Foreign Front by Quinn Slobodian

Author:Quinn Slobodian [Slobodian, Quinn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press

17. The back cover of Bahman Nirumand’s Persien, Modell eines Entwicklungslandes oder Die Diktatur der freien Welt (1967) featuring graphic photographs of tortured Iranian opponents of the shah, including Parviz Edalat-Manesch, at top right. Graphic imagery was central to the campaigns of Iranian dissidents in West Germany.

18. A typical issue of Konkret blending sex and atrocity (January 1965). The headlines include “Student Love: Striptease and Mathematics” and “Black Hell: Congo.”

The combination can be interpreted in two ways. The first would be to read it through Dagmar Herzog’s assertion that sexuality was a central site for the New Left confrontation with the fascism of their parents’ generation.123 Herzog argues that, because the New Left understood the “Third Reich as marked above all by sexual repression,” breaking with the Nazi past meant first and foremost undoing the received modes of sexual morality and behavior.124 Images of youthful nudity in magazines such as Konkret were printed and consumed for the precise reason that they offended the dominant morality, which young leftists saw as having retained the kernel of a fascist mentality. Heribert Adam, a graduate student at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, expressed this point in an article in the student magazine Diskus in 1965: “One can perceive rage against pretty, naked women and diffuse hatred for an already mutilated sexuality. This reaction points to a socially deep-rooted fact: ‘upright popular sentiment’ reflects both fear against that which places socially dictated compulsion in question and identification with one’s own oppression.”125 The sensitivity of “popular sentiment,” in Adam’s understanding, was merely the resentment of an older generation whose own sexuality was “mutilated” beyond repair. The censoriousness of the older generation appears as “revenge for the denials suffered as individuals.”126 He describes the “aggressive call for the death penalty” and the persecution of those who deviate from mainstream sexual morality—homosexuals, prostitutes—as further consequences of repressed sexuality.

Similarly reading human aggression as an epiphenomenon of imbalanced sexual drives, the prominent psychologist and leftist Alexander Mitscherlich wrote provocatively in 1966 about the media consumption of postcolonial conflict that

one can almost believe that our nature is so poorly balanced in the needs of our drives that everyday life can only proceed so reasonably and undisturbed because we unconsciously take part in the child murders in Congo or in Vietnam. The next morning we read eagerly, under any excuse, who has murdered whom. Everything remains “clean” for us here, but what one does at the equator, that seems excusable. Because it is practiced far away, the bloody handiwork of mercenaries becomes more a horror story than horrifying reality. It becomes manageable because it is less burdened with feelings of guilt. And we seem to need the horror stories like daily bread. Whoever believes that man is without demands is mistaken.127

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