by Philipp Blom
For Nazi ideologues, this was a vital point. Physical fitness was not just a means of asserting racial superiority; it was at the very heart of National Socialism, as it was in other political movements of the time, including Soviet communism and Zionism. The ultimate aim was not just to produce a stronger people but to transform human nature, creating, in effect, a New Man.
Like every powerful ideological element, this hope of human transformation had strong mythological antecedents. The New Man was an important motif in Christian apocalyptic theology, and it had also been taken up with enthusiasm by Renaissance thinkers wanting to be reborn in the image of classical antiquity. In Geneva, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had dreamed of spiritual rebirth in his 1762 treatise The Social Contract, and his words were to have a profound impact on twentieth-century totalitarian thought. “He who dares to undertake the founding of a people should feel that he is capable of changing human nature,” he wrote, “of transforming each individual . . . into a part of a larger whole from which this individual receives, in a sense, his life and his being; of altering man’s constitution in order to strengthen it; of substituting a partial and moral existence for the physical and independent existence we have all received from nature. So that . . . each citizen is nothing, and can do nothing, without the others.”4
Early in the nineteenth century, the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel had set out his vision of Germany’s eventual apotheosis through an inexorable process of human progress into a time and place beyond history. A quasi-messianic fantasy that identified the summit of history with north German Protestantism, and specifically with Prussia, Hegel’s idealism was nonetheless to prove immensely influential within Europe and beyond. One hundred years later, Friedrich Nietzsche spat out a contemptuous reply to Hegel’s vision of a supposedly inevitable progress, and, in a profound response to the alienation and quasi-enslavement attendant on incipient modernism, sketched out his own vision of the transcendence not of peoples but of free individuals.
Statues of athletes at the entrance to the sports complex in Dresden, 1936.
Nietzsche’s concept of the superman, expounded in his Thus Spake Zarathustra of 1883–1885, was more poetic, more complex, and more subtle than most of his readers were able to see; carried away by his metaphorical, strangely exalted prose, they constructed a variety of vulgarized ideas of the Übermensch, mostly concentrating not on his surprisingly Buddhist or Epicurean idea of self-transcendence but on fantasies of hulking, half-naked heroes bestriding a fearful imaginary landscape.
Through the central decades of the nineteenth century, the idea of the transcendence of the here and now, of a teleological goal of history and a world populated by New Men and New Women, had also provided the kernel for another German’s utopian worldview. Individuals would only truly flourish, wrote Karl Marx, once a political revolution had defined the appropriate conditions by ending oppression and creating social justice. The demise of capitalism and the servitude of the masses would make possible the spiritual as well as physical regeneration of individuals.
Marx and Nietzsche were the prophets of a new age of many diverse paths, one of them leading to “scientific racism” and thence to Nazism. Two further theories with no intrinsic link to racism contributed to the same fearful political and social ideology. Darwin’s unveiling of evolutionary processes was quickly integrated into a conservative teleology in which human beings were held to be evolving toward an innate potential, with biological competition gradually removing all imperfections from the genetically most favored group. The pithy term “survival of the fittest” came to mean not the survival of those best adapted to their environment but rather the inevitable dominance of the strongest, not just in a state of nature but also, ominously, in advanced human societies.
The pseudo-scientific, teleological vision of an evolutionary paradise of perfect beings in some distant future was nothing but a tattered lab coat pulled on over an old, essentially religious idea—the idea of humanity’s eventual transcendence and the advent of the New Man. Nonetheless, “survival of the fittest” soon became both apology and rallying cry for laissez-faire capitalism, and also for eugenicist demands to give evolution a helping hand by preventing “inferior” people from breeding.
By the end of the nineteenth century, against this harmonious choir of supermen of various timbres, one voice was sounding a decidedly dissonant note of skepticism. To the pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, the dream of transcendence was a mere social fiction imposed on individuals in order to check their natural, unruly impulses. Visions of transformation into a superior being and a life of eternal bliss, he held, were mere mirages in the emotional desert of Viennese bourgeois life—and, by extension, of human life. They might be necessary to the survival of hope, but they remained illusions nonetheless.
Dreams Becoming Nightmares
IN HIS 1921 DYSTOPIAN NOVEL We, precursor to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, published in 1932, the Russian author Evgeny Zamyatin had satirized the Bolshevik vision of society as a vast machine, along with its love of mechanization, hyperefficiency, and the “scientific management” system of Taylorism. In the technologized future of the novel, individuality is all but eliminated:
I watched the men below, how they would bend over, straighten up, turn around, all in accordance with Taylor, smoothly and quickly, keeping in time, like the levers of a single immense machine. Pipes glistened in their hands. . . . They were the same, all one: humanized, perfected men. It was the sublimest, the most moving beauty, harmony, music. . . . I wanted to go down there at once, to them, to be with them. And there I’d be: shoulder to shoulder with them, welded to them, caught up in the steel rhythm, the measured movements, the firm round ruddy cheeks, the mirror-smooth brows, unclouded by the insanity of thought.5
The nightmare imagined by Zamyatin seemed to be threateningly close, and the possibilities of reacting to it seemed limited. More than ever after Stalin’s rise to power and the institution of the Five-Year Plan, the Soviet answer to the problem of technology was an ardent embrace, declaring human beings valuable if and only if they were able to perform their allotted roles as cogs in a big machine. The Soviet New Man would hatch in a fully automatic incubator.
Some politically engaged avant-garde artists, such as designer and architect El Lissitzky and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, had adopted a constructivist approach to the human form, presenting the image of the body as machine in a glorious Soviet future. Their daring vision, however, had proved uncongenial to the authorities and also uncontrollable by them; it was quickly marginalized. Still, the emergent dominance of socialist realism, declared official artistic policy in 1931, remained firmly attached to the idea of a new Homo sovieticus, muscled and proud, endowed with superhuman gifts through Soviet education—and depicted in simple representational form acceptable to both the masses and the authorities.
The New Man transcended not only human limitations but also political boundaries. Glorious young men in marble, concrete, and bronze were also a potent symbol of the self-appointed “master race” to the west. Though socialist examples often included glorious New Women, too, where fascist examples were more focused on masculinity, observers were soon remarking on how hard it was to distinguish the heroic leftist visions from those of their rightist enemies.
Fascist ideologues and their sympathizers from Italy, France, and Germany had all arrived at this point via different paths. In contrast to the Bolsheviks, who wanted to mold individuals into spare parts for machines, fascists sought to liberate themselves from the yoke of an anonymous modern existence, and from the crisis of meaning that appeared to be part of it, by retreating into the political projection of a mythical past in which human bodies had supposedly been expressions of heroic archetypes, strong, beautiful, and in perfect harmony with nature. Nature, in this sense, was the very antithesis of modernity, with its essentially urban emphases on liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and reason. The fascists regarded nature as the inner voice of man, w
hich spoke different idioms to different people, or different races.
Toward a better future? Vera Ignatjevna Mukhina’s Worker and Kolkhos Woman.
The fascists called on the New Man to rise up and to wrest history—and of course political power—back from those who, they held, had been actively working against them. In this the German Nazis went much further than other fascists, calling for an apocalyptic clash of ideologies in which the battle lines would be drawn along racial distinctions. Capitalism, the Nazi theorists claimed, was alien to the Germanic soul, a Jewish conspiracy designed to suppress the greater spiritual strength slumbering in all Aryans and their greater intrinsic worth as human beings. In his film Metropolis, Fritz Lang had imagined the huge factory machines as the extended arms of the capitalist bosses, controlling and coercing a people noble by nature. In the Nazis’ belief, which they disseminated widely, the German people had been robbed of their deserved victory in the First World War, “stabbed in the back” by the cowardly politicians at Versailles; they would now redress the balance and achieve a position befitting their natural supremacy. To do so, they would have to transform themselves, developing the innate gifts of their race until they appeared as supermen to the rest of the world.
The Nazi cult of fitness was thus tied to an apocalyptic goal of racial warfare, but it could draw on a broad existing culture of physical awareness, health, natural living, and nudism that had been prevalent since the nineteenth century, not only in Germany but also in Britain and other, particularly northern European, countries. The interwar culture of the body was by no means fascist per se.
Frequently, though not necessarily, the rediscovery of the human body as a part of nature rather than of society went hand in hand with a degree of social nonconformism. Founded in 1896 and hugely popular during the interwar years, the Wandervogel (bird of passage) movement had encouraged young people to get out of the cities and away from the social constraints of their families to roam the countryside on foot or on a bicycle, sing folk songs by a campfire, commune with nature, and admire the starry skies—and to meet one another in ways that would probably have been impossible closer to home.
In the ferment of Weimar Germany, however, the young ramblers who had so scandalized their parents before 1914 looked markedly unadventurous. By the early 1920s, there were communities of socialist nudists and even sun-worshiping alternative schools where no clothes were worn. Thousands of gymnastics and sports clubs had sprung up, dedicated to creating stronger and more beautiful bodies; holiday camps for workers included hours of clothes-free gymnastics; beaches set aside large areas for the movement dedicated to “air- and light-bathing.” Throughout the 1920s, tens if not hundreds of thousands of Germans had participated in these Freikörperkultur (FKK) or Free Body Culture movements, which became a synonym for a new life without bourgeois restrictions, free of embarrassment, and free of clothes. On the eve of the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Germany’s FKK associations had around one hundred thousand registered members and many more sympathizers.
For the National Socialists, the preoccupation with physical culture was highly significant. Their entire rhetoric was suffused with body imagery, emphasizing health, fitness, and strength. When Hitler gave a speech in 1935 in front of fifty thousand members of the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth), he urged them to become “hard as Krupp steel, quick as whippets and tough as leather.” References to the collective “body of the people” (Volkskörper) and to physical strength and life in harmony with nature suffused Nazi speeches, articles, and propaganda. Beautiful bodies were important.
In order to transform their utopian ideas into concrete politics, the Nazis had had to appropriate these practices themselves, as well as the organizations and individuals representing them, and this they had done with great alacrity. Just as cultural life, university education, public administration, and trade unionism had been ideologically streamlined within a matter of months after the 1933 takeover, body culture, too, was swiftly taken into the grip of the new strongmen.
Under the new government, even the previously peaceful and universalist FKK clubs had felt compelled to expel all their Jewish members; sports associations had become temples of “Aryan” bodies, with journals such as Gesetz und Freiheit (Law and Freedom) and Deutsche Leibeszucht (German Body Culture) satisfying a steady, partly voyeuristic demand for chaste, naked bodies. In 1936, the bestselling 1925 book Mensch und Sonne—arisch-olympischer Geist (Man and Sun, the Aryan-Olympian Spirit) was republished, just in time for the Olympic Games. Whatever anarchic potential there might have been in earlier clubs and publications was now ironed out with truly utopian prudishness, as the Nazi press produced torrents of suggestive yet prim photos of nude bodies: these living sculptures, oiled biological machines cast in the mold of antiquity, extolling life and nature, were still obliged to cloak their nakedness in shadows created in the darkroom.
Keeping sex firmly in the shadows was also an expression of a fundamental concern that the National Socialists shared not just with Mussolini’s Fascists and with French and other right-wing sympathizers but with the Bolsheviks as well. It was one thing to liberate the body from the alienation of a capitalist environment and from Christian morality’s imprint of shame, but quite another to create a generation of libertines. As Europe’s totalitarian movements set about building their various utopian futures, and their democratic counterparts were engaged in the more modest task of clearing slums and fighting the diseases of poverty in the big cities, hygiene and cleanliness became key words, both physically and morally. Cleanliness was preached as a way of life, and it soon supplanted the ancient fear of sin with a set of new horror visions. Masturbation, homosexuality, promiscuity, and the lack of impulse control were portrayed not as wicked, as they might once have been, but as dirty, diseased, and potentially deadly to the individual as well as to society and, of course, to the race.
Perhaps the most curious as well as the most eloquent object documenting the Western obsession with cleanliness during the interwar period is still standing in Dresden, where it was installed in 1930. The German Hygiene Museum had been built in 1911 but was re-housed in a new, proudly rational, and Bauhaus-influenced structure three years before Hitler came to power. The museum was devoted to explaining not only the functioning of the human body but also basic facts about healthy nutrition and living. Pride of place was given to the “glass man,” a model of a human body with raised arms and transparent skin, revealing the bones, organs, and major veins and arteries. Graceful and poised, the glass man (which was actually made not of glass but of Cellon, an early plastic) seemed the ideal embodiment of modernity: transparent, functional, and thoroughly rational.
Other initiatives to bring health and hygiene to the people were more obviously belligerent in their intent. Founded in 1933, the organization Kraft durch Freude (Strength Through Joy) provided strictly regulated cheap entertainment and vacation camps for German workers, including plenty of exercise for children and adults. Even cruise ships for the people were part of the program. The organizers had carefully developed a range of exercises and activities designed to weld together unruly individuals into a single, obedient body, preparing them, whether they realized it or not, for the societal and other battles of the future. There was now no berth on a cruise ship without mass gymnastics on deck, no escape to the Baltic coast or the Black Forest without morning reveille and collective military-style activities producing a sea of bodies moving in unison. By 1945, seven million journeys to vacation camps and 690,000 sea voyages would be sold at cost, as a “gift from the Führer.”
In Germany as elsewhere, breeding the New Man also had another, more literal connotation. Eugenics movements were by now also popular among intellectuals in Britain, the United States, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Argentina, Russia, Italy, and Scandinavia. In several countries, the forcible sterilization of “mental defectives” and other undesirables became both policy and practice (and in some cases,
such as in the United States and Sweden, lasted into the 1970s). The Nazi regime, however, pushed eugenicist ideas even further. Beginning in 1933, in German hospitals and clinics, some four hundred thousand people would be sterilized, mostly involuntarily. After 1939, a murderous wave of “euthanasia” of “useless eaters”—people deemed “unfit to live”—would follow.
Eugenics was by no means a prerogative of the political right or of hard-nosed scientists such as Francis Galton. In fact, the idea produced a remarkable consensus among people of otherwise different views, though it is true that most of them hailed from notably privileged backgrounds. In Britain, for instance, John Maynard Keynes supported eugenicist ideas, as did Winston Churchill, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, and Bertrand Russell. Woolf herself had a seriously mentally disabled brother with whom she had been forced to share her meals during her childhood. When as an adult she encountered a “long line of imbeciles” during a country outing, she noted in her diary: “It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.”6 All felt that some form of “scientific” management could improve the national breeding stock.
The poet William Butler Yeats was convinced that a physical regeneration would hasten not only the political regeneration of his beloved Ireland but also its spiritual rebirth. At the same time, however, he observed: “Since about 1900 the better stocks have not been replacing their numbers, while the stupider and less healthy have been more than replacing theirs. . . . If some financial reorganization . . . [can] enable everybody without effort to procure all necessities of life and so remove the last check upon the multiplication of the uneducated masses, it will become the duty of the educated classes to seize and control one or more of those necessities. The drilled and docile masses may submit, but a prolonged civil war seems more likely, with the victory of the skillful, riding their machines as did the feudal knights their armoured horses.”7