The seemingly inexhaustible spate of literature on the Third Reich continues unabated with the soon to be published Memoirs of Friedrich Schmeed. Schmeed, the best-known barber in wartime Germany, provided tonsorial services for Hitler and many highly placed government and military officials. As was noted during the Nuremberg Trials, Schmeed not only seemed to be always at the right place at the right time but possessed "more than total recall" and was thus uniquely qualified to write this incisive guide to innermost Nazi Germany.Schmeed explains that -
I have been asked if I was aware of the moral implications of what I was doing. As I told the tribunal at Nuremberg, I did not know that Hitler was a Nazi. The truth was that for years I thought he worked for the phone company. When I finally did find out what a monster he was, it was too late to do anything, as I had made a down payment on some furniture. Once, toward the end of the war, I did contemplate loosening the Fuhrer's neck-napkin and allowing some tiny hairs to get down his back, but at the last minute my nerve failed me.After reading 7 Annual Review of Critical Psychology, devoted to Lacan, I wonder whether we need a hairdresser hermeneutic, just the thing for devotees of Zizek and other pomo provocateurs.
ARCP ("an international peer-reviewed online open-access journal") features an interview with Lacan's hairdresser (347-354).
Prior to the Enlightenment, that sadly under-appreciated development, people reverenced sacred trinkets such as the prepuce of Christ (at least five prepuces, all no doubt authentic and of course fully equipped with miraculous powers, were available in 1500), holy nails from The Cross, bits of Noah's Ark, knucklebones of saints and so forth. (I confess to enjoying the tale of the virtuous woman who demonstrated her piety and concern for her community during a pilgrimage by bending to kiss the preserved paw of a saint, biting off one of his digits and triumphantly taking that pirated bit of bone back to her local church where it became a local treasure). In 2010 we like our relics nicely disinfected and disembodied: come worship, true believers, at the virtual shrine of Jacques Lacan rather than worrying that your cleaner will throw out a clipping of St Jack's hair - blue rinse and all - acquired on eBay or that the cat will turn said relic into a furball.
'Lacan's hairdresser: an encounter with Karolos Kambelopoulos' by Stavros Psaroudakis, Ian Parker & Erica Burman notes that parts of the text "may not correspond to other published accounts that are grounded in empirical truth claims".
Ah, academia. Let's enjoy the tale and not worry about dusty "empirical truth claims" or boring facticity.
Kambelopoulos recounts that -
He was never a one to wait in the salon, he never wanted to wait. I would arrange everything, because every day I did 30 clients and so when he had the appointment I knew I had to arrange everything. And then one time he came and I couldn’t arrange everything. I had four clients and so he goes up to have his shampoo and his blue rinse, and he says to me 'What time will you see me', and I told him I'm not free so you have to wait a bit, go and sit down. Anyway he had a pink bib on, and the blue rinse was going down on it, and he was annoyed, and then he got up and then went out and went home, with the blue rinse still on and the pink bib. The owner of Carita told me that he'd gone home with all of the blue rinse on him, and she told me that I have to go and to see him at home. So, I had to go to his house. She was very furious, and she was the one who insisted that I follow him to his house and cut his hair. So I went there and he was in his bathroom, sitting there waiting, and he told me 'I like Greek people'. So then I cut his hair, and then I when I was finished I took the tip of hundred francs and I said to him 'Now Doctor Lacan I don't any more want to cut your hair anymore'. ...With that in mind I'm wondering about rediscovering the memoirs of Carl Schmitt's pedicurist, an interview with the girl who sold Roland Freisler a cream cake in 1932 or the guy who fixed a flat tyre on Vyshinsky's limo in 1946.
That was the last time I cut his hair. He never came back, and the owner of Carita said to me 'It was because of you that Lacan came here, but now we have lost him'. I used to see him in exhibitions and in the theatre and he used to say to me ‘I like you very much, but you don’t want to cut my hair'. It wasn't pride, my pride that made me say 'No', and refuse to cut his hair again, it was just that he was such a spoilt man. ...
I used to meet him many times outside an exhibition, and he used to speak to me and I would speak to him, but I was clear that I never was going to cut his hair again. You know, he was furious because I wouldn’t cut his hair. I only went to his house that one time to cut his hair that was the last time, as I said. When he came to the Carita salon he just had his hair done, he never had a massage or a shave or anything like that.
