the drowned and the saved the gray zone summary

This Levi attributes to shame and feelings of guilt. The Drowned and the Saved | Books and Culture Willingly or not, we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto the lords of death reign, and close by the train is waiting.29. Bulgarian-born philosopher Tzvetan Todorov has written extensively about moral issues relating to the Holocaust, perhaps most famously in his book Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. Sara R. Horowitz does important work in examining the role of gender in the experiences of women caught in the gray zone. It seems to me that Levi views the Hobbesian world of the Lager as so insane, so far removed from the niceties of everyday reality, that we do not have the moral authority to judge the actions of its victims. The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi | LibraryThing While one may disagree specifically with his way of making these distinctions or the conclusions he reaches in each of these areas, I believe that this approach is much more useful than the multiplication and stretching of Levi's gray zone in ways that were clearly unintended. The intersubjective act, on the other hand, establishes a relationship between two or more individuals. One can give these two categories different names. The Drowned and the Saved Summary - www.BookRags.com As Berel Lang clearly states, the concept of The Gray Zone applies to morally charged conduct in a middle ground between good and evil, right and wrong, where neither side of these pairs covers the situation and where imposing one side or the other becomes itself for Levi a moral wrong.56 Levi speaks above all of the situation of Holocaust victims, whose choices were fundamentally choiceless. Primo Levi. Most survivors come from the tiny privileged minority who get more food. Lang uses the following quotation to demonstrate Levi's staunch refusal to identify himself with perpetrators such as the infamous Eric Muhsfeldt: I do not know whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. As head of the Judenrat (Jewish Council), Rumkowski chose the utilitarian approach to his dilemma: he hoped that by working with the Nazis, and proving to them that the d ghetto was so productive that it was worth maintaining, he could save as many Jewish lives as possible. The historian Gerhard Weinberg cautions us to remember that Rumkowski did not know when the Soviets would arrive to liberate the d ghetto. Ultimately, for an act to be good it must accord with his famous Categorical Imperative: one should act as one would have everyone else act in the same circumstances, and always treat others as ends rather than as a means to an end. and although he feels compelled to bear witness, he does not consider doing so sufficient justification for having survived. . Order our The Drowned and the Saved Study Guide, teaching or studying The Drowned and the Saved. Heroes such as Colonel Okulicki of the Polish Home Army choose to fight and die for principles that usually are abstractions (such as the idea of the Polish nation). However, as a deontologist, Kant believes moral acts should be motivated by a sense of duty, never by a calculation of self-interest. These two kinds of virtuethe ordinary and the heroicdiffer with respect to the beneficiaries of the acts they inspire: acts of ordinary virtue benefit individuals, a Miss Tenenbaum, for example, whereas acts of heroism can be undertaken for the benefit of something as abstract as a certain concept of Poland.40 Todorov views Mrs. Tennenbaum's suicide as morally superior to that of Adam Czerniakw, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto. They inhabited a sort of moral no man's land, belonging to nobody and liked by neither group. Levi identifies the common impulse to tell the story of "events that for good or evil have marked [one's] entire existence" (149). The Drowned and the Saved Summary and Study Guide | SuperSummary After you claim a section youll have 24 hours to send in a draft. Once again, the Nazis most demonic crime was to coerce victims into the role of perpetrator, to force Jews to participate in the humiliation and murder of their fellow Jews. Some scholars argue against this interpretation of Kant, claiming that he does not intend the Categorical Imperative to apply when dealing with agents of an illegitimate government such as that imposed by the Nazis.3 I find these arguments intriguing, but in the end I reject this interpretationas do, I believe, most scholars of Kant. . Written by people who wish to remain anonymous Subjectivity and irony The irony of subjectivity comes through loud and clear in this account of Nazi concentration camps. The members of the special squads did the opposite. In certain ways, this distinction mimics the distinction between the consequentialist and the deontologist. The Drowned and the Saved Irony These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. He did not suggest that we ignore the moral implications of the actions of the special squads or of Chaim Rumkowski; indeed he insisted that we examine these implications carefully. While Levi tells us that Muhsfeldt was executed after the war, and contends that this execution was justified, he does suggest that Muhsfeldt's hesitationno matter how momentarywas morally significant. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss thenovel. The Nazis were not trying to coerce their victims into any form of action. . All of these unusual conditions, together with the fact that no selection took place when the prisoners were finally transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau in July 1944, meant that a much larger number of prisoners survived here than in other such camps. Survival in Auschwitz Chapter 9, The Drowned and the Saved Summary The Drowned and the Saved - Chapter 6, The Intellectual in Auschwitz Summary & Analysis. Ethics commonly distinguishes between deontologists and consequentialists. Deontologists, among them Immanuel Kant and the twentieth-century philosopher W.D. This is a difficult question but Levi explains how violence is different depending on the motivation behind it rather than the strength of it. He establishes four categories: criminal guilt, political guilt, moral guilt, and metaphysical guilt. Important as all these topics may be, I argue that to fold them into Levi's notion of the gray zone dilutes the moral force of his position. Using Kant's criteria, it seems clear that the actions of the special squads were immoral. In "The Intellectual in Auschwitz" (6) Levi speculates about how and in what circumstances being educated or cultured was a help or hindrance to coping with the situation. He acknowledges that his parents situation, while life-threatening and humiliating, never approached the level of horror and despair faced by Levi and other camp prisoners. 99, 121, 155), his focus is not on issues of gender. Nor, finally and most fundamentally, is the Gray Zone a place to which all human beingsby the fact of human frailtyare granted access, since that would then enable them conveniently to respond to any moral charge with the indisputable claim that I'm only human.8. Does Levi really mean to suggest in this haunting passage that we all exist in the gray zone nowthat none of us deserves to be judged morally because our current situation is indistinguishable from that of the Jewish victims in the ghettos and death camps?

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