maandag 21 mei 2012
The Taking of Power by Louis XIV
dinsdag 1 november 2011
Gerhard Riebicke
Notes and images from Gerhard Riebicke: Photographien
Published in 2000 by Galerie Bodo Niemann
Freed bodies - Nude photographs by Gerhard Riebicke 1924 -1932
Written by T.O. Immisch
Freed bodies? Perhaps not yet quite this, but still bodies that are freeing themselves. In the twentieth century the freeing of bodies, corporeality, and sensuality was tried again and again, rarely achieved and often prevented. In Riebicke's pictures it looks as if this was accomplished, for one historical moment.
[...]
What we have here before us is one of the rather rare cases of nude photography paired with humor. These pictures are witness to and part of a historical naturism which still accentuated both: the leap to freedom (from narrowing conventions to self-acceptance) and the culture, the careful attention to, and the practicing of bodily expression.
[...]
Riebicke's pictures give a sudden insight into the striving for a free community, already beyond the pseudo-religious sun-worshippers a la Fidus but not yet on the same level with the ungainly Kraftdurch-Freude Aryans. The pair and group configurations and figures do not force the bodies neatly in row, do not force them into poses of strength or into poses of idyllic round dances. In these, the bodies of those involved relate to each other, the protagonists clasping each other's limbs. Their bodies neither show deformation nor formation (and the photographer is showing it in his pictures), but rather form and forms, the forms of their own bodies and forms of joint action. Specific for photography and especially remarkable in these snapshots is that they make visible configurations of parts of the body in relation to each other, which cannot be seen in that way during the action. Individuals, two or more people, materialize in one single form, or rather form an ornament. Thus, form is becoming visible in its double meaning, as human figure(s) and as an entity which is more than the sum of its parts.
[...]
It is fascinating to see and to look into how the photographer is stretching these bodily ornaments across the landscape. People and land or water are joined together in a composition and by choosing the angle of view (mainly turned to the object slightly from the top or from the bottom), the horizon, the line between sky and lake or meadow, becomes part of the pictorial figure, becomes graphically flat and is inscribed in the hieroglyphs of the movements.
[...]
Riebicke's nude photographs are both records of stagings, self-stagings of the people photographed, and staged records, intensified in their fire, their being detached from gravity by photographic means, such as detail selection, the supremely fine play with light-dark contrasts or slightly low visibility. As conscious of the form as they are seen and made, they appear at times almost report-like. The staged action comes from the protagonists themselves, is recorded and intensified by the photographer and still remains in motion, and does not congeal into formulas.
Untitled, 1925
Untitled, 1925
Untitled, 1926
Untitled, 1926
Untitled, 1926
Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit, 1925
Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit, 1925
Published in 2000 by Galerie Bodo Niemann
Freed bodies - Nude photographs by Gerhard Riebicke 1924 -1932
Written by T.O. Immisch
Freed bodies? Perhaps not yet quite this, but still bodies that are freeing themselves. In the twentieth century the freeing of bodies, corporeality, and sensuality was tried again and again, rarely achieved and often prevented. In Riebicke's pictures it looks as if this was accomplished, for one historical moment.
[...]
What we have here before us is one of the rather rare cases of nude photography paired with humor. These pictures are witness to and part of a historical naturism which still accentuated both: the leap to freedom (from narrowing conventions to self-acceptance) and the culture, the careful attention to, and the practicing of bodily expression.
[...]
Riebicke's pictures give a sudden insight into the striving for a free community, already beyond the pseudo-religious sun-worshippers a la Fidus but not yet on the same level with the ungainly Kraftdurch-Freude Aryans. The pair and group configurations and figures do not force the bodies neatly in row, do not force them into poses of strength or into poses of idyllic round dances. In these, the bodies of those involved relate to each other, the protagonists clasping each other's limbs. Their bodies neither show deformation nor formation (and the photographer is showing it in his pictures), but rather form and forms, the forms of their own bodies and forms of joint action. Specific for photography and especially remarkable in these snapshots is that they make visible configurations of parts of the body in relation to each other, which cannot be seen in that way during the action. Individuals, two or more people, materialize in one single form, or rather form an ornament. Thus, form is becoming visible in its double meaning, as human figure(s) and as an entity which is more than the sum of its parts.
[...]
It is fascinating to see and to look into how the photographer is stretching these bodily ornaments across the landscape. People and land or water are joined together in a composition and by choosing the angle of view (mainly turned to the object slightly from the top or from the bottom), the horizon, the line between sky and lake or meadow, becomes part of the pictorial figure, becomes graphically flat and is inscribed in the hieroglyphs of the movements.
[...]
Riebicke's nude photographs are both records of stagings, self-stagings of the people photographed, and staged records, intensified in their fire, their being detached from gravity by photographic means, such as detail selection, the supremely fine play with light-dark contrasts or slightly low visibility. As conscious of the form as they are seen and made, they appear at times almost report-like. The staged action comes from the protagonists themselves, is recorded and intensified by the photographer and still remains in motion, and does not congeal into formulas.
Untitled, 1925
Untitled, 1925
Untitled, 1926
Untitled, 1926
Untitled, 1926
Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit, 1925
Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit, 1925
Georg Kolbe
Georg Kolbe (15 April 1877 – 20 November 1947) was the leading German figure sculptor of his generation, using a vigorous, modern, simplified classical style.
Kolbe was born in Waldheim (Sachsen). He studied Rodin, during half a year in Paris, in 1897. Originally trained as a painter in Dresden, Munich, and Paris, he began sculpting during a stay in Rome at the turn of the century under the technical guidance of sculptor Louis Tuaillon. His artistic breakthrough came in 1912 with his sculpture masterpiece Die Tänzerin.
All images come from the book Georg Kolbe: Werke der Letzten Jahre (1937)
Große Nacht, 1930
Große Pietà, 1930
Große Frauenstatue, 1934
Kolbe was born in Waldheim (Sachsen). He studied Rodin, during half a year in Paris, in 1897. Originally trained as a painter in Dresden, Munich, and Paris, he began sculpting during a stay in Rome at the turn of the century under the technical guidance of sculptor Louis Tuaillon. His artistic breakthrough came in 1912 with his sculpture masterpiece Die Tänzerin.
All images come from the book Georg Kolbe: Werke der Letzten Jahre (1937)
Große Nacht, 1930
Große Pietà, 1930
Große Frauenstatue, 1934
zaterdag 29 oktober 2011
František Drtikol
Circular Whirlpool, 1929
Untitled, 1929
Nude (Movement), 1927
Nude, 1928
A Worker II, 1925
Worker, 1925
Nude, 1929
Wave, 1925
+/- 1930
Pohyb, 1927
1927
Composition, 1927
Akt, 1927
vrijdag 7 oktober 2011
The Human Body in Movement
Mary Wigman jumping, photographed by Charlotte Rudolph, 1920s.Notes from The Human Body in Movement, written and researched by Jan-Gunnar Sjölin. Published online at http://bodyinmovement.se
The Human Body in Movement is a project concerned primarily with dance and physical theater, to some extent also with everyday corporeal expression, and with athletics where aesthetic aspects of body movements are important. In all ages, performers like dancers and actors have used their bodies as the foremost element of their creations. In contrast to painters and sculptors, they invest themselves in corporeal form in their work. The focus of the project is on aspects of principle concerning human body movements in the aesthetic field, not on the history of the performing arts or on individual artists’ manner of moving.
Chapter: Body Movements as Terrestrial Events
This text explains how I got the original idea for a study of human body movements, built on a few principles central to the American psychologist James J. Gibson. In its first version it comprised some 10 pages, written in short, forceful paragraphs in 1998.
[...]
There are two more observations initially to be made. In contrast to events in outer space, the events on earth are under the sway of gravity and other terrestrial forces. Man’s free will, as it is called, does not reach its goals through liberating us from mechanical forces reigning on earth like gravity, but through cooperating with them and making use of them. The same goes for man’s condition as a biological creature, a condition which we are bound to embrace. Even if it is possible to widen the field of body movements, these rest in the last resort confined by mechanical as well as biological limits.
However, it is not sufficient to define human body movements through their characteristic mechanical and biological status. When entering deeper into the history of different categories of body movements, it becomes evident that their mechanical and biological properties have often been linked to ideological questions raised through the centuries. Thus, what appears as a primitive inheritance from time immemorial is at the same time transmitting contemporary ideological messages, pertaining to political, scientific or aesthetic ideals. In this way, a dialogue is opened up with various researchers and choreographers from the last century, among them Siegfried Kracauer, Rudolf Laban and Erving Goffman.
Page: Translations and Rotations of the Body
[...] body movement cannot be studied in geometrical terms alone. It is a question of interaction between human bodies, between these and animals, between human bodies and inanimate things, and finally between human bodies and the whole surrounding environment. This is what Gibson calls ecological mechanics and defines as different from both celestial mechanics and particle mechanics, including thermodynamics (Gibson 1986:95-96).
Secondly, the definition is an abstraction in the sense that it does not take into consideration that body movements appear to us in two radically different ways. It does not distinguish between other people’s body movements and the movements of one’s own body. So, it is not possible within the scope of this definition to say what specifies the body movements of others as contrasted with body movements perceived by proprioception. But all human body movements belong either to the first or to the second category, and they are specified in totally different ways to us.
Page: Movements of Joints and Body Segments
[...] biological and anatomical aspects bring us nearer to the specific character of body movement. There are preliminary aspects, however, in need of attention. Firstly, not all movements of the body are based on the movement of joints and the motion of body segments. Secondly, like the first, abstract-geometrical model, this one does not take into account the ecological aspect of human movement, the interaction between living bodies and the environment.
[...]
Within the frame established by the biomechanical view of body movement it is meaningful to consider a group of distinctions, proposed by Gibson. Whereas celestial events are perpetual, in any case from a human point of view, terrestrial events have a beginning and an end (Gibson 1986:10ff.). This means that there is a situation before and after, as well as different phases of the event, in this case the corporeal movement, to consider. Or rather, in the last analysis, there is not only a movement of the body but also a state of affairs, the body`s posture as a whole, or in the words of Gibson, “a general formula of nonchange underlying change” (Gibson 1986:101).
Another distinction, based on this wider perspective, is that between repeated and non-repeated movements. As regards pure repetition, exemplified by the rotations of the hands of the clock, there is none in body movements, since an organism is never quite the same as it was before, as noted by Gibson (Gibson 1986:101). In principle, every movement of the body is unique; it might be like another one and yet it is always unlike it. In practice, however, we need to be able to talk about such quasi-repetitions, which are very important in the case of body movements. When the word “repetition” is used in connection with these, it should be understood in the light of this reservation.
Page: Collisions and Other Mechanical Contacts
Another way to observe and understand body movements than that of biomechanics is offered by Rudolf Laban’s Effort Theory, elaborated during the second quarter of the 20th century. In its center is the individual, acting with clear attention, intention and decision. What does seldom enter into the equation of Laban, however, is the response, resistance or passivity of others, who are the objects of the individual’s ambition or effort. In a way, this is what can be expected from a man who was always a leader. Few people are known to have impressed him and influenced him. This might explain why the main object of his research is the independently acting human being.
In order to characterize the whole movement repertory of human beings, Laban identified four decisive factors. These he found in space, time, weight, and flow. To be clearly defined in relation to space, a movement must have a definite direction, that is to say it must follow a straight line. Then it is said to be direct. If, however, it is displaying several directions, it is said to be flexible (or in some sources indirect). In relation to the factor of time, a movement is said to be sudden when it occurs and is performed rapidly. The alternative is that it is slow in the start and goes on and on. Then it is called sustained. As to the third motion factor, weight, a movement is said to be strong (also called firm), when it resists or fights against weight. But if it is weak and yields to weight, then it is said to be light (also called gentle). In several texts, a fourth factor is added, which is no less important, namely flow. In relation to this, a movement is called bound when it can be stopped and held without difficulty. If a movement needs effort to stop suddenly, the flow is called free or fluent (Laban 1963:56-58)
So far, there is no need for Laban to assume anything beyond biomechanics. But he also closely relates the motion factors to “the stages of inner preparation of an outer bodily action”, namely attention, intention, and decision. For him, attention means to relate oneself to space and have physical mastery of it. Intention means to master one’s relation to the weight factor. Finally, decision means to be adjusted to the time factor (Laban, quoted in Newlove & Dalby 2004:251). The importance of Laban’s system is not least his insistence on the mental aspects of human body movements, providing a necessary complement to the biomechanical aspects. More than his singling out of specific categories, this transgression of the limits between physical and mental activity is the basis of his importance.
Page: Movements Impeded - Movements Regained
Approaching the phenomenon of immobile bodies, one might believe this to be an uncomplicated affair, in contrast to bodies in motion. However, we need only ask in what different ways a body can become motionless in order to begin to understand the complexity of the phenomenon.
The easiest case to approach is that of self-chosen motionlessness. A human being may lie down on a comfortable support and relax. Such a reclining person has no difficulty to stay more or less immobile and may even fall asleep. In both states, being awake or asleep, immobility is natural, but it is not absolute, and certainly not for someone asleep.
It is noted by Rudolf Arnheim that “a dancer stopping for a moment during a run looks arrested rather than at rest” (Arnheim 1974:382). When there is movement before and after, as in this case, everything happening seems to exist in the dimension of movement. In this case, motionlessness is perceived as active resistance to motion.
The question of the immobile body, especially the reclining one, comes to the fore when standing or sitting persons are contrasted with others lying on beds or on the floor. A ranking of movement potential is created. Of course, one can argue that a still photograph always illustrates movement arrested – the body photographed may be immobile or not. Still, the posture assumed by a person relates in itself more or less to movement. A standing person, to a higher degree than someone sitting, is immediately free to move around, whereas a reclining person has much less of immediate movement potential.
Page: The Stillness Filled with Movement
Another case of stillness that brings movements to the fore is that of still images: photographs, paintings and also sculptures. Here, I want to summarize the pertinent description of how we experience a real movement in contrast to movement in a still image, given by the American philosopher Arthur Danto in 1979: in real life, we see a body moving; in a still image we see that a body moves (Danto 2006:108-112). This may be thought of as another case where stillness prompts movements and impulses to move, albeit only in the spectator’s perception, at least to start with. This leads to the question of what there may be in a still image to trigger this. Suffice it to mention a number of possible grounds.
In photographs, movement may be alluded to through
a) blurred contours, due to slight movement of the body during exposure (fig. 17) – to be distinguished from unsharpness due to focusing;
Fig. 17 Minor White, Movement Study no. 56, San Francisco 1949.b) body parts, elongated in the direction of movement, due to specific movements of the body during exposure (fig. 18) – to be distinguished from the elongation in the same direction of everything in a photograph, due to a camera moving at the time of exposure, even if this too alludes to movement;
Fig. 18 Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Self Portrait. Changing Position, 1911. c) dynamic composition, stressing e.g. oblique lines (fig. 19) – this is a conventionalized way to underline or simulate movements and not an index for its real existence;
Fig. 19 Siegfried Dietrich, Movement Study, 1932.d) representations of moments which are not self-sustaining, and which refer to what happened immediately before and after the moment registered (fig. 20) – for instance an unstable posture which cannot be assumed for more than a fraction of a second;
Fig. 20 Charlotte Rudolph, Gret Palucca, 1924.e) a sequence of two or more separate photographs, or exposures in the same image, representing a series of consecutive moments of a movement (fig. 21) – as in Muybridge’s famous photographic studies of animal and human locomotion from the latter half of the 19th century;
Fig. 21 Thomas Eakins, Jesse Godley, 1884, chronophotograph. f) multiple contours, representing consecutive stages in a body’s traversal of space (fig. 22), produced through jerky movements or by means of multiple exposures;
Fig. 22 Svante Lundgren, Studying in the Holidays, c. 1950.g) bright lines on a darkish background, representing for instance the bulb of a moving flashlight, or the traces left by it on the surroundings (fig. 23).
Fig. 23 Herbert Matter, Photograph (Man changing his clothes in a dark room, a number of electric bulbs fastened to his body).Still photographs of dance are often said to represent “postures”. In such cases, it is not really a question of freezing a movement but rather of a “passage through” in the words of Erin Manning, also sourced from Moshe Feldenkrais. It is not quite a displacement, nor an immobile pose (Manning 2009:44).
From a historical point of view, it should be observed that most old photographs of dancers and actors are representing immobile poses, a kind of idealized view of a posture. Even long after technical progress from about 1880 made possible instantaneous photography of dancers in movement, they continued to pose motionless for stills in a photographer’s studio up to around World War I. Such photographs certainly did not transmit the quality of a “passage through”, but they could yet suggest some kind of movement, like other stills.
A pioneer of dance photography, Charlotte Rudolph, continued to work with dancers in a studio in Dresden. In 1929 and again in 1930 she undertook to write specialized studies of the qualities of photography as a medium in relation to human body movements. Even today, these short texts are outstanding in their attention to essential aspects of the matter, as regards both photography and dance. She is working in an era when the dancer is no longer required to assume a posture and keep it until the exposure is done. Even so, photographers retained the habit to concentrate on the “principal” moments of the dance, for instance when the dancer performs a passage of greatest tension, or greatest relaxation or even of suspension in the air, which are the qualities singled out by Rudolph to distinguish such moments. To make photographs of them is relatively easy, but she makes exception for movements such as leaps and turns. But to Rudolph, stills like these did not yet qualify as “dance photography”, for this would require photographs to be taken during the very motion of dance (Rudolph 1929:82).
Such instantaneous photography even permits to catch the very change from one moment to another, what is called by Rudolph “moments of transition”. An obvious example is the transition from one movement into another. Rudolph also mentions taking out a moment from a leading movement or from a short rhythmic figure. Such photographs are more demanding to take, because it is not enough that the photographer closely follows every move of the dancer, it is also necessary to anticipate the dancer’s movements in order to release the shutter in time for the next move (Rudolph 1929:82).
According to Rudolph, many dancers with a propensity for monumentality focus their efforts on the principal moments of dance. The result is a firm, unambiguous movement, even if different dancers do it more or less imaginatively, simply, or gymnastically. As we shall see, this tendency also belongs to the core of classical ballet. But there are other dancers with a greater inclination for the “lyrical” qualities of dance, as Rudolph calls them, and these dancers tend to make more out of transitional moments. Here, the individual character of the dancer comes to the fore and is permitted to color the transition (Rudolph 1929:83).
There are innumerable examples of still photos, illustrating how a dancer communicates a definite meaning through a principal moment of dance. It is more difficult to find obvious examples of stills, illustrating the qualities of transition in dance, even in Rudolph’s own work. This may be related to the fact that her career culminated during the German “Ausdruckstanz”, which did not go for subtle expressions.
[...]
In the history of stage performance there is a trend based on the motionlessness of performers: the tableaux vivants. In these, artists appear live on stage, but the audience can only get impressions of movement by implication, as the performers are motionless as well as mute. There were antecedents to this during the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, but the flowering of this kind of display belongs to the 19th and early 20th centuries. Theaters staged tableaux vivants with professional artists, photographers produced illusory images of such spectacles (fig. 25), and it was an appreciated pastime at social gatherings, where family members and friends performed (Gram Holmström 1967).
Fig. 25 Anonymous, Tableau vivant after Ivanhoe by Walter Scott, albumen paper, c. 1863. The term “vivant” does not seem appropriate to the lack of movement in this kind of performance. It should be understood with the most popular prototypes for this kind of diversion in mind, namely well-known paintings and sculptures (in the latter case “living sculptures” was a common term). The staging of their subject matter by real people (fig. 26) was in contrast to the canvas and paint or cold marble of these works of art, which in comparison were found to be lacking in liveness. Commentators at the time, however, did not seem to miss the more subtle qualities, which connoisseurs found in paintings and sculptures.
Fig. 26 Olga Desmond in nude tableau, Berlin 1910.There was a frequent use of paintings and sculptures showing naked bodies as prototypes for tableaux vivants. Nakedness was usually not allowed on stage, but an exception was made in certain cities, for instance in New York, for suchlike in the tableaux vivants (McCullough 1983). There are, however, important differences between a naked body in a static pose and moving on stage. The view of a naked body in a painting, a sculpture or a tableau vivant provides information about both the surface and the threedimensional form of the body. The view of a naked body in movement, however, may reveal both the differing resistance of the body’s superficial layers to changes in posture and the existence of bones and organs deeper inside it. This is probably why a moving body in the nude appeals more strongly to the tactile sense than static nudes. The indecency of the former is much to do with the heightened liveness of a naked body when it is in movement. Examples in the contemporary press show that the short moments when a static group of figures in a tableau vivant was transformed into another tableau brought special notice (McCullough 1983). It is possibly no coincidence that the heydays of the tableaux vivants coincided with the invention of early cinematic techniques: behind both is the same urge for liveness.
[...]
Duncan’s tale of all the impulses she felt in her body was meant to draw attention to the origin of dance in the body and in what she calls “nature”. As she expressed it: “And this dance will have nothing in it either of the servile coquetry of the ballet or the sensual convulsion of the South African negro” (Duncan 1927:265). But she thought that one could find her ideal realized in Greek Antiquity. It is interesting that a near contemporary of hers, Rudolf Laban, regarded her “valuable dances” as “for the most part the expression of our time”, and added that they had only external resemblance to the movement forms of Ancient Greece (Laban 1963:5).
Duncan’s ambition to find the origin of the new dance in nature seems to be a weak point in her argument. Not only are bodies differently shaped, but man’s concept of nature shifts from one culture to another, from one period of time to the next. The words “nature” and “natural” have been used and misused both to defend and to attack different kinds of movement in dance. If Duncan’s dance has its origin in “nature” and in the body, this goes as well for those ethnic forms of dance which she so despised.
In one respect, the dance of Isadora Duncan was certainly at odds with classical ballet. The central events of the latter are postures, ornamented or varied with motions like lifts and pirouettes. They are what Charlotte Rudolph named “principal moments”. The dancers remain more or less on the same spot while performing them. Between these highlights, they move with varying techniques from one spot to another, where they may form new constellations with other dancers. Still, the emphasis is mainly on the postures. These are worked out to be impressive; it is because of them that theaters are crowded.
Several factors contribute to the fact that such summits are easy to describe, to recall in memory, and to represent, for instance in photographs or in drawings. One is that they are isolated in space from what happens in other areas of the stage, and in time from what happens before and after. Another factor is that they may be analysed as combinations and developments of only five basic positions. These moments are highlighted in the photographs, but not the stretches of transport between them.
What then about the dance of Isadora Duncan, seen in the same perspective? It certainly contains static moments, but what is important are its movements from one position to another. It has been said that the model for her dancing was walking. This characterization has two aspects. One of these refers to the spatial translation as such; the other to a specific way of moving. At this point, I have grounds to endorse only the former one. It appears in this respect to be the opposite of classical ballet. In the extension of Duncan’s actual manner of dancing, one has the premonition of a continually evolving dance, without static moments.
The subject of the project is the human body in movement. But when we try to mediate a visual-temporal impression of it, in practice we most often resort to still images, displaying the moving body as immobile, or, in the best case, suggesting the quality of movement by any of the means used in photography. Even when a body movement is caught on a film or a video, this is physically speaking a series of twodimensional still images, which are interpreted in perception as representing one continuous movement of a threedimensional body in physical space. How do we know that no essential qualities are lost in these optical and perceptual transformations? First when we have approached the phenomenon from several aspects, using different strategies, we might get a more secure hold on it.
Image References
Fig. 17 Minor White, Movement Study no. 56, San Francisco 1949. From Jan-Gunnar Sjölin, Studier till bildens och konstens historia, Edition Arcana 2007, p. 226.
Fig. 18 Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Self Portrait. Changing Position, 1911. From Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light, McGraw Hill 2000, p. 218.
Fig. 19 Siegfried Dietrich, Movement Study, 1932. From Sprung in die Zeit, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Berlin1992, p. 83.
Fig. 20 Charlotte Rudolph, Gret Palucca, 1924. From Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Malerei, Photographie, Film, 1925.
Fig. 21 Thomas Eakins, Jesse Godley, 1884, chronophotograph. From Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light, McGraw Hill 2000, p. 167.
Fig. 22 Svante Lundgren, Studying in the Holidays, c. 1950. From Ulf Hård af Segerstad, Bildkomposition, 2. edition, 1953, p. 103.
Fig. 23 Herbert Matter, Photograph (Man changing his clothes in a dark room, a number of electric bulbs fastened to his body). From Ulf Hård af Segerstad, Bildkomposition, 2nd edition, 1953, p. 32.
Fig. 25 Anonymous, Tableau vivant after Ivanhoe by Walter Scott, albumen paper, c. 1863. Collection of Michael and Jane Wilson. From Jan-Gunnar Sjölin, Studier till bildens och konstens historia, Edition Arcana 2007, p. 226.
Fig. 26 Olga Desmond in nude tableau, Berlin 1910. Photographer unknown. From M. Andritsky and Th. Rauthenberg, ”Wir sind nackt und nennen uns Du”. Giessen 1989.
donderdag 6 oktober 2011
The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany
Notes from The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History 1890-1930 written by Michael Hau.
Published in 2003 by The University of Chicago Press.
Weimar nude culture. Leichtland 7, no.13 (1930).
Introduction
page 01
Thee second half of the nineteenth century witnessed an increase in the living standards and the life expectancy of most Germans. At the same time, important breakthroughs in areas such as aseptic surgery and bacteriology endowed scientific medicine with symbols of diagnostic and therapeutic competence. Despite the growing prestige of the medical and life sciences, however, health and illness became important concerns for a growing number of Germans who scrutinized and disciplined their bodies in a utopian search for perfect health and beauty. During the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic, many Germans organized themselves into voluntary associations concerned with natural therapy and lifestyle reform. Members of the "life reform movement" (Lebensreformbewegung), as it was termed, attacked the regular medical profession for its powerlessness in the face of illness and embarked on an unceasing quest for health on their own: they experimented with vegetarianism, therapeutic baths, and psychotherapies; they explored the therapeutic value of nudity and sunlight.
Supporters of the life reform movement were worried not only about the health of individuals but about the healing process (Gesundung) of society as a whole. They believed that modern civilization, urbanization, and industrialization had alienated human beings from their "natural" living conditions, leading them down a path of progressive degeneration that could only be reversed by living in accordance with man's and woman's nature (naturgemäße Lebensweise).
page 03
The goal of this study is to examine the various subjective social experiences that lay behind people's attempts to regain their health by reforming their lives. What was behind the constant self-scrutiny of individuals who tried to find the perfect lifestyle and therapy to help them overcome their perceived ill health? I argue that subjective experience of illness was mediated or constituted by the social experience of individuals. This is evident, for example, in the frequent complaints about nervousness among life reform supporters who were afraid that they could not keep up with their own career expectations. Indeed, as Germans increasingly medicalized their professional and personal problems, anxieties about success were often at the root of concerns about health and fitness.
[...]
Germans increasingly defined their personal problems in medical terms, described them in medical language, and understood them in a medical framework. At the same time, men and women turned to health advice literature for guidance concerning the management of their marriages and intimate relationships; they attempted to regain a sense of agency and assert control over their lives by means of bodily discipline and other health measures; and men in particular hoped that healthy living and natural therapies would increase their physical fitness and mental performance levels. The relation between a modern, industrializing society and the life reform movement was therefore not primarily one of modernization and protest against modernization, as some authors argue. Rather, the contemporary explosion in people's attention to their health was an expression of the contradictions and tensions characteristic of the period of classical modernity.
page 04
The concept of hygienic culture as I use it here includes more than the therapeutic practices and dietetic prescriptions intended to keep people clean and disease-free. It also refers to the social meanings that people attributed to such hygienic practices, regimes, and notions of health and beauty. My interpretation of popular hygienic culture is indebted to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, who has proposed a useful theoretical framework for this kind of analysis. According to Bakhtin, people fashion new meanings and values from a shared social discourse based on their various social experiences. By focusing on hygienic practices and values related to norms of physical beauty, I try to show how different social groups attributed different meanings to the same practices and ideals. Men and women from both the Bildungsbürgertum and the lower middle class shared similar ideals of physical beauty, but the social uses and values attributed to these norms varied according to their social experiences. In theory, physical beauty can have as many different social meanings as there are social experiences.
page 05
Chapter 1 shows life reform to be an integral part of turn-of-the-century bürgerlicher Kultur. In accordance with recent scholarship on the German Bürgertum, the term bürgerlich (roughly translatable as "bourgeois") does not denote social class in a Marxist sense. Instead, the term refers to value orientations and cultural norms shared by different sectors of the middle classes as well as sectors of the respectable working class. Central to these shared orientations and norms was a certain goal-directedness combined with the assumption that individuals could rationally manage their own futures, a belief that found expression, for example, in people's career expectations. I argue that the experience of personal failure—or, perhaps more important, simply the fear of it—underpinned the contemporary obsession with health. With its promise to increase people's Leistungsfähigkeit (in the dual sense of ability to perform and achieve), life reform gave its supporters a sense of agency in their own future.
page 08
During the entire period discussed in this book, Germans invested the human body with multiple, and at times contradictory, meanings based on their social experiences. During the Kaiserreich and during the Weimar Republic, hygienic practices and aesthetic ideals for the body were important in the formation of class, gender, and racial identities. The meanings of physical beauty were always publicly contested and rarely stable. After 1933, this would change. To be sure, leading Nazis shared the aesthetic ideals of earlier propagators of popular hygiene, but these ideals took on a much more sinister significance under the conditions of the terrorist regime that the Nazis established. During the Nazi era physical beauty represented a racial Volksgemeinschaft from which the disabled as well as religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities such as Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals were purged. The Volksgemeinschaft that was forged by the Nazis, first by means of legal, social, and cultural stigmatization of minorities and finally by mass murder, was therefore quite different from the utopian communitarian visions of many life reformers before 1933.
Chapter 01: Life Reform as Bürgerliche Kultur
page 15
Since life reformers as well as orthodox physicians claimed that beauty was an expression of perfect health, people had to face the additional pressures of living up to the lofty aesthetic ideals of an increasingly body-conscious society. Indeed, one of the ironies of the health-consciousness of the period was that it perpetuated the feelings of personal inadequacy that gave rise to it.
page 17
Whether a person sees in illness an opportunity for agency or whether she sees her fate as inevitable, for instance, will make a difference in her subjective experience of the illness. It can be argued that one of the reasons why the life reform movement was so attractive was that it allowed for agency-no matter whether the experienced states of illness were life-threatening diseases or simply feelings of personal inadequacy. People could recapture a sense of autonomy by accepting the life reform premise that they would become healthy sooner or later if they followed nature's path and adopted an improved lifestyle.
Chapter 02: Popular Hygiene Culture, Class, and Aesthetic Norms
page 33
Turn-of-the-century popular hygienic literature presented an aesthetisized version of the ideal human body, as regular physicians and life reformers alike espoused the bodily norms of Greek and Roman antiquity. Regarding beauty as the expression of healthy and normal organic functioning and ugliness as a sign of disease, they offered gender-specific representations of the ideal: statues of Hercules and Apollo embodied the masculine ideals of beauty and strength, and statues of Venus gave form to the feminine ideal. These forms were believed to come closest to the formal laws determining absolute beauty that the bodies of really healthy human beings were supposed to express.
page 46
It was typical of many life reformers to assert bildungsbürgerliche aesthetic norms while rejecting intellectualism and luxuries and to prefer an ascetic health regimen that emphasized physical development instead. This combination held a special appeal for the lower middle-class members of life reform organizations, people who had neither cultivation in the form of higher formal education (Bildung) nor significant amounts of property (Besitz), the social markers of the Gebildeten. No wonder they tried to achieve true cultivation by transforming their bodies in order to approach the aesthetic ideals that had first been formulated in Greek antiquity. As [Richard] Ungewitter put it: "the culture of the nude [body culture] . .. is the necessary precondition for the true culture of all of mankind"
Chapter 8: Weimar Leisure Culture: Freikörperkultur and the Quest for Authenticity and Volksgemeinschaft
page 176
The most successful life reform authors, such as Hans Surén, appealed to the anti-academic and anti-intellectual sentiment of a mass audience. Many physical culturists hoped that Freikörperkultur (nudism; literally, "free physical culture") as a leisure activity allowed people to transcend the "artificial" distinctions of status and wealth by creating a "people's community" of equals. Stripped of their clothes, people would present their authentic selves devoid of deceptive self-presentations. This chapter first situates physical culture and nudism in the cultural context of the Weimer period and then looks at nudists' hopes for the creation of a utopian people's community (Volksgemeinschaft) that might transcend the social classes.
page 177
During the Weimar Republic, life reformers continued to assert that exercise and nude culture improved peoples' overall health and that life reform would save both individuals and the nation from the degeneracy brought on by the unhygienic practices and lifestyles of modern civilization. Körperkultur's goal, the holistic development of body and mind, distinguished it from other contemporary forms of exercise, such as sports. In contrast to traditional gymnastics as well as the gymnastics advocated by life reformers, the goal of the various sports disciplines was to increase the performance level of individuals in specialized, competitive contests of physical exercise. Sports fragmented the human body by exercising only the skills that were necessary for high performance in a specific discipline. Physical culturists criticized this tendency; their goal was the harmonious and healthy development of the body-one that was beautiful because its physical faculties were evenly developed. (Although traditional gymnastics came closer to this holistic ideal, it was still criticized by Weimar physical culturists for its military-like drill and unnatural formalism.)
page 178
In contrast to nude culture during the Wilhelmine era, when Richard Ungewitter and others early on combined rabid racism with ardent agitation for the eugenic necessity of nude culture, the nudism of the Weimar years increasingly stressed the hedonistic side of the practice. This was expressed in the titles of most nude culture journals: Joy (Die Freude), Laughing Life (Lachendes Leben) and Land of Light (Lichtland) were at no loss to celebrate the pure pleasure that could be experienced in the nature parks owned by nudist organizations. This hedonism can be understood as a rejection of old conventions and mores that seemed meaningless after the senseless slaughter of the war. As the historian Modris Eksteins has pointed out, hedonism and narcissism reached epidemic proportions in the war-weary European nations. The more meaningless the war appeared, the more people insisted that the "meaning [of life] lay in life itself, in the act of living, in the vitality of the moment.”
page 193/195/196
[...] Freikörperkultur supported the free mingling of the sexes and defended the joint bathing of men and women in the socially controlled setting of the nature parks established by nude culture associations. In this respect, nudism reflected conflicts in Weimar society about the appropriate relations between the sexes. Weimar nudists were in favor of abandoning the tradition of separate homo social spheres of social intercourse in favor of a mingling of the sexes. Pre-war Herrenpartien (all-male gatherings) for the purpose of drinking and amusement were condemned as "petit bourgeois" (spießig) and contrasted with men and women jointly spending wholesome quality time together in the open. Conservative attacks on mixed-sex but nonnudist family beaches were also energetically repudiated. The free mingling of the sexes, the nudist Therese Mülhouse-Vogeler claimed, was a precondition for the development of "true companionship based on trust" between future marriage partners because along with their clothes men and women would also rid themselves of deceptive masks that hid their true character. so In addition, some propagators of nude culture refused to condemn sexual relationships between unmarried men and women because sexuality was a necessity for personal fulfillment.
The free mingling of the sexes was, however, not the only significant attraction of nude culture. Historians now debate whether the social and moral milieus that formed the backbone of the political parties in the imperial era, the working-class subculture and the Catholic milieu, found their high point during the Weimar Republic or whether these milieus were only finally destroyed when the Nazi regime created the illusion of an egalitarian people's community (Volksgemeinschaft). A frequently recurring theme in the journals of the Freikörperkultur movement was the claim that nudism helped people transcendthe boundaries between social classes. Nudity, its defenders claimed, woulderase titles and other forms of social distinctions. Nudists could therefore doaway with social prejudices and select their spouses based on the quality of theircharacter and not on their social position. Nudity was seen as a certificate of authenticity. Freikörperkultur would mean that people were stripped not only of clothes but of social conventions.
Nudism held out the promise of the creation of a community in which, one author argued, class hatred would be suspended, because both manual and white-collar workers would realize that material possessions were unimportant. The experience of nude bathing on Sundays would make humans free, and they would achieve true equality. They would not be reminded anymore of their own poverty and would forget the sorrows of everyday life. Envy based on social distinctions would vanish, and the German people would be welded into a "brotherly whole." Hypocritical democracy would be replaced with a noble sense of community that was in stark contrast to the class hatred that was fostered by irresponsible elements agitating among the working classes. At the time, many sports and leisure associations were still organized along confessional and politicallines. Many socialist workers' and bürgerliche sports associations did not yet participate in common competitions. Therefore the creation of a Volksgemeinschaft held considerable promise for people who viewed the cultural and social separatism of the Social Democratic and Communist labor movement with suspicion.
"Whether one is young or old, man or woman, manual worker or thinker" was unimportant. According to many nudists, political convictions and religious beliefs did not matter as long as one was committed to the aesthetic and moral ideals of nudism. They hoped to erase status barriers in order to create a community that transcended the traditional "sociability" (Geselligkeit) of people of the same background. Nudists experienced the disintegration of the milieus that had structured leisure activities and given meaning to class identities during the Kaiserreich as a liberation. They celebrated nudism as the path to a social harmony that was to be realized as a leisure-time "people's community." The foundation of this community was a depoliticized illusion of social equality.
Conclusion
page 199
This work has been concerned with the various ways in which Germans invested aesthetic ideals of the human body with multiple and often contradictory meanings. Although regular physicians and life reformers, educated and lower-middle-class people, and feminists and antifeminists often used the same neoclassical icons in order to represent ideals of human health and beauty, they conveyed different messages through the various ways in which they propagated physical culture and a healthy lifestyle.
page 201/202
During the Nazi era older meanings of the beautiful body were still invested with the intentions they had acquired in the previous years. Such meanings are rarely unambiguous, as the historian Thomas Alkemeyer has stressed in his book on the Nazi Olympics. Nevertheless, with the rise of the Nazi movement to power, the meanings of physical beauty changed significantly It was not merely that the Nazis dissolved or purged some life reform and nude culture associations because they considered them politically and morally suspect. Life reform associations were forced into line and nazified (gleichgeschaltet). Marxists, socialists, and especially Jews were expelled.
Images of the beautiful body were no longer openly employed in symbolic contests about class and gender identities, as they had been during the Kaiserreich and the Weimar period. They did not have the same degree of semantic polyvalency that they had acquired in the social conflicts of these earlier, more pluralistic, periods. Physical beauty now became the emblem of a utopian racial community purged of stigmatized undesirables. Nazi race discourse did not racialize perceptions of social class. After 1933, Nazi propaganda in schoolbooks de-emphasized what the Nordic racists had claimed was the heterogeneous racial makeup of the non-Jewish German population. Emphasizing such differences would have conflicted with their propagation of a seemingly classless people's community from which "racially undesirables," in particular Jews, were excluded by means of social, legal, and cultural stigmatization?
The heroic representation of physical beauty in Nazi culture did not only serve the purpose of intimidation. The representation of the beautiful—be it in Nazi sculpture, illustrated magazines, postcards, or Leni Riefenstahl's film Olympia—promised Germans who were willing or able to become "worthy" members of the people's community the imaginary fulfillment of the desire of physical, spiritual, and national perfection. At the same time, however, the idealization of beauty and health set the stage for the devaluation and stigmatization of people who were sick, handicapped, or non-Aryan. The Nazis considered worthless the lives of humans who, in their view, did not have the racial potential of healthy Aryans and therefore could not aspire to their lofty ideals of beauty. The annihilation of the sick and ugly in the name of health and beauty was thus an important driving force of Nazism.9 Nowhere is the contrast between the pathological and the aesthetic more obvious than in the Nazi art exhibitions of 1937. In Munich the "pathological" art of the avant-garde shown in the exhibition "Degenerate Art" was presented in contrast to the "healthy" art shown in the "Great German Art" exhibition. Drawing on the techniques developed by Schultze-Naumburg, the former presented modern art as the product of the sick and twisted minds of "racial inferiors," whereas the latter presented works of timeless beauty as the expression of the racial essence of the German Volk.
page 202
The propagation of a "New German Healing Science" (Neue Deutsche Heilkunde) was in part an attempt to bring the natural therapy movement into line and reorient German medicine toward preventive medicine. This shift entailed an exclusive emphasis on the health of the "people's body" instead of on the health of individuals. Germans were expected to contribute to the health of the nation by being fit and avoiding poisons such as alcohol and tobacco that would weaken the race.
Published in 2003 by The University of Chicago Press.
Weimar nude culture. Leichtland 7, no.13 (1930).Introduction
page 01
Thee second half of the nineteenth century witnessed an increase in the living standards and the life expectancy of most Germans. At the same time, important breakthroughs in areas such as aseptic surgery and bacteriology endowed scientific medicine with symbols of diagnostic and therapeutic competence. Despite the growing prestige of the medical and life sciences, however, health and illness became important concerns for a growing number of Germans who scrutinized and disciplined their bodies in a utopian search for perfect health and beauty. During the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic, many Germans organized themselves into voluntary associations concerned with natural therapy and lifestyle reform. Members of the "life reform movement" (Lebensreformbewegung), as it was termed, attacked the regular medical profession for its powerlessness in the face of illness and embarked on an unceasing quest for health on their own: they experimented with vegetarianism, therapeutic baths, and psychotherapies; they explored the therapeutic value of nudity and sunlight.
Supporters of the life reform movement were worried not only about the health of individuals but about the healing process (Gesundung) of society as a whole. They believed that modern civilization, urbanization, and industrialization had alienated human beings from their "natural" living conditions, leading them down a path of progressive degeneration that could only be reversed by living in accordance with man's and woman's nature (naturgemäße Lebensweise).
page 03
The goal of this study is to examine the various subjective social experiences that lay behind people's attempts to regain their health by reforming their lives. What was behind the constant self-scrutiny of individuals who tried to find the perfect lifestyle and therapy to help them overcome their perceived ill health? I argue that subjective experience of illness was mediated or constituted by the social experience of individuals. This is evident, for example, in the frequent complaints about nervousness among life reform supporters who were afraid that they could not keep up with their own career expectations. Indeed, as Germans increasingly medicalized their professional and personal problems, anxieties about success were often at the root of concerns about health and fitness.
[...]
Germans increasingly defined their personal problems in medical terms, described them in medical language, and understood them in a medical framework. At the same time, men and women turned to health advice literature for guidance concerning the management of their marriages and intimate relationships; they attempted to regain a sense of agency and assert control over their lives by means of bodily discipline and other health measures; and men in particular hoped that healthy living and natural therapies would increase their physical fitness and mental performance levels. The relation between a modern, industrializing society and the life reform movement was therefore not primarily one of modernization and protest against modernization, as some authors argue. Rather, the contemporary explosion in people's attention to their health was an expression of the contradictions and tensions characteristic of the period of classical modernity.
page 04
The concept of hygienic culture as I use it here includes more than the therapeutic practices and dietetic prescriptions intended to keep people clean and disease-free. It also refers to the social meanings that people attributed to such hygienic practices, regimes, and notions of health and beauty. My interpretation of popular hygienic culture is indebted to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, who has proposed a useful theoretical framework for this kind of analysis. According to Bakhtin, people fashion new meanings and values from a shared social discourse based on their various social experiences. By focusing on hygienic practices and values related to norms of physical beauty, I try to show how different social groups attributed different meanings to the same practices and ideals. Men and women from both the Bildungsbürgertum and the lower middle class shared similar ideals of physical beauty, but the social uses and values attributed to these norms varied according to their social experiences. In theory, physical beauty can have as many different social meanings as there are social experiences.
page 05
Chapter 1 shows life reform to be an integral part of turn-of-the-century bürgerlicher Kultur. In accordance with recent scholarship on the German Bürgertum, the term bürgerlich (roughly translatable as "bourgeois") does not denote social class in a Marxist sense. Instead, the term refers to value orientations and cultural norms shared by different sectors of the middle classes as well as sectors of the respectable working class. Central to these shared orientations and norms was a certain goal-directedness combined with the assumption that individuals could rationally manage their own futures, a belief that found expression, for example, in people's career expectations. I argue that the experience of personal failure—or, perhaps more important, simply the fear of it—underpinned the contemporary obsession with health. With its promise to increase people's Leistungsfähigkeit (in the dual sense of ability to perform and achieve), life reform gave its supporters a sense of agency in their own future.
page 08
During the entire period discussed in this book, Germans invested the human body with multiple, and at times contradictory, meanings based on their social experiences. During the Kaiserreich and during the Weimar Republic, hygienic practices and aesthetic ideals for the body were important in the formation of class, gender, and racial identities. The meanings of physical beauty were always publicly contested and rarely stable. After 1933, this would change. To be sure, leading Nazis shared the aesthetic ideals of earlier propagators of popular hygiene, but these ideals took on a much more sinister significance under the conditions of the terrorist regime that the Nazis established. During the Nazi era physical beauty represented a racial Volksgemeinschaft from which the disabled as well as religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities such as Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals were purged. The Volksgemeinschaft that was forged by the Nazis, first by means of legal, social, and cultural stigmatization of minorities and finally by mass murder, was therefore quite different from the utopian communitarian visions of many life reformers before 1933.
Chapter 01: Life Reform as Bürgerliche Kultur
page 15
Since life reformers as well as orthodox physicians claimed that beauty was an expression of perfect health, people had to face the additional pressures of living up to the lofty aesthetic ideals of an increasingly body-conscious society. Indeed, one of the ironies of the health-consciousness of the period was that it perpetuated the feelings of personal inadequacy that gave rise to it.
page 17
Whether a person sees in illness an opportunity for agency or whether she sees her fate as inevitable, for instance, will make a difference in her subjective experience of the illness. It can be argued that one of the reasons why the life reform movement was so attractive was that it allowed for agency-no matter whether the experienced states of illness were life-threatening diseases or simply feelings of personal inadequacy. People could recapture a sense of autonomy by accepting the life reform premise that they would become healthy sooner or later if they followed nature's path and adopted an improved lifestyle.
Chapter 02: Popular Hygiene Culture, Class, and Aesthetic Norms
page 33
Turn-of-the-century popular hygienic literature presented an aesthetisized version of the ideal human body, as regular physicians and life reformers alike espoused the bodily norms of Greek and Roman antiquity. Regarding beauty as the expression of healthy and normal organic functioning and ugliness as a sign of disease, they offered gender-specific representations of the ideal: statues of Hercules and Apollo embodied the masculine ideals of beauty and strength, and statues of Venus gave form to the feminine ideal. These forms were believed to come closest to the formal laws determining absolute beauty that the bodies of really healthy human beings were supposed to express.
page 46
It was typical of many life reformers to assert bildungsbürgerliche aesthetic norms while rejecting intellectualism and luxuries and to prefer an ascetic health regimen that emphasized physical development instead. This combination held a special appeal for the lower middle-class members of life reform organizations, people who had neither cultivation in the form of higher formal education (Bildung) nor significant amounts of property (Besitz), the social markers of the Gebildeten. No wonder they tried to achieve true cultivation by transforming their bodies in order to approach the aesthetic ideals that had first been formulated in Greek antiquity. As [Richard] Ungewitter put it: "the culture of the nude [body culture] . .. is the necessary precondition for the true culture of all of mankind"
Chapter 8: Weimar Leisure Culture: Freikörperkultur and the Quest for Authenticity and Volksgemeinschaft
page 176
The most successful life reform authors, such as Hans Surén, appealed to the anti-academic and anti-intellectual sentiment of a mass audience. Many physical culturists hoped that Freikörperkultur (nudism; literally, "free physical culture") as a leisure activity allowed people to transcend the "artificial" distinctions of status and wealth by creating a "people's community" of equals. Stripped of their clothes, people would present their authentic selves devoid of deceptive self-presentations. This chapter first situates physical culture and nudism in the cultural context of the Weimer period and then looks at nudists' hopes for the creation of a utopian people's community (Volksgemeinschaft) that might transcend the social classes.
page 177
During the Weimar Republic, life reformers continued to assert that exercise and nude culture improved peoples' overall health and that life reform would save both individuals and the nation from the degeneracy brought on by the unhygienic practices and lifestyles of modern civilization. Körperkultur's goal, the holistic development of body and mind, distinguished it from other contemporary forms of exercise, such as sports. In contrast to traditional gymnastics as well as the gymnastics advocated by life reformers, the goal of the various sports disciplines was to increase the performance level of individuals in specialized, competitive contests of physical exercise. Sports fragmented the human body by exercising only the skills that were necessary for high performance in a specific discipline. Physical culturists criticized this tendency; their goal was the harmonious and healthy development of the body-one that was beautiful because its physical faculties were evenly developed. (Although traditional gymnastics came closer to this holistic ideal, it was still criticized by Weimar physical culturists for its military-like drill and unnatural formalism.)
page 178
In contrast to nude culture during the Wilhelmine era, when Richard Ungewitter and others early on combined rabid racism with ardent agitation for the eugenic necessity of nude culture, the nudism of the Weimar years increasingly stressed the hedonistic side of the practice. This was expressed in the titles of most nude culture journals: Joy (Die Freude), Laughing Life (Lachendes Leben) and Land of Light (Lichtland) were at no loss to celebrate the pure pleasure that could be experienced in the nature parks owned by nudist organizations. This hedonism can be understood as a rejection of old conventions and mores that seemed meaningless after the senseless slaughter of the war. As the historian Modris Eksteins has pointed out, hedonism and narcissism reached epidemic proportions in the war-weary European nations. The more meaningless the war appeared, the more people insisted that the "meaning [of life] lay in life itself, in the act of living, in the vitality of the moment.”
page 193/195/196
[...] Freikörperkultur supported the free mingling of the sexes and defended the joint bathing of men and women in the socially controlled setting of the nature parks established by nude culture associations. In this respect, nudism reflected conflicts in Weimar society about the appropriate relations between the sexes. Weimar nudists were in favor of abandoning the tradition of separate homo social spheres of social intercourse in favor of a mingling of the sexes. Pre-war Herrenpartien (all-male gatherings) for the purpose of drinking and amusement were condemned as "petit bourgeois" (spießig) and contrasted with men and women jointly spending wholesome quality time together in the open. Conservative attacks on mixed-sex but nonnudist family beaches were also energetically repudiated. The free mingling of the sexes, the nudist Therese Mülhouse-Vogeler claimed, was a precondition for the development of "true companionship based on trust" between future marriage partners because along with their clothes men and women would also rid themselves of deceptive masks that hid their true character. so In addition, some propagators of nude culture refused to condemn sexual relationships between unmarried men and women because sexuality was a necessity for personal fulfillment.
The free mingling of the sexes was, however, not the only significant attraction of nude culture. Historians now debate whether the social and moral milieus that formed the backbone of the political parties in the imperial era, the working-class subculture and the Catholic milieu, found their high point during the Weimar Republic or whether these milieus were only finally destroyed when the Nazi regime created the illusion of an egalitarian people's community (Volksgemeinschaft). A frequently recurring theme in the journals of the Freikörperkultur movement was the claim that nudism helped people transcendthe boundaries between social classes. Nudity, its defenders claimed, woulderase titles and other forms of social distinctions. Nudists could therefore doaway with social prejudices and select their spouses based on the quality of theircharacter and not on their social position. Nudity was seen as a certificate of authenticity. Freikörperkultur would mean that people were stripped not only of clothes but of social conventions.
Nudism held out the promise of the creation of a community in which, one author argued, class hatred would be suspended, because both manual and white-collar workers would realize that material possessions were unimportant. The experience of nude bathing on Sundays would make humans free, and they would achieve true equality. They would not be reminded anymore of their own poverty and would forget the sorrows of everyday life. Envy based on social distinctions would vanish, and the German people would be welded into a "brotherly whole." Hypocritical democracy would be replaced with a noble sense of community that was in stark contrast to the class hatred that was fostered by irresponsible elements agitating among the working classes. At the time, many sports and leisure associations were still organized along confessional and politicallines. Many socialist workers' and bürgerliche sports associations did not yet participate in common competitions. Therefore the creation of a Volksgemeinschaft held considerable promise for people who viewed the cultural and social separatism of the Social Democratic and Communist labor movement with suspicion.
"Whether one is young or old, man or woman, manual worker or thinker" was unimportant. According to many nudists, political convictions and religious beliefs did not matter as long as one was committed to the aesthetic and moral ideals of nudism. They hoped to erase status barriers in order to create a community that transcended the traditional "sociability" (Geselligkeit) of people of the same background. Nudists experienced the disintegration of the milieus that had structured leisure activities and given meaning to class identities during the Kaiserreich as a liberation. They celebrated nudism as the path to a social harmony that was to be realized as a leisure-time "people's community." The foundation of this community was a depoliticized illusion of social equality.
Conclusion
page 199
This work has been concerned with the various ways in which Germans invested aesthetic ideals of the human body with multiple and often contradictory meanings. Although regular physicians and life reformers, educated and lower-middle-class people, and feminists and antifeminists often used the same neoclassical icons in order to represent ideals of human health and beauty, they conveyed different messages through the various ways in which they propagated physical culture and a healthy lifestyle.
page 201/202
During the Nazi era older meanings of the beautiful body were still invested with the intentions they had acquired in the previous years. Such meanings are rarely unambiguous, as the historian Thomas Alkemeyer has stressed in his book on the Nazi Olympics. Nevertheless, with the rise of the Nazi movement to power, the meanings of physical beauty changed significantly It was not merely that the Nazis dissolved or purged some life reform and nude culture associations because they considered them politically and morally suspect. Life reform associations were forced into line and nazified (gleichgeschaltet). Marxists, socialists, and especially Jews were expelled.
Images of the beautiful body were no longer openly employed in symbolic contests about class and gender identities, as they had been during the Kaiserreich and the Weimar period. They did not have the same degree of semantic polyvalency that they had acquired in the social conflicts of these earlier, more pluralistic, periods. Physical beauty now became the emblem of a utopian racial community purged of stigmatized undesirables. Nazi race discourse did not racialize perceptions of social class. After 1933, Nazi propaganda in schoolbooks de-emphasized what the Nordic racists had claimed was the heterogeneous racial makeup of the non-Jewish German population. Emphasizing such differences would have conflicted with their propagation of a seemingly classless people's community from which "racially undesirables," in particular Jews, were excluded by means of social, legal, and cultural stigmatization?
The heroic representation of physical beauty in Nazi culture did not only serve the purpose of intimidation. The representation of the beautiful—be it in Nazi sculpture, illustrated magazines, postcards, or Leni Riefenstahl's film Olympia—promised Germans who were willing or able to become "worthy" members of the people's community the imaginary fulfillment of the desire of physical, spiritual, and national perfection. At the same time, however, the idealization of beauty and health set the stage for the devaluation and stigmatization of people who were sick, handicapped, or non-Aryan. The Nazis considered worthless the lives of humans who, in their view, did not have the racial potential of healthy Aryans and therefore could not aspire to their lofty ideals of beauty. The annihilation of the sick and ugly in the name of health and beauty was thus an important driving force of Nazism.9 Nowhere is the contrast between the pathological and the aesthetic more obvious than in the Nazi art exhibitions of 1937. In Munich the "pathological" art of the avant-garde shown in the exhibition "Degenerate Art" was presented in contrast to the "healthy" art shown in the "Great German Art" exhibition. Drawing on the techniques developed by Schultze-Naumburg, the former presented modern art as the product of the sick and twisted minds of "racial inferiors," whereas the latter presented works of timeless beauty as the expression of the racial essence of the German Volk.
page 202
The propagation of a "New German Healing Science" (Neue Deutsche Heilkunde) was in part an attempt to bring the natural therapy movement into line and reorient German medicine toward preventive medicine. This shift entailed an exclusive emphasis on the health of the "people's body" instead of on the health of individuals. Germans were expected to contribute to the health of the nation by being fit and avoiding poisons such as alcohol and tobacco that would weaken the race.
Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia
Olympia is a 1938 film by Leni Riefenstahl documenting the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, Germany. The movie was produced in two parts: Olympia 1. Teil — Fest der Völker (Festival of Nations) and Olympia 2. Teil — Fest der Schönheit (Festival of Beauty). A mass-gymnastics film fragment can be seen in Fest der Schönheit at 32:16 min.
View Part 1 here.
View Part 2 here.
View Part 1 here.
View Part 2 here.
Abonneren op:
Posts (Atom)