The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

the holocaust and german politics of memory 243
Figure 9.3. German Nudists and Clothed Third World Others in the “Garden of Eden”
(Paradise), West Berlin, 1989. From Wahlprogramm (1989:24). Copyright Bündnis 90/Die
Grünen, Berlin. Photograph by Ralph Rieth.
The German nudists (much like Adam and Eve) are positioned as overlords of
nature. This is signified by their elevated station. The dark-skinned Mediterranean
(Turkish) others, who are assembled in the foreground of the photo, are in tactile
contact with the park’s natural setting—a tactility that encodes physical labor as
the primary relation of these others to nature. Sitting directly on the ground, their
physicality is visually accentuated: by their clothing, their cooking of food on a grill,
their tending to an open fire. The photographic gaze connects their bodies to images
of work and consumption, signifying a dangerous preoccupation with corporal
matters—that is, food, labor, and reproduction.
The immigrants, sitting in the middle of the grass, in the foreground of the
picture, are rendered highly visible. This position places them on the nation’s social
periphery, on the margins, on the “outside,” while the naked Germans, sitting
in the background, partially hidden by the vegetation, are positioned within the nation’s
innermost center, the “inside,” which is encoded as a “natural” domain.
White naked bodies, equated with a civilized and privileged state of nature (paradise),
can be imagined as sites of an authentic, national interior. The visual emphasis
on natural and national privilege, which conceals the historic dimensions of
nudity, was crucial in the symbolic reconstruction of the postwar German body
politic. Such a reading in corporal aesthetics suggests that, as a terrain of signification,
the naked body (like skin color) served as a political icon: not all bodies were
equally invited to represent the German nation.