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At some point in 1933, Ms. Klose can no longer take it.

She is writing a poem.

It consists of a few iambs and also a few troches, whereby the first letters of the verses form the name "Adolf Hitler".

There is almost always an exclamation mark on the back.

Mrs. Klose sends her work to the "Führer" in the hope that he will have it printed by a newspaper.

The answer: "Unfortunately, permission to print your poem cannot be given, as the Führer fundamentally refuses to glorify his person."

A joke, one might think, but then the enthusiast only saw herself confirmed in her assumption that the beloved was a hero without blame or blame and only committed to the "goal" (Klose).

And so all inhibitions soon disappear in the female Hitler fan mail: "Adi, you sweet little bitch" calls him "Ritschi".

Friedel S., on the other hand, soberly just wants a child from him.

Such sexual clarity may have caused unease in the addressee, but the dictator was convinced: "In politics you need the support of women. The men follow you by themselves."

There we have it: Male herd instinct + female individual worship = dictatorship.

Are women to blame again?

Front lines between top and bottom

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Especially in swarm-intelligent times of "post gender" and "liquid democracy", the discussion of political eroticism has a certain urgency, precisely because the front lines between mass and power, man and woman, above and below seem to flow so nicely.

The French television journalist Diane Ducret courageously places such private and political testimonies of dictatorial seduction as the quoted "Adi" letters 2011 in a series with the life testimonies of selected "women of the dictators": women who are more or less voluntarily at the side of Mussolini, Lenin , Stalins, Salazars, Bokassas, Maos, Ceaucescus and Hitler's and in some cases achieved great, ominous power there themselves.

In return, they even accepted rather unsavory things, and we're not even talking about abstract nonsense like torture and mass shootings outside their own four hundred walls.

No, this is first and foremost about what has always sparked the people's imagination and increased the dictator's intimidating omnipotence: the matter of the coveted ruler's body.

"I wash in my women"

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Mao Tse-tung's oral hygiene, for example, consisted essentially of rinsing the throat briefly and then chewing a few leaves.

The teeth of the great chairman are said to have been covered with a greenish coating.

Instead of bathing or showering, he let the servants rub him down, at least with damp cloths.

About his intimate hygiene he stated: "I wash myself in my wives".

And there was always a supply.

He had his playmates, preferably dancers, recruited from communist art organizations by his private secretary.

By the way, he was married for the fourth time.

Mao's personal physician explains to his wife, the dreaded cultural revolutionary whip Jiang Qing, that physical and mental activities are "strictly separated" for her husband.

Later she also takes young male concubines, but apart from being beautiful, they should at least be a pianist or a writer.

Jiang Qing, who is blamed not only for her own actions but also for her husband's actions and who was sentenced to death in 1981 (but then kills herself), sums up: "The man's contribution to history is limited to a drop of semen."

Mussolini and the Ukrainian nobles

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According to her own assessment, Margarita Fazzini also had the right nose for dictator matters.

The Italian writer compares the "Duce" Benito Mussolini, whose eyes, mouth and chin area she succumbs immediately on the first visit, with Napoleon: Like him, Mussolini also knows how to deal with the crowd and the feminine.

The crowd is also female, and like a woman they recognize the man, "the real man".

Vladimir Putin's half-naked appearances at Jagd und Ritt prove that a lot of trust is placed in this mechanism even in a (if not entirely flawless) democracy.

However, it often does not stop at the mere instinctive recognition of outstanding physical characteristics.

In addition, the powerful man is not infrequently formed in the first place by the witty woman, and the beloved little would-be is purposefully made into an adorable dictator for everyone.

Mussolini's "Pygmalione", as he apparently called her according to Ducret, was the socialist Angelica Balabanoff, who came from the Ukrainian nobility.

The 36-year-old takes the still unknown, neglected young teacher under her wing, shapes his thinking and helps him with the publication of the magazine "Avanti!".

Some were driven to suicide

Adolf Hitler's change from the slender booby in lederhosen to the halfway lithe charismatic was done by a woman of high standing in the early 1920s: Helene Bechstein.

The wife of the piano heir senses a worthwhile educational work and goes to work.

She taught the future rulers behavior and clothing style, introduced him to politically decisive circles and introduced him to the Wagnerians.

As perfectly as Hitler soon masters the game of closeness and distance, as long as the crowd is at stake, his behavior towards women by his side remains clumsy (he was also said to be impotent) and even monstrous.

His incestuous niece Angelika "Geli" Raubal was not the only one he drove to suicide.

A systematic or exegesis should not be expected from "The Dictators' Wives".

They were also fundamentally different.

And the concepts of partnership were very different, depending on the ideology propagated, although, as in less spectacular marriages, there were interesting paradoxes.

The marriage skeptic Lenin lived a cruet a trois with two women who were warmly attached to each other, but was himself extremely jealous.

Bokassa had girls he wanted forcibly kidnapped and then locked them up, regardless of whether they, like Catherine, were then crowned Empress of Central Africa.

The blinded, the prisoners, the crazy

Despite all the differences: In the photo series in the middle of Ducret's book, it speaks gloomily from lowered eyes, and the chubby, radiant ones will fare badly too.

Almost all of the women sooner or later suffered from depression, anorexia, traumatic child loss or paranoia.

Most of the time, these blinded, prisoners, and crazy people slowly perished, put a bullet in their bodies or were executed.

Of course, it may play a key role here that a dictatorship, like other forms of rule, devotes itself to control over the female body.

It is the preferred battleground for private obsessions as well as collective claims.

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When Hitler visits his "Tschapperl" Eva Braun and she has her period, he has something prescribed for her.

Elena Ceaucescu, who fantasizes about an increase in the population and who was executed together with her husband in 1989, ensures that all women have to be examined for illegal abortions at short intervals, with terrible consequences.

How far do you go for love

So dictator women like to make it a little worse.

Insidiously, it is they who make contact with "the people" easier for the ruler.

As the sugar component of the bitter oral vaccination, they enable democratic foreign countries to deal with a regime of horror: If a dictatorship is inevitable, at least the beautiful dictator's wife has to prove her goodness.

Otherwise it will simply be relabeled as a beautiful beast.

That is what the current dispute over the wife of the Syrian ruler Bashar al Assad is about: diplomats and ambassadors recently appealed in an open letter to Asma al Assad's conscience as the mother of the country.

"What happened to you, Asma?"

German newspapers translated the words that cannot necessarily be interpreted as a Duz salutation in English.

It is the disappointed love for the London-born, modern-looking woman who continues to cling to her dubious husband, leaves the community of women and is unfaithful to all of us.

No man would come up with the idea of ​​writing a serious opinion article about his fellow man with "Bashar, why did you do that?"

to overwrite.

In an interview, Diane Ducret stated that the motivation for her book was primarily private-emotional motives aimed at a female "we": "As a woman, I asked myself: How far do you go for love? And: Can we really deal with someone love any price, even if it destroys us? "

Ideology vehicle and fig leaf

As unpleasant, numerous and barely comprehensible as these résumés are, the fascination with which they are held is so crystal clear that there is a general uncertainty about vague role models and fragile modes of participation in power.

The dictator's wife is an ideology vehicle and a fig leaf at the same time, and it shows that women are not as powerless as you always claim.

That is precisely why the principle of dictator's wife will continue to work and fascinate for a while, despite the baby diapers of changing men and a successful pirate party ("shit personality cult!") - like every extreme, which is often not as foreign to one's own as one would like it to be.

We are currently talking more often about "erotic capital" as an invitation to women to polish up their appearance in such a way that they can still gain influence in politics, business and science: through the pleasure of powerful men.

This article was first published in 2012.