The Ethics of the Gray Zone

Abstract

Primo Levi’s exact motives for writing his essay “The Grey Zone” (“La zona grigia,” 1986) are unknown. Although Levi gives us some indications as to his motivation when he writes “from many signs, it would seem that the time has come to explore the space which separates (and not only in the Nazi Lagers) the victims from the perpetrators, and to do so with a lighter hand, and with a less turbid spirit than has been done, for instance, in a number of films,”¹ it is ultimately left up to Levi’s readers to examine his writings and to make a sensitive judgment as to the genesis of his concept of the “gray zone.” Following this method it becomes clear that Levi was uncomfortable with the reductiveness of the terms “good” and “evil.” It is true that Levi never rejected the absolute positions of good and evil and in fact makes use of them in recalling “the evil and insane SS men”² or when describing the Italian laborer Lorenzo as a man with a “natural and plain manner of being good :”³ So to say that for Levi the notions of good and evil were reductive is not to say that they were redundant. What seems to have been dissatisfying for Levi was that the moral concepts of good and evil constituted the total linguistics and theoretical framework available for understanding the moral lives of the victims of Nazi rule.