“An act against fascism”: Notes on Testimony Based on Primo Levi´s The Drowned and the Saved
Pedro Caldas – “[…] The best historians of the Lager came from the ranks of the very few that had the ability and the good fortune to attain a privileged vantage point without stooping to compromise […]” The quote is from the preface to The Drowned and the Saved. When I read it, I asked myself several questions: according to Levi, was there any vantage point for camp prisoners that was not “[…] glued to the ground by the needs of every minute”? Would the principle that “the concentration camps themselves were not always the best vantage point for knowing the camps […]” find an exception in the scholars Levi called the “best historians”? Thus, how can we probe the limits of representation, recalling here the title of Saul Friedländer´s classic anthology?
