Hope, Shame, and Resentment: Primo Levi and Jean Améry

Abstract

Primo Levi was the twentieth century’s preeminent witness—preeminent both in general and, more specifically, among the voices that sought to draw attention to the shape of its central disfiguring tragedy. Levi attained this position because, as Philip Roth wrote of him shortly after his death, he had “the moral stamina and intellectual poise of a twentieth century Titan:”1 Levi’s name will forever be associated with Auschwitz, where he was imprisoned between February 1944 and January 1945. Indeed, he himself later said that but for his time there he would probably not have become a writer.2 I find this hard to credit in view of his exceptional wisdom about life and the world even as early as his mid-20s, when he composed his memoir of Auschwitz, If This Is a Man.3