The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

the holocaust and german politics of memory 237
Figure 9.1 “Naked Maoists before a Naked Wall”: Members of the Kommune 1—A Socialist
Collective of Young Maoists, West Berlin 1967. From a brochure by the Kommune 1. When
reprinted in German newsmagazines, the nude bodies were retouched to erase visual
signifiers of gender and sex (see Panorama 1967: 20; Spiegel 1999a:171; Stiftung Haus der
Geschichte 1998: 49). Courtesy Spiegel-Verlag Rudolf Augstein GmbH, Hamburg,
Germany. Photograph copyright Thomas Hesterberg.
The apparent inability to leave the past behind—indeed, the apparently unquenchable
urge to bring it up over and over again precisely in the context of sexual relations—not
only reveals how intense was the felt need to invert the sexual lessons of
Nazism drawn by their parents’ generation but also, and perhaps even more significantly,
suggests something about the difficulty of theorizing a sexual revolution—of
connecting pleasure and goodness, sex and societal justice [nudity and freedom]—in
a country in which only a generation earlier pleasure had been so intimately tied in
with evil. (p. 400)
The mnemotechniques of genocide, as practiced by the West German Left, remade
the body into a public site of contestation. Retrieved from the dark underground
spaces, where the state had deposited its records of historical knowledge,
the pathogenic memories of violence were made visible on the topographic surface
of the body. The body emerged as a chronotope of violence, the material and