Warped mourning: stories of the undead in the land of the unburied

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Notes

1. Drawing on the work of Arendt and Agamben, Etkind distinguishes between Muselmänner in the Nazi death camps and dokhodiagi or ‘goners’ and ‘soon-to-be-dead’ in the Soviet camps. While in Nazi camps there was a procedure of ‘selection’ there was nothing like that in Soviet camps: neither programmes of elimination nor programmes of support. ‘Produced by the gulag in huge numbers, the goners personified the abject world of the camps, its ideal type (p. 26).