The Italian Consulate with the Italian Istitute de Cultura hosted a powerful civic and cultural event.
Dramatist and actor, Diana Hobel rendered a strident emotive theatrical reading based on texts by Primo Levi and Hermann Langbein with original piano music played masterfully by Federico Nicole performing maestro Claudio Rastelli’s composition, with restraint and emotional force.
The reading “Hierarchy and Privilege” commemorates Giornata della Memoria 2026, remembering the Holocaust. Through Levi’s words this presentation offered an intense reflection on life in the extermination camps and on the themes of fear, hierarchy and moral collapse– questions that still resound today. Diana Hobel’s strident and heartfelt voice echoed the disembodiment of humanity and belonging, resonating with almost a morality of its own, a powerful stab at that sent shivers through the collective spines of those present.
Within the catastrophe of the Shoah, humanity was fortunate that the train leaving Italy for Auschwitz in February 1944 was transporting a special envoy, an anthropologist not yet aware of his talent. The scientific training of Primo Levi, his clarity of language, the character, so hostile and far removed from the “language of the heart”, along with the moral tension of his writing, all creates a unique testament, a combination of psychological experience in a Nazi concentration camps of Fossoli and later Auschwitz, employing Dante’s image of limbo. His dry, clear prose style, turned a moral duty into a literary strategy. His is a written testimony that goes beyond the description of human behaviour in extreme situations.
For many years the majority of readers failed to realise that IF THIS IS A MAN, in addition to being a great act of testimony based in truth and documented in every detail, is a philosophical study of a drastic experience. This makes Levi a sociologist and psychologist of concentration camps. The role of witness assumed by Levi as a poet, for a long time overshadowed his importance as an author placing him on the borderline between a writer of true literature and the producer of written testimony, only contributes to concealing and removing the question of writers’ responsibility when dealing with the most disturbing problems of our most recent past. He was central to the sensitive question as to whether it was possible to create poetry after Auschwitz. His answer was to write, in fact to create literature, where it might have seemed impossible to do so.
Historical revisionists attack on the truth about concentration camps, a new logic, if everything is “narration”, one is worth the other and the truth depends on who has power. It was against this dangerous trend that appeared in the mid-’80s that Levi raised his passionate voice, emphasising the need to always distinguish the reality of the victims from that of their executioners. According to the author, the victim is a victim and as such deserves our emphatic compassion and understanding. Its the weakest and most vulnerable within the community of the oppressed, those whose voices were never heard and vanished into thin air, those are the ones for whom Levi intends to be the spokesman.
In the preface to his first book Levi said that discretion mitigates the reader’s willingness to listen to what the world prefers to forget.
What can be sadder than a train?
That leaves when due,
That has but a single voice,
And has but a since route……
And a man? Is a man not sad?
If he lives for long in solitude
And thinks that time has reached its end.
In describing life in the Lager( concentration camp), Primo Levi uses metaphors often inspired by Dante. His voyage through a real “inferno” is described as a descent in which interment at Fossoli was “limbo”. When Dante’s words don’t come to help him, he turns to the language of the bible. The poem Shema, is his ability to transpose one of the best traditional Hebrew texts–the passage from Devarim/Deuteronomy, that includes the Jewish creed, into one of the most powerful appeals to memory and historical awareness. This ancient prayer has a sublime appeal for remembrance and the sentiments of human responsibility. His music has heart at its core: Canto dei Morti in Vano/ Song of those who died in vain.
Reading his poem, I find it perfect for what is currently happening around the globe. Its not often that a poem puts a shivers down my spine every time I read it, but this is certainly one of them. Levi is a rare writer about whom it can be said that his literary virtues are largely inseparable from his moral ones and rests on the superhuman strength of a mind, a refusal to distort the record with a spasm of self-pity or sentimentality, of pain or rage, or lust for revenge.
Tonight’s evocative delivery was intense but music’s ability to speak beyond words to evokes emotion through pure sound accompanied by the resonance of spoken texts, to re-present horrors that belie the limits of imagination, brings us closer to events that we can never comprehend.
