Boys in Crisis: Discourses of Castration in the Early Stabilized Period

Abstract

Peter Gay’s Weimar Culture: the Outsider as Insider (1968) is a still canonical, if now somewhat dated study of the period. The canon- ical status is in many ways deserved, but one of the books most annoying aspects is its somewhat facile Freudian analysis of Weimar cul- ture, an analysis that unfortunately still haunts us.2 Expressionism, which Gay defines as the dominant artistic expression of the Weimar Republic (thus placing a phenomenon primarily of the 1910s into the 1920s, a mis- take that Walter Laqueur only magnifies) can be characterized as a “Revolt of the Sons,” followed upon by the “Revenge of the Fathers,” which encompasses the later Weimar Republic and the triumph of the Nazis in 1933. That Gay so blithely defines Weimar culture in terms of fathers and sons, in terms of an Oedipal scheme enshrining male psychic development as the touchstone for all understanding, is perhaps not so surprising; indeed, it is typical of a long tradition of scholarship on the Left about German culture. From (the postwar) Kracauer to Adorno (Hewitt, 1–78), the Mitscherlichs, and beyond, weak or “effeminate” sons and powerful moth- ers are more or less blamed for fascism—and also for the inability to “mourn” fascism (Linville, 3–5). This attitude is evident in Gay’s reference would seem not only to undermine the sporty, virile image just established, but perhaps also to indicate some lingering anxieties, which the handheld camera that follows his run up the hill to wife and child accentuates. For the same technique was used early in the film as people rushed to the scene of the murder (Rentschler, 7–8).