MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Set against the backdrop of the geopolitical aggressions being played out between Germany and the Soviet Union at the 1937 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, a transparent scientific model of the human body entitled “l’Homme de Verre” was given its own exhibition space as part of the German contribution to the fair. Placed atop a raised circular platform in an otherwise bare room, the iconic posture of outstretched arms by an idealized nude male suggested a humanist representation of mankind, an impartiality that was no longer plausible given the unfolding ideological program of the National Socialist regime. This paper will trace the genealogy of the inclusion of the “Transparent Man” in important hygiene and international exhibitions through the 1920s and 30s in Europe and the United States during the interwar period in an effort to better understand how the National Socialists mobilized this popular figure to promulgate their own ideological ends in 1937. I will argue that the popularity of the Transparent Man can be attributed to they way it brought together science, naturalism, and technology as features central to German “exceptionalism” under the National Socialist regime. While the humanist conception of the body would position blood as the great equalizer between races and people, the shared entity that flows regardless of differences in skin, by 1937, the Nazi regime had fundamentally inverted such an analysis, instead turning to both the literal and metaphorical notion of blood as the central feature of their “racial hygiene” projects. To this end, through a reading of Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s discussions of micropolitics, I will analyze the focus on the body as the target of fascist power and how this was implemented through scientific discourse in Germany through the figure of the Transparent Man.