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The Holocaust Enacted a Shared Fantasy
I've documented in this presentation the relationship between the Nazi perception of reality--and actions undertaken based on this perception. At the core of Hitler’s ideology was his belief that Germany was suffering from a "disease"—the result of Jewish pathogens that had invaded the body politic. In the absence of measures taken against these pathogens, Hitler claimed that Germany would die.
Jews were imagined as bacteria or viruses, cause of the nation’s disease. The Nazis created a social institution of enormous scope, whose purpose was systematically to murder these actual human beings--conceived as bacteria.
The Jews were not murdered based on their "racial inferiority" or for any practical reasons. Jews were murdered because they instantiated a certain concept present in the mind of Hitler and the Nazis. The elimination of Jews was necessary in order to prevent the German nation from meeting its demise. The purpose of the Final Solution was to assure that Germany would "live on."
It is astonishing that such a bizarre idea could have been believed and taken hold with a society. The bizarreness of the idea is matched by the bizarreness of the activity that was enacted based on this fantasy.
The Enlightenment fantasy of rationality continues to dominate Western discourse. This is called “political realism.” Many scholars--many people-- continue to believe there are “real reasons” underlying political acts. This assumption of "rationality" impedes understanding the Holocaust--and many other episodes of political violence. The assumption that there are “reasons.”
There are no "real" reasons for what occurred. Jews posed no actual threat to Germany. I often ask people to guess how many Jews there were in Germany in 1933 out of a population of 66 million. The responses I receive--from educated people as well as from scholars who do not specialize in the Nazi era—range from three-million to twenty-million.
In actuality, there were 550,000 Jews in Germany in 1933, substantially less than 1% of the population. People find it difficult to conceive that the Jews were killed for no reason at all. This was the case. Or shall we say, that Jews were killed for purely psychological reason. One cannot understand the Holocaust by searching for "reasons." Rather, one must unpack the logic contained within the Nazi fantasy.
The Holocaust was generated by a fantasy projected into the political arena. Hitler was the “prime mover,” the creator and promoter of this fantasy. Hitler’s fantasy revolved around the idea of Germany as an enormous body (politic) suffering from a disease that could prove fatal. Jews were identified as pathogenic cells—source of the nation’s disease. Genocide was undertaken in order to destroy the pathogenic cells.
Nazi political theorist Ernst Rudolf Huber in Constitutional Law of the Third Reich stated that the Führer was the "bearer of the collective will of the people." In the will of the leader, Huber said, the "will of the people is realized." Hitler’s will was not the "subjective will of a single man." Rather, the "collective national will" was embodied within the leader.
A people’s collective will is rooted in the "political idea which is given to a people." This political idea is present in the people, Huger explains, but the Führer "raises it to consciousness and discloses it." The role of the leader, in short, is to bring into consciousness ideas that had been latent or unconscious.
The leader brings forth or makes manifest ideas and desires that had been latent within a culture. His ideology reveals and crystallizes a people’s shared fantasies. The leader invents images, metaphors and phrases to convey these fantasies. He processes his own fantasies and those of his people and "returns" this information to his audience—in the form of a societal discourse.
By virtue of having been transformed into a societal discourse or ideology, energies and passions bound to shared fantasies are released for action. The ideology transforms latent desires into a collective will to act. The will to act is generated by the desire to actualize or bring into reality the fantasies contained within the ideology. The role of the leader is not only to bring into consciousness fantasies shared by members of society, but also to devise a plan of action--a program allowing these fantasies to be enacted in reality.
CONCLUSION
The Final Solution grew out of a fantasy present in the mind of Hitler, Nazi leaders and many other Germans. This fantasy revolved around the idea of the nation as a real body confronted with a threat to its existence in the form of a deadly disease, the Jew. The disease within Germany was described concretely—as the invasion of the body politic by bacteria, viruses, and parasites.
Hitler conceived of himself as "Doctor of Germany:" that leader who had the capacity to diagnose and master Germany’s disease. Genocide was the cure: a monumental race against death—to destroy the source of death--Jewish bacteria before the bacteria could destroy Germany.
None of this, of course, makes any sense. Jews were not bacteria and exterminating Jews could not save the nation. Nevertheless, the Holocaust occurred. Apparently, some people plugged into this fantasy—that in turn generated a social institution—the “camps”—that was massive in scope and monumentally destructive.
In his seminal essay, "The Jewish Parasite," Alex Bein suggests that Nazi ideology spread and took hold as a consequence of the repeated use of certain words and images that led to "belief in the reality of a fantasy." In language, Bein explains, thoughts and conceptions are mirrored. Nazism crept into the flesh and blood of the masses by means of “single words, turns of phrase and stock expressions which, imposed upon the people a million times over in continuous reiteration, were mechanically and unconsciously absorbed by them."
The presentation of Jews as corroding and poisonous parasites, as vermin, bacteria and bacilli—everywhere infesting and striving to destroy the body of the German people as a whole and each individual German with a demonic power—"paralyzed to a large extent any internal resistance on the part of the masses." Lagarde’s metaphor of the Jews as "bacilli not to be negotiated with but to be exterminated" could, in the atmosphere of Bio-Mythology, become a horrible reality.
The Final Solution followed based on the perception of reality contained within Nazi ideology. Jews were depicted as bacteria or virus, source of a "disease within the body politic" that had to be cured if the nation was to survive. Hitler, "Doctor of the people," diagnosed Germany’s disease, and prescribed the cure. The cure Hitler prescribed and carried out was destruction of Jewish bacteria, i.e. genocide.
Of course, having identified or uncovered this Nazi fantasy, the task of explanation has only just begun. The next step is to interpret or ascertain the meaning of this fantasy. Why did Hitler imagine that Germany was a body containing a disease? Why did this metaphor resonate with many Germans? What were the nature of the desires that caused a population to embrace and to enact such a fantasy?
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