Between Victim and Perpetrator Constructions of Heroic Masculinity and the Religion of Death
Underlying Rene Girard’s theory of sacrifice is the principle of pars pro toto, part for the whole. In archaic sacrifice, the scapegoated victim represents the larger society and is sacrificed for its sake. In the crucifixion, though the narrative is told from the victim’s perspective as a cry again...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2019
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| In: |
Mimesis and sacrifice
Year: 2019, Pages: 147-160 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Girard, René 1923-2015
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Parallel Edition: | Non-electronic
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| Summary: | Underlying Rene Girard’s theory of sacrifice is the principle of pars pro toto, part for the whole. In archaic sacrifice, the scapegoated victim represents the larger society and is sacrificed for its sake. In the crucifixion, though the narrative is told from the victim’s perspective as a cry against violence, Jesus is nonetheless given—sacrificed—for all humanity, pars pro toto. In a case study of the “heroic male” in Weimar and Nazi Germany, Ulrike Brunotte investigates the transformation of “pars” pro toto into a “toto” willingness to self-immolation. The resulting nationwide death cult is a perverse Nazi elaboration of Girard’s archaic, where violence itself is sacralized. The murder of others—the victims scapegoated for societal and geopolitical problems—is both permitted and encouraged to benefit the state. One’s own death in the process of such murder is the highest of life’s achievements. In her close reading of the Langemar(c)k-myth, the story of school-boy soldiers who ostensibly went willingly to their deaths on the battlefields of the First World War, Brunotte reconstructs the Weimar/Nazi transformation of these young soldiers into self-immolating heroes and “living” brothers of the next generation, to sing and march with the young and so to inspire them to join the eternal “undead” brotherhood of those willing to murder and die in the next war. Brunotte then explores the extension of this sacrificial death cult from Weimar’s male youth clubs to all of German society in the Nazi period.—editor’s note... |
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| ISBN: | 9781350057449 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Mimesis and sacrifice
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.5040/9781350057432.0015 |