing career, especially in The Periodic Table (1975), provided him with a way of translating his memories to himself and to others.He did so both in realistic and metaphorical terms.Throughout his oeuvre Levi gave expression to his memory not only through crystal clear analysis of the kind he displays in his last book The Drowned and the Saved (1987) but also through literary forms of expression, by alluding to literary works and the oral tradition from Dante's Divina Commedia to ancient myths, as well as by way of a metaphorical language.
This paper examines the interface of Levi's vocation as a chemist and his literary language, in particular his philosophy of chemistry and the use of chemical metaphors in coming to terms with the harrowing experience of his year in Auschwitz.Levi's career as a chemist started at the University of Turin in 1937, shortly before the racial laws introduced by Mussolini made it impossible for Jews to enrol at Italian universities.However, those students who had begun courses were able to finish them, and Levi was one of these.He passed his examinations with distinction, and although the racial laws made it difficult for him to find a thesis supervisor, he was finally accepted by the physicist and fervent opponent of fascism Nico Dallaporta, who features as the 'assistant' in the 'Potassium' chapter of The Periodic Table .When Levi was liberated from Auschwitz he was just one of twenty still alive of the 650 Italian Jews who had been transported from the Italian transit camp of Fossoli to Auschwitz.The average life expectancy of a new entrant was about three to four months.He recounts this experience in Se questo è un uomo (If this is a man, 1947), a title referring to the dehumanization processes that went on in the camps.This notion of transformation, of metamorphosis, is a process that acutely interested Levi the chemist.
It is in If this is a man that he narrates for the first time how he came to be one of the three chosen prisoners to work in the chemistry lab at the Auschwitz III camp also known as Buna Monowitz during the final months of his imprisonment.Getting out of the harsh winter weather must have played a large part in saving Levi's life.About six months before his transfer to the lab he had been given a grotesque examination by the head of the Polymerization Laboratory, Doktor Pannwitz, the perfect archetype of the tall and blond Nazi: "he has eyes, nose and hair as all Germans ought to have them…, he raised his eyes and looked at me," Levi recalls."If I had known how completely to explain the nature of that 1 3 Metaphors of violence and survival: Primo Levi's philosophy… look… I would also have explained the essence of the great insanity of the third Germany" (Levi, 2007, 111-112).Levi passes the test, and in the bitter winter of 1944 is allowed to work in a place that is dry, warm and exempt from debilitating manual labour.Moreover, working in the lab allows him to pilfer chemistry glassware, soap, petrol and alcohol to sell for food and other essentials in the camp's black market (Thomson, 2002, 194).
Although the common story is that chemistry saved Levi, some critics like Philip Ball have argued that in fact it was his humanity that did: "His kindness attracted to him like-minded souls who together sustained each other through hell.He was, says Philip Roth (who knew him in later life), 'a magically endearing man'" (Ball, 2019).Nonetheless, it would be hard to imagine Levi surviving if he had not been placed in the 'Chemical Kommando', a team assigned to the production of chemicals in Buna Monowitz, where the chemical conglomerate IG Farben, which also produced Zyklon B, used slave labor for the production of synthetic rubber, methanol and other compounds (cf.Hilberg, 1961, 586-90;Rubenstein, 1975, 36-67;Borkin, 1978).
His biographer Ian Thomson tells us how Levi felt shame (vergogna) at having collaborated with the Germans (Thomson, 2002, 506) and having colluded in the German war effort so that while working in the lab he "began to sabotage production by muddling test tubes and botching samples, secret misdeeds which filled him with a small joy" (Thomson, 2002, 195).Although the lab offered him a respite from the hell outside and made him start contemplating and analysing what he had seen, he suffered from the guilt of having been selected for survival while thousands of others were selected to die.Here in the quiet of the lab, he even contemplated the idea of suicide to escape the claws of the Nazis, an idea that had never come to him while still outside where there was no time to ponder such things."When you are near death, death is the last thing on your mind" (Thomson, 2002, 195), and all you can think about is how to survive.
Levi was able to work in the lab until the war drew to a close.The Germans then abandoned the camp, marching most of the prisoners out of it before sending them on to the Buchenwald concentration camp or shooting them.Again Levi survives, being left behind in the sick ward with fever.From there the Russians transported him eastwards to Krakow and then through Ukraine to Russia itself-the start of a circuitous journey through the post-war devastation of eastern Europe back to Turin, the material of La Tregua/The Truce.In October 1945 he returned to the house in which he had been born (Ball, 2019).
All through his life Levi remained haunted by these experiences.The need to give testimony was accompanied by the sheer difficulty of representing, literally re-presenting, the experience of the concentration camp not only to himself but to relatives and friends back home.It was a fear that had already tormented him while still imprisoned and which upon his return then led to his compulsive urge to tell even strangers about what had happened to him.His comparison of himself with Coleridge's Ancient Mariner who compulsively tells a wedding guest his story reflects Levi's persistent fear of prolonged isolation with his memories.
However, writing about his experience in the camps provided Levi with ways of coping with his trauma, at least while he was still young.Survival in Auschwitz, the American trade title of his memoir, refers to surviving the camps physically but also points to a psychological and mental survival for the continuation of his life after the Lager; and chemistry, Levi argues, also provided him with the kind of mental resilience necessary for his survival: The trade of chemist (fortified in my case by the experience of Auschwitz) teaches you to overcome, indeed to ignore, certain revulsions that are neither necessary nor congenital; matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely transformable, and its proximate origin is of no importance whatsoever.(Levi, 2012, 150-1) He was thinking about the law of the conservation of matter: matter is matter, infinitely transformable but also ineliminable in the end.While matter, human beings were eliminated in the camps, still the spirit of survival that reigned in some of the prisoners was harder to quash, more difficult to eliminate.Levi gives us a few examples of such prisoners in both If this is a man and the sequel The Truce.One of these indestructible humans in Auschwitz, of physical and mental matter that could not be destroyed, took the form of Elias Lindzin.While his sheer strength kept Elias alive, Levi survived thanks to his skilfulness as a chemist and his facility with other people.After all, in an environment of enmity the politics of friendship are extremely important."Matter is matter," Levi says, "infinitely transformable," and it is this protean ability to transform oneself, such as the ability to quickly pick up German, that contributes to one's survival, while inflexibility meant a certain death sentence.And yet, the act of transforming prisoners was also initiated by the perpetrators.Their entire agenda targeted the transformation of humans into what they viewed as subhuman vermin, a kind of bestiality that was and continues to be very different from Elias's superhuman strength.It is the kind of metamorphosis that Kafka describes in his short story Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis, 1915), where the protagonist Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning from troubled dreams and finds himself transformed into a monstrous vermin.Kafka's 1915 text stands as a sinister foreboding of the metaphors reserved for those the Third Reich deemed undesirable and lebensunwert, life not worth being lived: the metaphor of the insect, the louse in particular.In the final solution, various forms of deception and practices of dehumanization and killing, above all the gas chambers, point to this conceptual eradication of humans as lice.It is what in the first sentence Kafka calls the Ungeziefer-the animal that in its etymology implies that it is not clean enough to be sacrificed but which can be killed by anyone with impunity-that forms the basis of this ideology of hatred in Nazi Germany towards traditionally nomadic and diasporic groups such as the Jews and Sinti and Roma people.
The word Ungeziefer is an uncanny cryptonym in Kafka's story deriving from deep within the collective Jewish unconscious.That it is "ein ungeheures Ungeziefer" means that it is an unclean animal of the lowest order (in line with the principles of kashrut and etymologically derived from Middle High German ungezibere, the negation of the animal clean enough to be sacrificed, cf.Bernofsky, 2014).This creature has no place in the family or in God's order, an existence that can be interpreted as the fundamental condition of Jewish exile, the abandonment of humans in the camps as a state of exception: "Jews were exterminated not in a mad 1 3 Metaphors of violence and survival: Primo Levi's philosophy… and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, as lice", which is to say, as bare life" (Agamben, 1995, 114).The conceptual demolition of humans to the level of species considered to be unclean and parasitic has a mythical dimension if we think, for example, of the Greek Lycaon myth in which Lycaon, the king of Arcadia, is turned into a wolf for his moral impurity resulting from breaking the taboo of cannibalism.It is, however, also the difficulty of expressing in adequate language and images what happened in Auschwitz that may explain why some authors choose to approach the representation of these crimes in mythological terms.Levi resorted to both Greek myth and an iconography of hell borrowed from Dante.This was an indirect way of representing the hell he experienced, a metaphorical way.And it is such metaphorical representation that later also made him draw on a range of chemical elements in The Periodic Table .Quite possibly, myth and metaphor, these timeless forms of telling stories and of depicting collective and personal history, reflect the insurmountable challenges of representing the gravest massacres in realistic terms.As Alvin Rosenfeld points out, in Auschwitz reality itself "underwent so radical a distortion as to disarm and render no longer trustworthy the normal cognitive and expressive powers.As a result, reason seemed to give way to madness, as language did time and again to silence" (Rosenfeld, 1980, 28).Myth and Metaphor may, however, also present those writing about traumatic events with ways of coping with and working through their trauma while avoiding the re-presentation of trauma in the sense of subjecting themselves to reliving it.
In writing about the Lager Levi resorts primarily to two mythical tales: the Tantalus myth and Dante's Divina Commedia with the 'canto di Ulysse' (Inferno,.It is noteworthy that thinking of Odysseus, whom Dante condemns to hell, contributes to Levi's spiritual survival in the hell that is Auschwitz.One may wonder why Dante condemns Odysseus to one of his hell's lower circles.Katherine Christy has argued that Dante completely separates Ulysses from the Christian divine, while in the Greek epic with its multiple deities he finds himself in a permanent tension between the wrath of a god like Poseidon versus being helped by the goddess Athena.Christy argues that Ulysses has been explicitly condemned to the circle of the fraudulent because of his cunning deceit involving the conquest of Troy, the city of the gods, but also because of his travel to forbidden territory: "Ulysses," Christy says, "has pushed against the boundaries of mortality, seeking out knowledge reserved for the divine alone," encouraging "his men to seek out the world where 'no one lives,' a further implication of this realm's prohibition against mortal knowledge" (Christy, 2017).It is this unchartered terrain, where 'nobody' (as Odysseus calls himself to the Cyclops) lives, that ties Ulysses to Primo (the first one) Levi in the camps, a non-place due to the absence of human rights, while being a place in which those banned from all rights find themselves in complete loneliness.It is in this loneliness in which the feeling of being nobody and primacy may find their fusion.
Both myths, Tantalus and the Odyssey, speak of the tantalizing reduction of body and mind to the non-human and the alimentary; at the same time, Levi's translation of the camp experience to himself and his Alsatian friend Jean Samuel into literary material saves both of them temporarily from this degradation to the level of the non-human, transcending their own humanity into a mythical realm.The proximity between the subhuman and the trans-human or superhuman is indeed a close one in Levi's account of Auschwitz, and as Odysseus becomes superhuman in his quest of forbidden knowledge, Levi attaches a certain super-humanity to the chemist in order to escape the nightmare of dehumanization that is both physical and mental: "The virtue and patience of ancient chemists must have been superhuman," Levi writes in the chapter on 'Nitrogen' (Levi, 2012, 152), well aware also that this superhumanity as the opposite of dehumanization extends beyond chemistry as a hard science to its spiritualist predecessor alchemy with its transformation processes that metaphorically equate the production of gold with the attainment of wisdom or spiritual enlightenment.
Levi's choice of words and the image of the chemist as superhuman, as Übermensch, are somewhat problematic.The term derives from Goethe's Faust but is widely associated with Friedrich Nietzsche whose concept of the Übermensch can never again be disentangled from the memory of Nazi ideology with its concepts of the master race and subhumans to be killed in the camps.The debasement of humans to animals was a Nazi strategy which, through its various perfidious methods (transportation in cattle wagons, delousing, and finally gassing), turned the killing of humans into the killing of beings reclassified as non-humans in accordance with Carl Schmitt's concept of absolute enmity towards those who outside of law and outside of humanity have lost their status as humans (Schmitt, 1932, 55).By contrast, Levi's focus on 'super-humanity' appears repeatedly in the context of survival.We see it in Elias the dwarf, whose strength transcends anything human and makes him survive (in the original he is described as 'extra-umano'), and we see it in the chemist.

II
While Auschwitz thus provided the gas of death, chemistry largely provides Levi with the gas of life embodied in carbon dioxide, the raw material that constitutes all life, as he explains in The Periodic Table (2012,191).His obsession with chemistry not only saved his life but it also allowed for meditative space as many of the chemical elements contain symbolic meanings that helped him translate his traumatic experience to himself.As non-sensical as the experience of the camps was, however, Levi ultimately failed to come to terms with it, so that in the end, one could argue, even chemistry failed to save him.
The Periodic Table is a thoroughly heterogeneous text that defies easy categories.It reflects an interdependence of scientific and philosophical discourses, and blurs the genres of autobiography and fiction, thus pointing to the impossibility of ever "arriving at the elemental or the pure in any field" (Chang, 2006, 543).Chang argues that "these stories about chemistry are perhaps most connected by the fact that each is intriguingly named for an element of the periodic table, and each contains an allegory based in some way upon the properties of that element" (Chang, 2006, 544).Although Levi refuses to call the collection a memoir, he admits that these tales are symbolically autobiographical, "declaring that he wanted this collection of stories to be the narrative of a profession, specifically his profession as 1 3 Metaphors of violence and survival: Primo Levi's philosophy… a chemist" (Elisabeth Scheiber, 2006, 226).The book was voted onto the shortlist for the best science book ever written.Indeed, for Levi, writing and the practice of chemistry shared much in common.As Galuzzi points out, "Levi combined in a rare way a literary sensitivity and fascination with words with the precision and immediacy of a scientist.He thought of writing and chemistry as similarly based on day to day practice, like artisan skills" (Galuzzi, 1988).As much as he tried to tell his story, he saw in chemistry and especially each of the elements in the periodic table the potential to tell an individual story.In this way, an element like Vanadium, a varnish, becomes allegorical for the theme of covering over the crimes committed in Auschwitz.In this way the allegorical potential of chemical elements Levi was able to tap into, their hidden symbolic matrices, enriched him for his own story-telling as a possibility to work through his traumatic past.
The Periodic Table covers the whole scope of his life, from his family's origins to his professional life as a chemist after the war.Each chapter could stand on its own so that the book works as a collection of short stories, although the order is chronological.The chemical elements that he describes in each chapter transcend chemistry as such and are thus highly metaphorical.In the first chapter 'Argon,' the noble, rare and inert, "lazy" gases that he mentions also refer to his family, his Jewish ancestors, some of whom he describes as "inert in their inner spirits" (3).In that context, his family's apathy contrasts sharply with the quest motif of the myth of the Argonauts, their avid search for the Golden Fleece.Argon is a gas so satisfied with its condition that it combines with no other elements, something Levi applies to his relatives.He reclaims them for history by describing their speech, a Judeo-Italian combining Hebrew roots with inflections and endings common in northwest Italy, which he calls Mediterranean Yiddish (Fulford, 2015).Levi tells this story of his people's nobility deliberately in contradistinction to the Nazis' self-elevation based on their conviction of Aryan supremacy, all the way down to Hitler's self-perception as 'Noble Wolf,' the meaning of his Old Scandinavian first name, Adolf derived from Aethelulfr.
The chapter 'Hydrogen' then describes the beginnings of his chemical experiments, "hydrogen … from whose condensation the universes are formed in eternal silence" (23).Thinking about 'Zinc' leads Levi to philosophize about one of his central themes, that of purity versus impurity, the purity that protects from evil, while impurity gives rise to changes in life (PT, 27f).'Iron' makes him think about resilience, resistance, the steadfastness of character; also about irony.It is a chapter about his friend Sandro Delmastro, "he who laughed at all monuments" (PT, 41).It is a chapter also that describes the beginnings of his fascination with what he calls the "nobility of chemistry."He continues to think about resilience in 'Potassium,' resilience in the face of fascism, a resilience Levi partly learned from his exposure to hiking in the alpine mountain world.As sodium and potassium are twins, he points out, there is detail in small differences, "like a railroad's switch points" (51), an image that ominously foreshadows the railway tracks leading to Auschwitz.He also starts questioning some of the ideas he had about the purported 'nobility' of chemistry.Under Fascism, chemistry ceased to be a source of certainty.It no longer provided him with answers to all his questions, the so-called truths revealed by Fascist doctrine either boring him stiff or arousing his suspicion.
Levi is well aware that the divisions between science and story-telling, myth, and literature are fuzzy.In 'Nickel' he ruminates about gnomes, tricksters, mines and other subterranean realms, thoughts that lead him to Dante's vision of Hell.In 'Lead,' one of the two entirely fictional chapters, he juxtaposes gravity and grace, the heaviness and toxicity of lead, the metal of death, with the lightness of being, of bees also, the babbling brook of bees.The chapter teems with associations of the concentration camp.Lead is the metal of death, and in the journey of the fictional hero to the island of Icnusa, Levi resumes his references to Homer's Odyssey of the Canto di Ulysse chapter from If this is a man.At the end of the story, the protagonist's loss of his native tongue and replacement through a new language also evokes the Lager that changed Levi's relationship with language, the untranslatability of some words and their life and death giving associations.It is a chapter about gravity and grace, as multidimensional perhaps as the ensuing and other fictional story, 'Mercury', about a substance that strikes him as a volatile spirit, a restless one; it is the Roman trickster God, the equivalent of the Greek Hermes, slippery and mysterious.Mercury/quicksilver is an element in which chemistry meets myth.Tricksters are important in the context of fascism, as people were both tricked by the fascist leaders into following them while employing trickery of their own as a key survival strategy in the camps.
It is truly a bizarre substance: it is cold and elusive, always restless, but when it is quite still you can see yourself in it better than in a mirror.If you stir it around in a bowl it continues to twirl for almost half an hour.[…] it is a material I do not like, and I was in a hurry to close the deal and get rid of it.(PT, 88-9) 'Phosphorus,' on the other hand, is a substance of light and hope; in its context Levi talks about his love for Giulia, and yet, he says, "the laws of racial separation were only stupid alibis" for an "inability to approach a woman" that will accompany him to his death (PT, 105).
He goes on to 'Gold,' the mountain river of gold, Dora, an emblem of freedom in the face of imprisonment, and the significance of that metal for alchemy."Of course, I would search for gold.Not to get rich, but to try out a new skill, to see again the earth, air, and water from which I was separated by a gulf that grew larger every day, and to find again my chemical trade in its essential and primordial form, the Scheidekunst, precisely, the art of separating metal from gangue" (PT, 114f).To separate gold from gangue, i.e. rock that does not contain any gold, is yet another ominous image in light of racial separation and the railroad switch-points that decide over life and death.Scheidekunst, the art of separation, in chemistry is a scientific process, and very different from the pseudo-science of fascist race ideology.Levi's fascination with alchemy, however, in this chapter implies his continued belief in spiritual transformation and in being able to overcome the bouts of depression that assailed him from the early years after the war all the way into the 1970s.It was a battle he eventually lost.'Cerium' then is the chapter most directly connected to his memory of Auschwitz, where he and his friend Alberto would steal cerium rods from the camp lab to extract the flint for cigarette lighters that could then be traded for bread allowing them to stay alive.

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Metaphors of violence and survival: Primo Levi's philosophy… After the war Levi took a job in the research laboratory of the lakeside factory of Duco Avigliana that made paints and varnishes.His work at Duco inspired the chapter 'Chromium,' in which he is asked to find out why tins of chromium orange anti-rust paint had congealed.His research made him 'resurrect' the fluid paint from an 'indecent death' as a slippery, semi-solid mass.As Ball argues, "with glee (and artistic license, it seems), [Levi] claims that the ammonium chloride he added to the defective paint to counteract the error made in its formulation is still 'religiously ground into the chromate anti-rust paint on the shore of that lake, and nobody knows why anymore'" (Ball, 2019).Ball argues further that such episodes are characteristic of The Periodic Table in offering "versions of the truth, rearranged and ordered to turn life into literature while retaining the essence that makes these chemical anecdotes vehicles for exploring humanity in all its rich strangeness, wonder, passion and horror" (Ball, 2019).In this case the element chromium can be seen as a metaphor for Levi's desire to bring the dead back to life, for "it is the spirit that dominates matter, is that not so?" (PT, 129); "I was ready to challenge everything and everyone, in the same way that I had challenged and defeated Auschwitz and loneliness" (PT, 128).The experience of working with chromium provides him with this spirit of resistance and resilience.
'Sulfur' is the story of Lanza who works the nightshift; it is full of images of hell and raised temperatures, and we remain clueless as to what it is that Lanza produces.Likewise, 'Titanium' is a very short prose piece on the power of words like 'alice' (small anchovy) and 'felice' (happy) and misunderstanding them.'Arsenic:' is a poison of course, used by both Mithridates and Madame Bovary (PT, 142).Could this chapter forecast the possibilities of suicide already on Levi's mind in 1975?The themes of matter versus spirit and of purity versus impurity are picked up again in the chapter 'Nitrogen.'Levi here thinks about chemistry and aesthetics, about the alchemical process of making 'aurum de stercore' (turning shit to gold), the idea of obtaining a cosmetic from excrement.Such images too are a translation of the camp experience, where contact with excrement was a daily ordeal and threat to one's life.Chemistry offers Levi a way of transcending those images, of escaping from the torments of the latrines.
There are friendly and hostile metals, he says.'Tin' "was a friend […] because it melts at a low temperature, almost like organic compounds, that is, almost like us." (PT, 154) "It melts almost like us."One needs a moment to allow the full impact of such words to sink in to comprehend that although this is one of the postwar chapters, Auschwitz is omnipresent.This chapter contains ominous images and language conjuring up the camps, from the "weeping of tin" to passages such as this one: "In the middle of the lab was a large ventilation hood of wood and glass, our pride and our only protection against death by gassing" (PT, 156).
The Holocaust is omnipresent.Consider, for example, also the following passage from 'Carbon,' the last chapter, one of the key chapters on the Holocaust together with 'Cerium' and 'Vanadium:' But there is more and worse, to our shame and that of our art.Carbon dioxide, that is, the aerial form of the carbon of which we have up till now spoken: this gas which constitutes the raw material of life, the permanent store upon which all that grows draws, and the ultimate destiny of all flesh, is not one of the principal components of air but rather a ridiculous remnant, an 'impurity', thirty times less abundant than argon, which nobody even notices.[…] from this ever renewed impurity we come, we animals and we plants, and we the human species, with our four billion discordant opinions, our millenniums of history, our wars and shames, nobility and pride.(PT,191) Surely, these are thoughts about chemistry but there is more in a passage like this than meets the chemist's eye: "the gas which constitutes the raw material of life," does it not also conjure up the gas that killed millions?The insistence on impurity from which we-as well as all animals and plants-come, does this not at the same time indicate the interconnectedness of all beings in opposition to the fascist drive for racial purity?Our four billion discordant opinions, is this a kind of polyphony or heteroglossia not at the same time diametrically opposed to what the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin called the monolithic, monoglot rhetoric of totalitarian ideology, Stalinism, Nazism, Mussoliniism, Trumpism?
The last chapter then, 'Carbon', tells the story of the "perpetual, frightening round-dance of life and death, in which every devourer is immediately devoured" (PT,194).It is the "journey of a carbon atom across hundreds of millions of yearsfixed in limestone, liberated by a pickaxe and becoming carbon dioxide, photosynthesised into a grape vine, drunk as wine and exhaled, and finally finding its way into Levi's own brain to guide his hand 'to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one'-with which the story, and the book, concludes" (Ball, 2019).

III
Auschwitz never leaves the thinking and writing of Levi.Especially in his final book I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved), written just before his death in 1987, he attempted a detailed theoretical analysis of the various facets of his experience of the Lager.This corresponds with Laurence Langer's argument that witnesses of the Holocaust "struggle with the impossible task of making their recollections of camp experience coalesce with the rest of their lives" (Langer, 1991, 3).Langer emphasizes that in representing or translating their Holocaust experience to themselves the victims attempt throughout their entire lives to comprehend what they underwent in the camps: "Each work, each cultural effort, reflects not defiance but a basic human need to interpret the meaning of one's experience, or to pierce the obscurities that shroud it in apparent meaninglessness" (Langer, 1991, 57).Langer's work here echoes not only Levi's own convictions but also those of Viktor Frankl, who survived three years in four concentration camps including Auschwitz and who perceived in human beings' search for meaning a central motivational force and way of maintaining one's mental health.
In his attempt to make sense of his year in Auschwitz, chemistry functioned as a 'catalyst' for coming to terms with his past.In psychoanalytical terms, Levi's translation of his past by way of chemical elements as metaphors offered him a way to re-enact what he had experienced.Although acting out is important for the process 1 3 Metaphors of violence and survival: Primo Levi's philosophy… of working through trauma, working through the experience of Auschwitz was ultimately impossible for Levi, if we look at his death, his fall from the third floor of his Turin apartment landing, an end that most critics have agreed was suicide.
One of the pressing questions for critical analysis is what it is in these chemical elements that points to more than just chemistry, specifically to Levi's harrowing experiences under fascism.To illustrate this let us take a closer look at the 'Vanadium' chapter.It is an element used in paint and varnishes, but for Levi it serves as a metaphor for the instability of memory in general and for representing the past.In fact, the very act of writing about past events cannot but distort somehow what happened, the dilemma of all historiography, which always borders on fiction.In this chapter, Levi recounts how years after the war he is being contacted by one of the Germans he worked with in the Auschwitz lab, a certain Müller, who after reading Levi's memoir If this is a man asks Levi for forgiveness."He wanted from me something like an absolution, because he had a past to overcome, and I didn't" (PT, 182).It is an absolution, a forgiveness Levi is not willing to grant him, and yet Müller helps him understand the unreliability of memory and that the past cannot be varnished over but is and ought to be like that non-drying paint whose chief element is Vanadium.
Müller is the quasi-fictionalized version of Ferdinand Meyer, whom Levi met while working in the lab and who had treated Levi with kindness, made sure that he was able to visit the camp barber twice a week, and equipped him with a pair of leather shoes to replace the wooden clogs he had been given (Thomsen, 2002, 196).The distorted fictionalization of Meyer is in itself a kind of glossing over undertaken by Levi, for the portrait of Müller in the Vanadium chapter comes nowhere near the actual kindness of the real Meyer.As offensive as this semi-fictionalization may have appeared to Meyer's widow (Thomsen, 2002, 378), it did not stem from a lapse in Levi's memory but was a deliberate act, although memory is as unstable as the substance Levi describes in this chapter.
"Varnish is an unstable substance by definition," he says in the first sentence, it is unstable because there is no guarantee that it will dry, and a "varnish that doesn't dry is like a gun that doesn't shoot" (PT, 177).It is the possibility that it will not dry that reflects the open wounds which the chapter also addresses, both on the side of Müller, who wants some kind of closure, an erasure of his own memories, and the survivor whose wounds will never heal.The arrival of Müller in Levi's life is in itself like the paint that does not dry, as are the memories of both.Unsurprisingly, Müller remembers his time in the Auschwitz lab very differently from Levi, distorting 'that terrible past' (182) in his mind to finally 'overcome' (182) it: He [Müller] put forward the (insane) opinion that the entire Buna-Monowitz plant, eight square kilometres of giant buildings, had been constructed with the intention of 'protecting the Jews and contributing to their survival', and that the order not to have compassion for them was eine Tarnung (camouflage)… no accusation against IG Farben….(PT, 185) In spite of Müller's own attempts to overcome the past by distorting uncomfortable truths about it, an absolution by Levi would put a lid on that past for the German.It is an understandable request, as Levi forgiving him would allow him to 'master' the past to the point of actually making it disappear for himself.On the other hand, Levi knows that he needs to keep his memories alive, like the varnish that ought not to harden too quickly, although harden these memories somehow must in order for Levi to preserve them.If memories did not become fixed but remained fluid they would likewise suffer from distortion and possible disappearance over time.Levi therefore keeps clinging to his memories: "I conserve pathologically precise memories of my encounters in that by now remote world" (PT, 179).I would argue that he is both afraid of their hardening process as well as their inability to harden, as the former will make it impossible for him to forget while the latter would subject memories to a process of metamorphosis, thus distorting the truth about his past.In a way, as far as his memories are concerned, Levi is caught between a rock and a hard place.As a chemist he was well-versed in the properties of these elements, aware of the shifting of states of matter from solid to liquid to gas.It is an awareness that was no doubt conducive to his literary production which implied both solidity and fluidity, that is, the preservation of the past as well as the flexibility required to confront it to work through his trauma.
Vanadium is thus a tricky substance, an imperfect one, the Italian variant less perfect than the German one as Levi emphasizes (PT, 181), unreliable and as imperfect as he is as victim and Müller is as perpetrator: "I did not feel capable of representing the dead of Auschwitz, nor did it seem to me sensible to see in Müller the representative of the butchers" (PT, 183).Such comments evoke Levi's thoughts on the unreliability of the witness in general, which he voiced in his final book The Drowned and the Saved: I must repeat: we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses.[…] We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom.Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the Muslims, the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance.They are the rule, we are the exception.(Levi, 1989, 83-4) The tension in this chapter expressed through vanadium thus lies somewhere between the attempt to remember correctly and an acceptance of the unreliability of memory, the unreliability of witnessing.It is a tension also between those who suffered the ultimate experience of the gas chambers and those who were spared this experience.Ultimately, there is also a tension for Levi in writing about his personal experience between keeping the terrible truth in the open and glossing, 'painting' or 'varnishing' it over.This tension is as philosophically charged to him as the dichotomy of Apollo and Dionysus is to Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Apollo being the God of beauty (reminiscent of Vanadis, the Old Norse goddess of youth, love, beauty and the dead), of youth defying the decay of age, while Dionysus is the catalyst for bringing the terrible truth to light.
However, yet another philosophical dimension is evoked in this chapter.As an unstable substance vanadium has the potential of glossing over, of covering over something that one wishes to be out of sight.The act of concealment is one of the principal issues surrounding the Holocaust.It affects the perpetrators as much as 1 3 Metaphors of violence and survival: Primo Levi's philosophy… the victims, Holocaust denial as much as the victims' disappearance, their condemnation to the realm of lethe, a mythological terrain of concealment, being forgotten and destroyed.Martin Heidegger spoke of these things in his Parmenides lectures at Freiburg University in the winter semester of 1942/43, at a time when millions were sentenced to the realm of lethe.The camps are a salient example of the silent fields expressed in this mythic dimension of the 'field of forgetting' where the screams of the prisoner remain unheard.
At that time, among the German silent majority, the common technique was to try to know as little as possible, and therefore not to ask questions.He [Müller] too obviously had not demanded explanations from anyone, not even from himself, although on clear days the flames of the crematorium were visible from the Buna factory.(PT,185) It is this silent field of lethe that ultimately reveals the light of truth, the Greek aletheia, and that lies at the base of all the massacres of the world.Like the paint and crimes produced by IG Farben, Vanadium may be a substance causing concealment, but in its very instability lies an element of reliability and authenticity as the truth cannot be concealed forever, constantly striving towards the surface, aspiring to be seen.Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice may come to mind, where in Act 2, scene 2 the jester Launcelot Gobbo says: "Truth will come to light, murder cannot be hid long, a man's son may, but at the length truth will out." The concealed, the hidden, and secrets are in the end as unstable as Vanadium.And it is the same with memory, as Levi became well aware over the years, memory's instability between staying fluid and rigidifying, becoming inflexible, between appearance and disappearance, between concealment and disclosure.Nonetheless, in the Vanadium chapter both Levi, the victim, and Müller, who as imperfect an antagonist as he may be, still emerges from the ranks of the butchers, insist on what the Germans have called Vergangenheitsbewältigung. It is a problematic term that literally means 'mastering or overcoming the past,' a phenomenon Levi was aware of: 'Bewältigung der Vergangenheit': I later found out that this is a stereotyped phrase, a euphemism in today's Germany, where it is universally understood as 'redemption from Nazism'; but the root word that it contains also appears in the words that express 'domination,' 'violence,' and 'rape,' and I believe that translating the expression 'distortion of the past' or 'violence done to the past' would not stray very far from its profound meaning.(PT,186) Such distortion of the past, as a kind of violence inflicted upon it, is contained in the very idea of varnishing it, but also in the notion of morphing from it, a process Levi, in resisting the loss of memories of the past, may undergo less than Müller.For Müller the process of overcoming the past is of paramount importance so that he is able to clear his conscience.Müller, however, ascribes that process of overcoming to Levi in whose memoir he falsely perceives 'an overcoming of Judaism' (PT, 185) due to the forgiveness he desires from the victims.
Müller naturally also desires such a process for himself, wanting to overcome the past and morph into someone with a clean conscience.To Levi, Müller's potential metamorphosis is a matter of irony at best, the perpetrator's self-revelation of inner motivations rather than an actual absolution.Through his request for absolution Müller was 'entpuppt; he had come out of his chrysalis' (PT,186).He was a dubious kind of butterfly, however, the past still clinging to him, although Levi does not consider him an enemy in the sense of someone who always 'remains an enemy' and therefore cannot be forgiven but someone against whom "after Auschwitz it is no longer permissible to be unarmed" (PT,187).

IV
In the fall of 1943 Levi took to the mountains as a partisan.This happened as a consequence of the Nazis drowning forty-nine Jewish people in Lago Maggiore, including Levi's uncle Mario, so that subsequently, "any hesitations he had about armed resistance disappeared.On October 1, along with a couple of disbanded Italian soldiers, as well as other Jewish refugees and anti-fascists, Levi became part of a small and shambolic resistance group" (Jacobson, 2015).Resistance and the lasting ability to resist, resilience, what German distinguishes as Widerstand and Widerstandsfähigkeit, in fact go together.This is something Levi learned in the mountain world, an experience he elaborates on in the chapter 'Iron.'He discovered his love of mountaineering in 1939 thanks to his friend Sandro Delmastro, and they spent many a weekend in the mountains above Turin.Physical exertion, the risk, and the battle with the elements all supplied Levi with an outlet for his frustrations, as he writes in 'Iron.' In June 1940 Italy declared war as an ally of Germany against Britain and France, and the first Allied air raids on Turin began two days later.One may ask to what extent mountaineering and his friendship with Sandro contributed to his resilience during the war and his internment; to what extent did it turn him into an iron man, so that possibly the chemical element iron has a wider allegorical significance for his life during fascism and his survival?
Preparing himself and Levi for an iron future, arousing in him a need for freedom, setting free his inner strength for perseverance, Sandro teaches Levi the kind of resilience he will come to profit from as he is reaching rock bottom during his internment in Auschwitz.The life-saving memory and presence of the mountains stay with Levi as he suffered through his iron future in Auschwitz, where on clear days he was able to see the High Tatras that form the border between Poland and Slovakia, and feel the clear mountain air that reminded him of his home in some of the most desperate hours.Levi emphasizes that their alpine exploits "helped me later on," although they did not end up helping his friend, "the first man killed fighting in the Resistance" (PT,40).
The mountains and chemistry were anchors to him, for it is here also, in the chapter entitled 'Iron', that Levi expresses his growing love of chemistry.The Periodic Table gives us an idea of the importance of chemistry in Levi's life.Chemistry with its vast potential for metaphor promised poetry, and later it would indeed provide Levi with a range of metaphors to express his most 1 3 Metaphors of violence and survival: Primo Levi's philosophy… harrowing experiences.However, as a system containing order and predictability chemistry also provided him with an antidote to random acts of violence, what in The Drowned and the Saved he comes to term 'violenza inutile', the useless violence inflicted on the camp inmates.Science offered him an anchor as much as the literature of Dante and other great works.And as we can see in The Periodic Table there seems to be no clear dividing line between the scientific and the literary.
The actual practice of chemistry was, however, of even greater interest to Levi.The Periodic Table abounds in various practical procedures described with profound admiration, such as the distillation process in 'Potassium': Distilling is beautiful.First of all, because it is a slow, philosophic, and silent occupation, which keeps you busy but gives you time to think of other things, somewhat like riding a bike.Then, because it involves a metamorphosis from liquid to vapour (invisible), and from this once again to liquid; but in this double journey up and down, purity is attained, an ambiguous and fascinating condition, which starts with chemistry and goes very far.(PT,48) Reading passages such as this one in light of the fascist background one might have an aversion to the mention of purity.Although Levi admires it in the chemical process it remains a problematic term if read in the context of Nazi ideology, as it conjures up the notion of racial purity and its opposite, impurity as something to be persecuted and eradicated.There seems to be no innocent use of the word 'purity' after 1945, unless we read this term exclusively in terms of the precision of chemical procedure and the craft of the chemist.Levi then continues: "Now I had to distil a second time in the presence of sodium.Sodium is a degenerated metal."(PT, 49).The word 'degenerated' too could lead to discomfort, as it was the word used for humans and art in the Third Reich: entartet, as in the infamous art exhibit on entartete Kunst in Munich in 1937.
In 'Zinc', however, Levi then continues: In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile.Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that's why you're not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not.But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.(PT, 28) We can see how chemistry offered Levi an antidote to fascist thought all through his life, well aware that in the eyes of the Nazis I too am Jewish… I am the impurity that makes the zinc react, I am the grain of salt or mustard.Impurity, certainly, since just during those months the publication of the magazine Defense of the Race had begun, and there was much talk about purity, and I had begun to be proud of being impure.(PT, 29) The Nazis' obsession with racial purity and with what was termed racial hygiene is at the heart of this chapter on zinc, and chemical processes of turning the impure into the pure provide Levi with philosophical nutrition to think about politics.Even a term like Urstoff, the primal matter, makes Primo Levi (which literally means the 'primal priestly assistant') wonder about the benefits of purity and impurity.While the Urstoff, primal matter, may reflect the purity of memories that go back to their deepest roots, The Periodic Table is in large part a celebration of impurity in the sense of alterity, testifying "to a history of alterity (in large part a history of Jewishness, but not exclusively so) which, upon its publication in 1975, was not yet well articulated in Italian culture" (Chang, 2006, 547, 560).As Tager says, The Periodic Table "considers a range of anti-semitisms, from the relatively benign and half-conscious, to the most murderous and systematic" (Tager, 1993, 270).
Although written in 1975, The Periodic Table, like all of Levi's writing, in spirit harkens back to the kind of Dantean Hell to which Hannah Arendt compared the Nazi camps in her seminal opus The origins of totalitarianism (Arendt, 1973, 445).The camps in particular were places in which dehumanization went so far that victims were deprived even of the significance of death: "by making death itself anonymous [the concentration camp] robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life.In a sense they took away the individual's own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one.His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never really existed" (Arendt, 1973, 452).
The anonymity of death reflects the state of nature in which what Agamben calls nuda vita ('bare life') finds itself, excluded from the community and beyond the reach of human rights.Agamben discusses this biopolitical figure as the homo sacer or Friedlos (human without peace) sentenced to nuda vita (naked or bare life), banned and rendered free (wolfsfrei) to be killed by anyone.Their loss of sanctuary coincided with a dissolution of the right for safe dwelling, their expulsion from the human community into a permanent state of exception (Agamben, 1995, 106).It is here that "man is a wolf to man," a phrase Levi applies to life in the camps as a place that combines the state of nature with the state of war and the state of exception.The three terms really are synonymous.Levi echoes Agamben in his chapter on the Greek Mordo Nahum in La Tregua (Levi, 2007, 224).
Homo hominem lupus est: these concepts and their political manifestations have not lost their validity over time.If we apply them to today's refugees, then the space and time between their loss of home and finding a new home resembles the exile of the medieval Friedlos or the Roman homo sacer, as they tend to come from war-torn countries.Contemporary migrants remain without peace if kept in a space that prevents them from going back or forward.That space does exist currently, for example, in detention camps off the coast of Australia in which refugees are detained for undetermined periods of time.These people could indeed be described as modern-day homines sacri in a state of exception that, paradoxically, has a tendency to become the norm.They find themselves in what Marc Augé has termed non-lieux, non-places (2009), spaces that are set apart without the protective function of a sanctuary.They are spaces of exception, a term that is highly ambivalent, as are 1 3 Metaphors of violence and survival: Primo Levi's philosophy… sanctuaries.Like the state of exception the sanctuary can both provide shelter from violence as well as be the location where violence reigns supreme, as is evidenced, for example by the camp Theresienstadt, which was disguised as a health resort when visited by workers of the Red Cross.
In these non-places where humans are debased to the level of non-humans, all speech is obliterated.Auschwitz, says Agamben, "is the radical refutation of every principle of obligatory communication […] In some camps communication was taken by the rubber whip, ironically renamed der Dolmetscher (the interpreter) [and] […] not being talked to was the normal condition in the camp, where 'your tongue dries up in a few days and your thoughts with it (Levi)" (Agamben, 1999, 65).Levi's attempt to express himself through myth and metaphor, and the chemical elements is therefore all the more admirable.
Levi, however, was among the salvati, the saved, thanks to his skills as a chemist, and yet as William Deresiewicz (2015) points out in his essay in The Atlantic: "the true repository of his negative emotions-isolation, bitterness, even hatred of life" wasn't Levi's writing about Auschwitz in his memoirs and in The Drowned and the Saved.It was his poetry."'We're invincible because we're the defeated,' he writes in 'Song of Those Who Died in Vain.' 'We're invulnerable because we've died.' Reading the poems, one wonders not that Levi killed himself, but that he took so long to do it."But not all views on Levi's writing are this dire.As Elisabeth Scheiber argues (225), "with the periodic table, Levi is able to unite his different selves, using chemistry as a link between his identity before, during, and after his experiences at Auschwitz." By way of chemistry Levi was able to draw on the opposite of the state of nature's inherent principles of lawlessness and randomness, namely a structure that promises predictability.In its allegorical representation The Periodic Table combines the structure of a system with a way of translating his experience in the Lager, his life leading up to it and following it, to himself and to others.This opens the wider question of how scientific paradigms and models can function as forms of representation and metaphorical translation in cultures of memory, specifically in the context of exile, migration, and political violence.Perhaps, in the end, Levi was employing scientific paradigms in literature to achieve a deeper realism, one in which the laws and principles of science pervade and shape our perceptions of reality.