Only for Convicts, Loose Women and Sailors? The Tattoo as Social, Political and Literary Practice in Germany from the 19th Century to Today

This dissertation combines readings of literary texts and films, visual analysis, and historical analysis of relevant socio-political contexts. I am particularly interested in how tattoos and texts negotiate the conceptualization and performance of gender roles and the construction of power relations. For this purpose, I conceive of the tattoo as an example of the textedness of the body and the skin as border zone between the social and the self. Situating the tattoo between commodification and self-expression, I analyze questions of gender, identity, nation, and "Otherness." Additionally, I scrutinize the power structures that become visible through the marking of the body.;Chapter 1 analyzes the discourse of the captivity tales of the tattooed circus and fairground performers against a general discourse of physical and sexual hygiene, rising nationalism, and the construction of a German identity. Building on this foundation, chapter 2 examines the representation of tattoos and body markings in Franz Kafka's In the Penal Colony and Egon Erwin Kisch's My Tattoos from his collection of reportages The Raging Reporter. I am interested in how colonial fantasies and realities, modernity and sexuality in Kafka's and Kisch's texts are played out on the body in the form of tattoos. Chapter 3 then analyzes the extreme consequences of the discourse on nationalism, hygiene, and Otherness: the forced tattooing of victims of the Holocaust, the gruesome way the Nazis flayed tattooed people, and the tattoo's symbolic meanings and ramifications in this context. The memoirs of Ruth Kluger, Primo Levi, Ka-Tzetnik 135633 (Yehiel De-Nur) and Jean Amery describe the process of tattooing in Auschwitz and analyze the impact of this practice on the victims, the Nazis, and finally the post-war population. Edgar Hilsenrath's picaresque novel Der Nazi und der Friseur (The Nazi and the Barber) finally tells the story of a con-artist, who uses the tattooed Auschwitz number for his personal benefit, and subsequently experiences identity confusions. Chapter 4 will demonstrate how such identity confusions are subverted by artists and second-generation Holocaust survivors, who use tattooing as an affirmation of their Jewish Identity. The most prominent example is L.A. based photographer Marina Vainshtein, a daughter of Ukrainian Holocaust survivors, who at the age of 25 decided to cover her body with tattoos depicting the trauma of the Holocaust, as a living reminder of "never again." Similarly, the fictional character Eve in Emily Prager's novel Eve's Tattoo claims to have an Auschwitz number tattooed on her wrist to give the Holocaust physical space and visibility in the bored Yuppie culture of New York in the 1980s. I juxtapose a visual analysis of Marina Vainshtein's tattoos with an interpretation Emily Prager's text, focusing on the politics of authenticity and situating both works within the debate on representations of the Holocaust. Chapter 5 finally scrutinizes the current renaissance of the tattoo in Germany as well as in a global context and the mushrooming of representations of tattoos, in particular, in film. Here, I focus on how Robert Schwentke's thriller Tattoo (2002) speaks to a German audience about its past through the global theme of body modification. Lastly, I investigate current discourses on tattoos and whether they are still influenced by the legacy of National Socialist body images.