W. Will van der The Transition of German Culture to National Socialism Source: The Body and the Body Politics as Symptom and Metaphor in the Transition of German Culture to National Socialism" in The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architectureand Film in the Third Reich, B. Taylor& W.v.d. Will (eds.) (Hampshire, 1990), pp. 14-52. Part A, B, C, D Responses to Modernity and the Rise of National Socialism National Socialism may in some respects be the result of peculiarly German developments, of Germany having travelled down a Sonderweg (idiosyncratic route), as some historians have argued. The chief concern of this chapter, however, is to trace within National Socialist society the symptoms of a break-away from Modernity to Post-Modernity. In other words, it is proposed to "read" in National Socialism the relatively early manifestations not of a purely national, but of a European cultural transition. It is set within a new political grammar, which marginalised the "modern" one of class struggle. The Germany of the 1930s signalled a departure from traditional class politics, for it is impossible to explain the power of National Socialism in Germany in terms of conflicting economic and class interests. The nature of Fascist politics, while ready to accommodate and exploit such interests, was essentially anchored in an organic concept of society, expressed in symbolic representation and cultural hierarchy. It could therefore build its support on a wide sociological stratum of voters and, once in power, was obliged to no particular class fraction. The victory of National Socialism in the Germany of the 1930s meant the replacement of a political grammar based on economic precepts and class struggle by one based on the symbolism of hierarchical integration. The latter implied ideological and racial exclusion and presupposed a re-feudalisation of social perception. This is clearly illustrated in the painting and drawing of the time, for example in the nostalgic portrayal of pre-industrial village life as an allegorically visualised source of instant rejuvenation, and in the heraldic design for a Luftwaffe officers' mess signifying the defence of community. National Socialism gained mass acceptance because it promised to overcome the alienation brought on individuals by modern capitalism and instead transform society to become a large integrated community. In reality, of course, National Socialism intensified the secular fate of alienation to the point of leading society into destruction. Yet we must ask whether the yearning for a socially more integrated community, on which the propaganda of National Socialism had played, does not survive today in many, typically non-Fascist, forms of Post-Modernist protest. Such propositions call for a reconsideration of the context of cultural history out of which National Socialism arose. In trying to understand the degeneration of a sophisticated Central European state into barbarity, a number of diverse factors may spring to mind. For example, many Germans wanted a fundamental revision of, if not revenge for, the Treaty of Versailles, which had concluded the hostilities of World War I without laying any foundations for a possible reconciliation between the adversaries. Furthermore, a large percentage of the German electorate at the end of the Weimar Republic was ready to follow a leader who promised work at a time when there were over six million unemployed and when many more had only a subsistence income from part-time or temporary employment. Such voters came less from the ranks of the unemployed themselves than from the lower middle classes who felt the threat of proletarianisation and a collapse of law and order. Many people, traditionally accustomed to the ideological and psychological securities afforded by the clear stratifications of an authoritarian state, became disorientated. They were unsettled first by a period of revolutionary upsurge (1919-21) which followed the defeat in war and later by the extreme pluralism of political parties, each fighting a hopeless battle for dominance in an increasingly confused and chaotic political discourse. Others abhorred not only the ideological disunity of the nation, but also its social division into have and have-not, into the leisured chic and the workers, into privileged and underprivileged classes. Although Hitler never attained more than 43.9% of the vote in a free general election, he appeared to many to be the answer to all these problems, for we have to assume that the plebiscites he held after he had attained power did in fact produce large acclamatory majorities, even if the final results were manipulated by the Nazi propaganda machine. 1 As long as there was peace Hitler was not a dictator who had to live behind an impenetrable shield of security men. Nor was National Socialism a political and ideological creed, which fed merely. On its sectarian delusions. Hitler denied these occult roots of his ideological education in Vienna 2 precisely because his political instinct told him that only the exploitation of "respectable" cultural traditions would confer political legitimisation in the eyes of the "broad masses" both on him and on his movement. After all, National Socialism had to provide what to many were plausible responses to the confusing reality of lived experience at that time. It could not do so without incorporating in its culture a perception of society that had a long European heritage. I shall attempt to show that the attractiveness of one of its central propaganda motifs, the vision of a united Volk (nation) (also used in compound nouns like Nationalvolk, Staatsvolk, Volksstaat, Volkskoerper), derived from older, distinctively anti-modernist arguments that were European in origin though German in inflection. They were nourished by venerable ideological traditions, which could also be traced in other countries, notably Britain. Furthermore, I shall demonstrate that these traditions hold utopian attractions, which have by no means lost their force even in the "Post-Modernist" culture of present-day Western societies. For the utopian anti-Modernism, on which National Socialist propaganda and art were founded, can be seen to suffuse modern culture and is re-emerging, whether ironically or accompanied by ideological ardour, in the iconography and architectural imagination of the present. In order to explain the events of the Nazi era in Germany historians have increasingly felt compelled to look beyond pure political analysis. They have sought to unravel the dominant life styles, the hegemonic ideological currents, the shifts in the social composition and the social psychology of the German people since the beginning of the twentieth century and have tried to follow a number of threads going back hundreds of years into German history. There can be little doubt that long-standing traditions of authoritarianism, nationalistic myth-making and anti-Semitic prejudice were indeed absorbed into Nazi propaganda. The danger of such social and cultural history is that deterministic developments are perceived where there are none and that special characteristics are highlighted which were by no means typical of Germany alone. There is, for example, no convincing evidence that certain stock features, which are supposed to constitute the "German character" are in fact specific to Germany. For example, anti-Semitic intolerance was far more militant and widespread in Poland, the Ukraine and the Austro-Hungarian Empire than in the German Reich. As for nationalist, chauvinist and imperialist sentiments, they were extremely strong in all the major nation states of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe. It is difficult to prove that attitudes of passive obedience were noticeably more marked in Germany than they were in other European societies. If Hitler is nevertheless to be regarded as the culmination of such traditions, then we must search for manifestations in twentieth-century German culture, themselves pointing back into European history, which indicated such pronounced reactions against modern developments that they were capable of pulling Germany in crisis in a significantly different direction from that taken by other Western societies. Accordingly, within the limits of this chapter, a set of intense and inimical responses to modernity will be traced which give evidence of extensive nostalgia for a vividly imagined traditional, "organic" society, free from the alienation of capitalist industrialism. This will help us to understand how Nazism could appropriate the best parts of an illustrious German cultural tradition. At the same time it will explain how attitudes that were by no means exclusive to Germany could, there, form a distinctive and seductive ideological mixture which in turn prepared the ground for a policy of murderous extremes. Clearly, we cannot attempt here a comprehensive study of the cultural dynamics within which incipient changes of attitude, the political radicalisation of the 1920s, and the re-fabrication of tradition by National Socialism led in the 1930s to mass allegiance to a ruthless dictator. We shall instead have to content ourselves with the study of one aspect within the sketch of a larger picture. By concentrating on some powerfully suggestive images and symptomatic movements since the turn of the twentieth century, which were either completely absent from other European societies or relegated to marginality there, it is possible to reveal deep-seated yearnings that in Germany demanded political attention and that called for a rhetoric targeted at the dissatisfied mass. The images both of nudity and the organic cohesion of society, which we have in mind were neither necessarily of National Socialist provenance nor could they be considered suitable material for the programmatic pronouncements of a mass party. Yet they carried messages and dreams of social organisation with the broadest appeal. They represented a store house of utopian promises that in the 1920s and before World War I was being raided by groupings from the far Left to the extreme Right. The latter was able to use such images within the manipulatory network of Fascist ideology and skilfully popularise them in a period of economic, social and cultural crisis; through them was suggested a necessary return to heroic values and a communally integrated life. In other words, distinctive elements within German tradition served to negate the present and were used to create a myth of the past that could feed the convictions of majorities and influence their attitudes and decisions regarding contemporary politics. The Crisis of Modernity The long-term factors, which were operative within the crisis of the 1920s could be found everywhere in Europe, rooted as they were in the secular transformation from a traditional authoritarian society to one of democratic pluralism. During the inter-war years the evolutionary character of this transformation faltered in Germany. Until then Germany had, with considerable lag behind Britain, embarked on the European transition to modernity. This process, which at times showed distinctly revolutionary features, can be traced over three centuries. It includes the post-Renaissance victories of modern science over superstition and medieval scholasticism, the disintegration of feudal-absolutist authority and universal religious faith, the development of global commerce, the emergence of manufacture and the evolution of an industrial capitalist society, large-scale urbanisation and the replacement of communalist attitudes by bourgeois individualism. These developments necessitated changes in the existing political structures, which would make them more responsive to the plural interests of growing mass populations. The foundation of modern political parties and the splitting of society into party-political groupings, the growth of the print media and their use by different ideological factions in the Kaiserreich and, finally, the crescendo of intensely nationalistic state propaganda were typical historical features that found their parallels elsewhere in Europe. World War I was the outcome of a situation where competing nationalisms had patently grown too big for their boots. In Germany, which had been pushed into hurried industrialisation over a single generation after the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), the transition to modernity was then significantly accelerated again, perhaps over accelerated, by the abolition of the monarchy and the introduction of a republican, liberal-democratic constitution in 1919. The momentum of social change, still not fast enough for sections of the urban proletariat who had little to lose, proved too fast for the majority of the conservative middle and lower-middle classes, who felt the loss of social prestige and material income and clung to ideas of a more traditional social order. The process of transition first produced frenzied party-political, ideological and social contradictions in the Weimar state and was then halted-though not in all respects-by the emergence of National Socialism and the establishment of the Hitler dictatorship, only to be completed in the Federal Republic of the post-Adenauer period and in the post-Honecker period of the German Democratic Republic. The demagogy of the Nazi movement and of Hitler in particular, however unconvincing it may have been to large sections of the electorate-the majority of workers, of Catholics and of the educated/liberal middle classes - was assured of ever greater public approval the more it could project the vision of an undivided nation. The abolition of all party-political and ideological divisions within a volatile multi-party state and the promise of forging the German people into one united body energised by the same "blood" was a counsel of despair, but it held considerable attractions. Notions of the "body" - both in its specific sense as the material shape of human beings and in its wider meaning as a metaphorical designation for the nation in the sense of the "body politic" - had been gaining steadily in importance since the dawn of the twentieth century. It was at this time in Germany that a society with an increasingly modern class structure appeared, together with its attendant social tensions and internal contradictions. These were clearly articulated in the political, economic and cultural spheres. The German parliament, the Reichstag, may have been overshadowed by the power of the Kaiser, his chancellor and a traditionally authoritarian government bureaucracy, but it steadily increased in political weight and, with the spread at least of male universal suffrage, gave expression to a plurality of political interests and representation to different social classes and class factions. A scenario of conflict emerged which became even more dominant in the Weimar Republic. No superior authority, such as that which before 1918 had staked its claims in terms of "divine right" (Gottesgnadentum), could now override political divisions. Germany exhibited the typical fissures of a secular society, in which religious creeds were on the decline and numerous Weltanschauungen (ideologies) and divergent political programs competed with each other. Even the university sciences were no longer considered to be free of ideology. Significantly, a scholar as eminent as Max Weber felt compelled to devote several treatises to the distinctions between social science, which was concerned primarily with facts and their location in an historical context, and ideology, which involved beliefs about ultimate values and their relatedness to political action 3. University chairs in Weltanschauungslehre (theory of ideology) began to appear-notably based on the work by Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler and Romano Guardini, with memories of the book entitled Weltanschauungslehre (1908) by the much earlier Heinrich Gomperz-because it was hoped that this would promote 'mutual acquaintance and understanding among the races, classes and parties within the political life of this country' 4. Philosophers as well as writers expressed their disquiet over "value pluralism", "value relativism", "the decay of values" and "nihilism". Theories about the "sociology of knowledge" which challenged all illusions of objectivity became fashionable. In other words, dissonance, not just in musical composition -where they were revolutionary-but in ordinary cognition became a basic experience. Josef Goebbels was right to stress in an article of 1935 that the reaction against the confusing democratic pluralism and the internal dissensions of the Weimar Republic was a major element in the acceptance of National Socialism by a majority of the German people: 'Never before had particularism of every kind revelled in such orgies at a time when we badly needed internal unity 5. Whether in the intellectually challenging cosmopolitan environment of the universities or in the rural backwoods, whose idyllic retardation was daily disturbed by the metropolitan media, all sections of society in the 1920s were drawn into a politicised contemporary which manifested itself in ever greater participation rates at elections. These shot up from an already respectable 75.696 in February 1928 to 88.796 in March 1933. Feelings of alienation, of being let down by society, were in the late 1920s not confined to the modern wage-dependent labourer, nor to the sensitive literary avant-garde of the educated bourgeoisie from Rainer Maria Rilke to Gottfried Benn. Instead, they became the central psychological, intellectual and social experience of members of all classes. Similarly, the economic crisis broadened. Earlier, it had mainly been the small savers of the lower and professional middle classes who had lost their money as a result of the hyper-inflation of 1923. Now, the Black Friday crash of 1929 affected shareholders, share dealers and financiers as well, at the same time worsening further the position of white and blue-collar labour. Disaffection with the existing political system became so widespread that, from the elections in September 1930 through three further general elections up until March 1933, a steadily increasing majority in the Reichstag joined in a shrill chorus of extremist propaganda in favour of abolishing parliamentary democracy. The Utopian Content of Nudism and Fascist Corporatism It was in this situation that a rhetoric gained ground which celebrated the return to rural simplicity and close-knit community pre-dating industrial civilisation. The appeal was to the harmony of the body as a metaphor of social balance, natural inequality and co-operation in a complex organism. At the very time when the designs of the Bauhaus and the New Objectivity in art and literature were achieving creative triumphs of Modernist culture, the most violent moment of an anti-modernist backlash was being prepared in politics, supported by the extensive spread of an anti-modernist mentality in large sections of the population. This is neither to say that Modernism actually breathed its last the instant that National Socialism came to power, nor that Hitler's policies stopped the forward march of industrialisation. Yet the utopian visions of organic wholeness, which were played on by Nazi propaganda campaigns drew on anti-modernist protests such as those organised since before World War I by adherents of the nudity cult, the many branches of the neo-romantic Buendische Jugend (the German Youth Movement), and right-wing publishing houses with influential journals such as Die Tat (The Deed-Eugen Diederichs Verlag, Jena), Deutschlands Erneuerung (Germany's Renewal-J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, Munich) and Deutsches Volkstum (German Folk-Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg) 6. All these groupings, which gained their clearest articulation in writers associated with the "Conservative Revolution", were more or less fiercely elitist, hoping for a Diktatur der Geistigen (dictatorship of the intellectual/spiritual elite) and believing in a special cultural mission of Germany. They sought to promote Ganzheit (wholeness), Einheit (unity) and Bindung (social and ideological incorporation) against Individualismus (individualism), Weltanschuungsvielfalt (ideological pluralism) and Fortschrittsdenken (idea of steady progress). While these were typical right-wing, proto-fascist responses to modernity, they were attractive to all segments of German society, whose respective sense of social distinction and ideological division became intensified at the same time. Thus, on the left too there was an ardent search for incorporation and collective commitment amongst the members of the socialist worker culture organisations, despite the internationalism of their outlook. The novels and theories of the communist cultural bolshevist reflected the all-encompassing capacity and wisdom of the Volk (the nation, the ordinary people). Communist and socialist youth organisations were founded which emulated the bourgeois youth movement, the symbolism of its banners and styles of clothing and the practices of exploring the countryside and living together in tent colonies. Nudism too burst out of its bourgeois enclaves. By the late 1920s the lure of the nudist arcadia had extended its influence across the best part of the ideological spectrum and thereby furnished clear proof that the naked body could become the focus of reformist, educational and aesthetic ideas in quite divergent ideological camps. It was a telling symptom of the degree of material uncertainty and mental anxiety then prevailing that human beings felt compelled to return to the most basic point of orientation, the body, in order to redefine their perception of society and their relation to it. Far from providing any guidance towards "pure", "natural" or "original" values, however, the body turned out to be a chameleon, reflecting the different colours of quite diverse ideological environments. The cult of the naked body had its origins in Germany around the turn of the twentieth century. The German FKK clubs-the literal translation of Freikoerperkultur is "bare (or open-air) body culture" - from which naturism took its cue, retain even now some of the high-minded ideals associated with nudism in the first third of the century. These ideals appear to have successfully defied the suspicions of debauchery, which the congregation of naked men and women initially kindled everywhere in petit-bourgeois police forces. The nudists' erstwhile campaigning zeal has today lost its provocative edge, having been smothered in reluctant acceptance or active tolerance of nudity on beaches, near lakes, In naturist resorts and, in Germany, even in public city parks. Nudity in the sun has become one of the regular enticements of the package holiday industry. Idyllic corners of sun-belt Europe, governed until recently by carefully circumscribed moralities of provincial decency, have in the 1970s and 1980s imperiously been invaded by the pale-skinned, money-bearing sun-seekers from the North. Yet even in this thoroughly commercialised environment nudity still seems to radiate to some extent the utopian equality of human beings and the dream of a re-union with nature, both of which are played on by the advertising industries. Nudity could and can also suggest the purity of life before it became depraved by the sophistication, cultural corruption, social disunity and decadence of overcrowded urbanised civilisations. References: 1. Cf. I. Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, London, 1985. 2. The striking similarities between some of Hitler's ideas and those of Joerg Lanz von Liebenfels and Guido von List have been impressively researched by Wilfried Daim, Der Mann der Hitler die Ideen gab. Die sektiererischen Grundlagen des Nationalsozialismus, Vienna, Cologne, Graz, 1985 (2nd edn) and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism. The Aristophists of Austria and Germany 1890-1935, Wellingborough, 1985. 3. Cf. M. Weber, 'Science as a Vocation', in P. Lassman and I. Velody, Max Weber's Science as a Vocation; London, 1989. 4. M. Scheler, 'Sociology and the Study and Formulation of Weltanschauung', ibid., p 91. 5. J. Goebbels, 'Der Fuehrer als Staatsmann', in Cigaretten/Bilderdienst (ed), Adolf Hitler, Bilder aus dem Leben des Fuehrers, Hamburg-Bahrenfeld, 1936, p 45. 6. Cf. G. D. Stark, Entrepreneurs of Ideology. Neo-conservative Publishers in Germany, 1890-1933, Chapel Hill (North Carolina), 1981. Part B Nudism was an attempt to regain, in the face of the ravages of industrialisation, physical and ideological spaces for the restoration of life in harmony with nature. At its inception it was embedded in a rarefied cult of beauty which, it was assumed, had reached its unsurpassed cultural climax in the Polis of classical Greek antiquity. Because of this overt connection of nudism with political thought any study of the naked body in the 1920s and 1930s must inevitably be set against the larger background of utopian hopes and aspirations which suffuse the entire period of Modernism and which receive the most articulate expression in the Germany of the inter-war years. Here, the body and the body politic revealed themselves as part of a joint ideological history. The many branches of the German Youth Movement had, since the turn of the century, expressed their longings for both charismatic leadership and a fresh reconciliation with nature. The right-wing nudity cult and the organicist thinking that went with it appeared to hold some of the answers. To conceive the state neither as a collectivity (as in the USSR) nor as a contractual association of individuals (as in liberal capitalism), but as a wholesome organism, stimulated the recovery of supposedly traditional values which modern civilisation had destroyed: the ties of kith and kin, the purity of racial blood relationship, the unity of racially identical folk, the ennoblement of rich and poor alike into members of the finest race, the comradeship of the tribal, regional or military group in the service of their leader and their nation, and the conception of life as a struggle between different races competing against each other for expansion and domination. The state was thus regarded as a combative athlete, continually testing its strength against others and regenerating itself like an organic body. Oswald Mosley, the English Fascist leader, put the basic idea most succinctly: 'Our policy is the establishment of the Corporate State. As the name implies, this means a state organised like the human body 7. It was this kind of anti-modernist thinking which shaped Hitler's ideas, without there being much evidence that he took any special notice of nudism as such, although we can assume that he would have come across references to it in the occult journal Ostara. Briefbuecherei der Blonden and Mannesrechtler (Ostara. Library of the Blond and Masculinists) which he collected in Vienna. Some of its issues were devoted to the nudity cult. However tenuous Hitler's connections with it may be, he was steeped in organicist notions. In Mein Kampf he rejected the modern form of the state as a cold 'monstrosity of human mechanism' (ein Monstrum von menschlichem Mechanismus 9, preferring instead the idea of the individual serving as a sacrificial member of the community (the horde): The Aryan is not greatest in his mental qualities as such, but in the extent of his willingness to put all his abilities in the service of the community. In him the instinct of self-preservation has reached the noblest form, since he willingly subordinates his own ego to the life of the community and, if the hour demands, even sacrifices it 10. Even in the nineteenth century we find a dichotomy in conceptions of the state and society as between images of dead mechanism on the one hand and vibrant organicism on the other. That dichotomy had its roots in the opposing conceptions of the Left and the Right, with the latter accusing the former of imagining that society could be "shaped thus and thus at will", with "aggregated men, twisted into this or that arrangement" by Acts of Parliament. Society had become the product of a mere "manufacture". This sort of thinking, in the eyes of conservatives as far back as Edmund Burke, had led to the 'erroneous conception of a society as a plastic mass instead of as an organised body', as Herbert Spencer put it in The Man versus the State (1881) 11. Hitler's notion of the state was deeply corporeal and corporatist. He had clearly been influenced by a stream of neo-conservative thought that had many tributaries, from Wagner and H. S. Chamberlain to Rosenberg and Lanz von Liebenfels. Individuals could only be conceived of by him as the constituent parts of a greater body, sentient in its own right, delegating the fight for its survival to all its individual members. This animal remained awesomely anonymous. Only the image of a vast Volkskoerper (body of the nation) suited it in National Socialist rhetoric. Hobbes's Leviathan was contractual and hence repudiated as a model by National Socialist lawyers and political thinkers, and "Behemoth", the Old Testament beast, had far too strong Jewish connotations to be appropriate. The only creature, which within the iconography of the Third Reich projected the fearless unity of nation was the specially stylised Reichsadler (imperial eagle) under whose protective wings the peaceful trades of a pre-industrial community of artisans could flourish. This, at least, was the vision, which fired Karl Heinz Dallinger in his tapestry design for a casino of the Luftwaffe. Shortly before the attempt on Hitler's life on 20 July 1944 he gave a rambling, philosophising speech to leading personalities in industry and commerce. Here he returned to the subordination of the individual to the social organism as a whole. He reiterated his belief that the foremost objective of the state was the optimal preservation of the nation, Volkserhaltung. Against the collectivism of the Bolshevist state, and the individualism of the liberal bourgeois one, he sought to project the idea of the National Socialist state where 'the creative activity of the individual must work for the benefit of the whole of society-fine words' 12 , indeed, which were in tune with his belief that no nation could be victorious by dint of military power alone and that it therefore had to develop an ideology superior to that of its enemies. Hitler failed to understand, however, that such an ideology must carry conviction not only within the nation but also outside it and that, in order to be of material assistance in victory, it must have attractions for the conquered, transforming them into convinced allies. This was impossible for National Socialism because it blinkeredly saw different nations built on the foundation of unequally rated "racial elements". Racial exclusiveness meant that mass assent by the conquered could never be forthcoming and that costly and brutal mechanisms of repression had to be deployed. These were, of course, also in evidence within the Reich itself. The huge bureaucracy of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Central Reich-Security Office), however, would not have been sufficient to control the ninety million people with their distinct regional traditions in Hitler's Greater Germany. A continuous ideological war, sensitively attuned to majority feelings, had to be waged in order to reproduce if not a mass consensus then at least broad assent for the public actions of the regime. Significantly, the policies of the holocaust were kept secret. The regime obviously felt the need for such secrecy because it could not be sure of public opinion at home, despite the fact that it had the media under its manipulative control. While the chief target of that policy was European Jewry, it embraced mass executions on general racial and ideological grounds, so that large numbers of Poles and Russians perished in the concentration camps, as well as German anti-fascists. This murderous side of the regime was but the violent reverse of its theatre of public rhetoric with its constant celebrations of the Volksgemeinschaft. There was, of course, always the threat of coercion, of physical sanction against anyone who actively resisted persuasion through propaganda. The permanent objective of this propaganda, even when not explicitly stated, was to conjure up a society that fervently believed in Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer, the Nazis' most effective slogan by far. In other words, this propaganda assumed that, above all, it had to establish in the German populace both a sense of togetherness in nationhood and an acceptance of fascist leadership. Nationhood was conceived as a racially identical bloc of people united in a single political will. In it, the individual was expendable, whether or not he or she happened to be endowed with the awareness which, according to Nazism, befitted humans in a mass, namely of being only 'a dust particle of that order which shapes and forms the whole universe' (A. Hitler) or, as a well-known slogan of the Third Reich had it: Du bist nichts, dein Volk ist alles (You are nothing, your nation is everything) 13. Modernity as the Loss of Organic Community As has often been observed, Germany was a relative late-comer in the historical process which led to the formation of modern nation states in Europe. It had also lagged behind Britain and parts of France in achieving general industrialisation, although it was clearly not so backward as to have no hope of catching up. The transformation from an agrarian society to one based predominantly on machine technology was very sudden when it came in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Germany's backwardness and, at the same time, the presence within it of a sharply critical literary and philosophical intelligentsia, meant that the society of that country could become a prime, though by no means exclusive, reservoir of anti-modernist attitudes and of anti-modernist criticism. In the past, German society, chiefly made up of rural and small-town communities, had been marked by a strong sense of cohesion. It was now plainly reluctant to cut the umbilical cord with the land, to expropriate its small-holding peasantry and to abandon its regional allegiances. Because of this local cohesiveness, rooted in medieval tradition, some German writers (notably Kant, Schiller and Goethe) acutely perceived the very earliest threats that the advent of modernity posed. Precisely because Germany, especially when compared to Britain, was at that time an extremely antiquated society, it could provide a stark backdrop for the harbingers of any thing that was at all modern. Strongly influenced by the remarkable school of Enlightenment philosophers, historians and political economists in eighteenth-century Scotland, German writers around the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century voiced concern and protest at the specialisation and fragmentation of human faculties through the division of labour and the elaboration of bureaucracy in modern society. They perceived a contradiction between the modern mode of production and the attainment of. a rounded personality. Yet it had long been recognised that technical, intellectual and social advances were possible only through the progressive division of labour. The creation of wealth depended on it. Adam Smith was aware that such specialisation brought about inevitable problems, namely the division of individuals into occupational particularity and the separation of society into social estates with special functions, such as the military, the agrarian and the industrial classes. Even before Smith we find in John Millar's lie Origin of the Distinction of Ranch (1771) and in Adam Ferguson's An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1766) remarkably clear-sighted though brief descriptions of the divorce of man from the roundness and integration of his own individuality and from the social totality of the Common Weal. The state, Ferguson held had become a machine, people "part of an engine" and human beings were but "stones in a wall" to modern government. Manufacturers prospered most, Ferguson observed, 'when the mind is least consulted', referring here to the stupefying subdivision of the labour process into separated specialisms. This led men to become indifferent to the polity as a whole and the citizen ceased to be a statesman, so that both in an individual and in a collective respect Ferguson was moved to speak of the 'fatal dismemberment of the human character' 14. All this is repeated and amplified with great rhetorical skill in Friedrich Schiller's extraordinary treatise On the Aesthetic Education of Man It was written in response to the French Revolution, in sympathy with its fundamental ideals of liberation, yet in opposition to the violence, terror and brutishness it unleashed. With all his sharpness of observation, his philosophical skill and his poetic genius Schiller proposed a programmatic counter-model to the emergent panorama of bourgeois-capitalist society. Within the context of our argument it is important to note firstly that in defence of a classical ideal of human individuality Schiller, in conjunction with other German writers, particularly Kant, posited the harmonising powers of an autonomous aesthetic sphere as a bulwark against the fragmentation of modern society. Secondly, by constructing a radical opposition between antiquity and modernity, he presented the latter in a series of barren metaphors and could thus engage in a scathing critique of the alienating tendencies which had become most distinctively discernible in France and in Britain and from which he wanted to save his blessedly backward Germany: The polypoid character of the Greek states in which every individual enjoyed an independent existence but could, when need arose, grow into the whole organism, now made way for an ingenious clockwork, in which, out of the piecing together of innumerable lifeless parts a mechanical kind of collective life ensued. State and Church, laws and customs were now torn asunder; enjoyment was divorced from labour, the means from the end, the effort from the reward. Everlastingly chained to a single fragment of the Whole man himself develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in his ear the monotonous sound of the wheel that he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being and instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon his own nature he becomes nothing more than the imprint of his occupation or of his specialised knowledge. But even that meagre, fragmentary participation by which individual members of the State are still linked to the Whole, does not depend upon forms which they spontaneously prescribe for themselves . . . it is dictated to them with meticulous exactitude by means of a formulary which inhibits all freedom of thought…The dead letter takes the place of organic understanding ... 15. Against tendencies of mechanistic, universal rationalism in the French Enlightenment Johann Gottfried Herder, an older contemporary of Schiller, had in his Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784-91) stressed the meaning of the historical process as one in which the many-sidedness and national plurality of human nature would in time unfold. History was seen by him as the organic growth process that would reveal the totality of the human potential, just as nations were seen by him as distinct personalities, held together in organic cultural community. Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, 1796) traced the steady, organic formation of an individual towards the full elaboration of his talents. The novel inaugurated the German tradition of the Bildungsroman (novel of individual development). At the same time Goethe opposed those aspects of modern science which tore objects out of their natural context and isolated them for experimental observation (cf. his opposition to Newton in Zur Farbenlehre, On the Theory of Colours, 1810). Modern technology was criticised by him for its inherently self-destructive megalomania in Faust II (1833) and in his visionary poem Der Zauberlehrling (The Sorcerer's Apprentice, 1798). The point here is this: despite the relative backwardness of Germany in becoming an industrialised, bourgeois society on the basis of a modern capitalist economy-and perhaps because of this backwardness-there was operative in German thought at the threshold to modernity an almost obsessive fear of the mechanistic reduction of the organic community to a cold, anonymous, alienated association and of the individual to a fragment of his/her human potential. In a country, which had experienced the influence of medieval thought and medieval social structures for so long, the collapse of the medieval ideology of anthropomorphic organicism, which had held together the social entity caused the greatest sense of crisis. The erosion of the medieval vision of the organic interdependence of individuals and estates within the homely environment of the extended social family induced an anti-modern protest in Germany even before modernity had properly been established. It raised the spectre of up-rootedness, dislocation, alienation and disorientation, which in Germany was particularly intense and which fed ultimately into the ideological currents of the 1920s and 1930s. History of the Body Metaphor In order to understand the strength of the organicist myth in twentieth-century anti-modernism we must rediscover the tradition of the metaphor, which lay behind the idea of the body politic. This is especially necessary in view of the fact that this metaphor has apparently lost all its fascination within the affluent, pluralistic societies of the West. Yet well into the twentieth century there was, within the tradition of European political thought, an ever renewed analogy between the human body and state-ruled society (Staatsgesellschaft). In Britain and the United States fictions of society as a great family or organism are sometimes invoked by politicians, but in truth the ideological persuasiveness of such images began to be eroded with the onset of modern bourgeois society, i.e. in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The incipient anonymity of competitive capitalism in which all social interdependence threatened to be regulated by money was lamented most vociferously in a country where, similar to Italy, medieval regionalism, medieval social structures and medieval ideology had been firmly entrenched for so long. Germany had not been ruptured by any successful revolution, glorious or bloody. It was here that the leaders of the Romantic Movement invented the image of an organically integrated society in the Middle Ages in an attempt to stem the tide of modernity. What then was the precise form of the body analogy in the Middle Ages and what was its purpose? It is in John of Salisbury's Policraticus in the middle of the twelfth century that we find an excellent example of the elaborate metaphor of the state as a body in which all internal social bonds were forged in strict hierarchical order to make up an indivisible living organism: In the commonwealth the prince takes the place of the head, subject to God alone and to those who act as His representatives on earth, even as in the human body the head is animated and ruled by the soul. The senate corresponds to the heart, from which proceed the beginnings of good and evil deeds. The offices of eyes, ears and tongue are claimed by the judges and governors of the provinces. Officials and soldiers correspond to the hands. . . Treasurers are like the belly and intestines, which if they become congested with excessive greed and too tenaciously keep what they collect, generate innumerable incurable diseases, so that ruin threatens the whole body when they are defective. Tillers of the soil correspond to the feet, which particularly need the providence of the head because they stumble against many obstacles when they walk upon the ground doing bodily service; and they have a special right to the protection of clothing, since they must raise, sustain, and carry forward the weight of the whole body... 16. References: 7.Oswald Mosley, quoted in R. Osborn: The Psychology of Reaction, London, 193 8, p.60. 8.Cf. Lanz von Liebenfels, Ostara, Nr. 66: 'Nackt- und Rassenkultur im Kampf gegen Mucker- und Tschandalenkultur', Rodaun, 1913. Ostara appeared irregularly between 1905 and 1930. Hitler appears to have been an avid reader. 9.A. Hitler, Mein Kampf tr R. Manheim, London, 1976 (1st edn 1969), p 351. 10.ibid., p 270. 11.H. Spencer, The Man versus the State Baltimore, 1969 (orig. publ. 1881), p 147. 12.A. Hitler, in H. v. Kotze, H. Krausnick and F. A. Krummacher (eds), 'Es spricht der Fuehrer'. 7 exemplarische Hitler-Reden, Guetersloh, 1966, p 339. 13.Quoted in C. Zentner, Adolf Hitlers 'Mein Kampf; Munich, 1974, pp 108-9. 14.A. Ferguson, Essay on Civil Society (1792), quoted in the excellent article by Roy Pascal 'Bildung and the Division of labour' in German Studies, Presented to W. Bruford by Pupils, Colleagues and Friends, London (etc), 1962, p 15. 15.F. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man inn Series of Letters, edited and translated by E. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, Oxford, 1967 (German original 1795), p 35. 16.Reproduced in E. Lewis, Medieval Political Ideas, vol. 1, London, 1954, p 225. Part C The organic corporatism of this medieval analogy between the human body and the body politic served an ideologically legitimatory purpose, namely to keep the entire hierarchical structure firmly in place, ruled ultimately by the Church and based on the exploitation of the peasants. John of Salisbury, who incidentally was an ally of Thomas a Becket, was an erudite man. Having been educated at Chartres and at the University of Paris (under Abelard) he could draw on) a rich fund of knowledge. His was but one version, remarkably secular, of a body metaphor, which had been used by many medieval writers to refer, in the first place, to society as the ecclesiastical body of Christ. Religious or secular, the metaphor fitted in with and expanded on another crucial depiction of medieval society, the ternary image 17 , which suggested a division into those who pray (orators), those who fight (pugnatores) and those who work (laboratories). The image of the three orders and that of the body were both used very widely throughout medieval Christendom. One of the earliest cases was that of Wallafried Strabo in Germany 18. Whatever Salisbury's medieval precursors, the reference to the "senate" reveals that his sources reached back to Roman antiquity, and it is indeed very likely that the Roman origins of the body metaphor were known to him. According to Camden's Remains of a Greater Work Concerning Britaine (1605) John of Salisbury had the story from Pope Adrian, an Englishman from Middlesex. In Hadrian's version the analogy appears more or less as it did originally in Livy, where it is attributed to Menenius Agrippa, a Roman Senator: All the members of the body conspired against the stomacke, as against the swallowing gulfe of all their labours; for whereas the eies beheld, the cares heard, the handes laboured, the feet travelled, the tongue spake, and all partes performed their functions, onely the stomacke lay ydle and consumed all. Hereupon they ioyantly agreed all to forbears their labours, and to pine away their lasie and publike enemy. One day passed over, the second followed very tedious, but the third day was so grivous to them all that they called a common Counsel; The eyes waxed dimmer, the feete could not support the body, the armes waxed lasie, the tongue faltered, and could not lay open the matter; Therefore they all with one accord desired the advise of the Heart. There Reason layd open before them that hee against whome they had proclaimed warres, was the cause of all this their misery: For he as their common steward, when his allowances were withdrawne, of necessitie withdrew theirs from them, as not receiving that he might allow. Therefore it were a farre better course to supply him than that the limbs should faint with hunger. So by the perswasion of Reason, the stomacke was served, the limbes comforted, and peace re-established. Even so it fareth with the bodies o f Common-weales; for albeit the Princes gather much, yet not so much for themselves, as for others: So that if they want, they cannot supply the want of others; therefore do not repine at Princes heerein, but respect the common good of the whole publike estate 19. This sermon in political science was clearly addressed to those who might be tempted to doubt that tile existing social classes were God-given, natural and immutable. The organic metaphor of the state as a huge, finely balanced metabolism functioned as a perfect legitimisation for the division of labour, the unequal distribution of wealth and the separation o f human beings into social estates. It could serve superbly well as a compelling illustration of the necessity for a ruler and a ruling classy while at the same time the metaphor could help spread the warm glow of community, of cradled security enfolding all individuals from the highest to the lowliest in one harmoniously co-ordinated body. It was the nostalgia for such a totally ("natural", totally integrated community In a society blatantly exploited by a magisterial feudal-absolutist aristocracy which prompted Rousseau's cry, 'Back to Nature'. A similar nostalgia, prompted by a social reality pregnant with the incubus of capitalism, inspired the relentless criticism by the German Romantics of society as a soulless machine, a dismembered body whose lifeblood had flowed away: You see artisans but no human beings; priests but no human beings; masters and servants, young and old, but no human beings; is it [i.e. society] not like a battlefield where hands and arms and all other limbs lie in a fragmented heap, while the lifeblood is spilt In the sand?' 20 This quotation shows that Schiller was not alone In his warnings about certain tendencies inherent in modern society. It is taken from a novel entitled Hyperion, which in the late 1790s spelt out the misery of life in Germany compared to that of classical Greece. Modern society was largely seen as the dismemberment of an old, organic body politic. Less pessimistically, another important Romantic poet, Novalis, likened society to a human body and turned the metaphor round, 'Every human being is a small society' 21, only then to give it a new twist: Law courts, theatres, courts, the church, the government, open assemblies, academies, colleges etc. are only the special, internal organs of the mystical individual of the state 22. The state, Rousseau had taught three and a half decades earlier, was not just an indifferent machine, but the executor of a will. The Romantics built on this idea and saw the state as a super individual. Hegel demystified this notion in two ways, firstly by insisting that the state as the guarantor of law and order protects the property and liberty of tile individuals associated under its authority. To this extent it has a purely contractual nature, allowing any arbitrary collection of individuals to make up a state. Secondly, however, the state in general is recognised as "objective spirit", i.e. the result of dialectical interaction between the general will and the will of individuals. Any particular state is the externalisation of a particular people, its particular ethos, which finds expression both in the morality underlying its constitution and in the consciousness of its citizens. (Philosophy of Right, § 274). The state therefore retains the special properties which make up the organism (§ 259) of a people. It is the conscious form of collectivity, its reason, developed by the nation over centuries. Despite the stress on "objective spirit", on the state as externalisation of human reason - in contrast to nature which is seen as an externalisation of divine reason - Hegel retained the organicist anchorage of any given state in the mentality of a people or nation. The dual character of the state as a legal persona regulating the relations of private citizens on the one hand and as an incarnation of social reason itself on the other is rehearsed in later theory. It can be found, for example, towards the end of the nineteenth century, in the writings of Ferdinand Toennies. He was a seminal figure in the rise of modern sociology, author of the thesis that modern societies were the result of a historical shift from Gemeinschaft (organic, rural community) to Gesellschaft (urbanised, industrial association), from the personableness of neighbourly ties to the anonymity of bureaucratic control and mass existence 23. While he had no illusions that this process was in fact irreversible, his analysis was nevertheless used by representatives of the "conservative revolution" 24 in the 1920s and by National Socialist sociologists to indulge retrogressive cravings. The organic body as a metaphor for the integratedness of community grew in ideological importance just as individuals were increasingly subjected to the cold anonymity of state bureaucracy and the industrial labour process. A bifurcation of ideology and reality was developing in which the two were not simply separate but fed on each other. The more German society was becoming a modern association the more it appeared to need the comforts of an ideology of organic community. Aspects of German Nudism: Bourgeois, Proletarian and Fascist It was in order to rediscover the lost organic ideal that the nudity cult arose within elite, upper-middle class circles in Germany after the turn of the twentieth century. The aim was to re-live an assumed ideal of ancient Greek beauty, to adhere to an elevated notion of sexual purity, and to keep aloof from what was regarded as the primitive sexuality of the proletarian masses. In their zest for maintaining sharp distinctions between sexuality and nudity the early bourgeois nudist clubs came close to a projection of gender as sterile, arcane frigidity. The organisational structure of these clubs was pervaded by, and indeed modelled on, the secrecy and hierarchy of Masonic lodges. Membership could only be gained after an apprenticeship and required the sponsorship of several senior members. This period of nudism has sometimes been referred to ironically as its "Bronze Age", since the stress was on the exposure of the body to the sun in the open air and on the display of its beautiful proportions. The main journal documenting this spirit of the early nudity cult was significantly called Die Schoenheit (Beauty). It ran from 1902 until 1931, first published in Berlin and then, from about 1910 onwards, in Dresden. Some of its special numbers appeared simultaneously in German and in English. The working classes were entirely excluded from the aesthetic concerns of Die Schoenheit, not least because their bodies tended to show evidence of occupational mis-shapenness. In their aesthetic seclusion the early nudist clubs did not particularly care about rebuilding organic communities; they were at best a sectarian, perhaps a titillating side-show in the ideological panorama pre-1914. But this situation was to change very rapidly. For these clubs, even before 1914, began to take on board other ideological freight. A member of a proletarian nudist organisation in the 1920s sarcastically summed up this development of the bourgeois nudist clubs before the Great War: They soon fell for ideas of eugenics and racial hygiene: the blue-eyed, blond young lady with her soul full of longing was searched out by that equally blue-eyed, blond, boneheaded Germanic youth. Accordingly the majority of these lodges and clubs were swimming in the anti-Semitic voelkisch tide from which they have not emerged until the present day 25. Die Schoenheit, while upholding general ideals of human progress, was certainly by the early 1920s illustrating "Greek spirit in a new German manner". It betrayed its racial leanings and, as it stated in one advert, hoped for a new cultural efflorescence through the body cult. One only needs to look at the prolific and unbearably self-laudatory writings of an author like Richard Ungewitter to appreciate the accuracy of the quotation's appraisal. In 1905 Ungewitter had published a book advocating the ideals of nudity from an anthropological, moral and health-care point of view. It was titled Die Nacktheit (Nudity). Three years later he published Nackt (Nude), which was impounded. It showed a sharp development towards ultra-Right ideas. In 1913 he brought out another book on the same subject, entitled Nacktheit and Kultur (Nudity and Culture). The subtitle announced 'New Demands by Richard Ungewitter'. In 1920 he published Nacktheit und Aufstieg (Nudity and Ascendancy). In the preface he explained why its completion had been delayed by a special contribution which he felt he had to make towards the war effort. That explanation included his ideological self-portrait: My pen too was put in the service of this sacred issue and, together with thirty collaborators, I wrote Germany's Rebirth Through Blood and Iron, which aimed at the renewal of the German people on a national-political, Germanic-racial, voelkisch-social, moral and cultural basis' 26. The main guideline for his collaborators had been to point out the unbridgeable gulf between the idealistic, Germanic Weltanschauung and that of the Jewish democratic, petty-shopkeeper mentality. He saw Germany threatened by three powerful international conspiracies: (the red, the gold and the black conspiracy, colours which symbolically stood for socialism, "Jewish" finance capitalism and popish Catholicism. Black, red and gold were, of course, the colours of the German flag of the Weimar Republic and of democratic Germans in the nineteenth century. This flag was therefore intensely hated by those who thought like Ungewitter. Evidently, a powerful brew of Fascist propaganda material was being fermented at the beginning of the 1920s: It had mixed into it a poisonous paranoia of a Germany haunted by superior, inimical forces both without and within. Ungewitter's ideas were obviously not a mere absorption of those held by the early bourgeois nudist clubs. He was not elitist in the sense of striving to uphold class privilege. He was elitist on a much more dangerously comprehensive scale, namely on a racial basis, fashioning an image of the German people as the master race of the world. It is worth noting that even as early as 1920 his writings had achieved total sales of 220,000 copies. Racial consciousness, he held, was to be coupled with the voelkisch-social idea. The cultivation of nudity was for him a vital element in the preparation of an uprising of the Right against all the decadence of Western civilisation that this author believed impaired true Germanic uprightness and undermined the integrity of Germany's political mission. -She basic assumptions behind his view of the present blended in with those of the cultural pessimists (like Oswald Spengler, Ludwig Klages and others) but differed from their fatalism by the persistent tone of aggressive racism. This ideological mix was more or less identical with what later came to be called National Socialism. For a while, however, it appeared that it was not the Right but the Left, which was going to make the running in the Weimar Republic. Interestingly, a nudity cult, stimulated by yearnings for health and a return to nature, also developed on the Left. Here, it was not racist. But it did have an important ideological function, for it was intended to create attitudes favourable to radically reformist or revolutionary change. Socialist advocates of nudism implied that people should not only discard their clothes but with them the whole armour-plating of authority-fixated conditioning which held proletarians in deference to their masters: parental authority, the paternalism of school and church, the mass media, and the organs of law and order. Nudity was understood as a strengthening of the individual's potential for opposition: 'It helps to form strong characters, hardened for battle, which is what is wanted by the proletariat' 27. Proletarian nudity was intended as a purgative of deep-seated anti-sensual prejudice and a radical method of discarding the chains of bourgeois ideas around proletarian minds. Gymnastics in the nude was designed to give individuals the feeling of being in tune with common rhythm and an integral part of a larger, harmonious pattern. New dance schools sprang up in Hamburg, Berlin, Leipzig and Cologne which, inspired by Rudolf von Laban's ideas about Bewegungstanz (rhythmic movement dance) and themselves developing Ausdruckstanz (expressive dance), strove to show naked bodies in gracefully configured motion. Gymnastics in the nude also inspired sculpture, which accentuated the streamlined strength of the human body. The Proletarische Freikoerperkulturbewegung (proletarian naturist movement) became a subsection of the huge Worker Sports Organisation, which in turn was part of a large Worker Culture Movement in the Weimar Republic. That movement thought of itself as an indispensable "third column" in a three-pronged attack on capitalism which, it was believed, could not be defeated solely by being politically outmanoeuvred (by proletarian parliamentary parties) or economically transformed (by strategic trade unionism) 28. Hundreds of thousands of workers came together in the richly diversified sections of the culture movement, which provided an all-encompassing counter-cultural environment for the organised working class, covering young and old, male and female, sports, singing, photography, theatre, tourism and many other activities. Together with similar endeavours in Czechoslovakia, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Holland it represented the most comprehensive attempt of any working class in a capitalist society to build an organisational and creative cultural framework of its own. Those involved in it had few illusions about the difficulties of the task they faced. In particular, the proletarian nudists shared with many activists in the worker culture movement an acute awareness of the philistinism and petit-bourgeois attitudes that suffused the everyday life even of many party and trade union functionaries. In other words, the morality of the petit-bourgeois life style was challenged, so that an altogether more egalitarian, anti-authoritarian and democratic lifestyle might take its place. The man who like no other developed the idea of proletarian nudism was Adolf Koch, a primary school teacher and educational innovator. For him nudity was above all the symbol of a new start, of the building of a new society freed from the distorting and crippling influences, which predominantly affected the proletarian classes. He sought to counteract these influences and the malformations and listlessness of the body by using so-called "organic-rhythmical exercises" in his pedagogic practice. His work began in Berlin in the early 1920s. When he introduced his methods into two Berlin schools Koch ran into an outcry from the conservative press. But, with the support of the Social-Democratic government in Prussia, he was eventually able to build up a school which was dedicated to his methods and which towards the end of the 1920s had some 3,000 pupils. Throughout the worker culture movement the nudist sections numbered 60,000 members. They were therefore significantly more numerous than the bourgeois nudists, who were organised in the Reichsverband fuer Freikoerperkltur (Reich-Association of Naturists), in the Reichsverband fuer Freikoerperkltur (Reich- Corporation of Naturists) and the Liga fuer freie Lebensgestaltung (Libertarian League), numbering merely 12,000 in all. The main publication of the proletarian nudists was Koerperbildung-Nacktkultur, Blaetter freier Menschen. It is clear from this publication that proletarian nudism, while ideologically at one with the reformist and revolutionary ideals of socialism, was also fulfilling important compensatory tasks by strengthening exhausted and neglected proletarian bodies through providing facilities for gymnastics, showers, swimming pools and sun lamps. The stress on such compensatory functions at times blunted the oppositional mentality and blurred the differences from the bourgeois clubs. It is there fore not surprising that in the late 1920s, probably under the influence of Magnus Hirschfeld, an eminent liberal-humanist sexologist, proletarian nudists who were opposed to racism did nevertheless advocate eugenics and the physical ennoblement of the nation. Nudism, then, meant renewal, a fresh beginning and the reconciliation of man and nature. The photographers, no matter whether they were operating in a left-liberal or in a right-wing environment attempted to capture this spirit by concentrating on moments which showed exuberant movement and the enjoyment of the open air. The naked round dance of women became a stock-in-trade image of utopian bliss, both on the left and on the right, and probably goes considerably further back in history than Lucas Cranach's late medieval "Golden Age" Technological objects were banished from these pictures. It is clear from such examples that the crisis of modernity produced similar reactions in both the Left and the Right, despite their different party-political preferences. Their aesthetic tastes, though distinct, show striking similarities, the former perhaps being less demonstrative and stylistically more informal. The nudists of the extreme Right, of course, stood out by their racist aestheticism, intent on the cultivation and photographic reproduction of bodies whose beauty was supposed to demonstrate superiority over human beings * from other races. References: 17.Cf. G. Duby, 'Ternarity' in the Three Orders, Feudal Society Imagined, tr. A. Goldhammer, Chicago and London, 1980 (French original 1978), p 81ff. 18.Wallafried Stabo in the year 841, cf. ibid. p 70, p 78, p 247. 19.Reproduced in Coriolanus, The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare, ed P. Brockbank, London, 1976, pp 369-70. 20.F. Hoelderlin, Hyperion oder der Eremit in Griechenland (1797-9), Stuttgart (Reclam), 1953, p 169. 21.Novalis, Bluetenstaub (1798), in C. Seelig (ed), Novalis, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Zurich, 1945, p 19, cf. also p 20: 'A complete human being is like a small nation.' 22. ibid., pp 23-4. 22.Cf. F. Toennies, Community and Society tr C. P. Looms, New York, 1963 (German original 1887), expanded 2nd edn Berlin, 1912). 23.Cf. K. Bullivant, 'The Conservative Revolution', in A. Phelan (ed), The Weimar Dilemma, Manchester, 1985, pp 47-70. 24.O. Weber, 'Nacktheit und Sozialismus', in Koerperbildung-Nacktkultur, Blaetter freier Menschen eds A. Koch & H. Graaz, Leipzig, Sonderheft 7: Nackh 1929, p 20. 25.R. Ungewitter, Nacktheit und Aufstieg, Ziele zur Erneuerung des deutschen Volkes, Stuttgart, 1920, p 111. 26.O. Weber, op. cit., p 22. 27.Cf. W. van der Will & R. Burns, Arbeiterkulturbewegung in der Weimarer Republik Historisch-theoretische Analyse der kulturellen Bestrebungen der sozialdemokratisch organisierten Arbeiterschaft, Berlin (etc.), 1982. Part D Once the ideological trends that supported such ideas had triumphed, proletarian nudism, along with the entire worker culture movement, was declared illegal. The not inconsiderable property assets of the various socialist cultural organisations were confiscated on the basis of a law of 26 May 1933 concerning the arrogation to the state of communist and socialist property, in conjunction with a law of 14 July 193 3 decreeing the confiscation of all property "inimical to the people" (volksfeindliches Vermoegen). Adolf Koch's schools of physical culture in both Berlin and Hamburg were closed down. The Verband fuer Volksgesundheit (Association for People's Health), to which these schools belonged, was declared illegal, together with all the other subsections of the Zentralkommission fuer Arbeitersport und Koerperpflege (Central Commission for Workers' Sport and Hygiene). According to police informers its membership in 1932 had stood at 1,456,162 29. Although it's Central Committee had disbanded, many of its sub-sections attempted a so-called "Trojan-Horse policy", i.e. they sought to invade and secretly control equivalent National Socialist organisations. These tactics failed against the police forces of a modern state, which was supported by thousands of sympathisers acting as ideological scouts. Any hopes of overcoming the alienation of modern man via the socialist road to a new society, in which people might live in peace with each other and reconciled with nature, appeared to be scotched. With such agencies as a Ministry for People's Enlightenment and Propaganda, a daily press brought in line with the wishes of National Socialism, a film industry, architecture and sport purposefully put to use for the new state, with Mediterranean cruises for the masses (Kraft durch Freude-Strength through Joy), cheap radio sets (Volksempfaenger) and controlled broadcasting, the most massive apparatus of ideology, public communication and culture in modern times began to operate. It was supported by coercive institutions of the Nazi party and a reorganised police. Never before had a state tried so drastically and so systematically to intervene in the circulation of ideas. Their production and dissemination was now highly selective and manipulatory. Never before had an ideologically intolerant government had such organisational and technological means at its disposal for shaping ideas, tastes and prejudices and for determining the level of information. It was, of course, neither a philosophy of the body nor a particular branch of the "bare body culture", which won through in 1933. But, as I have demonstrated, it is within the environment of the body culture movements that the ideas of the Left as well as those of the Right assumed a remarkably unorthodox, clearly utopian character. If the former might well be said to encapsulate some of the most peaceful features of a vision of freely associated human beings, then it must also be recognised that it was within the context of nudism that the Right developed the typical, innately aggressive expression of its most extreme ideology even before World War I. On the eve of World War II a certain Hermann Wilke published a book entitled Dein 'Ja' zum Leibe. Sinn und Gestaltung deutscher Leibeszucht (1939 - Your "Yes" to the Body. The Meaning and Organisation of German Body Discipline) in which he argued that German breeding stock ought to be selected with a view to racial improvement. The terms used in this connection are those of an interventionist racism as a positive means of social engineering: Aufartung (upgrading of the species) and Aufnordung (Nordification). The activist political logic of National Socialism did not shy away from drawing analogies with the breeding of cattle or chicken. The invocation of the Fuehrer in this context provided the necessary legitimisation: If the German people were told by the Fuehrer that the most well developed bodies had to come together in order to achieve a new beauty in the people, then he meant the whole body. . . The healthy, well-formed naked body-since clothes cover up and deceive-becomes the most important means of improving the race 30. Racial upgrading, without the term Aufartung being available at the time, had already been propagated by Richard Ungewitter, who wished to see German nudists as protagonists in the struggle to strengthen the "racial basis" of the nation. 'The improvement of the human race', but within a distinctly Germanic context, had been the avowed aim of a well-known (and government subsidised) film of the (bourgeois) nudity cult, entitled Wege zu Kraft und Schoenheit (Ways to Strength and Beauty), which was released in 1925. The same aim was evident- and calculatedly expressed by the accompanying photographs-in one of the most successful books of voelkisch nudism, Der Mensch und die Sonne (1924-Men, Women and the Sun) by Hans Suren. Sales reached 61,000 in one year, increased to 145,000 in 1936 and to over 200,000 by 1940. In his preface of 1924 Suren had stated: I did not include any pictures of communal life, because I wanted to show exemplary, well-built bodies and these unfortunately are exceptional 31. It was probably because this argument made the case for a racial elitism which was all too exclusive and showed up unfavourably the average quality of the supposed master race that this section of his book fell prey to elision in later editions. However, it is clear from this and other right-wing nudist publications that, in contrast to the photographs to be found in socialist publications, they were not snapshots but carefully staged events for the camera even if this involved uncomfortable nude poses on skis in the alpine snow! Not only are the bodies selected with a view to showing ideal racial types, they are also given especially shiny skins with the help of cosmetic oils. Suren, who had developed his nudist practices as head of the German Army Gymnasts' School in the early 1920s, kept the sexes strictly separate during training sessions. It was, of course, this overt racism and sexism, which most sharply marked off fascist from socialist nudism. However, in the 1920s the Right and the Left occasionally joined forces against a hostile conservative press which asserted that any public display of nudity, far from being appreciated as a protest against the decadence of modern society, could only be understood as a symptomatic confirmation of it. In 1924 a certain Dr. Altrock, who apparently belonged to right-wing circles, significantly lent the full authority of the learned institution to which he belonged to Koch's cause when he defended the latter's use of rhythmical gymnastics in the nude. In a lecture he drew on the strongly anti-Manichean sentiments shared by all nudists. Such counter-attacks on the common enemy of religious and petit-bourgeois philistinism brought about a precarious togetherness between Right and Left as they sought to defend their ideals against vilifying press campaigns. The proletarian nudists, being by far the bigger organisation in the Weimar Republic, Had to bear the brunt of the displeasure voiced by the conservative press, as illustrated by the following example: Ecstatic dances greeting Spring in front of 4,000 people... 250 men, women and children, old and fat, young and slim. This public filth of the 29th March 1932 in the Grand Theatre (Grosses Schauspielhaus) in Berlin, organised by this red nudist teacher, Adolf Koch, and a state authority which did not forbid this filth, are the reasons why Germans are ashamed of their fatherland… 32. The pompous defence of public decency was almost invariably linked with hints that the moral health of the nation was at stake. Representatives of the more affluent classes seem to have met with gentler treatment by the press. In Licht-Lust-Leben. Monatsschrift fuer Schoenheit, Gesundheit, Geist, Koerperbildung (Light - Pleasure - Life. Monthly Periodical for Beauty, Health, Spirit and Body Culture) we find reports on a court case in Tegernsee (south of Munich) against the nudists of the Bund der Lichtfreunde (Corporation of the Friends of Light) who in 1925 had held their national congress in a remote valley near Bad Kreuth. Their members were mostly from the professional classes and the aristocracy. They had had the good fortune that, when apprehended by the police, no objections were raised and they were allowed to continue. The public prosecutor nevertheless brought a law suit on account of causing a public nuisance and congregating without official permission. The judge, concurring, imposed a small fine. The press desisted from raising a public outcry, but then the Lichtfreunde had met in perfect seclusion and would never have been found by the police had it not been for a tip-off by a jealous wife 33. Female nudity was meanwhile fairly common in the review theatres of the big cities. In this context the signification of the naked body became complex and contradictory. For example, a well publicised drawing of the black French singer anti dancer, Josephine Baker, who in 1926 was giving performances in the Berlin Theatre den Western would have been an image of degeneration and decadence to some, while to others the figure represented the multi-cultural and multi-racial modernity of life in a European capital. The first reaction to the nudity cult when the Nazis came to power was to impose a general ban, at least in Prussia where Hermann Goering issued a decree on the "repression of the nudity cult". It was said to lead women to lose their natural feelings of shame and men to lose their respect for women. However, the Reichsverband fuer Freikoerperkultur had many National Socialist sympathisers and was an easy target for ideological and organisational incorporation (Gleichschaltung). The journal of the Nazi naturists, Die Deutsche Freikoerperkultur, openly opposed Goering's decree 34. The nudists became part of the NS-Verband fuer Leibesuebung. The old principles of "ideal beauty" and "healthy living" could easily be re-accentuated as demonstrations of racially ideal types and paramilitary fitness training. The re-issue of Hans Suren's book of 1924 was given a modified title to take account both of the arrival of National Socialism and the Olympic Games in Berlin and to signal the full acceptance of the former: Mensch und Sonne. Arisch-olympischer Geist (Men, Women and Sun. Aryan-Olympic Spirit). Leni Riefenstahl's famous film of the 1936 Olympics showed the beauty of youthful, naked bodies. When Das Schtwarze Korps, the weekly periodical of Hitler's SS (Schutzstaffel- Protective Guard) addressed itself to the question of "nudity or indecent exposure" a year later it castigated both Christian "renunciation" of the sensual body and the exploitation of the "racial beauty cult" for sensationalist ends by 'numerous revues and magazines which previously served concealed and unconcealed vice'. Rather loftily, the (anonymous) author held that 'nakedness in the North can only be convincing when it makes transparent the revelation of something divine' 35. The author's attitude to the photographic display of naked, if perfectly shaped, bodies in the press was ambiguous, since he believed that the "illustration of Nordic racial types" was but a pretext for the titillation of the baser senses. This ambiguity was indicative of the uncertainty in matters of public morality which prevailed within the SS. Its leader, Heinrich Himmler, when formulating directives about the procreation of children by SS personnel, either within marriage or with unmarried women in Lebensborn (SS procreation centres and maternity hospitals), had to resort to more cautious formulations than he would have liked. He might otherwise have alienated large numbers of SS-men whose moral ideas, when not serving the "emergency needs" of the state, were ordinarily petit-bourgeois. Nudism had meanwhile become integrated into Nazi ideology. By 1938 the Bund fuer Leibeszucht (Federation for Body Discipline) was allowed to hold an open-air summer camp again. A nudist film, Natuerliche Leibeszucht (Natural Body Discipline), was given official approval by being designated as "educative for the people". Finally, naked bathing was allowed in a police decree of 1942. The initially ambiguous attitude of National Socialism towards nudism should not detract from the symptomatic importance of the bare body culture within the ideological developments of the time. Eugenics was a further point of contact between left and right-wing body culturists. But caution is necessary at this juncture: eugenics did not mean the same thing in both camps. On the Left it merely meant a change of attitude. Education and better information could achieve improved bodies through healthy (and hence selective) breeding. On the Right the stress was on race. Hence the immediate closure in 1933 of institutions like the Reichsverband fuer Geburtenregelung und Sexualhygiene (National Association for Birth Control and Sexual Hygiene), the Verband fuer Sexualreform (Association for Sexual Reform), the Gesellschaft fuer Sexualreform (Society for Sexual Reform) and the Einheitsverband fuer proletarische Sexualreform and Mutterschutz (United Association for Proletarian Sexual Reform and the Protection of Mothers). All these bodies were deemed to be typically "cultural-Bolshevist", i.e. internationalist, anti-racist and socialist in outlook. According to a law passed in December 1933 the minimum age of voluntary sterilisation was set at ten and that of compulsory sterilisation at fourteen in the case of persons considered to be racially or biologically "impure". In Prussia there were some 31,000 compulsory sterilisation's -enforced by special courts called Erbgesundheitsgerichte (Hereditary Health Courts) -in 1934, and 50,000 in the following year. The figures for the whole of Germany were 45,000 and 65,000 respectively. Additionally there were thousands of individuals who were never dealt with by these courts, being referred instead to special institutions where they were kept for a time and then murdered. With the hindsight of historical knowledge the sheen on the bodies of Fascist nudes was that of the pretension to master-race status which carried a death warrant for those who could not satisfy the legally and bureaucratically enshrined criteria of racial conformity. Himmler had calculated that, with the strict application of the laws and directives on "racial hygiene" the German people could be gene-coded into a pure blooded "Nordic" race within a period of 120 years. The special role of the Germans as leaders between the nations of the East and the West was underpinned by a philosophy of irrational and anti-rational organicism, which must briefly be traced here. It involved the ultimate perversion of the old organicist metaphor of the state and society and served as legitimisation for the imperialist claims of National Socialism in Europe. Organicism Versus Individualism and Collectivism There are three books to which reference must be made in this context: Roderich von Engelhardt's, Organische Kultur. Deutsche Lebensfragen im Lichte der Biologie (Munich, 1925 -Organic Culture. Vital German Problems in the Light of Biology), Paul Krannhals's, Das organische Weltbild. Grundlagen einer neuentstehenden deutschen Kultur (Munich, 1928-The Organic World View. Foundations of a New German Culture) and Edgar J. Jung's, Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen. Ihr Zerfall and ihre Abloesung durch ein neues Reich (The Government of the Racially Inferior. Its Disintegration and Replacement by tile New Realm). All these books heralded the cultural ascendancy and eventual rise to power of the ultra-Right, prophesied by Ungewitter, and terminologically captured in a book title of 1931, Deutsche Kulturrevolution (German Cultural Revolution). It is not necessary within this context to give a faithful summery of these works. They should perhaps be entirely forgotten. But it remains of some importance for our understanding of the development of Germany in the twentieth century to see how the desirability of a German road to Fascism was argued and advocated in them. They are, of course, only some examples in a flood of similar publications. Within the terminology employed by these authors a number of recurring ideological dis-junctures can be discerned, for example (Western) "civilisation" and (German) "culture". These are easily recognisable as transpositions of the unquenched desires of German imperialism. According to the paranoid and aggressive logic behind these mutually exclusive ideas Germany held a prime geopolitical location. The authors bolstered their case further by hypostases and presumptions about national distinctions, which purported to be based on ultimate, irreducible metaphysical principles. In these publications Germany appeared as the land whose people yearned for and upheld the dream of the organic wholeness of their society. They were lauded as the historical protagonists of the organic principle. Hence they stood alone in the glory of heroic resistance, defending the values of rank, biological differentiation and racially (or nationally) rooted culture against the egalitarian and cosmopolitan Millie of mechanical, unnatural and rootless civilisation. They were therefore ranged as much against the social and cultural dislocation, democratisation and social fragmentation of the West as against the totalitarianism and deadening collectivism of the least. They invoked the contrasts which, according to a German tradition of thought, were spelled out by the terminological pair, Kultur and Zivilisation. Thomas Mann at his most conservative had given it a new respectability at the beginning of the 1920s by using it to explain the conflict in World War I between Germany, as a representative of Kultur, of the cultivation of the spirit, and the West, as a representative of Zivilisation, of modern conveniences and flat-headed conversation. Towards the end of the 1920s the neo-conservatives held that in the West the principles of an unnatural, rationally constructed society reigned supreme. They were based on the French Revolution's slogans of liberty, equality and fraternity, which they believed inaugurated the process of internal social dissolution. Allowing for a further egalitarian-collectivist perversion of these principles, the same was considered to be true of Russia since the Bolshevik revolution. Against this degeneration and the suffusion of society with Western influences it was claimed that Germany must defend itself and re-instate the organic principles of coercion (Zwang), distinction of rank (Ungleichartigkeit) and subordination (Unterordnung). It was argued that these principles held the various parts of the body together. An overt analogy was therefore being made between political and social culture and the biology of organisms as perceived by a politicised science. The books referred to above characterised the position of Germany between its Western and Eastern neighbours in terms of inimical tensions, which, it was thought, could only be resolved by a military cataclysm. Initially, however, the innere Feind (enemy within) had to be conquered and defeated. Recurring terminological oppositions, some of which went back further than Thomas Mann's Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of a Non-political Man) to Nietzsche, Goethe, Herder, et al., spelt out the internal tensions of society as the neo-conservatives saw them. The concepts cited first within the following pairs of terms were advocated by liberals and socialists- not always in the same negative formulation and without any disparaging connotations. Those cited second gave the neo-conservatives' and National Socialists' position: civilisation - culture (Zivilisation-Kultur); intellect-intuition (Intellekt-Intuition); superficiality - depth (Oberflaechlichkeit-Tiefe); aesthetic and ethical pluralism-hierarchical order (Wertverflachung- hierarchische Ordnung); democracy - leadership principle (Demokratie-Fuehrerprinzip); mechanical-organic (mechanisch-organisch); dead (static) form-living growth (tote [statische] Form-lebendiges Werden); French Revolution-Prussian duty and obedience (Franzoesische Revolution-Preussische Pflicht, preussischer Gehorsam); mixed races, multiple racial stock- racial purity (Voelkermischmasch-Rassenreinheit); contractual society-national community (Vernunftstaat-Vollksstaat). In other words, there was before 1933 in Germany a highly articulate right-wing intelligentsia able to furnish explosive ideological ammunition by claiming for Germany a unique historical mission, which had to be safeguarded against powerful enemies both internally and externally. This situation called for a heroic ethic which was indeed propagated by many journalists, philosophers and lawyers sympathetic to National Socialism both before 1933 and after 1933, when the conceptual oppositions cited above recurred, for example, in a number of pamphlets on National Socialist "cultural politics" 36. The terminology evolved in this struggle was not new. It exploited the long and by no means entirely disreputable German tradition of anti-modernist criticism. In doing so it was able to draw on sedimentation of real historical experience, usurping them for the rhetorical arsenals of the Right and thus denying the Left access to the same sources. At the same time, the Left was identified with all the unsettling Western invasions which had led to the long-term decay of values and the dismemberment of the organic order. National Socialists appeared to embrace in all seriousness and with great ardour the ideals of Gemeinschaft: the spontaneous will of individuals to form community, to identify not only with their kith and kin but also with their artisan or other occupational skills, which were hallowed by tradition, to structure their social being by norms sanctioned by religious beliefs, acts of faith and the ritualisation of creeds. National Socialists could thus project themselves as protagonists of an overdue revision of the social, cultural and ethical dissections modernity had wrought. It seemed to many that the modern had to be subjected to the correctives of the old, which had too lightly been disposed of in the name of progress. Exploiting popular perceptions of the crisis, German Fascism was able in the most cynical fashion to make the whole of society into a function of dictatorial will and hence become used for the reverse of what had been promised. By means of a colossal manipulative machine for the dissemination of their ideas they enlisted the support of majority opinion for a brutal administrative exercise. Far from reinstating the values of Gemeinschaft it reduced groups and individuals to mere Menschenmaterial (human beings as functional counters). By exacting an oath of allegiance from the German army, the party membership and the civil service, individuals, political anti state institutions were made into executioners of the destructive designs of the Nazi leadership. In conjuring up the idea, by constant propagandistic repetition, that the German people were a united body bonded by the same "blood", that the German nation had a right to a united terrain and that both were symbolically and actually incorporated in the political will of the one leader, National Socialism appeared not only to feed the hopes of German minorities outside the Reich] it also seemed to be offering solutions to the crisis of Modernism. All Germans would be re-united in the one splendid organism of an extended state, which would bind all its members into an integrated demonstration of power and racial harmony. Social classes, estates and the rankings of individuals, far from being denied, were actually affirmed as meaningful components of the whole body politic. The ideological appeal of National Socialism was its promise to restore a clear organic social order, in which those who were included could feel privileged, not least by looking at the wretched condition of those who were denied that privilege and condemned at best to slave existence or at worst to annihilation. As an ideology of the organic utopia, National Socialism needed not only a rich symbolism expressing the adherence of individuals to certain orders, groupings and ranks, but also an art that would basically provide images of power, social inclusion, the rootedness of the individual in the group and in nature, and of racially acceptable femininity and masculinity. Racial exclusion was implied in these images and hence-with few exceptions-did not need to be explicitly executed. Art under National Socialism was given a privileged place because it could create visions and symbolic demonstrations - in stone and paint, in static and moving pictures, in recited and printed words - of the new racial harmony of the body and the reintegration of the individual in a pacified society. At the same time, the actually existing discrepancy between the Fascist utopia and social reality meant that artists had to be subjected to ideological control in order not to "fall back" into the contradictory pluralistic panorama of the Weimar Republic. This ensured the reduction of social reality to ideologically acceptable forms of representation. Artists who did not accept these standards had to face the grim fate of exclusion. Those who did were used as celebrated exponents of the "new spirit" and served as important consolidators of the National Socialist regime. Its ostentatious political glories and its racial verities called for artistic realisations in dimensions of the demonstratively colossal or the quietly intimate. It is therefore not fortuitous that the practice of the various art forms assumed two basic aspects under National Socialism: the idyllic and the monumental, with the latter bifurcated into mythical and industrial images. Thus, on the one hand, there were pictures which showed idylls of family life and of naked, open-air beauty; on the other there were those of Germanicised classical myth, of monumentalised Nordic peasant and warrior, or those showing the achievements of 'workers of the fist and those of the forehead' (Arbeiter der Faust und Arbeiter der Stirn) such as motorway bridges or the giant strength of steel-works fore grounded by a wheat field with harvesting peasants. Similarly, in architecture, we find on the one hand monumental constructions, particularly those planned for the new Berlin, and on the other a predilection for half-timbered houses with neatly pitched roofs. Monumental neo-classicism and idyll were the artistic expressions of genuine organicist longings, which served simultaneously as a triumphal facade for a mercilessly repressive regime. References: 29.This figure is taken from reports to the police now kept in the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz under the archival mark R 58/630. 30.H. Wilke, Dein Ja' zum Leibe! Sinn und Gestaltung deutscher Leibeszucht, Berlin, 1939, p 108. 31.H. Surin, Der Mensch und die Sonne Stuttgart, 1924, Preface. 32.In Fridericus (Deutschnationale Wochenzeitung), 15.8.1932, quoted in Koerper-bildung-Nacktkultur, Sonderheft 14: Koerper und Kunst, Leipzig, 1932, p 33.Cf. Koerperbildung-Nacktkultur, 'Anklagen und Bekenntnisse', Leipzig, 1925. 34.Cf. Die Deutsche Freikoerperkultur, No. 2, Feb. 1934, p 20. 35.Dan Schwarze Korps, 25 Nov. 1937, p 6. 36.E.g.: H. S. Ziegler, Praktische Kulturarbeit im Dritten Reich, Munich, 1932; C. Lange & E. A. Dreyer, Deutscher Geist 1935, Leipzig, 1935; W. Sluyterman von Langeweyde, Kultur ist Dienst am Leben Berlin, 1937; W. Schultz, Grundgedanken national-sozialistischer Kulturpolitik, Munich, 1939 and 1943. Back to the top