H-Italy Save the Date: Michael Rothberg on the Grey Zone. Readings from Primo Levi's Complete Works

Discussion published by Natalia Indrimi on Thursday, November 19, 2015

November 24, 2015 at 7:00 pm

Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò | 24 West 12th Street. Free admission. Reservation is required: [email protected]

Reading and discussion from The Drowned and the Saved. Michael Rothberg (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

The Nazi genocide of European Jews has frequently been described as the paradigm of modern evil. More than any other event, it seems to oppose a group of guilty perpetrators to a mass of innocent victims. The Jews, after all, were not singled out for anything they might have done, but simply for who they were. As a secular Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, Primo Levi was well situated to observe this dynamic. Yet, in his final work, The Drowned and the Saved, Levi painted a radically different picture of the Holocaust. His exploration of what he called the "gray zone" drew attention to the space between the poles of good and evil and to the moments of blurring between victims and perpetrators. Without relativizing the nature of the Nazi system, Levi upended the conventional view of the Holocaust and drew attention to the considerable degree of complicity produced within the concentrationary universe

Citation: Natalia Indrimi. Save the Date: Michael Rothberg on the Grey Zone. Readings from Primo Levi's Complete Works. H-Italy. 11-19-2015. https://networks.h-net.org/node/7651/discussions/97137/save-date-michael-rothberg-grey-zone-readings-primo-levis-complete Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1