The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

the holocaust and german politics of memory 239
by the legacy of Auschwitz. Public displays of nudity were perceived as liberatory,
both in a social and historical sense. By rejecting the cultural machinations of a
murderous civility (clothing, commodities, memories), leftist political activists were
rendered “free” of shame.
The program for such a body politic, which employed public nudity as a means
of transforming German historical consciousness, was first launched by members
of the radical New Left—the founders of various socialist communes in Berlin,
Cologne, and Munich in the 1960s. Advocating a lifestyle opposite to that of the
Nazi generation, these New Leftists, or “68ers,” attempted to eradicate the private
and “hidden” in favor of a public intimacy: “to be able to sleep with anyone; to be
able to show oneself naked in front of everyone; to be honest without restraint
and willing to speak one’s mind without hesitation; to call a spade a spade, never
to keep anything to oneself, and never to withhold or repress anything” (Guggenberg
1985:1, col. 2). Honesty, sexual freedom, and social equality were among the
values that governed the new cult of nudity. The democratization of the German
body politic was to be achieved by the public shedding of clothes: “bare skin”
emerged as a new kind of uniform, an authentic body armor unmediated by the
state or history.
In West Germany, political membership, like national identity, came to be visually
encoded, physically grafted onto the skin (Gilman 1982). But this iconolatry of
public nudity, which emphasized the “natural innocence” of unclothed bodies, was
not devoid of historical meaning. The New Left’s rejection of bourgeois culture
took form through an ensemble of images that had their origin in the nationalist
reform movements of the Weimar Republic. In Germany in the 1920s, the antimodernist
revolt gave rise to a racialist vision that was articulated through the body.
Corporality became a symbolic site in the nationalist rebellion against modernity:
the unnatural, the impermanent, the decadent. Modern styles of life, with their
materiality and pornographic sexuality, were “condemned as breeding grounds of
immorality and moral sickness” (Mosse 1985:52). The terrain of the city, presumed
to induce bodily ills, was set in opposition to the terrain of nature, which was extended
to include the natural body: human nudity. German nationalism, with its
antiurban focus and its rejection of the modern lifeworld, was marked by a rediscovery
of the body. Societal reforms were tied to the reformation of the body. In
other words, the German disenchantment with the modern was to be cured by
purging the body of its materialist wrappings. Public nudity and the unclothed
human body became important signifiers of this new nationalist consciousness.
In West Germany, during the 1960s, the leftist critique of society took form
through nearly identical mythographies. The naked (white) body was imagined as
a privileged, presocial site of truth. Public nakedness, deployed as a strategy for the
promotion of societal reform, emerged as a new terrain of resistance against consumer
capitalism. The public exposure of the body, a “marginalized pastime of
anti-urbanists at the turn of the century” (Fehrenbach 1994:4), became a prevalent
symbol of cultural protest and opposition in postwar German politics. The