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their body is already in decay, and nothing can save them from selections or
from death by exhaustion. Their life is short, but their number is endless; they,
the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and
labour in silence, the divine spark dead in them, already too empty to really suffer.
One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the
face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.
They crowd my memory with their faceless presence, and if I could enclose
all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar
to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose
face and in whose eyes not a trace of thought is to be seen. (Levi 1986: 90)
2.2. There is little agreement on the origin of the term Muselmann. As is often
the case with jargon, the term is not lacking in synonyms. “The expression was
in common use especially in Auschwitz, from where it spread to other camps as
well. . . . In Majdanek, the word was unknown. The living dead there were termed
‘donkeys’; in Dachau they were ‘cretins,’ in Stutthof ‘cripples,’ in Mauthausen
‘swimmers,’ in Neuengamme ‘camels,’ in Buchenwald ‘tired sheikhs,’ and in
the women’s camp known as Ravensbruck, Muselweiber (female Muslims) or
‘ trinkets’”(Sofsky 1997: 329n5).
The most likely explanation of the term can be found in the literal meaning
of the Arabic word muslim: the one who submits unconditionally to the will of
God. It is this meaning that lies at the origin of the legends concerning Islam’s
supposed fatalism, legends which are found in European culture starting with
the Middle Ages (this deprecatory sense of the term is present in European lan-
guages, particularly in Italian). But while the muslim’s resignation consists in the
conviction that the will of Allah is at work every moment and in even the small-
est events, the Muselmann of Auschwitz is instead defined by a loss of all will and consciousness. Hence Kogon’s statement that in the camps, the “relatively large
group of men who had long since lost any real will to survive . . . were called
‘Moslems’—men of unconditional fatalism” (Kogon 1979: 284).
There are other, less convincing explanations. One example appears in the
Encyclopedia Judaica under the entry Muselmann: “Used mainly at Auschwitz, the term appears to derive from the typical attitude of certain deportees, that
is, staying crouched on the ground, legs bent in Oriental fashion, faces rigid as
masks.” Another explanation is suggested by Marsalek, who associates “the typ-
ical movements of Muselmänner, the swaying motions of the upper part of the body, with Islamic prayer rituals” (Sofsky 1997: 329n5). There is also the rather
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improbable interpretation of Muselmann as Muschelmann, “shell-man,” a man folded and closed upon himself (Levi seems to allude to this interpretation when
he writes of “husk-men”).
In any case, it is certain that, with a kind of ferocious irony, the Jews knew
that they would not die at Auschwitz as Jews.
2.3. This disagreement concerning the etymology of the term Muselmann
has as its precise counterpart an uncertainty as to the semantic and disciplinary
field in which the term should be situated. It is not surprising that the physi-
cian Fejkiel, who worked for a long time in the concentration camps, tended
to treat the Muselmann as a medical case, beset with a particular malnutritional
disorder endemic to the camps. To a certain degree, it was Bruno Bettelheim
who first considered this issue, when in 1943 he published his essay “Individual
and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations” in the Journal of Abnormal and Social
Psychology. In 1938–39, before being liberated, Bettelheim spent a year in Dachau and Buchenwald, which at the time were the two largest Nazi concentration
camps for political prisoners. Though the living conditions of the camps during
those years cannot be compared to Auschwitz, Bettelheim had seen Muselmänner
with his own eyes, and immediately recognized the novel transformations that
“extreme situations” produced in the personalities of camp prisoners. For him,
the Muselmann became the paradigm through which he conceived his study
of childhood schizophrenia, written years after he immigrated to the United
States. The Orthogenic School, which he founded in Chicago to treat autistic
children, thus had the form of a kind of counter-camp, in which he undertook
to teach Muselmänner to become men again. There is not one character trait
in Bettelheim’s detailed phenomenology of childhood autism described in The
Empty Fortress that does not have its dark precursor and interpretative paradigm
in the behavior of the Muselmann. “What was external reality for the prisoner
is for the autistic child his inner reality. Each ends up, though for different
reasons, with a parallel experience of the world” (Bettelheim 1967: 65). Just as
autistic children totally ignored reality in order to retreat into an imaginary
world, so the prisoners who became Muselmänner substituted delirious fantasies
for the relations of causality to which they no longer paid any attention. In the
semicross-eyed gaze, hesitant walk, and stubborn repetitiveness and silence of
Joey, Marcie, Laurie, and the other children of the school, Bettelheim sought a
possible solution to the enigma that the Muselmann had confronted him with at
Dachau. Nevertheless, for Bettelheim, the concept of “extreme situation” con-
tinued to imply a moral and political connotation; for him, the Muselmann
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could never be reduced to a clinical category. Because what was at stake in the
extreme situation was “to remain alive and unchanged as a person” (Bettelheim
1960: 158), the Muselmann in some sense marked the moving threshold in which
man passed into non-man and in which clinical diagnosis passed into anthro-
pological analysis.
As for Levi, whose first testimony was a “Report on the Hygenic and San-
itary Organization of the Monowitz (Auschwitz, High Silesia) Concentration
Camp for Jews,” written in 1946 at the request of the Soviet authorities, the
nature of the experience to which he was called to bear witness was never in
question. “Actually, what interests me is the dignity and lack of dignity of man,”
he declared in 1986 to Barbara Kleiner, with a sense of irony that probably went
unnoticed by his interviewer (Levi 1997: 78). The new ethical material that he
discovered at Auschwitz allowed for neither summary judgments nor distinc-
tions and, whether he liked it or not, lack of dignity had to interest him as
much as dignity. As suggested by the ironically rhetorical Italian title Se questo è
un uomo (literally “If This Is a Man,” translated as Survival in Auschwitz in English), in Auschwitz ethics begins precisely at the point where the Muselmann,
the “complete witness,” makes it forever impossible to distinguish between man
and non-man.
An explicit political meaning has also been attributed to the extreme thresh-
old be
tween life and death, the human and the inhuman, that the Muselmann
inhabits:
The Muselmann embodies the anthropological meaning of absolute power in an
especially radical form. Power abrogates itself in the act of killing. The death of the
other puts an end to the social relationship. But by starving the other, it gains time.
It erects a third realm, a limbo between life and death. Like the pile of corpses,
the Muselmänner document the total triumph of power over the human being.
Although still nominally alive, they are nameless hulks. In the configuration of
their infirmity, as in organized mass murder, the regime realizes its quintessential
self. (Sofsky 1997: 294)
At times a medical figure or an ethical category, at times a political limit or
an anthropological concept, the Muselmann is an indefinite being in whom not
only humanity and non-humanity, but also vegetative existence and relation,
physiology and ethics, medicine and politics, and life and death continuously
pass through each other. This is why the Muselmann’ s “third realm” is the perfect cipher of the camp, the non-place in which all disciplinary barriers are destroyed
and all embankments flooded.
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2.4. Recently, philosophers and theologians alike have invoked the paradigm
of the “extreme situation” or “limit situation.” The function of this paradigm is
analogous to the function ascribed by some jurists to the state of exception. Just
as the state of exception allows for the foundation and definition of the normal
legal order, so in the light of the extreme situation—which is, at bottom, a
kind of exception—it is possible to judge and decide on the normal situation.
As Kierkegaard writes, “the exception explains the general as well as itself. And
when one really wants to study the general, one need only look around for a real
exception.” In Bettelheim, the camp, as the exemplary extreme situation, thus
allows for the determination of what is inhuman and human and, in this way,
for the separation of the Muselmann from the human being.
Referring to the concept of the limit situation and, in particular, to the expe-
rience of the Second World War, Karl Barth justly observed that human beings
have the striking capacity to adapt so well to an extreme situation that it can no
longer function as a distinguishing criterion. “According to the present trend,”
he wrote in 1948,
we may suppose that even on the morning after the Day of Judgment—if such
a thing were possible—every cabaret, every night club, every newspaper firm
eager for advertisements and subscribers, every nest of political fanatics, every
discussion group, indeed, every Christian tea-party and Church synod would
resume business to the best of its ability, and with a new sense of opportunity,
completely unmoved, quite uninstructed, and in no serious sense different from
what it was before. Fire, drought, earthquake, war, pestilence, the darkening of
the sun and similar phenomena are not the things to plunge us into real anguish,
and therefore to give us real peace. “The Lord was not in the storm, the earthquake
or the fire” (1 Kings 19: 11 ff.). He really was not. (Barth 1960: 115)
All the witnesses, even those submitted to the most extreme conditions (for
example, the members of the Sonderkommando), recall the incredible tendency of the limit situation to become habit (“doing this work, one either goes crazy
the first day or gets used to it”). The Nazis so well understood this secret power
inherent in every limit situation that they never revoked the state of exception
declared in February 1933, upon their rise to power. In this sense, the Third Reich
has been aptly defined as a “Night of St. Bartholomew that lasted twelve years.”
Auschwitz is precisely the place in which the state of exception coincides
perfectly with the rule and the extreme situation becomes the very paradigm of
daily life. But it is this paradoxical tendency of the limit situation to turn over
into its opposite that makes it interesting. As long as the state of exception and
the normal situation are kept separate in space and time, as is usually the case,
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both remain opaque, though they secretly institute each other. But as soon as
they show their complicity, as happens more and more often today, they illumi-
nate each other, so to speak, from the inside. And yet this implies that the ex-
treme situation can no longer function as a distinguishing criterion, as it did for
Bettelheim; it implies that the extreme situation’s lesson is rather that of absolute
immanence, of “everything being in everything.” In this sense, philosophy can
be defined as the world seen from an extreme situation that has become the rule
(according to some philosophers, the name of this extreme situation is “God”).
2.5. Aldo Carpi, professor of painting at the Academy of Brera, was deported
to Gusen in February 1944, where he remained until May 1945. He managed to
survive because the SS began to commission paintings and drawings from him
once they discovered his profession. They mostly commissioned family portraits,
which Carpi produced from photographs; but there were also requests for Italian
landscapes and “Venetian nudes,” which Carpi painted from memory. Carpi was
not a realistic painter, and yet one can understand why he wanted to paint the
actual scenes and figures from the camp. But his commissioners had absolutely
no interest in such things; indeed, they did not even tolerate the sight of them.
“No one wants camp scenes and figures,” Carpi notes in his diary, “no one wants
to see the Muselmann” (Carpi 1993: 33).
Other witnesses confirm this impossibility of gazing upon the Muselmann.
One account is particularly eloquent, even if it is indirect. A few years ago,
the English film shot in Bergen-Belsen immediately after the camp’s liberation
in 1945 was made available to the public. It is difficult to bear the sight of the
thousands of naked corpses piled in common graves or carried on the shoulders
of former camp guards, of those tortured bodies that even the SS could not
name (we know from witnesses that under no circumstances were they to be
called “corpses” or “cadavers,” but rather simply Figuren, figures, dolls). And yet since the Allies intended to use this footage as proof of Nazi atrocities and make
it public in Germany, we are spared no detail of the terrible spectacle. At one
point, however, the camera lingers almost by accident on what seem to be living
people, a group of prisoners crouched on the ground or wandering on foot like
ghosts. It lasts only a few seconds, but it is still long enough for the spectator
to realize that they are either Muselmänner who have survived by some miracle
or, at least, prisoners very close to the state of Muselmänner. With the exception of Carpi’s drawings, which he did from memory, this is perhaps the sole
image of Muselmänner we have. Nevertheless, the same cameraman who had
until then patiently lingered over naked bodies, over the terrible “dolls” dis-
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membered and stacked one on top of another, could not be
ar the sight of these
half-living beings; he immediately began once again to show the cadavers. As
Elias Canetti has noted, a heap of dead bodies is an ancient spectacle, one which
has often satisfied the powerful. But the sight of Muselmänner is an absolutely
new phenomenon, unbearable to human eyes.
2.6. What no one wants to see at any cost, however, is the “core” of the
camp, the fatal threshold that all prisoners are constantly about to cross. “The
Muselmann stage was the great fear of the prisoners, since not one of them knew
when his fate would become that of the Muslim, the sure candidate for the gas
chambers or another kind of death” (Langbein 1972: 113).
The space of the camp (at least of those camps, like Auschwitz, in which
concentration camp and extermination camp coincide) can even be represented
as a series of concentric circles that, like waves, incessantly wash up against a
central non-place, where the Muselmann lives. In camp jargon, the extreme limit
of this non-place is called Selektion, the selection procedure for the gas chamber.
This is why the prisoner’s most pressing concern was to hide his sickness and his
exhaustion, to constantly cover over the Muselmann who at every moment was
emerging in him. The entire population of the camp is, indeed, nothing other
than an immense whirlpool obsessively spinning around a faceless center. But
like the mystical rose of Dante’s Paradiso, this anonymous vortex is “painted in our image” ( pinta della nostra effige); it bears the true likeness of man. According to the law that what man despises is also what he fears resembles him, the Muselmann is universally avoided because everyone in the camp recognizes himself in
his disfigured face.
It is a striking fact that although all witnesses speak of him as a central experi-
ence, the Muselmann is barely named in the historical studies on the destruction
of European Jewry. Perhaps only now, almost fifty years later, is the Muselmann
becoming visible; perhaps only now may we draw the consequences of this vis-
ibility. For this visibility implies that the paradigm of extermination, which has
until now exclusively oriented interpretations of the concentration camp, is not
replaced by, but rather accompanied by, another paradigm, a paradigm that casts