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A LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE ESSAY
The Jewish Parasite...is Germany
by Richard A. Koenigsberg
For a complete list of Richard A. Koenigsberg’s essays and papers, please click here.
The dream of immortality = no separation = no death becomes symbiotic upon the self. The immortal object and the “parasite” are one and the same. One must “feed” the impossible dream. The dream of immortality is brought into being by virtue of sacrifices made in relationship to the object.

Jews symbolized the negative meaning of the omnipotent object: experience of the object as parasitical—feeding upon the self. In killing Jews, Hitler is trying to kill Germany, that is, the destructive experience of an omnipotent object bound to the self.

Hitler wishes to fuse the German people into a single “melting pot:” uniting them into one omnipotent body politic. To fuse means to unite as by smelting or welding. The idea is to destroy the idea of individuality or separateness: create a single, gigantic body.

The gas chambers show the other side of the coin of the idealized fantasy. Melting together means degradation and death. Jews in the gas chambers are the negation of the Nuremberg rallies. The death camps reveal the other side of the coin of national unity: destruction of individuality as many bodies fuse together as if a single mass of flesh.

The nation is a “selfobject” containing self plus immortal object fused into one. This selfobject must exclude what leads bodies to die. A body that seeks immortality cannot be like other living organisms. Hitler aspires to create an immortal body politic free of defect and disease.

The Nazis projected the idea of weakness into “others.” The Jewish disease was imagined to be the source of national death. Killing Jews was killing the idea that bodies contain a force leading them to die. The Final Solution was a desperate struggle to destroy death, that is, the source of death, the Jews. If all Jews were killed, there would be no disease within the body politic and Germany could live forever.

The perception that all bodies die is projected into the Jew, perceived as a “force of disintegration.” Hitler represses his knowledge of death and projects the idea that there are no such things as immortal bodies into the Jew. Killing Jews is a struggle to kill the source of death: to destroy that which negates the fantasy of Germany as an immortal body.

Modern history is rooted in the fantasy of nations as omnipotent bodies politic. Nazism reveals this dream, and its destructiveness. In the Final Solution, Hitler embraced and enacted the fantasy of the nation as a body that could be “immortal” if only destructive forces—enemies within—could be removed. The Final Solution enacted a collective fantasy of “saving the nation:” killing that which prevented it from living forever.

Hitler sought the “resurrection” of Germany. In his rise to power, people suggested that Germany’s problems were insurmountable; that she could never recover. The German nation, some insisted, was dead and done for. Hitler fulminated: “Therefore let no one object ‘But this is impossible’. That no one can—no one must—say to me. I am not one of the men who allow themselves to say, ‘It is impossible’. It must be possible. For Germany must live.”

This idea, “Germany must live,” lay at the core of Hitler’s ideology. He aspired to bring the nation back to life. Refusing to accept the death of Germany, Hitler sought to “save the country.”

Hitler conceived of the German people as a single, massive body consisting of German people as cells of this body. Nothing is permitted to exist in separation from this body. Rather, everything must exist as part of this body. Thus, what is defective within the nation is also connected to this body.

Deformed children, the mentally ill, and Jews are deformed bodies that exist in a state of connection to the perfect body-politic. They therefore must be “separated” from this body: extricated, extirpated in order to maintain the purity and perfection of this body.

Hitler’s mission was to save the German nation from death by destroying the disease within the nation: source of death, the Jew. The Final Solution enacted an immunological fantasy: every single Jew had to be identified and located—because Jews like bacteria could divide and multiply. It was necessary to make Germany “Jew-free.” Germans conceived Hitler as “Doctor of the nation” whose objective was to save Germany by curing her disease.

Jews are accused of being anti-social criminals because they are perceived as lacking faith in the greatness of the nation. They are conceived as being insufficiently devout. Jews are individuals who do not worship Germany.

What is criminal—what is projected onto the Jew—is the wish to be separate: destruction of the condition of “oneness” imagined to exist between people and nation. The Jew symbolizes a force destroying the bond linking human beings with their nation. The Jew represents separation from the community: withdrawal from “culture.”

The “Jew” is an idea or mental representation in the mind of Hitler and the Nazis. The question of genocide revolves around the meaning of this symbolic object, the Jew. In seeking to kill Jews, what were the Nazis seeking to “kill off?” The destruction of the Jew constituted the destruction of an idea that Hitler found unbearable.

Hitler imagines that he and the other Germans exist in a state of fusion with one another. The people (as cells of a body) weld and fuse together to create a massive, indestructible organism, a unified body that cannot be broken or torn apart.

Hitler imagines that some individuals do not wish to be “at one” with this body; to fuse with it. These individuals are conceived as acting to disrupt or destroy the fantasy of “unity.” Because they seek to exist in a condition of “separateness” from the nation, they must be destroyed.

Hitler states that he wants to “exterminate the things that tear our volk apart.” He wishes to destroy the tendency to “separate” from the body-politic; to “split” from it. Hitler wants to create a “closely knit body:” fusing all German people into one body; uniting them as if they are cells to create a gigantic, indestructible organism.

This fantasy of an indestructible organism consisting of German people as cells was the foundation of Nazism. The idea of the Jew as a destructive or diseased cell within this organism—working to destroy it—was the source of the Final Solution.

Hitler fears that Germany will succumb to a fatal-disease: that the nation will not live forever. The “triumph of the will” is the hysterical denial of death: struggle to “defeat” the source of death: the enemy. An “enemy” is that which threatens the immortality of the nation.

Genocide was intended to be the final solution: an effort to destroy the enemy permanently; put an end to that which causes death, once and for all. The Nazis sought to kill off the source of death, the Jew. Jews symbolized precisely that which “disintegrated” the idea of the nation;” what negated immortality, leading bodies to their demise.

The Jewish “problem” is the problem that all bodies have: they eventually cease to exist. In order to solve this problem, it is necessary to kill the source of death. Jews symbolized that force within each body that moves it toward disintegration.
The hysterical energy mobilized by Hitler represented a response to the experience of suffering and death that was a consequence of the First World War.

It was “hyperhealth,” super-human strength that Hitler sought. The Nazis encouraged the German people to rise up against their weakness and suffering to become “supermen.” The ideology of strength, health and Hypermasculinity represented a response to the specter of disease and death.

The dream of Nazism is the fantasy of a gigantic organism suffering from a potentially fatal disease. Hitler imagined himself as the “Robert Koch of Germany:” that unique individual who had discovered the pathogen that was the source of the nation’s disease. He would act in the spirit of immunology: to destroy Germany’s pathogens, thus to “save the nation.”

Nazism is relocation of the self into the body politic. Nationalism is expansion of the body-ego: wish to create an omnipotent, immortal, self-perpetuating body that contains no weakness. Nazism is escape from one’s concrete body into an immortal body. The German nation embodied the fantasy of an immortal body that would never die.

What occurs in Nazism is the symbiotic fusion of self and nation. Life is lived in the name of the immortal German Reich. One is willing to sacrifice concrete existence in the name of maintaining the health and life of the body politic.

Equation of self with nation is the essence of nationalism. Radical nationalism is renunciation of one’s own body: sacrifice in the name of the idea of an immortal nation in which one’s own body will forever be contained.

The immortal object inside the self symbiotically clings to the self, constituting a burden or encrustation. One is oppressed, paralyzed by the fact that one is “bound” to the mental representation of an omnipotent object.

Attached to this object, the individual cannot separate from the dream of an immortal self. The dream of omnipotence oppresses concrete existence. Attachment to the immortal object is ambivalent, promising “eternity” but sapping life out of concrete existence.

Precisely the dream of immortality = no separation = no death becomes symbiotic upon the self. The parasite is the “immortal object” within. One must “feed” the impossible dream. One feeds the dream by making sacrifices. The dream of immortality is brought into being by virtue of sacrifices made in relationship to the object.

Dead bodies produced by war, genocide and terrorism testify to the reality of the object in the name of which sacrifices are made. One must feed the “monster”—one’s omnipotent fantasy—in order to keep the dream alive.

Jews symbolize the negative meaning of the omnipotent object: experience of the object as parasitical—feeding upon the self. In killing Jews, Hitler is trying to kill Germany, that is, the destructive experience of an omnipotent object bound to the self.

The dream of immortality provides consolation. However, the energy invested in structures of immortality (nations, gods, etc.) pull one away from concrete reality with its pleasures.

Hitler commits to the sacrificial dream. However, the pain of fulfilling this fantasy is projected into the Jew: symbol of the destructive meaning of sacrifice. The Nazis “split off” the negative experience of the dream of immortality and project it into the Jew, experienced as a “parasite” sucking one’s blood.

The parasite or negative experience of the omnipotent object sucks the blood out of the omnipotent object. When one experiences the omnipotent object as a parasite that is sucking one’s blood, one’s devotion to this object wavers.

Hitler—on some level—was aware of the suffering that he (and other Germans) had undergone in the name of their “beloved Reich.” But he cannot acknowledge the pain he has suffered in the name of Germany—and refuses to abandon his beloved. The death camps reveal the consequence of submission to the nation state: sacrifice as horror. The Jew symbolizes the Nazi’s masochistic self, which they try to “kill off.”

The Holocaust was willful destruction of the individual in the name of the state: the wish to destroy that part of the ego that is symbiotically bound to the omnipotent object. When the Jew “goes out the chimney,” turns into smoke, he is freed of the burden of the oppressive German state. The crematoria “release” individuals from the nation-state.

The Nazis described themselves as obedient, loyal, faithful, etc. In the First World War, obedience, loyalty and faithfulness led to degradation and death. However, in spite of the horror, Hitler continued to idealize and remain devoted to Germany. The death camps reveal the true meaning of submission to the nation: sacrificial death without the sugar-coating of words such as honor and nobility.

Jews in the gas chambers—bodies crushed together—give witness to the consequence of submission to the nation-state. Hitler’s fantasy of symbiotic oneness takes the form of many bodies bound to one another in death. This is the dream of “oneness” in its most horrific form: destruction of the individual and individuality. Flesh and blood fuse to create a nauseating form of unity.