Abstract des Autors

Shaping the Superman is concerned with a modern male icon - the Aryan Man, the Superman of German Fascism - as Prometheus Unbound. It is a study of masculinity as a metaphor and especially of the muscular male body as a moral symbol - inviolable, invulnerable, dominant. It examines the need of mankind (in its generic sense) for muscular heroes, its adulation of mostly male images of superiority and security, attendant militarism and its repetitive search for Prometheus Unbound. Aggression, martial or otherwise, legalized and sanctioned or otherwise, is a constant characteristic of human existence. In his The Cultivation of Hatred (1993) Peter Gray is especially concerned with a triple rationale for the nineteenth-century aggression of European cultures and communities both among themselves and towards others: arguments for competition emanating from biological theory, the construction of the convenient 'other' resulting from pseudo-scientific 'discoveries' and comfortable prejudices, and a cult of manliness evolving directly out of an earlier aristocratic ideal of essential male prowess. This rationale has thunderous resonances for the Fascist Superman. Aloof nude posturing, ancient and modern, is a device 'to elevate man above time, space, particularity and decay'. it allows the transcendence of the specific and the contingent by the presentation of a superhuman beauty presented as an abstract image of male perfection. The naked warriors of Aryan Fascism had precisely the same role as those of ancient Greece, as this volume reveals. Victorian 'science' and Grecian imagery provided horrendous legacies. Verf.-Referat