Witnessing the Ghost, Letting the Ghost Witness: Exploring the Impediments of Witness Narratives in Holocaust Camp Testimonies through Spectrality and the Metaphor of the Muselmann

Abstract

Abstract:Within debates surrounding "Levi's Paradox"—the idea that through their survival, survivors are not necessarily the "complete witnesses" of the Holocaust—the Muselmann is frequently posited as able to reconcile this conundrum. Within testimonial literature, these emaciated prisoners were perceived as ghost-like entities who were neither alive nor dead but somehow between life and death. The observed absence left in witness narratives thereby appears to be testimony from inside the experience of these Muselmänner. What is ubiquitously overlooked in such analyses is that the Muselmann primarily functions as a metaphor—rendering the absent dead legible in language. Ignoring this risks instrumentalizing the Muselmann, which threatens to allow the metaphor to become shorthand for something more generic—obfuscating the reality that Muselmänner signify real Holocaust victims.However, all metaphors contain a potential for semantic flexibility. Cannot the Muselmann's ability to pollute rigid dichotomies therefore be approached productively and more ethically when refocalizing him as a ghostly entity in testimonial literature? By examining passages from Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz and After, this article asks: if the Muselmann is viewed as a ghostly or spectral metaphor—a haunting force within the Holocaust's literary corpus—how might this spectral witness be able to draw attention to erasure and historical blind spots? Constituting an ethical and an interpretive undertaking, this refocalization simultaneously allows one to speak with the Muselmann and enables these anonymous victims to manifest themselves anew as haunting forces through literary testimony.