Hitler, Nationalism, Sacrifice: Koenigsberg and Beyond…Towards the Tamil Tigers
By Michael Roberts
(Melbourne, Sri Lanka Guardian). Review Article: Richard A Koenigsberg: Nations have the Right to Kill. Hitler, the Holocaust and War, New York: Library of Social Science¸ 2009, ISBN 978-0-915042-23-4.
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Ever since he wrote Hitler’s Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology in 1975 (New York: Library of Social Science), Richard A. Koenigsberg has deployed his own institutional base in New York to develop specific themes in the Nazi ideology with evangelical zeal. In this monograph, one theme focuses on the manner in which Hitler’s experiences in the trenches of the First World War entrenched his support for Germany’s goals in that war [1] and the principle that the individual must sacrifice self for national cause.
Rather than decry the horrors of wartime bloodshed, Hitler was elevated by the community of the trenches and venerated those comrades who died in the fight. Modris Ekstein’s tells us that this bohemian loner of the pre-1914 years “came to regard his war experience as … his training in life,” so that his subsequent retellings bubble with exuberance (1989: 307-08).
Koenigsberg argues that on this foundation Hitler directed his fury toward weak Germans who were deemed to have shirked their duty, specifically the German Jews. Thus, the logic of war in Hitler’s reasoning eventually led to the logic of genocide (pp. 14, 1, 00).
Mark Mazower’s work reveals that the campaigns pursued by the Nazi German armies seeking to create an empire “cost the lives of as many other Europeans as Jews who perished in the Holocaust” and that roughly “8.2 million civilians … perished under Nazi occupation in Europe as a whole.” This outcome derived in part because they “wanted empty spaces in Eastern Europe” in order “to create their new Germanized Utopia” (Hastings 2008 46, 47-48).
In an important move, the theme of Hitler’s obsessions with the Jews is expanded by Koenigsberg to expose the horrendous maiming and killing that occurred in the battlefields of World War One. Statistical and descriptive details serve as a platform for a passionate condemnation of the nation state and its adjunct ideology, nationalism.
Germany was not alone in the overwhelming emphasis on the call of the nation: a sacrificial ideology suffused the thinking of all the protagonists. Koenigsberg’s task is to expose the “fundamental structure of thought” and “psychological dynamic” underlining this war effort (pp. 65, 45); and, by implication, all modern wars. His book, therefore, is a searing criticism of the fact that “in war, human bodies are sacrificed in the name of perpetuating a magical entity, the body politic” (p. 42).[2],
Without expertise in European history in the Twentieth Century, I am not qualified to evaluate his summary of Nazi ideology. Eckstein’s work (part of his bibliography) certainly supports Koenigsberg’s insistence that Hitler’s experience in the frontlines [3] informed his ideological outpourings (1989: 305-11, 193-95). But Koenigsberg does not compose his arguments in relation to the standard accounts of the two world wars or Nazi ideology provided by reputed historians in ways that permit ordinary readers to locate him within the intellectual firmament. [4]
Nor is the critical literature on the nation-state held up for view in ways which enable readers to discern where Koenigsberg differs from those who are hostile to nationalism qua nationalism or those who pinpoint its excesses. Where other scholars (Ecksteins, Glenn Gray and Jay Winter for example) are brought into the argument, they enter as embellishments of the book’s main themes. Koenigsberg forges his own path: hence my reference to “evangelical zeal.”
Significant facets of twentieth century Europe were thrown up before my outsider eyes. It is towards an elaboration of these strands of empirical argument and evidence and their implications for my own work that I now move.
One: the quotations from leading Nazi figures display their deep commitment to Germany as heimat and collective. “Bourgeois privatism” was simply detested (p. 18). The individual was to be totally subordinated to the nation. “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” said Hitler (p. 13).
The “socialism” in the Nazi title was the fraternity of the frontline trenches. As one Nazi ideologue put it, the nation was “simply ‘a higher human being’ ” (in Ecksteins 1989: 195). This leads to the conclusion that in Nazi thinking “the individual was the nation…. The nation had been telescoped into the dynamic individual” (1989: 195).
Two: Koenigsberg highlights some striking analogies. The railway cattle trucks that brought masses of German troops to the battle front during WW One were not dissimilar to the cattle trucks taking jam-packed Jewish people to concentration camps some 20 years later (pp. 27-28). Indeed, the conditions suffered by German troops on the Russian front in the latter stages of the Second World War were not far removed from the situation in the concentration camps. These observations sustain the thesis that the logic of genocide flowed out of the logic of war (p. 14).
Three: the most significant aspect of this book is the move from the specifics of German policies to that of the other countries involved in the First World War. Military strategy was directed by the belief that human wave attacks had enabled the Japanese to triumph over the Russians in 1904-05. [6] Thus informed, both sets of protagonists pursued a policy of “offensive at all costs” (p. 47). Directed by this goal, the maintenance of morale and discipline was seen as a determining factor of success.
As a result, a total of nine million soldiers were killed, 21 million wounded and nearly 8 million were taken prisoner or reported missing in the First World War, adding up to 58 percent of the total manpower that was mobilized (p. 47). Such horrendous casualties developed out of military thrusts which, for the most part, gained little ground and got continually bogged down in stalemate.[7]
Four: remarkably, the idiom of sacrifice drummed up by each nation’s leaders and media outlets was accepted and reiterated by some men as they resided in the stench and mud of the trenches. “I shall have died the most glorious of deaths. Do not bewail me too much…” wrote a French soldier, George Morillot in a letter to a kinsperson (p. 42). Apparently, such commitment was widespread and desertions relatively few. [8] On a regular basis, men marched in lines into machine-gun fire and were cut down like blades of grass before a scythe.
The heroic acceptance of death by so many males, one should note, was preceded by the fanfare and glory surrounding marching bodies of troops as the public in all major cities on both sides of the war assembled in excitement to acclaim their patriotism (p. 65). The “euphoria” in Germany when war was declared in August 1914 is said to have been “millenarian.” Hitler was among those in Odeonplatz in Munich rendered ecstatic by the announcement (Ecksteins 1989: 197, 306: see picture of Hitler’s face in this book).
Let me inject two embellishments: it would appear that the cult of masculinity and encouragement of “muscular Christianity” during the latter half of the nineteenth century came home to roost in 1914-18. [9] For example, Australia and Australians joined the war effort with pride and trumpet. They would show the world that they were worthy of nationhood: they would prove their worth in a “baptism of fire.”[10] That they did, in their own estimation, in the magnificent defeat at Gallipoli.
The landing of troops at Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915 has become enshrined as Australia’s de facto national day. The cultural producers of print, visual arts and rhetoric who fashioned the image of the heroic (Australian) Anzac[11] in subsequent years inscribed motifs of youthful virility, purity and innocence within this icon (Flaherty & Roberts 1989).
The mateship and sacrificial heroism of the Anzac men was widely extolled, with special emphasis on the dead.[12] Significantly, the first commemoration of this event was marked at Westminster Cathedral on 25 April 1916.[13] Subsequent intellectual work and material artefacts built on this heritage.
Five: An emphasis on sacrifice on behalf of the nation was pervasive in most countries participating in the First World War. The vocabulary was drawn from the religious lexicon, even where some of these countries had moved towards establishing a secular modern state. French soldiers spoke of their sacrifice as a force towards redemption. Attending a field mass for 500 dead, an observer affirmed that “it is by suffering that regeneration occurs” (quoted p. 67).
Likewise, in his exhortatory and legitimizing rhetoric, the French novelist and politician, Maurice Barres, [14] spoke of rebuilding souls (p. 68). It would seem that the state inspiration and mobilization on the one hand, and thus the language of justification could draw upon religious imagery so deeply etched into Western cultural forms.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the elite levels of Western culture were also enamored of the Greek civilization and its achievements. The slant was masculine: Richard Jenkyns has argued that “the Greek genius [was seen] as a kind of lithe, buoyant athleticism” and that “in the age of muscular Christianity the Greeks became muscular pagans, clean fresh air became a symbol of the Hellenic spirit” (1980: 170).
C. E. W. Bean, the Australian war journalist turned historian, was among the secularized Australian intellectuals whose experience of the war[15] was bolstered by readings of the Greek world in ways that informed the fashioning of the Anzac as icon. He took to heart a Greek inspiration from the Dardanelles that he had gathered from the National Museum at Athens: “These by the Dardanelles laid down their shining youth in battle, and won fair renown for their native land, so that their enemy groaned, carrying war’s harvest from the field.[16]
Six: Drawing from Bruce Kapferer’s work, one may suggest that the idiom and symbolism of inspiration and commemoration deployed during and after World War One was not purely “Christian,” but rather “Judeo-Christian.”[17] In his analysis of Anzac symbolism, Kapferer insists that the “Anzacs are vital symbolic embodiments of the Australian nationalist imagination because they established an identity for Australia in the context of the very ideological and ontological roots of Western Judeo-Christian civilization” (1988: 126-27).
Seven: significantly, Kapferer sees his comparative study of Australian and Sinhalese nationalism in contemporary times[18] as a work revealing how “nationalism makes the political religious and places the nation above politics.”
The nation is created as an object of devotion and the political forces that become focused upon it are intensified in their energy and passion. The religion of nationalism, wherein the political is shrouded in the symbolism of “higher” purpose, is vital to the momentum of nationalism.
This momentum [can be] among the most liberating, but also among the most oppressive political energies of [our time]. The religion of nationalism has engulfed political ideas and doctrines—liberal democracy, communism, socialism, fascism, and anarchism— in its path. These have become subordinate to the nationalist purpose (1988: 1).”
At one point he notes that the “political nation [as] the object of devotion assumes messianic and proselytizing dimensions” (1988: 136). One is reminded of the images of Hitler in his most insane mood.
Here we have Kapferer crossing Koenigsberg’s trail. Though his position is not grounded in the theoretical foundations that sustain Kapferer’s arguments, Koenigsberg insists that Nazism “was a form of religion” (p. 18) within a more general argument that “nationalism is a living religion” (p. xiii).
Eight: rather to my surprise, one of the ecstatic celebrations of the heroic dead in the fields of Europe recounted within Koenigsberg’s book came from the turbulent heart of Padraig Pearse: “The last sixteen months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe. It is good for the world to be warmed with the red wine of the battle field. Such august homage was never before offered to God as this….” (pp. 22 & p. 42). My surprise originates in my passing familiarity with Patrick Henry Pearse. His stirring orations in the cause of Irish resistance to British domination had been among the ingredients that I had drawn upon in my early work on the stimuli for anti-colonial movements.
To hear him praise the heroism of his English enemies seemed incongruous–till reflections led me to see the logic energizing his devotion to heroic sacrifice. For it is from dead Irish martyrs that Pearse drew some of his inspiration.[19] It was the path of death in the Irish nationalist cause that Pearse himself trod a few months after he made this statement: he was one of the leaders of the Easter Uprising of 1916, an effort that failed and eventually led to his execution on 3 May 1916.[20]
Nine: in this manner, through Pearse, we find that resistance struggle in search of self-determination is meshed into Koenigsberg’s argument that “war is a sacrificial ritual that valorizes the nation-state” (p. 45). Through Pearse, therefore, we can expand our survey to other conflicts today where participants see themselves as liberation fighters.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Eksteins, Modris 1989 Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Modern Age, Toronto: Key Porter Books.
Flaherty, Chris & Michael Roberts 1989 “The Reproduction of Anzac Symbolism,” journal of Australian Studies, 24:52-69.
Gambetta, Diego (ed.) 2005 Making Sense of Suicide Missions, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Girard, Rene 1977 Violence and the Sacred, trans. by P. Gregory, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
Kapferer, Bruce 1991 “Nationalist Ideology and a Comparative Anthropology,” Ethnos 54: 161-99
Kershaw, Ian 2008 Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution, Yale University Press.
Marvin, Carolyn & David W. Ingle 1996 “Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion,” Journal of the American academy of Religion, 64: 767-80.
Mazower, Mark 2008 Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis ruled Europe, Penguin.
Roberts, Michael 2008 “Tamil Tigers: Sacrificial Symbolism and ‘Dead Body Politics’,” Anthropology Today, June 2008, 24/3: 22-23.
Valeri, Valerio 1985 Kingship and Sacrifice. Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Publications.
[1] Note: Kaiser Wilhelm II “shared Hitler’s belief in a worldwide anti-German plot and possessed the same aspiration to rule Europe” (Hastings 2008: 46) summarizing the work by Mazower (2008).
[2] For this reason, we can also note that it elliptically complements Mark Mazower’s recent reminder that “far too much modern scholarship about the Nazi era addresses the Holocaust in isolation” (Hasting 2008: 48).
[3] Note that Hitler was decorated with the Iron Cross on two different occasions.
[4] There is one exception: criticism is levelled at the bland military accounts of the World War One that function to naturalize its horrors (pp. 34-37).
[5] For instance, Rene Girard 1977, Valerio Valeri 1985 and Bruce Kapferer 1988 & 1997.
[6] Koenigsberg 2008: 50. The existence of this belief was confirmed by Brian Victoria; who then went on to explain that more recent researches have shown that it was the decline of the will to fight within the home front in Russia that was central to their capitulation, while on the battlefield on land it was the Japanese naval artillery deployed as land guns that turned the tide at a critical battle (conversation 6 Dec. 2008).
[7] Trevor Wilson (who has considerable expertise in military history) of the History Dept., University of Adelaide, confirmed this fact, with a caveat re the German General’s Ludendorf’s campaign in 1918.
[8] Again, confirmed by Trevor Wilson.
[9] Cf. Koenigsberg 2008: 54-55.
[10] See Toowoomba Chronicle, 30 April 1915 and Argus, 8 May 1915. For other references, see Flaherty & Roberts 1989: 53.
[11] “Anzac” is actually an acronym standing for the Australian and New Zealand Army command (?). In Australian vision the New Zealanders are often obliterated.
[12] Also see Kapferer 1988 and Ken Inglis 1965.
[13] Times, 25 & 26 April 1916.
[14] Barres (1862-1923) was a French novelist, journalist and nationalist politician. In Wikipedia he is described as a “strong supporter of the Union sacrée (Holy Union) during World War I, Barrès remained a major influence of generations of French writers, as well as of monarchists, although he was not a monarchist himself.”
[15] Oxford educated in the 1890s, Bean was embedded among the troops at Gallipoli as well as the Western front as a war correspondent.
[16] “Memorials in Stone,” Reveille, vol. 6, 1 May 1933, p. 28. Also see Flaherty & Roberts 1989: passim.
[17] This is Kapferer’s reading. His father, let me note, was French Jewish migrant to Australia in the 1930s so that his understanding is coloured by the Jewish heritage of himself (as well as his wife, Judy).
[18] His study underlines the difference between the two forms, while yet insisting that both are modern. For a subsequent elaboration see Kapferer 1991. Cf., too, the emphasis on the “sacralization of politics” in Schalk 1997b and Hellmann-Rajanayagam 2005: 116.
[19] I have not discovered where precisely I deployed Pearse, but recollect that his oration referred to the Irish dead. I think I got this quotation from Nicholas Mansergh’s The Commonwealth Experience.
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