Is there something sinister and totalitarian in the union of the words "perfect body"? A form of idealism that can only lead to disaster? The words "perfect body" in 2026 sound like the pressures of the unfriendly happiness and wellness industry, but their origin goes back and has a political meaning: Germany, in the years of the Third Reich, shaped the idea of the perfect body that we still have in mind. And the representation in bronze of a perfect body in the National Socialist style, a sculpture by Arno Breker called The Calling, appears on the cover of The Nazi Body. The Contained Body (Trotta publishing house), the essay written by filmmaker Nayra Sanz Fuentes about the battle of bodies in the dark period from 1933 to 1945.
In summary: Sanz Fuentes explains in her research what the ideology and politics of the Nazis were regarding bodies of their people and their enemies. And the second part of the title of her book, "the contained body," is the concept that synthesizes her work.
What is a contained body? "I follow Foucault: we are bodies crossed by power in one way or another. The 12 years of the Reich were very short, but they have marked history. And the contained body means enclosed and, at the same time, speaks of the body as a container. What do they contain? The Nazi bodies contain the concept of gene and race, which is essential. Bodies are part of a chosen people, the German people, who have a unique destiny. The body must become aware of its racial soul and dedicate itself to the unique destiny of the German people. It was not a matter of belonging to a race, but of contributing to its mission. The individual surrendered their individuality and consecrated their body to the thousand-year empire."
And where does that idea come from? "There were elements brewing since the late 19th century. For example, the Freikorpel Kultur, the culture of the free body, which comes from the romantic tradition and proposes a direct relationship between the body and nature. We are talking about nudism, sports, idealization of nature... These are harmless values, initially, but National Socialism perverted them. Sports and health became a means to an end, which was the fulfillment of the destiny of the Aryan race." The Nazis, explains Sanz Fuentes, start from "the idea of the Greek body, the body of mens sana in corpore sano, where there is a relationship between the body and intellectual life, but they turn the body into armor made for war."
The last third of The Nazi Body. The Contained Body uses the films of Leni Riefenstahl to create images with ideas. What should we know about Riefenstahl? "She was a very ambitious woman and there was an opportunistic side to her. But she was not in the Nazi system out of opportunism. Riefenstahl believed in the Reich and in the contained body. She herself was a contained body," says Sanz Fuentes. Also in her flaws. "Her maternal grandmother was a Polish Jew. Riefenstahl falsified her papers and presented her mother's stepmother as her grandmother to enter the film industry. That speaks of a very interesting concept, the governmentalization of bodies that Foucault wrote about, the obsession with genealogical trees and racial proportions. Her interest in art was genuine, she had what it took to be an artist. She had seen paintings since she was a child and had a well-trained eye, she was a dancer, she was an actress... Directing films was her way of synthesizing that training, as it happened with Akira Kurosawa."
"And there was technical audacity. She went to see engineers and got them to make her a camera for underwater shots. She invented camera balloons. She would launch them into the sky and when they fell to the ground, they would reveal a message that said: 'Please inform Mrs. Leni Riefenstahl's production company.' If we compare the films made about the Olympic Games 10 years earlier with those made by Riefenstahl, it's like going from the 19th century to the 20th century. The editing, the movement, the expression on faces. During the years of the Reich, 1,200 films were made in Germany. Of these, today we are interested in three, those of Riefenstahl."
And that, despite the perfect bodies of Olympia, a thousand times serialized, all the same, expressionless. They are ideally beautiful but, in reality, not even desirable. "Because desirability is transferred elsewhere. Desirable, for the Nazis, is a body that serves to fulfill the collective end, not the individual one of pleasure or delight in beauty. For us, being beautiful or finding someone beautiful is something that belongs to the individual level, it is something intimate that is part of our individuality. In the contained body, being beautiful is also a means to an end which is the construction of the empire. There were very specific characteristics of what it meant to be Aryan. Beauty does not arise from a place of attraction or taste, but from purpose. Women, for example, what purpose did they have? The three K's: Kirche, Kuche und Kinder, church, kitchen, and children. And they were beautiful as long as they fulfilled those functions," explains Fuentes Sanz.
One more matter: in The Nazi Body. The Contained Body, there is also a chapter dedicated to the representation of the Jewish body in Nazi cinema. "The Jewish body is the antibody. It is the image of what conspires against the mission of the race, it is the anti-model. The Nazis used the metaphor of the garden from which the weeds must be pulled. It is a brutal metaphor because it distorts the word garden, which always evokes something positive... The anti-Semitic films had their most important year in 1940: The Rothschilds, Jew Suss,The Eternal Jew... All represented the stigmatized body of the Jew, with a series of physical characteristics antagonistic to what supposedly was the Aryan body. And the story is always the same: unmasking, dehumanization, and extermination."