the drowned and the saved the gray zone summary

This view holds that life has become so complicated and difficult that the job of ethics is no longer to determine the proper course of action and to correctly assign moral responsibility to those who have failed to live up to the appropriate moral standards. This is a difficult question but Levi explains how violence is different depending on the motivation behind it rather than the strength of it. 1The '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. The gray zone is NOT reserved for good people who lapse into evil or for evil people who try to redeem themselves through an act of goodness. 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.. Instead of the teleological and the intersubjective, one can speak of the world of things and the world of persons, object and subject relations, cosmos and anthropos, I and thou, and so forth.42 Having alluded to Martin Buber, Todorov makes clear that he prefers the profound joy of the intersubjective action that expresses, he believes, both the rational and the caring aspects of our fundamental human nature: The accounts I have read of life in the camps convince me that the moral action is always one that the individual takes on himself (the moral action is in this sense subjective) and [is] directed towards one or more individuals (it is personal, for when I act morally I treat the other as a person, which is to say he becomes the end of my action). Indeed, Todorov builds his new morality on his observations of the inherent goodness that remains in individuals even in the worst of conditions. 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. 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. For example, he tells the story of a Mrs. Tennenbaum, who obtained a pass that allowed the bearer to avoid deportation for three months. Sander H. Lee is Professor of Philosophy at Keene State College in New Hampshire. The Question and Answer section for The Drowned and the Saved is a great Levi, however, was never a believer, although he admits to having almost prayed for help once, but caught himself because "one does not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, not when you were losing" (146). Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. Even more important, the camps remained under factory management throughout their existence. Later in the essay, Rubinstein states that Rumkowski's Give me your children speech indicates that he was under no illusions concerning the fate of the deportees. dition the "gray zone." A zone where there exist gray, ambiguous persons who, "contaminated by their oppressors, unconsciously strove to identify . This choice could lead to a secular salvation.15. suicide is an act of man and not of the animal . In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi argues that it is unfair to judge the victims of genocide using moral tools that are appropriate to normal, everyday life. Print Word PDF. The special squads fare no better under a consequentialist approach to ethics. It existed before he used it, and is useful in distinguishing between the types of behavior engaged in by members of various groups within Nazi Germany. Each individual is so complex that there is no point in trying to foresee his behavior, all the more in extreme situations; nor is it possible to foresee one's own behavior" (60). . Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), 119. Read Argumentative Essays On The Drowned And The Saved - Primo Levi and other exceptional papers on every subject and topic college can throw at you. Levi profiles Rumkowski not because he believes that his actions were justified, but precisely because he believes that they were not. . Print Word PDF This section contains 555 words Alan Rosenberg and Gerald E. Myers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 224. As Christopher Browning and others have demonstrated, no one was forced to become a perpetrator: Browning's groundbreaking study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 shows that members of police formations, at least in this case, could choose not to participate in atrocities. 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 . Those who survived were able to remind themselves in small ways every day that they were still human. Thus, Rumkowski created in the ghetto a caricature of the totalitarian German state.46 Ignoring Levi's distinction between victims and perpetrators, between those who had viable choices and those whose meaningful choices had been destroyed, Todorov sees the gray zone as permeating the entire totalitarian German state: everyone had his or her freedom limited by people higher up in the hierarchy. "The Drowned and the Saved Summary". (199). She uses this story to illustrate her contention that Jewish tradition demands of women that they give up their lives rather than submit to rape. 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. This is not a novel but more of an essay The Drowned and the Saved is an attempt at an analytical approach. First, as Levi makes clear, even full-time residents of the gray zone such as Rumkowski are morally guilty; we can and we should see that. Fundamental to his purpose is the fear that what happened once can happen (and in some respects, has happened) again. More books than SparkNotes. Browning concludes that such strategies of alleviation and compliance, while neither heroic nor admirable, without doubt saved Jewish lives that otherwise would have been lost. To his parents disgust, the Zamojskis demanded an exorbitant sum of money. After giving brief historical accounts of Jewish cooperation with rulers and of Rumkowski's specific actions, Rubinstein rejects Gandhi and Arendt's claim that had Jews simply refused to cooperate in any way with the Nazis, many fewer would have been killed. Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 299. In other words, Levi is making a normative argument against the right to judge, not an ontological claim about the possibilities of moral action. Todorov distinguishes between heroic and ordinary virtue. Yet, Todorov's interpretation of the moral situation of prisoners in the camps is quite different from Levi's as I understand it. The Nazis victims did not choose to be victims, and they could not choose to stop being victims. Had they liberated it in 1942 instead of January 1945, Rumkowski might have been credited with saving thousands of lives: What if Joseph Stalin's hopes of a decisive victory in early 1942 had been realized, and, as a result, the ghettos of Vilna, Kovno, d, and perhaps even Warsaw, as well as many others had been liberated in the spring or summer of 1942? While they may have traveled there in a special railway car, once they arrived they were Jewish victims no different from the rest. Levi also describes the additional suffering of those who were cut off from all communication with friends and family. Using bribery and payoffs (including the extortion of sexual favors from female prisoners), Wilczek became a Jewish Fhrer comparable to, and, some would say, even more immoral than Chaim Rumkowski. 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. 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. In The Gender of Good and Evil: Women and Holocaust Memory, she explores the images of good and evil associated particularly with women under Nazism, as these shape our perception of the Holocaust.32. Chapter 1, "The Memory of the Offense," dissects out the vagaries of memory, rejection of responsibility, denial of unacceptable trauma and out and out lying among those who were held to account by tribunals as well as among the victimized. I believe that the most meaningful way to interpret Levi's gray zone, the way that leads to the greatest moral insight, requires that the term be limited to those who truly were victims. 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. Chapter 3, " Shame," is, in my opinion, the most profound and moving section of the book. Toggle navigation . These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. Order our The Drowned and the Saved Study Guide. Her father urged her to move to Paris, saying: No one will know. Since Levi was one of those saved, he is "in permanent search of a justification . The fact that they may have had a few more choices and that making those choices saved more prisoners does not change their status any more than the status of the rebelling Sonderkommandos of 1944 would have changed had they somehow miraculously survived the war. Does Levi really mean to suggest in this haunting passage that we all exist in the gray zone nowthat none of us deserves to be judged morally because our current situation is indistinguishable from that of the Jewish victims in the ghettos and death camps? Do perpetrators who are not victims belong in the gray zone? Levi identifies the common impulse to tell the story of "events that for good or evil have marked [one's] entire existence" (149). 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 rejection of relativism and the defense of ethics are fundamental to the comprehension and proper application of Levi's notion. The Holocaust calls into question the very possibility of ethics. The members of the special squads did the opposite. 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. one is never in another's place. An editor It is an exploration of complex human responses to unimaginable trauma. The shame and guilt that many feel are absurd but real, and only those who do something extraordinary are beyond the feeling. Heller's parents suggest that she, too, should keep quiet. Quite the contrary, it is at once morally tough-minded and morally imaginative. In her essay, Sexual Abuse and Holocaust Literature, S. Lillian Kremer states: Although male writers such as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi convey the effect of starvation and primitive sanitary facilities on their protagonists strength, health, and feelings of powerlessness, they do not address the aesthetic reactions and procreational anxieties dominant in women's writing.36 Horowitz thus does a service by drawing our attention to the specific ways in which the gray zone was even more complicated for female victims than it was for their male counterparts. 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. While it is true that the victims did have choices, and Levi acknowledges that it is important to study those choices, in the end he argues that we must not judge the victims as we do the perpetrators. 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 . Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 12. 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. The Drowned and the Saved was Levi's last book; he died after completing the essays that comprise it. It seems to me that Levi views the Hobbesian world of the Lager as 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. The words "gray zone, useless violence and shame" pay special attention to the inmates who had survived the initial selection and continued increasing their chances of survival. How should we judge the moral culpability of the members of these special squads? Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 5869. Our moral yardstick had changed [while in the camps]" (75). 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. The drowned, meanwhile, are those who do not organize, who pass their time thinking of home or complaining, and who quickly perish. 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. 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. will review the submission and either publish your submission or providefeedback. 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. Is all violence created equal? On the few occasions when he mentions women (pp. Sara R. Horowitz does important work in examining the role of gender in the experiences of women caught in the gray zone. In 1946, Gandhi said in an interview that if he had been a Jew under the Nazis he would have committed public suicide rather than allow himself to be re-located into a ghetto.4 From this perspective, there is no question that the members of the Sonderkommandos would be condemned as collaborators and murderers. When those pleas were denied, he returned to his office and committed suicide, leaving a note that said: I can no longer bear all this. "Useless Violence" (5) gives examples of how the Nazis tormented their prisoners with "stupid and symbolic violence.". Using lies and coercion they led thousands of victims to a horrible death. Horowitz tells us that when Heller's memoirs appeared in the 1990s, she was condemned by many in the Jewish community and caught in a gender-specific double-bind: if Heller did not love Jan then she prostituted herself; if she did love him, then she consorted with the enemy., Heller's aunt also suffered sexual violationshe was raped by a German soldierbut she chose to keep it secret from all but a few close relatives. 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. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. To resist it requires a truly solid moral armature, and the one available to Chaim Rumkowski, the d merchant, together with his whole generation, was fragile.28, Levi concludes his chapter with a poetical comparison of Rumkowski's situation to our own: Like Rumkowski, we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility. . Despite some of his comments about Muhsfeldt, I believe Levi's answer must be negative because of the importance of free will. Abstract. Ethics commonly distinguishes between deontologists and consequentialists. Deontologists, among them Immanuel Kant and the twentieth-century philosopher W.D. In the concentration camp, says Levi, it was usually "the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the 'gray zone,' the spies" who survived ["the saved"] while the others did not ["the drowned"] (82). It degrades its victims and makes them similar to itself, because it needs both great and small complicities. Non-victims such as Muhsfeldt had moral responsibility and deserved to be prosecuted for their actions. 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. 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. This is the essence of Levi's notion of the gray zone. On Amazon.com one reviewer of Todorov's Hope and Memory was inspired to claim that Levi talks about a Gray Zone inside which we all operate. This was the chief method employed by the Germans to break the prisoners' spirits. . To me, it seems clear that Levi does not include the guards, much less all Germans, in that zone. This Study Guide consists of . For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription. Levi wonders about the nature of these men and considers whether their "survival of the fittest" mentality is the natural reaction to being imprisoned in a death camp where they might be killed at any moment. He reassures us that morality survived the evil of the Holocaust: Morality cannot disappear without a radical mutation of the human species. In other words, intersubjective morality is intrinsic to human nature. "Letters from Germans" summarizes his correspondence with Germans who read his earlier books. In this sense, Levi may be harsher in his evaluation of Rumkowski than is Rubinstein. 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. Members of Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando burn bodies of gassed prisoners outdoors, August 1944. 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. GradeSaver, 5 May 2019 Web. 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). 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. Her sacrifice directly benefitted anotherher daughter. 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. Perhaps the most difficult and controversial use of the notion of the gray zone appears in Levi's discussion of SS-Oberscharfhrer Eric Muhsfeldt.

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