If This Is a Man

The title If This Is a Man is a conditional clause (if this is a man). The memoir is concerned with the conditional state of manhood and how manhood can be determined.

The camps are segregated by sex, and Levi discusses men and manhood specifically, since his experience in the Lager is exclusively with male prisoners. Levi insists, based on his experience at Auschwitz, that men can become non-men. The definition of manhood—and the oppositional state of a “non-man”—is sometimes hard to grasp, however.

In the case of Lorenzo, manhood is being a genuinely good person, helping Levi simply because Levi needs his help. He brings Levi food for six months, gives him a vest, and helps him send a postcard, and “for all this he neither asked nor accepted any reward” (139). Manhood here is defined by concern and action for the other, even in the midst of great personal risk:

the personages in these pages are not men […] Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man (142).

Lorenzo’s care for Levi reminds him that he himself is a man. Yet Levi, a prisoner in the Lager, is arguably not able to extend the same radical care that Lorenzo does, and therefore it seems that Lorenzo may be reminding Levi that he, too, has the capacity for radical goodness and care. To be a man, then, is to be aware of oneself as a creature with this capacity, and to extend care when able. This definition of manhood contrasts with more traditional definitions of masculinity and aligns itself with feminist care ethics.

On the other hand, Levi describes every human segment of the Lager, from the “evil” SS to the “drowned” prisoner, as “not men” (142). The SS’s loss of their manhood is the result of the extreme violence—the “evil”—they commit against the Jews and other prisoners. Lorenzo is a man because he acts out of goodness, cultivating the capacity for care that exists within Levi. The Nazis are non-men because they refuse their capacity for goodness. Levi suggests that manhood, the ability to care for and treat one another with love, is itself fragile and can be destroyed. In literally destroying the Jews, the Nazis destroy their capacity for goodness and thus their manhood.

The drowned, however, are also described as “not men,” but this is not the result of any evil action on their part: they are the victims of the SS, who are also not men. Instead, what seems to mark the drowned as non-men is their nihilistic indifference to their own life; they have been emptied of all thoughts, fears, and even the ability to suffer, Levi claims. Becoming a non-man is to lose the creaturely desire, shared with nonhuman animals, to survive. The drowned is no longer animated with the spirit of creaturely life, though he is biologically alive. Levi offers the example of a draft horse, who will pace themself as best they can in contrast to the drowned non-man, who makes no attempt to avoid exhaustion. The state of the drowned is that of the living dead. It may be that the drowned, in the witnessing and visceral experience of evil, have had their ability to care not only for others but for themselves, destroyed. This suggests that manhood—goodness—is essential to survival. Yet the Nazis, in all their evil, survive.

These definitions are in tension with one another and sometimes even contradictory, and these tensions are as important as the definitions themselves. The reader has a sense of what Levi is trying to describe, but it also feels impossible to see through to a clear definition of any of these states. This narrative difficulty, for the reader, reflects in a small way the existential crises of the Holocaust. These narrative tensions also provide one example of the many difficulties of writing a Holocaust memoir, a genre that attempts to make sense of states of being that do not make sense—but that the author nonetheless tries to communicate.