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Belpoliti, Marco

Vanadium and the Grey Doctor Müller

2018 - CPL - Centro Primo Levi

47 p.

  • With an introduction by Simona Forti featuring Primo Levi's story Vanadium from The Periodic TableOne of Italy's finest literary critics, Marco Belpoliti is the curator of the Italian edition of Primo Levi's complete works. Despite his pioneering decades-long critical engagement with Levi, his work remains largely unavailable in English.CPL EDITIONS is proud to announce the publication of Belpoliti essay on Levi's chapter “Vanadium” from The Periodic Table. This slim but insightful and thought-provoking volume, introduced by philosopher Simona Forti also includes Levi's original short story.After surviving Auschwitz, Primo Levi never stopped questioning how the German culture which had given humanity Goethe and Beethoven, had produced Nazism. In his quest for a deeper understanding of the circumstances and mechanisms that had turned a people into barbarians, and to confront post-war Germans with his testimony, Levi sought a dialogue with them.
  • The desire and need for such a dialogue manifest clearly in his fiction and non-fiction alike.His determination to have If This is a Man translated into German, the short story “Vanadium” in The Period Table, and the chapter the final chapter “Letters from Germans” of The Drown and the Saved are the more overt examples of this tension.From Forti's introduction:“It is, in the ends, that average type of humanity, more than the Nazi demons, which explains, even for us today, the possibility of political evil, and not only the extreme variety perpetrated at Auschwitz. It is in fact on types like Muller, as well as on the many figures that crowd the intermediate space inside and outside of extermination camps, that power grows and prospers, in some cases generating a fierce domination. It is this, I believe, that Primo Levi wishes to tell us with this story.” [Publisher's text]