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Disgust

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2023

Ute Frevert
Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung, Berlin
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Summary

Disgust is typically said to be a bodily sensation experienced as nausea: repelling and expelling that which causes the nausea is its chief goal. People respond with disgust to things that will supposedly taint or poison them. This chapter shows how it is put into political and social practice. Under National Socialism, homosexuals were ruthlessly ‘eliminated from the body politic’; the state and the party also spread propaganda to provoke disgust with Jews and Sinti and Roma. By describing them as ‘parasites’ or ‘pus’, they paved the way for their ‘eradication’ and ‘elimination’. The GDR, too, spoke of ‘public nuisances’ and organized the ‘cleansing’ of the border region in 1952 under the code name ‘Action Vermin’. It accused the West of propagating a culture of depravity and derided the fans of Beat music as ‘unwashed layabouts’. In a similar vein, regulars in West German pubs wrote off left-leaning students as ‘long-haired apes’. Yet, when politician Franz Josef Strauß of the Christian Social Union described critical authors as ‘rats and flies’ in 1978, even conservative newspapers drew the line at this ‘dung shovel language’. The politics of disgust thus has many faces and consequences; evoking feelings of disgust to stigmatize, defame and discriminate against social groups is not yet a thing of the past.

Keywords

Type
Chapter
Information
The Power of Emotions
A History of Germany from 1900 to the Present
, pp. 77 - 91
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Disgust
  • Ute Frevert, Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung, Berlin
  • Book: The Power of Emotions
  • Online publication: 14 July 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009376792.005
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  • Disgust
  • Ute Frevert, Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung, Berlin
  • Book: The Power of Emotions
  • Online publication: 14 July 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009376792.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Disgust
  • Ute Frevert, Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung, Berlin
  • Book: The Power of Emotions
  • Online publication: 14 July 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009376792.005
Available formats
×