Scenographies of suicide: Hitler and his victims

Writings on the most extreme concentration camps offer a number of explanations for low rates of suicide. Drawing on philosophical anthropology, this article argues that the categories of 'worldlessness' - deprivation of the means of keeping reality at a distance - and temporal perversion - reduction of the capacity for retention and protention - offer the most general way of formulating the camps' inhumanity and of bringing these explanations together. Following Blumenberg, it is argued that these categories may also be used to make sense of the world orientation of Adolf Hitler.