German Bodies

Race and Representation After Hitler

Uli Linke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135962791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

German Bodies explores the cultural representations of German identity and citizenship before and after World War II, and offers a critical analysis of race, violence, and modernity in German history and contemporary German society. Uli Linke examines how Germans invested the body with meanings that had significance for the larger body politic and investigates how this fits within the larger consumer culture, social memory and the postwar democratization of the country. The book is divided into three sections discussing different aspects of the German cult of the body: Aryan aesthetics, as in the postwar obsession with white nudity; blood aesthetics, as in the demonization of immigrants as a blood-contagion; and cultural violence, as in the images of genocide and dismemberment evoked in political protests during German reunification.

WHITE SKIN, ARYAN AESTHETICS

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Power in contemporary society habitually passes itself off as embodied in the normal as opposed to the superior. This is common to all forms of power, but it works in a peculiarly seductive way with whiteness, because of the way it seems rooted in common-sense thought, in things other than ethnic difference… Socialized to believe the fantasy that whiteness represents goodness and all that is benign and nonthreatening, many white people assume this is the way black people conceptualize whiteness. They do not imagine that the way whiteness makes its presence felt in black life, most often as terrorizing imposition, a power that wounds, hurts, tortures, is a reality that disrupts the fantasy of whiteness as representing goodness. (Dyer 1988:45)

In the Western scholarly imaginary, white skin is designated a discursive construct: Unmarked, unseen, and protected from public scrutiny, whiteness is said to be deeply implicated in the politics of domination. Viewed as a location, a space, a set of positions from which power emanates and operates, white political practice appears to be thoroughly disconnected from the body: Corporality has been removed from the politics of whiteness. Dissociated from physicality, and “the essentially embodied nature of our social existence” (Connerton 1989:74), whiteness is perceived as a normalizing strategy which produces racial categories. Seen not as a marker of actual skin color, whiteness is no more than a discursive axiom for racial differentiation: It is merely a “politically constructed category parasitic on blackness” (West 1993:212). Although some scholars concede that “whiteness is embodied insofar as it is lived experience” (Ware 1996),¹ the metaphysical dimensions of whiteness are generally accepted without challenge. Such assertions are troublesome as well as deeply problematic.

What are the cultural and institutional conventions and practices that continue to normalize white invisibility? How is the discursive transparency of whiteness sustained? Deconstructing the category “white” involves making visible its “founding metaphorics and ideology of invisibility” (Fuss 1994:22). Like all racial categories, whiteness is capable of being “created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (Omi and Winant 1994:55). But, until quite recently, the multiple ways in which whiteness has been politically manipulated, culturally mediated, and historically constructed have in large part been ignored (Gallagher 1995). Since “white” defines itself through a powerful and illusory fantasy of disembodiment, it is important to investigate the place of such phantasms and desires in the exercise of social power.

In this chapter, I examine the location of whiteness in German political culture, and I inquire how white skin, as a racial construct and a site of power, is naturalized and rendered unseen. More specifically, I explore the social formations of white public space: how the aestheticization of whiteness, as a technique of the body and as a field of memory, is articulated across a multiplicity of sites (Hall 1985, 1986; Williams 1973); how the naturalization of white skin, as the physical embodiment and sign of social power, is brought about and sustained in different arenas of public discourse (Eley 1992; Robbins 1993; Fraser 1993; Benhabib 1992); and how the configuration of a popular racial aesthetic is structured by specific historic linkages between the state and its subaltern publics (Landes 1988).

My research is focused on postwar Germany, where whiteness has been reclaimed as an unmarked signifier of race and citizenship; where the use of white public nudity has been officially sanctioned to promote commodity consumption; where the public display of white naked bodies has emerged as a countercultural strategy of environmental and political protest; and where this recovery of the white natural body has become crucial in legitimating public narratives about the threat of dark-skinned others. Given the corporal topography of German racial violence, which is obsessively preoccupied with the color of alterity, my project seeks to investigate how the enhancement of whiteness, the very deployment of a white racial aesthetic, surfaced to become an indispensable element in the recolonization of the bodily interior of the postwar German state.

How is whiteness signified in German public culture? Can we use an archaeology of racial representation to expose the metaphorics of white skin in twentieth-century Germany? Or is there another meaning to whiteness in German culture, which originates from an aesthetics of the body that is disconnected from issues of race? After a detailed review of the literature on the dis/embodiment of color, and a critical discussion of this material, I proceed with a dissection of the semiotics of whiteness in modern Germany, from the turn of the century onward. The Aryan aesthetic, with its tropes of Germanness, whiteness, and nakedness, is written into the history of German political culture. The mechanisms by which this aesthetic is reproduced is given careful scrutiny and documentation. As we will see, the iconographic representation of the racial body, taking form just before World War I, entailed the propagation of two interrelated signifiers: white skin and nudity. Since its inception as a popular discourse, the Aryan aesthetic had seized the motif of the natural German body as a validating signifier. Conceived as an authentic, presocial site of truth, the natural body was imagined through a series of mediating symbols or tropes. The terrain of whiteness and the phenomenon of nakedness, both metonymic signs of bodily nature, were integrated into separate, but parallel, racial mythographies. My attempts at historical periodization expose the dynamics of this racial aestheticism. Defined by a distinct historiography, symbolic code, and field of meaning, the metaphorics of white skin and naked flesh are mutually implicated and connected.

The naturalization of nudity in the German political arena echoes the dynamics by which whiteness is normalized in other cultures. The discursive transparency of white skin in the United States can be equated to the perceptual concealment of the cult of nudity in Germany, which renders whiteness commonplace and normative. Put differently, my analysis transports the theorization of whiteness as an unmarked racial category to the German context, outlining how nudity resurrects Aryan symbolism at the same time that it provides a new logic of naturalization, one organized around the paradoxical production of whiteness as normative and unremarkable precisely through its hypervisibility. While there are parallels to the construction of whiteness elsewhere, there are important differences and specificities to the German context. In the German racial state, dreams of whiteness are more directly about the manifestations of lineage, family, and nation. The white (German) body is seen as under threat of contamination by Others who seek to undermine the integrity of an organic nation/state. Whiteness in Germany is also haunted by visions of white bodies that attempt to recall the imagery of classicism, an imagery fixated on an aesthetics of the antimodern, and a corporality that is always trying to erase traces of eroticism or displace it onto others in an effort to consolidate its appeal to a harmonious and cultivated nature. Throughout, I explore how these cultural commitments colonize images of nature that are constructed around white public nudity.

How are whiteness, nudity, and nature mutually implicated? The German integration of white skin with nature (and natural signifiers) moves the body out of history, denying the possibility of history as process. The aestheticization of nudity likewise transforms racialized bodies into natural entities, whereby the dehistoricization of whiteness is rendered uncontested. This denial of history, these attempts to suppress or control fields of memory through a corporal aesthetic seem to be a retreat, a regression, into a mythic past, permitting Germans to exhibit race “innocently” (even after the Holocaust). Such a reinvigoration of the German racial aesthetic is particularly significant in a global world order: Placed within the context of transnational economies, transnational commodity culture, and guest-worker immigration, German nakedness is once again becoming “white.” In turn, this form of racialization echoes Nazi tropes of an earlier era, a circumstance that may well be suggestive of the (re) emergence of the Aryan aesthetics in a postwar German nation.

My discussion exposes the intertwining of whiteness and nakedness through an archaeology of German political culture, and attempts to document the similarity of their fetishizing dynamics. My ethnographic narrative is a montage of how body space and public space intersect in a political and historical unconscious. I demonstrate the conjuncture of whiteness and nakedness by exploring their mutual naturalization, their mutual capacity to dehistoricize the body politic and to mythify the human body, and to establish a naturalized, presocial self as an uncontested site of truth. Thus, whiteness and nudity (as separate terms in a metaphorics of shared contingency and mutual reification) vibrate sometimes together and sometimes separately. In other words, the naturalization of the naked German body (in contrast to the iconography of the black nude) is a particular extension of the trope of whiteness, the intangible “ground-zero” of all bodily imaging in the West: invisibility and naturalization being two sides of the same epistemological coin. The shared mythographic, antihistorical, and antimodern subtexts of these mythographic (racialist) iconographies are the paths that lead me to demonstrate the necessary conjuncture of whiteness and nakedness in German public culture. It is this process of mutual reification and refetishization that implicates one in the other. My task is to show how modern Germans became both “white” and “naked” and to document the dramatization of this generational and cross-ideological project of an antimodernist posture.²

Defining Whiteness

Whiteness is a location of power, a designation of a political space. Although a crucial signifier of physical difference, grafted onto the skin, whiteness is neither a biological essence nor a racial population as defined within the modern evolutionary framework (Kaplan 1992; Haraway 1991). While placed in the body, whiteness is at base a social construct. In other words, there are locations, discourses, and material relations to which the term whiteness applies (Lipsitz 1993).³ Anchored in specific historical circumstances, the meaning of white skin is defined by shifting relations of domination. “Whiteness is not an essential racial category that contains a set of fixed meanings, but a strategic deployment of power. It comprises the construction and occupation of a centralized space from which to view the world, and from which to operate the world. This space of whiteness contains a limited but varied set of normalizing positions from which that which is not white can be made into the abnormal; by such means whiteness constitutes itself as a universal set of norms by which to make sense of the world” (Fiske 1994:42). Integrated into different fields of power (Bourdieu 1991), whiteness implies engagement with normative cultural practices: Ultimately, in Western cultural history, it signifies the right to dominate (Fanon 1967; Hannaford 1996; Malik 1996).

Within this framework, whiteness is fundamentally a relational category: It is constructed by the way it positions others at its borders (Dyer 1988; Hall 1995; Nederveen Pieterse 1992). Stated differently, whiteness is a space defined by reference to those named cultures it has flung out to its perimeter (Frankenberg 1993:231). Such a strategic production of otherness persists as a remainder of the colonial legacy: Viewing subject peoples as fundamentally different from Europeans implanted a system of inequality that promoted the administration of natives and the expansion of markets (Spivak 1985). According to Edward Said (1973), “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient” (3) through a process of racial othering, a strategic formation of texts and representations to construct the “positional superiority” of Westernness (20). Within these colonial regimes of representation, racial alterity became a phobic projection of a distinctly Western imaginary: a “repository of repressed fantasies,” a “mainstay of [white] preoccupations and desires” (Fanon 1952:170).

Such a “colonialist metaphorics of representation” (Fuss 1994: 20–21) is exceedingly persistent. Commenting on this phenomenon of white racial phantasm, the writer and cultural critic Toni Morrison (1993) has argued that the terrain of “whiteness” in the United States, with its presumptions of power, history, and progress, relies on imagined notions of Africanism, “a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire” (25). Whiteness tends to maintain itself as a dominant space by defining racial differences. According to Diana Fuss (1994), “Colonialism works in part by policing the boundaries of cultural intelligibility, legislating and regulating which identities attain full cultural signification and which do not. [For nonwhites], the implications of this exclusion from the cultural field of symbolization are immediate and devastating” (21). For a black man, writes Frantz Fanon, the impact of this process is such that he is sealed into a “crushing objecthood”: In an attempt to respond to the violence of racial interpellation, his “very body strains, fragments, and finally bursts apart” (Fuss 1994:21). “Black” may be a protean imaginary Other for “white,” but for itself it is a stationary object: stricken, immobilized, unable to consolidate its own selfhood. Fanon’s encounter with the colonial regime of representation is experienced by him as mutilating, a kind of physical dismemberment: “I took myself off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood?” (1967:112). Racialization works through a process of objectification: The assignation of identities is fixed and rendered uncontestable by reference to physical or biological markers which incarcerate blackness, and at the same time position the field of whiteness.

But the boundaries that are drawn around the terrain of color (despite the assumed rigidity of these criteria of difference) must on occasion be viewed as decentered and permeable. Because such a space is strategic, and not essential, there is movement into and out of these categories of identity (Lopez 1996). Whereas blackness, as the marked (devalued) signifier, is understood as immutable, invariable, and thus incarcerating, the boundaries of whiteness appear diffuse, permeable, and unfixed. Yet such a perception can be deceptive: White space is accessible by invitation only (Dominguez 1986; Gordon 1996; di Leonardo 1994; Sacks 1994). As Donna Haraway (1991) explains: “That point makes it easier to remember how the Irish moved from being perceived as colored in the early nineteenth century in the United States to quite white in Bostons school busing struggles in the 1970s, or how U.S. Jews have been ascribed white status more or less stably after World War II, while Arabs continue to be written as colored in the daily news” (402).

Relations of racial inequality sustain themselves by averting a critical gaze from the terrain of whiteness. This avoidance of recognition is tactical. In the United States, during slavery and the years of apartheid, as bell hooks (1991) explains, domination centered around white control of the black gaze. “Black slaves, and later manumitted servants, could be brutally punished for looking, for appearing to observe the whites they were serving… These looking relations were reinforced as whites cultivated the practice of denying the subjectivity of blacks… Reduced to the machinery of bodily physical labor, black people learned to appear before whites as though they were zombies, cultivating the habit of casting the gaze downward” (168).

The politics of seeing have remained an effective strategy of terror and dehumanization. Even though legal racial apartheid no longer exists in the United States, the structural invisibility of whiteness continues. As in the past, it is today coupled with spectatorship, albeit technologically enhanced through the use of video cameras and television, the “panopticism” of mass media (Feldman 1994:406–7; Foucault 1978).3 While attempting to remain unseen, the white gaze ensures the hypervisibility of dark-skinned others through exposure and surveillance.⁴ The power over public sight emerges as an important strategy of domination: “to know without being known, to see without being seen” (Fiske 1994:46). The discourse of whiteness retains its position of dominance because of its ability to both define and monitor the boundary between itself and its others, and to control the movement of bodies across that boundary.⁵

Seeing through Skin

In her discussion of racial representations in the American media, titled Postmortems: Facing the Black Male Corpse, Deborah McDowell (1995) took as her text the pictures of young black male corpses and mourning mothers that have become an increasingly common feature in daily newspapers. Publishing the black male corpse, McDowell suggests, protects the privacy of white death and its mourners. The publicity given to maternal mourning obscures both the factual presence of mourning black fathers and the physical existence of other unphotographed white corpses.

In these visual depictions of alterity, whiteness recedes from public view to assume a disembodied presence: through the lense that records, the gaze that seeks out, the law that observes. By protecting (and privatizing) the public display of white bodies, the visible proximity of dark-skinned others is rendered meaningful through false assumptions of “objective realism” (Feldman 1994:406). The “seen” is interpreted as immediately ascertainable fact (Feldman 1997; Bloch 1990). These same principles of structuring perceptual realism are at work in global terms: “Television transmits endless images of the dying millions…: starving Pakistanis, Muslims killed by drowning, mountains of corpses in Biafra or Ethiopia, massacre in Tel Satar, strip bombing in Vietnam, hundreds of thousands presumed killed in Cambodia…and we ourselves are always absent. These are images of our victories, they confirm our survival…. [The] ubiquity of visions of mountains of corpses in the Third and Fourth Worlds…seem to allow us access to the psychic ecstasy of power and survival” (Theweleit 1989:269; my emphasis). Commanding the public representation of alterity, the predominantly white Western media conjures graphic images of disease, death, and decomposition without distance or respect for the bodies of black subalterns (Ledbetter 1995; Lutz and Collins 1993; Bloom 1994; Hall 1995). White media projects images of a black public sphere that is characterized by presumptions of intrinsic disorder and dependency (Kelly 1995). In these mass-mediated visions, the representations and dynamics of power are routinely mapped onto black bodies (Nederveen Pieterse 1992), while white presence remains translucent and unacknowledged.

Thus, the white Western self, as a racial being, has for the most part remained unexamined. This evasion must not be viewed exclusively as intentional or consciously engendered: It is partly hegemonic. In her exploration of the experience of race among white American women, Ruth Frankenberg (1993) documents how “whiteness” persists as an unmarked cultural space. The women seem to experience race privilege as normalized, integrated into their commonsense world to the point of invisibility. In their conversations with the author, the women express concern about “the formlessness of being white,” the sense of “nothingness,” and “having no people.” Whiteness is experienced as a cultural void. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• White Skin, Aryan Aesthetics
• Blood, Race, Nation
• Culture, Memory, Violence
• Notes
• Bibliography