The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

the holocaust and german politics of memory 251
lence may be engendered by iconographic representations. In postwar Germany,
public nudity was mobilized as a specific form of countermemory that could be
transported through the iconography of bodies. Naked skin, equated with nature
and natural signifiers, sought to expel the body from the terrain of social violence.
Natural nakedness, as a symbolic construct, preempted presence, identity, and propriety:
it produced a closure of history. Such a refusal of history, the very attempt
to suppress or control fields of violent memory through a corporal aesthetic, seems
to be a retreat, a departure, into a mythic realm: the innocent and wholesome world
of nature. These mythographic phantasms of “natural nudity” enable Germans to
exhibit their bodies publicly without shame: the theater of nakedness is staged
against the traumatic memories of Nazi racial/sexual violence.
But such a reinvigoration of nudist body practices seems particularly significant
in a global world order. Placed within the context of transnational economies,
transnational commodity culture, and guestworker immigration, German nakedness
is once again becoming “white.” In turn, this form of racialization echoes tropes
of an earlier era, a circumstance that may well be suggestive of the (re)emergence
of a racial aesthetic that demands the erasure and suppression of difference.
Moreover, the public staging of the naked body, with its evocation of “nature”—
an antithesis of “history”—is paradoxically tied to an oppositional language of violence
and annihilation. Leftist activists, including supporters of the 1960s antifascist
movement, promote the use of verbal violence as a medium for political
contestation. In demonstrations, political rallies, and election campaigns, the mobilization
of traumatic memory formations is accomplished through linguistic, visual,
and performative practices that are staged in an effort to remake (and fortify)
a democratic public sphere. Although the German New Left emphasizes its commitment
to liberal democratic values (antimilitarism, minority rights, feminism),
my research uncovered a perpetual reliance on metaphors and images that was
(and is) historically problematic. The organic imagery, with its evocation of nature,
that is prevalent in leftist body practices is synchronized with a verbal discourse of
violence and annihilation. A range of highly charged image schema, focused on
death, silencing, and physical brutality (typified by the swastika, SS sign, gallows,
Nazi rhetoric, death camps) are appropriated as antisymbols, transformed into a
language of resistance: the opposition to a violent past. Fantasies of violence, directed
against the political “other,” are thereby not merely historicized but reproduced
as templates of action and identity. Holocaust images, deployed as oppositional
signs, seem to facilitate a profound dissociation from shame.
In the following section, I attempt to scrutinize how social memories of genocide,
Nazi terror, and race-based violence are verbally invoked by postwar German antifascists.
With a focus on Germany’s New Left activists, who belong to a broadbased
democratic social movement (headed by the party of the Greens), I explore
how the historical experience of Nazism and the Holocaust emerged as a formative
discourse in leftist political protest. The body, as in the public theater of nudity,
figures as a central memory icon in the New Left’s verbal battles.