This paper presents a method for revealing the deep structure of ideology through analysis of recurring images and metaphors used in ideological discourses. Koenigsberg claims that Hitler’s ideology revolved around fantasies about his own body in relationship to the German body politic.

Ideologies exist, the article argues, because they constitute vehicles for working through deep-rooted psychological issues. Hitler’s ideology represented a medium through which Hitler attempted to come to terms with the problem of death. At the core of his ideology lay his fantasy of Germany as an actual organism—a real substance of flesh and blood.

Hitler understood his mission to be to the maintenance of  the health of the German nation. Within this ideological structure, Jews represented a virus – a biological threat to the German body politic. Hitler believed Jews were a force of disintegration that would cause the death of the national body. He instituted his politics as a struggle of life against death.

Koenigsberg’s argues that National Socialism revolved around the problem of death. The Nazis aspired to remove from within the nation any element that might cause weakness or disease. Koenigsberg links Freud’s theory of the death instinct with Hitler’s fear of death. He shows how Hitler’s experience of a force of disintegration within his own body was projected into the political arena, leading to the perception that Germany was in the process of disintegrating.

Hitler’s ideology revolved around putting an end to the process of disintegration occurring within the German nation. The Final Solution represented an effort to solve the problem of death, once and for all. Genocide was conceived as a radical form of surgery-- intended to remove from within the national body the source of the disease that was leading the German body politic toward death.

The institutionalization of Nazism (conversion of fantasy into ideology) depended on the identification of the individual self with the national body. Hitler implored each German to abandon individuality and to fuse his own body with the body politic, or the nation as a whole. Hitler proposed that equating one’s own body with the body politic produced a positive result: individuals are transitory, but a nation lives forever. By abandoning one’s own body for the sake of the body politic, each human being could partake of German immortality.