[BRIEF NOTE] The Muselmänner

[rfmcdonald]

While I'm cleaning out old links, I thought I'd point people to S. Parvez Manzoor's essay "Turning Jews into Muslims: The Untold Saga of the Muselmänner", hosted at The American Muslim. This essay examines at length the phenomenon of the Muselmann, a class of people detained in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany who were catastrophically dehumanized by their living conditions.

The most challenging work on the subject, however, is a recent study by the very incisive Italian thinker, Giorgio Agamben (Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. (Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen), Zone Books, New York, 1999) that is a very intense philosophical reflection on the seminal moral issues of the Nazi death camp, the signification of testimony and the nature of speech and silence at the crossroads of humanity and inhumanity. It is the source of much information for this inquiry and may even serve for the Muslim reader as the most convenient access to the literature on this subject. It must be borne in mind, however, that Agamben is principally concerned with the most recalcitrant text of the Western ethics of our times and that his arcane reading of this text is no more than a secular refinement of the moral grammar of Judaeo-Christianity. For all the uncanny linguistic resemblance between them and the Muselmänner, Muslims are not part of this reflection. Be that as it may, here is how Agamben’s philosophical vision unmasks the Gestalt of the Muselmann: ‘At times a medical figure or an ethical category, at times a political limit and an anthropological concept, the Muselmann is an indefinite being in whom not only humanity and non-humanity, but also vegetative existence and relation, physiology and ethics, medicine and politics, and life and death continuously pass through each other. This is why the Muselmann’s “Third Realm” is the perfect cipher of the camp, the non-place in which all disciplinary barriers are destroyed and all embankments flooded.’ (p. 48)

Without doubt, Agamben’s moral reflection on Auschwitz, just as his philosophical thought in general, is worthy of the Muslim’s serious attention. Nevertheless an earnest Muslim encounter with Agamben’s philosophy, as with the moral-theological conundrums of Auschwitz, must await its proper moment. Here, we must continue our search for the image of the Muselmann, as found in the minds of the inmates of Auschwitz, and investigate its linguistic, semantic and cultural background. We must, in other words, carry on where Levi left off. To start with, the linguistic moorings of the term are the easiest to establish: these reproduce the German word for the Muslim, the singular form of which is der Muselmann, and the plural die Muselmänner. The non-Arabic form Musulman (orig. Musliman) however denotes quite simply the Persian plural of the Arabic Muslim and has been the standard term in Iran, Turkey, India and elsewhere. As such, it entered various European languages, and though it is now obsolete in English, it still denotes Muslims in German and French. An alternative suggestion, that Muselmann actually is a distortion of Muschelmann (lit. Mussel-man; a man folded and crouched, as in a shell) has not found much support among the scholars.

Obviously, the semantic significations of the word Muselmann are less certain and more conjectural, though these always abound with prejudicial and pejorative connotations. Here, for instance, is what Ryn and Koldzinski believe is the origin of this epithet: ‘They (the Muselmanns) became indifferent to everything happening around them. They excluded themselves from all relations to their environment. If they could still move around, they did so in slow motion, without bending their knees. They shivered since their body temperature usually fell below 98.7 degrees. Seeing them from afar, one had the impression of seeing Arab praying. This image was the origin of the term used at Auschwitz for people dying of malnutrition: Muselmänner.’ (p. 94) (I have scrupulously avoided translating Muselmänner with ‘Muslims’, or removing other emblems – italics, citation marks – that suggest the alien context and usage of the term. Unfortunately, this is far from the case and even the most conscionable of scholars, Agamben included, do not always observe this simple linguistic distinction and thus fail to accord the minimum of courtesy both to the Muselmänner and to the Muslims.)

[. . .]

Writing more than fifty years after the event, the most sober, knowledgeable and philosophical of the commentators, Giorgio Agamben, has to concede: ‘The most likely explanation of the term can be found in the literal meaning of the Arabic word muslim: the one who submits unconditionally to the will of God. It is this meaning that lies at the origins of the legends concerning Islam’s supposed fatalism, legends which are found in European cultures starting with the Middle Ages (this deprecatory sense of the term is present in European languages, particularly in Italian).’ (p. 45). However, Agamben also notes that the particularly stark and persistent prejudices of the European soul that identify Islamic ‘submission’ with loss of will constitute a travesty of the Muslim’s faith. He accepts that ‘while the Muslims’ resignation consists in the conviction that the will of Allah is at work every moment and in even the smallest events, the Muselmann of Auschwitz is defined by a loss of will and consciousness.’ (Ibid.) Still, according to the accepted convention of the camp, only ‘those men who had long since lost any real will to survive …. were called “Moslems” – men of unconditional fatalism.’ (Kogon, Eugen: The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the Systems Behind Them. (Translated by Heinz Norden), Octagon Books, New York, 1979. p. 284.)

My thanks to heraclitus for pointing me in the direction of this concept.