Sybille Steinbacher has recently pointed out that, because men's and women's gendered experience of everyday life in Nazi Germany were closely interwoven, they need to be discussed in relation to each other. If a housewife, for instance, enjoyed listening to Zarah Leander while her husband objected to the deep (unfeminine) voice and turned off the radio, questions about men's and women's expectations and relative understandings of femininity and masculinity arise.

In Nazi Germany, as elsewhere, “constructions of masculinity are interwoven with constructions of femininity.” This essay discusses three women in Nazi Germany and their discursive engagement with “moving men”: sportsmen of the Third Reich. Discursive engagement is a creative engagement with historical and cultural traditions within the framework of social policies and the practices of everyday life. It is a process that enables cultural and social agency: women (for example) may thereby access male stereotypes and carve out of them a non-traditional image of “woman”; or they may become image-makers for men, giving the public what it expects in social and political terms while simultaneously remodeling male stereotypes with a creative and critical eye. The men in motion of this study are “moving men” in a double sense: they are both men of sports, and men who arouse emotions in their audiences — idols of popular culture. That such men appealed to mixed audiences in the Third Reich is not least the result of these women engaging with them discursively; their masculinity could be made to link women's and men's gender-specific experience of everyday life with larger historical contexts.

Leni Riefenstahl

Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003) has long been at the center of public debate. Her images of men in motion, while in her own words reflecting nothing but beauty, arguably turned a racist agenda into a sinister object of desire. Famously, the prologue of Fest der Völker (Olympia I) establishes a close-up perspective on the body in motion that brings the moving body and the moving eye of the observer into playful interaction. The camera, angled upwards, engages with the athlete's body closely, in just a hint of slow motion. The angle frames the upper body against the sky; a perspective that draws attention to and idealizes the athletic physique, cutting away the immediate surroundings as well as the intermediary space between viewer and object.