A review by flyingfox02
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

3.0

Primo Levi was an Italian-Jewish chemist and Holocaust survivor. This collection of essays is a look into various episodes of his life: the Jewish community he grew up in in Piedmont Italy, his teenhood in the time when Fascism was growing and creeping closer to home, briefly his spell at Auschwitz, and his career afterwards and living as a survivor. These are interspersed with tales recounted by people he met in his life (as he admitted, he was someone that people liked to speak to) and a couple of fictions that he wrote himself. Each essay is titled after an element from the Periodic Table and touches upon that element in one way or another, even if only for a paragraph. 

 

The tales are almost fantastical in tone and have an otherworldly feel to them. The autobiographical chapters are, on the other hand, sober and to some extent impassive. But when he talks about chemistry and doing chemistry, it’s with purpose and a calm passion. I’m not much of a chemist (I took classes for my first two terms at uni and barely passed) and many things flew over my head, but reading those parts felt like I was watching someone who knew what he was doing, a man who knows his craft intimately. 

 

This is a passage from my favourite chapter, “Vanadium”, where he reveals his correspondence with Dr. Müller, a former SA member who worked at the concentration camp where he was taken. 

 

The Müller character was entpuppt, he had come out of his chrysalis, he was sharply defined, in perfect focus. Neither infamous nor a hero: after filtering off the rhetoric and the lies in good or bad faith there remained a typically gray human specimen, one of the not so few one-eyed men in the kingdom of the blind. He did me an undeserved honor in attributing to me the virtue of loving my enemies: no, despite the distant privileges he had reserved for me, and although he had not been an enemy in the strict sense of the word, I did not feel like loving him. I did not love him, and I didn’t want to see him, and yet I felt a certain measure of respect for him: it is not easy to be one-eyed. He was not cowardly, or deaf, or a cynic, he had not conformed, he was trying to settle his accounts with the past and they didn’t tally. 
 
His condemnation of Nazism was timid and evasive, but he had not sought justifications. He sought a colloquy: he had a conscience, and he struggled to soothe it. 
 
I admitted that we are not all born heroes, and that a world in which everyone would be like him, that is, honest and unarmed, would be tolerable, but this is an unreal world. In the real world the armed exist, they build Auschwitz, and the honest and unarmed clear the road for them; therefore every German must answer for Auschwitz, indeed every man, and after Auschwitz it is no longer permissible to be unarmed.