He had no concern for the individual. In her controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt famously criticizes those Jews who, she believed, collaborated with the Nazis. His . Perhaps the most difficult and controversial use of the notion of the gray zone appears in Levi's discussion of SS-Oberscharfhrer Eric Muhsfeldt. Another anthology dealing with these issues is Elizabeth Roberts Baer and Myrna Goldenberg, eds., Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003). He describes situations in which inmates chose to sacrifice themselves to save others, as well as small acts of kindness that kept others going even when it would have been easier to be selfish. The corpses were then taken to the crematoria to be burned. She uses this story to illustrate her contention that Jewish tradition demands of women that they give up their lives rather than submit to rape. First published in Italy in 1986. The Drowned and the Saved - Wikipedia Gerhard L. Weinberg, Gray Zones in Raul Hilberg's work, in Petropoulos and Roth, Gray Zones, 75. Morality was transformed. Barbour, Polly. . Robert Melson's Choiceless Choices: Surviving on False Papers on the Aryan Side also usefully expands Levi's original concept of the gray zone, applying it to Jews living on false papers. Melson describes the experiences of his own parents as they managed to obtain falsified identity papers allowing them to evade the Nazis throughout the war. The Drowned and the Saved presents a thematic treatment of the Holocaust, revealing the how it is remembered, forgotten, and stereotyped by surviving victims, the perpetrators, and subsequent generations. 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. Levi's intent in introducing his notion of the gray zone is to say that it is, while Rubinstein argues that it is not. Indeed, the last lines of The Drowned and the Saved make Levi's position on this issue explicit: Let it be clear that to a greater or lesser degree all [perpetrators] were responsible, but it must be just as clear that behind their responsibility stands that great majority of Germans who accepted in the beginning, out of mental laziness, myopic calculation, stupidity, and national pride the beautiful words of Corporal Hitler, followed him as long as luck and the lack of scruples favored him, were swept away by his ruin, afflicted by deaths, misery, and remorse, and rehabilitated a few years later as the result of an unprincipled political game.55. Since Levi was one of those saved, he is "in permanent search of a justification . The Drowned and the Saved Irony | GradeSaver They brought the greatest amount of harm (a terrifying death) to the greatest number of people (the thousands of victims) while bringing pleasure to very few (Nazis dedicated to the extermination of the Jews). The Drowned and the Saved Summary - www.BookRags.com I do not believe so. The woman's guardian angel discovers that she once gave a beggar a small onion, and this one tiny act of kindness is enough to rescue her from Hell. I suffer because of your anguish, and I don't know how I'll survive thiswhere I'll find the strength to do so.21 But Rubinstein does not find this apparent agonizing to be credible: This speech exemplifies Rumkowski's mindset and modus operandi. Hirsch asks, Would Todorov wish to argue that the social regimen (if it can be called that) created by the Germans throughout the Konzentrationslager system is what he would consider a normal social order?51 Patterson goes much further, claiming that good and evilin the eyes of Arendt and Todorov, as well as the Nazisare matters either of cultural convention for the weak or of a will to power for the strong. With regards to the premises of their thinking, Arendt and Todorov are much closer to the Nazis than they are to the Jews.52 While I reject such hyperbole as inflammatory, I do agree with Hirsch and Patterson that Todorov's claim that the entire German population could be located in the gray zone is a misuse of Levi's terma misuse that undermines our ability to properly assign moral responsibility. Rubinstein quotes an American Orthodox rabbinical ruling that, while it is permissible for a soldiers to eat pork when no other food is available, they must not lick the bones (Lecht nicht die bayner).18 He concludes that for Rumkowski the gray zone had turned black.19. While they may have traveled there in a special railway car, once they arrived they were Jewish victims no different from the rest. I will show that certain misuses of the term travel far from Levi's original intention and become part of a relativistic challenge to contemporary ethics. As Rubinstein agrees that Rumkowski was a victim, the primary disagreement between Levi and Rubinstein may be over the question of whether that victimhood is sufficient to place someone outside our moral jurisdiction. Here Todorov allies himself with Kant's deontological approach, essentially re-stating Kant's second formulation of the Categorical Imperative. As Christopher Browning and others have demonstrated, no one was forced to become a perpetrator: Browning's groundbreaking study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 shows that members of police formations, at least in this case, could choose not to participate in atrocities.
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