College instructors may receive a free copy of this extraordinary book for use in teaching & research. Simply respond to this email or write to oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com saying you will ask your library to order Developmental Time, Cultural Space (provide your name and the name of your college or university when you respond). We will send you a free electronic copy of the entire book that is identical to the hard copy, including the front & back cover. Pages:   262 pages Publisher:   Library of Social Science Author:   Howard F. Stein Date of Publication:   May 14, 2013 List Price Paperback:   $39.99 ISBN-13:    978-0915042050 List Price Hardbound:   $49.95 ISBN-13:   978-0-915042067 “Truly remarkable—an enduring contribution.”   —Prof. John Connor, California State University, Sacramento “Howard Stein has one of the finest minds engaged in the study of culture in our time. He has the capacity to see straight through to the meaning of things, and to understand it and express it with precision—a quality people used to refer to as genius. This wide ranging book is a feast.”   —Howard S. Schwartz, Oakland University, author of Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay “Howard Stein is one of the world’s most original thinkers in the human sciences.”   —Robert Endleman, Ph.D., author of Psyche and Society About the Author: Howard F. Stein is Professor at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Department of Family and Preventive Medicine. He is the author of 26 books and over 250 published papers and chapters.

Howard Stein’s concept of psychogeography grows out of my book, Hitler’s Ideology (1975), in which I identified the central fantasy that was the source of Hitler’s perception of reality—and the actions that followed.

This fantasy revolved around the idea of Germany as an actual body politic threatened by a disease that had to be destroyed if the nation were to survive (Robert Lifton developed this idea in The Nazi Doctors, 1986).

In Developmental Time, Culture Space, building upon data presented in Hitler’s Ideology, Howard Stein presents the concept of psychogeography, theorizing that “Men and women fashion the world out of the substance of their psyches from the experience of their bodies.”

This perspective contradicts the view that has dominated scholarship for 40 years—that the human self is shaped primarily by language: that we are “subjects of the symbolic order.”

Instead of saying that discourse shapes the body, I contend that discourse grows out of bodily sensations and experiences—fantasies about our own body and the bodies of others.

In the essay below, I show how genocide enacted an immunological fantasy. Hitler conceived of himself as a physician, following in the footsteps of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch.

When I studied at Wesleyan University, I was taught about the “community of scholars.” I deeply internalized this belief that a group of individuals could be devoted to the pursuit of truth.

Library of Social Science offers a free copy of Developmental Time, Cultural Space in this spirit—hoping you will join us in creating a revolution in thought.

With best regards,
Richard Koenigsberg

Richard A. Koenigsberg, Ph.D Director, LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE Telephone: 718-393-1081 Fax: 413-832-8145 RAKoenigsberg@libraryofsocialscience.com

The German Organism

At the core of Nazism was Hitler’s fantasy of the German people as an organism: “My Movement encompasses every aspect of the entire Volk. It conceives of Germany as a corporate body, as a single organism.” It followed that there could be no such thing as “non-responsibility in this organic being,” not a single cell which is “not responsible for the welfare and well-being of the whole.”

Totalitarianism grew out of this bodily fantasy. If the nation were a single organism and human beings cells in this organism, there could be no such thing as a separate individual. Each and every person was bound to the German organism and—as a cell—had no choice but to behave according to the requirements of the whole.

The Nuremberg rallies embodied the essence of Nazism. This is when Hitler experienced his greatest joy—and shared his joy with his people. Tens of thousands of Germans came together within a single geographic space to experience themselves as the German organism. At these moments, Hitler and the German people knew they were a nation. They experienced themselves as a people united in a single body politic—with Hitler the head of this body.

Despite the success of the Nazi movement, Hitler spoke of “incurables” who were unable—or refused to—embrace the joyful national community. These people sought separateness or individuality; refused to blend in; were incapable of merging with the body politic. These non-conforming cells were called Jewish bacteria—the source of the “disease within the body of the people.” Jews were pathogenic cells—alien, foreign—whose continued presence would lead to the demise of the German body unless drastic action was taken.

The Nation Possesses an Immune System

Alfred Hoch, an early advocate of state euthanasia, claimed the state was a “whole with its own laws, much like one self-contained human organism which, in the interests of the whole—as we doctors know—abandons and rejects particles that have become worthless or useless.” In Mein Kampf, Hitler posed the question, “Could anyone believe that Germany alone was not subject to exactly the same law as all other human organisms?” What was the law to which Hitler referred?

It was the law of the immune system. David Wilson (1972) observes that the only way an animal body can cope with the enormous range of disease organisms threatening it is by some mechanism that “recognizes what is ‘self’ and rejects everything else as ‘not self’.” Physician Ronald Glasser (2012) explains that the theory of immunology depends on the “ability of one cell to recognize a cell unlike itself.” Recognition precedes destruction. Once a cell has been identified as foreign, different, or not-self, the attack upon this cell begins.

Nazi genocide grew out of the fantasy that Germany was an organism possessing an immune system. This organism would proceed naturally—like any other organism—to destroy foreign cells. Jews were identified by Hitler as the not-self cells within Germany—bacteria or viruses, cause of the nation’s suffering—that had to be destroyed for the body politic to survive.

The Final Solution: Destroying Jewish Bacteria

Himmler stated that “alien bloodlines” had merged into the German people. Yet Germans had the strength to sift out and cast aside what “did not belong to us.” In a speech before the Reichstag on January 30, 1937, Hitler explained that his anti-Jewish policy was designed to make the German people “immune against this infection.” Germans had to avoid contact with the “carriers of this poisonous bacillus.”

Robert Lifton (1986) shows how Nazi doctors grasped and embraced this idea of Germany as a body with an immune system. Dr. Rudolph Ramm explained to Lifton that physicians in Nazi Germany were to be “concerned with the health of the Volk even more than with individual disease.” The health of the Volk depended on identifying and destroying pathogenic cells. National Socialism was “nothing but applied biology.”

In his 1935-6 booklet on the SS as an anti-Bolshevik battle organization, Himmler stated that the life and death struggle between Jews and other peoples was part of the “natural course of life on our planet.” The struggle of Jews against nations was a law of nature, similar to the struggle of “the plague bacillus against the healthy body.”

Just as Jews—by their very parasitic nature—attached themselves to organisms, so it was natural that Germans would fight to destroy Jews. A pamphlet issued by Alfred Rosenberg in 1941 compared the state to a “body that can be invaded by parasites, such as bacteria.” These bacteria can “live in a body,” multiply, and “secrete their poison.” A nation or body thus afflicted must “defeat the bacteria which have penetrated it,” otherwise they will be defeated by them.

With regard to processes of this kind, the pamphlet says, "Humanitarian principles cannot be taken into consideration at all," as they do not apply to "disinfecting a body or a contaminated room." It is necessary in such cases to clear a path for a "completely novel way of thinking." Only such thinking can really lead to "the final decision which must be made in our time so as to safeguard the existence of the great creative race."

The “final decision”—a “completely novel way of thinking”—was the Final Solution. Genocide grew out of the fantasy of Germany as an actual body containing Jewish bacteria that had to be destroyed if the nation was to survive. Jews were identified as foreign cells—alien to the German self—generating an immune response.

Hitler as Robert Koch

As the Holocaust was underway, Goebbels noted in a diary entry on March 27, 1942, that the procedure was “pretty barbaric; not much will remain of the Jews.” Nonetheless, such actions were unavoidable—reflecting the “life and death struggle” being waged between the “Ayran race and the Jewish bacillus.” In a speech delivered to SS leaders in 1943, Himmler claimed that Germany had the moral right—the “duty toward our people” to “destroy this people that wanted to destroy us.” We do not want to be “infected by this bacillus and to die.”

Germans often called Hitler the “Doctor of the German people.” On July 19, 1941, he declared:

I feel I am like Robert Koch in politics. He discovered the bacillus and thereby ushered medical science onto new paths. I discovered the Jew as the bacillus and fermenting agent of all social decomposition.

On February 22, 1942, Hitler reiterated his mission:

This is one of the greatest revolutions there has ever been in the world. The Jew will be identified! The same fight that Pasteur and Koch had to fight must be led by us today. Innumerable sicknesses have their origin in one bacillus: the Jew! We will get well when we eliminate the Jew.

“We Have Lanced the Jewish Abscess”

The Final Solution grew out of a fantasy of the German nation as an actual body containing Jewish bacteria conceived as the source of Germany’s disease. Genocide represented a desperate, hysterical, manic struggle to destroy Jews—in order to save the life of the nation.

As the war wound down—with Germany defeated—Hitler dictated his “Testament” to Martin Bormann (February-April 1945). In spite of everything, Hitler embraced and reaffirmed the mission that had driven and guided him from the beginning of his political career, and reflected upon what he had “achieved.”

He asked the German people to respect the racial laws that the Nazis had laid down. In a world becoming “more and more perverted through the Jewish virus,” a people that remained “immune to the virus” must “in the long run remain supreme.” Though the war was lost, National Socialism could justly claim the “eternal gratitude of the people” for having “eliminated the Jew from Germany and Central Europe.” Hitler remained unrepentant: “We have lanced the Jewish abscess; and the world of the future will be eternally grateful to us.”