To this side of good and evil: Primo levi as a truth-teller

Abstract

For Hannah Arendt, Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 was a clear indication of a total collapse of the Western political tradition and its vocabulary. From World War II onwards, she repeatedly reflected on the question of how it was possible that even the analyses, made after the collapse of the Third Reich, failed to reach the heart of the matter, that is to say, failed to reach a political judgment on the mechanism of the birth and character of totalitarian power.