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 a figure able 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. Appearing to incarnate the threshold where life passed into death, the observed 'absence' left in witness narratives thereby comes across as being testimony from inside the experience of these Muselmänner. Yet, what is ubiquitously overlooked in such analyses is that the Muselmann primarily functions as a metaphor to render the anonymous, absent dead legible in language. Ignoring this risks instrumentalizing the Muselmann which endangers the metaphor becoming shorthand for something more generic – obfuscating the reality that Muselmänner signify real victims of the Holocaust.
However, all metaphors contain a certain potential for semantic flexibility. Cannot the Muselmann'sghost-like abilities to pollute rigid dichotomies therefore be approached productively and more ethically when re-focalizing him as a ghostly entity in testimonial literature? By examining three passages in Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz and After, this paper centers around the question that if the Muselmann metaphor 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 which are hitherto overlooked? Constituting an ethical and an interpretive undertaking, this re-focalization simultaneously allows one to speak with the Muselmann and enables these anonymous victims to manifest themselves anew as haunting forces through the literary testimony.
