Book contents
1 - The Gray Zone
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Primo Levi (1988:38) describes the shock experienced by the newly arrived at the Lager concentration camp in the following way:
The world into which one was precipitated was terrible, yes, but also indecipherable: it did not conform to any model; the enemy was all around but also inside, the “we” lost its limits, the contenders were not two, one could not discern a single frontier but rather many confused, perhaps innumerable frontiers, which stretched between each of us. One entered hoping at least for the solidarity of one's companions in misfortune, but the hoped-for allies, except in special cases, were not there; there were instead a thousand sealed off monads, and between them a desperate covert and continuous struggle.
The world into which one was thrown was far from simple, he says, because it could “not be reduced to the two blocs of victims and persecutors” due to the existence of a “hybrid class of the prisoner-functionary” (Primo Levi 1988:37). The privilege enjoyed by certain prisoners and the collaboration they provided to the camp authorities constitute the Lager's “armature and at the same time its most disquieting feature. It is a gray zone,” Levi writes, “poorly defined, where the two camps of masters and servants both diverge and converge. This gray zone possesses an incredibly complicated internal structure and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge” (Primo Levi 1988:42).
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- Information
- Routine Politics and Violence in ArgentinaThe Gray Zone of State Power, pp. 31 - 54Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007