Muselmänner and Prisoner Societies: Toward a Sociohistorical Understanding

ABSTRACT

In Holocaust discourse, Muselmänner are commonly depicted as mute, passive prisoners fated to die. We identify alternative representations in works of Jorge Semprún and Imre Kertész but also in a great number of other testimonies. Many of them were written by former Muselmänner. We argue for a sociohistorical turn in Muselmann discourse. Many testimonies show that Muselmänner were a constitutive part of the social structure of prisoner societies. Taking up a term from the camp language, we analyze the process of Muselmanization. We argue that the Muselmann must be understood as a processual and relational rather than an essentialist category. We propose to add a spatiotemporal approach to the analysis of prisoner societies. A close examination of particular blocks, barracks, or commandos and their changing function in the course of the camp system’s development yields unexpected insights into the social realities of Muselmänner and, in turn, into the inner workings of prisoner societies. We conclude that the Muselmann signifies that death and dying became defining factors of the social order of Nazi concentration camps.

KEYWORDS:

• Holocaust
• Muselmann
• prisoner society
• concentration camps
• Holocaust literature
• social history

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank Hannah Peaceman for her invaluable comments and corrections.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Michael Becker is a doctoral candidate at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. His PhD covers the relation between German sociology and National Socialism after 1945. His research interests are Holocaust studies, history and memory of Nazi concentration camps, Critical Theory, history of sociology, antisemitism, racism and right wing terrorism.

Dennis Bock is a sociologist and literary scholar. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg in 2016. His research interests are representations of violence and persecution, Holocaust and gender studies, and history and memory of NS concentration camps. He is currently working on knowledge transfer in comic books. Dennis has collaborated actively with researchers from several other disciplines including history, sociology, comparative literature, and cultural studies.

Notes

1 Maja Suderland, Inside Concentration Camps: Social Life at the Extremes (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).

2 David P. Boder, professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology, traveled to Europe in 1946 to record interviews with displaced persons. They are the earliest known audio recordings of Holocaust survivors. For details about Boder’s project see Alan Rosen, The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) and David P. Boder, I Did Not Interview the Dead (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1949).

3 “David P. Boder Interviews Adam Krakowski, July 30, 1946, Paris,” 2020, https://iit.aviaryplatform.com/collections/231/collection_resources/17639 (accessed May 24, 2020).

4 “David P. Boder Interviews Samuel Isakovitch, July 30, 1946, Paris,” 2020, https://iit.aviaryplatform.com/collections/231/collection_resources/17624 (accessed May 24, 2020).

5 “David P. Boder Interviews Marko Moskovitz, July 30, 1946, Paris,” 2020, https://iit.aviaryplatform.com/collections/231/collection_resources/17656 (accessed May 24, 2020).

6 Rosen, The Wonder, p. 190.

7 Nicole Warmbold, Lagersprache: Zur Sprache der Opfer in den Konzentrationslagern Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Buchenwald (Bremen: Edition Temme, 2008).

8 Elmer G. Luchterhand, sociologist by training and intelligence officer of the US Army, conducted interviews with survivors of Buchenwald, Gusen, and Mauthausen concentration camps among others immediately after their liberation. He later continued his research in the United States. His dissertation has only recently been published in German translation. See Elmer Luchterhand, Einsame Wölfe und stabile Paare: Verhalten und Sozialordnung in den Häftlingsgesellschaften nationalsozialistischer Konzentrationslager. Herausgegeben und eingeleitet von Andreas Kranebitter und Christian Fleck (Vienna: New Academic Press, 2018) and Elmer Luchterhand, “Social Behavior of Concentration Camp Prisoners: Continuities and Discontinuities with Pre- and Postcamp Life,” in Joel E. Dimsdale, (ed.), Survivors, Victims, and Perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust (Washington, DC: Hemisphere Publishing Cooperation, 1980), pp. 259–82.

9 Elmer G. Luchterhand, “Prisoner Behavior and Social System in Nazi Concentration Camps,” Madison: University of Wisconsin, typescript, 1952, p. 23, quoted in Luchterhand, “Social Behavior,” p. 269.

10 Ibid., emphasis in original.

11 “David P. Boder Interviews Anna Kaletska, September 26, 1946, Wiesbaden, Germany,” https://iit.aviaryplatform.com/collections/231/collection_resources/17633 (accessed May 24, 2020). Her real name was Anna Kovitzka (see the transcript in Boder, I Did Not Interview, pp. 1–25).

12 It is noteworthy in this context that the drawing used for the TAT showed a woman. For a perspective on the female Muselmann, see Sharon Oster’s contribution to this issue; for a perspective on the Muselmann as a male experience, see Michael Becker and Dennis Bock, “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.

13 Zdzisław Ryn, “Between Life and Death: Experiences of Concentration Camp Mussulmen during the Holocaust,” Genetic, Social & General Psychology Monographs, vol. 116, no. 1 (February 1990): pp. 7–19. For an overview of the research literature, see Michael Becker and Dennis Bock, “‘Muselmänner’ und Häftlingsgesellschaften: Ein Beitrag zur Sozialgeschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, vol. 55 (2015): pp. 133–75.

14 Dennis Bock, Literarische Störungen in Texten über die Shoah: Imre Kertész, Liana Millu, Ruth Klüger (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2017), pp. 161–75.

15 Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (New York: The Orion Press, 1959), pp. 101–2.

16 Levi, If This Is a Man, p. 103.

17 Ibid.

18 Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), chapter 5; Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), chapter 17; Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002).

19 Israel Gutman, “Muselmann,” in Israel Gutman, (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, vol. 3 (New York: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 1009–10. The online encyclopedia of Yad Vashem contains an almost identical entry on the Muselmann (https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206474.pdf, accessed May 24, 2020). Similar entries can also be found in German encyclopedias. See Becker and Bock, “Muselmänner und Häftlingsgesellschaften,” p. 145.

20 Sofsky, The Order of Terror, p. 205.

21 Becker and Bock, “Muselmänner und Häftlingsgesellschaften,” pp. 142–7.

22 Ibid., pp. 138–42; Sharon B. Oster, “Impossible Holocaust Metaphors: The Muselmann,” Prooftexts, vol. 34, no. 3 (Fall 2014): pp. 302–48, here pp. 305–6. While some of these features undoubtedly hark back to Levi, his testimony already hints at a more complicated picture with regard to the Muselmänner’s role for the social fabric of the concentration camp. Even though Muselmänner have ‘no history,’ according to Levi, they are still ‘the backbone of the camp.’ And while he asserts, they left ‘no trace in anyone’s memory,’ Levi distinctly remembers ‘Null Achtzehn,’ a Muselmann, and his role in Levi’s commando (see below).

23 Oster, “Impossible Holocaust Metaphors.”

24 Becker and Bock, “Muselmänner und Häftlingsgesellschaften,” p. 144.

25 Jorge Semprún, Le mort qu’il faut (Paris: Gallimard, 2001); German as Der Tote mit meinem Namen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002). The book has not been translated into English, but its title is generally rendered as The Dead Man We Needed.

26 For the question of identity, see 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): pp. 243–59. She argues that survivors resist fully engaging with their experience. They represent the Muselmann as the ‘ultimate “other”,’ leaving ‘a lacuna in the texture of memory’ (p. 256). The lacuna is ‘testimony from inside the experience of the Muselmann’ (p. 250). This is, Consonni contends, safer for them and for the readers (p. 256). Semprún’s novel seems to confirm this, lulling the readers into a sense of security by introducing the Muselmänner through Kaminsky’s distancing gaze. But he successfully overcomes the distance by turning the ‘ultimate other’ into the ‘constitutive other’ in a phenomenological sense – as a defining factor of the self. Kertész, on the other hand, refutes the notion of the lacuna by writing from inside the experience of the Muselmann.

27 Semprún, Der Tote, p. 58 (our translation; Semprún takes up the Heideggerian term of ‘Sein-zum-Tode/Being-toward-death’ and alters it to ‘Mitsein zum Tode’).

28 Semprún, Der Tote, p. 39 (our translation).

29 Sofsky, The Order of Terror, p. 205.

30 Imre Kertész, Fatelessness: A Novel (New York: Vintage International, 2004), chapters 6–8.

31 Adolf Gawalewicz, Überlegungen im Warteraum zum Gas: Aus den Erinnerungen eines Muselmannes (Gütersloh: Jakob van Hoddis, 1998 [published in Polish in 1969]). The English translation was not available to us. A short English summary of his report is Adolf Gawalewicz, “The Waiting Room to the Gas: From the Memoirs of a Muselmann,” trans. M. Kantor, in Medical Review – Auschwitz 31 (2018), https://www.mp.pl/auschwitz/journal/english/201417,the-waiting-room-to-the-gas-from-the-memoirs-of-a-muselmann, (accessed May 24, 2020).

32 Gawalewicz, “The Waiting Room.”

33 Gawalewicz, Überlegungen.

34 Gawalewicz, “The Waiting Room.”

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 Gawalewicz, Überlegungen, p. 73.

38 Suderland, Inside, p. 157.

39 Suderland, Inside. Suderland thus challenges Wolfgang Sofsky’s influential account of the concentration camp. She shows that prisoners were by no means a serially ordered mass and passive objects of the absolute power of the SS. For a sociological perspective on prisoner societies, see also the pioneering studies by Falk Pingel, e.g. “Social Life in an Unsocial Environment: The Inmates’ Struggle for Survival,” in Jane Caplan and Nikolaus Wachsmann, (eds.), Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 58–81.

40 Suderland, Inside, pp. 128–54.

41 Semprún, Der Tote, p. 31.

42 The noun modeled from this verb is muzułmanienie. Zdzisław Ryn and Stanisław Kłodziński, “An der Grenze zwischen Leben und Tod: Eine Studie über die Erscheinung des ‘Muselmanns’ im Konzentrationslager,” in Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, (ed.), Die Auschwitz-Hefte: Texte der polnischen Zeitschrift “Pzregląd Lekarski” über historische, psychische und medizinische Aspekte des Lebens und Sterbens in Auschwitz, Band 1 (Hamburg: Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 1994), pp. 89–154. See also Ryn, “Between Life and Death,” p. 10 and Danuta Wesołowska, Wörter aus der Hölle: Die “lagerszpracha” der Häftlinge von Auschwitz (Kraków: Impuls, 1998), pp. 36–7.

43 Yad Vashem online encyclopedia: Muselmann.

44 Ryn, “Between Life and Death,” p. 10.

45 Both processes have been discussed elsewhere. See Becker and Bock, “Muselmänner und Häftlingsgesellschaften,” pp. 150–5.

46 Steinberg occurred as Henri in Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man. http://www.wollheim—memorial.de/en/paul_steinberg_19261999 (accessed May 23, 2020).

47 Paul Steinberg, Chronik aus einer dunklen Welt (Munich: Hanser, 1998), p. 74 (our translation).

48 Kertész, Fatelessness, p. 170.

49 Ibid., pp. 172–3.

50 Ibid., p. 173.

51 Prisoner report by Albert Rohmer (without date), archives of Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, ANg, prisoner reports, 883, pp. 18–9.

52 Ryn and Kłodziński, “An der Grenze,” p. 122 (our translation). Leona Toker argues that the loss of facial expression is a symptom of the hunger disease, rather than of apathy and the loss of the will to live, as is commonly assumed. Here, a prisoner’s self-perception and his attribution to the Muselmänner could already diverge. Leona Toker, Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontexual Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), p. 92.

53 Ryn and Kłodziński, “An der Grenze,” p. 122 (our translation). See Anna Kaletska’s quote at the beginning: ‘I decided again to live.’ Also striking is what Kertész’s protagonist György Köves says about his feelings as a near-dead Muselmann: ‘I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp.’ Kertész, Fatelessness, p. 189.

54 Benedikt Kautsky, Teufel und Verdammte: Erfahrungen und Erkenntnisse aus sieben Jahren in deutschen Konzentrationslagern (Vienna: Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1961), pp. 158–68 (our translation).

55 Kautsky, Teufel und Verdammte, p. 166 (our translation).

56 Ibid., p. 167 (our translation).

57 See the recordings of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. 1. Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess, ‘Strafsache gegen Mulka u. a.,’ 4 Ks 2 / 63, Landgericht Frankfurt am Main, 50. Verhandlungstag, 29.5.1964, Vernehmung des Zeugen Władysław Fejkiel. Court records are a valuable yet untapped source for the investigation of prisoner societies. Another example is David Matzner (also a Boder interviewee), who reports how he survived his Muselmanization to become a clerk at the Groß-Rosen subcamp Wolfsberg. In the last days of the war, in Ravensbrück subcamp Barth, he became a Muselmann again. David Matzner, The Muselmann: The Diary of a Jewish Slave Laborer (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1994).

58 Bruno Apitz, “Das ‘kleine Lager’,” in Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands Stadt und Kreis Leipzig, (ed.), Das war Buchenwald! Ein Tatsachenbericht (Leipzig: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Literatur, 1946), pp. 57–63, here p. 60 (our translation). Neuengamme survivor Odd Nansen describes Muselmänner in a diary entry in the following words: ‘They will soon “go through the chimney,” as they say. They are approximately like animals.’ Odd Nansen, Von Tag zu Tag: Ein Tagebuch (Hamburg: Dulk, 1949), p. 81 (our translation).

59 Levi presents ‘Null Achtzehn’ as an example of a Muselmann in the chapter “The Drowned and the Saved,” see Levi, If This Is a Man, p. 101.

60 Levi, If This Is a Man, pp. 42–3. György Köves once more: ‘I even had rows with Bandi Citrom: I was “letting myself go,” I was a burden on the work squad, he would catch my scabies, he reproached me.’ Kertész, Fatelessness, p. 172.

61 Anna Pawełczyńska, Values and Violence in Auschwitz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 77.

62 For an elaboration on ‘bread law’ and ‘camp law,’ see Imke Hansen’s contribution in this issue.

63 Nansen, Von Tag zu Tag, p. 276 (our translation).

64 Thus, othering appears not only as a protection of the self in hindsight, during the act of testifying, but also as a reflection of the social and psychic process of the protection of the self during imprisonment, in which the Muselmann was indeed made into the other.

65 Gawalewicz, Überlegungen, p. 11.

66 Michaela Christ, Die Dynamik des Tötens: Die Ermordung der Juden in Berditschew (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2011), p. 40.

67 Claire Zalc and Tal Bruttmann, “Introduction,” in Claire Zalc and Tal Bruttmann, (eds.), Microhistories of the Holocaust (New York: Berghahn, 2017), p. 3.

68 Christ, Die Dynamik des Tötens, p. 40.

69 E.g. Apitz, “Das kleine Lager,” pp. 60–3; Prisoner report Leo Kok, April 4,1945, archives of Buchenwald Memorial, BwA, 52 / 46–18. See also Katrin Greiser, “‘Sie starben allein und ruhig, ohne zu schreien oder jemand zu rufen’: Das ‘Kleine Lager’ im Konzentrationslager Buchenwald,” Dachauer Hefte: Studien und Dokumente zur Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. 14 (1998): pp. 102–24.

70 Greiser, “Sie starben allein,” p. 119.

71 Semprún, Der Tote, p. 30.

72 Ibid., pp. 42–3.

73 Interrogation of the witness Phillip Jackson in the Neuengamme main trial, 3/20/1946, The National Archives, WO 235/162.

74 Ibid.

75 Prisoner report Maurice Choquet, 10/20/1984, archives of Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, ANg, prisoner reports, 183.

76 Prisoner report José Lopez, 5/29/1993, archives of Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, ANg, prisoner reports, 1549.

77 When Adolf Gawalewicz suffered from a light form of tuberculosis in Auschwitz, he was sent to Block 28 and afterwards

back to the camp, to the Muselmann commandos and blocks, and again set to ‘an easy job.’ During this period, I was sent for some time to Block 19, the famous Muselmann hosiery shop. It was a Schonungsblock, a block for convalescent prisoners.

Gawalewicz, “The Waiting Room.”

78 Prisoner report Heinrich Christian Meier, 1/25/1984, archives of Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, ANg, prisoner reports, 1640, p. 12. Meier’s testimony urges a careful and critical reading. To verify his claim, we would need to focus on the specific camp he describes and compare it to other testimonies from that place. We should also have in mind that Meier’s testimony was given almost 40 years after the war. In his book from 1946, he mentions Muselmänner several times in a derogatory tone, describing them as distant others, and not identifying himself as a Muselmann (Heinrich Christian Meier, So war es. Das Leben im KZ Neuengamme (Hamburg: Phönix, 1946), pp. 29–31; 103–4).

79 Prisoner report Grigorij Nikolajewitsch Kul’baka, April 2001, archives of Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, ANg, prisoner reports, 1699.

80 Prisoner report Nikolaj Nikolajewitsch Sadowskij, 9/3/1993, archives of Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, ANg, prisoner reports, 1592.

81 The Flechtkommando was one of the largest commandos in Neuengamme concentration camp. It is reported that almost exclusively particularly weak prisoners and Muselmänner had to work there. These reports allow us to draw conclusions about the high number of Muselmänner in the camp. Jan Everaert speaks of a majority of all prisoners in Neuengamme who were Muselmänner, while the former prisoner physician Tadeusz Kowalski assumes that 80 percent of the prisoners became Muselmänner. Interrogation of the witness J. Everaert in the Neuengamme main trial, 3/21/1946, The National Archives, WO 235/162; Interrogation of the witness Dr. Tadeusz Kowalski in the Neuengamme main trial, 3/22/1946, The National Archives, WO 235/162.

82 Toker, Gulag Literature, p. 88.

83 Oster, “Impossible Holocaust Metaphors.”

84 Ibid. See also Des Pres, The Survivor, chapter 5 (Life in Death).

85 Oster, “Impossible Holocaust Metaphors,” p. 317.

86 Semprún, Der Tote, p. 58 (our translation).