Lagersprache: Primo Levi and the Language of Survival

Abstract

The article examines survival and its place as a form of language dominating life in the camp in Primo Levi’s account. Such a focus on the nature of survival as a mechanism of the camp reveals the disintegration of the friend/enemy distinction and opens ambivalent ground between the survivor and the victim. The language of survival determines that all are an enemy of all under conditions of deprivation, scarcity, and violence unimagined by theory. The result is an inability of language to fully represent the experience of the camp, in which all meaning is warped by the gravity of survival. One of Levi’s great achievements as a writer is shown to be the creation of a coded layer of the text that allows access through interpretation to this dark side of experience and the inability to contain it in everyday language. Figurative reading and the language of commerce are shown to be ways to overcome the distance between the language of survival and the language of everyday. The camp’s economy of survival is so close to the normal, everyday commerce that we practice that some harsh realizations about the persistence of the camp in the postwar world are inevitable.