57 pages • 1 hour read
Primo LeviIf This Is a Man
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1947A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Drowned and the Saved”
Two broad categories of existence in the Lager are proposed: the drowned and the saved. These categories are not evident in ordinary life. The muselmann (plural, muselmanner), or “drowned,” form “the backbone of the camp” (103).
The drowned are an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living; one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand (103).
The drowned also “have no story, and single and broad is the path to perdition” (103). However, for the saved “the paths to salvation are many, difficult and improbable” (103). In ordinary life, there is a third path, but it does not exist in the Lager.
The chapter lays out several paths to “salvation,” all requiring a combination of the roles of Organisator, Prominent, and Kombinator.
The prominents are given power. Non-Jewish prominents are chosen from outside prisons specifically to “supervise” in the camps. These are not average Germans, or even average prisoners. The narrator is more interested in Jewish prominents, who unleash the power they are given on their own people, unloading the abuse they suffer from above on those below them. This description “is very distant from the picture that is usually given of the oppressed who unite, if not in resistance, at least in suffering” (104).
Four different paths to salvation are provided by way of four individuals: Schepschel, Alfred L., Elias, and Henri.
Schepschel is able to make electric braces, and gains some by doing this. He also dances at the hut of the Slovak workers, who give him a little soup. He does not hesitate to have his partner in an attempted theft in the kitchen flogged, hoping that turning on his partner will curry him favor.
Alfred L. is an engineer. He was the director of an important factory of chemicals before he was imprisoned. He is extremely disciplined and hygienic. He washes his clothing, an extremely rare activity because it requires the difficult procurement of soap in addition to the washing itself, during which a prisoner must vigilantly protect their other items. Finally, any washing of clothing requires that the prisoner wear the clean but wet article, even in the winter. Alfred L. is able to manage his rations, despite the severe hunger, and his plan is very long-term, exceptional in an environment so focused on the moment. Alfred L. is probably “still living his cold life of the determined and joyless dominator” (109).
Elias is a dwarf of staggering physical stamina and strength. He can do about anything: he is a tailor, a carpenter, a cobbler, and a barber. He excels at almost everything physical, whether eating, spitting, or fighting. He also has incredible amounts of energy and is regarded as mentally unstable. Were he not in the Lager he would be in an asylum. He resists destruction from the outside because of his exceptional physical capacities, and he resists interior destruction because of his mental state. If Elias survives, he will either be in prison or an asylum, but there are no criminals or “madmen” in the Lager. In the “inside-out” world of the camp, because Elias is such a good worker, he rarely has to work.
Henri is very smart and believes there are three paths to salvation: organization, pity, and theft. He is particularly gifted at invoking pity and cultivates it among the oppressors. He is highly self-aware and acutely conscious of his ability to cultivate pity. He has managed to manipulate the doctors in Ka-Be so that he can “hibernate” whenever he pleases, with whatever diagnosis he pleases. He is “inhumanly cunning” and focused on his survival. Speaking from the present, Levi notes that Henri is alive and that he is interested in what his life is like as a free man, but he does not want to know him.
Of these four types who survive, none are people Levi would want to know outside the Lager. It is only the very few, exceptional people who are able to survive without “renunciation of any part of one’s own moral world,” but Levi does not seem to know any of these (106).
Chapter 9 Analysis
The narrative voice goes back and forth between the first person singular (“I”) and a communal “we” that approaches the Lager as a social experiment. “We” asks the fundamental question of whether it is “necessary or good to retain any memory of this exceptional human state” (99). It is not clear who this “we” is, but the answer provided is yes, that any human experience is worthy of analysis. This chapter also draws attention to the experiences described as past ones.
In placing prisoners into two categories, the drowned and the saved, the narrative provides a social analysis specific to the Lager. These categories do not exist in normal life, as people are not usually so entirely abandoned by society. In the Lager, however, “the struggle to survive is without respite, because everyone is desperately and ferociously alone” (101). In the camp there is no social contract, no protection for the most vulnerable, and “if some Null Achtzehn vacillates, he will find no one to offer a helping hand” (101). Another term for “drowned” people like Null Achtzehn, who no longer seem to care about their survival, is “muselmann.” These categories of being complicate the theme of Men and Non-Men that Levi explores as those who are “saved” often forego moral actions that Levi associates with manhood. But Levi’s very act of categorizing could be thought as complicit with the larger dehumanization of the Holocaust if not understood within the theme of Language and Morality as Contextual. Part of Levi’s own survival is analyzing and categorizing, even if done as an act of remembering.
Both the singular and plural first-person narrators struggle to define what it is to be a drowned muselmann. If the drowned are “already too empty to really suffer,” and “one hesitates to call their death death,” (103) then they are zombie-like, the living dead, as witnessed earlier with Null Achtzehn’s indifference. Yet the reader is also told that the drowned do indeed “suffer and drag themselves along in an opaque intimate solitude” (102). Whether they suffer or not, then, is unclear.
The image of the muselmann—"an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen”—“enclose[s] all the evil of our time” (103). The SS have broken these men, and this is unequivocally evil. The chapter, however, struggles with addressing moral obligations to the drowned, once they are drowned. If they no longer think, suffer, or know or fear death, and are the walking dead, their lives do not really “count.” If their death is not really a death, then the narrative potentially suggests that their killing is not really a killing. The abandonment of the muselmann by fellow prisoners, too, is therefore morally unclear.
The chapter seems unsure, too, about the remembrance of the drowned, who “die or disappear, without leaving a trace in anyone’s memory” (102). A page later, however, the narrative voice returns to the first person (“I”), and Levi writes that “they crowd my memory with their faceless presences” (103). On one page, they are declared forgotten, and on the very next page they cannot be forgotten. This paradox underlines The Difficulty and Necessity of Remembrance.
Unlike the four saved men—Schepschel, Alfred L., Elias, and Henri—who each have a unique story to be told, the drowned are all the same, with only one shared and anonymous story. The muselmann have no individual identities and thus no unique stories. They do not exist, narratively, as individuals. The reader must then assume that the drowned do not share the nightmare of trying to tell their story upon returning home and never having it heard, as there is no story for them to tell. Alternatively, the reader may wonder whether Levi is denying the muselmanner their individual stories, and whether the muselmanner do also share the “collective” nightmare of not being heard—not just by their family but by their fellow prisoners.
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