Sade, Sergeant of Sex
Earlier this year, Formula One boss Max Mosley landed himself in a spot of bother for allegedly engaging in sadomasochistic Nazi sex orgies. Sadomasochism – the sexual enjoyment of suffering and pain – has often been linked to Nazi symbolism, especially by the porn industry. But this link is artificial, creating an unfair negative perception of S & M, because the Nazis were not in the least bit sadomasochistic. As Michel Foucault explains, they were far too boring:
Nazism was not invented by the great erotic madmen of the twentieth century but by the most sinister, boring and disgusting petit-bourgeois imaginable. Himmler was a vaguely agricultural type who married a nurse.
We must understand that the concentration camps were born from the conjoined imagination of a hospital nurse and a chicken farmer. A hospital plus a chicken yard – that’s the phantasm behind the concentration camps.
Millions of people were murdered there, so I don’t say it to diminish the blame of those responsible for it, but precisely to disabuse those who want to superimpose erotic values upon it.
The Nazis were chairwomen in the bad sense of the term. They worked with brooms and dusters, wanting to purge society of everything they considered unsanitary, dusty, filthy; syphilitics, homosexuals, Jews, those of impure blood, Blacks, the insane.
It’s the foul petit bourgeois dream of racial hygiene that underlies the Nazi dream. Eros is absent.
