Gattermann’s cookbook
The story of the man whose chemistry textbook saved Primo Levi’s life
About a year ago, the human rights lawyer Philippe Sands organised a remarkable event in the Royal Festival Hall in London: a complete reading of Primo Levi’s If this is a man, a memoir of Levi’s imprisonment at the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz. The readers included actors, playwrights, novelists and jurists as well as several genocide survivors. In the 10th chapter, The chemistry exam, read that afternoon by the chemist Martyn Poliakoff, Levi is summoned to an office outside the fence of the camp to be quizzed about chemistry by the director of the Buna rubber factory. Levi’s sense of unreality is heightened when he is handed a copy of Ludwig Gattermann’s Die Praxis der organischen Chemikers (The organic chemist’s practicum) identical to the one he had owned and worked from as a chemistry undergraduate in Turin before the war. Not surprisingly, he is chosen to be assistant in a lab, where he comes into contact with German civilians from the nearby town. To them he is next to invisible; in turn, he observes them with a mix of curiosity and horror.