The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

238 genocide’s wake
temporal figuration on a landscape, “where time takes on flesh and becomes visible
for human contemplation” (Bakthin 1981:7). And as traumatic history gradually
came to visibility, the nude body was treated as revelationary: a repository of
German historical consciousness. The exposure of past violence, with its allegories
of fragmentation and ruin, placed the naked body on center stage in a monumental
theater of public remembrance.
POPULAR NUDITY: CULTURAL PROTEST
AND OPPOSITIONAL MEMORY
The West German revival of body consciousness, and the privileging of nakedness,
received its initial impetus from the student rebellion of the 1960s: nationhood was
reconfigured through the icon of the naked body. During this era of leftist political
protest, public nudity became a central emblem of popular opposition. The unclothed
body signified liberation in several ways: it symbolized freedom from the
“moral economy” of a consumer capitalism that relied on sexual sobriety as a technique
of unremembering the past; it suggested disengagement from the materialist
values of a society that equated Western democratization with commodity choice
and conspicuous consumption (Boehling 1996; Carter 1997); and it facilitated deliverance
from the burden of German history by political opposition to the anesthetizing
effects of a booming postwar economy. While rallying against a seemingly repressive
and inhumane society, and in defending a new openness of lifestyles, student
radicals adopted public nudity as a crucial component of their political activism (Herzog
1998). Such a public showing of naked bodies gave rise to a corporeal aesthetic
of Germanness that staged national privilege in relation to society’s salient victims:
the dead, the subjugated, and the betrayed. Public displays of nudity used the body
in a novel dramaturgy of memory: nakedness was staged to expose a violent past and
to render visible, on the canvas of the body, the legacies of the Third Reich.
The demand for sexual liberation and the promotion of nudity transported the
subjects of Nazism and the Third Reich into public discourse by drawing on an
iconography of shame: sexuality, gender relations, and nakedness belong to the
affective structure of society, the moral economy of feelings. In their political battles
with German history and memory, leftist activists deployed public body exposure
to mobilize this residual archaeology of sentiments in several ways. Disillusioned
(and angered) by their parents’ inability to acknowledge the murder of
millions, student protesters used public nakedness as a symbolic expression of their
own victimhood and shame. Although this iconography of public nudity greatly
facilitated the students’ self-representation as casualties of Nazism, full-body exposure
also provided a metaphor for the attempt to uncover the past by stripping
Germany’s murderous epoch of its protective and defensive armor. Public nudity
was thus fiercely politicized and emotionally charged. Driven by a programmatic
call for sexual liberation, the act of becoming naked in public signified a return to
the authentic, the natural, and the unrepressed—that is, to a way of life untainted