Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938

by Philipp Blom

The old, effeminate image was to be supplanted by that of a new, muscular, tanned, proud, and self-reliant Jew, able to till the soil and to fight, a pioneer and a hero capable of meeting any physical challenge.

they revived and reconstructed the ancient Hebrew language and made it a living idiom, with new words invented to match realities unknown to Bible scribes.

Other refugees who had arrived in Palestine out of sheer necessity, rather than any Zionist conviction, tried to ignore the fact that they were now walking down Sheinkin or King David Street rather than Unter den Linden.

Not for them the dream of the new Jew—they simply mourned their old lives, trying to navigate the hot, deprived, provincial present as best they could.

Jesse Owens sprang out of the starting blocks and into sporting history, posting a time of 10.3 seconds. Footage from the event shows a stony-faced Hitler, an animated spectator during most other events, turning around in disgust. Owens was African American, as was the winner of the silver medal, Ralph Metcalfe. Though scheduled to congratulate the victor in person, Hitler left the stadium before the awards ceremony could take place. The Führer’s snub meant little to Owens, though newspapers in the United States were full of disgusted comments about the insult. But the media outrage at home revolted him. The same people who were now clamoring for the fair treatment of an American athlete in Germany had always treated him as a second-class citizen at home.

Owens went on to win three further gold medals at the 1936 Olympics, a historic achievement in itself. But when he returned to the United States, America’s most outstanding athlete did not receive so much as a telegram of congratulations from President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Owens was later to say that this snub stung him far more than Hitler’s petty irritation at his victory.

For Nazi ideologues,

Physical fitness was not just a means of asserting racial superiority; it was at the very heart of National Socialism, as it was in other political movements of the time, including Soviet communism and Zionism. The ultimate aim was not just to produce a stronger people but to transform human nature, creating, in effect, a New Man.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“He who dares to undertake the founding of a people should feel that he is capable of changing human nature,” he wrote,

Early in the nineteenth century, the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel had set out his vision of Germany’s eventual apotheosis through an inexorable process of human progress into a time and place beyond history.

One hundred years later, Friedrich Nietzsche spat out a contemptuous reply to Hegel’s vision of a supposedly inevitable progress, and, in a profound response to the alienation and quasi-enslavement attendant on incipient modernism, sketched out his own vision of the transcendence not of peoples but of free individuals.

Nietzsche’s concept of the superman, expounded in his Thus Spake Zarathustra of 1883–1885, was more poetic, more complex, and more subtle than most of his readers were able to see; carried away by his metaphorical, strangely exalted prose, they constructed a variety of vulgarized ideas of the Übermensch, mostly concentrating not on his surprisingly Buddhist or Epicurean idea of self-transcendence but on fantasies of hulking, half-naked heroes bestriding a fearful imaginary landscape.

Through the central decades of the nineteenth century, the idea of the transcendence of the here and now, of a teleological goal of history and a world populated by New Men and New Women, had also provided the kernel for another German’s utopian worldview.

Karl ...

Marx and Nietzsche were the prophets of a new age of many diverse paths, one of them leading to “scientific racism” and thence to Nazism. Two further theories with no intrinsic link to racism contributed to the same fearful political and social ideology.

“survival of the fittest”

The pseudo-scientific, teleological vision of an evolutionary paradise of perfect beings in some distant future was nothing but a tattered lab coat pulled on over an old, essentially religious idea—the idea of humanity’s eventual transcendence and the advent of the New Man. Nonetheless, “survival of the fittest” soon became both apology and rallying cry for laissez-faire capitalism, and also for eugenicist demands to give evolution a helping hand by preventing “inferior” people from breeding.

one voice was sounding a decidedly dissonant note of skepticism. To

Sigmund Freud, the dream of transcendence was a mere social fiction imposed on individuals in order to check their natural, unruly impulses.

IN HIS 1921 DYSTOPIAN NOVEL We,

published in 1932, the Russian author Evgeny Zamyatin had satirized the Bolshevik vision of society as a vast machine,

socialist realism, declared official artistic policy in 1931, remained firmly attached to the idea of a new Homo sovieticus,

Glorious young men in marble, concrete, and bronze were also a potent symbol of the self-appointed “master race” to the west.

observers were soon remarking on how hard it was to distinguish the heroic leftist visions from those of their rightist enemies.

In contrast to the Bolsheviks, who wanted to mold individuals into spare parts for machines, fascists sought to liberate themselves from the yoke of an anonymous modern existence, and from the crisis of meaning that appeared to be part of it, by retreating into the political projection of a mythical past in which human bodies had supposedly been expressions of heroic archetypes, strong, beautiful, and in perfect harmony with nature.

Nature, in this sense, was the very antithesis of modernity, with its essentially urban emphases on liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and reason. The fascists regarded nature as the inner voice of man, which spoke different idioms to different people, or different races.

The fascists called on the New Man to rise up and to wrest history—and of course political power—back from those who, they held, had been actively working against them. In this the German Nazis went much further than other fascists, calling for an apocalyptic clash of ideologies in which the battle lines would be drawn along racial distinctions. Capitalism, the Nazi theorists claimed, was alien to the Germanic soul, a Jewish conspiracy designed to suppress the greater spiritual strength slumbering in all Aryans and their greater intrinsic worth as human beings.

The Nazi cult of fitness was thus tied to an apocalyptic goal of racial warfare, but it could draw on a broad existing culture of physical awareness, health, natural living, and nudism that had been prevalent since the nineteenth century, not only in Germany but also in Britain and other, particularly northern European, countries. The interwar culture of the body was by no means fascist per se. Frequently, though not necessarily, the rediscovery of the human body as a part of nature rather than of society went hand in hand with a degree of social nonconformism.

Wandervogel

movement had encouraged young people to get out of the cities and away from the social constraints of their f...

By the early 1920s,

socialist nudists

Thousands of gymnastics and sports clubs had sprung up, dedicated to creating stronger ...

For the National Socialists, the preoccupation with physical culture was highly significant. Their entire rhetoric was suffused with body imagery, emphasizing health, fitness, and strength.

Keeping sex firmly in the shadows was also an expression of a fundamental concern that the National Socialists shared not just with Mussolini’s Fascists and with French and other right-wing sympathizers but with the Bolsheviks

hygiene and cleanliness became key words, both physically and morally. Cleanliness was preached as a way of life, and it soon supplanted the ancient fear of sin with a set of new horror visions. Masturbation, homosexuality, promiscuity, and the lack of impulse control were portrayed not as wicked, as they might once have been, but as dirty, diseased, and potentially deadly to the individual as well as to society and, of course, to the race.

Western obsession with cleanliness during the interwar period

The German Hygiene Museum

Kraft durch Freude (Strength Through Joy) provided strictly regulated cheap entertainment and vacation camps for German workers, including plenty of exercise for children and adults.

range of exercises and activities designed to weld together unruly individuals into a single, obedient body, preparing them, whether they realized it or not, for the societal and other battles of the future.

There was now no berth on a cruise ship without mass gymnastics on deck, no escape to the Baltic coast or the Black Forest without morning reveille and collective military-style activities producing a sea of bodies moving in unison.

In Germany as elsewhere, breeding the New Man also had another, more literal connotation. Eugenics movements were by now also popular among intellectuals

In several countries, the forcible sterilization of “mental defectives” and other undesirables became both policy and practice

The Nazi regime, however, pushed eugenicist ideas even further.

Eugenics was by no means a prerogative of the political right or of hard-nosed scientists

In fact, the idea produced a remarkable consensus among people of otherwise different views, though it is true that most of them hailed from notably privileged backgrounds.

All felt that some form of “scientific” management could improve the national breeding stock.

William Butler Yeats