If This Is a Man
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"It was left to literature, such as Primo Levi's If This Is a Man (1947) or Robert Antelme's The Human Race (1947) to describe what poetry, according to Theodor Adorno, could not describe."--Sholem Stein "Many people – many nations – can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy’. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager. Here is the product of a conception of the world carried rigorously to its logical conclusion; so long as the conception subsists, the conclusion remains to threaten us. The story of the death camps should be understood by everyone as a sinister alarm-signal.” (Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, page 9)" |
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If This Is a Man (Italian title: Se questo è un uomo; United States title Survival in Auschwitz) is a work of witness by the Italian author Primo Levi. It was influenced by his experiences in the concentration camp at Auschwitz during the Second World War, but rather than being autobiographical, seeks to consider the human condition in all its extremes through the narrative form.
The first manuscript for If This Is a Man was completed by Levi in December 1946. However, in January 1947, the manuscript was refused by Einaudi. Despite this, Levi managed to find another, smaller publisher who printed 2,500 copies of the book. 1,500 of these were sold, mostly in his home town, Turin. It was not until 1956 that Einaudi published the work in a revised form. On this occasion, the book had major worldwide success, being translated into English by Stuart Woolf in 1958, and into German by Heinz Reidt in 1959. Both translations were done under keen observation by Levi. The German edition of If This Is A Man also contains a special preface addressed to the German people, which Levi affirms he wrote out of passionate necessity to remind them of their actions in The Drowned and the Saved (Italian title: I Sommersi e i Salvati).
If This Is a Man is often published with Primo Levi's second work of witness, The Truce (Italian title: La Tregua).
See also
- Ecce homo
- Human nature
- Mensbeeld
- Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century
- Night (book)
- The Diary of a Young Girl
- The Holocaust in popular culture
