One of Borowski’s most dramatic gestures was to break the prevailing taboo against representing the figure of the Muselmann, or Muslim, which stood in complete opposition to the figure of the heroic fighter persistently promoted by the Polish government.489
“Muselmann” was an Auschwitz term for a prisoner who, in total exhaustion and despair, withdraws into himself, losing the will to survive. As Wolfgang Sofsky puts it,
“The Muselmänner are persons destroyed, devastated, shattered wrecks strung between life and death.”490 Jean Améry writes a similar definition in his memoir: “The so-called Mussulman, as the camp language termed the prisoner who was giving up and was given up by his comrades, no longer had room in his consciousness for the contrasts good or bad, noble or base, intellectual or unintellectual. He was a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions.”491 Aldo Capri also recalls in vivid details:
I remember that while we were going down the stairs leading to the baths, they had us accompanied by a group of Musselmänner, as we later called them – mummy-men, the living dead. They made them go down the stairs with us only to show them to us, as if to say, “you’ll become like them.”492
As Agamben points out, the origins of the word Muselmann are unclear; however, it was a specific jargon term used in Auschwitz. In Majdanek, “the living dead were termed ‘donkeys’; in dachau they were ‘cretins,’ in Stutthof ‘cripples,’ in Mathausen
‘swimmers,’ in neuengamme ‘camels,’ in Buchenwald ‘tired sheikhs,’ and in the women’s camp known as Ravensbrück, Muselweiber (female Muslims) or ‘trinkets.’”493 The Muselmänner spent their time crouching on the ground, shivering. “Seeing them afar, one had the impression of seeing Arabs praying. This image was the origin of the term used at Auschwitz for people dying of malnutrition: Muslims.”494 The word Muselmann also referred to Islam in the spiritual sense:
It is the meaning that lies at the origin of the legends concerning Islam’s supposed fatalism, legends which are found in european culture starting with the Middle Ages.
[…] But while the Muslim’s resignation consists in the conviction that the will of Allah is at work every moment and in even the smallest events, the Musselmann of Auschwitz is defined by a loss of all will and consciousness.495
Kogon called them “men of unconditional fatalism.”496
There were two stages of severe malnutrition that Muselmänner underwent. Ryn and Kłodzinski point out that the first stage was characterized by “weight loss, muscular asthenia, and progressive energy loss in movement.” The second stage began
when the starving individual lost a third of his normal weight. If he continued losing weight, his facial expression also changed. His gaze became cloudy and his face took on an indifferent, mechanical, sad expression. His eyes became covered by a kind of layer and seemed deeply set in his face. His skin took on a pale gray color, becoming thin and hard like paper. […] In this phase, they became indifferent to everything happening around them. They exclude themselves from all relations to their environment. If they could still move around, they did so in slow motion, without bending their knees. They shivered since their body temperature fell below 98.7 degrees.497
Finally,
In a final stage of emaciation, their skeletons were enveloped by flaccid, parchment-like sheaths of skin, edema had formed on their feet and thighs, their posterior muscles had collapsed. Their skulls seemed elongated; their noses dripped constantly, mucus running down their chins. Their eyeballs had sunk deep into their sockets; their gaze was glazed. Their limbs moved slowly, hesitantly, almost mechanically. They exuded a penetrating, acrid odor; sweat, urine, liquid feces trickled down their legs. The rags that covered their freezing frames were full of lice; their skin was covered with scabies. Most suffered from diarrhea. They ate anything they could lay their hands on – moldy bread, cheese wriggling with worms, raw bits of turnip, garbage fished from the bins.498
Along with the physiological changes, the Muselmänner underwent psychological changes as well. A number of scholars and researchers suggest that their mental condition deteriorated to the point of autism. They lost their will to live and became pure bodies:
Their psychological and mental condition has been interpreted as a loss of the will to live, an enigmatic apathy and surrender to fate. Psychopathology talks about
“affective anesthesia,” an “annihilation,” a radical destruction of the meaning of life.
[…] The mental and psychological changes to which the Muselmann was subject were closely linked with physical emaciation and the destruction of social relations.
Immiseration implies a simultaneous destruction of the social sphere, the vita activa and vita mentalis.499
In the end, “they were no longer the masters of their own bodies. The soma collapsed into its component parts. The unity of bodily existence was dissolved.”500 In his 1943 essay “Individual and Mass Behavior in extreme Situations,” Bruno Bettelheim chronicles his one-year stay at the two biggest concentration camps for political prisoners, dachau and Buchenwald. One of the goals of the camp was to “break
the prisoners as individuals and to change them into docile masses from which no individual or group act of resistance could arise.”501 The camp rules and structure aimed to change the prisoners’ personalities to the point where they became objects useful for the nazi state. The result was a form of detachment and rejection of reality that evolved as a defense mechanism. “The prisoners lived, like children, only in the immediate present; they lost the feeling for the sequence of time, they became unable to plan for the future or to give up immediate pleasure satisfactions to gain greater ones in the near future.”502 eventually, “A feeling of utter indifference swept the prisoners.
They did not care whether the guards shot them; they were indifferent to acts of torture committed by the guards. The guards had no longer any authority, the spell of fear and death was broken.”503 In the end, they became like autistic children, completely detached from reality and enclosed in their own world. “What was external reality for the prisoner is for the autistic child his inner reality. each ends up, though for different reasons, with a parallel experience of the world.”504 Giorgio Agamben writes about the process:
Just as autistic children totally ignored reality in order to retreat into an imaginary world, so the prisoners who became Muselmänner substituted delirious fantasies for the relations of causality to which they no longer paid any attention. In the semi-crossed-eyed gaze, hesitant walk, and stubborn repetitiveness and silences of Joey, Marcie, Laurie, and the other children of the school, Bettelheim sought a possible solution to the enigma that the Muselmann had confronted him with in dachau. nevertheless, for Bettelheim, the concept of “extreme situation” continued to imply a moral and political connotation; for him, the Muselmann could never be reduced to a clinical category. Because what was at stake in the extreme situation was “to remain alive and unchanged as a person” (Bettelheim 1960: 158), the Muselmann in some sense marked the moving threshold in which man passed into non-man and in which clinical diagnosis passed into anthropological analysis.505
The Muselmann existed outside of understanding, outside of ethics, and outside of definitions: “At times a medical figure or an ethical category, at times a political limit or an anthropological concept, the Muselman is an indefinite being in whom not only humanity and non-humanity, but also vegetative existence and relation, physiology and ethics, medicine and politics, and life and death continuously pass though each other.”506 Agamben adds: “The Muselman is a limit figure of a special kind, in which not only categories such as dignity and respect but even the very idea of an ethical limit lose their meaning.”507 Muselmänner were generally ignored by the other prisoners, as they testified to some horrible limits on survival:
To survive as a man not as a walking corpse, as a debased and degraded but still human being, one had first and foremost to remain informed and aware of what made up one’s personal point of no return, the point beyond which one would never, under any circumstances, give in to the oppressors, even if it meant risking and losing one’s life. It meant being aware that if one survived at the price of overarching this point
one would be holding on to a life that had lost all meaning. It would mean surviving – not with a lowered self-respect, but without any.508
Muselmänner often invited abuse, as “[t]heir lethargy was frequently mistaken for laziness, or a form of passive resistance against the orders of the supervisors and prisoner functionaries. […] Their apathy was provocative; it stirred the rage of their tormentors.”509 The prisoners avoided them so as not to be reminded of what they themselves might become: “The prisoners wrote them off – in order not to have to write themselves off. To watch the Muselmann die was to preview one’s own dying, a dying that was more frightening than death.”510 As Agamben put it: “The sight of Muselmänner is an absolutely new phenomenon, unbearable to human eyes.”511 Or as Wolfgang Wolf framed it: “Like the pile of corpses, the Muselmänner document the total triumph of power over the human being.”512
In writing about the Muselmänner openly, Borowski crossed a line in Polish literature that wasn’t supposed to be crossed. In 1961, a year before the premiere of Akropolis, a Polish medical journal finally published the first-ever account of the Auschwitz experience on the human body and mind. The journal issue, devoted solely to the figure of the Muselmann, broke the taboo around the issue.513 The same year, Bogdan Wojdowski published an article on Borowski, calling him the one true and honest chronicler of his times, and suggesting that it is with Borowski’s text that real analysis of Auschwitz should begin.514 In fact, Wojdowski begins the article by stating definitively that contemporary literature starts with Borowski’s poem “Pieśń,” the very poem quoted by Grotowski on the poster for Akropolis.515 Grzegorz niziołek notes that both of these events had enormous effect on the public debate around Auschwitz, and both of them took place a year before Grotowski began rehearsing Akropolis.516 In 1970, Antoni Kępiński published yet another milestone article titled “KZ-Syndrome,” which summarizes his ten years of research on Auschwitz survivors and the figure of the Muselmann.517 In his article, Kępiński makes a number of points that shed light on the long-term psychological consequences of surviving Auschwitz. First, Kępiński notes that survivors tend not to form deep, intimate bonds with anyone other than other survivors. They move through life as if wearing a mask, always detached from people and events around them: “In normal contacts with people, they prefer superficial relationships, hiding behind the mask of social conventions, unable and afraid to get close to anyone.”518 Having seen what the human being is capable of when the veneer of civilization is removed, they don’t trust or engage with anyone who hasn’t shared their experiences. The only time they come alive is when they talk about the camp:
They come alive. Their eyes begin to sparkle as if they suddenly became younger, turned back to the times of the concentration camp. everything becomes alive and fresh again in their memories. They can’t escape the magic circle of the camp life. In this world, there are things horrible, things beyond human understanding, but there are also beautiful things, the lowest and highest of human nature: nobility and dignity alongside ruthlessness and horror. They got to know the human being from all sides and perhaps, because of that, they constantly wonder who he is.519
All of the survivors, though they may suffer a myriad of different ailments, share one characteristic: they all seem to exist in a different world. The detachment, the otherness of the survivors, Kępiński suggests, comes from very particular aspects of their experience:
First, camp provided an unbearable range of emotions: one was as much shocked by the brutality as by the unconditional kindness. Second, one underwent an extreme experience of one’s psycho-physical oneness. In everyday life, a normal person can distinguish between his psyche and his soma. In the camp life, however, such differentiation became impossible. In that sense, the experience of the camp can be compared to that which psychoanalysis diagnoses as a regression to childhood when the body is the site of one’s whole psychological life. The final result is descent towards autism as an attempt to establish one focal point that would mobilize one’s survival instinct, permitting one to negate all mechanisms of the external reality.520
To a smaller or larger degree, all prisoners underwent a similar form of what Kępiński calls “camp autism.” In fact, it was a necessary “adaptation” to camp life; one simply couldn’t survive without it. The prisoner, Kępiński suggests, withdrew into himself and became autistic in order to survive; it was the only way he could protect his psyche:
by eliminating its connection to the outside world and becoming solely body. The most extreme case of camp autism was the Muselmann, whose condition reached a state of “woodening,” a complete internal indifference. Kępiński’s article was the first significant medical assessment of the camp life, and of the psychological reality of a Muselmann. The article was widely read and discussed. niziołek suggests that, besides Borowski’s writings, the 1961 issue of Przegląd Lekarski and Kępiński’s 1970 article were primary influences on Grotowski’s Akropolis. In fact, niziołek argues, we can effectively ask “whether Grotowski used the extreme and shocking historical situation to explore and demonstrate the validity of his methods, or vice versa, the extreme experience became, in fact, a basis for his anthropology.”521 There are ethical and formal issues at stake in the niziołek question. To put it differently, in Adorno’s terms, is form a function of history in Akropolis, or is history a function of form?
Akropolis is the exploration of the elements of the historical, psychosomatic reality of Auschwitz’s Muselmann, as described by the medical studies of that time: the autistic condition experienced by the Muselmann; the psychological detachment felt by the survivors; and finally, their “coming to life” to tell their stories, much like Wyspiański’s mythical figures. In many of his writings and interviews, Grotowski stresses the actor’s need to search for authentic emotions: “We wish to confront our art without costly devices or commercial accoutrements. We want to work through our own impulses and instincts, through our own inner beings and through our own individual responses.”522 Part of that search is what Grotowski calls “an absolute act,” the moment in which the actor becomes one with himself; his body and psyche function on the same level, thus there is no distance between psyche and soma, thought and action. In a sense, the actor’s body, like the Auschwitz prisoner’s, becomes the site of his whole psychic life: psyche collapsed into soma while the actor becomes one with himself. The goal
of Grotowski’s acting training was thus “to eliminate from the creative process the resistances and obstacles caused by one’s own organism, both physical and psychic (the two forming a whole).”523 Or, as Jennifer Levy puts it, “the absolute act” is “the crux of an actor’s art through which one reveals oneself completely to another (the spectator) in a self-reflexive act that does not distinguish between character and self.”524 eugenio Barba calls it “a non-duality in which the object does not differ from the subject. […]
This is the Perfect Wisdom, the enlightenment that can be attained through via negativa, denying worldly categories and phenomena to the point of denying the self and, by so doing, reaching the Void.”525 In a number of ways, in the moment of the “absolute act,” the actor approaches, or rather mimics, the autistic condition of the Auschwitz Muselmann. Grotowski himself defines the concept of “absolute act” in his 1969 article
“Theatre Versus Ritual,” in which he writes that during the absolute act, the distance between thought and feeling, body and soul, collapses. This is, Grotowski writes, what happens in the final scene of Akropolis:
The absolute act happens in the final scene of Akropolis, when the prisoners all go to the crematorium. When the absolute act takes place, then the actor, the human being, moves beyond the temporal to which we all are confined in our everyday life. The distinction between thought and feeling, body and soul, consciousness and subconsciousness, seeing and impulse, sex and reason disappears. The actor who accomplishes this becomes whole with himself. […] He is no longer acting.526
However, modeling the acting process on the condition of the Muselmänner raises a number of ethical and theoretical questions. In reviewing the show, a number of critics touched upon some of the issues, offended by what they perceived to be an “acting exercise” serving as representation of the horrors of Auschwitz. In an open letter to Grotowski published in the New York Times, eric Bentley, for example, accuses Grotowski of reducing the experience of the Holocaust to an abstract theatrical exercise: “your version of Auschwitz in Acropolis is over-esthetic and therefore distressingly abstract.
[…] In new york, thousands of whose families lost relatives in the extermination camps, you show us an Auschwitz that is of technical interest to theater students!”527 Likewise, John Simon found the entire viewing experience “repulsive.” Simon writes:
A little reflection will show that all this, apart from its obvious ugliness, is nonsense.
For if the prisoners were enacting visions that are supposed to fill them with hope and a sense of the transcendent, they would not portray them as ghastly travesties.
If, on the other hand, the prisoners are jeering at their cultural and spiritual heritage, their actions become a grim charade so nihilistic that no one would bother enacting it in the shadow of death. Grotowski has confused – inadvertently or deliberately – the horrible experiences of prisoners with their hopeful fantasies; the result is not harrowing enough to convey the death-camp experience, and sheds no new light on it; even less is it able to express the persistence of human dignity and imagination, for which task it lacks poetry. […] For me, Akropolis produced only one effect – of studied repulsiveness, which made the incineration of these creatures come none too soon.528
For Simon, Grotowski’s production not only failed to communicate the experience of
For Simon, Grotowski’s production not only failed to communicate the experience of