Sunday, December 30, 2012

Naked Nazi chics on horseback

Over 100 posts without mentioning Nazis, it ends now.

For most people, including us, we mostly think about this period in terms of when they came to power (1933) and the war (1939 - 1945), maybe with some attention to the unleashing of full persecution of Jews in the years prior.

So, what else did your Nazi potentates do in those roughly six years before the war?

We found one small facet of this on a trip to Munich and a visit to the museum Villa Stuck.
There, you can see the statue of an amazon warrier on horseback. The story goes that it was this statue that inspired a festival held every summer from 1936 to 1939 in Munich, the Night of the Amazons festival.

The above link takes you to a youtube clip that survived. Like all film footage from those days, the film speed can skew perception towards the deceptively comedic.

The, we are not asking to pardon the pun, meat of the clip comes toward the end, the night events with dance and more parades and naked women.

Another poignant example of the large scale displays of public nudity during this time in German history.

While German magazine Der Spiegel of 8/1951 mentioned "scantily dressed" women in the "night of the amazons", it took a novel that appeared about 40 years later to bring this to the attention of a younger generation.

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