The newsletter of M The magazine of the World gets a new look. To subscribe for free, go here.
In the small apartment located on the fourth floor of an old Turin building that he transformed into a writing studio, the historian and writer Carlo Greppi, 42, works among the ghosts of completed works and the promises of unborn texts. . In a window frame sits an enlarged reproduction of the cover ofHe buon tedesco (“the good German”, Editori Laterza, 2021, untranslated), in which Carlo Greppi traces the story of a Wehrmacht officer who joined the Italian resistance in 1944.
On a wall is pinned an insert cut from a newspaper dedicated to his pamphlet Anti-fascismo not served more to nothing (“anti-fascism is no longer useful”, Editori Laterza, 2020, untranslated), a defense by antiphrase of a political culture that was once central in Italy but has been undermined for around thirty years.
Between the library and the kitchen, where he has set up his office, a shelf is dedicated to the man to whom Carlo Greppi dedicated his new work, A man without words (JC Lattès), which will be released in France on April 3 after having been published in Italy in March 2023. Inhabited by the memory of the Second World War, Carlo Greppi, who writes both essays and novels for young people, tells the destiny of Lorenzo Perrone. At Auschwitz, this illiterate Piedmontese mason, who could have remained completely anonymous and has been listed since 1998 in the register of the Righteous Among the Nations at the Yad Vashem memorial, shared his meager food rations with Primo Levi (1919-1987).
An essential role
Thanks to him, the immense Turin writer, arrested because he was a resistance fighter in December 1943, and deported because he was Jewish a few months later, was able to survive. In 1947, in his masterpiece, If it’s a man, fundamental testimony on the concentration camp experience and essential reflection on the totalitarian mechanisms of destruction of human dignity, Levi writes about Perrone: “Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and intact, this world of negation was foreign to him. It is to Lorenzo that I owe not having forgotten that I was a man too. »
“In all of Primo Levi’s work, Lorenzo Perrone occupies around fifteen pages at most and yet he plays an essential role in his thought,” explains Carlo Greppi, sitting in his armchair, surrounded by shelves loaded with books devoted to fascism, Italian partisans, the history of the Holocaust or even borders and migrations. “Through his radical moral act, his clear appreciation of what must be done without expecting retribution and even putting himself in danger, Lorenzo represents the antidote to what Primo Levi calls the “gray zone”,” summarizes Carlo Greppi. This concept, which runs through all of Primo Levi’s work, designates the space of the contamination of evil between the executioners and the victims.
You have 44.69% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.