The Politics of the Male Body in Global Sport by Hans Bonde

Author:Hans Bonde [Bonde, Hans]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sports & Recreation, General, Gymnastics, Cultural & Social Aspects
ISBN: 9781317966029
Google: 0bWMAQAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-18T00:52:29+00:00

Nazism and Homosexuality

It might seem strange that Niels Bukh, a homosexual, could be an avid supporter of a system that would carry out the modern world’s most barbaric assault on homosexuals and the elimination of a very strong homosexual culture that was found in the large cities of the Weimar Republic. From a photograph it can be seen that Bukh clearly found it no problem to be shown around Berlin by a member of the Nazi SA, arm-in-arm with his former partner, Krogshede.

Bukh’s ‘visit’ to Berlin took place, however, at a point when the Nazi terror against homosexuals was still in an embryonic state, and in the SA in particular there was a good deal of tolerance for homosexual friendships. But the reason for Hitler’s liquidation of the SA leaders in the so-called Röhmputsch was given as widespread homosexuality among the corps, and this sounded a starting-pistol for an extremely violent persecution of homosexuals. Bukh’s visit occurred before that ‘night of the long knives’, which took place on 30 June 1934. [26] Bukh may therefore have gained the impression that Nazism had less of a homophobic attitude than in reality it proved itself as having. Perhaps the Nazi pursuit of male fellowship gave Bukh the feeling that, here, he was not an outsider but an integrated part of the people’s fellowship.

In fact there was an ambiguity in the Nazi conception of intense relations between men, which on the one side was emphatically heroic but which on the other side certainly led to persecution as soon as the relationship crossed over into homosexuality. [27] The Nazi ideology contained a revolt against the cold, calculating relationships between men in bourgeois society. Instead, a strong feeling of loyalty, idealism and self-sacrifice was to be cultivated among groups of comrades, which was an essential building block for a military upbringing, and which was placed on a par with all-male societies earlier in history, such as the Knights Templars. [28] Therefore, the Nazi hatred of the Freemasons’ fraternity should be seen against the background that it was regarded as a cosmopolitan, liberal, instrumental and class-divided bourgeois organization, and was in competition with the Nazi idea of Ma¨nnerbund, or a league of men, such as the SS and the SA. [29] The artist Josef Thorak was most instrumental in the visual mediation of heroic comradeship in the Third Reich.

The notion of comradeship also played a crucial role in Bukh’s gymnastics, not least in two men’s intense collaboration in the very physically demanding and aesthetic working in pairs. To provide a symbol of comradeship, Bukh had a statue set up in 1937, called ‘Fellowship’, which according to Bukh portrayed ‘two young men hurrying forward. The one has momentarily stumbled but the other stretches out a helping hand, while he continues to point forward towards the goal that they both struggle to attain’. [30]

It may well have been that Nazism could have developed along lines that accepted actual male homosexuality, in much the same manner as the classical

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