Carin Fock-Göring’s Gravestone: Tracing the Legacy of the Swedish First Lady of the Third Reich

This chapter takes a long view of the dynamic role played by the image of Carin Fock-Goering within the Nazi imagination before, during and after the Third Reich. Exploring and interrogating various constructions of imagined Swedishness and Aryanness within the Nazi propaganda machine, the chapter sheds light on the problematic, multivalent, mythologizing discourses surrounding the creation of the Fock “legend.” Her public image first functions as a paragon of total fealty to the Fuehrer and as a quasi-First Lady of the regime in the absence of a Mrs. Hitler. Fock’s curious posthumous legacy as an elevated and almost saintly ideal of womanhood within the Reich reveals much about how Sweden and Swedishness were imagined by the Third Reich. The postwar trajectory of the Fock “legend” signals a more overt expression of Sontag’s notion of “fascinating fascism” as seen through the macabre and highly fetishized fascination with and itinerary of her remains.