Muselmann—Kippensammler Muselmann—Cigarette Butt Collector
Origins of Muselman: In 1938 a German circus named “Krone” (crown) arrived in Cieszyn [a town in Poland where Kulisiewicz lived at the time]. In Polish it was called “Korona.” From among the performers and artists I was attracted to a 17-year-old performer on horseback named Alicja N. As it was the period of summer vacation, I found some excuse to leave home and began traveling with “Korona.” I worked very hard hoisting tent masts, pasting circus posters, slipping little articles regarding the circus into the local papers—anything to be close to Alicja. Strongly urged by the girl, the director allowed me to perform in several shows when one of the clowns broke his leg. I was the main clown’s “assistant.” I would lie down on the sawdust, like a corpse, while the boss would beat me on the head with an inflated rubber club. I’d then get up whistling, out of the blue, “Czardasz Montiego,” and afterward a simply idiotic, unrefined couplet called “Szanghai” (Shanghai) would begin. Later, in 1940, when in Sachsenhausen I once again put on a “clown’s costume”—this time a tragic version of it—I was obsessed with that circus song. I thought to myself, the camp is some sort of dark, perverted circus of sadists and miscreants. But here they don’t hit you with inflated rubber clubs. Fellow prisoners looked like striped clowns, on whom an entire menagerie was unleashed. There was no sawdust—only cold dirt. No one had to pretend to be dead. — Aleksander Kulisiewicz Music adapted from circus tune “Szanghai” and “Zulejka” (M. Oppenheim). For more information, refer to the Aleksander Kulisiewicz collection of sound recordings in RG-91 or RG-55 at USHMM.
Aleksander (Alexander) Kulisiewicz (1918-1982) was born in Kraków, Poland in 1918. He was a law student in German-occupied Poland when, in October 1939, he was denounced for antifascist writings, arrested by the Gestapo, and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, near Berlin. An amateur singer and songwriter, Kulisiewicz composed 54 songs during more than five years of imprisonment at Sachsenhausen. After Russian troops liberated the camp on May 2, 1945, he remembered his songs, as well as those learned from fellow prisoners, dictating hundreds of pages of text to his attending nurse at a Polish infirmary. The majority of Kulisiewicz’s songs are darkly humorous ballads concerning the sadistic treatment of prisoners. Performed at secret gatherings, imbued with biting wit and subversive attitude, these songs helped inmates cope with their hunger and despair, raised morale, and offered hope of survival. Beyond this spiritual and psychological purport, Kulisiewicz also considered the camp song to be a form of documentation. “In the camp,” he wrote, “I tried under all circumstances to create verses that would serve as direct poetical reportage. I used my memory as a living archive. Friends came to me and dictated their songs.” In the 1950s, Kulisiewicz began amassing a private collection of music, poetry, and artwork created by camp prisoners, gathering this material through correspondence and hundreds of hours of recorded interviews. In the 1960s, he inaugurated a series of public recitals of his repertoire of camp songs, and issued several recordings. Kulisiewicz’s major project, a monumental study of the cultural life of the camps and the vital role music played as a means of survival for many prisoners, remained unpublished at the time of his death. He toured both Europe and the United States performing concerts of his works and the works of other Holocaust survivors until about 1980. He died in Kraków, Poland, on March 12, 1982. His archive is the largest extant collection of music composed in the camps.
Kulisiewicz’s self-described “tragic parody” vividly evokes his encounter with a camp Muselmann, an emaciated inmate who had lost the will to live. According to Kulisiewicz, such prisoners were sent to Stehkommando, where they were forced to stand for hours on end in the latrine as punishment for no longer being able to work. Kulisiewicz first sang “Muselmann” for his friends in Cell Block 65 toward the end of July 1940. (Like Kulisiewicz, the protagonist of “Muselmann” was a political prisoner whose uniform, as noted in the song, was branded with a “red triangle badge.”) Kulisiewicz added further verses during the fall of 1943, after hundreds of Italian prisoners had been transported to Sachsenhausen. In performance, Kulisiewicz dramatized the song with a bizarre would-be “Muselmann dance,” improvising on wobbly legs a one-step, a Lambeth Walk, and a boisterous “Cossack dance.” As he relates: The scene was intended to look pitiful. At hop, hop! hi-ho!, the madness became more pronounced: knee-bends, flapping elbows, high-pitched squeals of yippee, yahoo! At the words I’m dancing!, a Muselmann-like oblivion was depicted by an angelically idiotic expression that suddenly contracted into a look of utter despair. The singer then returned to the pandemonium of the camp: a Muselmann slowly sinking from a crouch to a kneeling position, head hung as if severed, a sob caught in his throat. For the finale, he stopped moving entirely, as if unconscious.