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Part of the project of reweaving the threads of the history of the Third Reich, the essay discusses the complex relation between the testimony of the victims and their body as an epistemic source of the witnessing. On a theoretical bases constructed with the help of Shoah memoirs – by Primo Levi, Jean Améry, Jorge Semprun, Robert Antelme, and others, the paper challenges the notion of the witness as a speaker, a narrator; instead, it treats the kind of victim that since Auschwitz has been known as “a Muselmann” as an integral witness. It is the body of the survivor that constitutes integral testimony; it fills a testimonial lacuna. The presence of the Muselmann is testifiable, and it can replace the memoir by the body as the repository of the event. When the body translates into the corpus of writing, survivor testimony is perceived as incomplete so long as the Muselmann is perceived as the other. The lacuna in survivor narratives is testimony from inside the experience of the Muselmann.
June 2009: Dr. Manuela Consonni is a Fellow and Section Director in Scholion, the Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies. She wrote a monograph on the memory of the deportations and extermination in Italy between 1945 and1985 (Magnes University Press), based on literary and memoir sources. She published several articles on Jewish-Christian Relations after World War II, on memory and identity issues, and on the question of gender. Her research and teaching fields are general and Jewish history and literary and cultural studies, including study of the Holocaust in Italy in a comparative European context, that is, in the context of Spanish, French, and German history and literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cultural history, gender theory, and film studies. Her current research project is “Bracketing Death: Philosophical and Anthropological Analysis of Death and the History of the Shoah.” She is a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Italia -- On the History and the Literature of Italian Jewry.
