WHERE IT ALL BEGAN: The origin of my discoveries

Richard Koenigsberg

The First Edition of Hitler's Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology was published in 1975. It was a study of Hitler's language, specifically the embodied metaphors that gave rise to his ideology. The Holocaust was a medical ideology: Hitler conceived Jews as "bacteria within the body of the people" that had to be "removed" if the nation was to survive.

Hitler's Ideology was too far ahead of its time. I had to wait for quite some time.

Building upon Hitler's Ideology, the psychoanalytic anthropologist Howard F. Stein published Developmental Time, Cultural Space: Studies in Psychogeography in 1987 (a new edition was released in 2013). Then Robert Jay Lifton published The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. Gee, I was onto something.

Then came Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (1988) by Robert N Proctor. Gee, I was onto something.

Then I was invited to present a paper at meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology in July 1988 on a Panel that included Vamik D. Volkan (eventually nominated for a Nobel Prize), who had just published The Need to Have Enemies & Allies: From Clinical Practice to International Relationships.

After an absence of seventeen years from the academic world (having quit my position of "Assistant Professor in Behavioral Science"), it was a pleasurable experience to be back in the civilized world.

Encouraged to see that scholarship was moving in my direction, I decided to return to my study of Hitler and Nazism. I obtained a Library Card from New York University and immersed myself in the research on Hitler, Nazism, the Holocaust and genocide. Beginning in 1991, I read approximately one book a day, then would type up notes at the NYU computer lab (my first experience with digital technology).

Everything that I've discovered and written about since derived from the discoveries I  made reading and taking notes in the NYU library.

From 1990-2008, I presented papers at scholarly conferences (N = 70), including a number of keynote addresses. In collaboration with my lecture coach, Bob Hall, we developed The Koenigsberg Lectures.

Beginning in 2006--with Orion Anderson--we developed a novel way of presenting my findings through the Library of Social Science Newsletter. You are now reading one of the editions of this Newsletter. A number of you have been reading the Newsletters for many years. There have been approximately 790 if these. In these Newsletters, I've attempted to condense and crystallize my findings--into a digestible form.

However, what I've published through the Newsletters is grew out of my readings and the notes I took at the NYU Library, 1991-1992. The notes consist of approximately 30,000 pages. As I use these notes to publish my central findings through the LSS Newsletter, I gradually abandon them. I have no desire for them to exist in a "room" after I die (the ambition, apparently, of quite a number of academics). I want the idea to make a way into reality before I die.

Some of you may be satisfied to read my "conclusions" in the LSS Newsletter, and to riff upon the ideas in your own way. However, some of you may wish to understand how I developed these ideas--where they came from, to  observe my thinking as the ideas were coming into being--before I had the opportunity to refine them. 

I'm going to present my ideas as they developed in a series of Newsletters--as I was in a frenzy of discovering and beginning to understanding Hitler and the Final Solution.

And how I came to realize that Hitler was not as an anomaly--but someone who developed and presented a template for mass-murder in the Twentieth Century

REFLECTION ON HITLER, NAZISM, THE HOLOCAUST AND MASS MURDER: #1

  1. The idea of the nation is sustained by an unconscious fantasy about the body. I interpret the meaning of nationalism by revealing the unconscious fantasy that is its source. Hitler articulated and enacted the central fantasy of nationalism: creation of an immortal body through elimination of the “enemy,” i. e., that which contradicts the fantasy of immortality. To awaken from the nightmare of history is to reveal the bodily fantasies from which nationalism and war are derived. In nationalism, the body politic takes the place of one’s own body.
  2. Oppression derives from the experience of a massive body attached to the self. One is weighed down and diminished. The self is negated by this fantasy of an entire nation attached to the self. One feels as if one is a “leaf on a tree:” connected to something larger than oneself  that one cannot resist(the symbiotic fantasy). But this larger entity to which one is connected--also makes one feel small and insignificant. Hitler: "You are nothing, your nation is everything.
  3. The volk is a double of the self: the king’s second body. Totalitarianism means that everyone is contained within and constitutes the body politic. There is one Reich, one Fuhrer, and all human beings exist in a state of fusion with this body. There is no such thing as something separate from this body. The totalitarian fantasy is that nothing can exist separately from the omnipotent organism—that contains all of the people as cells of an enormous body (politic) St. Paul’s fantasy of the church is where this fantasy began: a foundation of Western Civilization.
  4. The dream of immortality. To identify with a body politic is to escape one’s own body, relocate the self into a new body and crucify oneself with Christ (the body of the Church). Sacrifice means abandoning one’s frail body in the name of the immortal one with which one imagines one is fused. Nazism is based on the dream of an immortal body.
  1. Hitler declared: “That no one can, no one must say to me. It must be true. For Germany must live.” Germany is Hitler’s mother. No one can say to him that she will die. Therefore, whoever contradicts or negates this fantasy must be destroyed. The Jew is the idea that the immortality of Germany is a fantasy. “Kill Jews” means sustain the fantasy that Germany is a body that can live forever: kill that which negates the fantasy of immortality.
  2. The “parasite” is the fantasy of an object that drains the life of the self. The parasite is the immortal object, Germany. What is parasitic is precisely the belief in immortality, attachment to the nation: what causes one to sacrifice concrete existence with its pleasures in the name of sustaining the immortal organism. The parasite that is sucking one’s blood is Germany; the fantasy of an immortal German organism.
  3. The Jew becomes this parasite--projection of the negative side of the Nazi’s attachment to Germany. The Jew is the German nation in its negative guise. It is attachment to Germany that is destroying the German people. However, Hitler cannot bear to acknowledge this. The Jew is a projection of the negative impact of attachment to Germany: symbol of someone who does not embrace the Nazi fantasy; does not embrace the fantasy because of the recognition that the fantasy is destructive. The Jew is the party-pooper. They are “eating up,” consuming the dream of Germany as a benevolent force.
  4. The Jews, in Hitler’s mind, are a people going their own way, doing their own thing. The very absence of the bond to the German nation means Jews are “getting away” (with something). Why does the soldier have to sacrifice his life and not the Jew? The Holocaust means "Death to the non-believer" and is proof that the German nation is real and inescapable. The Jewish fantasy of omnipotence contradicts the German one. The Final Solution meant there shall be no one who contradicts or negates the fantasy. The Final Solution was a demonstration of the omnipotence of Germany, showing that it is futile to try to escape, evade the obligation to sacrifice one’s life.
     
  5. People do not wish to look at the evil inherent in society. It happens all the time: destruction and self-destruction. Historians look at the narrative of conquest and destruction as if it possessed some real or practical meaning. The sound and the fury signify nothing. However, the human race sees war as a sign of its humanity, namely its capacity to rise above the animals and to sacrifice their lives for a concept. For all the good it does them.
     
  6. The evolutionary biologists then call it, “instinctive aggression” and pretend it has some practical value, thereby denying the humanity of the species. The humanity of the species consists precisely of doing useless and destructive things like building pyramids.
  1. The sacrifice of concrete existence to omnipotent objects (the fantasy of immortality) is the source of oppression. One needs to feed the object (the fantasy). The omnipotent object is the parasite  draining one’s lifeblood. The parasite is the negative of the idealized object: fantasy of omnipotence in its destructive dimension; the nation now perceived as draining one’s life (the source of death). The Jew is the perception of the omnipotent object in its negative guise, but also another omnipotent object (immortality fantasy) that drains the life out of one’s own fantasy (a parasite).
  1. The Jew is the deformed version of the idealized object: the fantasy of immortality perceived as the source of death and destruction. Jewish doubt or skepticism means that the fantasy is not real. One does not believe in Germany. However, the Jew is also the belief in Germany, now experienced as a force of destruction. Perception of the fantasy (attachment to Germany as a source of destruction is what destroys or disintegrates the wish to be attached to Germany. Hitler wishes to be released from his destructive attachment, but he can't bear to separate, so he kills Jews (symbols of the wish to separate).
  1. The Nazis externalized the struggle for survival, “to be or not to be,” into the German nation. This would be a perfect, omnipotent body containing no weakness, no death, no imperfection. This would be a body consisting of millions of Germans: an all-mighty, indestructible body. HUMAN BEINGS ARE MAD: they sacrifice their life for their mad ideas. Then they pretend they are rational: That’s the greatest madness of all.