Primo Levi's sense of history

Abstract

Primo Levi was distant from professional historical research, but read consistently the historical literature on Nazism and the Second World War. His sense of history was that of the cultural anthropologist, with an epic, literary approach to the history of humanity. Levi's public interviews and conversations clarify the evolution of his reflections on Auschwitz and the Lager, and the conditions under which collective human behaviour can degenerate. Levi suffered the cultural changes of the 1980s. He took no part in the historians’ debate about the deconstructionism of postmodern historiography, but he was strongly conscious of the ‘public use of history’, deploring the trivialization of the experience of the Lager and reacting to the historical revisionism of Nazism and Fascism. Despite his awareness of the problematic relationship between memory and history, Levi insisted on the priority of memory; his approach can be compared fruitfully to the anthropologists’ use of memory.