Search Results

“... expose deliberate untruth, there is a deeper connection between freedom and looking for the truth. Primo Levi tells in his autobiography how he found a refuge from Fascism’s suffocating and poisonous lies in his work on chemistry. His idea was that the pursuit of objective scientific truth itself expressed freedom, because what one did was not under the ...”

“... almost careless way, her neck broken at the bottom of a well’. But that’s how trauma works. Primo Levi died in a similar fashion, decades after surviving Auschwitz.A Passage North is a novel about war’s aftermath: we don’t hear bombs and shells falling. In Arudpragasam’s previous novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, we hear little ...”

“... should not be underestimated.’Such was the ‘unprincipled political gamesmanship’, as Primo Levi called it, that expedited the rehabilitation of Germany only a few years after the full extent of its genocidal antisemitism became known. A strategic philosemitism, parasitic on old antisemitic stereotypes but now combined with sentimental images ...”

“... un-Nazified Germans’ in ‘a web of ideas that gave metaphysical value to the killing’. And as Primo Levi testified, the concentration camps were designed to reduce Jews, Roma and homosexuals to beasts – to force them into a recognisably prehistoric, subhuman condition.Geroulanos thinks that most theories of prehistory have been, if not ...”

“... vision long ago lost its shocking novelty. Thanks to the memoirs of survivors like Jean Améry, Primo Levi and Nadezdha Mandelstam, we know much more now than we did in 1951 about the inner experience of totalitarian regimes, and the manifold ways in which moral confidence can be shaken and trust undermined by a system of mutual surveillance, forced ...”

“... events do take place but are not true; others are – although they never occurred.’ Along with Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, Aharon Appelfeld, Piotr Rawicz, Jakov Lind and Jerzy Kosinski, he elided events and fashioned composite characters to attain a sense of realism – but that doesn’t mean that Auschwitz was a hoax, or that Israel is ...”

“... author’s approval, in a stew of language that manages to quote, uncomfortably, the title of a Primo Levi book, and misquote the first line of Herzog (Bellow has ‘it’s all right with me’). Alex disappears under the weight of all this reference, and never recovers. Amid this anarchy of styles, amid the cartoonishness and excess, the misplaced ...”

“... assembled a team of collaborators whose views were shaped by an evolving canon that included Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and, most significant of all, the work of Erving Goffman, which Ongaro translated for an Italian edition. In 1961, too, Goffman ...”

“... to which they never refer far more profoundly than the directly representational writing of, say, Primo Levi. The idea that a work’s unspoken real can reside in exterior historical fact is most lucidly stated, ironically enough, by one of Nazism’s intellectual architects, Carl Schmitt, who, writing on Hamlet, sees in the murder of James I’s father ...”

“... or the irrational horror that one’s survival involved someone else’s death (an irrationality Primo Levi explores in his work). There is also guilt at the idea that the dead are at our mercy, that we can choose to remember or forget them. This is finely caught in a stray passage by Adorno, in an essay on Mahler written in 1936: ‘So our memory is ...”

“... on the cover of the paperback is ‘redemptive’, and the killer quote on the inside flap is from Primo Levi: ‘the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis’. It is tempting to see Quangel as a portrait of the author, the untalented but persistent scribbler, but Escherich too is a candidate: the slightly arrogant deskbound ...”

“... in the king’s bedroom; the Muselmann sometimes survives, his very inhumanity proof that, as Primo Levi put it, ‘the human being is the one who can survive the human being.’ However, Agamben’s original model of bare life holds no such promise. The homo sacer was, according to archaic Roman custom, a criminal condemned not to a ...”

“... to Russia. They were drunk much of the time. Their transport columns looked like circus caravans: Primo Levi, after the victory, watched camels towing yellow Berlin buses across the Ural steppe into Asia. And yet – what soldiers! The old Russian teaching – if you reach a river, cross it and ask questions afterwards – still held good. Small units ...”

“... to find larger readerships. Thus Ascherson joins the oddly-assorted, lively company of Primo Levi, Oliver Sacks, John Berger, Edward Said and Germaine Greer – but from a slippery starting-point: the journalist is a specialist in nothing. Sometimes he seems to know that only too well, and to underrate his own contribution. Calling for work on ...”

“... Churchill’s heroic struggle or basking in its post-war glorification. Such ‘shame’, as Primo Levi calls the malaise felt by survivors of imprisonment, does not parade itself. There are political reasons, too, why the resistance hasn’t been chronicled more thoroughly – Bunting’s account is itself far from complete or accurate – and why ...”