Ethnic drag : performing race, nation, sexuality in West Germany / / Katrin Sieg.

• Superior document: Social history, popular culture, and politics in Germany
• Author: Sieg, Katrin, 1961-
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Edition: 1st pbk. ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Social history, popular culture, and politics in Germany.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (viii, 286 p. ); ill.
• Notes: Reprint. Originally published: 2002.

"The Holocaust is considered a singularly atrocious event in human history, and many people have studied its causes. Yet few questions have been asked about the ways in which West Germans have "forgotten," unlearned, or reconstructed the racial beliefs at the core of the Nazi state in order to build a democratic society. This study looks at ethnic drag as one particular kind of performance that reveals how postwar Germans lived, disavowed, and contested "Germanness" in its complex racial, national, and sexual dimensions. Using engaging case studies, Ethnic Drag traces the classical and travestied traditions of Jewish impersonation from the eighteenth century onward to construct a pre-history of postwar ethnic drag. It examines how shortly after World War II mass culture and popular practices facilitated the repression and refashioning of Nazi racial precepts. During a time when American occupation authorities insisted on remembrance and redress for the Holocaust, the Wild West emerged as a displaced theater of the racial imagination, where the roles of victim, avenger, and perpetrator of genocide were reassigned"--Publisher's description

Table of Contents

A prehistory : Jewish impersonation -- Race and reconstruction : Winnetou in Bad Segeberg -- Winnetou's grandchildren : Indian identification, ethnic expertise, white embodiment -- The violent white gaze : drag and the critique of fascism -- Queer colonialism : ethnographic authority and homosexual desire -- Ethnic travesties.