Il carteggio con Heinz Riedt

Primo Levi’s correspondence with Heinz Riedt revolves around the translation of three books: Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man), La tregua (The Truce), and Storie naturali. Many of the lexical issues they discussed for Se questo è un uomo take us inside the life in a concentration camp – the German expressions remembered by Levi refer to the situations he had experienced, the jargon used in Auschwitz – and represent a very interesting complement to his masterpiece. The search for the “right” German word forces Levi to dive back into his tragic experience and convey it to a German, no less. But, from the very first letters, Levi realizes that Riedt is a very different kind of German from the ones he had met in the concentration camp and at the Buna factory, and his initial mistrust is soon replaced by a lasting friendship. The correspondence also chronicles the story of this friendship and Riedt emerges as a very interesting character: he left the Wehrmacht during the war to join Veneto’s partisans, he was a friend of Brecht’s, he lived in East Berlin and then fled to the West.
Martina Mengoni has been studying for years the relationship between Primo Levi and his German interlocutors, with all the psychological and cultural issues involved in the delicate relationship between the author and the German world. This book, which she edited, covers the years between 1959 and 1968, the most intense period in the correspondence between Levi and Riedt (which went on until 1986), and it contains around 130 letters. Aside from a few sporadic letters by Primo Levi that appeared here and there, this is the author’s first correspondence to be published in bulk based on the papers contained in the family archive.