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ABSTRACT
A study of the ‘female Muselmann’ is long overdue. Here I question the male figure of the Muselmann as a universal trope of concentration camp debasement, by examining it through a gendered lens. The term Muselmänner refers to those closest to death by starvation and abuse; at the bottom of the camp hierarchy; those ‘selected’ for the gas chambers; and routinely described as the ‘living dead.’ According to Levi's profoundly influential account, scholars take the term to denote a silent, emaciated concentration camp prisoner, not just about to die but fated to do so. Scholars have accepted the Muselmann as the embodied product of the Lager, an archetype of mass suffering, mass murder, and ‘living death.’ Yet this version of the Muselmann conceals crucial aspects of women's stories. Critical Holocaust studies, I argue, can benefit intellectually and ethically from decentering the ‘miraculous,’ paradoxical Muselmann as a logical point of reference. Narratives by female concentration camp survivors, I show, figure the Muselmann to construct narratives of female agency, but they also recount female figures that deserve attention: Goldstücke and Schmuckstücke, similar to the Muselmann, except for the presumed fatalism. These terms capture the unique ways Nazis tortured women, especially mothers. Rereading these figures together and considering the fact that many women were killed immediately upon arrival to death camps illuminates the sexually violent forms of torture to which Nazis subjected women, and their fundamental genocidal attack on (Jewish) women's reproducing bodies. This, in turn, reveals the complexity of narratives of prisoner agency in the Nazi concentration camp system.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Dennis Bock and Michael Becker for the opportunity to contribute to this special issue and for their invaluable comments and corrections, and to Eric Sundquist and Dan Magilow for feedback on earlier drafts.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Sharon B. Oster is Professor of English at the University of Redlands. She is author of No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Wayne State University Press, 2018). Her essays on American, Jewish, and Holocaust literature have appeared in English Literary History and Prooftexts.
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 11. The poem was also published separately as ‘Shema.’
2 This idea of the ‘fatalist’ Muselmann is presented by Terrence Des Pres in order to articulate as its counterimage the ‘survivor.’ The Muselmänner are the ‘walking dead’ for whom ‘time ran out,’ ‘the empirical instance of death-in-life,’ and those ‘dead souls’ who garnered a mixture of ‘pity and revulsion’ from others for having ‘quit,’ even though he acknowledges that when ‘the will to live had been regained it was constantly undermined by chance and despair.’ See Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor (New York: Washington Square Press, 1976), pp. 99–100, 201. The ‘fatalist’ aspect, perhaps by default, is routinely reproduced as part of the term's definition, something this essay shows and challenges.
3 Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 90; Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), p. 70. Giorgio Agamben calls this ‘Levi's paradox.’ See Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), p. 150.
4 Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 87.
5 I thank Berel Lang for this insight.
6 See Michael Becker and Dennis Bock's essay, “Muselmänner in Nazi Concentration Camps: Thinking Masculinity at the Extremes,” in Björn Krondorfer and Ovidiu Creanga, (eds.), The Holocaust and Masculinities: Critical Inquiries into the Presence and Absence of Men (New York: SUNY Press, 2020), pp. 129–46. There they argue that “Muselmänner had a central role for shaping the social order in Nazi concentration camps,” (p. 135) as well as ‘strategies of self-assertion and survival’ (ibid.) including acts of solidarity, that complicate the common narrative of the socially dead, fatalist Muselmann.
7 We see literary evidence of this continuum in survivor-writer's efforts to express their own quotidian, yet phenomenal ‘life-in-death’ experience of the camps, that which seems beyond everyday language but which the Muselmann is thought to embody. See Sharon B. Oster, “Impossible Holocaust Metaphors: The Muselmann,” Prooftexts, vol. 34, no. 3 (Fall 2014): pp. 302–48. Goscinki's account is recorded in Zdzisław Ryn and Stanisław Kłodziński, An der Grenze zwischen Leben und Tod: Eine Studie über die Erscheinung des “Muselmanns“ im Konzentrationslager, Auschwitz-Hefte, vol. 1 (Weinheim and Basel: Beltz, 1987); qtd. in Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 168.
8 Joan Ringelheim argues that ‘women and men suffer from oppression in different ways even in its genocidal forms.’ See Joan Ringelheim, “Thoughts about Women and the Holocaust,” in Roger S. Gottlieb, (ed.), Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1990), p. 147. Pascale Bos claims that women ‘experience, remember, and recount events differently’ because of gender, which thus demands a complex approach to interpreting gendered differences in Holocaust accounts (emphasis in original). See Pascale Rachel Bos, “Women and the Holocaust: Analyzing Gender Differences,” in Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg, (eds.), Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003), pp. 33, 39. See most recently, Sarah Cushman, “The Auschwitz Women's Camp: An Overview and Reconsideration,” in Victoria Aarons and Phyllis Lassner, (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2020), pp. 707–24.
9 Bos explores these complexities in “Women and the Holocaust,” pp. 23–50.
10 Suzanne (Katz) Reich, “Sometimes I Can Dream Again,” in Myrna Goldenberg, (ed.), Before All Memory Is Lost: Women's Voices from the Holocaust (Toronto: Azrieli Foundation, 2017), pp. 300–1.
11 Reich, “Sometimes I Can Dream Again,” p. 302. The asterisk marks Goldenberg's footnote, which offers the typical gloss on the term ‘Muselmann’ we have seen almost verbatim in other glossaries, and with which I take issue:
a slang term used by camp prisoners to describe prisoners who were near death and seemed to have lost the will to live. Some scholars attribute the use of the word to the fact that the prostrate and dying prisoners were reminiscent of devout Muslims at prayer. (Goldenberg, Before All Memory Is Lost, 302n3)
12 Goldenberg, Before All Memory Is Lost, p. 303.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., p. 306.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., p. 308.
17 Ruth Klüger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York: Feminist Press, 2001), p. 89. The text was originally published in German as Weiter leben: Eine Jugend (1992).
18 Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, trans. Barbara Vedder (New York: Penguin, 1967), p. 121.
19 Klüger, Still Alive, p. 90.
20 Ibid.
21 Gil Anidjar argues that the term's history shows it to be an anti-Arab racial slur. See Gil Anidjar, The Jew, The Arab: The History of the Enemy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 113–49. Becker and Bock's account of the etymology and colloquial use of the term ‘Muselmann’ in ‘Muselmänner in Nazi Concentration Camps’ also suggests its racist origins. They trace the term to German oral culture, given a well-known nineteenth-century children's song, ‘C-a-f-f-e-e,’ by Karl Gottlieb Hering (1766–1853). Often taught to young children (I learned an English version in grade school in New York), the German lyrics make explicit, racist, associations between Muslims and pale, nervous, sick coffee addicts:
22 Klüger, Still Alive, p. 90.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., pp. 90–1.
26 Ibid., p. 91.
27 Klüger attributes her own survival to the ‘lucky accident’ of having lied about her age during a ‘selection,’ but a prisoner-functionary also helped her, taking a great risk to corroborate her lie. See Klüger, Still Alive, pp. 106–8.
28 Manuela Consonni, “Primo Levi, Robert Antelme, and the Body of the Muselmann,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, vol. 7, no. 2 (June 2009): p. 246.
29 Ibid., p. 250.
30 Ibid., p. 254.
31 Charlotte Delbo, Days and Memory, trans. Rosette Lamont (Evanston, IL: Marlboro, Northwestern University Press, 1990), pp. 2–3.
32 Consonni, “Primo Levi,” p. 255; emphasis in original.
33 Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1947), p. 188.
34 Ibid., p. 207.
35 Ibid., p. 110. For Julia Kristeva, the abject denotes the human reaction to the loss of distinction between subject and object, or self and ‘other,’ her primary example being the corpse: ‘The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject.’ Here Lengyel would have us behold the living, masturbating corpse. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4.
36 Zoë Waxman, Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 102–3.
37 Ibid., p. 103.
38 Waxman, Women in the Holocaust, p. 103n89. Here Waxman cites Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 152–68, n. 5. I address Sofsky's account below.
39 See, for example, the glossary entry for ‘Muselmann’ on the Yad Vashem website: ‘Muselmann,’ Yad Vashem Shoah Resource Center, http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206474.pdf.
40 See especially Becker and Bock, “Muselmänner in Nazi Concentration Camps.”
41 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1950), p. 349.
42 See Sharon B. Oster, “The Muselmann Liberated: Impossible Holocaust Metaphors in Survivor Memoirs and Photography,” in Tim Cole and Simone Gigliotti, (eds.), The Holocaust in the 21st Century: Relevance and Challenges in the Digital Age, Lessons and Legacies Volume XIV (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming 2020).
43 See Anna Pawełczyńska, Values and Violence in Auschwitz: A Sociological Analysis, trans. Catherine S. Leach (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 77.
44 Sofsky, The Order of Terror, pp. 200, 329n5.
45 Sarah Helm, “Muselweiber,” Glossary, Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (New York: Anchor, 2016, Kindle edition, pp. 675–6).
46 Helm, Ravensbrück, p. 676.
47 Sarah Helm, If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbrück: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (London: Little, Brown, 2015), pp. 166–7.
48 Ibid., p. 176.
49 See Pawełczyńska, Values and Violence in Auschwitz, p. 77.
50 Helm, Ravensbrück: Life and Death, p. 675. Helm cites Germaine Tillion as a source. See Tillion below.
51 Helm, If This Is a Woman, pp. 166.
52 Ibid., pp. 178.
53 Thanks to Saul Noam Zaritt for offering guidance on the Yiddish slang. At the risk of being too crude, I might suggest the insult was to call a woman a ‘dick-trick,’ another way of calling her a ‘whore.’ In German, Stücke also means ‘artwork.’
54 Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, p. 85.
55 Germaine Tillion, Ravensbrück: An Eyewitness Account of a Women's Concentration Camp (New York: Doubleday, 1975), pp. 23–4.
56 Rochelle Saidel notes that ‘[c]hildren were sometimes brought to the camp with their mothers and some managed to survive, although most either perished at the camp or were sent on to death camps’; Jewish women at Ravensbrück before 1942 ‘were murdered’ or ‘sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau or another camp’ by the fall of 1942 ‘(soon after the camp was made judenrein, or free of Jews)’; and most of the Jewish survivors came ‘in late 1944, after the evacuation of Auschwitz in 1945.’ See Rochelle G. Saidel, The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), p. 10.
57 Joan Ringelheim claims that ‘[m]ore women were deported than men. More women were killed than men.’ See Ringelheim, “Thoughts about Women and the Holocaust,” p. 147; Raul Hilberg also claims a higher death rate for women as they comprised a majority of occupied European Jews, and greater value was put on male than female labor. See Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, and Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), pp. 127, 130; Pascale Bos points out problems with Ringelheim's statistics, but also that Nazis typically chose Jewish men for leadership and work, so that ‘women were more often killed immediately.’ See Bos, “Women and the Holocaust,” p. 32.
58 Bos, “Women and the Holocaust,” p. 33.
59 Myrna Goldenberg, “Lessons Learned from Gentle Heroism: Women's Holocaust Narratives,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 548 (November 1996): p. 81.
60 Waxman, Women in the Holocaust, p. 17.
61 See Gisella Perl, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz (Tamarac, FL: Yale Garber, 1987), pp. 79–80.
62 See, for example, Vera Laska, Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust: The Voices of Eyewitnesses (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983); Esther Katz and Joan Ringelheim, (eds.), Proceedings of the Conference, Women Surviving: The Holocaust (New York: Institute for Research in History, 1983); Sybil Milton, “Women and the Holocaust: The Case of German and German-Jewish Women,” in Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossman, and Marion Kaplan, (eds.), When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984); Joan Ringelheim, “The Unethical and the Unspeakable: Women and the Holocaust,” in Alex Grobman, (ed.), Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual I (Chappaqua, NY: Rossel Books, 1984), pp. 69–87; Joan Ringelheim, “Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research,” Signs, vol. 10, no. 4 (1985): pp. 741–61; Marlene Heinemann, Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986); Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987); and Ruth Schwertfeger, Women of Theresienstadt: Voices from a Concentration Camp (Oxford: Berg, 1989).
63 Ringelheim, “Thoughts about Women and the Holocaust,” p. 147. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth made Ringelheim's notion of ‘double jeopardy’ the premise of their 1993 collection, aimed at redressing gaps in male-centered Holocaust histories. See Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, (eds.), Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (New York: Paragon House, 1993), p. 3.
64 Rittner and Roth, Different Voices, p. 2.
65 Myrna Goldenberg, “Different Horrors, Same Hell: Women Remembering the Holocaust,” in Roger S. Gottlieb, (ed.), Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), p. 151.
66 As Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, put it in one of his speeches,
We came to the question: what about the women and children? … I did not regard myself as justified in exterminating the men … while letting avengers in the shape of children … grow up. The difficult decision had to be taken to make this people disappear from the face of the earth.
67 Babey Widutschisky Trepman, “Living Every Minute,” in Myrna Goldenberg, (ed.), Before All Memory Is Lost, p. 382.
68 See Cushman, “The Auschwitz Women's Camp,” pp. 719–20; and Goldenberg, “Lessons Learned from Gentle Heroism,” pp. 82–4. See also Yaffa Eliach, “Women and the Holocaust: Historical Background,” in Women of Valor: Partisans and Resistance Fighters, vol. 6, no. 4 (Spring 1990): p. 8.
69 Goldenberg, “Different Horrors, Same Hell,” p. 150.
70 Saidel, The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück, pp. 19–20.
71 Ibid., pp. 13–15.
72 Ibid., p. 18.
73 Ibid., pp. 8, 10. Saidel points out that the effort was unsuccessful: ‘there were Jewish women in the camp for nearly the entire six years of its existence’ (66).
74 It was so crowded that women had to stand, many suffocated and died: although by 1944 Ravensbrück became a death camp with its own gas chamber, death by crowding also became a genocidal method. Himmler ordered a gas chamber to be built in Ravensbrück in 1944, which was destroyed in April 1945 before the Russians liberated the camp. See Saidel, The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück, pp. 18, 19–21, 79.
75 Saidel, “Olga Weiss Astor,” in Saidel, Jewish Women of Ravensbrück, p. 84.
76 Ibid., p. 84.
77 Saidel, “Ilona Klein Feldman,” in Saidel, Jewish Women of Ravensbrück, p. 88.
78 Waxman, Women in the Holocaust, p. 96.
79 See Cushman, “The Auschwitz Women's Camp,” p. 719; Goldenberg, “Different Horrors, Same Hell,” pp. 154–5; and Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, (eds.), Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2010).
80 Leib Langfuss, “The Horrors of Murder,” in Ber Mark, (ed.), The Scrolls of Auschwitz (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1985), p. 209.
81 Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys, p. 28.
82 Trepman, “Living Every Minute,” p. 383.
83 Cecilie Klein, qtd. in Goldenberg, “Lessons Learned,” p. 85.
84 Waxman, Women in the Holocaust, pp. 92–3.
85 See Goldenberg, “Different Horrors, Same Hell,” 155; and Waxman, Women in the Holocaust, pp. 88–9. Bos notes that although women were not specifically targeted for this procedure (men were shorn as well), they suffered a greater emotional impact because of it (“Women and the Holocaust,” p. 34).
86 Waxman, Women in the Holocaust, 89; Ida Urbach Dimant, “To My Daughters,” in Goldenberg, (ed.), Before All Memory Is Lost, p. 407.
87 Reich, “Sometimes I Can Dream Again,” p. 301.
88 Cushman, “The Auschwitz Women's Camp,” p. 711.
89 Ibid., p. 719. See also Lengyel, Five Chimneys, pp. 190–3.
90 Ellen Ben-Sefer; qtd. Waxman, Women in the Holocaust, p. 95.
91 Waxman, Women in the Holocaust, p. 95.
92 Ibid., p. 96. On ‘Ravensbrück rabbits,’ see also Rochelle G. Saidel, “Integrating Ravensbruck Women's Concentration Camp into Holocaust Memorialization in the US,” in Marcia Sachs Littell, (ed.), Women in the Holocaust: Responses, Insights, and Perspectives (Merion Station, PA: Merion Westfield Press, 2001), p. 67; and Myrna Goldenberg, Before All Memory Is Lost, p. 268.
93 Lengyel, Five Chimneys, p. 199. It is unclear from Lengyel's account whether the dogs were trained to maul girls’ genitals or perform a bestial act (though likely the former).
94 Saidel, The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück, p. 22.
95 Ibid.
96 Goldenberg, “Different Horrors, Same Hell,” p. 161.
97 Gisella Perl, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz, pp. 82–3.
98 Ibid., pp. 79–80.
99 Ibid., p. 83.
100 Lucette M. Lagnado and Sheila C. Dekel, Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 80.
101 Lengyel, Five Chimneys, p. 114.
102 Waxman, Women in the Holocaust, p. 86.
103 Goldenberg, “Lessons Learned,” p. 87. Like others, Goldenberg defines Musselmen as ‘a term of unknown and debatable origin but widely used to denote “emaciated walking corpses,”’ relying on the familiar trope of fatalism: ‘Musselmen were those prisoners who were physically and psychologically worn out, those who surrendered their will to live.’ Goldenberg, “Lessons Learned,” p. 87n47.
104 Bos notes that even Ringelheim abandoned this approach in the mid-1980s, since it means capitulating in advance to a ‘set agenda’ that glorifies women's experiences of oppression. See Bos, “Women and the Holocaust,” pp. 27–9. Bos notes that since the 1970s, pioneering feminist scholars like Ringelheim, Goldenberg, Sybil Milton, and others searched for a specific ‘women's culture’ that proved how their unique resourcefulness helped them survive ‘better’ than men. But Ringelheim did something unprecedented when she republished a revised version of her essay ‘Women and the Holocaust’ as ‘Thoughts about Women and the Holocaust’ in Rittner and Roth, Different Voices.
105 Goldenberg, “Lessons Learned,” pp. 87–8.
106 Becker and Bock illustrate male ‘gestures of solidarity’ in “Muselmänner in Nazi Concentration Camps,” p. 143. Vladek Spiegelman helping his friend Mandelbaum get decent shoes in Auschwitz and Levi's moving account of his friendship with Lorenzo come to mind. See Art Spiegelman, Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (New York: Pantheon, 1992), p. 34; and Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, pp. 121–2.
107 Cushman, “The Auschwitz Women's Camp,” p. 712.
108 Goldenberg, Before All Memory Is Lost, pp. 270, 271.
109 Reich, “Sometimes I Can Dream Again,” p. 305.
110 Ibid., 310.
111 Ibid., 311.
112 Ibid., 314.
113 Rebekah Shmerler-Katz, “If the World Had Only Acted Sooner,” in Goldenberg, Before All Memory Is Lost, p. 332.
114 Ibid., 333.
115 Ibid., 334.
116 Charlotte Delbo, “Lulu,” in Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 102.
117 Ibid., p. 103.
118 Ibid., p. 104.
119 Ibid.
120 Ibid., p. 105.
121 Ibid.
122 Ibid., p. 12.