The Transition of German Culture to National Socialism (Part A)
The Body and the Body Politics as Symptom and Metaphor in the Transition of German Culture to National Socialism
Source: Wilfried van der Will "The Body and the Body Politics as Symptom and Metaphor in the Transition of German Culture to National Socialism" in The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architectureand Film in the Third Reich, B. Taylor& W.v.d. Will (eds.) (Hampshire, 1990), pp. 14-52.
Responses to Modernity and the Rise of National Socialism
National Socialism may in some respects be the result of peculiarly German developments, of Germany having travelled down a Sonderweg (idiosyncratic route), as some historians have argued. The chief concern of this chapter, however, is to trace within National Socialist society the symptoms of a break-away from Modernity to Post-Modernity. In other words, it is proposed to "read" in National Socialism the relatively early manifestations not of a purely national, but of a European cultural transition. It is set within a new political grammar, which marginalised the "modern" one of class struggle. The Germany of the 1930s signalled a departure from traditional class politics, for it is impossible to explain the power of National Socialism in Germany in terms of conflicting economic and class interests. The nature of Fascist politics, while ready to accommodate and exploit such interests, was essentially anchored in an organic concept of society, expressed in symbolic representation and cultural hierarchy. It could therefore build its support on a wide sociological stratum of voters and, once in power, was obliged to no particular class fraction. The victory of National Socialism in the Germany of the 1930s meant the replacement of a political grammar based on economic precepts and class struggle by one based on the symbolism of hierarchical integration. The latter implied ideological and racial exclusion and presupposed a re-feudalisation of social perception. This is clearly illustrated in the painting and drawing of the time, for example in the nostalgic portrayal of pre-industrial village life as an allegorically visualised source of instant rejuvenation, and in the heraldic design for a Luftwaffe officers' mess signifying the defence of community. National Socialism gained mass acceptance because it promised to overcome the alienation brought on individuals by modern capitalism and instead transform society to become a large integrated community. In reality, of course, National Socialism intensified the secular fate of alienation to the point of leading society into destruction. Yet we must ask whether the yearning for a socially more integrated community, on which the propaganda of National Socialism had played, does not survive today in many, typically non-Fascist, forms of Post-Modernist protest.
Such propositions call for a reconsideration of the context of cultural history out of which National Socialism arose. In trying to understand the degeneration of a sophisticated Central European state into barbarity, a number of diverse factors may spring to mind. For example, many Germans wanted a fundamental revision of, if not revenge for, the Treaty of Versailles, which had concluded the hostilities of World War I without laying any foundations for a possible reconciliation between the adversaries. Furthermore, a large percentage of the German electorate at the end of the Weimar Republic was ready to follow a leader who promised work at a time when there were over six million unemployed and when many more had only a subsistence income from part-time or temporary employment. Such voters came less from the ranks of the unemployed themselves than from the lower middle classes who felt the threat of proletarianisation and a collapse of law and order. Many people, traditionally accustomed to the ideological and psychological securities afforded by the clear stratifications of an authoritarian state, became disorientated. They were unsettled first by a period of revolutionary upsurge (1919-21) which followed the defeat in war and later by the extreme pluralism of political parties, each fighting a hopeless battle for dominance in an increasingly confused and chaotic political discourse. Others abhorred not only the ideological disunity of the nation, but also its social division into have and have-not, into the leisured chic and the workers, into privileged and underprivileged classes.
Although Hitler never attained more than 43.9% of the vote in a free general election, he appeared to many to be the answer to all these problems, for we have to assume that the plebiscites he held after he had attained power did in fact produce large acclamatory majorities, even if the final results were manipulated by the Nazi propaganda machine. 1 As long as there was peace Hitler was not a dictator who had to live behind an impenetrable shield of security men. Nor was National Socialism a political and ideological creed, which fed merely. On its sectarian delusions. Hitler denied these occult roots of his ideological education in Vienna 2 precisely because his political instinct told him that only the exploitation of "respectable" cultural traditions would confer political legitimisation in the eyes of the "broad masses" both on him and on his movement. After all, National Socialism had to provide what to many were plausible responses to the confusing reality of lived experience at that time. It could not do so without incorporating in its culture a perception of society that had a long European heritage. I shall attempt to show that the attractiveness of one of its central propaganda motifs, the vision of a united Volk (nation) (also used in compound nouns like Nationalvolk, Staatsvolk, Volksstaat, Volkskoerper), derived from older, distinctively anti-modernist arguments that were European in origin though German in inflection. They were nourished by venerable ideological traditions, which could also be traced in other countries, notably Britain. Furthermore, I shall demonstrate that these traditions hold utopian attractions, which have by no means lost their force even in the "Post-Modernist" culture of present-day Western societies. For the utopian anti-Modernism, on which National Socialist propaganda and art were founded, can be seen to suffuse modern culture and is re-emerging, whether ironically or accompanied by ideological ardour, in the iconography and architectural imagination of the present.
In order to explain the events of the Nazi era in Germany historians have increasingly felt compelled to look beyond pure political analysis. They have sought to unravel the dominant life styles, the hegemonic ideological currents, the shifts in the social composition and the social psychology of the German people since the beginning of the twentieth century and have tried to follow a number of threads going back hundreds of years into German history. There can be little doubt that long-standing traditions of authoritarianism, nationalistic myth-making and anti-Semitic prejudice were indeed absorbed into Nazi propaganda. The danger of such social and cultural history is that deterministic developments are perceived where there are none and that special characteristics are highlighted which were by no means typical of Germany alone. There is, for example, no convincing evidence that certain stock features, which are supposed to constitute the "German character" are in fact specific to Germany. For example, anti-Semitic intolerance was far more militant and widespread in Poland, the Ukraine and the Austro-Hungarian Empire than in the German Reich. As for nationalist, chauvinist and imperialist sentiments, they were extremely strong in all the major nation states of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe. It is difficult to prove that attitudes of passive obedience were noticeably more marked in Germany than they were in other European societies. If Hitler is nevertheless to be regarded as the culmination of such traditions, then we must search for manifestations in twentieth-century German culture, themselves pointing back into European history, which indicated such pronounced reactions against modern developments that they were capable of pulling Germany in crisis in a significantly different direction from that taken by other Western societies. Accordingly, within the limits of this chapter, a set of intense and inimical responses to modernity will be traced which give evidence of extensive nostalgia for a vividly imagined traditional, "organic" society, free from the alienation of capitalist industrialism. This will help us to understand how Nazism could appropriate the best parts of an illustrious German cultural tradition. At the same time it will explain how attitudes that were by no means exclusive to Germany could, there, form a distinctive and seductive ideological mixture which in turn prepared the ground for a policy of murderous extremes.
Clearly, we cannot attempt here a comprehensive study of the cultural dynamics within which incipient changes of attitude, the political radicalisation of the 1920s, and the re-fabrication of tradition by National Socialism led in the 1930s to mass allegiance to a ruthless dictator. We shall instead have to content ourselves with the study of one aspect within the sketch of a larger picture. By concentrating on some powerfully suggestive images and symptomatic movements since the turn of the twentieth century, which were either completely absent from other European societies or relegated to marginality there, it is possible to reveal deep-seated yearnings that in Germany demanded political attention and that called for a rhetoric targeted at the dissatisfied mass. The images both of nudity and the organic cohesion of society, which we have in mind were neither necessarily of National Socialist provenance nor could they be considered suitable material for the programmatic pronouncements of a mass party. Yet they carried messages and dreams of social organisation with the broadest appeal. They represented a store house of utopian promises that in the 1920s and before World War I was being raided by groupings from the far Left to the extreme Right. The latter was able to use such images within the manipulatory network of Fascist ideology and skilfully popularise them in a period of economic, social and cultural crisis; through them was suggested a necessary return to heroic values and a communally integrated life. In other words, distinctive elements within German tradition served to negate the present and were used to create a myth of the past that could feed the convictions of majorities and influence their attitudes and decisions regarding contemporary politics.
The Crisis of Modernity
The long-term factors, which were operative within the crisis of the 1920s could be found everywhere in Europe, rooted as they were in the secular transformation from a traditional authoritarian society to one of democratic pluralism. During the inter-war years the evolutionary character of this transformation faltered in Germany. Until then Germany had, with considerable lag behind Britain, embarked on the European transition to modernity. This process, which at times showed distinctly revolutionary features, can be traced over three centuries. It includes the post-Renaissance victories of modern science over superstition and medieval scholasticism, the disintegration of feudal-absolutist authority and universal religious faith, the development of global commerce, the emergence of manufacture and the evolution of an industrial capitalist society, large-scale urbanisation and the replacement of communalist attitudes by bourgeois individualism. These developments necessitated changes in the existing political structures, which would make them more responsive to the plural interests of growing mass populations.
The foundation of modern political parties and the splitting of society into party-political groupings, the growth of the print media and their use by different ideological factions in the Kaiserreich and, finally, the crescendo of intensely nationalistic state propaganda were typical historical features that found their parallels elsewhere in Europe. World War I was the outcome of a situation where competing nationalisms had patently grown too big for their boots. In Germany, which had been pushed into hurried industrialisation over a single generation after the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), the transition to modernity was then significantly accelerated again, perhaps over accelerated, by the abolition of the monarchy and the introduction of a republican, liberal-democratic constitution in 1919. The momentum of social change, still not fast enough for sections of the urban proletariat who had little to lose, proved too fast for the majority of the conservative middle and lower-middle classes, who felt the loss of social prestige and material income and clung to ideas of a more traditional social order. The process of transition first produced frenzied party-political, ideological and social contradictions in the Weimar state and was then halted-though not in all respects-by the emergence of National Socialism and the establishment of the Hitler dictatorship, only to be completed in the Federal Republic of the post-Adenauer period and in the post-Honecker period of the German Democratic Republic. The demagogy of the Nazi movement and of Hitler in particular, however unconvincing it may have been to large sections of the electorate-the majority of workers, of Catholics and of the educated/liberal middle classes - was assured of ever greater public approval the more it could project the vision of an undivided nation. The abolition of all party-political and ideological divisions within a volatile multi-party state and the promise of forging the German people into one united body energised by the same "blood" was a counsel of despair, but it held considerable attractions. Notions of the "body" - both in its specific sense as the material shape of human beings and in its wider meaning as a metaphorical designation for the nation in the sense of the "body politic" - had been gaining steadily in importance since the dawn of the twentieth century.
It was at this time in Germany that a society with an increasingly modern class structure appeared, together with its attendant social tensions and internal contradictions. These were clearly articulated in the political, economic and cultural spheres. The German parliament, the Reichstag, may have been overshadowed by the power of the Kaiser, his chancellor and a traditionally authoritarian government bureaucracy, but it steadily increased in political weight and, with the spread at least of male universal suffrage, gave expression to a plurality of political interests and representation to different social classes and class factions. A scenario of conflict emerged which became even more dominant in the Weimar Republic. No superior authority, such as that which before 1918 had staked its claims in terms of "divine right" (Gottesgnadentum), could now override political divisions. Germany exhibited the typical fissures of a secular society, in which religious creeds were on the decline and numerous Weltanschauungen (ideologies) and divergent political programs competed with each other. Even the university sciences were no longer considered to be free of ideology. Significantly, a scholar as eminent as Max Weber felt compelled to devote several treatises to the distinctions between social science, which was concerned primarily with facts and their location in an historical context, and ideology, which involved beliefs about ultimate values and their relatedness to political action 3. University chairs in Weltanschauungslehre (theory of ideology) began to appear-notably based on the work by Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler and Romano Guardini, with memories of the book entitled Weltanschauungslehre (1908) by the much earlier Heinrich Gomperz-because it was hoped that this would promote 'mutual acquaintance and understanding among the races, classes and parties within the political life of this country' 4. Philosophers as well as writers expressed their disquiet over "value pluralism", "value relativism", "the decay of values" and "nihilism". Theories about the "sociology of knowledge" which challenged all illusions of objectivity became fashionable. In other words, dissonance, not just in musical composition -where they were revolutionary-but in ordinary cognition became a basic experience. Josef Goebbels was right to stress in an article of 1935 that the reaction against the confusing democratic pluralism and the internal dissensions of the Weimar Republic was a major element in the acceptance of National Socialism by a majority of the German people: 'Never before had particularism of every kind revelled in such orgies at a time when we badly needed internal unity 5.
Whether in the intellectually challenging cosmopolitan environment of the universities or in the rural backwoods, whose idyllic retardation was daily disturbed by the metropolitan media, all sections of society in the 1920s were drawn into a politicised contemporary which manifested itself in ever greater participation rates at elections. These shot up from an already respectable 75.696 in February 1928 to 88.796 in March 1933. Feelings of alienation, of being let down by society, were in the late 1920s not confined to the modern wage-dependent labourer, nor to the sensitive literary avant-garde of the educated bourgeoisie from Rainer Maria Rilke to Gottfried Benn. Instead, they became the central psychological, intellectual and social experience of members of all classes. Similarly, the economic crisis broadened. Earlier, it had mainly been the small savers of the lower and professional middle classes who had lost their money as a result of the hyper-inflation of 1923. Now, the Black Friday crash of 1929 affected shareholders, share dealers and financiers as well, at the same time worsening further the position of white and blue-collar labour. Disaffection with the existing political system became so widespread that, from the elections in September 1930 through three further general elections up until March 1933, a steadily increasing majority in the Reichstag joined in a shrill chorus of extremist propaganda in favour of abolishing parliamentary democracy.
The Utopian Content of Nudism and Fascist Corporatism
It was in this situation that a rhetoric gained ground which celebrated the return to rural simplicity and close-knit community pre-dating industrial civilisation. The appeal was to the harmony of the body as a metaphor of social balance, natural inequality and co-operation in a complex organism. At the very time when the designs of the Bauhaus and the New Objectivity in art and literature were achieving creative triumphs of Modernist culture, the most violent moment of an anti-modernist backlash was being prepared in politics, supported by the extensive spread of an anti-modernist mentality in large sections of the population. This is neither to say that Modernism actually breathed its last the instant that National Socialism came to power, nor that Hitler's policies stopped the forward march of industrialisation. Yet the utopian visions of organic wholeness, which were played on by Nazi propaganda campaigns drew on anti-modernist protests such as those organised since before World War I by adherents of the nudity cult, the many branches of the neo-romantic Buendische Jugend (the German Youth Movement), and right-wing publishing houses with influential journals such as Die Tat (The Deed-Eugen Diederichs Verlag, Jena), Deutschlands Erneuerung (Germany's Renewal-J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, Munich) and Deutsches Volkstum (German Folk-Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg) 6. All these groupings, which gained their clearest articulation in writers associated with the "Conservative Revolution", were more or less fiercely elitist, hoping for a Diktatur der Geistigen (dictatorship of the intellectual/spiritual elite) and believing in a special cultural mission of Germany. They sought to promote Ganzheit (wholeness), Einheit (unity) and Bindung (social and ideological incorporation) against Individualismus (individualism), Weltanschuungsvielfalt (ideological pluralism) and Fortschrittsdenken (idea of steady progress). While these were typical right-wing, proto-fascist responses to modernity, they were attractive to all segments of German society, whose respective sense of social distinction and ideological division became intensified at the same time. Thus, on the left too there was an ardent search for incorporation and collective commitment amongst the members of the socialist worker culture organisations, despite the internationalism of their outlook. The novels and theories of the communist cultural bolshevist reflected the all-encompassing capacity and wisdom of the Volk (the nation, the ordinary people). Communist and socialist youth organisations were founded which emulated the bourgeois youth movement, the symbolism of its banners and styles of clothing and the practices of exploring the countryside and living together in tent colonies. Nudism too burst out of its bourgeois enclaves. By the late 1920s the lure of the nudist arcadia had extended its influence across the best part of the ideological spectrum and thereby furnished clear proof that the naked body could become the focus of reformist, educational and aesthetic ideas in quite divergent ideological camps. It was a telling symptom of the degree of material uncertainty and mental anxiety then prevailing that human beings felt compelled to return to the most basic point of orientation, the body, in order to redefine their perception of society and their relation to it. Far from providing any guidance towards "pure", "natural" or "original" values, however, the body turned out to be a chameleon, reflecting the different colours of quite diverse ideological environments.
The cult of the naked body had its origins in Germany around the turn of the twentieth century. The German FKK clubs-the literal translation of Freikoerperkultur is "bare (or open-air) body culture" - from which naturism took its cue, retain even now some of the high-minded ideals associated with nudism in the first third of the century. These ideals appear to have successfully defied the suspicions of debauchery, which the congregation of naked men and women initially kindled everywhere in petit-bourgeois police forces. The nudists' erstwhile campaigning zeal has today lost its provocative edge, having been smothered in reluctant acceptance or active tolerance of nudity on beaches, near lakes, In naturist resorts and, in Germany, even in public city parks. Nudity in the sun has become one of the regular enticements of the package holiday industry. Idyllic corners of sun-belt Europe, governed until recently by carefully circumscribed moralities of provincial decency, have in the 1970s and 1980s imperiously been invaded by the pale-skinned, money-bearing sun-seekers from the North. Yet even in this thoroughly commercialised environment nudity still seems to radiate to some extent the utopian equality of human beings and the dream of a re-union with nature, both of which are played on by the advertising industries. Nudity could and can also suggest the purity of life before it became depraved by the sophistication, cultural corruption, social disunity and decadence of overcrowded urbanised civilisations.
References:
1. Cf. I. Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, London, 1985.
2. The striking similarities between some of Hitler's ideas and those of Joerg Lanz von Liebenfels and Guido von List have been impressively researched by Wilfried Daim, Der Mann der Hitler die Ideen gab. Die sektiererischen Grundlagen des Nationalsozialismus, Vienna, Cologne, Graz, 1985 (2nd edn) and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism. The Aristophists of Austria and Germany 1890-1935, Wellingborough, 1985.
3. Cf. M. Weber, 'Science as a Vocation', in P. Lassman and I. Velody, Max Weber's Science as a Vocation; London, 1989.
4. M. Scheler, 'Sociology and the Study and Formulation of Weltanschauung', ibid., p 91.
5. J. Goebbels, 'Der Fuehrer als Staatsmann', in Cigaretten/Bilderdienst (ed), Adolf Hitler, Bilder aus dem Leben des Fuehrers, Hamburg-Bahrenfeld, 1936, p 45.
6. Cf. G. D. Stark, Entrepreneurs of Ideology. Neo-conservative Publishers in Germany, 1890-1933, Chapel Hill (North Carolina), 1981.
