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Primo Levi's Summary

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In the 1920s, a young Adolf Hitler became the head of the National Socialists’ German Workers Party. A worker’s organization that promoted German nationalism and anti-semitism. Over the next ten years, his political influence rose significantly and he was appointed Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. Then, he eventually took the title of Fuhrer or supreme leader in 1934. He served in both positions from 1933-1945. During this time period, Hitler and the Nazis scapegoated Jews for the economic, social, and political disarray Germany had been in post-WWII. They led propaganda campaigns in which they used pseudoscience and pseudohistory to explain the supposed inferiority of the Jewish people. These campaigns resulted in widespread persecution …show more content…

One example would be, “When we finish, everyone remains in his own corner and we do not dare lift our eyes to look at one another. There is nowhere to look in a mirror, but our appearance stands in front of us, reflected in a hundred livid faces, in a hundred miserable and sordid puppets. We are transformed into the phantoms glimpsed yesterday evening” - (pg.26). The implication from these lines is that Primo Levi feels utterly powerless. He's saying that because most of his identity markers have been taken away, the prisoners and himself are essentially phantoms. They're ephemeral and intangible, not quite human. Also by referring to the prisoners as “puppets” Levi is degrading them because he's saying that they don't have any free will or agency of their own. A similar sentiment is echoed on page 90, “If I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: 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.” By implying that the emaciated prisoner’s eyes don't contain any trace of a thought, Levi is saying that they lack intelligence. Humans having higher cognitive abilities distinguishes them from animals. To strip a person of that ability devalues their existence. Levi is also saying that losing one’s will or autonomy is a sort of death in of

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