ABSTRACT

At the beginning of this book we referred to recent debates in Germany about the term Volkskörper (literally, the people’s or nation’s body), and its associations with racist discourse and Nazi jargon. This stigma of a “Nazi jargon” echo attaches, to be sure, only to the specifi c expression Volkskörper (as well as to further Nazi-characteristic applications of the body-nation metaphor such as talk about social groups as parasites or vermin) but not to other expressions from that lexical fi eld, let alone the underlying general conceptual metaphor, which could be paraphrased as A political entity is a body. Thus, we can fi nd uses of the body-state/nation metaphor that are not “tainted” by any Nazi stigma and are used as politically unproblematic, even neutral ways of referring to political entities, as in the following examples:

A jury of critics discusses the ten most signifi cant theatre productions of this season. They speak of the ‘body of the stage’ and the ‘body of the nation’ [vom “nationalen Körper”]—society has become the giant body that theatre dissects1 (article on unifi cation of East and West German theatre cultures).