Silke Segler-Messner

The Grey Zones of Witnessing: Levi, Améry,

Shalamov
1 Entangled memories
Since the publication of Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanal-
ysis and History by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992), the act of witnessing,
and especially the testimony as a privileged form of communication, has become
an area of research not only in cultural and literary studies, but also in history
and philosophy. The survivors of the Shoah seem to embody a certain knowl-
edge, presumably suppressed until the 1980s, when Claude Lanzmann convinced
some members of the Sonderkommando to re-enact their experiences at the his-
torical sites in Poland (Lanzmann 1985). They are to be situated in the center of
all debates about the historical, political, and ethical consequences of death
camps. Besides the discourse of Lévinas, Ricœur, Derrida or Agamben, who –
instead of giving a definition of testimony – insist on the aporetic structure of
witnessing, the philosopher Sibylle Schmidt has been trying to synthesize in a
series of studies the epistemic and ethical dimensions of bearing witness into a
concept of testimony as a social practice of knowledge (Schmidt 2009, 2015;
Krämer 2011). Her aim is to shift the philosophical focus from the theoretical to
the more practical impact of the act of witnessing, which not only transmits
sheer facts or pieces of information, but also offers the possibility of interper-
sonal exchange, or at least of acknowledging the pain of the other (Schmidt 2015:
16–17). Even though she emphasizes the universal character of her studies, the
only historical event she cites is the Shoah, since it assumes the function of an
undisputed authority for her philosophical interest in witnessing as a mode of
knowledge. In this context she misses the chance of widening her perspective
and of getting over the dominant position of the Shoah in the global discussion
of memory culture.
The fact that the Shoah dominates the public and critical discourses of West-
ern Europe and the United States seems to smother other memories of repres-
sions, such as the Gulag or the decolonization of Africa, as well as more general
questions, for example the research for a phenomenology of camp narratives in
the West and in Eastern Europe. On the occasion of the commemoration of the
end of the Second World War in 2005 all journals and commentators talked of
the “divided memory” and the “split past,” relating to the different processes of
coming to terms with the two main ideologies of the twentieth century – National

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170 Silke Segler-Messner

Socialism and Communism, closely associated with the Shoah and the Gulag
(Troebst 2005). It was Jorge Semprún in his memorial address at Buchenwald
concentration camp who articulated the wish that in 2015 the Kolyma Tales of
Varlam Shalamov would be integrated in the (European) canon of camp litera-
ture and that the experience of the Gulag would become part of the collective
memory of Europe (Semprún 2005: 52). Indeed, in the past decade a number of
articles and analyses of different aspects of the Kolyma Tales have been pub-
lished, a sign of a nascent critical discussion of an avant-garde author, who had
been ignored by European critics for a long time.1 In his article Ulrich Schmid
outlines the European reception of the Kolyma Tales, which had been translated
already in the 1960s, but passed more or less unnoticed in the wake of the publi-
cation of The Gulag Archipelago (Schmid 2007: 87–90). As Schmid points out, the
1970s were influenced by the Cold War and Solzhenitsyn provided the European
public with a powerful narrative of living and surviving in the Gulag, whereas
Kolyma Tales are stories of different length in non-chronological order and do
not offer a coherent story of Shalamov’s experiences. Trying to avoid all moral
judgment and all sort of dramatization, they keep the reader at a distance, not
wanting him to become a moral or emotional accomplice in the narration. This
difficult access is perhaps one of the main reasons for their belated reception in
Europe as well as in Russia.
Lack of attention of a wider audience is a phenomenon that concerns not
only the Kolyma Tales, but also the first editions of the survival stories of Primo
Levi and Robert Antelme. European post-war societies were not able to face the
atrocities of the (death) camps and to admit their tacit complicity with the Nazi
regime in the persecution and deportation of the Jews, while they were busy
rebuilding their democratic systems. Another example of a French writer
unjustly ignored is Georges Hyvernaud, who told his experience as a prisoner
of war in Germany in a way similar to Shalamov’s, that is to say in a laconic,
subjectless prose, which re-enacts the physical effects of dehumanization
(he titles his first work La Peau et les Os (Hyvernaud 1997; published in English
as Skin and Bones, 1994) and denounces all attempts to idealize the war, the
Resistance, or survival. Unlike Shalamov, Hyvernaud decided to abandon writ-
ing definitively when his second book, Wagon à vaches (1953; Engl. The Cattle
Car, 1994), did not achieve critical success either (Lecarme 2009).

1 One of the first to analyze the Kolyma Tales was Leona Toker (1989, 2000). It is also worth
mentioning a special edition of the Osteuropa journal (2007, 57.6), entitled Das Lager schreiben.
Varlam Šalamov und die Aufarbeitung des Gulag (“Writing about the lager. Varlam Shalamov
and the coming to terms with the Gulag”).

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 The Grey Zones of Witnessing: Levi, Améry, Shalamov 171

All these examples show that a survivor who wants to tell his or her experi-
ences needs an audience willing to listen and to understand, as well as a histor-
ical and cultural context in which his testimony is recognized not only as a
source of knowledge, but as an expression of (literary) resistance to the op-
pressing system, no matter if it is the German enemy (in the case of Hyver-
naud), the Stalinist regime or the National Socialist government under Hitler.
Resistance in this respect is not to be compared with political commitment, but
rather with the need to put the unspeakable or the unbelievable into a verbal
form. Storytelling assumes the function of reconstructing the wounded, trauma-
tized self, and of facilitating the return from the dead in the presence of an
audience.
Neither Primo Levi nor Varlam Shalamov or Jean Améry used their testimo-
nies as tools of direct political protest, although they do have a critical dimen-
sion, inasmuch as they are putting the victim and the missing social and
historical acceptance in the center of their considerations. They share not only
the traumatic memory of the camp, but also the permanent self-questioning in
their respective roles as (intellectual) witnesses of Auschwitz and the Gulag.
They all felt a responsibility to remind the public of its repressed memories,
even if they were aware of the futility of their efforts. As far as literary techni-
ques are concerned, they experimented with open and new forms of life-telling
or bearing witness. Whereas Levi and Améry chose the essay form, which
allows intertwining their personal memories with philosophical, historical, or
ethical perspectives, Shalamov created an innovative narrative: the “lived doc-
ument,” in opposition to the humanistic novels of the nineteenth century. Like
Levi and Améry, he not only transferred his experience of the Gulag into radi-
calized prose, but also reviewed his writing in several essays and letters. In his
essay On Prose (2014), he declares that the question of the camp is a topic even
more important than the war, which is functioning as a psychological screen
for the publicly organized mass murder of citizens.
In this chapter I present a reading of The Drowned and the Saved (Levi
2013), At the Mind’s Limits. Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its
Realities (Améry 1980) and Kolyma Tales (Shalamov 1994) as entangled memo-
ries, in which the actualization and transmission of the camp experience is the
main subject. Since the limits between form and content in the texts are fluid,
the act of witnessing is located in a “grey zone,” that is to say, in an area in
which all clear-cut distinctions and oppositions are suspended. The author, the
narrator, the traumatized survivor, and the intellectual who reflects and com-
ments on the events he has lived through are equivalent instances, and it is
often impossible to decide exactly who is speaking. This confusion upsets the
reader, who is confronted with a perspective that does not answer to his need

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172 Silke Segler-Messner

of a clear statement about the past. Levi, Améry, and Shalamov do not convey
messages or a moral. Therefore, I will discuss in the next section the authors’
choice of the essay and of the “lived document” as a “grey zone” of witnessing
in the sense of a paradoxical? process of narrative justification of victimhood
and the indissoluble traumatic loss associated with it.
The most threatening knowledge articulated by Levi, Améry, and Shalamov
is perhaps the awareness of the persistence of mass violence and of the possi-
bility of the victims’ collaboration with their oppressors. In the second essay
from the collection The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi introduces the con-
cept of a “grey zone” as a sphere where the opposition between victims and
perpetrators dissolves. The most striking example is that of members of the Son-
derkommando, who were forced to put women, men, and children into the cre-
matories. The contamination of the deportees with the will of the SS to
systematically and ultimately destroy the other as a human being leads to the
decomposition of solidarity among the victims, a phenomenon also noted by
Shalamov in the Kolyma Tales, although in a different way. In this context I
will also focus upon the situation of the intellectual in the camp, who is trying
to discern causalities and regularities of camp life and has to recognize the re-
placement of the body–mind dualism by an approximation of humans to ani-
mals, thus creating a new zone of indistinguishability. This approach is echoed
in Levi, Améry, and Shalamov, and even if Levi seems to criticize Améry in his
essay The Intellectual at Auschwitz (Levi 2013) his confession of faith in the vital
forces of life remains questionable when one considers his supposed suicide
one year after the publication of The Drowned and The Saved. All education
loses its cultural function in the camp, a belief shared especially by Améry and
Shalamov. The violence suffered in the camp belies the pretended superiority
of the intellect and puts the vulnerability of mankind in the forefront.

2 The grey zone of witnessing

The second volume of Georges Didi-Huberman’s series “L’œil de l’histoire,”
Remontages du temps subi [Montage of times gone] (Didi-Huberman 2010),
opens with a description of remembrance ceremonies of the 60th anniversary
of the Holocaust. As happens every year, certain films are shown over a few
weeks, certain books are reprinted, survivors are interviewed, and some maga-
zine covers show horrible shots of the camps and their cadaverous survivors.
Yet, despite the omnipresence of “Auschwitz” in the public media, Didi-Huber-
man is wondering whether this remembrance spectacle keeps the memory alive

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 The Grey Zones of Witnessing: Levi, Améry, Shalamov 173

or rather, whether it freezes the remembrance of Auschwitz by simply repeating

a well-known set of commonplaces and by unwittingly encouraging the impres-
sion of having already “seen it all” (Didi-Huberman 2010: 11). He cites Annette
Wieviorka, who talks about “mémoire saturée” (saturated memory), and who
presents a number of doubts concerning all current attempts at working
through “Auschwitz” (Wieviorka 2005: 9). Wieviorka concludes that Auschwitz
has become an abstract concept of evil beyond historical knowledge. Stressing
the necessity to re-read historical events such as Auschwitz because of their im-
pact on our present, Didi-Huberman argues in support of montage as one of the
few practices to “(re-) open the eyes” and to “(re-)open the mind” to the histori-
cal reality of the camps (2010: 144–145). His examples of a new legibility of the
past, including a vital critique of violence, are the films of Harun Farocki,
which work like an essay, creating a montage of different types of media that
does not tell a story but exposes the story before the public.
The noun “essay” comes from the Latin noun exagium, which means
“weight” and in a figurative sense the process of pondering the facts and cir-
cumstances. One of the first European writers who revealed the potential of the
essay as a way of self-questioning that yields more questions than it does
answers was Michel de Montaigne. Having lost his only friend, and in light of
his approaching death, he gave up all public charges and retired in 1571 to a
famous tower he owned (Starobinski 2001: 64). The starting point for his delib-
erations was his experience and awareness as a human being, with all his
moral and physical defects. In permanent dialogue with the Greek and Latin
classics, he discussed modern topics such as the question of good education,
the Europeans dealing with the “savages,” and last but not least, the anthropo-
logical aspects of human nature being like the affinity to vanity or the ambition
of glory. In a circular process of reasoning, which often starts form general
observations, Montaigne places his own experience in opposition to the works
of Aristotle, Plato, or Cicero, and finally turns back to subjective perception,
presenting the image of a weak modern subject, who depends on his physical
body and is delivered onto life in the consciousness of certain death.
If both Primo Levi and Jean Améry have chosen the essay form for standing
up publicly as survivors of Auschwitz, they deliberately put themselves at a dis-
tance from the corpus of documentary survivor tales and intertwined their trau-
matic memories and general considerations. Referring to the hypothesis of
Adorno, Didi-Huberman emphasizes the composite character of the essay,
which combines exegesis and criticism by creating a sphere of experimentation
and interpretation that transgresses the traditional idea of truth. “The Essay,
however, does not let its domain be prescribed for it,” writes Adorno. And
further,

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174 Silke Segler-Messner

[. . .] Its concepts are not derived from a first principle, nor do they fill out to become
ultimate principles. Its interpretations are not philologically definitive and conscien-
tious; in principle they are over-interpretations – according to the mechanized verdict
of the vigilant intellect that hires out to stupidity as a watchdog against the mind.
(Adorno 1991: 4)

The central point of reference for essayistic writing is the opposition between
experience and thinking in certitudes and facts. According to Adorno, the essay
is signed by the “consciousness of the non-identity of presentation and subject
matter” (1991: 18). Even if in his essays Améry appears to congenially illustrate
Adorno’s thesis (Lorenz 1991; Hofmann 2003: 41), a most striking difference
becomes apparent in the bodily presence of the trauma of dehumanization. All
writing of Jean Améry ends in the certainty that someone who has been tor-
tured remains tortured for the rest of his life. This corporal knowledge over-
writes all attempts at dealing with the traumatic past, so that the non-finite
character of the essay is to be situated in a tension to the physical limits of a
(possible) visualization.
Unlike Primo Levi, who wrote the first account of his camp experience
directly after the liberation of Auschwitz and shortly afterwards wrote his testi-
mony If This is a Man (Levi 1959), Jean Améry presents himself for the first time
as a persecuted German Jew in the collection of essays, At the Mind’s Limits.
Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, from 1966. As he
reveals in the preface to the first edition, the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt coin-
cided with the writing of his first text concerning his experiences in the Third
Reich. At first, he discussed the condition of being an intellectual in Auschwitz,
with no plans of continuation; but afterwards he became aware of the need to
find an answer to the general question of how he got into the death camp, he
who was at no time a practicing Jew and, what is more, an expert on German
literature. Despite his wish to keep an objective and distanced view, he realizes
that it is impossible for him to reject his “I” and his experiences: “If in the first
lines of the Auschwitz essay I had still believed that I could remain circumspect
and distant and face the reader with refined objectivity, I now saw that this was
simply impossible. Where the word ‘I’ was to have been avoided completely, it
proved to be the single useful starting point.” (Améry 1980: XIII) Améry’s aim is
to attempt a “phenomenological description of the existence of the victim”
(XIII), and having elucidated the non-historical, but chronological order of his
five essays, he revises the expression of “Nazi victim,” to him all too general:
“[. . .] only when I reached the end and pondered on the necessity and impossi-
bility of being a Jew, did I discover myself in the image of the Jewish victim.”
(XIV) This displacement from the general to the particular, from an objective
description of victimhood to a self-reflection in the image of the Jewish victim,

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 The Grey Zones of Witnessing: Levi, Améry, Shalamov 175

marks the schism between object and subject that Améry tries to overcome in
his essays, knowing at the same time that it is impossible. Imre Kertész dedi-
cates his essay “The Holocaust as Culture” to Améry and argues for the neces-
sity of the victim to liberate himself from the degradation suffered by assuming
the right to objectify and therefore to reconstruct his negated subjectivity as the
common ground of his writing (Kertész 1999: 54).
The essay “Torture,” which opens with a detailed description of Fort Breen-
donk, the site where Améry was tortured, is undoubtedly of particular impor-
tance from a tourist’s point of view. It ends with a repeated declaration:
“Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world.”
(Améry 1980: 40) In the exposition the narrative voice, which seems to be famil-
iar with the evoked site, guides the reader like a tourist, from the outside into the
present-day Belgian national museum. After a short scene in the first paragraph,
in which the first-person narrator reveals his limited knowledge concerning the
history of Fort Breendonk from the First World War onwards, the voice switches
to an impersonal mode of presentation, until the reader-tourist enters a window-
less arch inside the fortress. At the end of the third paragraph the narrative voice
announces not only the subject of the essay, but also, rather unexpectedly, the
object: “From there no scream penetrated to the outside. There I experienced it:
torture.” (Améry 1980: 22) As Christian Poetini points out, the repetition of the
adverb of place “there” (Ger. dort) draws the reader’s attention to syntactical
inversion, which stresses the importance of the indirect object (Ger. mir) that
stands in a direct relation to the postponed subject, “(the) torture” (Poetini 2014:
67). Since the second sentence is written in the passive voice, a special emphasis
is placed on the act of the narrator’s suffering. A colon marks the gap between
the object and the subject – “There I experienced it: torture.” (Améry 1980: 22) –
as well as the distance between the narrator and the reader, who is only a visitor
to the site and does not know what it means to be tortured. As torture reduces
the “I” to his body and confronts the victim with his own death, the passive
voice indicates it is a chronic condition rather than a singular event.
All the essays in At the Mind’s Limits revolve around the loss of home
(land), the negation as a human being worth living, self-alienation, and other-
ness. All of Jean Améry’s reasoning is based on the inscription of physical vio-
lence in his body during the extreme situation of torture: “At the first blow [. . .]
this trust in the world breaks down. The other person, opposite whom I exist
physically in the world and with whom I can exist only as long as he does not
touch my skin surface as border, forces his own corporeality on me with the
first blow.” (Améry 1980: 28) The experience of being overpowered by a fellow
human being constitutes the focal point of the second part of the German title
of the collection: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten. Already the use of

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176 Silke Segler-Messner

the past participle (überwältigt) reveals that neither the temporal distance nor
the act of witnessing has changed or suspended his condition as a victim of the
Nazis. With every essay Améry tries to embody the event in its temporality that
had made of him a Jewish victim (Didi-Huberman 2010: 28). And even if he
knows that his essays do not answer the questions he raises, he continues to
protest publicly against the closure of the past by a present that falsifies the
reality of the camps by prematurely placing communism on equal terms with
the Nazi ideology of annihilation and by displaying a general indifference to-
wards the victims. The growing anti-Semitism of the European left refers to an
absent confrontation with Auschwitz and reflects the actuality of the last of
Améry’s essays, in which he is dealing with the “necessity and impossibility of
being a Jew” (Améry 1980: 82–101).
At this point, Améry’s exposed position in the preface to the second edition
overlaps with the preliminary remarks of Primo Levi’s in The Drowned and The
Saved. More than forty years after the liberation of Nazi concentration camps,
and more than forty years after witnessing the process of dehumanization for the
first time, Primo Levi submits his memories of Auschwitz to a critical
review. There are at least two reasons for his need of bearing witness once again.
On the one hand, unfolding the truth of the camps by historians and in victims’
testimonies bore no consequences at all for global politics (Levi 2013: 11–13). Yet
for Levi the question of whether the camp really disappeared as a historical phe-
nomenon or just returned in different forms, like in the crimes of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, of Vietnam, Argentina, and Cambodia, and last but not least, in the
gulags of the Soviet Union, is fundamental. On the other hand, already in the
foreword a certain moral unease can be noticed, which concerns Levi’s position
as a witness and survivor. Having discussed the restricted view of the memories
of former camp inmates, Levi finds that most of the testimonies have been writ-
ten by those who had been privileged in the camp:

At a distance of years, one can today definitely affirm that the history of the Lagers has
been written almost exclusively by those who, like myself, never fathomed them to the
bottom. Those who did so did not return, or their capacity for observation was paralyzed
by suffering and incomprehension. (Levi 2013: 9)

In the following essays Levi repeats this argument several times; it forms the title
of the essay collection and already appeared for the first time in If This Is a Man,
where it had formed the middle axis of this testimony and represented a sort of
conclusion to Levi’s camp experience. The will to come to a generalizable judg-
ment reflects Levi’s scientific mind and underlines his intention to understand
the idea of this incredible experiment with mankind. In the opening paragraph
of the chapter “The Drowned and the Saved,” he confronts the Nazi project of

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 The Grey Zones of Witnessing: Levi, Améry, Shalamov 177

total annihilation of the European Jews with his conviction that there is no
human experience devoid of sense and unworthy to be remembered. He con-
cludes: “We would also like to consider that the Lager was pre-eminently a
gigantic biological and social experience.” (Levi 1959: 99) and creates a new par-
adigm, extrapolated from his experiences and reflections about the camp. All
tentative attempts to divide the mankind into good versus bad or courageous ver-
sus cowardly become less important and at least less visible in the camp, because
there really is only one fundamental opposition: “[. . .] there comes to light the
existence of two particularly well differentiated categories among men – the
saved and the drowned” (Levi 1959: 100). For Levi the “drowned” are synony-
mous with Muselmann, that is to say with those prisoners who have lost all will
to live, vegetating, already in a place where they neither suffer nor think. As they
died quickly and left no stories to tell, Levi feels himself haunted by “their face-
less presences” (103). But the more threatening aspect is the position of the nar-
rator himself, who becomes privileged by getting a job in a chemical laboratory
because of his background in chemistry. How can Levi justify his survival?
This question seems to return forty years later in correlation with a changing
public discourse, which undermines the authority of the survivors and offends
the memory of the “drowned.” In the first essay of the collection The Drowned
and the Saved, dedicated to “The memory of the Offense,” Levi refers to an article
by the French revisionist Louis Darquier de Pellepoix (L’Express, 28.10.1978),
which provoked a debate about the existence of gas chambers, culminating in
the philosophical contradiction by Jean-François Lyotard in Le Différend.2 Even if
the subject of this essay suggests a re-examination of his own traumatic memo-
ries, Levi keeps a distanced, nearly objective perspective, giving the impression
of having worked through his traumatic memories, of not being involved:

I intend to examine here the memories of extreme experiences, of injuries suffered or

inflicted. In this case, all or almost all the factors that can obliterate or deform the mne-
monic record are at work. The memory of a trauma suffered or inflicted is itself trau-
matic because recalling it is painful or at least disturbing: a person who was wounded
tends to block out the memory so as not to renew the pain; the person who has inflicted
the wound pushes the memory deep down, to be rid of it, to alleviate the feeling of
guilt. (Levi 2013: 16–17)

In the next paragraph he emphasizes the irremediable character of the offense

suffered, but instead of proving this assertion by his own example he remem-
bers Jean Améry and cites the conclusion of the essay “Torture”: “Whoever was

2 Published in English as The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1999; trans. Georges Van den
Abbeele, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) [Ed.].

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178 Silke Segler-Messner

tortured, stays tortured.” (Améry 1980: 34) As this is the only quotation that
appears in this essay (Levi’s first), Améry’s testimony assumes particular signif-
icance. The German philosopher, who like Primo Levi was an active member of
the Resistance (Belgian) and also a Jew, not only becomes the preferred ad-
dressee of Levi’s inner dialogue, but also the voice of the suffered offense, of
the physical dimension of the camp experience that Levi never describes
directly. However, another aspect is hidden behind the reference to Améry. In
the exposition of the first chapter of If This Is a Man Levi points out that he
identified himself as an Italian Jew during the first interrogation by the Italian
militia, fearing he would be tortured or even killed if he had confessed his part
in the Resistance (Levi 1959: 4). Taking into account, the decision to betray his
political commitment in order to save his life, unlike Améry, who accepted the
torture because of his role in the Resistance, Levi seems to grant a certain
moral superiority to his intellectual companion and at the same time dissoci-
ates himself from him, as we will see in the context of the later discussion of
the role of the intellectual in Auschwitz.
The confrontation with Améry in The Drowned and the Saved reveals a dif-
ferent thematic priority, which puts the main stress on moral or ethical dilem-
mas and especially on the survivors’ guilt and shame. The first three essays in
the collection all deal with a belated justification of Primo Levi’s survival by
dissecting his traumatic memories one more time, oscillating between a scien-
tific-dispassionate and a nearly self-destructive mode, between an impartial
and a personal-intimate presentation. “I felt innocent, yes,” writes Levi in
“Shame,” “but enrolled among the saved and therefore in permanent search for
a justification in my own eyes and in the eyes of others. The worst survived –
that is, the fittest; the best all died” (Levi 2013: 87–88). The dramatic culmina-
tion of the fundamental gap between the saved and the drowned, identified
with the worst and the best respectively, cannot be bridged and threatens to
sap the act of witnessing itself, which at least serves to reopen the wound and
reactivate the pain, as Levi writes in “The Memory of the Offence”. But there is
another threat that Levi is writing against by giving his voice to the collective of
survivors: the risk to be forgotten and to have survived for nothing. In the
conclusion to his collection of essays he reflects on the difficult dialogue with
the younger generation, for whom the survival testimonies are only stories of
the past without relevance to their personal life:

For us to speak with the young becomes ever more difficult. We see it as a duty, and at
the same time as a risk: the risk of appearing anachronistic, of not being listened to. We
must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience, we have collectively
been the witnesses of a fundamental, unexpected event, fundamental precisely because
unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. (Levi 2013: 230)

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 The Grey Zones of Witnessing: Levi, Améry, Shalamov 179

If there is no audience ready to listen, bearing witness loses its epistemic and
ethical foundation. The repetition of the need to be heard in relation to an event
that is two times designated as fundamental illustrates the growing concern of a
witness who has to recognize a change in the global perception of the Holocaust.
The series of catastrophes that Levi refers to show not only the persistence of
mass violence, but also a process of relativization undermining the singularity of
the Holocaust, which Levi, and also Améry, try to defend.
If Levi justifies his testimony ethically as witnessing in the name of Musel-
männer, who normally never returned from Auschwitz, Varlam Shalamov high-
lights especially the dochodjaga (“goners”) or as Wolfgang Kissel writes, the
condition of a minimal life completely reduced to an instinctive, physical lan-
guishing comparable to that of an animal (Kissel 2009: 163–164). After nearly
eighteen years as prisoner of the Gulag, fourteen in the Kolyma region, he began
to write in the 1950s (Thun-Hohenstein 2007). The starting point for his project
to create a completely new sort of narrative is to bear witness to the exhaustion
and dehumanization suffered in an almost physical sense. The distance between
the suffering body and (in retrospective) the act of writing is to be suspended, so
that the author himself becomes the object of literary investigation, as Luba Ju-
rgenson observes (2007: 171). Therefore, all witnessing of the Gulag as an experi-
ence of an extreme situation reveals a paradox: on the one hand, Shalamov tries
to inscribe his physical trauma in the text (Siguan 2014), but on the other hand,
precisely the act of writing implies a growing distance to the past. The gulf be-
tween the bodily experience, still present, and the written testimony cannot be
bridged, so that the Kolyma Tales aim not only at visualizing the nuances of this
minimal life, but also at the literary process of translation. The opening episode
of the Kolyma Tales illustrates perfectly the crucial importance of the reader as
an addressee and accomplice of the narration, who has to assume the role of a
secondary witness and must realize the testimony by deciphering the (re-)con-
structed marks of the physical pain that are all exposed to the danger of getting
lost and forgotten.
The Kolyma Tales cycle opens with a description of a group of men plowing
through a pristine, snow-covered surface. This scene can neither be located in
space or time, nor can it be associated directly with the experience of the
Gulag. The narrator first asks, “How is a road beaten down through the virgin
snow?” (Shalamov 1994: 3), as if he is referring to a writing exercise, and then
shows a picture of a group of men walking through the deep snow and creating
a first track. He does not give us their names or details of their appearance, but
focuses on their physical effort, that is to say on the use of their sheer physical
force, manifest in their breath and sweat. The creation of a path in the white
surface can be read as a reference to the process of writing, a theory that is

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180 Silke Segler-Messner

confirmed with the last sentence of the story: “Later will come tractors and
horses driven by readers, instead of authors and poets.” (Shalamov 1994: 4) If
the writer does not come on horseback, nor by tractor, he is to be found among
or near the walking men, whereas the position of the reader is characterized by
a fundamental temporal difference and distance. He only arrives on the scene
after the work has been done and as he stands outside the setting, he has to
visualize the related event. The writer, in turn, is not only close to the nameless
characters that can be identified as all those who died in the Gulag, but
becomes himself like a living dead described in the last story of the second vol-
ume, “The Sentence.” Here the first-person narrator is in a condition of
advanced consumption, having lost all contact with the outside world and
getting more and more closed up within himself. In a painful process of self-
dissection, he notes the transformation of his body into a rag of skin and bones
and the subsequent severing of all emotions. All that remains is bitterness. In
this story, as well as in the first episode of “Through the Snow,” bearing wit-
ness to a primarily physical experience is seen as a paradoxical process of
appropriation and loss of self. The body becomes a vehicle of suffering that can-
not be expressed directly. The survivor and writer has to transfer the traces of
his pain and troubles to the text, which assumes the status of a supplement to
memory.3
As Shalamov explains in his essay “On Prose,” the Gulag as well as the
Auschwitz experiences necessitate a different kind of writing and an uncom-
mon aesthetics experimenting with the traditional opposition of literature ver-
sus document, memory versus history and life versus art. He characterizes his
texts by a set of negations. They are neither tales nor literature. They are not
linked to the Russian canon, because they break with all humanistic ideals.
Briefly speaking, they can be defined as scenic visualizations of situations,
encounters, and observations. One of the most disturbing insights consists in
the definition of humanity by boundless physical resilience: in the short story
“Rain” the narrator notices that horses die before prisoners in the Gulag. This
awareness of his physical strength is, the narrator confesses, the only thing
that prevents him from dying by suicide. Besides the domination of the body
over the mind as one of the main characteristics of mankind, in several stories
Shalamov hints at the possibility of returning from the (near) dead to the living.
In contrast to the presentation of the Muselmann by Primo Levi and in contrast
to Agamben, who situates the Muselmann on the edge of death and life,

3 For Luba Jurgenson the memory assumes the function of “prosthesis” (Jurgenson 2007:
179–182).

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 The Grey Zones of Witnessing: Levi, Améry, Shalamov 181

Shalamov presents the Gulag prisoner as a participant in a never-ending cycle

of passing away and returning back to life.
The experience of the Gulag as an extreme situation demands a radical-
ized writing style, reduced to a minimalist aesthetic without moral judgment
and without the possibility of identification with the characters. Therefore,
Shalamov generates a fragmented narrative that, like the essay, creates a
montage of scenes in a nearly identical setting, but with changing narrative
voices and protagonists. Sometimes, the narrator can be identified with the
communal voice, sometimes it is the autodiegetic narrative instance that
reports an event, and sometimes the narrator seems to be entirely absent from
the story, focusing on the life stories of his camp inmates.4 Iteration as a nar-
rative strategy reinforces the impression of an eternal recurrence of the same,
that is to say, of living and dying in the Gulag (Kissel 2009: 166).
Levi, Améry, and Shalamov all deal with the question of bearing witness by
reflecting on forms of transmission and comprehension beyond the mere facts.
Choosing between the essay and a new prose form documents the emphasis on
the question of transfer and on the communication with the reader, confronting
him with a poetics of writing based on the visualization of the indignities
suffered. Even if the loss of identity and physical integrity cannot be bridged,
witnessing remains the only form of self-reassurance and of re-integration into
a world after Auschwitz and the Gulag.

3 The intellectual and the grey zone

of collaboration
Primo Levi’s reflections on the grey zone are directly associated with the general
observation that humans need precise directions to understand history. The
process of understanding often corresponds to the simplification of complex
situations; thus, after a catastrophe everyone wants to restore, as quickly as pos-
sible, the vision of an ideal world in which the question of responsibility can be
answered without hesitation. But the reality, and the facts of life, cannot only be
categorized in simple binary oppositions – good or bad, guilty or innocent, win-
ner or loser. Even in the world of concentration camps the distinction between
victims and perpetrators is not as obvious as it may seem at first sight. The most
terrible shock for Primo Levi was the arrival at the camp, because his humanistic

4 For a discussion of the different effects that are produced by different narrative voices in the
Kolyma Tales, see Golden (2004).

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182 Silke Segler-Messner

belief in solidarity among the oppressed and in the spirit of charity was
completely destroyed. Instead, arrival in the Lager was indeed a shock because
of the surprise it entailed:

The world in which one was precipitated was terrible, yes, but also indecipherable: it did
not conform to any model, the enemy was all around but also inside, the “we” lost its
limits, the contenders were not two, one could not discern a single frontier but rather
many confused, perhaps innumerable frontiers, which stretched between each of us. One
entered hoping at least for the solidarity of one’s companions in misfortune, but the
hoped-for allies, except in special cases, were not there; there were instead a thousand
sealed-off monads, and in between them a desperate hidden and continuous struggle.
The brusque revelation, which became manifest from the very first hours of imprison-
ment, often in the instant form of a concentric aggression on the part of those in whom
one hoped to find future allies, was so harsh [as] to cause the immediate collapse of one’s
capacity to resist. For many it was lethal, indirectly or even directly: it is difficult to de-
fend oneself against a blow for which one is not prepared. (Levi 2013: 33–34)

This excerpt documents the traumatic effects of entering into a cosmos in

which evil seems to be everywhere and in which the deportee is promptly in-
volved in a struggle for survival. Jean Améry has noted that the first blow de-
stroys not only any idea of self-determination, but also confidence in a world in
which the Jews are expelled from human community. In this context the camp
is not only an area of detention but also a sphere of relentless aggression
against humanity and at the same time of continuous resistance against the ne-
gation of being human. What Levi describes is the breakdown of modern Euro-
pean civilization as the necessary condition for the creation of grey zones. In
this regard his critical view of the supposed supremacy of the human being
seems to converge with the position of Varlam Shalamov, for whom the human-
ist literature of the nineteenth century, with all its convictions, bears some
blame for the twentieth-century catastrophes of Auschwitz and the Gulag.
Besides the entry ritual that involves kicks and blows, screamed orders, strip-
ping of clothes until complete nakedness and the shaving of the hair, the destruc-
tion of solidarity among the victims in the concentration camp was furthermore
promoted by according privileges to those who were inclined to collaborate with
the Nazis. As Primo Levi observes, the system of totalitarian oppression does not
only want to humiliate the deportees, but tries to make them resemble their own
oppressors by giving them the power to discipline and punish their comrades. The
introduction of a system of privileges blurs the dividing lines between victims and
perpetrators and encourages the creation of a grey zone, an area of complicity and
collaboration between the privileged prisoners and the SS guards, “with ill-defined
outlines which both separate and join the two camps of masters and servants”
(Levi 2013: 38).

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 The Grey Zones of Witnessing: Levi, Améry, Shalamov 183

Therefore, Levi insists on the fact that the area between victims and perpetra-
tors has to be explored, because neither in Nazi Lagers, nor in Soviet camps, are
the respective spheres well defined. The harsher the oppression, the more the op-
pressed is willing to collaborate with the oppressor. The motives of collaboration
with the Nazis are various and Levi cites the following: “[. . .] terror, ideological
seduction, servile imitation of the victor, myopic desire for any power whatso-
ever, even though ridiculously circumscribed in space and time, cowardice, and
finally, cold calculation aimed at eluding the orders and the imposed order.” He
concludes: “All these motives, on their own or combined, have been at work in
creating the grey zone, whose components were held together by the wish to
preserve and consolidate their privilege vis-à-vis those without privilege.” (Levi
2013: 40)
In this regard Levi defines the Lager as an excellent “laboratory” of com-
plicity between victims and perpetrators. For Giorgio Agamben, Primo Levi is
the first to sketch the frame for a new ethic after Auschwitz, with the grey zone
in its center. In Remnants of Auschwitz the grey zone becomes an emblematic
area that is “independent of every establishment of responsibility” or is “a zone
of irresponsibility” (Agamben 1999: 21), because it is an area in which “victims
become executioners and executioners become victims” (17). The Italian philos-
opher suggests that in the grey zone the positions of victim and oppressor are
reversible or interchangeable, a statement that does not correspond to the posi-
tion taken by Levi.5 Far from generalizing the change of roles and the question
of guilt, Levi gives priority to the responsibility of “the very structure of the
totalitarian state” (Levi 2013: 40). Even if it is impossible to judge the different
forms of collaboration, he rejects the idea of extending the grey zone to an
anthropological state. Opting most of the time for an impersonal modus of pre-
sentation signaling distance and objectivity, the narrative voice changes the
moment he cites Liliana Cavani, declaring in an interview: “We are all victims
or murderers, and we accept these roles voluntarily.” (Levi 2013: 46) For Levi
the question of responsibility is not to be confused with psychoanalytical inter-
pretations or identifications. The truth of the camp is clear to see: at a collective
level the totalitarian state organized the annihilation of millions of victims,
whereas at a personal level Primo Levi definitely highlights his victimhood:

I am not an expert of the unconscious and the mind’s depth, but I do know that few peo-
ple are experts in this sphere, and that these few are the most cautious; I do not know,
and it does not much interest me to 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. I know that the

5 For a critical analysis of the position of Agamben, see Leys (2007).

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184 Silke Segler-Messner

murderers existed, not only in Germany, and still exist, retired or on active duty, and that
to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinis-
ter sign of complicity; above all, it is precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to
the negators of truth. (Levi 2013: 46)

Through the anaphoric repetition of the “I” Levi emphasizes his personal
experience as a source of knowledge. In the essay collection The Drowned and
the Saved there are only a few paragraphs in which he refers in such a direct
and unequivocal way to his authority as a moral witness. His statement can
be read as an intervention against the illegitimate appropriation of Auschwitz
by a public discourse that ignores the differences among the group of victims
and the nuances of guilt in a concentrationary system. That leads Levi to de-
velop a sort of hierarchy of guilt, with the exponents of the Nazi regime at the
top, followed by camp functionaries – the kapos and barracks chiefs. Those
individuals did not just carry out SS orders, they also agreed to chastise and
torture their companions, hoping to thus save their own lives, or sometimes
also enjoying the pain of others. Even though Levi indicates possible motives
of collaboration and identifies the totalitarian state as the original cause of
oppression, he condemns all kind of violence executed by the oppressed
against the oppressed (Brown 2013).
As far as this point, there is an overlap between Levi’s and Shalamov’s
positions. In the last chapter of the first volume of the Kolyma Tales, Shala-
mov sums up his experience in the different camps by enumerating what he
had seen and what he had learnt. Previously, in the ninth tale, “Marching
Rations,” the narrator affirms his refusal to become a brigadier, because he
never wants to impose his will on others. Although he has lost all his empathy
in the Gulag and has become a man reduced to obeying his instincts and liv-
ing for the next moment, he is proud that he has never been responsible for
the death of a comrade, as he writes in the last chapter. He adds that he never
betrayed any of his companions in misfortune. Concerning the formation of
the grey zone, the differences between prisoners and executioners seem to
be even more flexible in the Gulag, because the Stalinist system of arbitrary
arrests and detentions without trial is based on a variegated image of the
enemy. All prisoners with dominant positions can quickly lose their privileges
because of betrayal and changing alliances. The entire Russian people were
subjected to reprisals, no social class was excluded, and in each village, fac-
tory or family there was a neighbor or a relative who suddenly found himself/
herself confronted with some unfounded accusation. The Kolyma region thus
constitutes a microcosm in which the totalitarian organization of the Soviet
state is reflected.

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 The Grey Zones of Witnessing: Levi, Améry, Shalamov 185

Unlike Primo Levi, who categorizes the population of the camp in If this is
a Man by distinguishing the drowned from the saved, Shalamov considers the
mass of prisoners “without a biography, without a past and without a future,”
including himself not in his role as outstanding, observing writer but as a par-
ticipant of the drama of life. Whereas Levi explores all nuances of grey in the
camp, presenting the Special Squads and Chaim Rumkowski, the president of
the Łódź ghetto in Poland, as two cases of extreme collaboration, Shalamov
does not seek to enter into the moral ambiguities of collaboration. In general,
he distinguishes three groups of people: ordinary prisoners, prisoners in a com-
manding position, and crooks or gangsters, who inhabit a world of their own
and who will not hesitate to sell out or kill their companions for a privilege.
These are the most dangerous people in the Gulag, because their immorality
corrodes the last remnants of solidarity between the oppressed.
In a camp the intellectual occupies a special position, being on the one hand
an object of ridicule and mockery, as Shalamov shows in several of his stories,
and on the other hand suffering more than the mass of ordinary prisoners be-
cause of his analytic mind. As already mentioned, Shalamov leaves no doubt
about the disempowerment of intellect in the camp in the face of basic physical
needs. The real grey zone in the Kolyma Tales does not refer to complicity with
the oppressing system of the Gulag, but to the floating transitions between
humans and animals. The intellectual can react in two ways: he can either accept
the breakdown of civilization and use his mental fortitude in the (biological)
struggle for life, or he can continue to believe in the superiority of his intellect,
so that his mental strength becomes another source of moral suffering. Shalamov
adopts the first attitude. It enables him to endure the physical suffering and the
reduction to a sort of primitive, instinctive reasoning concentrated on the satis-
faction of essential needs. He rejects the idea of intellectual heroism and stresses
the impossibility of escaping from an extreme situation.
Jean Améry, too, states that the victim cannot repress the pain, which re-
mains embedded in the body for the rest of his life. Thus, a single act of torture
forever destroys the physical and mental identity of the victim: “Twenty-two
years later I am still dangling above the ground by dislocated arms, panting,
and accusing myself. In such an instance there is no ‘repression.’” (Améry
1980: 36) Classical education becomes pointless in confrontation with the abso-
lute willingness to annihilate the Jews as part of humankind. Intellectual arro-
gance gets lost in light of an extreme situation such as Auschwitz, in which
dying and death are omnipresent and determine the condition of everyday life.
The immediate reality of the camp supplants the philosophical idealism and
corrodes the aesthetic concept of death presented by Novalis, Arthur Schopen-
hauer, Richard Wagner, and Thomas Mann. For Améry the consequences that

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186 Silke Segler-Messner

this recognition entails are to be located on a collective and individual level. At

the end of his first essay, “At the Mind’s Limits,” he cites the famous statement
that Karl Kraus delivered at the beginning of the Third Reich: “The word fell
into sleep, when that world awoke.” (Améry 1980: 20) Although Kraus announ-
ces the end of the metaphysical dimension of language, he obviously rests con-
vinced of the transcending potential of words. With his discovery that no word
can transcend the reality of the camp, Améry puts the futility of culture, and
ultimately the worthlessness of the experience he suffered, in the foreground. If
there is something to learn about Auschwitz, it is a deep skepticism towards all
culture and all idea of humanism.
Neither Améry nor Shalamov envision ethical consequences for writing
after Auschwitz and the Gulag (Siguan 2014: 206–207). Whereas Améry, in his
essay “On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew,” confesses that the
camp experience disabled him for metaphysical speculation, Shalamov, to the
contrary, radicalizes the camp as a complete negative experience corrupting
everybody who gets in contact with it – including bystanders and readers. In
his notes he explains his motivation to write in three points. First, he insists
that literature has no moral function and no power to reform humanity. Then
he points out that literary texts cannot save mankind from the repetition of his-
tory. After having realized the impasse into which he has maneuvered himself
by these two negations, he nevertheless expresses hope that the reader of his
new prose may be inspired to do something positive in his own life. In spite of
all the disillusionment he has suffered, he implicitly indicates in this context
an ethical founding of his bearing witness addressed to the other, who in the
Kolyma Tales is confronted with the truth banished from the official discourse
in the Soviet Union and who himself is inclined to forget his troublesome mem-
ories and the traumatic events that befell him.
In contrast to Améry and Shalamov, Primo Levi endeavors to show the pos-
itive effects of a classical education and cultural knowledge in his essay about
the exceptional position of the intellectual in Auschwitz. Levi compares his
camp experience to Améry’s essay “At the Mind’s Limits” that in his view
reflects bitterness and emotional coldness, and he indicates perhaps one funda-
mental difference: whereas Améry entered the camp world as an intellectual,
Levi became one only afterwards. His relationship to Améry remains deeply
ambivalent, describing him as “companion and antagonist” at the same time.
On the one hand, he asserts his affinity by validating the conclusions drawn by
Améry. He stresses the similarities of their perceptions and uses the communal
voice. On the other hand, he feels the need to present himself as different, be it
regarding his definition of the term “intellectual” or referring to his survival
philosophy in the camp, which was based on the conservation of his vital

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 The Grey Zones of Witnessing: Levi, Améry, Shalamov 187

energies and at no time on considerations about possible forms of death, which

Améry exposes:

On this point, my experience and my recollections diverge from Améry’s. Perhaps

because I was younger, perhaps because I was more ignorant than he, or less marked, or
less conscious, I almost never had the time to devote to death; I had many other things to
keep me busy – find a bit of bread, exhausting work, patch my shoes, steal a broom, or
interpret the signs and faces around me. The aims of life are the best defence against
death: and not only in the camp. (Levi 2013: 167)

Even if Levi appears to idealize the “aims of life” and his ability to preserve the
faith in life within a world of utter negation, he cannot leave the grey zone of guilt
and shame and feels himself persecuted by the drowned, as he repeatedly admits.
His pretended differences from Améry cannot abolish their common Jewish back-
ground that marks them both, although in different ways. Whereas Améry, as an
Austrian philosopher, is aware of being expelled from the German culture and
regards himself homeless, Levi not only finds in his cultural knowledge a source
of survival, but he can also return home to a country that in the past had defended
him against the attacks of the Germans and the Austrians (Segre 2003). If he lacks
Améry’s political education, he becomes more and more political in The Drowned
and the Saved, where he emphasizes the persistence of mass violence and insists
on the collective responsibility of the German people for crimes against humanity
perpetrated by the Nazis. Bearing witness for him, as for Améry and Shalamov,
becomes in this context an act of self-assertion and at the same time a performa-
tive display of his physical and mental vulnerability.

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