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A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing
An essay on art, identity and fascism.
In an era where identity politics is being weaponised against the very people it has sought to make visible, how can we reclaim complexity?
In 1937 the Nazis staged an exhibition of seized artworks to showcase the 'perverse Jewish spirit' pervading German culture. It contained work by Jewish artists, but also those were queer or foreign. It was an event that sought to define degeneracy and put it on display.
This exhibition, Entartete Kunst, is just a single episode in a long running culture war, one that has always been fought on terms set by fascism. Drawing on the work of dissident sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, South African artist Zanele Muholi as well as key proponents of queer cinema such as Pedro Almodovar and Derek Jarman, So Mayer demonstrates how artists have snuck things out of the traditional canon, playing against the grain to defy the patriarchal, imperialist and colonial terms which have been imposed on them.
A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing is a call to arms. It asks, how might we create a joyous riot? How might we use pleasure to decolonise gender and sexuality and refuse the prevailing fascist, box-ticking taxonomies?
In an era where identity politics is being weaponised against the very people it has sought to make visible, how can we reclaim complexity?
In 1937 the Nazis staged an exhibition of seized artworks to showcase the 'perverse Jewish spirit' pervading German culture. It contained work by Jewish artists, but also those were queer or foreign. It was an event that sought to define degeneracy and put it on display.
This exhibition, Entartete Kunst, is just a single episode in a long running culture war, one that has always been fought on terms set by fascism. Drawing on the work of dissident sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, South African artist Zanele Muholi as well as key proponents of queer cinema such as Pedro Almodovar and Derek Jarman, So Mayer demonstrates how artists have snuck things out of the traditional canon, playing against the grain to defy the patriarchal, imperialist and colonial terms which have been imposed on them.
A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing is a call to arms. It asks, how might we create a joyous riot? How might we use pleasure to decolonise gender and sexuality and refuse the prevailing fascist, box-ticking taxonomies?
158 pages, Paperback
First published November 5, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
February 9, 2024
So Mayer takes as their starting point ways in which the Nazi regime set out to classify, shame and ultimately eradicate people, ways of being, ideas and work that they considered undesirable, all grouped together under the category of ‘other.’ Mayer examines the nature and purpose of seemingly symbolic acts carried out by the Nazis, such as book-burning, although they focus on the exhibition of ‘Entartete Kunst’ (degenerate art) which toured German towns in 1937. Mayer’s specific interest is the attempt to erase the queer and ‘non-normative’ cultures which had briefly flourished in the Weimar era. Mayer explores forms of destruction that were inextricably interwoven with anti-Semitic narratives and concepts of ‘ideological Jewishness’ often building on so-called science including eugenics, Lombardo’s concepts of the criminal body and wilful mis-readings of theories such as Nordau’s ideas of the degenerate. However, Mayer isn’t just documenting these activities but reflecting on how they might exemplify the workings of power particularly the limiting of access to certain histories or types of information – strategies still visible in today’s culture wars, the concept of cultural Marxism (akin to what the Nazis referred to as ‘cultural Bolshevism') fake news, and the machinations of contemporary right-wing groups seeking to silence, marginalise and ‘other’, even targeting the same people as the Nazis did in Germany.
Mayer then explores the ways in which these forms of power can be, and have been, resisted by writers, film-makers and artists working within the fractures and lacunae in official histories and fragmented archives in order to transform these into pieces that actively reframe both past and present. All part of a series of ongoing challenges to ‘official’ histories and to dominant cultures’ repeated, violent, erasures. Mayer discusses numerous examples of productive ‘reading against the grain’ including campaigns by ACT UP in the 80s, queer film-makers Barbara Hammer, Derek Jarman, Pasolini, Fassbinder and Pedro Almodovar; texts such as Madchen in Uniform and Looking for Langston; and Saidiya Hartman’s recent resurrection and re-reading of the lives of ‘wayward’ black women often only briefly documented in archived court records of their ‘transgressions.’
Mayer draws on a variety of theoretical frameworks and historical material, deploying ideas taken from theorists like Derrida and Mayer’s background in film studies. I found Mayer’s approach fascinating and I appreciated the range of material that they’re drawing from here but their essay’s short and incredibly compressed – sometimes making it difficult to fully engage with or evaluate the core arguments. At times the spirit of Mayer’s debate was clearer than its intricacies, perhaps inevitably the restricted space available resulted in a glossing over of complex ideas/positions. But Mayer doesn’t represent this as a finished or ‘fixed’ interrogation of their territory but rather a contribution to a series of ongoing conversations, and viewed in that way I found it compelling and fairly effective.
Rating: 3.5
Mayer then explores the ways in which these forms of power can be, and have been, resisted by writers, film-makers and artists working within the fractures and lacunae in official histories and fragmented archives in order to transform these into pieces that actively reframe both past and present. All part of a series of ongoing challenges to ‘official’ histories and to dominant cultures’ repeated, violent, erasures. Mayer discusses numerous examples of productive ‘reading against the grain’ including campaigns by ACT UP in the 80s, queer film-makers Barbara Hammer, Derek Jarman, Pasolini, Fassbinder and Pedro Almodovar; texts such as Madchen in Uniform and Looking for Langston; and Saidiya Hartman’s recent resurrection and re-reading of the lives of ‘wayward’ black women often only briefly documented in archived court records of their ‘transgressions.’
Mayer draws on a variety of theoretical frameworks and historical material, deploying ideas taken from theorists like Derrida and Mayer’s background in film studies. I found Mayer’s approach fascinating and I appreciated the range of material that they’re drawing from here but their essay’s short and incredibly compressed – sometimes making it difficult to fully engage with or evaluate the core arguments. At times the spirit of Mayer’s debate was clearer than its intricacies, perhaps inevitably the restricted space available resulted in a glossing over of complex ideas/positions. But Mayer doesn’t represent this as a finished or ‘fixed’ interrogation of their territory but rather a contribution to a series of ongoing conversations, and viewed in that way I found it compelling and fairly effective.
Rating: 3.5
January 18, 2023
what could have been a really interesting book, totally lost in an insufferable writing style - pretentious, overly academic for no reason and difficult to follow. mostly focuses on queer cinema which was banned, repressed or literally burned by the nazi regime and other govts. would love to see snippets of these films and think this essay could have worked better as a documentary. the writing style was so hard to sift through that i can’t even remember most of what i’ve read.
May 16, 2023
It's interesting episodically rather than as a whole, I liked the bit on Jarman (I would) but it veers between academia and... something else that results in an acute feeling of whiplash. It also contains the phrase "Sigmund Freud threw shade" with complete sincerity.
March 23, 2025
Contextually, this book is everything I love about literature - radical, challenging, bleeding one genre into another, full of great references. In practise, it’s everything I hate about it - pretentiously written, impossible to decipher, arguably incredibly inaccessible.
This had no structure nor real relation to the theme at hand.
Art writing gets a bad rep because of books like this. Art writing doesn’t need to be hard to understand or grasp, yet the language in this, a lot of the time, just makes no sense. No sense to the point where carrying on feels hard; detaching the reader from the writer - to me, that’s the worst kind of thing an author can make a reader feel.
This had no structure nor real relation to the theme at hand.
Art writing gets a bad rep because of books like this. Art writing doesn’t need to be hard to understand or grasp, yet the language in this, a lot of the time, just makes no sense. No sense to the point where carrying on feels hard; detaching the reader from the writer - to me, that’s the worst kind of thing an author can make a reader feel.
October 23, 2022
a must read on lgbtqia+ history
October 28, 2020
I read this last week and haven't stopped thinking about it. A must-read book reclaiming queer + Jewish art, history and identities from erasure, exploring queer and antifascist cinema, basically exploding the concept of degenerate art completely. Incredible from So Mayer.
November 11, 2020
This book is brilliant from cover to cover. In this book, So Mayer blends their habitual acute observation and clarity of language with an experimental essay form that reflects the subject of erasure and anarchival reconstruction of history that the book centres on. It unfolded me.
p.s. I've never enjoyed reading a bibliography so thoroughly.
p.s. I've never enjoyed reading a bibliography so thoroughly.
December 4, 2020
I loved this essay. So Mayer has given us something so tender and considered, and radical.
December 8, 2020
A searing, vital examination of the Nazi thinking that tried to destroy queer culture, and the defiant queer cinema that rose to stand against it.
March 10, 2024
Tries to be both an academic work and a personal essay and fails miserably at both.
January 21, 2025
“We enfold queer texts and traces into our memories so we can pass them on.” A Nazi Word For A Nazi Thing, an extended essay by So Mayer, is a timely perspective on the erasure and eradication of LGBTIQ+ history from within WWII history, which Mayer so cogently argues “is to do the Nazis’ work for them”. Exploring Nazi propaganda around degeneracy (entartet), Mayer draws a wide historical picture, at the time and in the years since, considering key moments like the AIDS crisis or Section 28, or the work of Almodóvar, Jarman, Wojnarowicz, LaBeija. I also found Mayer’s reading of Max Nordau fascinating, especially in his view of “Wilde as a degenerate symptom of the decline of English masculinity”, easily evocative of the claims made by right-wing losers recently denigrating such figures as Harry Styles for their skewering of masculinity. There is also much value in Mayer’s insistence on the danger of viewing Nazism as aberration: we lose too much ground if we blindly ignore the many structures and forces that allowed and entrench Nazism and similar forms of fascism, supremacy, etc. We must resist the decontextualisation and recontextualisation being constantly perpetrated against us, to hold onto and pass on truth, our greatest tool: “If we cannot learn our history in all its complexity, we cannot speak it.”
May 11, 2023
Gets a bit lost at times with its own writing style - whilst not at all inaccessible, Mayer employs a method of writing that mixes history and present, biographical accounts and fictional pondering, that at times led me to need to reread sections purely to understand what was intended.
Perhaps that was, however, the intention! But I think it did lose itself, still, around the novel’s midpoint before taking hold of its own style again by the last third.
Most importantly, this text feels like a brilliant jumping off point into a vast array of queer, race, and feminist thinking. I feel that this work, alongside those cited in the bibliography (and, okay, that is the BEST BIBLIOGRAPHY EVER and I shall fight to be able to write one like it as well, what an obviously better way to list references WHY IS THIS NOT THE STANDARD?!) will be very useful for my future academic study!
Perhaps that was, however, the intention! But I think it did lose itself, still, around the novel’s midpoint before taking hold of its own style again by the last third.
Most importantly, this text feels like a brilliant jumping off point into a vast array of queer, race, and feminist thinking. I feel that this work, alongside those cited in the bibliography (and, okay, that is the BEST BIBLIOGRAPHY EVER and I shall fight to be able to write one like it as well, what an obviously better way to list references WHY IS THIS NOT THE STANDARD?!) will be very useful for my future academic study!
August 26, 2022
So Mayer's anarchival work here is a testament to both their dedication to self-understanding and re-folding queer history for posterity. Reconstructing, sometimes re-imagining, the history of Queer film that was lost in the Nazi's burning of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft and destroyed, defunded, or otherwise silenced through the ensuing decades, Mayer's work of reifying that deemed by the Reich and alt-right alike as entartet goes beyond the explosiveness of their employment of the filmmaking agent nitrate—it is strong, sturdy, well-researched, yet self-sufficient. There is no way to get all of this in one go, so give it a read, then save it on a shelf close by.
November 16, 2020
Totally reinvigorated my enthusiasm for theory (where next?) and I am in love with some of the concepts extrapolated here; 'folding' time; the potential menace of the film camera; and above all the 'anarchives' and our place(s) in them. Mayer has woven together so many of my own creative impulses and favourite artists in a way that makes me see everything that more clearly and this book has revived my feelings of historical connection and queer synchronicity at a moment when Goddess knows I/we need all the energy I/we can muster. Joyful riotous writing. Bravo.
January 19, 2021
This is an absolutely faultless essay. It’s quite hard to categorise - it’s a historical, critical essay that calls out the violent appropriation of queer art to reinforce an identity politics formed around ideas of “degeneracy” (named “Entartete Kunst”) by the Nazis. However, it also feels like a manifesto that shines a light on queer art and cinema that didn’t achieve recognition in its own time and calls on contemporary artists to reclaim complex personal identities and histories. It is definitely a “joyous riot” that merits reading and rereading.
September 2, 2024
In parts, this is a really good book and the way in which she defines the notion and history of 'entartet' is an interesting one, but much of the time it is frustrating - as if the meat of the subject is not actually being dealt with. Over a short book, the expansive and broad references are cool and definitely demonstrate the interconnectedness of struggle, but what ends up being neglected is a lot of the material precursors to this particular strand - could have been longer to make up for this!
April 13, 2021
Some interesting information - which was completely smothered by a painful level of pretentiousness
June 29, 2023
DNF it ages ago, couldn’t be bothered to finish it. The writing was very academic and boring.
July 13, 2024
A great little essay, perfect for a time when a famous children's books author denies holocoust and that nazi's destroying LGBTQ+ history.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews