Fascism and the Female Form: Performance Art in the Third Reich

Abstract

Nazi Germany is generally understood to have been a sexually repressive society, and in fundamental social and political ways, it was repressive. The National Socialist Party intervened in the private space of the body to an extent never before experienced and in hitherto unprecedented ways. The state instituted a politics of the body that rendered the individual body a public site whose purpose was to further the larger social organism. In the drive toward the establishment of a pure, thriving Volk, the National Socialist regime conducted a dual campaign, a pronatalist campaign encouraging "healthy" Aryan women to bear and rear children and an antinatalist policy aimed at preventing the reproduction of "undesirable" elements (Jews, Poles, Africans, and the mentally disabled, among others). Whereas pronatalist policies operated through incentives, such as government subsidies, child allowances, tax rebates, and medals for childbearing, antinatalist measures were carried out through repressive laws, including compulsory sterilization of the genetically "inferior," forced abortions, and marriage prohibitions. 1 The body became a social site onto [End Page 164] which political ideals were mapped. The notion of the healthy body as a microcosm for the healthy state was reiterated in the images of the "sacred wife and mother" in officially sanctioned art and promoted in a vast propaganda campaign enjoining women to lend their bodies to the movement to maintain the vitality of the race.