Seeing some of my favorite films again (The Damned, The Conformist) as well as The Night Porter and thinking about Cabaret — all during this constant German film festival they seem to be having here in New York City — I wondered if the Nazis (or the Narzis as Mel Brooks would say) really sat around in garter belts all the time singing. And it got me to thinking about decadence. Some people insist on equating anything about Nazi Germany with decadence, decadence with fashion and the ultimate chic; ergo-Nazis are chic. Certainly Nazi films are in.. .but somehow the whole thing seems so.. .well, two years ago to me. I remember being on Portobello Road with Richard and Dennis Katz and Lou Reed and all of us looking at the Nazi medal booths; Dennis bought one Nazi flag and came home to proudly drape it across the couch in his RCA Vice President’s office. That was in 1972. Ron Asheton always had an incredible Nazi memorabilia collection — medals, armbands, coats, jackets, postcards.. .the whole lot. But all of this always seemed so harmless; like Dennis’ flag, it was like a little boy sticking his fingers in the fire, playing at something.

And then there are all those supposed Nazi bands. All I really know about them is that Murray Krugman of Columbia Records seems to have something to do with some of them. Or at least The Blue Oyster Cult and now The Dictators. For a start, Blue Oyster Cult really only has that semi-swastika flag; (Fran Lebowitz said that if you wear a semi-swastika that means only one of your grandparents was a Nazi), and Danny Fields says that The Dictators are just about leather and vomit. They don’t even really vomit onstage like Iggy did (nothing so healthy as Lillian would say), they sing about it. We once heard about a band called Hitler and the Belmonts that Marty Thau was interested in; they lived near Philadelphia under a bridge and the lead singer stripped to his boxer shorts during auditions and ran around his living room. Anyway — we all know that the only Nazi bands were The Stooges and Nico. So much for that.

People’s fascination with torture aside, were the Nazis really into decadent fashion as some of the films would have us believe? One glance at the clothing of the women during that period — Eva Braun, etc. — reveals that they were into very simple floral print dresses. The entire movement was really a lower middle class one without much style; the men were high macho military, it was all uniforms. In terms of glamor, there was none. What has made it glamorous today perhaps is the distorted view of the evil of the military and of uniforms, especially (yum-yum) the emphasis on leather. The personal clothing was boring beyond belief, as was the personal life of the Nazi bigwigs. Hitler sat around eating lettuce and watching the same film night after night; Donald Lyons says it was high Archie Bunker. So okay — the women wore flowered crepe de chine and murmured “I love you Adolph” when they masturbated and the men did a lot of parade strutting in what was the Nazi sense of theater. So where were all the drag queens? All those garter belts and top hats? Helmut Berger. Dominque Sanda and Stefania Sandrelli dancing together, and all that.

Actually, it was in the late 1920s that Berlin was hot. Lotte Lenya, Josef von Sternberg, Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht, Marlene Deitrich, Erich von Stroheim, Fritz Lang. . .all those people were creative and flourishing in Germany. Kurt Weill’s Drei Groschenoper (Threepenny Opera as it is more familiarly known today) was staged in Berlin in 1928 and immediately was the rage csf all Europe. George Grosz was painting all those painted fat ladies beating up little old men, the, Bauhaus was creating' modern architecture and people were gay and Jewish and left wing. (An oversimplification to be sure, but you get the point.) Anyway -* many of the sophisticated, ironic, and sexual fashions found their way to Hollywood via the likes of Deitrich,.von Sternberg, Lang and so forth; by the late 1930s most of the creative forced had either fled Germany in terror or were on their way to their deaths.

With the exception of the SA branch of the Nazi military which was quickly wiped out, there wasn’t even any overt homosexuality in the Nazi movement. You may derive what you will from the flaunted masculinity of uniforms, parades, guns, etc. — but it was all fairly repressed. To talk of Nazi fashion is really a joke — it’s like a Puerto Rican who’s who. It was just a drabber version of what was happening* in the West during the late 1930s — early 1940s. Joan Crawford dresses and gabardine suits. Not decadent, not flashy, not glamorous.

But probably Hollywood (or. Rome or whatever) will continue turning out this kind of fantasy because it’s so easy to lump transvestites, or sado-masochism, or decadence, — or anything interesting for that matter — with something evil. It’s like Wayne County’s grandmother told him at an early age when she caught him wearing high heeled boots and combing his blond hair down into his eyes: “The Bible says that one of the signs that the world is near cornin’ to an end is when the men go to lookin’ and actin’ like women.”