German Bodies

How did Nazism and its legacy define German identity and citizenship? Anthropologist Ulrike Linke examines the various ways 'German-ness' has been imagined in public discourse since World War II. While the substance of the project concerns politics, issues of citizenship and democracy, and the enigmas of racism, Linke approaches her subject with an anthropologist's tools. Beginning with the Nazi eroticization of the bodily ideal, Linke moves across the 1945 threshold to explain how the new Germany organized its understanding of the body: public nudism the revival of the cult of the body the attempt to de-eroticize white nakedness Linke also examines the the 'feminization' of the 'guest' labourers; foreign workers needed during the reconstruction boom and then regarded as unwelcome aliens and the ways in which today's German left and militant right converge. In the 1990s the language of otherness, of 'the enemy', reintroduces into everyday German culture distubingly familar images of genocide, annihilation and dismemberment.

Review: "This is a marvelously evocative and worthwhile work of interpretation." -- Choice

"Uli Linke's book provides the most comprehensive look in English at the fantasies about the "German" body in German thought and politics after the Shoah. Superbly illustrated, intelligently structured, Linke's study provides the sort of primer that has been missing to understand the basic concepts of Germanness which formed and continue to form the self-image of the "German" in a reunified Germany. A standard book for all interested in contemporary German Studies." -- Sander L. Gilman, Henry Luce Professor of the Liberal Arts in Human Biology, University of Chicago

"German Bodies offers a detailed and stimulating analysis of how the essentialisms of gender, blood, and race continue to operate in German cultural memory. This "anatomy of German nationhood," as Linke calls it, challenges many conventional assumptions, including my own, about discontinuities in German society following World War II. It is sure to provoke widespread debates." -- John Borneman, author of Settling Accounts: Violence, Justice and Accountability in Postsocialist States

"Much of the wisdom that could be extracted from Linke's thought-provoking notions will be lost on readers who are not familiar with postmodern terminology and usage. On the other hand, those who take the book seriously will have new tools with which to view the changing, but historically burdened and burdensome, Germany." -- Journal of Anthropological Research

"Exploring the cultural representations of German identity and citizenship across the political divide of 1945, Linke provides us with a fascinating prism through which to investigate continuity and change in modern Germany. This reassessment of Nazi visions of the Aryan body, its impact on the construction of national identity in the Third Reich, and its relationship to the public imagery of citizenship in postwar Germany elucidates one of the most crucial issues of German history from an entirely new angle. This work will doubtlessly be welcomed by historians, sociologists, and political scientists grappling with questions of citizenship, national identity, and political-cultural discourse in modern Western societies." -- Omer Bartov, Professor of History at Rutgers University and author of Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (1991) and Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (1996).

"The monographs by anthropologist Uli Linke and historian Uta G. Poiger break new ground in attending to the postfascist constructions of whiteness in East and West Germany that have been shaped by the legacy of the Holocaust and by German-American relations...pay close attention to the intersections of reace and gender, and...examine a larger and more diverse array of texts than do earlier studies of race." -- Katrin Sieg, Georgetown University, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Winter 2003