Content area
Full text
In Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi vividly records the relentless attempts by the SS to dehumanize through nudity. When his group of ninety-six Italian men have been separated from the women and sent to Monowitz, near Auschwitz, guards greet them with blows, insults, and the demand to undress. Not only do the prisoners lose their own familiar clothes, but each loses his personalizing hair to the shavers. In a series of lunatic details, a functionary next sweeps the ninetysix pairs of shoes together to unmatch them. Then, overseers herd the prisoners into boiling showers, drive them into a freezing room, and finally toss each one a stranger's clothes. Before being allowed to dress, however, the prisoners must run naked, clutching the bundles, for a hundred yards to the next hut, in icy snow (2226). Levi flatly sums up this madhouse as "the demolition of a man" (26).
By questioning the place of mass nakedness in the Lager system (Levi's term for the concentration camps and slave labor camps), I am not searching out individual psychologies of perpetrators such as Rudolf Hoss, Adolph Eichmann, and Franz Stangl. Rather, I am using their testimony and the writings of survivors to look further into links between what George Steiner calls "the structures of the inhuman" and the "contemporary matrix of high civilization" (29). As his lecture series In Bluebeard's Castle trenchantly asked more than forty years ago, why weren't "humanistic traditions" more of a "barrier against political bestiality," and, even more provocatively, could those very traditions perhaps have carried "express solicitations of authoritarian rule and cruelty" (30)? Steiner speculates that an important social contributor to cruelty can be found in the "messianic religions": Judaism, Christianity (and, for him, Marxism) (43). I follow Steiner in finding harmful effects in religion, but I shift from the ideas he blames to focus instead on a religious devaluation of the body: fear of, contempt for, and compensating preoccupation with its nakedness, its sexuality, and embodiment itself.
The Nazi policy of mass strippings had as its often conscious aim to erase identity, humiliate, make victims feel weak and defenseless, and provide perpetrators with both disgust and sexual titillation. To these purposes, I am emphasizing two additional sources of meaning from the cultural "imaginary,"...