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Author: Richard Koenigsberg
"The best critical analysis in English of Hitler’s thought."—Colin Day
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ABOUT HITLER'S IDEOLOGY
Why did Hitler initiate the Final Solution and take Germany to war? Based on analysis of Hitler’s rhetoric—the words, images and metaphors contained within his writing and speeches—Koenigsberg reveals the “hidden narratives” that were the source of genocide. The history Hitler created followed based on his fantasy that by destroying the Jewish “disease” Germany might live forever.
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The idea of the nation is sustained by an unconscious fantasy about the body. Hitler articulated and acted out the central fantasy of nationalism: the creation of an immortal body through elimination of the “enemy,” i. e., that which contradicts the fantasy of immortality.
The experience of “oppression” derives from the fantasy of a massive body attached to the self. One is weighed down, diminished, and the self is negated by this fantasy of an entire nation attached to the self. One feel connected to something larger than oneself (the symbiotic fantasy), but this also makes one feel small and insignificant.
The volk is the 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 this omnipotent organism, the nation. The nation contains all of the people as if cells of an enormous body.
The fantasy of immortality causes one to identify with a body politic in order to escape from one’s own, actual body: the relocation of the self. 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 this dream of an immortal body.
The metaphor of the “parasite” is the fantasy of an object that drains the life of the self. The parasite is the immortal object, Germany herself. What is parasitic is precisely the idea of immortality, one’s own attachment to the fantasy of the nation that which causes one to sacrifice concrete existence with its pleasures in the name of sustaining the dream of an organism that is immortal.
The parasite that is sucking one’s blood is none other than the idea of Germany, the fantasy of one’s nation as an immortal organism or body politic. When “the Jew” is equated with a parasite, what is occurring is that the negative experience of attachment to the omnipotent object is being projected.
The sacrifice of concrete existence to omnipotent objects (the fantasy of immortality) is the source of oppression. One needs to feed these objects. The omnipotent object is the parasite that is draining one’s lifeblood. The parasite is the negative of the idealized object, the fantasy of omnipotence in its destructive dimension, the nation now perceives 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).
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