The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

the holocaust and german politics of memory 249
unprotected and vulnerable, sought to reveal itself as a potential environmental
casualty. Such a strategy, with its appeal to universal human values and its recuperation
of German bodies as templates for a global ethics, unwittingly subverted
recognition of existing racial inequality and ethnic difference. Leftist environmental
activists invested naked bodies and white physicality with meanings that
had a profound significance for the national body politic: German bodies were
presented as perpetual victims of state violence.
NUDE NOSTALGIA: SUBLIME NATURE
AGAINST STATE VIOLENCE
In contemporary Germany, during the late 1990s, when the governing apparatus
was reconfigured by an uneasy alliance of leftists (the centrist Social Democrats and
the radical Greens), and when German soldiers, as members of NATO, began to
intervene in the war in Kosovo by dropping bombs on Serbia, the practice of public
nudity was recovered as a medium of radical protest. At the national party convention
of the AllianceGreens, in May 1999, the members of the New Left, now
composed of old pacifists, 68ers, and government supporters, clashed with fervor
over fundamental differences in ideological commitments. In this context, the naked
body, as an icon of authenticity, nature, and nonviolence, was mobilized by the opponents
of war. Among the utensils of protest, the whistles, posters, slogans, and
blood-filled projectiles, which were hurled at Joschka Fischer (the foreign minister)
and his supporters with accusations of “murder” and “war mongering,” there also
surfaced the conventional male nude: “proud, almost Jesus-like, wandering about,
a stark-naked opponent of war” (Spiegel 1999b:303). The male nude, stepping out of
the terrain of violent memory, stood as a reminder of past left-wing radicalism, when
political opposition had a purging function, and when the battle against German
state authority could erase the shame of “catastrophic nationalism” (Geyer 2001).
But at this convention, the arsenal of unclothed indignation was mobilized against
those members of the New Left, who, as part of the German governing body, had
consented to acts of military violence abroad. The dramatic use of nude masculinity
sought to expose the changeover of a party, whose radical pacifism took form
some twenty years ago, emerging out of a political movement of antifascist protest:
the opposition to state violence. But the naked war-opponent did not verbalize his
discontent. In speechless rage, he provided his well-dressed party leaders with a signpost
to the beginning. The male nude, according to critical media commentary,
sought to convey the following:
Undress yourselves, with naked buttocks wander back to nature, so that you become
just as innocent as nature itself...or like Adam and Eve in their paradise phase. Others
should bite into the bitter fruit from the tree of political knowledge. But after paradise—after
the party convention. (Spiegel 1999b:303)