Disgust

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.