During the Holocaust, there was a word for a prisoner who was resigned to his death: a Muselmann. Primo Levi described Muselmänner in his memoir Survival in Auschwitz as “an anonymous mass” that formed the “backbone of the camp.” “[They are] non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer,” he wrote. Muselmänner were men stripped entirely of any individuality or discernible identity; sheer deprivation debased them beyond the limits of recognizable humanity. In Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben calls this process “desubjectification,” which rendered the Muselmann “the complete witness,” a figure whose narrative presence could only function as testimony of the hideousness and abjection of the camps. All the Muselmänner “who finished in the gas chamber have the same story, or more exactly, have no story,” wrote Levi.
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