Bozena Shallcross - 'The Muselmann and the Necrotopography of a Wartime Ghetto'

In this lecture, the figure of a Muselmann emerges from archival photographs, diaries, medical and forensic accounts to foreground an experience of death by starvation, diseases, and isolation. Described yet overlooked, photographed yet despised, the Muselmann — viewed in a current discourse solely as a product of the Nazi concentration camps — is comprehended here as a bearer of a post-verbal, somatic witness in the necro-zones of both the Lager and the ghetto. Bozena Shallcross is professor in the Department of Slavic Literatures and Languages.