the warm, soft polar bear skin

Maybe Jorg Haider really was Austria’s people’s princess, if you translate people as volk.

The successor to the Austrian rightwing populist Jörg Haider, Stefan Petzner, has shocked the staunchly conservative country by revealing in a tearful interview that they shared a "special relationship".

Petzner, 27, who was confirmed yesterday as the leader of the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZO) after Haider's death in a car crash two weeks ago, made the admission on Austrian radio, effectively confirming long-standing rumours that he and Haider were lovers.

…The news stunned Austria, which has been coming to terms with the death of the anti-immigrant politician. Haider, who voted against a parliamentary motion to lower the age of consent for homosexuals, had presented himself as a family man who drank sparingly. But after the car crash it was revealed that he had been driving at twice the speed limit, his blood alcohol level had been four times the legal limit, and he had spent his final hours in a gay bar in Klagenfurt, the capital of the southern state where he was governor.

There has been further speculation that the crash happened after Haider and Petzner argued at a party.

Ach so: it was ever thus on the Germanic far right:

Theodor was lying on the warm, soft polar bear skin and beside him lay Prince Heinrich, breathing heavily and audibly. The Prince bit into Theodor’s flesh. The stubble of the Prince’s beard was scratchy, and the tangled hair of his chest and legs tickled Theodor.

From The Spider’s Web. It should be said that Joseph Roth didn’t go in for gay soft porn as such. But if you’re writing about the initiation of someone into a stalhelm group in Weimar Germany, it’s the kind of thing you end up writing.

I suppose the obvious candidates for comparison are Rohm and Black Bertha. But gay Germanic rightwingery has a rich creepy history stretching all the way back to the days when Frederick William 1 would have processions of beefy guardsmen march through his bedroom (literally; in full uniform, one after another).

Who now recalls the Eulenberg-Hardin affair; or the terrible night when Dietrich Graf von Hulsen-Haseler, chief of the Imperial Military Secretariat dropped dead of a heart attack dancing a pas seul for the Kaiser while clad in a tutu? What of Baron Kuno “sweetie” von Moltke, “the most delicate of generals” and his playmates in the Berlin Garde du Corps? And moving to Austria we find Archduke Ludwig-Viktor, brother to the Emperor, but better known to his masseur as “Luzi Wuzi,” though that incident was overshadowed by the later and more famous case of Colonel Redl.

How to explain the persistence of gay rightwingery, and by rightwing I don’t mean a preference for lower taxes and libertarianism? At one level there’s no reason why someone shouldn’t be a gay far rightist. But the positive case was probably stated most bluntly by Yukio Mishima when he said that gay men should support authoritarianism because they had an interest in seeing the mob kept firmly under control. Mishima was barking, but you don’t have to agree with him to see how the idea might have some resonance. All in all it’s a shame that someone never produced a history of Butch to go with Sontag’s history of Camp. It might have been enlightening.

Comments

[ajay]

the terrible night when Dietrich Graf von Hulsen-Haseler, chief of the Imperial Military Secretariat dropped dead of a heart attack dancing a pas seul for the Kaiser while clad in a tutu?

Not to defend the Kaiser, but this may just have been a straightforward exercise of dictatorial power rather than anything steamier. Stalin was also known for making his senior aides dance. Khrushchev, apparently, was ordered to do the Gopak (the dance often called the Cossack Dance - you know, that one where you have to squat down and leap around the place kicking your legs out).

"Khrushchev was a terrible dancer. He danced like a cow on ice," remembers a witness. But who among us could do better? Remember, Khrushchev was a chunky lad, and at least in his late forties by this point. If the Queen ordered you - implicitly on pain of death - to execute a quick Morris, how would you do? Not as well as Nikita, in my case.

[jamie]

I never read it like that: but if the Kaiser was making him perform in a tutu then that says something too.

[ajay]

Oh, come on. Doing a pas seul in an Imperial German military uniform would just make you look silly.

[Alex]

Interesting, really; I wouldn't say it was an open secret that Haider was gay, more like an open assumption. There is something unavoidably camp about his entire career; politics as a performance, life as performance...in a sense he was always dancing in his Kaerntner national costume/tutu for various audiences.

Note that he wasn't actually from there, neither did he have any connection with the place until he found out it was full of old nazis.

[Tom]

"Doing a pas seul in an Imperial German military uniform would just make you look silly."

I've always maintained, deep down, that the whole point of Nazism was to ensure that, in the end, anyone who calls you silly can be taken out and shot. Beware of any regime that sees the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes as an awful warning of the consequences of too much freedom.

[ajay]

I've always maintained, deep down, that the whole point of Nazism was to ensure that, in the end, anyone who calls you silly can be taken out and shot.

It's the dream of every mad scientist. "They laughed at me at the university! Well, I'll show them!"

Orwell had something to say on the subject in "The Lion and the Unicorn":

"...The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is ‘Yes, I am ugly, and you daren't laugh at me’, like the bully who makes faces at his victim. Why is the goose-step not used in England? There are, heaven knows, plenty of army officers who would be only too glad to introduce some such thing. It is not used because the people in the street would laugh. Beyond a certain point, military display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army. The Italians adopted the goose-step at about the time when Italy passed definitely under German control, and, as one would expect, they do it less well than the Germans..."

And Norman Davies wrote about the goose step, when it was first adopted by the 17th-century Prussians, that it

"transmitted a clear set of messages. To Prussia's generals, it said that the discipline and athleticism of their men would withstand all orders, no matter how painful or ludicrous. To Prussian civilians, it said that all insubordination would be ruthlessly crushed. To Prussia's enemies it said that the Prussian army was not made up just of lads in uniform, but regimented supermen. To the world at large, it announced that Prussia was not just strong, but arrogant..."

[Chris Williams]

That would explain Goering's uniforms.

But wait. If you're _really_ hard, you don't come over all leather and studs - you dress like something out of Pirandello and defy anyone to comment on it without getting a faceful. Like Greek ceremonial troops. Or else you put your really hard scary blokes in skirts, so as to get them in as many fights as possible. Who'd do that, eh?

But if you're really _really_ hard, habitus doesn't matter, since your mild-mannered techncrats will incinerate the enemy a couple of hours into the war. As usual, Wells got there first, in _The Land Ironclads_.

[ajay]

Or else you put your really hard scary blokes in skirts, so as to get them in as many fights as possible.
I can't think who you're referring to...

But anyway.

Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for the Man in Black:

...And he said: "Son, this world is rough
And if a man's gonna make it, he's gotta be tough
And I knew I wouldn't be there to help ya along.
So I give ya that name and I said goodbye
I knew you'd have to get tough or die
And it's the name that helped to make you strong."

He said: "Now you just fought one hell of a fight
And I know you hate me, and you got the right
To kill me now, and I wouldn't blame you if you do.
But ya ought to thank me, before I die,
For the gravel in ya guts and the spit in ya eye
Cause I'm the son-of-a-bitch that named you Sue."

[jamie]

Stop the Spirit of Shirley Crabtree!

[Alex]

It's the dream of every mad scientist. "They laughed at me at the university! Well, I'll show them!"

Hence Herbert Backe, State Secretary of Agriculture and prime mover of the Hunger Plan and maybe more; his thesis had been rejected years before because he wanted to kill all the Russians, now he reprinted it as briefing material for the invasion.

[Chris Williams]

Reprint my thesis, and the invading army will be well clued up on the ways that democratic control, radical critiques, and the English legal system interacted to re-define urban space in the C19th. And I could have been a contender. Damn.

[Tom]

"That would explain Goering's uniforms."

Quite - I've just come back from a visit to RAF Hendon, where they have some Nazi stuff in the Battle of Britain Hall, including Goering's sky blue outfit and an overblown certificate awarding some honour or other, all gilt and angular fontage. I'd like to hope the British equivalent would be a crumpled telegram with slightly crooked printing - I think my partner's grandfather's MBE was communicated like that (he was a career RAF desk flyer).

"Orwell had something to say on the subject in "The Lion and the Unicorn": "

Bah, I thought I was being original, but as usual Mr. Blair got their first. He does sound like he's channelling Al Murray and Jeremy Clarkson, doesn't he?

"Stop the Spirit of Shirley Crabtree!"

Fighting Marion Morrison and Charles Pratt, no doubt?

[anonymous]

Androphilia.

Ex Cathedra.

That'll get you started.