The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

242 genocide’s wake
“Today nobody cares if thousands take off their clothes in the English Garden
[in Munich]. But those thousands, who unintentionally walk by, are forbidden
to look. Shame works the other way around: nakedness must be veiled—by
beauty” (Friedrich 1986:50). This emphasis on nature as an aesthetic construct
worked by exclusion. The naked/natural body was idealized by juxtaposition
to the biologically “ugly”: “[German] public nudity always implies a privileging
of the beautiful and youthful body. The display of nakedness in parks or
cafes creates a situation of merciless scrutinization that intensifies the social
marginalization of those who are physically disadvantaged: the fat and the
overly thin, the misshapen or disfigured, and the handicapped” (Guggenberg
1985:1, col. 4). In West Germany, public nudity came to be governed by an ideology
of difference that celebrated the unblemished body as a natural symbol.
Naked “nature” was to be rendered free of the unsightly. Natural nakedness,
as a quasi-mythical construct, could not be tainted by physiological markers of
age, death, or history. Public nudity, like nature, was to present a facade of eternal
beauty, unmarred by signs of physical weakness. Such iconographies of essentialized
perfection (youth, beauty, and health) were integral to a postwar aesthetic
that sought to rehabilitate the German body after Auschwitz.
MEMORY IMPLANTS: A MYTHOGRAPHY OF NATURAL NUDITY
The public display of naked German bodies was symptomatic of a return to a
corporal aesthetic that celebrated the essential, natural, and authentic. Not surprisingly,
the construction of national identity in postwar West Germany came
to be governed by familiar visions of the racial body. The social geography of
bare skin, with its symbolic emplacement of national identity and selfhood, made
use of iconographic representations of undesirable difference. In an exemplary
illustration, a photographic glimpse of a public park in West Berlin, two naked
Germans—a man and a woman—are enjoying the tranquil outdoors: domesticated
nature (see Figure 9.3). Positioned against a canvas of trees and bushes,
the couple is sitting in the shady cover of the foliage. The display of nudity draws
on existing social fantasies of “paradise,” as indicated by the graffiti on the park’s
sign. This iconography of public nudity, the imagery of naked German bodies
reposed on green grass, enveloped by shrubs and tall grass, hearkens back to early
pictorial images of Adam and Eve in the Garden. Nakedness is staged in a mythic
realm, in which the unclothed body signifies freedom from original sin. The scene
evokes domesticated wilderness, a sense of the sublime world of nature, even as
this carefully crafted landscape seeks to shroud the exposed body, repressing it,
incarcerating it, and thereby protecting it from the gaze of a nation that does not
invite all bodies to be sexual objects. In the photo, nakedness and body exposure
are staged as a consumerist retreat. Leisure, experienced as an escape from the
collective social world, is displaced to a domesticated natural interior: a mythic
realm devoid of struggle or violence.