Chapter VI: The Psychological Interpretation of Culture and History
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Based on Mein Kampf and Hitler’s speeches, I discovered that organic metaphors lay at the heart of Hitler’s ideology. These organic images, phrases and metaphors contained within Hitler’s rhetoric reveal the phantasies that defined Hitler’s ideology. Hitler’s fundamental phantasy—as one can see from the table below—was that of the German nation as an organism; an actual “body” politic. One might say that Hitler’s phrases were “just” metaphors. On the contrary, I found that everything Hitler said (and eventually did) grew out of this phantasy—of Germany as an actual body. Beginning with this fact—that Hitler thought of (experienced) Germany as an actual organism, everything else followed. Based on Hitler’s phantasy of the nation as an organism, it is not difficult to trace the “logic” of National Socialism—and of the Holocaust. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Table 1. The Country is a Living Organism
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
