November 5, 1999

'Recovering the Nation's Body: Cultural Memory, Medicine, and the Politics of Redemption'

By NINA C. AYOUB

Blut und Boden, the Nazis called it. "Blood and soil": the tie between the German homeland and those counted as part of the Volkskorper, or body of the people. The collective notion of a "social body" did not include those labeled Lebensunwertes Lebens: "lives unworthy of living." Their bodies were seen as societally worthless, but quite valuable in an organic sense. The Nazis harvested the dead and experimented on the living. At Auschwitz, physicians worked in a