Nationalism is the fantasy of the nation as an omnipotent extension of the self. One imagines that one’s own body is bound to a body politic; many bodies fuse to create a single body. When people imagine that their own bodies are bound together with other bodies to constitute the same body—the idea of the nation comes into being.

Hitler’s extraordinary feat was to have put forth the view that the nation was a biological reality—and to have persuaded people to believe in and act upon this view. He became “doctor of the German people,” acting to cure Germany’s disease by destroying Jewish bacteria—the source of Germany’s disease—so that civilization would survive.

The aspiration of Hitler and his followers was to kill death, that is, to kill Jews who symbolized the principle of death. Hitler’s sought to refute the proposition that all organisms die; that death comes to every organism. Germany would be a different—unique—kind of organism: one not subject to death and decay.

Hitler and the Nazis sought to destroy the principle of death—imagined to be contained within the Jew. However, no matter how many Jews the Nazis killed—affirming the proposition that Germany could become immortal—the idea of death continued to raise its head. No matter what Hitler did, he could not escape the feeling that Germany was disintegrating.

Abstract concepts cannot be separated from their source within the organism. Bodies politic cannot be detached from actual bodies. Hitler imagined that Germany—the body politic—was diseased and decomposing. He projected his own experience of disease and disintegration outward.

Hitler was engaged in an endless struggle to destroy death—the death he experienced within his own body. Hitler projected the idea of death into the Jew, and aspired to destroy Jews. By killing Jews, Hitler imagined he could exterminate death.

Since Hitler’s perceptions emanated from within his own mind and body, Hitler could not rid himself of the idea of death—no matter how many Jews he killed. Hitler was never able to shut off the feeling that the German body politic was in mortal danger. The Nazi movement revolved around an endless—futile—struggle to kill death.

Nazism was a spiritual movement seeking eternal life through identification with the nation. Germany represented the idea of an immortal body that would never die. The Jew was the principle of materialism—or “world affirmation.” Hitler’s mentor Dietrich Eckhart stated that “The earth-centered Jew lacks a soul.”

The Nazis were "other worldly," even as they were part of the world. Embracing their belief in the immortality of Germany, they sought to eliminate Jewishness, that is, belief that there is no such thing as immortality.

The “Volk” constituted a double of the self; a symbolic representation of the self. Just as Hitler was Germany, so every German was Hitler. Hitler symbolized an immortal self—contained within an immortal nation.

Totalitarianism meant that the idea of separation was forbidden. Everyone was required to identify with the Volk. There could be only one body, one Reich, one Fuhrer, one people. Everything that existed had to be contained within this single body. Each human being within Germany (cells of the body politic) had to fuse with the national organism.

Hitler refused to conceive the possibility that any-thing could exist in a condition of separation from the body politic. For him, there was no such thing as “external reality”—people or things that were not encompassed by national life. In Hitler’s mind, Germany had to be every-thing.

Identification with a body politic implies escape from one’s own body. In nationalism, the self is relocated. The idea of one’s actual body is projected into an omnipotent body politic. People become devoted to this entity—and are willing to “sacrifice” their concrete bodies in the name of a mystical body.

Nazism constituted a pure culture of nationalism: distillation or crystallization of its central fantasies. Deutschland über alles (Germany above all): The nation would reign supreme, swallowing individuals: consuming everyone and everything.