Literal Nazis and the Retro-transing of History

 Researching Marienbad and the Savoy led me to Erika Mann and all the gossip, scandal, politics, and drama of her family. I wanted to read her account of life in pre-war Germany The Lights Go Down in part of my preparation for the 1940 Club and here.

I couldn’t track down a copy so I read School for Barbarians: Education under the Nazis (1938) instead. And reading that had me curious and wanting to know more beyond the gossip gleaned from Sybille Bedford.

Fortunately, I found In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain The Erika and Klaus Mann Story by  Andrea Weiss. 2008,

And what an amazing story it is. Recommended.

But back to Barbarians. 

It’s Erika Mann’s account of how the Nazi party hijacked education and gained its stranglehold on all aspects of children’s lives at home and school. It draws on Nazi documents, interviews with refugees, textbooks, and news articles to show the systematic brainwashing of children.

The Nazis prepared their youth for the future by insinuating their propaganda into every aspect of their lives and alienating them from their parents who were effectively gagged from voicing opposition.

They established a chilling and pervasive control with a cult of personality centered on loyal obedience to Hitler, German superiority, and preparation for war.  Mann knows  Mein Kampf and how it played out in policy and practice. 

To read an example of how this worked read The Birthday Party.

No Debate

There really was no escaping its grip. To resist – or raise questions or mock – meant certain denunciation and probable arrest with a one-way ticket to a concentration camp. 

Suddenly – or so a seems – a new orthodoxy takes hold and it is dangerous to question it. If you do, you may be shunned, excluded, and your career sidelined. What some schools are teaching children about ‘gender’ certainly comes to mind. That’s America and the UK today. In the case of Germany in the 1930s – questioning was met with literal violence and frequently death. Wrongthink big time.

The Nazi influence took over every aspect of the curriculum. Example: Mathematics

Occidental Mathematics and The Nordic Fighting Spirit

“Occidental mathematics, as it has developed in the past three hundred years, is Aryan spiritual property; it is an expression of the Nordic fighting spirit, of Nordic struggle for the supremacy of the world beyond its boundaries. – Dr. Erwin Geck, in The National Socialist Essence of Education

It sounds like a vast joke against learning — “an expression of the Nordic fighting spirit!”” But we have been warned. At least, now, the problems in arithmetic cannot surprise us.

They all have to do with airplanes, bombs, cannon, and guns.

And Mann provides problem examples. Listen up children, and solve these problems: See the sidebar left.

Transing the Past 

Last week this post plopped into my world with all the welcome of the splat of a rotten apricot.

Wait a minute. What? Gluck was a gender-fluid they/them? You mean the Gluck who lived with and loved women her whole adult life? The same Gluck who defied her family’s expectations and lived life on her own terms? 

Just who had decided on that little erasure of history?  My mind immediately conjured up a most uncharitable stereotype of some newly minted graduate comms person with a degree in Gender Woo and Art History adorned with tattoos, blue hair, and various face studs who thinks erasing gays and lesbians from past and present is on the right side of history. Dreadful cliched thinking on my part and probably off the mark. Unfortunately, such homophobic thinking is embedded in too many of our cultural organizations and institutions, including schools. 

Needless to say, there was an immediate fierce eruption in response to the post.

Manchester Art Gallery was reminded that there are only two sexes – male and female – and that we are all one of the other and no one changes sex. It was reminded that we are all heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual and that the artist who wanted to be known as Gluck was a woman, a female, and a lesbian. And that we should not impose our ideology on the dead. Retro-transing is not good history. 

Here’a small edited sampling of the hundreds of comments:

Stop stealing our herstory!

Oh FFS. You are simply projecting today’s ludicrous identity politics onto an historical figure – in her time there was NO gender ideology. She did NOT use “They”. You are claiming she, as a lesbian, must have denied her sex! It was her sex that allowed her to be a lesbian – by definition this means same-sex attracted. You are part of a vicious women-hating homophobic movement that erases the category of woman. Her wearing clothes that didn’t conform to female sex stereotypes doesn’t make her “gender fluid” (!!) it just means she’s a woman who expressed herself without reproducing the oppressive stereotypes of her age

Those responsible for this post are a disgrace. Are there no adults at Manchester Art Gallery who can help them understand how sexist, misogynist, homophobic, and regressive they are? Come on grown-ups – you can do social media too. Stop outsourcing it to ideologues who have no clue about history and reality.

Quite apart from the obvious misogyny and homophobia it’s the total wrecking of history that grinds my gears.

She was an adult, human female, a lesbian. Wearing men’s clothes does not mean a woman is no longer a woman and a lesbian. Being unconventional does not make a woman a man.

She was a woman. Why are you imposing your gender nonsense on her?

She was a woman, therefore she defined what a woman could be; wearing mens clothes and abandoning stereotypes did not make her a man or “non-binary”.

Stop erasing lesbians because they don’t fit in your narrow worldview of what a woman should be. Stop pretending there are no lesbians and homosexuals.

A woman is someone with a female body and any personality. Any other definition is sexism!

This ideology is so obviously sexist regressive nonsense! It is a first world male fantasy.

This is so infuriating because you know what a backlash “deadnaming” or “misgendering” a trans person causes,

This is abject homophobia. Just stop it.

She was a lesbian. Transing dead LGB icons is one of the most homophobic things I’ve ever seen.

Stop rewriting History. She was a woman. Just because she challenged restrictive gender stereotypes does not mean she was not a woman. Women can wear whatever they want. Clothes do not denote what sex someone is.

Are you going to tell us all we’re ‘gender fluid’? Because I know what all these women would like to call you…

Why are you doing this to women, especially lesbian women? Pandering to a sexist and homophobic regime will not age well. Your erasure of females and lesbians into “theydom” is duly noted.

Stop pandering to men who say they are women by erasing actual women.

And my favorite:

Reported for misgendering.

The Response

Well – that sorry, not sorry response got the reaction it deserved. The Gallery wants to be a safe space? But safe for whom? Safe from whom? And at whose expense?  Who – exactly – is made unsafe by calling a woman a woman, a lesbian, a lesbian? And why does the museum privilege them over the safety of women and lesbians? Footling nonsense.

A Lesson from Glasgow

Here’s how it’s done Manchester. Glasgow Museums also stepped in shit. When they were called out, they apologised for their mistake:

Footnotes

I have found no evidence that Erika Mann and Gluck ever met. If they had they probably would not have agreed on much politically. Mann was a political activist – thought by the FBI to have dangerous homosexual and communist leanings – and Gluck was a political conservative.

I was taken by this odd little connecting detail. Gluck derived her wealth from her family’s business – J Lyons & Co of tea shop, corner house, fruit pie, and ice cream fame. In 1938, unidentified sources smuggled Thomas Mann’s German Education – which also served as the introduction to Barbarians  – into Germany hidden in packets of Lyon’s Red Label tea. The color of the packets matched the colors of the book jacket showing burning books.

And if you are now curious about Hannah Gluckstein – the artist now and formerly known as Gluck – then I recommend DianeSouhami’s excellent biography Gluck:Her Biography.

Read the book. It’s great!

Here are a couple of relevant extracts: 

“‘e says she’s Miss Gluckstein”

“The paintings matter, not the sex of the Artist”