The Transition of German Culture to National Socialism (Part C)
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.
The organic corporatism of this medieval analogy between the human body and the body politic served an ideologically legitimatory purpose, namely to keep the entire hierarchical structure firmly in place, ruled ultimately by the Church and based on the exploitation of the peasants. John of Salisbury, who incidentally was an ally of Thomas a Becket, was an erudite man. Having been educated at Chartres and at the University of Paris (under Abelard) he could draw on) a rich fund of knowledge. His was but one version, remarkably secular, of a body metaphor, which had been used by many medieval writers to refer, in the first place, to society as the ecclesiastical body of Christ. Religious or secular, the metaphor fitted in with and expanded on another crucial depiction of medieval society, the ternary image 17 , which suggested a division into those who pray (orators), those who fight (pugnatores) and those who work (laboratories). The image of the three orders and that of the body were both used very widely throughout medieval Christendom. One of the earliest cases was that of Wallafried Strabo in Germany 18.
Whatever Salisbury's medieval precursors, the reference to the "senate" reveals that his sources reached back to Roman antiquity, and it is indeed very likely that the Roman origins of the body metaphor were known to him. According to Camden's Remains of a Greater Work Concerning Britaine (1605) John of Salisbury had the story from Pope Adrian, an Englishman from Middlesex. In Hadrian's version the analogy appears more or less as it did originally in Livy, where it is attributed to Menenius Agrippa, a Roman Senator:
All the members of the body conspired against the stomacke, as against the swallowing gulfe of all their labours; for whereas the eies beheld, the cares heard, the handes laboured, the feet travelled, the tongue spake, and all partes performed their functions, onely the stomacke lay ydle and consumed all. Hereupon they ioyantly agreed all to forbears their labours, and to pine away their lasie and publike enemy. One day passed over, the second followed very tedious, but the third day was so grivous to them all that they called a common Counsel; The eyes waxed dimmer, the feete could not support the body, the armes waxed lasie, the tongue faltered, and could not lay open the matter; Therefore they all with one accord desired the advise of the Heart. There Reason layd open before them that hee against whome they had proclaimed warres, was the cause of all this their misery: For he as their common steward, when his allowances were withdrawne, of necessitie withdrew theirs from them, as not receiving that he might allow. Therefore it were a farre better course to supply him than that the limbs should faint with hunger. So by the perswasion of Reason, the stomacke was served, the limbes comforted, and peace re-established. Even so it fareth with the bodies o f Common-weales; for albeit the Princes gather much, yet not so much for themselves, as for others: So that if they want, they cannot supply the want of others; therefore do not repine at Princes heerein, but respect the common good of the whole publike estate 19.
This sermon in political science was clearly addressed to those who might be tempted to doubt that tile existing social classes were God-given, natural and immutable. The organic metaphor of the state as a huge, finely balanced metabolism functioned as a perfect legitimisation for the division of labour, the unequal distribution of wealth and the separation o f human beings into social estates. It could serve superbly well as a compelling illustration of the necessity for a ruler and a ruling classy while at the same time the metaphor could help spread the warm glow of community, of cradled security enfolding all individuals from the highest to the lowliest in one harmoniously co-ordinated body.
It was the nostalgia for such a totally ("natural", totally integrated community In a society blatantly exploited by a magisterial feudal-absolutist aristocracy which prompted Rousseau's cry, 'Back to Nature'. A similar nostalgia, prompted by a social reality pregnant with the incubus of capitalism, inspired the relentless criticism by the German Romantics of society as a soulless machine, a dismembered body whose lifeblood had flowed away:
You see artisans but no human beings; priests but no human beings; masters and servants, young and old, but no human beings; is it [i.e. society] not like a battlefield where hands and arms and all other limbs lie in a fragmented heap, while the lifeblood is spilt In the sand?' 20
This quotation shows that Schiller was not alone In his warnings about certain tendencies inherent in modern society. It is taken from a novel entitled Hyperion, which in the late 1790s spelt out the misery of life in Germany compared to that of classical Greece. Modern society was largely seen as the dismemberment of an old, organic body politic. Less pessimistically, another important Romantic poet, Novalis, likened society to a human body and turned the metaphor round, 'Every human being is a small society' 21, only then to give it a new twist: Law courts, theatres, courts, the church, the government, open assemblies, academies, colleges etc. are only the special, internal organs of the mystical individual of the state 22. The state, Rousseau had taught three and a half decades earlier, was not just an indifferent machine, but the executor of a will. The Romantics built on this idea and saw the state as a super individual. Hegel demystified this notion in two ways, firstly by insisting that the state as the guarantor of law and order protects the property and liberty of tile individuals associated under its authority. To this extent it has a purely contractual nature, allowing any arbitrary collection of individuals to make up a state. Secondly, however, the state in general is recognised as "objective spirit", i.e. the result of dialectical interaction between the general will and the will of individuals. Any particular state is the externalisation of a particular people, its particular ethos, which finds expression both in the morality underlying its constitution and in the consciousness of its citizens. (Philosophy of Right, § 274). The state therefore retains the special properties which make up the organism (§ 259) of a people. It is the conscious form of collectivity, its reason, developed by the nation over centuries. Despite the stress on "objective spirit", on the state as externalisation of human reason - in contrast to nature which is seen as an externalisation of divine reason - Hegel retained the organicist anchorage of any given state in the mentality of a people or nation.
The dual character of the state as a legal persona regulating the relations of private citizens on the one hand and as an incarnation of social reason itself on the other is rehearsed in later theory. It can be found, for example, towards the end of the nineteenth century, in the writings of Ferdinand Toennies. He was a seminal figure in the rise of modern sociology, author of the thesis that modern societies were the result of a historical shift from Gemeinschaft (organic, rural community) to Gesellschaft (urbanised, industrial association), from the personableness of neighbourly ties to the anonymity of bureaucratic control and mass existence 23. While he had no illusions that this process was in fact irreversible, his analysis was nevertheless used by representatives of the "conservative revolution" 24 in the 1920s and by National Socialist sociologists to indulge retrogressive cravings. The organic body as a metaphor for the integratedness of community grew in ideological importance just as individuals were increasingly subjected to the cold anonymity of state bureaucracy and the industrial labour process. A bifurcation of ideology and reality was developing in which the two were not simply separate but fed on each other. The more German society was becoming a modern association the more it appeared to need the comforts of an ideology of organic community.
Aspects of German Nudism: Bourgeois, Proletarian and Fascist
It was in order to rediscover the lost organic ideal that the nudity cult arose within elite, upper-middle class circles in Germany after the turn of the twentieth century. The aim was to re-live an assumed ideal of ancient Greek beauty, to adhere to an elevated notion of sexual purity, and to keep aloof from what was regarded as the primitive sexuality of the proletarian masses. In their zest for maintaining sharp distinctions between sexuality and nudity the early bourgeois nudist clubs came close to a projection of gender as sterile, arcane frigidity. The organisational structure of these clubs was pervaded by, and indeed modelled on, the secrecy and hierarchy of Masonic lodges. Membership could only be gained after an apprenticeship and required the sponsorship of several senior members. This period of nudism has sometimes been referred to ironically as its "Bronze Age", since the stress was on the exposure of the body to the sun in the open air and on the display of its beautiful proportions. The main journal documenting this spirit of the early nudity cult was significantly called Die Schoenheit (Beauty). It ran from 1902 until 1931, first published in Berlin and then, from about 1910 onwards, in Dresden. Some of its special numbers appeared simultaneously in German and in English. The working classes were entirely excluded from the aesthetic concerns of Die Schoenheit, not least because their bodies tended to show evidence of occupational mis-shapenness.
In their aesthetic seclusion the early nudist clubs did not particularly care about rebuilding organic communities; they were at best a sectarian, perhaps a titillating side-show in the ideological panorama pre-1914. But this situation was to change very rapidly. For these clubs, even before 1914, began to take on board other ideological freight. A member of a proletarian nudist organisation in the 1920s sarcastically summed up this development of the bourgeois nudist clubs before the Great War:
They soon fell for ideas of eugenics and racial hygiene: the blue-eyed, blond young lady with her soul full of longing was searched out by that equally blue-eyed, blond, boneheaded Germanic youth. Accordingly the majority of these lodges and clubs were swimming in the anti-Semitic voelkisch tide from which they have not emerged until the present day 25.
Die Schoenheit, while upholding general ideals of human progress, was certainly by the early 1920s illustrating "Greek spirit in a new German manner". It betrayed its racial leanings and, as it stated in one advert, hoped for a new cultural efflorescence through the body cult. One only needs to look at the prolific and unbearably self-laudatory writings of an author like Richard Ungewitter to appreciate the accuracy of the quotation's appraisal. In 1905 Ungewitter had published a book advocating the ideals of nudity from an anthropological, moral and health-care point of view. It was titled Die Nacktheit (Nudity). Three years later he published Nackt (Nude), which was impounded. It showed a sharp development towards ultra-Right ideas. In 1913 he brought out another book on the same subject, entitled Nacktheit and Kultur (Nudity and Culture). The subtitle announced 'New Demands by Richard Ungewitter'. In 1920 he published Nacktheit und Aufstieg (Nudity and Ascendancy). In the preface he explained why its completion had been delayed by a special contribution which he felt he had to make towards the war effort. That explanation included his ideological self-portrait:
My pen too was put in the service of this sacred issue and, together with thirty collaborators, I wrote Germany's Rebirth Through Blood and Iron, which aimed at the renewal of the German people on a national-political, Germanic-racial, voelkisch-social, moral and cultural basis' 26.
The main guideline for his collaborators had been to point out the unbridgeable gulf between the idealistic, Germanic Weltanschauung and that of the Jewish democratic, petty-shopkeeper mentality. He saw Germany threatened by three powerful international conspiracies: (the red, the gold and the black conspiracy, colours which symbolically stood for socialism, "Jewish" finance capitalism and popish Catholicism. Black, red and gold were, of course, the colours of the German flag of the Weimar Republic and of democratic Germans in the nineteenth century. This flag was therefore intensely hated by those who thought like Ungewitter. Evidently, a powerful brew of Fascist propaganda material was being fermented at the beginning of the 1920s: It had mixed into it a poisonous paranoia of a Germany haunted by superior, inimical forces both without and within. Ungewitter's ideas were obviously not a mere absorption of those held by the early bourgeois nudist clubs. He was not elitist in the sense of striving to uphold class privilege. He was elitist on a much more dangerously comprehensive scale, namely on a racial basis, fashioning an image of the German people as the master race of the world. It is worth noting that even as early as 1920 his writings had achieved total sales of 220,000 copies. Racial consciousness, he held, was to be coupled with the voelkisch-social idea. The cultivation of nudity was for him a vital element in the preparation of an uprising of the Right against all the decadence of Western civilisation that this author believed impaired true Germanic uprightness and undermined the integrity of Germany's political mission. -She basic assumptions behind his view of the present blended in with those of the cultural pessimists (like Oswald Spengler, Ludwig Klages and others) but differed from their fatalism by the persistent tone of aggressive racism. This ideological mix was more or less identical with what later came to be called National Socialism.
For a while, however, it appeared that it was not the Right but the Left, which was going to make the running in the Weimar Republic. Interestingly, a nudity cult, stimulated by yearnings for health and a return to nature, also developed on the Left. Here, it was not racist. But it did have an important ideological function, for it was intended to create attitudes favourable to radically reformist or revolutionary change. Socialist advocates of nudism implied that people should not only discard their clothes but with them the whole armour-plating of authority-fixated conditioning which held proletarians in deference to their masters: parental authority, the paternalism of school and church, the mass media, and the organs of law and order. Nudity was understood as a strengthening of the individual's potential for opposition: 'It helps to form strong characters, hardened for battle, which is what is wanted by the proletariat' 27. Proletarian nudity was intended as a purgative of deep-seated anti-sensual prejudice and a radical method of discarding the chains of bourgeois ideas around proletarian minds. Gymnastics in the nude was designed to give individuals the feeling of being in tune with common rhythm and an integral part of a larger, harmonious pattern. New dance schools sprang up in Hamburg, Berlin, Leipzig and Cologne which, inspired by Rudolf von Laban's ideas about Bewegungstanz (rhythmic movement dance) and themselves developing Ausdruckstanz (expressive dance), strove to show naked bodies in gracefully configured motion. Gymnastics in the nude also inspired sculpture, which accentuated the streamlined strength of the human body.
The Proletarische Freikoerperkulturbewegung (proletarian naturist movement) became a subsection of the huge Worker Sports Organisation, which in turn was part of a large Worker Culture Movement in the Weimar Republic. That movement thought of itself as an indispensable "third column" in a three-pronged attack on capitalism which, it was believed, could not be defeated solely by being politically outmanoeuvred (by proletarian parliamentary parties) or economically transformed (by strategic trade unionism) 28. Hundreds of thousands of workers came together in the richly diversified sections of the culture movement, which provided an all-encompassing counter-cultural environment for the organised working class, covering young and old, male and female, sports, singing, photography, theatre, tourism and many other activities. Together with similar endeavours in Czechoslovakia, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Holland it represented the most comprehensive attempt of any working class in a capitalist society to build an organisational and creative cultural framework of its own. Those involved in it had few illusions about the difficulties of the task they faced. In particular, the proletarian nudists shared with many activists in the worker culture movement an acute awareness of the philistinism and petit-bourgeois attitudes that suffused the everyday life even of many party and trade union functionaries. In other words, the morality of the petit-bourgeois life style was challenged, so that an altogether more egalitarian, anti-authoritarian and democratic lifestyle might take its place.
The man who like no other developed the idea of proletarian nudism was Adolf Koch, a primary school teacher and educational innovator. For him nudity was above all the symbol of a new start, of the building of a new society freed from the distorting and crippling influences, which predominantly affected the proletarian classes. He sought to counteract these influences and the malformations and listlessness of the body by using so-called "organic-rhythmical exercises" in his pedagogic practice. His work began in Berlin in the early 1920s. When he introduced his methods into two Berlin schools Koch ran into an outcry from the conservative press. But, with the support of the Social-Democratic government in Prussia, he was eventually able to build up a school which was dedicated to his methods and which towards the end of the 1920s had some 3,000 pupils. Throughout the worker culture movement the nudist sections numbered 60,000 members. They were therefore significantly more numerous than the bourgeois nudists, who were organised in the Reichsverband fuer Freikoerperkltur (Reich-Association of Naturists), in the Reichsverband fuer Freikoerperkltur (Reich- Corporation of Naturists) and the Liga fuer freie Lebensgestaltung (Libertarian League), numbering merely 12,000 in all. The main publication of the proletarian nudists was Koerperbildung-Nacktkultur, Blaetter freier Menschen. It is clear from this publication that proletarian nudism, while ideologically at one with the reformist and revolutionary ideals of socialism, was also fulfilling important compensatory tasks by strengthening exhausted and neglected proletarian bodies through providing facilities for gymnastics, showers, swimming pools and sun lamps. The stress on such compensatory functions at times blunted the oppositional mentality and blurred the differences from the bourgeois clubs. It is there fore not surprising that in the late 1920s, probably under the influence of Magnus Hirschfeld, an eminent liberal-humanist sexologist, proletarian nudists who were opposed to racism did nevertheless advocate eugenics and the physical ennoblement of the nation.
Nudism, then, meant renewal, a fresh beginning and the reconciliation of man and nature. The photographers, no matter whether they were operating in a left-liberal or in a right-wing environment attempted to capture this spirit by concentrating on moments which showed exuberant movement and the enjoyment of the open air. The naked round dance of women became a stock-in-trade image of utopian bliss, both on the left and on the right, and probably goes considerably further back in history than Lucas Cranach's late medieval "Golden Age" Technological objects were banished from these pictures. It is clear from such examples that the crisis of modernity produced similar reactions in both the Left and the Right, despite their different party-political preferences. Their aesthetic tastes, though distinct, show striking similarities, the former perhaps being less demonstrative and stylistically more informal. The nudists of the extreme Right, of course, stood out by their racist aestheticism, intent on the cultivation and photographic reproduction of bodies whose beauty was supposed to demonstrate superiority over human beings * from other races.
References:
17.Cf. G. Duby, 'Ternarity' in the Three Orders, Feudal Society Imagined, tr. A. Goldhammer, Chicago and London, 1980 (French original 1978), p 81ff.
18.Wallafried Stabo in the year 841, cf. ibid. p 70, p 78, p 247.
19.Reproduced in Coriolanus, The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare, ed P. Brockbank, London, 1976, pp 369-70.
20.F. Hoelderlin, Hyperion oder der Eremit in Griechenland (1797-9), Stuttgart (Reclam), 1953, p 169.
21.Novalis, Bluetenstaub (1798), in C. Seelig (ed), Novalis, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Zurich, 1945, p 19, cf. also p 20: 'A complete human being is like a small nation.' 22. ibid., pp 23-4.
22.Cf. F. Toennies, Community and Society tr C. P. Looms, New York, 1963 (German original 1887), expanded 2nd edn Berlin, 1912).
23.Cf. K. Bullivant, 'The Conservative Revolution', in A. Phelan (ed), The Weimar Dilemma, Manchester, 1985, pp 47-70.
24.O. Weber, 'Nacktheit und Sozialismus', in Koerperbildung-Nacktkultur, Blaetter freier Menschen eds A. Koch & H. Graaz, Leipzig, Sonderheft 7: Nackh 1929, p 20.
25.R. Ungewitter, Nacktheit und Aufstieg, Ziele zur Erneuerung des deutschen Volkes, Stuttgart, 1920, p 111.
26.O. Weber, op. cit., p 22.
27.Cf. W. van der Will & R. Burns, Arbeiterkulturbewegung in der Weimarer Republik Historisch-theoretische Analyse der kulturellen Bestrebungen der sozialdemokratisch organisierten Arbeiterschaft, Berlin (etc.), 1982.
