The great catastrophes of history can be recognised through the paralysed silence which they leave in their wake, a silence which frequently is broken only to make way for the falsifications of memory. BEtween silence and falsification, a third path may be opened. For those who are capable of it, this path involves saying what happened, writing in the first person. This third possibility is doubly valorised. First of all, it offers a public testimony. It allows a truth which is unspeakable or not to be spoken to erupt onto the social scene. Secondly, it is meant to have a cathartic function. The author of the testimony would in this way be unburdening himself o a horror too heavy to bear. Put into words, his suffering would become something which could be shared. It is this sharing which will be discussed here, its power to grant peace. One may doubt this power.
Search Results
You are looking at 1 - 10 of 32 items for :
- "PRIMO LEVI" x
- Refine by Access: All content x
- Refine by Content Type: All x
And Till the Ghastly Tale Is Told: Sarah Kofman – Primo Levi
Survivors of the Shoah and the Dangers of Testimony
Rachel Rosenblum
In European Judaism
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2000
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 81–103 (22 total)
François Mitterrand and the Gray Zone of Vichy
Hugh McDonnell
Third World: Decolonization and the Rise of the New Left in France, c .1950–1976 , trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 106–111. It is also important to note that this “gray zone” is not synonymous with Primo Levi's use of
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 87–109 (23 total)
Righteous Gentiles and Courageous Jews
Acknowledging and Honoring Rescuers of Jews
Mordecai Paldiel
Since 1962, Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust memorial, has pursued a program to honor non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. Basically, every non-Jewish person who saved at least one Jewish person, while placing his or her own life and freedom at risk, and exacted no payment as a precondition for such help, and the story's evidence is confirmed by beneficiary party—then such a person may qualify to the traditional Jewish title for non-Jews, of Righteous Among the Nations. To date, some 23,500 persons, from all walks of life have been awarded this prestigious title. However, while many of these honorees worked in tandem with Jewish rescuers, no similar program exists for the latter. Recent Holocaust historiography has uncovered stories of many Jewish rescuers, who either worked individually or in conjunction with Jewish clandestine organizations, to save dozens and hundreds of their coreligionists. In doing this, they multiplied the risks to themselves as Jews on the run, of being uncovered by the Nazis and suffering the fate reserved for all Jews under the Final Solution program. This article underlines the need for the creation of a program to identify and acknowledge the role of Jewish rescuers to Jews.
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2012
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 134–149 (16 total)
Love and Violence
Sartre and the Ethics of Need
Katharine Wolfe
others and the need to care for others in turn. I take up Primo Levi's reflections in The Drowned and the Saved to speak to the phenomenon of second-person needs and their ethical implications. Yet, in conclusion, I also highlight how the capacity for
In Sartre Studies International
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 37–56 (20 total)
Introduction
Holocaust Poetry
Antony Rowland and Robert Eaglestone
‘Why no appraisals of [Holocaust] verse – particularly verse composed in the English language?’, asks Susan Gubar in Poetry after Auschwitz. The question appears particularly pertinent, if paradoxical, in the context of her list of canonical authors in the field of Holocaust literature, most of whom are either primarily poets (Dan Pagis, Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs) or prose writers as well as poets (Charlotte Delbo, Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski). One answer is that critics have rightly attended to the more sophisticated prose in the work of Delbo, Levi and Borowski. However, this has lead to the overshadowing of, for example, the significance of Levi’s ‘Shemà’ as metatestimony in relation to If This is a Man, Borowski’s ‘October Sky’ as a complex, dialectical anti-lyric, and Delbo’s shift into poetic form in Auschwitz and After when she senses that her prose is simply not up to the task of recounting certain traumatic experiences.
Editorial
John Ireland and Constance Mui
to counter the antagonistic account Sartre offers in the Critique, where need is seen as a catalyst for conflict and violence as we struggle against each other for survival. Yet Wolfe, using Primo Levi's reflections on the concentration camp
The grey zone, distortion and the ownership of causation
A response to Don Gardner
Nigel Rapport
. Causation and determination ‘It must be remembered that each of us, both objectively and subjectively, lived the Lager in his own way’ ( Levi 1996a: 56 ). It can seem to me glib – artful, profaning – to quote from Primo Levi and his experiences at
In Journal of Legal Anthropology
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2019
- Article Type:
- Other
- Pages:
- 94–102 (9 total)
One of the Saved
In Memory of Jan Fuchs
Angela West
so much individual justification after death , but rather collective rescue from death at the hands of persecutors. In his last work, The Drowned and the Saved , Primo Levi, perhaps the best-known survivor of the Shoah, reflects on the meaning
In European Judaism
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2017
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 74–88 (15 total)
Grey Zones of Resistance and Contemporary Political Theory
Maša Mrovlje and Jennet Kirkpatrick
and exposing us to uncertainty and risk ( Beausoleil 2017: 295 ). Since Primo Levi's powerful formulation of the concept in the context of concentration camps, scholars have employed the grey zone discourse to shed light on the complexities of
Out of the Whirlwind Reconsidered
Context and Appreciation
Michael Berkowitz
Mist by Eugene Heimler; If This Is a Man by Primo Levi; The Janowska Road by Leon W. Wells; The Town Beyond the Wall by Elie Wiesel; The Mission by Hans Habe; Blood from the Sky by Piotr Rawicz; The Whole Land Brimstone by Anna Langfus