Moral Angst

Abstract

This chapter analyzes a little-known episode of moral panic during the 1950s: the alleged abduction of young German men into the French Foreign Legion. Fears and fantasies of the Foreign Legion reflected a widespread sense of popular humiliation and limited sovereignty vis-à-vis the Western allies during that decade. Fears of the abduction of young Germans into the Legion reflected deep-seated concerns regarding the safety and integrity of male youth, which formed the core constituency of postwar reconstruction. The alleged “recruiter” as “folk devil” represented the absolute opposite of normative male citizenship. Cultural representations cast the recruiter as effeminate, foreign, and potentially homosexual, as well as displaying some of the stereotypical antisemitic features of the Jewish “other.” By the late 1950s, the growing recognition that young men entered the Legion out of their own volition shifted public attention from fear of recruiters to concerns about the fragility of male youth in postwar society. West German anxieties regarding the Legion began to focus on the inner resilience and resistance of young German men rather than the external threat of seduction by French-paid recruiters. This shift from externally to internally generated fears and anxieties anticipated a general shift in the history of fear and anxiety in West Germany from the late 1950s onward.