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Primo Levi Zitate
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Primo Levi war ein italienischer Schriftsteller und Chemiker. Er ist vor allem bekannt für sein Werk als Zeuge und Überlebender des Holocaust. In seinem autobiographischen Bericht Ist das ein Mensch? hat er seine Erfahrungen im KZ Auschwitz festgehalten. Er schrieb außerdem auch unter dem Pseudonym Damiano Malabaila.

✵ 31. Juli 1918 – 11. April 1987
Primo Levi Foto
Primo Levi: 44 Zitate0 Gefällt mir

Primo Levi: Zitate auf Englisch

“Interviewer: Is it possible to abolish man's humanity?
Levi: Unfortunately, yes. Unfortunately, yes; and that is really the characteristic of the Nazi lager [concentration camp]. About the others, I don't know, because I don't know them; perhaps in Russia the same thing happens. It's to abolish man's personality, inside and outside: not only of the prisoner, but also of the jailer. He too lost his personality in the lager.
These are two different itineraries, but with the same result, and I would say that only a few had the good fortune of remaining aware during their imprisonment; some regained their awareness of the experience later, but during it, they had lost it; many forgot everything. They did not record their experiences in their mind. They didn't impress on their memory track. Thus it happened to all, a profound modification in their personality. Most of all, our sensibility lost sharpness, so that the memories of our home had fallen into second place; the memory of family had fallen into second place in face of urgent needs, of hunger, of the necessity to protect oneself against cold, beatings, fatigue… all of this brought about some reactions which we could call animal-like; we were like work animals.
It is curious how this animal-like condition would repeat itself in language: in German there are two words for eating. One is essen and it refers to people, and the other is fressen, referring to animals. We say a horse frisst, for example, or a cat. In the lager, without anyone having decided that it should be so, the verb for eating was fressen. As if the perception of the animalesque regression was clear to all.”

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Primo Levi

Interview http://www.inch.com/~ari/levi1.html with Daniel Toaff, Sorgenti di Vita (Springs of Life), a program on the Unione Comunita Israelitiche Italiane, Radiotelevisione Italiana [RAI] (25 March 1983); translated by Mirto Stone

“The bond between a man and his profession is similar to that which ties him to his country; it is just as complex, often ambivalent, and in general it is understood completely only when it is broken: by exile or emigration in the case of one’s country, by retirement in the case of a trade or profession.”

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Primo Levi buch Other People's Trades

"Ex-Chemist"
Other People's Trades (1985)

“It is the duty of righteous men to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end.”

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Primo Levi buch The Drowned and the Saved

The Drowned and the Saved (1986)

“It is not at all an idle matter trying to define what a human being is.”

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Primo Levi buch Other People's Trades

Other People's Trades (1985)

“The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.”

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Primo Levi buch Other People's Trades

"News from the Sky"
Other People's Trades (1985)

“We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless.”

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Primo Levi

As quoted in The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (1994) by Eric J. Hobsbawm

“It is a pretty structure isn’t it? It makes you think of something solid, stable, well-linked. In fact it happens also in chemistry as in architecture that “beautiful” edifices, that is, symmetrical and simple, are also the most sturdy: in short, the same thing happens with molecules as with the cupolas of cathedrals of the arches of bridges.”

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Primo Levi buch The Periodic Table

On the structure of alloxan, in "Nitrogen".
The Periodic Table (1975)

“Is anything sadder than a train
That leaves when it’s supposed to,
That has only one voice,
Only one route?
There’s nothing sadder. Except perhaps a cart horse,
Shut between two shafts
And unable even to look sideways.”

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Primo Levi buch Collected Poems

"January 17, 1946"
Collected Poems (1984)

“It was not possible for us nor did we want to become islands; the just (i giusti) among us, neither more nor less numerous than in any other human group, felt remorse, shame and pain for the misdeeds that others and not they had committed, and in which they felt involved, because they sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable. Never again could it be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species — we, in short — had the potential to construct an enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act.”

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Primo Levi buch The Drowned and the Saved

The Drowned and the Saved (1986)

“The prisoners who saved themselves were not the best, the predestined to good, the bearers of a message: what I had seen and experienced showed the exact opposite. Survived the worst of preference, the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the 'gray area', the spies. It was not a certain rule (there were, nor are there in human affairs, certain rules), but was also a rule. I felt so innocent, but trooped among the saved, and therefore constantly looking for an excuse, before me and the others. Survived the worst, that is the most suitable; the best are all dead.”

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Primo Levi buch The Drowned and the Saved

The Drowned and the Saved (1986)

“Sandro was surprised when I tried to explain to him some of the ideas that at the time I was confusedly cultivating. That the nobility of man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conquerer of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev's Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed!”

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Primo Levi buch The Periodic Table

"Iron"
The Periodic Table (1975)

“If he believes time has run its course,
A man is a sad thing too.”

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Primo Levi buch Collected Poems

"January 17, 1946"
Collected Poems (1984)

“In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that’s why you’re not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.”

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Primo Levi buch The Periodic Table

"Zinc"
The Periodic Table (1975)

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