The Transition of German Culture to National Socialism (Part B)
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.
Nudism was an attempt to regain, in the face of the ravages of industrialisation, physical and ideological spaces for the restoration of life in harmony with nature. At its inception it was embedded in a rarefied cult of beauty which, it was assumed, had reached its unsurpassed cultural climax in the Polis of classical Greek antiquity. Because of this overt connection of nudism with political thought any study of the naked body in the 1920s and 1930s must inevitably be set against the larger background of utopian hopes and aspirations which suffuse the entire period of Modernism and which receive the most articulate expression in the Germany of the inter-war years. Here, the body and the body politic revealed themselves as part of a joint ideological history. The many branches of the German Youth Movement had, since the turn of the century, expressed their longings for both charismatic leadership and a fresh reconciliation with nature. The right-wing nudity cult and the organicist thinking that went with it appeared to hold some of the answers. To conceive the state neither as a collectivity (as in the USSR) nor as a contractual association of individuals (as in liberal capitalism), but as a wholesome organism, stimulated the recovery of supposedly traditional values which modern civilisation had destroyed: the ties of kith and kin, the purity of racial blood relationship, the unity of racially identical folk, the ennoblement of rich and poor alike into members of the finest race, the comradeship of the tribal, regional or military group in the service of their leader and their nation, and the conception of life as a struggle between different races competing against each other for expansion and domination. The state was thus regarded as a combative athlete, continually testing its strength against others and regenerating itself like an organic body. Oswald Mosley, the English Fascist leader, put the basic idea most succinctly: 'Our policy is the establishment of the Corporate State. As the name implies, this means a state organised like the human body 7. It was this kind of anti-modernist thinking which shaped Hitler's ideas, without there being much evidence that he took any special notice of nudism as such, although we can assume that he would have come across references to it in the occult journal Ostara. Briefbuecherei der Blonden and Mannesrechtler (Ostara. Library of the Blond and Masculinists) which he collected in Vienna. Some of its issues were devoted to the nudity cult. However tenuous Hitler's connections with it may be, he was steeped in organicist notions. In Mein Kampf he rejected the modern form of the state as a cold 'monstrosity of human mechanism' (ein Monstrum von menschlichem Mechanismus 9, preferring instead the idea of the individual serving as a sacrificial member of the community (the horde):
The Aryan is not greatest in his mental qualities as such, but in the extent of his willingness to put all his abilities in the service of the community. In him the instinct of self-preservation has reached the noblest form, since he willingly subordinates his own ego to the life of the community and, if the hour demands, even sacrifices it 10.
Even in the nineteenth century we find a dichotomy in conceptions of the state and society as between images of dead mechanism on the one hand and vibrant organicism on the other. That dichotomy had its roots in the opposing conceptions of the Left and the Right, with the latter accusing the former of imagining that society could be "shaped thus and thus at will", with "aggregated men, twisted into this or that arrangement" by Acts of Parliament. Society had become the product of a mere "manufacture". This sort of thinking, in the eyes of conservatives as far back as Edmund Burke, had led to the 'erroneous conception of a society as a plastic mass instead of as an organised body', as Herbert Spencer put it in The Man versus the State (1881) 11. Hitler's notion of the state was deeply corporeal and corporatist. He had clearly been influenced by a stream of neo-conservative thought that had many tributaries, from Wagner and H. S. Chamberlain to Rosenberg and Lanz von Liebenfels. Individuals could only be conceived of by him as the constituent parts of a greater body, sentient in its own right, delegating the fight for its survival to all its individual members. This animal remained awesomely anonymous.
Only the image of a vast Volkskoerper (body of the nation) suited it in National Socialist rhetoric. Hobbes's Leviathan was contractual and hence repudiated as a model by National Socialist lawyers and political thinkers, and "Behemoth", the Old Testament beast, had far too strong Jewish connotations to be appropriate. The only creature, which within the iconography of the Third Reich projected the fearless unity of nation was the specially stylised Reichsadler (imperial eagle) under whose protective wings the peaceful trades of a pre-industrial community of artisans could flourish. This, at least, was the vision, which fired Karl Heinz Dallinger in his tapestry design for a casino of the Luftwaffe.
Shortly before the attempt on Hitler's life on 20 July 1944 he gave a rambling, philosophising speech to leading personalities in industry and commerce. Here he returned to the subordination of the individual to the social organism as a whole. He reiterated his belief that the foremost objective of the state was the optimal preservation of the nation, Volkserhaltung. Against the collectivism of the Bolshevist state, and the individualism of the liberal bourgeois one, he sought to project the idea of the National Socialist state where 'the creative activity of the individual must work for the benefit of the whole of society-fine words' 12 , indeed, which were in tune with his belief that no nation could be victorious by dint of military power alone and that it therefore had to develop an ideology superior to that of its enemies. Hitler failed to understand, however, that such an ideology must carry conviction not only within the nation but also outside it and that, in order to be of material assistance in victory, it must have attractions for the conquered, transforming them into convinced allies. This was impossible for National Socialism because it blinkeredly saw different nations built on the foundation of unequally rated "racial elements". Racial exclusiveness meant that mass assent by the conquered could never be forthcoming and that costly and brutal mechanisms of repression had to be deployed. These were, of course, also in evidence within the Reich itself. The huge bureaucracy of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Central Reich-Security Office), however, would not have been sufficient to control the ninety million people with their distinct regional traditions in Hitler's Greater Germany. A continuous ideological war, sensitively attuned to majority feelings, had to be waged in order to reproduce if not a mass consensus then at least broad assent for the public actions of the regime.
Significantly, the policies of the holocaust were kept secret. The regime obviously felt the need for such secrecy because it could not be sure of public opinion at home, despite the fact that it had the media under its manipulative control. While the chief target of that policy was European Jewry, it embraced mass executions on general racial and ideological grounds, so that large numbers of Poles and Russians perished in the concentration camps, as well as German anti-fascists. This murderous side of the regime was but the violent reverse of its theatre of public rhetoric with its constant celebrations of the Volksgemeinschaft. There was, of course, always the threat of coercion, of physical sanction against anyone who actively resisted persuasion through propaganda. The permanent objective of this propaganda, even when not explicitly stated, was to conjure up a society that fervently believed in Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer, the Nazis' most effective slogan by far. In other words, this propaganda assumed that, above all, it had to establish in the German populace both a sense of togetherness in nationhood and an acceptance of fascist leadership. Nationhood was conceived as a racially identical bloc of people united in a single political will. In it, the individual was expendable, whether or not he or she happened to be endowed with the awareness which, according to Nazism, befitted humans in a mass, namely of being only 'a dust particle of that order which shapes and forms the whole universe' (A. Hitler) or, as a well-known slogan of the Third Reich had it: Du bist nichts, dein Volk ist alles (You are nothing, your nation is everything) 13.
Modernity as the Loss of Organic Community
As has often been observed, Germany was a relative late-comer in the historical process which led to the formation of modern nation states in Europe. It had also lagged behind Britain and parts of France in achieving general industrialisation, although it was clearly not so backward as to have no hope of catching up. The transformation from an agrarian society to one based predominantly on machine technology was very sudden when it came in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Germany's backwardness and, at the same time, the presence within it of a sharply critical literary and philosophical intelligentsia, meant that the society of that country could become a prime, though by no means exclusive, reservoir of anti-modernist attitudes and of anti-modernist criticism. In the past, German society, chiefly made up of rural and small-town communities, had been marked by a strong sense of cohesion. It was now plainly reluctant to cut the umbilical cord with the land, to expropriate its small-holding peasantry and to abandon its regional allegiances. Because of this local cohesiveness, rooted in medieval tradition, some German writers (notably Kant, Schiller and Goethe) acutely perceived the very earliest threats that the advent of modernity posed. Precisely because Germany, especially when compared to Britain, was at that time an extremely antiquated society, it could provide a stark backdrop for the harbingers of any thing that was at all modern. Strongly influenced by the remarkable school of Enlightenment philosophers, historians and political economists in eighteenth-century Scotland, German writers around the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century voiced concern and protest at the specialisation and fragmentation of human faculties through the division of labour and the elaboration of bureaucracy in modern society. They perceived a contradiction between the modern mode of production and the attainment of. a rounded personality. Yet it had long been recognised that technical, intellectual and social advances were possible only through the progressive division of labour. The creation of wealth depended on it. Adam Smith was aware that such specialisation brought about inevitable problems, namely the division of individuals into occupational particularity and the separation of society into social estates with special functions, such as the military, the agrarian and the industrial classes. Even before Smith we find in John Millar's lie Origin of the Distinction of Ranch (1771) and in Adam Ferguson's An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1766) remarkably clear-sighted though brief descriptions of the divorce of man from the roundness and integration of his own individuality and from the social totality of the Common Weal. The state, Ferguson held had become a machine, people "part of an engine" and human beings were but "stones in a wall" to modern government. Manufacturers prospered most, Ferguson observed, 'when the mind is least consulted', referring here to the stupefying subdivision of the labour process into separated specialisms. This led men to become indifferent to the polity as a whole and the citizen ceased to be a statesman, so that both in an individual and in a collective respect Ferguson was moved to speak of the 'fatal dismemberment of the human character' 14.
All this is repeated and amplified with great rhetorical skill in Friedrich Schiller's extraordinary treatise On the Aesthetic Education of Man It was written in response to the French Revolution, in sympathy with its fundamental ideals of liberation, yet in opposition to the violence, terror and brutishness it unleashed. With all his sharpness of observation, his philosophical skill and his poetic genius Schiller proposed a programmatic counter-model to the emergent panorama of bourgeois-capitalist society. Within the context of our argument it is important to note firstly that in defence of a classical ideal of human individuality Schiller, in conjunction with other German writers, particularly Kant, posited the harmonising powers of an autonomous aesthetic sphere as a bulwark against the fragmentation of modern society. Secondly, by constructing a radical opposition between antiquity and modernity, he presented the latter in a series of barren metaphors and could thus engage in a scathing critique of the alienating tendencies which had become most distinctively discernible in France and in Britain and from which he wanted to save his blessedly backward Germany:
The polypoid character of the Greek states in which every individual enjoyed an independent existence but could, when need arose, grow into the whole organism, now made way for an ingenious clockwork, in which, out of the piecing together of innumerable lifeless parts a mechanical kind of collective life ensued. State and Church, laws and customs were now torn asunder; enjoyment was divorced from labour, the means from the end, the effort from the reward. Everlastingly chained to a single fragment of the Whole man himself develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in his ear the monotonous sound of the wheel that he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being and instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon his own nature he becomes nothing more than the imprint of his occupation or of his specialised knowledge. But even that meagre, fragmentary participation by which individual members of the State are still linked to the Whole, does not depend upon forms which they spontaneously prescribe for themselves . . . it is dictated to them with meticulous exactitude by means of a formulary which inhibits all freedom of thought…The dead letter takes the place of organic understanding ... 15.
Against tendencies of mechanistic, universal rationalism in the French Enlightenment Johann Gottfried Herder, an older contemporary of Schiller, had in his Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784-91) stressed the meaning of the historical process as one in which the many-sidedness and national plurality of human nature would in time unfold. History was seen by him as the organic growth process that would reveal the totality of the human potential, just as nations were seen by him as distinct personalities, held together in organic cultural community. Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, 1796) traced the steady, organic formation of an individual towards the full elaboration of his talents. The novel inaugurated the German tradition of the Bildungsroman (novel of individual development). At the same time Goethe opposed those aspects of modern science which tore objects out of their natural context and isolated them for experimental observation (cf. his opposition to Newton in Zur Farbenlehre, On the Theory of Colours, 1810). Modern technology was criticised by him for its inherently self-destructive megalomania in Faust II (1833) and in his visionary poem Der Zauberlehrling (The Sorcerer's Apprentice, 1798).
The point here is this: despite the relative backwardness of Germany in becoming an industrialised, bourgeois society on the basis of a modern capitalist economy-and perhaps because of this backwardness-there was operative in German thought at the threshold to modernity an almost obsessive fear of the mechanistic reduction of the organic community to a cold, anonymous, alienated association and of the individual to a fragment of his/her human potential. In a country, which had experienced the influence of medieval thought and medieval social structures for so long, the collapse of the medieval ideology of anthropomorphic organicism, which had held together the social entity caused the greatest sense of crisis. The erosion of the medieval vision of the organic interdependence of individuals and estates within the homely environment of the extended social family induced an anti-modern protest in Germany even before modernity had properly been established. It raised the spectre of up-rootedness, dislocation, alienation and disorientation, which in Germany was particularly intense and which fed ultimately into the ideological currents of the 1920s and 1930s.
History of the Body Metaphor
In order to understand the strength of the organicist myth in twentieth-century anti-modernism we must rediscover the tradition of the metaphor, which lay behind the idea of the body politic. This is especially necessary in view of the fact that this metaphor has apparently lost all its fascination within the affluent, pluralistic societies of the West. Yet well into the twentieth century there was, within the tradition of European political thought, an ever renewed analogy between the human body and state-ruled society (Staatsgesellschaft). In Britain and the United States fictions of society as a great family or organism are sometimes invoked by politicians, but in truth the ideological persuasiveness of such images began to be eroded with the onset of modern bourgeois society, i.e. in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The incipient anonymity of competitive capitalism in which all social interdependence threatened to be regulated by money was lamented most vociferously in a country where, similar to Italy, medieval regionalism, medieval social structures and medieval ideology had been firmly entrenched for so long. Germany had not been ruptured by any successful revolution, glorious or bloody. It was here that the leaders of the Romantic Movement invented the image of an organically integrated society in the Middle Ages in an attempt to stem the tide of modernity. What then was the precise form of the body analogy in the Middle Ages and what was its purpose?
It is in John of Salisbury's Policraticus in the middle of the twelfth century that we find an excellent example of the elaborate metaphor of the state as a body in which all internal social bonds were forged in strict hierarchical order to make up an indivisible living organism:
In the commonwealth the prince takes the place of the head, subject to God alone and to those who act as His representatives on earth, even as in the human body the head is animated and ruled by the soul. The senate corresponds to the heart, from which proceed the beginnings of good and evil deeds. The offices of eyes, ears and tongue are claimed by the judges and governors of the provinces. Officials and soldiers correspond to the hands. . . Treasurers are like the belly and intestines, which if they become congested with excessive greed and too tenaciously keep what they collect, generate innumerable incurable diseases, so that ruin threatens the whole body when they are defective. Tillers of the soil correspond to the feet, which particularly need the providence of the head because they stumble against many obstacles when they walk upon the ground doing bodily service; and they have a special right to the protection of clothing, since they must raise, sustain, and carry forward the weight of the whole body... 16.
References:
7.Oswald Mosley, quoted in R. Osborn: The Psychology of Reaction, London, 193 8, p.60.
8.Cf. Lanz von Liebenfels, Ostara, Nr. 66: 'Nackt- und Rassenkultur im Kampf gegen Mucker- und Tschandalenkultur', Rodaun, 1913. Ostara appeared irregularly between 1905 and 1930. Hitler appears to have been an avid reader.
9.A. Hitler, Mein Kampf tr R. Manheim, London, 1976 (1st edn 1969), p 351.
10.ibid., p 270.
11.H. Spencer, The Man versus the State Baltimore, 1969 (orig. publ. 1881), p 147.
12.A. Hitler, in H. v. Kotze, H. Krausnick and F. A. Krummacher (eds), 'Es spricht der Fuehrer'. 7 exemplarische Hitler-Reden, Guetersloh, 1966, p 339.
13.Quoted in C. Zentner, Adolf Hitlers 'Mein Kampf; Munich, 1974, pp 108-9.
14.A. Ferguson, Essay on Civil Society (1792), quoted in the excellent article by Roy Pascal 'Bildung and the Division of labour' in German Studies, Presented to W. Bruford by Pupils, Colleagues and Friends, London (etc), 1962, p 15.
15.F. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man inn Series of Letters, edited and translated by E. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, Oxford, 1967 (German original 1795), p 35.
16.Reproduced in E. Lewis, Medieval Political Ideas, vol. 1, London, 1954, p 225.
