Return to the Mother-Country

The nation is a "self-object" containing self plus immortal object fused into one. This self-object must exclude the death-instinct, which leads bodies to die. An object that is immortal cannot be like a human body or that of any other living organism: gradually aging and moving toward its demise. Hitler attempted to create a German nation that possessed absolute health, an immortal body politic powerful, free of disease and that could never die.
The Nazis project the idea of weakness and death onto “others.” The Jewish “disease within the body politic” was imagined to be the source of national death. Killing Jews was killing the idea that bodies contain a force leading to death. The Final Solution was a desperate struggle to destroy death, that is, the source of death, the Jew. If all Jews were killed, there would be no disease or death within the body politic, and Germany could live forever.
The study of Hitler’s writings and speeches, of metaphors contained within Nazi ideology, reveals the fantasy of the nation as a body and Jew as a disease within this body whose removal is necessary if this body is to survive. Genocide is an immunological fantasy: killing the source of disease in order to “save the nation.”
The fundamental sources of the historical process are irrational. History has its source in the fantasy of nations as omnipotent body politics. Nazism reveals this dream, and its destructiveness. In the Final Solution, Hitler embraced and acted out the fantasy of the nation as a body politic that could be “immortal” if only destructive forces, the “enemies within,” could be removed. Nazism reveals the psychopathology of the historical process.
The “Final Solution” enacted the collective fantasy of “saving the nation” by killing that which would prevent the nation from living forever. At the heart of the historical process lies a fantasy, which is at the root of historical destructiveness, the psychopathology of mass murder in the form of war and genocide.
My task is to reveal the unconscious fantasies that are the foundation of the historical process, leading to “awakening from the nightmare of history.” This may seem grandiose, but this is only because nearly everyone “plugs in” to this fantasy so deeply.
Hitler: “Therefore let no one object ‘But this is impossible.’ That no one can--no one must--say to me. I am not one of the men who allow themselves to say, ‘It is impossible.’ It must be possible. For Germany must live.”
Nazism is an example of mass-destructiveness carried out in the name of the wish to "save the country." Nazism reveals the destructive pathology which is the other side of "love of country." To awaken from the nightmare of history is to reveal the destructive fantasy which lies at the core of nationalism (the wish to preserve the body-politic). The fantasy of nationalism revolves around the idea of the nation as an immortal body which can be kept alive forever if human beings will sacrifice their lives in the name of this body.
Hitler conceives of the German people as a single, massive body which consists of the German people as cells of this body. Nothing is permitted to exist in separation from this body. Rather, everything must exist as part of this body, and therefore all that which is defective within the nation is also connected to this body. Thus, deformed children, the mentally ill, and Jews are defective or deformed bodies which exist in a state of connectedness to the pure or perfect body politic. They therefore must be "separated" from this body, extricated from it, extirpated, removed in order to maintain the purity and perfection of this body.
The Jew symbolizes the temptation to separate from the nation-state, to live for oneself, separate from the nation, individuate and therefore negates the idea of omnipotent connectedness to the nation. To kill Jews is to kill this wish to separate from, rebel against, and to defy Hitler and the state.
The death camps to demonstrate the omnipotence of the state, show that the Jews must be obedient to the state, just as Nazis and other Germans must be obedient (must be defeated by the state; the Jews must share the Nazis' submission, their masochistic posture).
The logic is: If the German people, particularly the German soldiers, are forced to sacrifice their lives for the nation, why should Jews be exempt from such sacrifice? The death camps insist that the Jew too must submit to the omnipotent nation; no one can escape or resist Hitler and the German Volk.
Hitler's fundamental mission was to save the German people, the nation, from death, by destroying the disease-element within the nation, the source of death, the Jew. The Final Solution was the enactment of an immunological fantasy: every single Jew had to be identified and located because Jews were bacteria that would divide and multiply if they were not destroyed. It was necessary that Germany be made "Jew-free." Hitler was "Doctor of the nation" whose mission was to save Germany by curing her disease.
The Jews are accused of being anti-social criminals because they are perceived to lack faith in the greatness of the nation. Jews are conceived as being insufficiently devout. They are individuals who do not worship Germany. What is criminal—what is projected onto the Jew—is the wish to be separate, destroying the condition of “oneness” imagined existing between the people and the nation. The Jew symbolizes the force that destroys the bond linking human beings with their nation. The Jew represents separation from the community; withdrawal from society or “culture.”
The “Jew” is an idea or mental representation in the mind of Hitler and the Nazis. The question of genocide revolves around the meaning of this symbolic object, the Jew. In seeking to kill Jews, what were the Nazis seeking to “kill off.” The destruction of the Jew constituted the destruction of an idea that Hitler found unbearable.
Hitler imagines that he and other Germans exist in a state of fusion with one another. The people (as if cells of a body) weld and fuse together to create a massive, indestructible organism, a unified body that cannot be broken or torn apart.
Hitler imagines that there are individuals who do not wish to be "at one" with this body, to fuse with it. These individuals are perceived as acting to disrupt or destroy the fantasy of "unity." These individuals must be destroyed precisely because they exist in a condition of “separateness” from the nation. The fact of their separateness might tempt other citizens, generating an impulse to withdraw from or abandon the community. The impulse to separateness could lead to the disintegration of the nation.
Hitler says that he wants to "exterminate the things which tear our volk apart." He wishes to destroy the tendency to "separate" from the body-politic, to "split" from it. Hitler wants to create a "closely knit body," to fuse all of the German people, to unite them as if they are cells in order to create a gigantic, indestructible organism. The fantasy of an indestructible organism consisting of the German people as cells was the foundation of Nazism. The fantasy of the Jew as a destructive or diseased cell within this organism—working to destroy it—was the source of the Final Solution.
The gas chambers show us the other side of the coin of the idealized fantasy of "oneness." In the gas chambers, melting together means degradation and death. Jews in the gas chambers are the negative of the Nuremberg rallies, the idea that many bodies become united to become one body. In the death camps, Hitler shows us the other side of the coin of “national unity.” He depicts the pain and ugliness of group psychology: “Many bodies coming together to form one body.” The "unity" of people: union in death; melting into one.
Hitler fears that Germany will succumb to a fatal disease: that the nation will not live forever. The "triumph of the will" is the hysterical denial of death, the struggle to "defeat" the source of death, the “enemy." An "enemy" is that which threatens the idea of the immortality of the nation.