The Female Muselmann in Nazi Concentration Camp Discourse

Abstract

ABSTRACT A study of the ‘female Muselmann’ is long overdue. Here I question the male figure of the Muselmann as a universal trope of concentration camp debasement, by examining it through a gendered lens. The term Muselmänner refers to those closest to death by starvation and abuse; at the bottom of the camp hierarchy; those ‘selected’ for the gas chambers; and routinely described as the ‘living dead.’ According to Levi's profoundly influential account, scholars take the term to denote a silent, emaciated concentration camp prisoner, not just about to die but fated to do so. Scholars have accepted the Muselmann as the embodied product of the Lager, an archetype of mass suffering, mass murder, and ‘living death.’ Yet this version of the Muselmann conceals crucial aspects of women's stories. Critical Holocaust studies, I argue, can benefit intellectually and ethically from decentering the ‘miraculous,’ paradoxical Muselmann as a logical point of reference. Narratives by female concentration camp survivors, I show, figure the Muselmann to construct narratives of female agency, but they also recount female figures that deserve attention: Goldstücke and Schmuckstücke, similar to the Muselmann, except for the presumed fatalism. These terms capture the unique ways Nazis tortured women, especially mothers. Rereading these figures together and considering the fact that many women were killed immediately upon arrival to death camps illuminates the sexually violent forms of torture to which Nazis subjected women, and their fundamental genocidal attack on (Jewish) women's reproducing bodies. This, in turn, reveals the complexity of narratives of prisoner agency in the Nazi concentration camp system.