The project is carried out at the University of Ferrara (Italy) by a research group that includes researchers, faculty members, PhD candidates, translators, and computer scientists. The aim is to publish for the first time, and in open-access form, on the website www.levinet.eu, the correspondence between Primo Levi and German readers and intellectuals.
With the publication of Ist das ein Mensch? in November 1961, Primo Levi began to receive many letters from German readers. In the preface written for the German edition of If This is a Man, Levi wrote: «I hope that this book will have some kind of echo in Germany: not only because of my ambitions but also because the nature of this echo will perhaps allow me to understand the Germans better and to soothe this itch». Prompted by this invitation, German readers began writing to the author from the very first weeks following the volume's publication in the Federal Republic. Surprised by this response, Levi immediately recognized the value of this correspondence, to the point of proposing to his publisher a collection of the exchange with German readers. The editorial project was never realized, but in the following years these letters continued to provide Levi with a privileged point of access to Germany and its recent history: not only the lives of Germans during the Third Reich, but also the contradictions of denazification, the forms of collective elaboration of the Nazi past, and the initiatives undertaken by new generations to counter the persistence of antisemitism and neo-Nazi movements.
In his last book The Drowned and the Saved (1986), Primo Levi devoted an entire chapter — "Letters from Germans" — to his German correspondence. The LeviNeT project is founded on the conviction that this epistolary exchange constituted a fundamental element in the development of Primo Levi's reflection on Auschwitz, the Memory of the Shoah, and, more broadly, the dynamics of power that made possible the realization of the Nazi concentration camp system.
LeviNeT consists of the open-access publication of a correspondence comprising forty correspondents, written in four languages (French, German, English, and Italian), between the years 1961 and 1986. The edition includes not only the transcription and annotation of each letter, but also the reconstruction of the correspondents' biographies, many of whom were not public figures. The research carried out by the team has therefore involved not only the analysis of Primo Levi's work, but also the archival and documentary reconstruction of the correspondents' profiles. This has made it possible to bring to light the motivations and stories underlying this correspondence, which represents not only a new, previously unpublished portion of Primo Levi's work, but also an interesting and peculiar case study of European cultural hystory.
The three presentations in this session aim to introduce to the MLA audience, and for the first time in a conference in the United States, the results of the research conducted at the University of Ferrara.
Martina Mengoni, Principal Investigator and creator of the project, will first introduce the history and nature of the project, before moving to an analysis of its methodologies and contents.
Camilla Veneziani, PhD candidate of LeviNeT, will address the reception of Primo Levi's work in Germany, presenting for the first time documents whose discovery was made possible precisely through the analysis of these letters (reviews in academic journals, daily newspapers, student publications, editorial reports, etc.).
Simone Ghelli, senior postdoctoral researcher of the project, will instead address one of the macro-themes emerging from the correspondence: the Christian background of many of the correspondents, which defines a very specific — and problematic — way of elaborating the Nazi political evil.
The three presentations will allow participants to gain an effective overview of the nature of the project and the contents of the LeviNeT edition. Finally, the common institutional affiliation of the speakers — here representing the different academic positions within the team — is intended to convey not only the variety of the research team, but also the interdisciplinary nature of their work.