Primo Levi wrote If This is a Man in 1947, he originally wanted to call it The Drowned and the Saved (the title of Chapter 9), a phrase from Dante’s Inferno, but he was persuaded to change the title by his publisher. The title comes from the phrase in the poem that serves as the book’s epigraph.

The text recounts his experience as a young Italian Jew who after joining a band of resistance fighters against the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis was captured and imprisoned in a camp at Fossoli near Modena, Italy in December 1943. Ironically, Levi surrendered as a Jew rather than risk execution as a resistance fighter.

In February 1944, he was deported along with 650 Italian Jews to Auschwitz. He became Haftling (prisoner) 174517 and was soon after transferred to Buna, a synthetic rubber factory connected to the extermination camp. For some of the time he worked there as a chemist –an element of the ‘good fortune’ to which he attributed his survival– until the Russians liberated the camp in January 1945.

After the war, Levi returned to his pre-war work as an industrial chemist, but he also began writing books and poetry. Levi was aware that the analytical precision and dispassion required of him as a scientist influenced his way of thinking about experience in general, and this in turn influenced his style of writing. His chemical knowledge provided him with the structure of his collection of part autobiographical tales, The Periodic Table (1975).

His experience of Auschwitz provided him with the substance of his other writing, including his last book, The Drowned and the Saved (1986), a series of essays which explore many issues: memory, communication, the shame of the survivor, the Nazis’ ‘useless’ violence, and the ‘grey zone’ of moral ambiguity between victim and oppressor - the moral and historical dilemmas of his Auschwitz experience and the memory of it 40 years later. He died in 1987: it is commonly accepted that his death was suicide, although some contests this.

If this is a Man is a gruesome record of an institution built on an organised system of brutality, a system that routinely committed acts of barbarous inhumanity in a clinically detached manner. Levi takes his readers inside a ‘gigantic biological and social experiment’ that was designed to not only make life as unbearable for the Haftlinges as possible, but also to dehumanise its victims so completely that it brought them to the state of a wild and desperate animal.

Levi’s chronicle of Auschwitz explores how brutal treatment made brutes of men; how through a process of dehumanising, the Lager’s inmates could be forced to behave inhumanely. Even so, despite the inconceivable horrors depicted, Levi’s account rejects a cynically pessimistic conclusion about the nature of man; Levi maintains his humanity because he will not believe that ‘man is fundamentally brutal, egoistic and stupid’.

By recognising that some people kept their humanity intact, even though there were numerous others whose ‘humanity [was] buried’ so that they ceased to be recognisable as men, by understanding this, he is encouraged to maintain his own humanity, and by doing so, he ‘managed not to forget that [he himself] was a man’. Indeed, Levi’s autobiographical account is itself testimony to how he managed to cling to his humanity.

The study map for If this is a Man is a visual representation of all key aspects of the text including:

• Genre
• Structure
• Historical Issues
• Style
• Background Notes
• Summary
• Character Profiles
• Themes and Issues
• Sample Examination Questions
  

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