Tre rifrazioni di Se questo è un uomo in Germania

In the early 1960s Primo Levi’s Ist das ein Mensch? arrived in Ger- many. It landed in the German-speaking world in various forms: as an excerpt of a journal, as a book, and as part of an anthology of testimonies and accounts of Auschwitz. Primo Levi’s German for- tunes begin here, three years after the Einaudi edition (1958), and fourteen years after the first edition (De Silva 1947). It is the starting point of a more than 20-year discussion (epistolary and otherwise) of Primo Levi with his German readers and interlocutors. The paper aim to explore this threefold entry of Primo Levi’s major work in Germany, examining constants and variants in the different texts. In all cases Levi’s work appears in the same translation (by Heinz Riedt), but it appears in very different publishing forms and with many sig- nificant variants. This seems to be an important chapter of the life in movement of Se questo è un uomo: particularly if we consider the relevance it had for Levi and his later work, beginning with what he himself called: “the always burning, never gratuitous adventure of being translated, of seeing my thoughts manipulated, refracted, my words sifted, transformed, or misunderstood, or maybe invigorated through an unexpected resource of the new language.”