What the Word "Aryan" Actually Costs

Blond hair, blue eyes, white skin—the image is so familiar it barely requires description. A fantasy assembled from insecurity and pseudoscience, one that provided ideological cover for the murder of millions. The word "Aryan" became the most lethal concept in modern European history, and for all the death it caused, it was based on a fabrication: the original Aryans were an ancient Indo-Iranian people whose genetics have nothing to do with Northern European phenotypes and whose civilization predates Nazi Germany by several millennia.

Mo Asumang—a German-Ghanaian filmmaker and actress—decided to trace the word back to its source. Her documentary Die Arier takes her into the rooms where the myth is still being maintained: German nationalist student fraternities (Burschenschaften), Ku Klux Klan chapters in the American South, neo-Nazi cells, and at least one man who sincerely believes the Nazis survived the war by relocating to Mars and now traverse the skies above Berlin in zigzagging UFOs. She walks into all of these rooms as herself—a Black woman—which isn’t incidental. It’s the entire methodology.

The gap between what these people believe and what’s standing in front of them is the film’s central argument, and Asumang lets it breathe without editorializing. Her approach is curious, almost gentle, which strips her subjects of the martyrdom they’d receive from a confrontational interviewer. They end up exposing themselves with more thoroughness than any debate could achieve. The film makes the obvious point—that "Aryan" and "German" have approximately as much in common as racial purity ideology has with intelligence—but it makes it by letting the believers speak, and by letting the historical record speak louder.