Prisoners who failed to adapt within days became the nameless Muselmann mass

Evidence

All the Muselmiinner who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story; they followed the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run down to the sea. On their entry into the camp, through basic incapacity, or by misfortune, or through some banal incident, they are overcome before they can adapt themselves; they are beaten by time, they do not begin to learn German, to disentangle the infernal knot oflaws and prohibitions until their body is already in decay, and nothing can save them from selections or from death by exhaustion. Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmiinner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men, who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead in them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 685

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The Muselmann as a category beyond the living/death binary — ‘too empty to really suffer’ — is a paradigm-level meditation on the limits of mortality, manhood, and historical narration.
• XREF: Connects to Primo Levi’s ‘The Drowned and the Saved’ and to Agamben’s ‘Remnants of Auschwitz’ on the Muselmann as the threshold figure.