In the beginning: Primo Levi and the witnesses of his generation From one generation to another: the writing of great witnesses

Primo Levi © Shoah Memorial

Some witnesses wrote immediately after the war, creating a literary genre. Others, later, shed light on renewed aspects of the genocidal process and its aftermath. Over time, the public has discovered the works of Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Imre Kertész, Aharon Appelfeld, Charlotte Delbo and other great founding texts.

How did these works impact our contemporaries and why did they become classics?

This meeting is part of a cycle of four meetings on the theme "D'une génération à l'autre: l'écriture des grands témoins" 

During this evening that inaugurates the cycle, Philippe Mesnard will evoke the variants of the rewriting of Primo Levi’s text that we know under the title of If it’s a man, translated and published in French in 1987. This text is not exactly that of the 1958 Italian edition, it relies on a previous version dated 1947, resulting from several sources and different rewritings.
Anny Dayan Rosenman will evoke the way in which some of the great texts by witnesses constitute a new chapter in so-called classical literature insofar as they have been able, through the choice of a style, to make one voice "unmistakable" with any other. A voice capable of stating what happened to their companions but also how they themselves were confronted with evil and extreme suffering.
In the second part of the evening, the writer Agnès Desarthe and the director Emil Weiss will dialogue on the impact of Primo Levi’s work in their own creations. Giovanni Tesio, who carried out a final hitherto unpublished interview with Primo Levi in the first months of 1987 will also participate in this meeting.