Wilhelm Reich: Culture as power

The past several generations of scholarship on Rembrandt's “Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp” have suffered from the anxiety of influence exercised by the influential interpretations of William Heckscher and William Schupbach. Schupbach's interpretation in particular has guided interpretation of the painting in the past generation and has given rise to a fundamental misunderstanding of the painting and its cultural significance. Schupbach and those whom he has influenced have failed to recognize that, from the standpoint of Baroque consciousness, there is an inner compatibility rather than a paradox or tension between the optimistic endorsement of earthly science and the putatively pessimistic resignation to the inevitability of death. Where the figure of Tulp represents the optimism of science and technology, that of the topmost surgeon Van Loenen represents the recognition that the technological project functions within the larger context of a Christian worldview. A reflection on the original form of “Tulp,” in which Van Loenen was depicted wearing a hat, shows how Rembrandt's painting can still speak to us from a distance of almost four hundred years and pose a challenge to our own secular ambitions.     

Wilhelm Reich and Sexology from Below

One of sexologist Wilhelm Reich's most ambitious and enduring theories claims that sexuality and sexual repression play a central role in the production and reproduction of class structures and hierarchies. From 1927–1933, Reich combined his sexological work with his communist political convictions in a movement that became known as sex-pol. Reich developed some of his most provocative and potentially emancipatory theories through this empirical work with members of working-class communities. Though they often remain anonymous in his writings, the traces of their voices remain audible throughout. In this paper, I employ a Gramscian method, developed by post-colonial scholars, to read for the trace of proletarian voices in Reich's archive. I argue that these subjects helped to theorize the role of sex in producing and reproducing class oppression. Reading for the trace of proletarian voices in the archive expands our understanding of how working-class subjects in early twentieth-century Germany and Austria helped to produce concrete sexological knowledge from below.     

Geisteswissenschaften in the Third Reich: Some Reflections

Professor Hans Reiss left Germany on 22 August 1939, ‘cuttingit rather fine’, as he puts it, for Ireland, where hestudied and subsequently taught at Trinity College Dublin. Helater held teaching posts at the London School of Economicsand Queen Mary College, London, and was professor at McGillUniversity and the University of Bristol. Professor Reiss haspublished twelve books and editions and over seventy articlesthat range widely across the fields of German literature, culturalhistory and political thought. In this historiographical review,he discusses recent research on the conduct of German literaryscholars during the Third Reich.     

The Long Arm of the Third Reich

Mission histories and autobiographies dealing with the internment of Germans from New Guinea in Australia during World War II remember the shock and hardship of the initial detention and the journey from New Guinea to Australia, stories of funny events and good times in the camps, and the struggle with the Australian bureaucracy to get back to New Guinea. The time of enthusiastic or reluctant commitment to National Socialist leadership and ideology has had hardly any space in personal memories or written history, neither in mission accounts nor in Australian war histories. This article examines the politics of Tatura Camp 1, where most Germans from New Guinea were interned, within the context of wider Australian and German internment policies. The Germans from New Guinea were not cut off from the outside world behind barbed wire, but became entangled in a net of interacting and conflicting agencies. By examining the role of the German Reich and Switzerland, and their interaction with the Australian government, military authorities, and internees, the article shifts away from national histories of internment, which set the interning nation as the central reference point, to transnational histories.     

Culture and power: the rise of Afrikaner nationalism revisited*1

ABSTRACT. Outside parliament, the story of Afrikaner nationalism is largely a story of political (and sometimes economic) activists establishing language and cultural organisations. In a preliminary attempt to systematise the intentions and achievements of these extra‐parliamentary components of the Afrikaner movement, this article critiques and refines Joep Leerssen's model of nationalism as ‘the cultivation of culture’ (Nations and Nationalism 12, 4: 559–78). Drawing on the examples of the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaanders and the Afrikaner‐Broederbond, I revisit the relationship between cultural and political nationalism – both as concepts and as actual movements – and question the notion of a dichotomy.