The Muselmann and the Necrotopography of a Ghetto

ABSTRACT

This article revises the status, function, linguistic origin, and experiential meaning of the emaciated figure of the Muselmann through a reading of Holocaust diaries, archival photography, as well as the post-Holocaust literature; the reading establishes certain similarities between the Muselmann and other victims of Nazi genocide. It reconstructs necrotopography as a common denominator of diverse Holocaust hostile spaces of confinement, in which dead bodies constitute the terrain’s main features. The article purports that death in the necrotopograhic spaces was caused by starvation and exploitation as well as by solitude and isolation. For a contemporary reader/viewer, necrotopography represents the return of the Holocaust affect in its most visceral way.

KEYWORDS:

• Ghostly appearances
• hostile spaces
• isolation
• Muselmann
• necrotopography
• starvation

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Haun Saussy for his insightful and helpful comments on the earlier version of this article. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributor

Bożena Shallcross is a professor of Polish and Polish-Jewish cultural studies in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago and a member of the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies. She published several monographs, edited and translated volumes, and numerous articles, in which she has explored an intersection of the once fundamental division between the seeing subject and the objectual sphere in literature, the visual arts, and the phenomenal world. One of the main interests of her research focuses on Polish-Jewish studies, especially on the material world, as demonstrated in her monograph The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture. Currently, she is working on the book-length project dedicated to the Kulmhof-am-Ner extermination camp.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 I refer here to Sharon B. Oster's understanding of the Muselmann as a temporary condition that many prisoners experienced and claimed afterward, thus survived. Oster does not see the Muselmann's condition as exceptional, but rather as similar to the whole spectrum of near-death states experienced by other prisoners. The medical data proves, however, that there existed ‘the point of no return’ for emaciated prisoners: the swelling of their legs and feet was symptomatic of such a stage, as well as the irrevocably damaged internal organs. See Sharon B. Oster, “Impossible Holocaust Metaphors: The Muselmann,” Prooftext: A Journal of Jewish History, vol. 34, no. 3 (2014): pp. 302–348.

2 Jill Jarvis scrutinizes Agamben's blindsided reading of the word Muselmann as omitting completely its origin in Orientalism, especially, in its French colonial context. While her contextualization of the term presents a valuable contribution to the discourse, Jarvis does not seek an answer to the critical question how (or whether at all) the French colonial etymology of the term was transferred to the German concentration camps. (The word circulated in the camps as a German transfer.) Moreover, she states that no one ever analyzed the etymology of the word Muselmann; if so, this would make her article the first scholarly attempt to do so. Jill Jarvis, “Remnants of Muslims: Reading Agamben's Silence,” New Literary History, vol. 45, no. 4 (Autumn 2014): pp. 707–728. In fact, after the war two linguists, Witold Doroszewski and Mojżesz Altbauer, authored the first linguistic examinations of the term. See Witold Doroszewski, “O wyrazie muzułman,” Rozmowy o języku, 4 (1948): pp. 85–92; and Mojżesz Altbauer, “Przyczynki do słownictwa wojennego: Muzułman z niem. Muselmann,” Język Polski, vol. 30, no. 3 (1950): pp. 84–87. More about Altbauer in Rafał Żebrowski, “Altbauer Mojżesz (Mosze),” Polski słownik judaistyczny [Polish Judaic dictionary], http://www.jhi.pl/psj/; last accessed May 21, 2020.

3 See, for example, Bruno Bettelheim's publications, in particular the 1943 article “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 38 (1943): pp. 417–452. Bettelheim, who was imprisoned in KL Buchenwald, had firsthand experience in this matter.

4 Danuta Wesołowska, Słowa z piekieł rodem: Lagerszpracha (Cracow: Impuls, 1996), p. 93. She writes that lagerszpracha was ‘an entirely new linguistic convention or rather a collection of linguistic conventions,’ based on the German language, which was the reason why ‘prisoners did not easily identify with them,’ Wesołowska, Słowa z piekieł rodem, p. 63. Lagerszpracha, literally ‘camp language,’ was a distorted German word adapted to the Polish language. Wesołowska makes references to Altbauer's article.

5 Besides the Nazi military and auxiliary units, there were Jewish police units, also formed in other Nazi ghettos, whose members were responsible for maintaining order.

6 It is helpful to note at the beginning of this inquiry Tadeusz Borowski's understated description of the Muselmann's condition of finality in his ‘Określenia oświęcimskie’ [Auschwitz camp terminology], which the Polish writer and Holocaust survivor compiled for the publication We Were in Auschwitz. Tadeusz Borowski, Janusz Nel Siedlecki, Krystyn Olszewski, We Were in Auschwitz, trans. Alicia Nitecki (New York: Welcome Rain Publisher, 2000). The authors wrote the book in a DP camp near Munich and published it in 1946. Borowski writes: ‘Muzulman [sic] … a physically and mentally totally depleted human being who no longer had the strength or the will to fight for his life,’ Borowski et al., We Were in Auschwitz, p. 192. Borowski (and subsequently his translator) used the shortened slang version muzułman as it functioned in Auschwitz instead of the correct Polish form muzułmanin.

7 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazer (New York: Zone Book, 2002).

8 Przegląd Lekarski-Oświęcim is also known as Zeszyty Oświęcimskie [The Auschwitz notebooks]. The periodical has become more accessible since the 1980s, appearing also in the German language and, more recently, in English; Zeszyty Oświęcimskie (OCoLC)630080249.

9 Ewa Domańska, Nekros: Wprowadzenie do ontologii martwego ciała (Warsaw: PWN, 2017).

10 Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz. The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 88.

11 Following Henri Lefebvre, I hold that the ‘space is a social product … and a means of control, thus of domination, of power.’ I would add to this list violence, which is an unavoidable consequence of the perversion of power. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 26.

12 The German jurist Carl Schmitt theorized the geopolitical relationship between power and space in both his prewar and postwar writing, for example, in his Dialogues on Power and Space, trans. Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, Andreas Kalyvas, and Federico Finchelstein (eds.) (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015) related to Cold War geopolitics. Derek Gregory introduced the notion of the space of exception as derivative of Schmitt's state of exception that connotes the sovereign ability to transcend the rule of law for the sake of public good. See Derek Gregory, “The Black Flag: Guantanamo Bay and the Space of Exception,” NGV Triennial Voices, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition_post/the-black-flag-guantanamo-bay-and-the-state-of-exception, last accessed May 21, 2020.

13 As Anja Nowak shows in her dissertation, one of the main tools of the brutalization and destruction of the Jewish people was exactly the manipulation of their space. See Anja Nowak, “The Spatial Configurations of the Warsaw Ghetto: Selected Aspects of Jewish Space and Nazi Policies,” Ph.D. diss., University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, 2018.

14 Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Warsaw,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/warsaw; last accessed May 21, 2020.

15 Tim Cole, Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 2.

16 The Budapest Ghetto was created by a decree of the Royal Hungarian Government; the Nazi occupation of Budapest started in March of 1944.

17 In the case of KL Auschwitz, the existing Polish military barracks were utilized; the old Jewish neighborhood was chosen as the location of the Warsaw Ghetto; and Theresienstadt is another case in point. The tight spaces inside the barracks in Dachau or Auschwitz were so rudimentary and uniform that, over the years, the barracks became the symbol of the built-in environment of totalitarianism.

18 German businessmen, among them Walter Toebbens from Brema, moved their manufactures to the Warsaw Ghetto where they employed Jews; despite exploitative labor, the manufactures (in the ghetto slang szopy) issued certificates of employment (Ausweis), which initially protected Jews from deportation.

19 Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Warsaw,” last accessed May 21, 2020.

20 Emanuel Ringelblum was a Jewish historian and the founder of the Oyneg Shabbos project that led to the Ringelblum Archive. Oyneg Shabbos group collected and solicited documents to chronicle life in the Warsaw Ghetto during the German occupation. The collecting occurred between 1939–1943 and included testimonies such as poems, diaries, posters, and essays. A portion of the archives, buried for safety in three milk cans and boxes, was unearthed after the war.

21 Emanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emanuel Ringelblum, trans. and introduction Jacob Sloan (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1958), p. 130.

22 The history of the Warsaw Ghetto, including its maps and buildings, is the subject of the encyclopedic monograph by Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, trans. Emma Harris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

23 Muselmanization is a process during which a prisoner succumbs to death due to starvation, exploitation, and disease.

24 Willy Georg's pictures surfaced in the 1960s thanks to Raphael F. Scharf who was contacted by Georg. Georg was a thirty-year-old German soldier serving as a radio operator in the army, who on the order of his senior officer photographed ghetto life with his Leica camera; one of his five rolls of film was confiscated, but the remaining four rolls were safe in his pocket. More about this story and Georg's photographs in In the Warsaw Ghetto Summer 1941. Photographs by Willy Georg with passages from the Warsaw Ghetto Diaries. Compiled and with an afterword by Rafael F. Scharf (New York: Aperture Book, 1993). Scharf created a dual narrative by using the photographs and excerpts from various autobiographical writing from the ghetto alongside Georg's photographs.

25 Zdzisław Ryn and Stanisław Kłodziński, “Na granicy życia i śmierci: Studium obozowego ‘muzułmaństwa,’” Przegląd Lekarski-Oświęcim, 1983 (40): 27–72, here p. 36.

26 Swollen legs were a ‘typical’ symptom and recognized as such by numerous other sources.

27 The research was founded by the Judenrat [Jewish council] and was published after the war in book form edited by Leon Płocker, Choroba głodowa: Badania kliniczne nad głodem wykonane w getcie warszawskim z roku 1942 (Warsaw: American Joint Distribution Committee, 1946).

28 A pushke was a tin container, kept at home or in a synagogue, where money was collected for charity.

29 Across Poland's prewar Eastern territories, Jewish charity began to function on a larger scale after the Khmelnytsky massacre that nearly completely destroyed the Jewish community living in these lands along with its wealth.

30 For example, Emanuel Ringelblum asked Rachel Auerbach to organize one of the Warsaw Ghetto's public kitchens. See also, Rachela Auerbach, “Brulion monografii kuchni ludowej,” in Karolina Szymaniak (ed.), Pisma z getta warszawskiego, trans. Anna Ciałowicz, Karolina Szymaniak (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2016), pp. 207–238.

31 Marek Stok, “Pamiętnik,” in “Pamiętniki Żydów,” sygnatura 302/144, Archiwum Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, Warszawa.

32 Likewise, 'The Musselmann's eyes were restless, but they stirred only for one thing: where to obtain food. The look in those eyes was apathetic, sunken under the eyelids, shining green, they seemed dead already, showing not a will to live, but a blind and vacuous hunger.’ In Ryn and Kłodziński, “Na granicy życia i śmierci,” p. 43. Zdzisław Ryn (b. 1938) is a Polish psychiatrist and diplomat specializing in the ethics of medicine, psychiatry of concentration camp, and alpine medicine. Stanisław Kłodziński (1918–1990) was a Polish physician, Auschwitz survivor, and a co-founder of Przegląd Lekarski–Oświęcim. After his death, the journal was no longer published.

33 Mary Berg, Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary, S. L. Shneiderman (ed.) (New York: L.B Fischer, 1945), p. 122.

34 Sylwia Karolak informatively writes about the funerary rituals of the wartime ghettos in her article “Pogrzeby, których nie było: O rytuałach niemożliwych (w literaturze poholokaustowej),” Napis, vol. 16 (2010): pp. 211–223.

35 As cited on this page: United States Holocaust Museum, “Bodies, Coffins, and a Funeral Wagon on the Grounds of the Jewish Cemetery on Okopowa Street in the Warsaw Ghetto,” May 4, 2015, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa2607; last accessed February 23, 2020.

36 Mary Berg, Warsaw Ghetto, p. 116.

37 The term should not be applied to define battlefields or spaces of natural disasters that are entirely outside the specific system and objectives of a totalitarian ideology, propaganda and practice.

38 Heinrich Joest was a sergeant in the Wehrmacht, a hotel owner, and an amateur photographer who took pictures in the Warsaw Ghetto over a few days in September 1941. His undisputable photographic skills are clearly manifested in the pictures selected for this text.

39 Chaper (Polish): a snatcher. For more about this word, see Barbara Engelkind and Jacek Leociak, Ghetto warszawskie: Przewodnik po nieistniejacym mieście (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN, 2001), p. 301. In Black Seasons, Michał Głowiński describes an instance that occurred in the Warsaw Ghetto, when a boy – even hungrier than him – grabbed his cookie and ran away. Michał Głowiński, “The Pastry,” in The Black Seasons, trans. Marci Shore, foreword Jan T. Gross (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), pp. 17–20.

40 As stated by Daniel H. Magilow, “The Interpreter's Dilemma: Heinrich Joest's Warsaw Ghetto Photographs,” in David Bathrick, Brad Prager, and Michael David Richardson (eds.), Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008), pp. 38–61, here p. 40.

41 Mary Berg, Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 115–116.

42 Chaim Kaplan, “Scroll of Agony,” in David G. Roskies (ed.), The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe, (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988): pp. 435–449, here p. 447.

43 Quotation from Tim Cole, Holocaust Landscapes (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 4.

44 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “A Jewish Woman Lies Dead on the Street in the Warsaw Ghetto,” February 13, 2004, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa2804.

45 Jonathan Davidov and Zvi Eisikovits, “Free Will in Total Institutions: The Case of Choice Inside Nazi Death Camps,” Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 34 (2015): pp. 87–97, here 94.

46 Allan Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” in Burgin Victor (ed.), Thinking Photography: Communications and Culture (London: Palgrave, 1982), pp. 84–109, here p. 84.

47 Sometimes, men were photographed taking off their hats, as the Nazi law required.

48 Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” p. 84.

49 See Magilow, “The Interpreter's Dilemma,” p. 40.

50 For more about photography and Holocaust research, see Raye Farr, “The Use of Photographs as Artifacts and Evidence,” in Robert Moses Shapiro (ed.), Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and Other Contemporaneous Personal Accounts, introduction Ruth R. Wisse (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, 1999), pp. 277–281.

51 Jacques Rancière, “The Intolerable Image,” The Emancipated Spectator, trans. George Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 83–106.

52 Lucjan Dobroszycki (ed.), The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto 1941–1944, trans. Richard Lourie, Joachim Neugroschel, and others (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 166.

53 Moreover, as a walled and guarded zone of exclusion, the Litzmannstadt Ghetto never functioned as a normal public space.

54 Unlike other ghettos, which depended largely on smuggled food and other indispensable goods, Litzmannstadt was sealed off through heavy security; to exacerbate the situation further, its territory was located in the city known for having the largest German minority loyal to Nazism. Its necrotopographic character was established from the onset, as people died in public spaces of heart attacks, suicides (by jumping from windows), and by means of executions; there were no mass graves in that ghetto. For more detailed information about such events, see Dobroszycki, The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto 1941–1944.

55 The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Łódź Ghetto, introduction Alan Adelson (ed.), additional footnotes and trans. Kamil Turowski, foreword Lawrence L. Langer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 90. The ghetto schools lost their provisions and were ultimately shut down in 1941.

56 After the liberation of Lagers by the Red Army and the Allies, many of those initially found alive nevertheless died, having reached the physical point of no return. Food did not save them; in fact, it killed them. Hunger disease makes intestines as thin as thread, thus making it impossible to digest any food.

57 The exact cause of his death remains unknown, but it was likely a combination of starvation, exhaustion, and possibly typhus.

58 The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak, p. 268.

59 Przegląd Lekarski-Oświęcim cites similar syndromes: ‘Loss of the will to live, an easy way to enter the pre-agonal stage, impossibility of healing, impossibility of an effective self-defense and saving one's life,’ quoted after Wesołowska, Słowa z piekła rodem, p. 93.

60 The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak, p. 90.

61 As Alina Molisak states, Wojdowski develops a strong connection in his novel between his autobiographical experience and the novel's storyline. See Alina Molisak, “‘Judaizm jako los’: On the Essay by Bogdan Wojdowski,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 28 (2016): pp. 441–456, here p. 443.

62 Wojdowski Bogdan, Bread for the Departed, trans. Madeline G. Levine, foreword Henryk Grynberg (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), p. 287.

63 Ibid., p. 284.

64 See the discussion of the abject in Sven-Erik Rose, “Writing Hunger in a Modernist Key in the Warsaw Ghetto: Leyb Goldin's ‘Chronicle of a Single Day,’” Jewish Social Studies, vol. 23, no. 1 (2017): pp. 29–63.

65 Stefan Konecki was a pseudonym for Ostap Ortwin, the prominent Polish-Jewish literary critic, who perished during the Holocaust. Adolf Rudnicki, “The Great Stefan Konecki,” in Ludwik Krzyżanowski and Adam Gillon (eds.), Introduction to Modern Polish Literature: An Anthology of Poetry and Fiction, trans. H. C. Steven, (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1968), pp. 236–257, here p. 256.

66 Wojdowski, Bread for the Departed, p. 157.

67 Cole, Holocaust Landscapes, p. 2.

68 Manuela Consonni advances a similar argument in her insightful article “Primo Levi, Robert Antelme, and the Body of the Muselmann,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, vol. 7, no. 2 (2009): pp. 243–259. I write more about the bodily traces as giving witness in my book Rzeczy i Zagłada (Cracow: Universitas, 2010); English edition The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011).

69 Much has been written about the differences between the Nazi and the Soviet camps; this article is not focused on the emaciated figure of the Gulag's goner [dokhodiaga], although that figure parallels the Muselmann. See Leona Toker, “Testimony and Doubt: Shalamov's ‘How It Began’ and ‘Handwriting,’” https://shalamov.ru/en/research/121/, accessed September 10, 2018. The goner trope was initiated by Gustaw Herling-Grudziński's memoir A World Apart: A Journal of the Gulag Survivor, trans. Joseph Marek (pseudonym of Andrzej Ciołkosz) (London: Heinemann, 1951) and a decade later by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, trans. Ralph Parker, introduction Marvin L. Kalb, foreword Alexander Tvardovsky (New York: Signet Classic, 1963).