MAKING NAZISM SEXY

The motives of German writers during the rise of Nazism are highly contestable, according to Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature Judith L. Ryan.

According to Ryan, writers of the period aestheticized violence. They conjoined nationalist sentiment with “libidinal interest.” Essentially, they made Nazism sexy, or at least sexually charged.

A case in point is Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs. Junger’s work is purportedly a “resistance story,” recounting the tale of two travelers who encounter, and later flee, a viciously despotic ruler not too different from Hitler himself. In Ryan’s view, however, the gory but gorgeous detail lavished upon the so-called villains of the novel uses the “aestheticization of violence” to glorify barbaric sadism.

The difficulty in proving whether such novels are implicitly pro-Nazi or anti-Nazi, Ryan admitted, is that under Nazism no explicit literary dissent in Germany was possible. Authors instead could either physically exile themselves or undergo “inner emigration,” a retreat into one’s own artistic world to combat the horrors of the world without. Modern readers must judge the validity of many authors’ post-war claims that their work under Hitler contained subtexts of anti-Nazi dissent, even when the texts themselves suggest otherwise.