The Periodic Table (27 page)

Müller wrote to me on the company level that the fifty kilos had been shipped, and that W. was sure of a friendly settlement, etcetera. Almost simultaneously there arrived at my house the letter I expected; but it was not what I expected. It was not a model letter, paradigmatic: at this point, if this story were invented, I would have been able to introduce only two kinds of letters: a humble, warm, Christian letter, from a redeemed German; a ribald, proud, glacial letter from an obdurate Nazi. Now this story is not invented, and reality is always more complex than invention: less kempt, cruder, less rounded out. It rarely lies on one level.

The letter was eight pages long and contained a photograph that shook me. The face was
that
face: grown old and at the same time ennobled by a skillful photographer; I could hear him again high above me pronounce those words of distracted and momentary compassion: “Why do you look so perturbed?”

It was visibly the work of an inept writer: rhetorical, sincere only by half, full of digressions and farfetched praise, moving, pedantic, and clumsy: it defied any summary, all-encompassing judgment.

He attributed the events at Auschwitz to Man, without differentiation; he deplored them and found consolation in the thought of the other men spoken of in my book, Alberto, Lorenzo, “against whom the weapons of the night are blunted”: the phrase was mine, but repeated by him it struck me as hypocritical and jarring. He told his story: “dragged initially along by the general enthusiasm for Hitler’s regime,” he had joined a nationalistic student league, which soon after was by mandate incorporated in the SA; he had managed to be discharged and observed that “this too was therefore possible.” When the war came he had been mobilized in the antiaircraft corps, and only then, confronted by the ruins of the city, had he experienced “shame and indignation” about the war. In May of 1944 he had been able (like me!) to have his status as a chemist recognized, and he had been assigned to the Schkopau factory of IG-Farben, of which the plant at Auschwitz was an enlarged copy: at Schkopau he had trained a group of Ukrainian girls for work in the lab, girls whom in fact I had met again in Auschwitz and whose strange familiarity with Dr. Müller I could not then explain. He had been transferred to Auschwitz together with the girls only in November 1944: at that time the name of Auschwitz did not have any significance, either for him or his acquaintances; on his arrival, he had had a brief introductory meeting with the technical director (presumably Engineer Faust), who warned him that “the Jews in Buna must be assigned only the most menial tasks, and compassion was not tolerated.”

He had been assigned to work directly under Dr. Pannwitz, the man who had put me through a peculiar “state exam” to ascertain my professional abilities. Müller made it clear that he had a very low opinion of his superior, and informed me that the man had died of a brain tumor in 1946. It was he, Müller, who had been in charge of the organization of the Buna lab; he stated that he had known nothing about that exam, and that he himself had chosen us three specialists, and me in particular; according to this information, improbable but not impossible, I was therefore in debt to him for my survival. He affirmed that he had had a relationship with me almost of friendship between equals; that he had conversed with me about scientific problems and had meditated, on this occasion, on what “precious human values are destroyed by other men out of pure brutality.” Not only did I not remember any such conversations (and my memory of that period, as I have said, is excellent), but against the background of disintegration, mutual distrust, and mortal weariness, the mere supposition of them was totally outside reality, and could only be explained by a very naive ex post facto wishful thinking; perhaps it was an incident he told a lot of people and did not realize I was the one person in the world who could not believe it. Perhaps in good faith he had constructed a convenient past for himself. He did not remember the two details about the shaving and the shoes, but he remembered others, similar and, in my opinion, quite plausible. He had heard about my scarlet fever and had worried about my survival, especially when he learned that the prisoners were being evacuated on foot. On January 26, 1945, he had been assigned by the SS to the Volkssturm, the tatterdemalion army of rejects, old men, and children who were supposed to block the Soviet advance. Luckily, he had been saved by the aforementioned technical director, who had authorized him to run off to a rear area.

To my question about IG-Farben he answered curtly that, yes, it had employed prisoners, but only to protect them: actually, he put forward the (insane!) opinion that the entire Buna-Monowitz plant, eight square kilometers of giant buildings, had been constructed with the intention of “protecting the Jews and contributing to their survival,” and that the order not to have compassion for them was
“eine Tarnung”
(“camouflage”).
Nihil de principe,
no accusation against IG-Farben: my man was still an employee of W., which was its heir, and you do not spit into your own dish. During his brief sojourn at Auschwitz he “had never gained knowledge of any proviso that seemed aimed at the killing of Jews.” Paradoxical, offensive, but not to be excluded: at that time, among the German silent majority, the common technique was to try to know as little as possible, and therefore not to ask questions. He too, obviously, had not demanded explanations from anyone, not even from himself, although on clear days the flames of the crematorium were visible from the Buna factory.

A little before the final collapse he had been captured by the Americans and locked up for a few days in a camp for prisoners of war that he, with unwitting irony, described as being “primitively equipped”; just as at the time of our meeting in the lab, so now as he wrote, Müller apparently continued not to have an inkling—“
keine Ahnung.”
He had returned to his family at the end of June 1945. And this, substantially, was the content of his notations, which I had asked to see.

He perceived in my book an overcoming of Judaism, a fulfillment of the Christian precept to love one’s enemies, and a testimony of faith in Man, and he concluded by insisting on the necessity of a meeting, in Germany or Italy, where he was ready to join me when and where I wished: preferably on the Riviera. Two days later, through company channels, a letter arrived from W. which, surely not by chance, bore the same date as the long private letter, and also the same signature; it was a conciliatory letter, they recognized that the fault was theirs, and declared themselves open to any proposal. They implied that all is well that ends well; the incident had brought to light the virtues of vanadium naphthenate, which from now on would be incorporated directly into the resin for all customers.

What to do? The Müller character was
“entpuppt,”
he had come out of his chrysalis, he was sharply defined, in perfect focus. Neither infamous nor a hero: after filtering off the rhetoric and the lies in good or bad faith there remained a typically gray human specimen, one of the not so few one-eyed men in the kingdom of the blind. He did me an undeserved honor in attributing to me the virtue of loving my enemies: no, despite the distant privileges he had reserved for me, and although he had not been an enemy in the strict sense of the word, I did not feel like loving him. I did not love him, and I didn’t want to see him, and yet I felt a certain measure of respect for him: it is not easy to be one-eyed. He was not cowardly, or deaf, or a cynic, he had not conformed, he was trying to settle his accounts with the past and they didn’t tally: he tried to make them tally, perhaps by cheating a little bit. Could one ask much more from an ex-SA? The comparison, which so many times I had the opportunity to make, with other honest Germans met on the beach or in the factory, was all in his favor: his condemnation of Nazism was timid and evasive, but he had not sought justifications. He sought a colloquy: he had a conscience, and he struggled to soothe it. In his first letter he had spoken of “overcoming the past,”
“Bewältigung der Vergangenheit”
: I later found out that this is a stereotyped phrase, a euphemism in today’s Germany, where it is universally understood as “redemption from Nazism”; but the root
wait
that it contains also appears in the words that express “domination,” “violence,” and “rape,” and I believe that translating the expression with “distortion of the past” or “violence done to the past” would not stray very far from its profound meaning. And yet this taking shelter in commonplaces was better than the florid obtuseness of the other Germans: his efforts to overcome were clumsy, a bit ridiculous, irritating and sad, and yet decorous. And didn’t he get me a pair of shoes?

On my first free Sunday I set about, full of perplexity, preparing a reply as sincere as possible, balanced and dignified. I made a draft: I thanked him for having taken me into the lab; I declared myself ready to forgive my enemies, and perhaps even to love them, but only when they showed certain signs of repentance, that is, when they ceased being enemies. In the opposite case, that of the enemy who remains an enemy, who perseveres in his desire to inflict suffering, it is certain that one must not forgive him: one can try to salvage him, one can (one must!) discuss with him, but it is our duty to judge him, not to forgive him. As to the specific judgment on his behavior, which Müller implicitly asked of me, I tactfully cited two cases known to me of his German colleagues who in their actions toward us had done something much more courageous than what he claimed to have done. I admitted that we are not all born heroes, and that a world in which everyone would be like him, that is, honest and unarmed, would be tolerable, but this is an unreal world. In the real world the armed exist, they build Auschwitz, and the honest and unarmed clear the road for them; therefore every German must answer for Auschwitz, indeed every man, and after Auschwitz it is no longer permissible to be unarmed. I did not say a word about the meeting on the Riviera.

That same evening Müller called me on the telephone from Germany. The connection was bad, and in any event by now it is no longer easy for me to understand German on the telephone: his voice was labored and seemed broken, his tone tense and agitated. He announced that for Pentecost, within six weeks, he would come to Finale Ligure: Could we meet? Taken unawares, I said yes. I asked him to let me know beforehand the details of his arrival and put aside my now superfluous draft.

Eight days later I received from Mrs. Müller the announcement of the unexpected death of Doktor Lothar Müller in his sixtieth year of life.

C
ARBON

The reader, at this point, will have realized for some time now that this is not a chemical treatise: my presumption does not reach so far—
“ma voix est foible, et même un peu profane.”
Nor is it an autobiography, save in the partial and symbolic limits in which every piece of writing is autobiographical, indeed every human work; but it is in some fashion a history.

It is—or would have liked to be—a micro-history, the history of a trade and its defeats, victories, and miseries, such as everyone wants to tell when he feels close to concluding the arc of his career, and art ceases to be long. Having reached this point in life, what chemist, facing the Periodic Table, or the monumental indices of Beilstein or Landolt, does not perceive scattered among them the sad tatters, or trophies, of his own professional past? He only has to leaf through any treatise and memories rise up in bunches: there is among us he who has tied his destiny, indelibly, to bromine or to propylene, or the -NCO group, or glutamic acid; and every chemistry student, faced by almost any treatise, should be aware that on one of those pages, perhaps in a single line, formula, or word, his future is written in indecipherable characters, which, however, will become clear “afterward”: after success, error, or guilt, victory or defeat. Every no longer young chemist, turning again to the
verhàngnisvoll
page in that same treatise, is struck by love or disgust, delights or despairs.

So it happens, therefore, that every element says something to someone (something different to each) like the mountain valleys or beaches visited in youth. One must perhaps make an exception for carbon, because it says everything to everyone, that is, it is not specific, in the same way that Adam is not specific as an ancestor—unless one discovers today (why not?) the chemist-stylite who has dedicated his life to graphite or the diamond. And yet it is exactly to this carbon that I have an old debt, contracted during what for me were decisive days. To carbon, the element of life, my first literary dream was turned, insistently dreamed in an hour and a place when my life was not worth much: yes, I wanted to tell the story of an atom of carbon.

Is it right to speak of a “particular” atom of carbon? For the chemist there exist some doubts, because until 1970 he did not have the techniques permitting him to see, or in any event isolate, a single atom; no doubts exist for the narrator, who therefore sets out to narrate.

Our character lies for hundreds of millions of years, bound to three atoms of oxygen and one of calcium, in the form of limestone: it already has a very long cosmic history behind it, but we shall ignore it. For it time does not exist, or exists only in the form of sluggish variations in temperature, daily or seasonal, if, for the good fortune of this tale, its position is not too far from the earth’s surface. Its existence, whose monotony cannot be thought of without horror, is a pitiless alternation of hots and colds, that is, of oscillations (always of equal frequency) a trifle more restricted and a trifle more ample: an imprisonment, for this potentially living personage, worthy of the Catholic Hell. To it, until this moment, the present tense is suited, which is that of description, rather than the past tense, which is that of narration—it is congealed in an eternal present, barely scratched by the moderate quivers of thermal agitation.

But, precisely for the good fortune of the narrator, whose story could otherwise have come to an end, the limestone rock ledge of which the atom forms a part lies on the surface. It lies within reach of man and his pickax (all honor to the pickax and its modern equivalents; they are still the most important intermediaries in the millennial dialogue between the elements and man): at any moment—which I, the narrator, decide out of pure caprice to be the year 1840—a blow of the pickax detached it and sent it on its way to the lime kiln, plunging it into the world of things that change. It was roasted until it separated from the calcium, which remained so to speak with its feet on the ground and went to meet a less brilliant destiny, which we shall not narrate. Still firmly clinging to two of its three former oxygen companions, it issued from the chimney and took the path of the air. Its story, which once was immobile, now turned tumultuous.