Lawrence V. Shebb is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at North Dakota Tech University, Bismarck Campus. Nazi Sex: A Cultural Studies Perspective is his most recent work. He is the author of two previous monographs, Reading Nazi Mustaches and Sex and the Other: Intersubjectivity Discourse and Trans-specific Coital Practice in Bavaria, 1955-1962. He has published several articles in such renowned journals as This/these is/are Cultural Studies, Queer Theory Unlimited, and Myopiana. Currently, Professor Shebb is at work on a fourth book about the aesthetics of circumcision in contemporary German adult cinema.He would like to thank his family and friends for their fanatical support and the UNDTB Cultural Studies department for their tacit complicity throughout the duration of this project. Without them, Nazi Sex would not have been possible.
Well, I suppose I must face the reckoning. I have executed my shopping maneuvers in an expedient, dare I say admirable, fashion, but the end is upon me.As Pliny the Elder said, “The happier the moment, the shorter.” We can’t remain in the bakery section all day now, can we? Or even in the butchery, where I would be content to idle a while by that handsome roast, dreaming of next Sunday’s Tafelspitz. Speaking of, did I get the cherries for Else’s streudel? Yes, of course you did, you wretch--- your fingers are stained with their ripe juice, just like Mitzi’s tender—Enough! Now is no time for a fit of weakness. You’ll stain more than your fingers with juice carrying on like that. Despicable! I shall now choose a line and face my destiny like a man.
Schade, they are so long! Wait, aisle three appears to be manageable. Yes three, the trinity, it has been chosen. I swear my allegiance to aisle three. Look at those idiots waiting among the masses. They veritably will their own suffering. A simple survey of the field and some swift arithmetic would save them from their misery. But, no—the slightest exercise of the intellect is beyond the functioning of their atavistic brain. Here is your democracy in action, you rabble. Truly amazing, the amount of degenerates who have slithered into the capital lately. Look at the goiter on that cretin!
I’m sorry, what? What? 15 items? Well, how should I know? Do you make a habit of counting your comestibles? It sounds positively morbid! Other line? But have you seen the length? You expect me to stand behind that deformed creature?This is an outrage! Sladoled, my Veronal! I feel flush.
I almost wish I had suffered the view of that throbbing goiter now. At least I would be nearly to the register. Instead, I ended up behind the whole shtetl. How can such repulsive people create so many children? This freckled one here at my knee will probably grow up to write socialist filth. While this one has the physiognomy of a dynamiter. And stop eyeing my profiteroles! Shameless indecency the way they just let their children ogle their social superiors.A good horsewhip on the behind is what you need, just like they used to do at the Theresianum. I can still feel that stiff black leather biting red into my young flesh. Now, that is how you make a man! No, no, no! No! I am not getting aroused. It’s just my girdle constricting. Most unappetizing! I can’t even eat these profiteroles. And what’s happened to my Pfeffernusse? They’re crumbling before my eyes—just like my beloved empire! Oh, when will this anguish cease? Sladoled, where is that infernal Veronal?
Well, at least I can see the periodicals now. You may as well go fetch us a hansom cab, Sladoled. T’wont be but a minute now. So, what say the scribblers and slogan-mongers today? My god, does the press know no bounds of decency? Look at that slender Tartaress, nearly totally naked at the beach. And, here, a story of drug addiction. And, oh, I’m going to be sick. They’re photographing the terminally ill in color! Inside a manual for prostitutes?! Say, what’s that sound? Not my girdle ripping! Think of your mothe—no, your commanding offic- no, Nana on her deathbed. Yes, I believe that did the trick. God, what is happening to my mind? Is my brain softening? Perhaps a chocolate bar will help, with a sprinkle of Veronal in the Marzipan center.
At last, the register. Well, my cherries have surely wilted by now, but the important thing is I did not desert my duty, for without duty there is no honor. And as Pliny the Elder said, “Let honor be to us as strong an obligation as necessity is to others.” I will not go home empty-handed this time. But it’s no wonder I waited so long. How slow this hideous woman moves. Chop-chop, my homely fraulein! An officer has his orders. My what? Club card?! Dear god, woman, do I look like I would belong to the same club as you? Insolence! And what? Ate a Whatchamacallit? Well, I don’t know what it was called either, but, yes, I did eat a chocolate bar and I’m not paying for it. There was no marzipan inside and tasted like the sole of a Slav’s foot.
What’s that? Do I want help out?! What do you take me for, a cripple! You have the gall not only to handle my profiteroles with reckless disregard but on top of that to insult my manhood? Well, madam, I’ll have you know that according to Paragraph 114 of the Imperial army’s criminal code, the urgent defense of honor with the aid of a weapon is not only legal but mandatory when the honor of the officer is under attack without provocation and in the presence of one or more persons. Sladoled, my saber! Sladoled? Oh, even my servants have turned on me! But what else should I expect from a damn Czech? Autonomy, they say? Treason-- that's what I say! Despicable treason!
Well, I see you have left me no choice, madam. If you would just hand over what remains of my abused pastries, you may keep the rest of these vittles. Frankly, I don’t care what you do with them! Stuff them down you gaping hole or fling them to the wretches behind me. I have no use for groceries where I’m headed. To my study, where a bottle of schnapps and loaded pistol will give me all the nourishment I need.
**Note: This conceit is a riff on (or shameless theft of) Arthur Schnitzler's 1901 novella Lt. Gustl.
Our thankfully former president, after he lost his popular mandate, used to reassure himself by invoking the immortal judgment of a history yet to be written. Bush wasn't bad, just untimely. What looked like incompetence and malevolence in the present would become wisdom and courage in the future. That is, assuming the future was bizarro world. In recent months, during the transition from the Bush to Obama administration, pundits on both sides have dusted off the Ouija board of their own mediocre minds to learn how Bush will be remembered by the future.
Now you, too, can play this game so beloved by politicians and journalists in the comfort of your own home— ( http://www.gallup.com/poll/113806/Americans-Expect-History-Judge-Bush-Worse-Than-Nixon.aspx).It’s a game for all ages and political persuasions—no one is too daft to play. Just ask yourself whether ‘history’ will know Bush as the worst American president ever or as an untimely visionary who did not fear the fickle boos of popular opinion—then air your idle speculation!
Once you’ve reached a consensus, don’t worry, this game has potential for infinite variation. Just think about any contentious goings-on today and figure out what history will say about it. Iraq War? Global warming? AIDS in Africa? No nut is too tough for history to crack. And why limit yourself to world political issues, when the future verdict of history is right here ready to solve your most vexing existential crises. Beach vacation in Mexico or skiing in Utah? What would history say? Ranch or vinaigrette? History knows!
One can’t help but question the sanity of an age that looks to the future for its history so that it may know how to judge the present. Pundits are shoddy enough fortunetellers when they have their crystal ball statistics in hand, but in the realm of future historical judgment we have no numbers to belie our absolute ignorance of what shall be. So why invoke the authority of a backward-looking future?
The underlying supposition is that, unlike the present—marred by opposing political views and manifold interpretation—the future will somehow be free of these messy complications. The good history-writing citizens of the future, perched on the heights of hindsight, will discern the patterns of our actions in the befogged present.
I don’t mean to sneer here at the virtues of historical reflection, but rather at the two fallacies that lead us to appeal to the authority of future historical reflection. The first fallacy is that of a monolithic posterity. When we say history will remember George W. Bush as a worse president than Richard Nixon, which historically-reflective posterity are we referring to? Next year’s? The next generation’s? Posterity five hundred years from now? Each of these posterities presumably would have different historical understandings of our age.
Even if we could pin down where in time this future historical perspective of ourselves is located, who knows how anyone or anything will be “remembered” by any point in the future? Who’s to say whether in two hundred years George Bush and Richard Nixon won’t both appear as nostalgic icons of a prelapsarian golden age before a later Commander-in-Chief in 2112 accidentally sat on the button while humming the nuclear launch codes and plunged the world into nuclear apocalypse?
The second fallacy at work in our prediction of future historical judgment is the belief in an objective history. The future, under the guise of ‘history’, has become a stand-in for an idealized objectivity that we no longer claim in present judgment. Whereas now speculation on the legacy of George Bush’s presidency or the Iraq War is ideologically charged, in the future it will simply be historical truth.
We may like to think we see things more clearly than those we study did at the time, but, frankly, we only see them from the perspective of the present. And if history is a mirror of the present, then why should we expect the future present, whose history we will become, to be any different? In other words, history is an enterprise of the present, deeply embedded in the present, with all its contingencies and cultural and political dimensions that shape and constrain what we may know, and there’s no reason to think future history will transcend these limitations.
The truth is, when statesmen, pundits, and Gallup pollsters talk about how history will judge a person or an event, they are not thinking about history at all. They are talking about how they want us to judge that person or event right now. By invoking all-knowing History (replete with deified capitalization), they’re hoping to impress upon their opinion the stamp of singularity and finality that has long been considered a hallmark of authoritative judgment.
But if we’re looking for singular and final judgment, we’ll have to look somewhere beyond history. Traditionally, religion has been the outlet for this fantasy. I vote for keeping it that way. And so does History.
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