ABSTRACT
What became of the “symbolics of blood” after 1945, following Hitler’s defeat and the collapse of the Third Reich? How were the themes of health, progeny, and race inscribed into German memory after the war? According to Michel Foucault (1978), the thematics of blood, specifically a sanguine aesthetics of race, had their origin in a premodern age, in which the genealogical principle (with its emphasis on birthright, descent, and kin) had maintained the ancient forms of rank and privilege. In the twentieth century, as Foucault observed, the blood myth was disinterred to serve the political interests of a modern state apparatus: “Nazism was doubtless the most cunning [in its deployment] of the [old] fantasies of blood [and] power. A eugenic ordering of society,…in the guise of an unrestricted state control, was accompanied by the oneiric exaltation of a superior blood; the latter implied both the systematic genocide of others and the risk of exposing oneself to a total sacrifice. It is an irony of history that [under Hitler] the blood myth was transformed into the greatest blood bath in recent memory” (ibid, 149-50). But did the death of the Nazi state, and the end of its regime of terror,
successfully eradicate these long-lived preoccupations with blood, body, and race? Was the traumatic shift in political systems able to dislodge the sanguine aesthetic from its firm hold on the German historical unconscious? While no longer endorsed as an official ideology after 1945, the blood mystique was often visibly inscribed on the historiographic surface of postwar Germany. Residing at the margins of awareness, fantasies of blood were rendered visible in fragments, each appearing by itself in a “scene,” thereby providing the performative labor of social memory. For instance,
In 1983, during an air show at an American military base in the Rhine Palatinate, West German peace protesters staged the occurrence of a nuclear Holocaust by simulating mass-death: dressed in black costumes to symbolize the victims’ charred bodies and skeletal remains, the protesters arrayed themselves on the ground. When the military police finally intervened, the event turned into a form of dramatic poetry in which members of the German audience played out familiar roles, becoming participants in the physical brutalization of their political opponents. One spectator, a man with a small son, proclaimed that he wanted to “rip the heart” from one of the protester’s bodies. Another shouted that the activists “should be run over with a tractor.” A man to his left, who until then had been contentedly chewing on a hot dog, suddenly poured his cup of beer over a young woman lying on the ground, and began to shout “Blood! Blood! Blood!” while rhythmically stomping his foot up and down. A female spectator, while kicking and spitting at the protestors, screamed: “Beat them to death, beat them all to death!” As the peace protesters were loaded onto the waiting military trucks, another man proclaimed: “And now into the gas with them!”1
