Sella, A;
(2018)
Gattermann’s Cookbook.
Chemistry World
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Abstract
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.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Gattermann’s Cookbook |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Publisher version: | https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/gattermanns... |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Chemistry |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10057570 |
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