On Blondes

by Joanna Pitman

  A respectful obeisance to antiquity was another key theme demanded by the Nazis’ aesthetic tastemakers. Countless heavily blonded versions of Danae, Leda, Venus and the Judgement of Paris were churned out, giving a Nordic wash to the classical myths. Themes of youth, health and vigorous outdoor sport were also encouraged. Albert Janesch’s Water Sport of 1936 depicts fourteen blond supermen in skintight white shorts rowing and canoeing on a river. Each one is a steroidally muscular automaton, and even the cox has the bloated musculature of a bodybuilder. Hitler reserved this one for his private collection.

  The cream of Aryan mankind had well-considered templates. Lanz von Liebenfels in his Ostara periodicals and many other racial anthropologists had furnished their readers with detailed physiological characteristics in their hymns of praise to the perfect Aryan. In 1926 a committee of German anthropologists and physicians sponsored by the publisher J.F. Lehmann had actually announced a prize to find ‘the best Nordic head’, both male and female. This was Germany’s first official blonde beauty contest. Readers of the most popular racial journals were invited to send in photographs of individuals they considered best represented German Nordic man or woman. When the contest closed on 1 October 1926, 793 male and 506 female photographs had been received and the prizes were duly awarded. A year later a book containing a selection of the photographs was published. Deutsche Kopfc Nordischer Rasse is a breathtaking display of self-conscious racial virility. The men are earnest, most of them dressed in sober suits, one in his medal-laden First World War uniform, one sporting a bare hairless torso and gazing towards a future of unassailable Aryan domination. The women are exemplary blonde maidens, piously posed with an eye to the coming German Millennium, their hair plaited and pinned up over the head, or loosely knotted in buns, some in ballgowns, some in peasant blouses, and all fantastically serious as if undertaking a task of supreme national importance.

  The Nazi cult of blonde beauty was an essential part of Goebbels’s propaganda campaign. Given that only 6–8 per cent of Germans were pure blondes, mendacious shufflings of the pack were engineered to turn up blondes with unrealistic regularity. Official photographs and posters of the Hitler Youth showed vigorous young blonde girls and boys striding about like miniature Nazis, cheerily bounding up mountains, performing heroic gymnastic feats, marching beneath swastikas and undertaking exemplary boy-scout-type good deeds.j

  All these healthy young blondes symbolised the youth of the Nazi regime, its future and its hopes. But the Nazis did not appreciate the irony of lauding qualities that its own leaders did not possess. Hitler was fifty at the start of the war and manifestly not blond, although a portrait in the Imperial War Museum painted by Heinrich Knirr in 1937 gives him some nice golden highlights. Several Nazi supporters attempted to reconcile the image of their leader with the Nazis’ ideal racial picture, and some dissembled to a comical degree. A certain A. Richter wrote in a pamphlet entitled Our Leaders in the Light of the Racial Question and the Study of Prototypes: ‘Hitler is blond, has rosy skin and blue eyes, and therefore is of pure (Aryan) Germanic nature, and all other rumours concerning his appearance or personality have been sown into the soul of the people by the black or red press . . .’ Goebbels’s mastery of propaganda was infectious, creating and fetishising the very thing that was lacking in reality.

  Only one senior Nazi possessed a physical appearance that fitted the racial ideals of the Third Reich. He was Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s second-in-command in the SS and later Deputy Reich Protector and Hitler’s representative in Czechoslovakia. Heydrich was tall, athletic, blond and blue-eyed, a highly intelligent, calculating man with a menacing streak of cruelty. He appeared to be the perfect Nazi. Ironically, he was also believed to have Jewish ancestry. Tormented by this stain on his pedigree, which was tactically used by both Hitler and Himmler, Heydrich became a driven man, stealthily climbing the ranks of the Nazi party. By the age of thirty-two he was in charge of state security and one of the most powerful men in the country. His awed subordinates referred to him as ‘the Blond Beast’. He had proven himself a supreme political manipulator with considerable tactical and psychological skill and in many ways he embodied the SS state completely. Official photographs show an aquiline figure of startling thinness with a lean profile and long almost bloodless fingers. He looks bony and possessed, the poisoned viper of the Third Reich. Yet he was also a family man. One photograph shows him in his weekend Bavarian costume, dressed in leather shorts and playing with his blond infant son. He is lovingly watched over by his blonde wife, Lina, who is done up as Heidi in a dirndl dress.

  After Heydrich was assassinated in May 1942 by Czech resistance fighters in Prague, Hitler described him in a funeral address as ‘the Man with the Iron Heart’. In inner Nazi circles, he had been talked of as Hitler’s successor; and as Joachim Fest points out in his fascinating book The Face of the Third Reich, the blond Heydrich was a symbol, perhaps the representative figure of the Third Reich at the peak of its internal and external power. He, more than any other senior officer, represented the youth, vigour, fearlessness – and evil – of their ideals.

  Nazi Germany had fashioned an image of itself which was built almost entirely on fantasy; and the parallels with the Soviet Union are clear. Although there were obvious political, ethnic, geographical and demographic differences, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union to a great extent shared fantasy racial self-images.

  Stalin faced a far wider ethnic diversity within his borders than did Hitler. The Soviet Union of the 1930s was a colossus made up of a staggering variety of populations, ranging from the largely Slavic Russians (who accounted for by far the largest proportion of the total population), Ukramans and Belorussians to the Turkic peoples in the south, the Latvians, Lithuanians, Mongols, Tartars, Khazars and Moldavians, as well as the Soviet Iranians, Koreans, Chinese, Kurds, Finns, Germans, Greeks and others. In order to promote state unity, and in spite of his own origins in Georgia, Stalin introduced in the 1930s a deliberate strategy of rigid centralisation based on the elevation of the Russians to occupy a core unifying role. Russian history and Russian heroes were aggressively celebrated across the entire Soviet Union. The Russian language became compulsory learning in all schools. A month into the Second World War, Pravda referred to ‘the great Russian people’ as ‘the first among the equal peoples of the USSR’. At the same time, in the growing climate of paranoia and xenophobia, a new category of’enemy nations’ deemed to be traitors was created which led to severe recriminations against individuals and entire nations simply on the basis of their ethnic identity. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, hundreds of thousands of Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Kurds and Chinese, as well as Chechens, Tartars, Ingush and others, were either deported to Siberia and Central Asia or arrested and executed.

  Stalin’s policies of forced assimilation and national repression rested on the chauvinistic promotion of the Russians at all times. He introduced an aggressive policy of Russocentnc propaganda in the mid-1930s and Russians became highly visible as the ‘Elder Brother’ nation. Visual images were paramount, and their themes, texts and designs were dictated to artists from a single government department, closely regulated by official censors and supervised by the Central Committee. Paintings were turned out in large numbers and reproduced for distribution; and posters were printed in huge editions so that in urban and rural areas, in factories and collective farms, in huts, houses, dormitories and apartments, virtually every person in the state was confronted with the image of the ideal Soviet citizen, both male and female.

  The emphasis for this chosen ideal was on the youthful, vigorous and clean-cut look. Given the obsessively pro-Russian bias, the faces in these posters were not Tartar, Mongol or Siberian. The preferred fiice was of course Russian; but from within the variety of ethnically Russian faces, a particular kind was chosen with fine bones, pale skin, blue eyes and blonde hair. Stalin’s ideal citizen was definitely an Aryan. That only a small proportion of Russi
ans, and an even smaller proportion of Soviet citizens nationwide, were actually blonde does not seem to have bothered Stalin and his propagandists. Blondes cropped up more frequently in these propaganda images than any other kind of Russian, each one a vision of divine Aryan superiority. Stalin’s new blonde Soviet gods were attractive and enthusiastic workers energetically building a dynamic Soviet paradise of abundance and harmony.

  Stalin sourced his propaganda models in unlikely places. Like many Soviets, he was infected with amerikanomaniya, hypnotised by the shimmer and power, the methods and products, of the world’s most advanced capitalist economy, America. Stalin was attracted not only by its production lines of gleaming tractors and other symbols of technological progress, but also by the powerful appeal of the wholesome, clean-cut, healthy young blondes seen in America’s films and news-reels. Stalin himself was an avid fan of Hollywood movies, and it is not surprising that the aura of the glamorous blondes he admired on screen fed into the propaganda imagery of his ideal Soviet citizen. Stalin was also, like Hitler, not young – he was seventy by the end of the war – and for him the vision of superior blonde Aryan youth was crucial m setting a theme of hope and future prosperity for his regime.

  Healthy and tanned, displaying mouthfuls of stunning white dentistry, the young blonde men and women of the Soviet Union were depicted accordingly in art and propaganda posters cheerfully building a technological future for the USSR. Beneath flawless blue skies they worked away tirelessly on building sites, tunnelled metros, and brought vast acreages of the steppes under fertile control with combine harvesters, threshing machines and other marvellous technological advancements. Stakhanovite worker-heroes were particularly singled out and celebrated. Aleksandr Samokhvalov’s 1937 painting Woman Metro-Builder with a Pneumatic Drill is typical in its portrayal of a superhuman woman, an epic athlete of the building site, blonde, busty, with broad hips and a gorgeous Hollywood profile, nonchalantly resting with her drill, looking out towards the light.

  Another painting of 1934, by Serafima Ryangina, entitled Higher and Higher shows a young man and woman poised like triumphant mountaineers as they climb pylons high above the country in the drive to build an electricity network across the state. The picture could be the cover of a Mills and Boon romantic adventure. He is dark and rugged, she is blonde and cosmetically perfect, smiling euphorically as she looks up towards her country’s sunny future.

  Posters, too, played a powerful role in proclaiming the newly invincible Soviet state. One colourful work of 1933 shows two slim and strong young women both displaying peroxide-blonde hair under their headscarves, marching happily off to help with the harvest, rakes slung over their shoulders. ‘Collective Farm Woman, Be a Shock Worker of the Harvest’, exhorted the text. Following Stalin’s declaration that Soviet life had become merrier, workers in posters were required to smile. A muscle-bound blond labourer happily cheers the completion of the Dneprostroi Dam in a poster of 1932, and in another of 1934 a pointedly blonde farming family gathers with broad grins round a gramophone with their giggling golden-haired toddler, the books and certificates in the background proof of social advancement and prosperity gained through hard work. As one poster critic wrote in 1933, the image of the worker should include a ‘healthy, lively, intelligent, intellectual face. He is the prototype of the new man, a combination of physical strength, energy, fortitude and intelligence.’ But a braver reviewer disapproved of the grotesque unreality of these images, particularly the two slim blonde women setting off for the harvest.101 The artist ‘wanted to present healthy, jolly, pretty and intellectual faces, to show the new person who combines in herself physical strength and energy with a high level of culture. But it must be recognised that the artist did not succeed. The kolkhoznitsy [collective farm women] are not typical. We have instead some kind of “Mashen’ka and Dasha”, pretty and rosy but completely uncharacteristic of the kolkhoz masses.’102

  Of course, all these images were grotesquely unrepresentative of reality. The tractors, drills, combine harvesters and electrical pylons were precisely the things that were missing in Soviet life. In the ruined Soviet villages of the 1930s, a tractor was as rare as a decent meal. Peasant lives were brutish and short, eked out in the squalor of fly-ridden hovels with thatched roofs and mud floors. Millions of emaciated farmers tilled the soil with wooden ploughs. Many more Soviets lived a nightmarish existence of collectivization and servitude, dealing with communal kitchens and loos, intimidation and informers. City life was oppressively overcrowded, with scarce, rationed food supplies at the ends of long queues, the results of Stalin’s policy of exporting grain from the starved countryside in exchange for Western technology. The workers who struggled in ironworks and on assembly lines to achieve Stalin’s targets were ill-equipped, inadequately trained and half-starved, typically driven by terror. They were far removed from the blonde bombshell imagery churned out by Stalin’s well-oiled propaganda machine.

  Yet Stalin saw himself as the very embodiment of progress. There was to be no compromise in his determination to whip his weakened country into shape and catch up the fifty to hundred years he estimated it lagged behind the advanced nations of the West. Stalin was engaged with his country in a struggle for survival and he knew that he badly needed the help of the bourgeois West to succeed. While he enthusiastically and freely adopted the imagery of Hollywood blondes for his propaganda models, he had more difficulty getting hold of the Western technology that was going to enable his Russian socialist state to survive. The capitalist world was also in crisis. The Great Depression had affected every country with which the United States did business, creating ugly scenes of poverty, hatred and war. Roosevelt, like Stalin and Hitler, was to take shelter behind the propaganda of manufactured optimism, in an enhanced world that teemed with racially acceptable blondes.

  j The influences of the Nazis’ Nordic aspirations have been felt in some unexpected quarters. Arthur Koestler, as a Jew persecuted during the war, later felt that his badge of acceptance was to be seen with blonde women. According to one of his biographers, Koestler had a preference for blonde women for the rest of his life.

  13

  Blonde Venus

  When Roosevelt rolled into office as President of the United States in 1933, serene, dignified and confident, with his elegant cigarette holder and his calculated ‘eternal smile’, he was taking on a country crouching under a dark cloud of impending bankruptcy, starvation and fear. Within his first hundred days he had averted disaster, restored a psychological balance to the nation and reinvigorated the country with a new sense of purpose and dynamism. In a blizzard of legislative activity the financial sector was shored up with federal support; private enterprise got an injection of public spirit and public money; public works projects were initiated; and work camps were set up for the young. Like Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, America became a planned economy of a sort. Yet it was ruled by neither socialism nor totalitarianism, but by a state capitalism aimed at national prosperity.

  In its initial stages, Roosevelt’s New Deal was both lauded and cursed. Many of his measures were unpremeditated and incoherent. He created dozens of new agencies, designated by their initials (the CCC, the NRA, the TVA and many more) which frequently confused even the President himself. These agencies were riddled with anomalies, their efforts overlapped, their staff engaged in feuds, and their output was of only partial success. Yet it was with this aura of rapid constructive action that Roosevelt managed to revitalise the United States, injecting new energy and hope into his electorate. He was compassionate and confident. He made courageous speeches. He appeared to be engaged in a great heroic adventure. He convinced millions that he was the heaven-sent man of the hour. In the end, he managed to turn the emergency into a personal triumph.

  Roosevelt had an intuitive grasp of the importance of the mass media in modern politics. During his first year in office he gave the first of his nearly 1,000 presidential press conferences, the first of his pioneering
‘fireside chat’ radio talks, and ensured that he was seen week in week out on the cinema screen, a commanding and vigorous presence which exuded optimism and carefully disguised his infirmity from polio. Film played a key role in the campaign to sell the New Deal to Americans, and in many cinemas the FDR newsreels, glorifying the President with flattering camera angles and friendly sound-bites, were given more time than the accompanying feature film.

  In all three countries – the United States, Germany and the Soviet Union – where power was supported or enforced by means of elaborate illusion, the silver screen became the most important myth-making medium of the age, the perfect surface on which to project political fantasy. But when it came to the business of weaving fantasies, no organization could compete with the dazzling power of Hollywood. America was the ultimate maker of myths, and movies became the most effective expression of American culture. From the 1930s up to the end of the Second World War, Hollywood churned out thousands of films for international audiences which endorsed and illustrated the prevailing racial preference for the Aryan.

  Some of them went to extremes in their portrayal of the incorruptible blonde as a symbol of white American superiority. During the early 1930s, a series of what have been called racial adventure films was produced in Hollywood. Shot mainly on backlots in Los Angeles, these films charted the travels of white Americans to darkest Africa, exotic Asia and other hazardous territories. The results were risible in terms of ethnography, but they revealed much about American racial paranoia, focusing on the steamy allure of racial mixing, both cultural and sexual – but mainly sexual.