Celebrating the 90th Anniversary of Primo Levi’s birth, this program opened the debate on some of Levi’s most controversial ideas: the grey zone, German culture, the Middle East. Ernesto Ferrero, longtime editor of Levi's work at Einaudi, offered new insight into Levi's intellectual and moral concerns:

"The reception of Primo Levi's work has been characterized, in Italy and abroad, by serious misunderstandings. In the United States, If This Is a Man was published in 1961 by Collier Books with a different, and misleading title: Survival in Auschwitz. A title that makes it sound like a war report, which emphasizes  the protagonist's trials and tribulations and concludes with a happy ending. Apart from fact that the book ends with a scene of death and desolation, the new title avoids the question implied by the whole book: Is this a man? The German, the good family man who belongs to the most civilized country in Europe, the country which produced Bach and Goethe, yet plans the extermination with bureaucratic rigor? Is it the Jewish prisoner who becomes a kapo, collaborating to gain a few more days of life? Was Auschwitz an accident in history, and as such cannot be replicated? But in fact it has been replicated (let's think of Soviet gulags, Cambodia, Chile, Argentina, Bosnia, Congo-Zaire, or Sudan). Or is Auschwitz the rule rather than the exception, a modality imprinted in the human DNA, a revelation of a deviant gene ready to unleash the metastasis, the sadistic pleasure described by Sigmund Freud? These are the questions that Levi tried to answer for forty years and the burden he carried on his shoulders; who could have shared his anguish? Not the nihilists, such as Cioran, who would just shrug and say that they already knew all of this. Not the Marxists, who were already  tormented by the doubt that between social project and human biology there might be some gap that could never be filled. Not the post-war philosophers, who were elegant, subtle, fastidious, but not likely to test themselves with such fundamental questions.