The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

252 genocide’s wake
TRANSPOSED MEMORY: RACIAL PHANTASMS
AS OPPOSITIONAL SIGNS
The production of death and the erasure of Jewish bodies were central to the Nazi
politics of race. The aim of genocide was to maintain the “health” of the German
body by enforcing a strict regimen of racial hygiene (Proctor 1988; Müller-Hill 1988;
Aly et al. 1994). German political fantasy employed a model of race that relied on
images of disease, dirt, and infection. Blood became a marker of pathological difference,
a signifier of filth and contagion: Jews and outsiders were equated with excrement
that had to be eliminated or expunged (Dundes 1984). After 1945, these
same images reappeared in right-wing protest against immigrants: foreigners, seen
as pollutants, a dangerous racial threat, became victims of street violence (Linke
1995, 1997b). The political Right called for the expulsion of all ethnic others. One
example, graffiti that appeared on the radio tower in Frankfurt, expressed the desire
to purge the German nation of foreign (and polluting) matter (Müller 1985):
Foreigners out of Germany!
Excrement/shit out of the body!
(Ausländer raus aus Deutschland!
Scheisse aus dem Körper! )
These same motifs surface in the political language of the German Left. In their
public protests against the street terror against immigrants, leftist activists, like the
supporters of the Anti-Fascist League in West Berlin, made use of the following
formulaic slogans. 14 The verbal repertoire of Leftist speech acts articulates a desire
to eradicate the “enemy” by tapping into a paradigm of elimination:
Turks in! Nazis get out!
(Türken rein. Nazis raus! )
Garbage out! Human beings in!
(Müll raus! Menschen rein! )
Nazi dirt must be purged!
(Nazi Dreck muss weg! )
Keep your environment clean! Get rid of the brown filth!
(Halte Deine Umwelt sauber! Schmeiss weg den braunen Dreck! )
Nazis out! Cut away (exterminate) the excrement!
(Nazis raus! Hau weg den Scheiss! )
The German language of expulsion, as exemplified by the oppositional terms
rein and raus, transcends historical and ideological boundaries. Unlike the corresponding
into and out of in English, the German terms rein and raus are not merely
spatial referents. Their use is grounded in a paradigm in which the nation, the imagined
political community, is a human body. The denial of membership, and the expulsion
of people, is linguistically conceptualized as a process of bodily discharge:
a form of excretion or elimination. German raus belongs to a semantic field that
defines expulsion as a physiological process, a process of termination and death