Camps named the death-adjacent Jew ‘Muselmann,’ linking Muslim imagery with dying

Evidence

So much has the figure of the Muslim been tied to Europe’s horror of death’s threat that the “Muselmann” became the name for those Jews in the Holocaust camps that had left life but had not yet given in to death. The camps’ Muselmanner were those who existed, it might be said, alongside death, in death’s wake, the moment prior to death’s throes, prostrate as if a Muslim praying. Emaciated, moving only to scrounge scraps to eat, caring about nothing but passing through the next moment, and the next, and the next. Wild eyed, lacking almost all will, “men of unconditional fatalism” (to mimic Agamben’s citation of Kogon). Lacking dignity and self-control. Indeed, the embodiment of lack, most notably a lack of love, of respect, of spirit for life itself. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 870

Categorization

• QUESTION: Goldberg implies etymology — ‘prostrate as if a Muslim praying’ — but the standard account derives Muselmann from the German for Muslim via the prisoner’s fatalistic posture. Is Goldberg fusing etymology with metaphor deliberately, and what’s the history of the term’s actual use in camp testimony?
• DEFINE: Defines the camp term Muselmann and its implied link to Muslim iconography.
• DEEPTHINKING: The reversal — that a racialized figure of death-threat gets transposed onto the very victims of Europe’s death camps — is a dense, layered point about how symbolic imagination travels, worthy of prolonged sitting.
• XREF: Deeply resonates with the broader death-obsession thread in this book and with Agamben’s ‘Remnants of Auschwitz.’ Also a grim inversion worth holding up to the reader’s curatorial interest in how images of the dead and dying are conscripted politically.