The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

236 genocide’s wake
ceived connection between men’s “release of libido” and “evil” (Herzog 1998:399;
see also Theweleit 1987; Heider 1986; Preuss-Lausitz 1989; Siepmann 1984): “One
noteworthy feature of so many of the debates within the left scene about sex and about
sex and fascism [was] their focus on the male body and male desires and anxieties in
particular. In postwar West German struggles over various sexual lessons of Nazism,
male bodies were called to a kind of public visibility and accountability that most scholars
of the history of sexuality generally assume to be reserved for women” (Herzog
1998:398). Remarkable is “the obsessiveness,” says Herzog (ibid.:399), “with which [this
postwar generation] tried to make public some of the most intimate ways in which
men related to their own bodies and the bodies of others.” The public exposure of the
male body, including men’s sexual desires, became a political agenda in leftists’ attempts
to reform gender relations and revolutionize the bourgeois/fascist individual
(Bookhagen et al. 1969:92; Dürr 1994:418–20). By 1968, various socialist collectives, including
the infamous Kommune 2 in West Berlin, had integrated radical male nudity
into both their domestic lifestyle and their public political program.
The West German Left had initiated such nudist body practices in part, as Herzog
(1998:398) put it, “to strengthen their case for sexual liberation with the most
shocking metaphors available” (see Figure 9.1):
One group that did so—with spectacular flair—were the members of the Kommune 1,
a small but endlessly publicized and debated experiment in communal living and
anarcho-radicalism launched in Berlin in 1966. A classic example of the Kommune 1’s
provocative style was provided by the photo of its members—including one of the
two children living with them—distributed by the members themselves on a self-promotional
brochure....This photo has been reprinted many times—usually in a spirit
of humor and/or nostalgia—and now counts as one of the icons of this era
(ibid.:404–6, 405). 12
What was the political subtext of this portrait of collective nudity? Some twenty
years later, in 1988, as noted by Herzog, the former leader of the Socialist Student
Union (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund—SDS), Reimut Reiche, interpreted
the photo as follows:
Consciously this photo-scene was meant to re-create and expose a police house-search
of the Kommune 1. And yet these women and men stand there as if in an aesthetically
staged, unconscious identification with the victims of their parents and at the
same time mocking these victims by making the predetermined message of the picture
one of sexual liberation. Thereby they simultaneously remain unconsciously identified
with the consciously rejected perpetrator-parents. “Sexuality makes you free”
fits with this picture as well as “Work makes you free” fits with Auschwitz. (Reiche
1988:65) 13
Commenting on this persistent tactic by the German New Left to represent instances
of their own political victimization in terms of Judeocide and Auschwitz,
cultural historian Dagmar Herzog (1998) concludes: