The Transition of German Culture to National Socialism (Part D)
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, Architecture and Film in the Third Reich, B. Taylor& W.v.d. Will (eds.) (Hampshire, 1990), pp. 14-52.
Once the ideological trends that supported such ideas had triumphed, proletarian nudism, along with the entire worker culture movement, was declared illegal. The not inconsiderable property assets of the various socialist cultural organisations were confiscated on the basis of a law of 26 May 1933 concerning the arrogation to the state of communist and socialist property, in conjunction with a law of 14 July 193 3 decreeing the confiscation of all property "inimical to the people" (volksfeindliches Vermoegen). Adolf Koch's schools of physical culture in both Berlin and Hamburg were closed down. The Verband fuer Volksgesundheit (Association for People's Health), to which these schools belonged, was declared illegal, together with all the other subsections of the Zentralkommission fuer Arbeitersport und Koerperpflege (Central Commission for Workers' Sport and Hygiene). According to police informers its membership in 1932 had stood at 1,456,162 29. Although it's Central Committee had disbanded, many of its sub-sections attempted a so-called "Trojan-Horse policy", i.e. they sought to invade and secretly control equivalent National Socialist organisations. These tactics failed against the police forces of a modern state, which was supported by thousands of sympathisers acting as ideological scouts. Any hopes of overcoming the alienation of modern man via the socialist road to a new society, in which people might live in peace with each other and reconciled with nature, appeared to be scotched. With such agencies as a Ministry for People's Enlightenment and Propaganda, a daily press brought in line with the wishes of National Socialism, a film industry, architecture and sport purposefully put to use for the new state, with Mediterranean cruises for the masses (Kraft durch Freude-Strength through Joy), cheap radio sets (Volksempfaenger) and controlled broadcasting, the most massive apparatus of ideology, public communication and culture in modern times began to operate. It was supported by coercive institutions of the Nazi party and a reorganised police. Never before had a state tried so drastically and so systematically to intervene in the circulation of ideas. Their production and dissemination was now highly selective and manipulatory. Never before had an ideologically intolerant government had such organisational and technological means at its disposal for shaping ideas, tastes and prejudices and for determining the level of information.
It was, of course, neither a philosophy of the body nor a particular branch of the "bare body culture", which won through in 1933. But, as I have demonstrated, it is within the environment of the body culture movements that the ideas of the Left as well as those of the Right assumed a remarkably unorthodox, clearly utopian character. If the former might well be said to encapsulate some of the most peaceful features of a vision of freely associated human beings, then it must also be recognised that it was within the context of nudism that the Right developed the typical, innately aggressive expression of its most extreme ideology even before World War I. On the eve of World War II a certain Hermann Wilke published a book entitled Dein 'Ja' zum Leibe. Sinn und Gestaltung deutscher Leibeszucht (1939 - Your "Yes" to the Body. The Meaning and Organisation of German Body Discipline) in which he argued that German breeding stock ought to be selected with a view to racial improvement. The terms used in this connection are those of an interventionist racism as a positive means of social engineering: Aufartung (upgrading of the species) and Aufnordung (Nordification). The activist political logic of National Socialism did not shy away from drawing analogies with the breeding of cattle or chicken. The invocation of the Fuehrer in this context provided the necessary legitimisation:
If the German people were told by the Fuehrer that the most well developed bodies had to come together in order to achieve a new beauty in the people, then he meant the whole body. . . The healthy, well-formed naked body-since clothes cover up and deceive-becomes the most important means of improving the race 30.
Racial upgrading, without the term Aufartung being available at the time, had already been propagated by Richard Ungewitter, who wished to see German nudists as protagonists in the struggle to strengthen the "racial basis" of the nation. 'The improvement of the human race', but within a distinctly Germanic context, had been the avowed aim of a well-known (and government subsidised) film of the (bourgeois) nudity cult, entitled Wege zu Kraft und Schoenheit (Ways to Strength and Beauty), which was released in 1925. The same aim was evident- and calculatedly expressed by the accompanying photographs-in one of the most successful books of voelkisch nudism, Der Mensch und die Sonne (1924-Men, Women and the Sun) by Hans Suren. Sales reached 61,000 in one year, increased to 145,000 in 1936 and to over 200,000 by 1940. In his preface of 1924 Suren had stated:
I did not include any pictures of communal life, because I wanted to show exemplary, well-built bodies and these unfortunately are exceptional 31.
It was probably because this argument made the case for a racial elitism which was all too exclusive and showed up unfavourably the average quality of the supposed master race that this section of his book fell prey to elision in later editions. However, it is clear from this and other right-wing nudist publications that, in contrast to the photographs to be found in socialist publications, they were not snapshots but carefully staged events for the camera even if this involved uncomfortable nude poses on skis in the alpine snow! Not only are the bodies selected with a view to showing ideal racial types, they are also given especially shiny skins with the help of cosmetic oils. Suren, who had developed his nudist practices as head of the German Army Gymnasts' School in the early 1920s, kept the sexes strictly separate during training sessions. It was, of course, this overt racism and sexism, which most sharply marked off fascist from socialist nudism.
However, in the 1920s the Right and the Left occasionally joined forces against a hostile conservative press which asserted that any public display of nudity, far from being appreciated as a protest against the decadence of modern society, could only be understood as a symptomatic confirmation of it. In 1924 a certain Dr. Altrock, who apparently belonged to right-wing circles, significantly lent the full authority of the learned institution to which he belonged to Koch's cause when he defended the latter's use of rhythmical gymnastics in the nude. In a lecture he drew on the strongly anti-Manichean sentiments shared by all nudists. Such counter-attacks on the common enemy of religious and petit-bourgeois philistinism brought about a precarious togetherness between Right and Left as they sought to defend their ideals against vilifying press campaigns. The proletarian nudists, being by far the bigger organisation in the Weimar Republic, Had to bear the brunt of the displeasure voiced by the conservative press, as illustrated by the following example:
Ecstatic dances greeting Spring in front of 4,000 people... 250 men, women and children, old and fat, young and slim. This public filth of the 29th March 1932 in the Grand Theatre (Grosses Schauspielhaus) in Berlin, organised by this red nudist teacher, Adolf Koch, and a state authority which did not forbid this filth, are the reasons why Germans are ashamed of their fatherland… 32.
The pompous defence of public decency was almost invariably linked with hints that the moral health of the nation was at stake. Representatives of the more affluent classes seem to have met with gentler treatment by the press. In Licht-Lust-Leben. Monatsschrift fuer Schoenheit, Gesundheit, Geist, Koerperbildung (Light - Pleasure - Life. Monthly Periodical for Beauty, Health, Spirit and Body Culture) we find reports on a court case in Tegernsee (south of Munich) against the nudists of the Bund der Lichtfreunde (Corporation of the Friends of Light) who in 1925 had held their national congress in a remote valley near Bad Kreuth. Their members were mostly from the professional classes and the aristocracy. They had had the good fortune that, when apprehended by the police, no objections were raised and they were allowed to continue. The public prosecutor nevertheless brought a law suit on account of causing a public nuisance and congregating without official permission. The judge, concurring, imposed a small fine. The press desisted from raising a public outcry, but then the Lichtfreunde had met in perfect seclusion and would never have been found by the police had it not been for a tip-off by a jealous wife 33.
Female nudity was meanwhile fairly common in the review theatres of the big cities. In this context the signification of the naked body became complex and contradictory. For example, a well publicised drawing of the black French singer anti dancer, Josephine Baker, who in 1926 was giving performances in the Berlin Theatre den Western would have been an image of degeneration and decadence to some, while to others the figure represented the multi-cultural and multi-racial modernity of life in a European capital. The first reaction to the nudity cult when the Nazis came to power was to impose a general ban, at least in Prussia where Hermann Goering issued a decree on the "repression of the nudity cult". It was said to lead women to lose their natural feelings of shame and men to lose their respect for women. However, the Reichsverband fuer Freikoerperkultur had many National Socialist sympathisers and was an easy target for ideological and organisational incorporation (Gleichschaltung). The journal of the Nazi naturists, Die Deutsche Freikoerperkultur, openly opposed Goering's decree 34. The nudists became part of the NS-Verband fuer Leibesuebung. The old principles of "ideal beauty" and "healthy living" could easily be re-accentuated as demonstrations of racially ideal types and paramilitary fitness training. The re-issue of Hans Suren's book of 1924 was given a modified title to take account both of the arrival of National Socialism and the Olympic Games in Berlin and to signal the full acceptance of the former: Mensch und Sonne. Arisch-olympischer Geist (Men, Women and Sun. Aryan-Olympic Spirit). Leni Riefenstahl's famous film of the 1936 Olympics showed the beauty of youthful, naked bodies. When Das Schtwarze Korps, the weekly periodical of Hitler's SS (Schutzstaffel- Protective Guard) addressed itself to the question of "nudity or indecent exposure" a year later it castigated both Christian "renunciation" of the sensual body and the exploitation of the "racial beauty cult" for sensationalist ends by 'numerous revues and magazines which previously served concealed and unconcealed vice'. Rather loftily, the (anonymous) author held that 'nakedness in the North can only be convincing when it makes transparent the revelation of something divine' 35. The author's attitude to the photographic display of naked, if perfectly shaped, bodies in the press was ambiguous, since he believed that the "illustration of Nordic racial types" was but a pretext for the titillation of the baser senses. This ambiguity was indicative of the uncertainty in
matters of public morality which prevailed within the SS. Its leader, Heinrich
Himmler, when formulating directives about the procreation of children by SS
personnel, either within marriage or with unmarried women in Lebensborn (SS
procreation centres and maternity hospitals), had to resort to more cautious formulations than he would have liked. He might otherwise have alienated large numbers of SS-men whose moral ideas, when not serving the "emergency needs" of the state, were ordinarily petit-bourgeois. Nudism had meanwhile become integrated into Nazi ideology. By 1938 the Bund fuer Leibeszucht (Federation for Body Discipline) was allowed to hold an open-air summer camp again. A nudist film, Natuerliche Leibeszucht (Natural Body Discipline), was given official approval by being designated as "educative for the people". Finally, naked bathing was allowed in a police decree of 1942. The initially ambiguous attitude of National Socialism towards nudism should not detract from the symptomatic importance of the bare body culture within the ideological developments of the time.
Eugenics was a further point of contact between left and right-wing body culturists. But caution is necessary at this juncture: eugenics did not mean the same thing in both camps. On the Left it merely meant a change of attitude. Education and better information could achieve improved bodies through healthy (and hence selective) breeding. On the Right the stress was on race. Hence the immediate closure in 1933 of institutions like the Reichsverband fuer Geburtenregelung und Sexualhygiene (National Association for Birth Control and Sexual Hygiene), the Verband fuer Sexualreform (Association for Sexual Reform), the Gesellschaft fuer Sexualreform (Society for Sexual Reform) and the Einheitsverband fuer proletarische Sexualreform and Mutterschutz (United Association for Proletarian Sexual Reform and the Protection of Mothers). All these bodies were deemed to be typically "cultural-Bolshevist", i.e. internationalist, anti-racist and socialist in outlook. According to a law passed in December 1933 the minimum age of voluntary sterilisation was set at ten and that of compulsory sterilisation at fourteen in the case of persons considered to be racially or biologically "impure". In Prussia there were some 31,000 compulsory sterilisation's -enforced by special courts called Erbgesundheitsgerichte (Hereditary Health Courts) -in 1934, and 50,000 in the following year. The figures for the whole of Germany were 45,000 and 65,000 respectively. Additionally there were thousands of individuals who were never dealt with by these courts, being referred instead to special institutions where they were kept for a time and then murdered.
With the hindsight of historical knowledge the sheen on the bodies of Fascist nudes was that of the pretension to master-race status which carried a death warrant for those who could not satisfy the legally and bureaucratically enshrined criteria of racial conformity. Himmler had calculated that, with the strict application of the laws and directives on "racial hygiene" the German people could be gene-coded into a pure blooded "Nordic" race within a period of 120 years. The special role of the Germans as leaders between the nations of the East and the West was underpinned by a philosophy of irrational and anti-rational organicism, which must briefly be traced here. It involved the ultimate perversion of the old organicist metaphor of the state and society and served as legitimisation for the imperialist claims of National Socialism in Europe.
Organicism Versus Individualism and Collectivism
There are three books to which reference must be made in this context: Roderich von Engelhardt's, Organische Kultur. Deutsche Lebensfragen im Lichte der Biologie (Munich, 1925 -Organic Culture. Vital German Problems in the Light of Biology), Paul Krannhals's, Das organische Weltbild. Grundlagen einer neuentstehenden deutschen Kultur (Munich, 1928-The Organic World View. Foundations of a New German Culture) and Edgar J. Jung's, Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen. Ihr Zerfall and ihre Abloesung durch ein neues Reich (The Government of the Racially Inferior. Its Disintegration and Replacement by tile New Realm). All these books heralded the cultural ascendancy and eventual rise to power of the ultra-Right, prophesied by Ungewitter, and terminologically captured in a book title of 1931, Deutsche Kulturrevolution (German Cultural Revolution). It is not necessary within this context to give a faithful summery of these works. They should perhaps be entirely forgotten. But it remains of some importance for our understanding of the development of Germany in the twentieth century to see how the desirability of a German road to Fascism was argued and advocated in them. They are, of course, only some examples in a flood of similar publications. Within the terminology employed by these authors a number of recurring ideological dis-junctures can be discerned, for example (Western) "civilisation" and (German) "culture". These are easily recognisable as transpositions of the unquenched desires of German imperialism. According to the paranoid and aggressive logic behind these mutually exclusive ideas Germany held a prime geopolitical location. The authors bolstered their case further by hypostases and presumptions about national distinctions, which purported to be based on ultimate, irreducible metaphysical principles.
In these publications Germany appeared as the land whose people yearned for and upheld the dream of the organic wholeness of their society. They were lauded as the historical protagonists of the organic principle. Hence they stood alone in the glory of heroic resistance, defending the values of rank, biological differentiation and racially (or nationally) rooted culture against the egalitarian and cosmopolitan Millie of mechanical, unnatural and rootless civilisation. They were therefore ranged as much against the social and cultural dislocation, democratisation and social fragmentation of the West as against the totalitarianism and deadening collectivism of the least. They invoked the contrasts which, according to a German tradition of thought, were spelled out by the terminological pair, Kultur and Zivilisation. Thomas Mann at his most conservative had given it a new respectability at the beginning of the 1920s by using it to explain the conflict in World War I between Germany, as a representative of Kultur, of the cultivation of the spirit, and the West, as a representative of Zivilisation, of modern conveniences and flat-headed conversation. Towards the end of the 1920s the neo-conservatives held that in the West the principles of an unnatural, rationally constructed society reigned supreme. They were based on the French Revolution's slogans of liberty, equality and fraternity, which they believed inaugurated the process of internal social dissolution. Allowing for a further egalitarian-collectivist perversion of these principles, the same was considered to be true of Russia since the Bolshevik revolution. Against this degeneration and the suffusion of society with Western influences it was claimed that Germany must defend itself and re-instate the organic principles of coercion (Zwang), distinction of rank (Ungleichartigkeit) and subordination (Unterordnung). It was argued that these principles held the various parts of the body together. An overt analogy was therefore being made between political and social culture and the biology of organisms as perceived by a politicised science. The books referred to above characterised the position of Germany between its Western and Eastern neighbours in terms of inimical tensions, which, it was thought, could only be resolved by a military cataclysm. Initially, however, the innere Feind (enemy within) had to be conquered and defeated.
Recurring terminological oppositions, some of which went back further than Thomas Mann's Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of a Non-political Man) to Nietzsche, Goethe, Herder, et al., spelt out the internal tensions of society as the neo-conservatives saw them. The concepts cited first within the following pairs of terms were advocated by liberals and socialists- not always in the same negative formulation and without any disparaging connotations. Those cited second gave the neo-conservatives' and National Socialists' position: civilisation - culture (Zivilisation-Kultur); intellect-intuition (Intellekt-Intuition); superficiality - depth (Oberflaechlichkeit-Tiefe); aesthetic and ethical pluralism-hierarchical order (Wertverflachung- hierarchische Ordnung); democracy - leadership principle (Demokratie-Fuehrerprinzip); mechanical-organic (mechanisch-organisch); dead (static) form-living growth (tote [statische] Form-lebendiges Werden); French Revolution-Prussian duty and obedience (Franzoesische Revolution-Preussische Pflicht, preussischer Gehorsam); mixed races, multiple racial stock- racial purity (Voelkermischmasch-Rassenreinheit); contractual society-national community (Vernunftstaat-Vollksstaat). In other words, there was before 1933 in Germany a highly articulate right-wing intelligentsia able to furnish explosive ideological ammunition by claiming for Germany a unique historical mission, which had to be safeguarded against powerful enemies both internally and externally. This situation called for a heroic ethic which was indeed propagated by many journalists, philosophers and lawyers sympathetic to National Socialism both before 1933 and after 1933, when the conceptual oppositions cited above recurred, for example, in a number of pamphlets on National Socialist "cultural politics" 36. The terminology evolved in this struggle was not new. It exploited the long and by no means entirely disreputable German tradition of anti-modernist criticism. In doing so it was able to draw on sedimentation of real historical experience, usurping them for the rhetorical arsenals of the Right and thus denying the Left access to the same sources. At the same time, the Left was identified with all the unsettling Western invasions which had led to the long-term decay of values and the dismemberment of the organic order. National Socialists appeared to embrace in all seriousness and with great ardour the ideals of Gemeinschaft: the spontaneous will of individuals to form community, to identify not only with their kith and kin but also with their artisan or other occupational skills, which were hallowed by tradition, to structure their social being by norms sanctioned by religious beliefs, acts of faith and the ritualisation of creeds. National Socialists could thus project themselves as protagonists of an overdue revision of the social, cultural and ethical dissections modernity had wrought. It seemed to many that the modern had to be subjected to the correctives of the old, which had too lightly been disposed of in the name of progress. Exploiting popular perceptions of the crisis, German Fascism was able in the most cynical fashion to make the whole of society into a function of dictatorial will and hence become used for the reverse of what had been promised. By means of a colossal manipulative machine for the dissemination of their ideas they enlisted the support of majority opinion for a brutal administrative exercise. Far from reinstating the values of Gemeinschaft it reduced groups and individuals to mere Menschenmaterial (human beings as functional counters). By exacting an oath of allegiance from the German army, the party membership and the civil service, individuals, political anti state institutions were made into executioners of the destructive designs of the Nazi leadership.
In conjuring up the idea, by constant propagandistic repetition, that the German people were a united body bonded by the same "blood", that the German nation had a right to a united terrain and that both were symbolically and actually incorporated in the political will of the one leader, National Socialism appeared not only to feed the hopes of German minorities outside the Reich] it also seemed to be offering solutions to the crisis of Modernism. All Germans would be re-united in the one splendid organism of an extended state, which would bind all its members into an integrated demonstration of power and racial harmony. Social classes, estates and the rankings of individuals, far from being denied, were actually affirmed as meaningful components of the whole body politic. The ideological appeal of National Socialism was its promise to restore a clear organic social order, in which those who were included could feel privileged, not least by looking at the wretched condition of those who were denied that privilege and condemned at best to slave existence or at worst to annihilation.
As an ideology of the organic utopia, National Socialism needed not only a rich symbolism expressing the adherence of individuals to certain orders, groupings and ranks, but also an art that would basically provide images of power, social inclusion, the rootedness of the individual in the group and in nature, and of racially acceptable femininity and masculinity. Racial exclusion was implied in these images and hence-with few exceptions-did not need to be explicitly executed. Art under National Socialism was given a privileged place because it could create visions and symbolic demonstrations - in stone and paint, in static and moving pictures, in recited and printed words - of the new racial harmony of the body and the reintegration of the individual in a pacified society. At the same time, the actually existing discrepancy between the Fascist utopia and social reality meant that artists had to be subjected to ideological control in order not to "fall back" into the contradictory pluralistic panorama of the Weimar Republic. This ensured the reduction of social reality to ideologically acceptable forms of representation. Artists who did not accept these standards had to face the grim fate of exclusion. Those who did were used as celebrated exponents of the "new spirit" and served as important consolidators of the National Socialist regime. Its ostentatious political glories and its racial verities called for artistic realisations in dimensions of the demonstratively colossal or the quietly intimate. It is therefore not fortuitous that the practice of the various art forms assumed two basic aspects under National Socialism: the idyllic and the monumental, with the latter bifurcated into mythical and industrial images. Thus, on the one hand, there were pictures which showed idylls of family life and of naked, open-air beauty; on the other there were those of Germanicised classical myth, of monumentalised Nordic peasant and warrior, or those showing the achievements of 'workers of the fist and those of the forehead' (Arbeiter der Faust und Arbeiter der Stirn) such as motorway bridges or the giant strength of steel-works fore grounded by a wheat field with harvesting peasants. Similarly, in architecture, we find on the one hand monumental constructions, particularly those planned for the new Berlin, and on the other a predilection for half-timbered houses with neatly pitched roofs. Monumental neo-classicism and idyll were the artistic expressions of genuine organicist longings, which served simultaneously as a triumphal facade for a mercilessly repressive regime.
References:
29.This figure is taken from reports to the police now kept in the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz under the archival mark R 58/630.
30.H. Wilke, Dein Ja' zum Leibe! Sinn und Gestaltung deutscher Leibeszucht, Berlin, 1939, p 108.
31.H. Surin, Der Mensch und die Sonne Stuttgart, 1924, Preface.
32.In Fridericus (Deutschnationale Wochenzeitung), 15.8.1932, quoted in Koerper-bildung-Nacktkultur, Sonderheft 14: Koerper und Kunst, Leipzig, 1932, p
33.Cf. Koerperbildung-Nacktkultur, 'Anklagen und Bekenntnisse', Leipzig, 1925.
34.Cf. Die Deutsche Freikoerperkultur, No. 2, Feb. 1934, p 20.
35.Dan Schwarze Korps, 25 Nov. 1937, p 6.
36.E.g.: H. S. Ziegler, Praktische Kulturarbeit im Dritten Reich, Munich, 1932; C. Lange & E. A. Dreyer, Deutscher Geist 1935, Leipzig, 1935; W. Sluyterman von Langeweyde, Kultur ist Dienst am Leben Berlin, 1937; W. Schultz, Grundgedanken national-sozialistischer Kulturpolitik, Munich, 1939 and 1943.
