The Muselmann at the Water Cooler

A survivor of concentration camps and the Death March, Eli Pfefferkorn looks back on his Holocaust and post-Holocaust experiences to compare patterns of human behavior in extremis with those of ordinary life. What he finds is that the concentration camp Muselmann, who has lost his hunger for life and is thus shunned by his fellow inmates on the soup line, bears an eerie resemblance to an office employee who has fallen from grace and whose coworkers avoid spending time with him at the water cooler. Though the circumstances are unfathomably far apart, the human response to their situations is triggered by self-preservation rather than by calculated evil. By juxtaposing these two separate worlds, Pfefferkorn demonstrates that ultimately the human condition has not changed significantly since Cain slew Abel and the Athenians sentenced Socrates.

Eli Pfefferkorn (PhD Brown University) has served as Director of Research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, worked as a reviewer for the Literary Supplement of Haaretz, and edited the periodical “Hebrew Literature in Translation.” He has worked as a professor at Haifa and Tel-Aviv Universities and has been a guest lecturer at Brown University. He is also the recipient of a Fulbright-Hays Scholarship.