Chapter VII: The Psychological Interpretation of Culture and History
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In Chapter VI, I presented Table 1 of Hitler’s Ideology, “The Country is a Living Organism.” Hitler stated that Nazism alone was capable of creating a “national organism,” that the German nation was a “substance of flesh and blood,” and that economics is a “living process”—one of the “functions of that body which is the people.” He noted that the German people had become a “body corporate pulsing through and through with a vital inner life.” At the core of Hitler’s ideology, then, was this metaphor or phantasy of Germany as a living organism. Nearly everything Hitler said and did can be traced to his conception—or experience—of German as an actual body. Directly below, I’ve presented a second Table featured in Hitler’s Ideology. Table 6 presents 43 statements summarized with the title, “The National Body is Diseased.” In these statements—39.5% from Mein Kampf and 61% from his speeches—Hitler states that the German nation is suffering from:
Hitler noted that “forces of decay” in terrifying numbers were “brushing up and down the body politic.” As a result of the disease from which Germany was suffering, the nation “did not grow inwardly healthier,” but “languished more and more.” The “cure of a sickness,” Hitler declared, can only be achieved if its “cause is known,” and the same was true of “curing political evils.” Hitler stated that if one wanted to “cure this era which is inwardly sick and rotten,” one had to summon the courage to “make clear the causes” of the disease. The only way to cure diseased conditions was to “disclose their causes.” Hitler’s project was to wage a battle against the nation’s disease, lest Germany decay and “sink to ruin like a rotting corpse.” He would fight the “international carrier of the bacillus.” He gave the order to “burn out down to the raw flesh the ulcers.” He would see to it that the “Bolshevik plague” did not spread over Europe. Hitler would act to “lance the cancerous ulcer”—to remove the “Jewish bacillus infecting the life of peoples.” As a result of his efforts, the German people—and Reich—would become “immune from a Bolshevik infection.” So there it is—the core of Hitler’s ideology—his idea that Germany was suffering from a potentially fatal disease, the continuing presence of which within the body politic would lead to the death of the nation. The passages below make it clear that Hitler passionately experienced Germany’s disease. It was as if the disease within the body politic—the nation’s illness—was occurring within Hitler’s body. At the time I wrote Hitler’s Ideology, I had scant knowledge of the history of Nazism. Building upon my training as an experimental psychologist, my book was an empirical study focusing upon identifying recurring images and metaphors bound to the central elements of Hitler’s ideology. My only theoretical assumption was that recurring images and metaphors in Hitler’s writings and speeches revealed the phantasies that were the source of Hitler’s attraction to his ideology. Hitler projected certain phantasies into his ideology. These phantasies were the source of the nature and shape of Hitler’s ideology—of his perception of reality. |
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Table 6. The National Body is Diseased
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