Political Reflections on November 9th

 

 

I. 

 

I'm sure there are reasons why November 9th might resonate within the British memory and cultural imagination; events that took place on this date include, for example, the birth of Edward VII (1841) and the murder of Mary Keller at the hands of Jack the Ripper (1888). The Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, also died on this date, in 1953. 

 

However, November 9th means far more for the Germans than it does for us Brits. For November 9th was the date of two fatally significant events in modern German history: the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 and Kristallnacht in 1938 ...

 

 

II. 

 

The Beer Hall Putsch was a failed coup d'état led by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler (in collaboration with the famous German general and War hero Erich Ludendorff).

 

Inspired by the Fascist March on Rome the year before, around 2000 Nazis marched on the Feldherrnhalle, in Munich city centre. Here they were confronted by an armed police cordon, which resulted in the deaths of sixteen Nazis, four police officers, and one bystander.

 

Hitler escaped and hid out in the countryside for a couple of days before being arrested and charged with treason. Although things had not gone to plan, the putsch brought Hitler to the attention of the entire German nation for the first time and generated front-page headlines in newspapers around the world. 

 

His subsequent trial, which lasted for over three weeks, was also widely publicised and gave him an opportunity to promote his National Socialist ideology. Found guilty of treason, Hitler was sentenced to five years in Landsberg Prison (where he dictated his autobiography-cum-political manifesto, Mein Kampf). 

 

After serving only nine months in jail, Hitler was released on Christmas Eve, 1924. Having learned from his mistaken attempt to seize power through revolutionary force, he immediately set about transforming the NSDAP from a paramilitary organisation into a modern political party that could garner popular support and secure him victory at the ballot box.

 

In 1933, the Nazi Party won 44 per cent of the vote, which gave them 288 seats in the Reichstag. Hitler, as Chancellor, passed the Enabling Act in March of this year, which gave him the plenary powers to make laws without the Reichstag's approval. This also allowed him to destroy all opposition to his rule and by the autumn of 1934 - following the death of President Hindenburg in August of that year - Hitler was now in complete control as Führer of the German Reich.  

 

In 1939, Hitler declared that November 9th would henceforth be an official public holiday, on which to commemorate the martyrs of the Nazi movement who were killed during the Munich Putsch.

 

 

III.

 

There is, of course, another reason to remember this date: Kristallnacht - or the Night of Broken Glass - a planned and coordinated pogrom against the German Jews carried out by members of the Nazi Party's paramilitary forces (the SA and SS), in 1938.

 

Shamefully, a number of German citizens also actively participated in the orgy of violence and destruction, although most, like members of the civil authorities, simply stood by looking on (some with horror some with glee) as Jewish stores, houses, schools, and synagogues were ransacked and smashed. Even Jewish graves were violated.  

 

In all, 267 synagogues were destroyed throughout Greater Germany; over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. Estimates of fatalities caused by the attacks have varied. Early reports claimed that 91 Jews had been murdered, but more recent analysis of German sources puts the figure much higher and when deaths from post-arrest maltreatment and subsequent suicides are included, the death toll reaches well into the hundreds. 

 

The world was shocked at this widely reported event; The Times declared - rightly - that it had disgraced the entire German nation. The Daily Telegraph correspondent spoke of a nauseating mix of racism and hysteria. But no one really did anything other than voice their outrage at what was, we now know, a prelude to or foreshadowing of the Final Solution and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust.   

 

 

IV.

 

When people today wonder why they should be concerned with the surge in antisemitism and anti-Israeli hate speech following the events of October 7th and the subsequent war in Gaza, this is why. 

 

To be perfectly honest, as much as one may feel sympathy for the Palestinians, I really don't want to hear calls for Jihad and/or intifada on the streets of London; nor chants of from the river to the sea. 

 

And nor, come to that, do I think it anything other than outrageous that the Anne Frank day care center for pre-school children in the small German town of Tangerhütte - which has operated under that name since the 1970s - may be renamed after a number of migrant parents complained.

 

Apparently, these parents find the name (and story of) Anne Frank problematic - presumably in much the same way that posters featuring the faces of Jewish children kidnapped and held hostage by Hamas are said to be problematic and provocative.  

 

For officials, including the mayor, in Tangerhütte to agree to this act of historical erasure is profoundly depressing. Didn't Germany promise to never forget what had happened in the twentieth-century and never allow such things to happen again ...?

 

Predictably, however, they justify the name change on the (woke) grounds that it is important to celebrate the diversity of the children attending and not oblige them (or their parents) to have to deal with complex political issues arising from a past about which they know nothing and care even less.

 

If these officials get their way - although following a huge backlash this now seems very unlikely - Kita Anne Frank will soon become known as the World Explorer [Weltendecker] day care centre; a name that is as vacuous as the people who came up with it.   

 

 

Pretty in Pink (Notes on the Engendering of Baby Mia)

Baby Mia in a salmon pink cardigan

I.

Now that baby Mia is recognisably human - though still outside language - she is being colour-encoded by her parents within a traditional gender stereotype. In other words, she's being assigned a romantic and floral model of femininity (sweet-natured, sensitive, girly) and taught how to look, to act, and to think of herself as pretty in pink.   

However, like everything, the colour pink as sign and symbol is itself subject to changing cultural interpretation and reinterpretation; it has no essential character and can just as easily be tied to a model of masculinity should it become desirable or fashionable to do so. Indeed, young boys in the 19th century often wore pink, whilst their sisters were dressed in blue and white.

It wasn't until the early-mid-20th century that the colour became almost exclusively associated with girls and ladylike women - Mamie Eisenhower's decision to wear a pink dress at her husband's inauguration as US President in 1953 being a crucial factor in this latter association.

It also replaced lavender as the colour associated with male homosexuality and effeminacy; the Nazis obliging queer inmates of concentration camps to wear outfits embroidered with a pink triangle (though sadly not with matching accessories).      

Meanwhile, the Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli had created a bold and assertive new variety of the colour in 1931 - so-called Shocking Pink - made by mixing magenta with a small amount of white; a shade much loved by Surrealists at the time and by punk rockers in the 1970s looking to turn the world day-glo.

Sadly, many parents of baby girls still prefer to opt for a more muted princess pink that is more Barbara Cartland than Poly Styrene ...    

II.

Interestingly, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), in New York, recently had an exhibition entitled Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color (2018-19), which emphasised the provocative potential of pink (not least its ability to sharply divide opinion).  

Organised by the Museum's director and chief curator Valerie Steele, the show featured approximately 80 outfits dating from the 1700s to the present, including work by Schiaparelli and a fabulous piece from the 2016 Comme des Garçons fall collection entitled 18th Century Punk.

I've no idea what kind of young woman baby Mia will grow up to be, but I do hope she'll dress like this: 

See: Valerie Steele (ed.), Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color, (Thames and Hudson, 2018).

Click here to visit the Museum at FIT website which provides full details of the Pink exhibition and a short audio tour with Valerie Steele. 

And for a (predictable) musical bonus from the Psychedelic Furs (original 1981 version): click here.

Fragments from a Dark History of Black Fashion (V-VII)

V.

The colour is black ... the seduction is beauty ... the aim is ecstasy ... the fantasy is death - or how fascism exerted its sartorial fascination ...

Initially, Mussolini seemed to have a better eye for fashion than Hitler; for clearly black shirts look so much better than brown! But the paramilitary thugs of the Sturmabteilung only wore brown shirts because a large number were available on the cheap following the end of the First World War and the fledgling Nazi Party had to watch the pfennigs. However, once in government and receiving the backing of big business - and once Röhm had been dealt with and the SA superseded by the SS - the Führer ensured that his Nazi elite were dressed to kill in a close-fitting, all-black uniform designed to make its wearer not only feel superior, but look supremely stylish.

Manufactured by Hugo Boss, the uniform was tailored to project malevolent authority and perpetuate the fascist aesthetization and eroticization of power. If many people felt sick with fear when they saw it, a significant number felt sexually aroused and the SS uniform has secured its place not only within the annals of terror, but the pornographic imagination.


VI.

In the post-War world of 50s youth culture, however, black - particularly the black leather jacket - became a symbol of individuality and rebellion; the colour of beatniks and bikers who didn't accept the established norms and values of society. In Paris, meanwhile, it was worn by Left-Bank intellectuals; painters, philosophers, writers, and über-cool performers such as Juliette Gréco, muse to Jean-Paul Sartre and lover of genius jazz musician Miles Davis.

The hippies who followed in the 1960s, with their love of psychedelic colours, tie-dyed clothing, paisley prints and floral patterns, subscribed to an almost anti-black rainbow aesthetic - one of the reasons that Malcolm McLaren despised them. But those within the punk movement of the mid-late 70s, shaped by McLaren in his own image, would again make black an emblematic colour. Finally, mention must be made of the post-punk goths and devotees of kink within the world of fetish fashion taking black outfits to a whole new level of perverse dark beauty.

VII.

According to Coco Chanel, a woman only needs three things to look elegant - and one of these three things is what has become known as the little black dress, a vision of which she published in Vogue in October 1926, radically changing women's fashion forever. After this date, a full-length gown might still be required for formal occasions, but, apart from these ceremonial social events, the LBD could be worn anywhere, anytime with the assurance that one would not be committing a faux pas and never not looking anything but chic, stylish, and sophisticated.

As Karl Lagerfeld has explained, black is the colour that goes with everything; if you're wearing black, you can't go wrong. Ultimately, black is fashion and fashion is black. And all those designers who suggest other colours upon which to build a wardrobe by declaring them to be the new black are basically fraudsters looking to push the latest trend and sell a few more frocks while they can. Hemlines rise and fall, accessories come and go, but the LBD is the essential must have item.           


Notes 

The image of the good-looking SS officer is by CainIsNotMyEnemy and can be found on Deviant Art by clicking here.

The photo of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly is a publicity shot for Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961); she is wearing a sheath little black dress, designed by Givenchy in Italian satin. 

Those interested in reading fragments I-IV of this dark history of black fashion should click here. 

Jüdische Insekten or Himmler's Lice

Antisemitic poster from 1942 used in German occupied Poland to warn against the 

supposed connection between Jews, lice and typhus; for the Nazis, Jews infected 

with the disease were metaphysically indistinguishable from its insect carriers.  

To paraphrase Shakespeare, if I may: Some are born insects, some wish to become-insect, and some have insecthood thrust upon 'em. 

Take the Jews, for example, in Hitler's Germany. When not being described as a cancer to be cut out of the body politic, or portrayed as a plague of sewer rats, they were obscenely characterised as parasitic lice or giant cockroaches in need of extermination. For racism loves to dehumanise and to operate in terms of pest control and personal hygiene.

In a speech to his fellow officers in April 1943, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler openly declared:

"Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness. In just the same way, antisemitism, for us, has not been a question of ideology, but a matter of cleanliness ..."

To be judenfrei was, in Himmler's mind, to be deloused - i.e. free of blood-sucking, disease-carrying insects that infest individuals and threaten to spread throughout the entire population; creatures that cause feelings of revulsion and which deserve to be eradicated. 

Of course, Jews are not actually insects; they're human beings. And there are moral and legal prohibitions on the premeditated killing of human beings; we even have a special term for it - murder. And it's difficult to persuade people to commit murder. Thus the Nazis had a problem ...

The solution, as the quotation from Himmler demonstrates, involves pushing a metaphor - the Jews are inhuman vermin; the Jews are disgusting insects - beyond its own limit, transforming it into a pseudo-scientific fact and a deadly piece of doxa. Genocide ends with a pile of corpses, but it always begins with an abuse of language that allows us to kill in good conscience. As Hugh Raffles writes:

"There is no doubt that this happened in the Holocaust. ... Explaining it is at the heart of understanding the fate of the Jews, who, after all, would be killed like insects - like lice, in fact. Literally like lice. Like Himmler's lice. With the same routinized indifference and, in vast numbers, with the same techologies."

Raffles also suggests - and one suspects this might very well be the case - that Himmler in his speech was "indulging in an intimate irony with his men"; making a little joke at the expense of those murdered in the gas chambers:

"As is well known, prisoners at Auschwitz were treated to an elaborate charade. Those selected for death were directed to 'delousing facilities' equipped with false-headed showers. They were moved through changing rooms, allocated soap and towels. They were told they would be rewarded for disinfection with hot soup. ... The prisoners massed uncertainly in the shower room. Overhead, unseen, the disinfectors waited in their gas masks for the warmth of the naked bodies to bring the ambient temperature to the optimal 78 degrees Fahrenheit. They then poured crystals from the cans of Zyklon B - a hydrogen cyanide insecticide developed for delousing buildings and clothes - through the ceiling hatches. Finally, the bodies, contorted by the pain caused by the warning agent ... were removed to the crematoria.
      In this grotesque pantomime, the victims ... move from objects of care to objects of annihilation. To diseased humans, delousing promises remediation, a return to community, a return to life; to lice, it offers only extermination. Too late, the prisoners discover they are merely lice."

One of the reasons that the language of National Socialism continues to fascinate (and to appal) is because of the way it conflates and confuses metaphor, euphemism and a brutal literalism into a witches' brew that is vague and void of meaning on the one hand, whilst paradoxically transparent and full of deadly intent on the other.    


Afterword

There are, thankfully, far happier and more positive associations between Jews and insects. In fact, several species of the latter have been named after celebrated Jewish figures; there is, for example, the Karl Marx wasp and the Sigmund Freud beetle - not to mention the Harry Houdini moth, the Lou Reed spider, and the Carole King stonefly.   

See: Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia, (Vintage Books, 2010); particularly the chapter entitled 'Jews', pp. 141-61, from where all of the lines quoted - including those from Heinrich Himmler - were taken. 

Those interested in knowing more about the insects (and other organisms) named after famous Jewish figures, should click here.  

On Ecosexuality

Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle

Here Come the Ecosexuals

For those of you who don't know, Elizabeth Stephens is an interdisciplinary artist, activist and academic whose work explores themes of sexuality, gender, and politics.

Former prostitute and porn star Annie Sprinkle, meanwhile, played an important role in the sex positive feminist movement during the 1980s and has since built up over thirty-five years of experience in erotically charged entertainment, education, and performance art. 

Today, Sprinkle and her partner Stephens are committed to queering the environmental movement and to this end have declared themselves to be ecosexuals. They have also written an ecosex manifesto and established a new field of research and aesthetic practice called sex ecology.

Central to their philosophy is the notion of replacing the metaphor of Earth Mother with that of Earth Lover, in the hope that this might "entice people to develop a more mutual, pleasurable, sustainable, and less destructive relationship with the environment". This means not only treating the Earth with kindness and respect, but also engaging in libidinal relationships with the material world; hugging trees, caressing rocks, being pleasured by waterfalls, etc.

Now, you might be thinking at this point that, as someone who has written enthusiastically on floraphilia, I would happily and unconditionally offer my support to Stephens and Sprinkle - but you'd be mistaken. Unfortunately, I have a number of problems with their project, but these might, for the sake of convenience, be boiled down to just two: firstly, I don't share their idealism and, secondly, I don't like the way they attempt to impose a unified and recognisable sexual identity upon a diverse range of paraphilias and polymorphously perverse practices.

Let's examine each of these points in a bit more detail ...   

1. Like many others before them, including nature worshipping Romantics and blood and soil loving Nazis, Stephens and Sprinkle quickly fall into idealism and, related to this, anthropocentric conceit as they project their own egos (their own politics, their own prejudices, their own peccadilloes) into everything; not just the Earth, but the Sun, the Moon and the Stars to boot. Their ecosexuality is thoroughly - and disappointingly - allzumenschliche.

They would do well, in my view, to learn from Lawrence on this, who, with reference to the case of Thomas Hardy, warns that to try and subject the earth to your own idealism always ends badly - not least of all for you as an idealist. He writes:

"What happens when you idealize the soil, the mother-earth, and really go back to it? Then with overwhelming conviction it is borne in upon you ... that the whole scheme of things is against you. The whole massive rolling of natural fate is coming down on you like a slow glacier, to crush you to extinction. As an idealist.
      Thomas Hardy's pessimism is an absolutely true finding. It is the absolutely true statement of the idealist's last realization, as he wrestles with the bitter soil of beloved mother-earth. He loves her, loves her, loves her. And she just entangles and crushes him like a slow Laocoön snake. The idealist must perish, says mother-earth. ...
      You can't idealize mother-earth. You can try. You can even succeed. But succeeding, you succumb. She will have no pure idealist sons [or, in this case, daughters]. None.
      If you are a child of mother-earth, you must learn to discard your ideal self ... as you discard your clothes at night."

Put simply, the Earth doesn't want to nourish you like a child nor accept you as a lover or spouse; it is massively and monstrously indifferent to your existence and your longings.

2. One of the joys of floraphilia is that it's a paraphilia and not a legitimised form of love; the prefix para implying not only that it exists alongside the latter, but that it's abnormal. And that's how I like it and want it to remain. To be pollen-amorous is to allow one's desire to free float on the passing breeze; it is to become-flower, which is to say, beautiful and soulless. It's not about constructing some new form of sexual identity and of tethering the latter to an essential truth.

Foucault, of course, brilliantly analysed the dangers and disadvantages of this with reference to the birth of the modern homosexual, arguing that homosexuality only "appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species" subject to an entirely new discursive regime.

I'm sure Stephens and Sprinkle are aware of all this and so it surprises me to say the least that they insist on positing ecosexuality as a primary drive and identity, or some sort of ontological category into which all other sexual positionings - GLBTQI - can ultimately be collapsed (because we are all natural beings and all sex is ecosex).

I wish them well, but I also wish they'd exercise a little more philosophical caution and nuance ...       


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Dana's "Two Years before the Mast"', Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1998). 

Readers interested in knowing more about the work of Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle and reading their ecosex manifesto can visit: sexecology.org

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In Defence of Weeds and Wildflowers

Bill and Ben The Flower Pot Men, with much loved friend Little Weed

If the word vermin is one that I find offensive and problematic (as explained in a recent post), so too is the term weed - and for similar reasons. For like vermin, weed is not simply a neutral term which objectively describes; taxonomically, it lacks any real botanical meaning or reference. 

Weed, rather, is a qualitative noun used to classify certain plants thought to be growing out of place and in a manner that opens the way for the discriminatory practice of weeding, or the use of herbicides by those green-fingered fanatics who insist on human order and the coordination of life (or what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung).

Like vermin, weed is therefore a morally pernicious term that passes judgement; a form of fascist death sentence passed on any wildflower that threatens to encroach upon our intensively farmed agricultural spaces, or dares to blossom in our well-maintained, lovely-looking, but essentially joyless gardens and parks.

It should be noted that the term weed is also applied to those people thought to be feeble, effeminate, or perhaps too bookish; those who might not only be regarded as poor physical specimens, but politically suspect and socially undesirable - persons in need of weeding out ...

It is thus another thoroughly vile term; one that I never use and do not like to hear used - unless it's by Bill and Ben, The Flower Pot Men, and with reference to their friend Little Weed whom they obviously love dearly, as do I. 


This post is dedicated to David Brock.

Vermin (With Reference to the Case of Gregor Samsa)

 Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, 

fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.

The word vermin is an ugly term for an ugly phenomenon; a qualitative noun that doesn't innocently describe a type of unclean animal or a class of sub-human subject, but identifies, classifies, and characterizes as such. 

A morally pernicious term that is effectively a mortal judgement passed; a death sentence. For to designate as vermin is to make fit for extermination. 

It includes wild birds and beasts that are thought to carry disease or in some other way endanger or threaten to disrupt human enterprise with their destructive activities; pesky insects and parasites that swarm and infest; and, lastly, people perceived as dirty, despicable, and problematic (Jews, gypsies, immigrants, the homeless, the unemployed, and the poor in general). 

Thus, if when applied to animals the term betrays mankind's innate sense of supremacy or speciesism, when applied to our fellow men and women it manifests our murderous racism and xenophobia. 

The Nazis, of course, had a particular penchant for portraying their opponents and those they feared and despised as Ungeziefer and Untermenschen - i.e. not worthy of sacrifice or society; Lebensunwertes Leben. 

And so vermin is a word that makes me particularly uncomfortable; one that I would never use and do not like to hear used. It reminds me at last of poor Gregor Samsa; what happened to him might happen to any of us, so there's surely a lesson to be learned here.

Auschwitz and the Question of Evil

Auschwitz by Tana Schubert (2014)

tana-jo.deviantart.com 

This week marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, allowing commentators in the news media to put on their most solemn faces, mouth a series of clichés and broadcast all-too-familiar images, thereby constructing a lazy moral narrative around a place and an event that demands and deserves far more than sanctimonious inanity. 

For a start, we need to face up to the fact that, as Baudrillard points out, the Nazi genocide was not the extermination of a people by evil, but, rather, the attempted extermination of evil by a people acting in the name of Love; the murderous outcome of idealism and an insanely logical order.  

Secondly, we must reconsider the piles of rotting corpses and accept that they are, technically speaking from a camp commandant's perspective, besides the point and profoundly problematic. For the final solution essentially aimed not at the monstrous production of dead bodies; rather, it was an attempt to systematically process death and transform wretched human flesh into bars of glistening, pure white soap. As Nick Land writes:

"We simplify out of anxiety when we conflate the mounds of emaciated bodies strewn about the camps at the point of their liberation - the bodies of those annihilated by epidemics during the collapse of the extermination system - with the reduced ash and shadows of those erased by the system in its smooth functioning. The uneliminated corpse is not a submissive element within this or any other 'final solution', but an impersonal resistance to it, a token of primordial community."

In other words, it is only because our bodies are weak and prone to disease - only because our flesh is mortal and life is fundamentally immoral - that fascism of whatever variety can never triumph: Evil makes free.

Les Zazous

Pretty much everyone has heard of the jazz-loving teens in Hitler's Germany known as the Swing Youth, who developed a subversive Anglo-American sensibility and style in diametric opposition to National Socialism. Likewise, those who are interested in this period and in subcultural and counter-cultural forms of resistance to the Third Reich are probably also familiar with the Edelweiss Pirates. But far less well known are the French equivalent of die Swingjugend, called les Zazous.

The Zazous were a group of mostly Parisian based hipsters living under German occupation during World War II who chose to defy their Nazi overlords and display their nonconformity by wearing outlandish clothes, carrying umbrellas, growing their hair long, and dancing to jazz, swing, and bebop.

Whilst boys favoured wearing oversized, often knee-length box jackets, peg leg trousers, and suede brothel creepers, the girls wore short pleated skirts, striped stockings and shoes with thick wooden soles. Often the girls would bleach their hair, worn in long curls, and paint their lips bright red. Both sexes also had a penchant for sunglasses, whatever the weather.

When not hanging about on the terrace of the Pam Pam café drinking cocktails, the Zazous often frequented vegetarian restaurants and ordered grated carrot salads. If there's a subtle political gesture in this choice of lunch, I have to confess it escapes me. But their decision to voluntarily wear the yellow star of David, in solidarity with French Jews, was certainly an overt and courageous sign of dissident behaviour in a country where anti-Semitism was widespread and silent complicity with the Nazis (if not active collaboration) was shamefully often the norm.  

And for this, one cannot help affording them great affection and respect. Perhaps they didn't risk their lives in the same manner as their German counterparts, but they were nevertheless detested and targeted by the Nazis and members of the Vichy government who saw them as a threat to the moral well-being of the nation.

Articles published by the authorities at the time, branded them as decadent, work-shy, anti-patriotic egoists and, after 1942, les Zazous were often attacked and beaten on the streets by pro-fascist groups, or arrested and sent to labour in the fields and farms of the French countryside. 

Disappointingly - though not surprisingly - members of the official French Resistance movement had little time for the Zazous either and afforded them no support or protection. In fact, the communists and other ultra-leftists dismissed the Zazous in much the same terms and for many of the same reasons as the fascists.

But, despite such hostility from both ends of the political spectrum, they still continued to dance, to dress-up, and make their daring and dandyish revolt into style.

Wenn Ich Kultur Höre ... The Rise and Fall of Hanns Johst

 Hanns Johst (1890 - 1978)

When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver!

This oft-quoted line - commonly, but mistakenly, attributed to Hermann Goering or one of the other Nazi leaders - continues to resonate with us today and to mutate into new and often amusing forms. 

But it has perhaps still not quite been understood that whilst the original speaker - a character called Friedrich Thiemann, in a play entitled Schlageter - is indeed expressing his preference for paramilitary violence over all intellectual or artistic pursuits, the author, Hanns Johst, had a rather more developed racial understanding of the culture question.

    

For Johst, like many other writers and thinkers at this time, there was traditional German culture on the one hand, which he loved and wished to defend; and then there was modern Jewish culture, which he despised and wished to combat, fearing that it would otherwise infect and corrupt the purity of the former. This is why he joined the nationalistic and anti-Semitic Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (Militant League for German Culture) in 1928 and why, four years later, he became a committed member of the Nazi Party.

Schlageter, which tells the story of a proto-Nazi martyr, was in fact written solely to express his support for National Socialist ideology, including its arts policy which declared that only works which conformed with classical standards and expressed the Aryan ideal would be allowed; those which failed to do so were notoriously branded as degenerate. 

In 1935, Johst became the President of both the Writers' Union in Germany and of the Akademie für Dichtung. By 1944, now an officer in the Waffen-SS, he was named as one of the Third Reich's most important artists. 

After the war, Johst was interned by the Allies and eventually received a three-and-a-half year prison sentence. Unable to successfully re-establish his writing career following his release, he was reduced to placing poems written under a pseudonym in Die kluge Hausfrau - a magazine published by that great bastion of all things German, Edeka, a large supermarket chain.

 

When I hear the word kultur, I reach for my price gun ...