dignity ends. And Levi, who bears witness to the drowned, speaking in their
stead, is the cartographer of this new terra ethica, the implacable land- surveyor of Muselmannland.
2.17. We have seen that to be between life and death is one of the traits con-
stantly attributed to the Muselmann, the “walking corpse” par excellence. Confronted with his disfigured face, his “Oriental” agony, the survivors hesitate to
attribute to him even the mere dignity of the living. But this proximity to death
may also have another, more appalling meaning, one which concerns the dignity
or indignity of death rather than of life.
As always, it is Levi who finds the most just and, at the same time, most
terrible formula: “One hesitates,” he writes, “to call their death death.” It is the
most just formula, for what defines Muselmänner is not so much that their life
is no longer life (this kind of degradation holds in a certain sense for all camp
inhabitants and is not an entirely new experience) but, rather, that their death is
not death. This—that the death of a human being can no longer be called death
(not simply that it does not have importance, which is not new, but that it can-
not be called by the name “death”)—is the particular horror that the Muselmann
brings to the camp and that the camp brings to the world. But this means—and
this is why Levi’s phrase is terrible—that the SS were right to call the corpses
Figuren. Where death cannot be called death, corpses cannot be called corpses.
2.18. It has already been observed that what defines the camp is not simply
the negation of life, that neither death nor the number of victims in any way
exhausts the camp’s horror, and that the dignity offended in the camp is not
that of life but rather of death. In an interview given to Günther Gaus in 1964,
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Hannah Arendt thus described her reaction upon learning the truth about the
camps, in all its details:
Before that we said: Well, one has enemies. That is entirely natural. Why shouldn’t
a people have enemies? But this was different. It was really as if an abyss had
opened. This ought not to have happened. And I don’t just mean the number of
victims. I mean the method, the fabrication of corpses and so on—I don’t need
to go into that. This should not have happened. Something happened there to
which we cannot reconcile ourselves. None of us ever can. (Arendt 1993: 13–14)
Every sentence here is charged with a meaning so awful as to compel whoever
speaks to have recourse to phrases that stand halfway between euphemism and
the unprecedented. First of all, the curious expression repeated in two versions,
“this should not have happened,” appears at first glance to have at least a resentful
tone, which is surprising given its origin on the lips of the author of the most
courageous and demystifying book on the problem of evil in our time. The im-
pression grows as one reads the final words: “Something happened there to which
we cannot reconcile ourselves. None of us ever can.” (Resentment, Nietzsche
said, is born from the will’s impossibility to accept that something happened,
from its incapacity to reconcile itself to time and to time’s “so it was.”)
Arendt identifies what should not have happened and nevertheless happened
immediately afterward. It is something so appalling that, having named it, Arendt
makes a gesture bordering on reluctance or shame (“I don’t need to go into that”):
“the fabrication of corpses and so on.” Hilberg informs us that the definition of extermination as a kind of fabrication by “conveyor belt” ( am laufenden Band )
was used for the first time by a physician of the SS, F. Entress. Since then, it has
been repeated countless times, often out of context.
In each case, the expression “fabrication of corpses” implies that it is no
longer possible truly to speak of death, that what took place in the camps was
not death, but rather something infinitely more appalling. In Auschwitz, people
did not die; rather, corpses were produced. Corpses without death, non-humans
whose decease is debased into a matter of serial production. And, according to a
possible and widespread interpretation, precisely this degradation of death con-
stitutes the specific offense of Auschwitz, the proper name of its horror.
2.19. Yet it is not at all obvious that the degradation of death constitutes the
ethical problem of Auschwitz. Whenever Auschwitz is approached from this
perspective, certain contradictions arise inevitably. This is already the case with
those authors who, many years before Auschwitz, denounced the degradation of
death in our time. The first of these authors, of course, is Rilke, who may even
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809
constitute the unexpected, more or less direct, source of Entress’s expression con-
cerning the chain production of death in the camps. “Now there are 559 beds to
die in. Like a factory [ fabrikmässig], of course. With production so enormous,
each individual death is not made very carefully; but that isn’t important. It’s the
quantity that counts” (Rilke 1983: 8–9). And in the same years, Péguy, in a pas-
sage that Adorno evoked concerning Auschwitz, spoke of the loss of the dignity
of death in the modern world: “the modern world has succeeded in swallowing
what is perhaps the hardest thing in the world to swallow, since it is something
that in itself, almost in its texture, has a kind of special dignity, something like a
particular incapacity to be swallowed: death.”
Rilke opposes “serial” death to the “proper death” of good old times, the
death that everyone carried within him just “as a fruit has its core” (ibid.: 10),
the death that “one had” and that “gave to each person special dignity and silent
pride.” The entire Book of Poverty and Death, written in the shock of Rilke’s stay in Paris, is dedicated to the degradation of death in the big city, where the
impossibility of living becomes the impossibility of bringing to fruition one’s
own death, the “great death each of us has within us” (Rilke 1995: 90). It is
remarkable, though, that if one excludes the obsessive recourse to imagery of
childbirth and abortion (“we give birth to our own stillborn death” [ibid.: 91])
and bitter and ripe fruit (“this death hangs green, devoid of sweetness, / like a
fruit inside them / that never ripens” [ibid.: 90]), proper death distinguishes
itself from the other kind of death only by the most abstract and formal predi-
cates: proper/improper and internal/external. Faced with the expropriation of
death accomplished by modernity, the poet reacts according to Freud’s scheme
of mourning; he interiorizes the lost object. Or, as in the analogous case of mel-
ancholy, by forcing to appear as expropriated an object—death—concerning
which it makes no sense to speak either of propriety or impropriety. Nowhere
does Rilke say what renders Chamberlain Brigge’s death a “princely” and proper
death, with the one exception that the Old Brigge dies precisely in his house,
surrounded by his servants and his dogs. Rilke’s attempt to give back “a special dignity” to death leaves an impression of such ind
ecency that in the end, the
peasant’s dream to kill his suffering lord “with a dung fork” seems to betray
the poet’s own repressed desire.
2.20. Before Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Arendt’s teacher in Freiburg
in the mid-twenties, had already used the expression “fabrication of corpses” to
define the extermination camps. And, curiously enough, for Heidegger the “fab-
rication of corpses” implied, just as for Levi, that it is not possible to speak of
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death in the case of extermination victims, that they did not truly die, but were
rather only pieces produced in a process of an assembly line production. “They
die in masses, hundreds of thousands at a time,” reads the text of Heidegger’s lec-
ture on technology given in Bremen under the title “The Danger” ( Die Gefahr).
Do they die? They decease. They are eliminated. They become pieces of the
warehouse of the fabrication of corpses. They are imperceptibly liquidated in
extermination camps. . . . But to die ( Sterben) means: to bear death in one’s own Being. To be able to die means: to be capable of this decisive bearing. And we
are capable of it only if our Being is capable of the Being of death. . . . Every-
where we face the immense misery of innumerable, atrocious deaths that have
not died [ ungestorbener Tode], and yet the essence of death is closed off to man.
(Heidegger 1994: 56)
Not without reason, a few years later, the objection was raised that for an
author implicated even marginally in Nazism a cursory allusion to the extermi-
nation camps after years of silence was, at the very least, out of place. What is
certain, however, is that the victims saw the dignity of death to be so negated
for them that they were condemned to perish—according to an image recalling
Rilke’s reference to “aborted deaths”—in a death that is not dead. But what, in
the camp, could a dead death have been, a death borne in its very Being? And
is there truly any sense at Auschwitz in distinguishing a proper death from an
improper death?
The fact is that, in Being and Time, death is assigned a particular function. Death is the site of a decisive experience that, under the name “Being-
towards-death,” expresses perhaps the ultimate intention of Heidegger’s ethics.
For in the “decision” that takes place here, everyday impropriety—made up
of chatter, ambiguities, and diversions and in which man finds himself always
already thrown—is transformed into propriety; and anonymous death, which
always concerns others and is never truly present, becomes the most proper
and insuperable possibility. Not that this possibility has a particular content,
offering man something to be or to realize. On the contrary, death, considered
as possibility, is absolutely empty; it has no particular prestige. It is the simple
possibility of the impossibility of all comportment and all existence. Precisely for this reason, however, the decision that radically experiences this impossibility
and this emptiness in Being-towards-death frees itself from all indecision, fully
appropriating its own impropriety for the first time. The experience of the mea-
sureless impossibility of existing is therefore the way in which man, liberating
himself of his fallenness in the world of the “They” ( das Man), renders his own factical existence possible.
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811
Auschwitz’s position in the Bremen lecture is therefore all the more signif-
icant. From this perspective, the camp is the place in which it is impossible to
experience death as the most proper and insuperable possibility, as the possibility
of the impossible. It is the place, that is, in which there can be no appropriation
of the improper and in which the factual dominion of the inauthentic knows
neither reversal nor exception. This is why, in the camps (as in the epoch of the
unconditional triumph of technology, according to the philosopher), the Being
of death is inaccessible and men do not die, but are instead produced as corpses.
Yet one may still wonder if Rilke’s model, which rigidly separates proper from
improper death, did not produce a contradiction in the philosopher’s thinking.
In Heidegger’s ethics, authenticity and propriety do not hover above inauthentic
everydayness, as an ideal realm placed above reality; instead, they are “an emended
apprehension of the improper” in which what is made free are simply the factual
possibilities of existence. According to Hölderlin’s principle often invoked by
Heidegger, “where there is danger, there grows the saving power,” precisely in the
extreme situation of the camp appropriation and freedom ought to be possible.
The reason for which Auschwitz is excluded from the experience of death
must be a different one, a reason that calls into question the very possibility of
authentic decision and thus threatens the very ground of Heidegger’s ethics. In
the camp, every distinction between proper and improper, between possible and
impossible, radically disappears. For here the principle according to which the
sole content of the proper is the improper is exactly verified by its inversion,
which has it that the sole content of the improper is the proper. And just as in
Being-towards-death, the human being authentically appropriates the inauthen-
tic, so in the camp, the prisoners exist everyday anonymously toward death. The
appropriation of the improper is no longer possible because the improper has
completely assumed the function of the proper; human beings live factually at
every instant toward their death. This means that in Auschwitz it is no longer
possible to distinguish between death and mere decease, between dying and
“being liquidated.” “The free person,” Améry writes thinking of Heidegger, “can
assume a certain spiritual posture toward death, because for him death is not
totally absorbed into the torment of dying” (Améry 1980: 18). In the camp this
is impossible. And this is so not because, as Améry seems to suggest, the thought
of ways of dying (by phenol injection, gas, or beating) renders superfluous the
thought of death as such. Rather, it is because where the thought of death has
been materially realized, where death is “trivial, bureaucratic, and an everyday
affair” (Levi 1989: 148), both death and dying, both dying and its ways, both
death and the fabrication of corpses, become indistinguishable.
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2.21. Grete Salus, an Auschwitz survivor whose words always sound true,
once wrote that “man should never have to bear everything that he can bear,
nor should he ever have to see how this suffering to the most extreme power no
longer has anything human about it” (Langbein 1988: 96). It is worth reflecting
on this singular formulation, which perfectly expresses the specific modal status
of the camp, its particular reality, which, according to survivors’ testimony, ren-
ders it absolutely true and at the same time unimaginable. If in Being- towards-
death, it was a matter of creating the possible through the experience of the
impossible (the experience of death), here the impossible (mass death) is pro-
duced through the full expe
rience of the possible, through the exhaustion of
its infinity. This is why the camp is the absolute verification of Nazi politics,
which, in the words of Goebbels, was precisely the “art of making possible what
seems impossible” ( Politik ist die Kunst, das unmöglich Scheinende möglich zu machen) . And this is why in the camp, the most proper gesture of Heidegger’s ethics—the appropriation of the improper, the making possible of existence—
remains ineffectual; this is why “the essence of death is closed off to man.”
Whoever was in the camp, whether he was drowned or survived, bore every-
thing that he could bear—even what he would not have wanted to or should not
have had to bear. This “suffering to the most extreme power,” this exhaustion of
the possible, nevertheless has nothing “human” about it. Human power borders
on the inhuman; the human also endures the non-human. Hence the survivor’s
unease, the “unceasing discomfort . . . that . . . was nameless,” in which Levi dis-
cerns the atavistic anguish of Gene sis, “the anguish inscribed in every one of the
‘tohu-bohu’ of a deserted and empty universe crushed under the spirit of God
but from which the spirit of man is absent: not yet born or already extinguished”
(Levi 1989: 85). This means that humans bear within themselves the mark of the
inhuman, that their spirit contains at its very center the wound of non-spirit,
non-human chaos atrociously consigned to its own being capable of everything.
Both the survivor’s discomfort and testimony concern not merely what was
done or suffered, but what could have been done or suffered. It is this capacity,
this almost infinite potentiality to suffer that is inhuman—not the facts, actions,
or omissions. And it is precisely this capacity that is denied to the SS. The executioners unanimously continue to repeat that they could not do other than as they
did, that, in other words, they simply could not; they had to, and that is all. In German, to act without being capable of acting is called Befehlnotstand, having to obey an order. And they obeyed kadavergehorsam, like a corpse, as Eichmann said. Certainly, even the executioners had to bear what they should not have
had (and, at times, wanted) to bear; but, according to Karl Valentin’s profound
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813
witticism, in every case “they did not feel up to being capable of it.” This is why
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