Queer Eyes and Wagnerian Guys: Homoeroticism in the Art of the Third Reich
Physique . . . constitutes a basic sign.
—Roland Barthes, "The World of Wrestling"1
At least since Susan Sontag's essay "Fascinatin' Fascism" we have been aware that people may be interested in the aesthetic objects produced by Nazism without necessarily being sympathetic to the politics of this movement.2 This discrepancy raises questions about how individuals living under the Nazi regime understood and interpreted the aesthetic objects that were meant to communicate the ideology of the movement. However, efforts to uncover how different audiences have understood and interpreted particular texts or aesthetic objects have generally been plagued by a dearth of sources. While cultural elites might preserve their official observations in reviews, essays, or other published forms, more ephemeral remarks made by the rest of the population in the process of cultural reception and consumption are more difficult to obtain. Out of frustration with such roadblocks, scholars have turned to theories of desire, observation of the self, and discussions of the mythical meanings of objects that seem to offer a way to get at reception modes.
One theorist whose ideas have guided much of this scholarship is Roland Barthes. Barthes has described how, even when the signifier seems to ascribe a fixed, given meaning to the entire image, the signifier is still an independent element of "the sign" that can be separated from the object once a cultural shift of perspective is entertained. Even when the meanings of objects seem abundantly clear or intrinsically attached, in the end these [End Page 110] meanings are determined by the viewer's own perspective. All symbolic objects are polysemous, their meanings shaped by the complicated network of references embedded in any given sociocultural system. Given this multivalent potential, a viewer has some power to ignore some meanings in favor of others. The choice between one set of meanings and another can be powerfully influenced by the cultural knowledge available to the viewer. The perspective that ascribes one set of values to a particular image for one person may differ radically from the values available for another person.3 Consequently, the understanding taken away from an image or object by a viewer well versed in the values of a particular subculture may differ radically from an understanding gained from the point of view of the dominant culture.
If we accept Barthes's suggestion of signs, symbols, and mythical syntax being attached to all objects of cultural production, it is but a small step to argue that the meaning attached as part of the process of production may differ from meanings ascribed to objects through various processes of reception. While an artist producing a work may have specific goals or ideas in mind (and the aesthete takes pride in recognizing these purposes), an aesthetic appreciation independent of that informing the producer certainly also exists. In some cases it may imbue an object with meanings never intended by the object's creator. While some may complain that the observer misunderstands the artist's intent, for those interested in reception, this "misunderstanding" is more interesting than the artist's intention.
Sophisticated study of the reception of Nazi art has yet to apply either Barthes's analysis of signs or Sontag's insight into the powerful attraction of fascist symbols in the art of the Third Reich. One interesting possibility is suggested by the memories of the gay erotic artist Tom of Finland, who recalled that he and others living and repressed under Nazism were titillated by the masculine imagery of National Socialist art.4 This effect should not be all that surprising, since the homoerotic nature of much art of the Third Reich easily catches the eye, much of it displaying nude or seminude men, frequently heavily muscled and in physical contact with one another.
Although some studies of...
