The death instinct is often represented as the most obscure of concepts. In actuality, the idea is quite simple. The death instinct points to the breakdown that occurs within all organisms, a process that accelerates with aging. The death instinct refers to the aging process: the gradual breakdown of our bodies. As we age, our bodies grow weaker, less resilient, and more susceptible to disease.

People tend to think of death as what occurs after contracting a fatal disease, suggesting that if one did not become ill, one might live forever. The idea of the death instinct draws attention to the fact that our bodies are continually breaking down. As we age, it’s extremely unpleasant to realize that we are moving toward our demise.

Ernest Becker hypothesized (in The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil) that denial of death lies at the source of culture building and of the creation of ideological systems. According to Becker, human beings attach desperately to symbolic systems that contain the promise or possibility of “living on” after one dies. The ego attaches to an ideology, equating self-perpetuation with perpetuation of the ideology with which it identifies. Human beings bind to “immortality systems” that they defend hysterically and violently.

For Hitler, Germany was the immortal object with which he identified. Denial of death took the form of attempting to forge an indestructible body politic that could live forever. Ordinary organisms break down or disintegrate. Hitler imagined that he could shape a German nation that would become a different kind of organism. He would create a body politic that did not contain a death instinct and therefore could live forever.

Hitler’s ideology revolved around “maintaining the life of the nation.” While individual Germans died, the German nation would “live on.” Hitler’s dream of ceaseless existence—his fantasy of immortality—was projected into the idea of the never-ending existence of Germany.

The cultural impulse often is directed toward building monuments—for example, megaliths and pyramids—which survive longer than the individual human life span. Hitler relished the creation of monumental buildings to “strengthen the National Socialist State.” Since “we believe in the eternity of this Reich,” Hitler proclaimed, “these works of ours shall also be eternal.”

Buildings, however, were only a symbol of the “eternity of the Reich.” The fundamental meaning of immortality was that of “a people which lives forever.” Nazi ideology was designed to lead the individual “away from the personal to the eternal.” Though men come and men die, Hitler declared, “This community shall last forever.”

We now understand what Hitler meant when he said that National Socialism strove to “safeguard the people as such, if necessary at the expense of the individual.” The term “the people” has nothing to do with actual human beings.

Rather, this term symbolized the idea of a national community that could live forever. Nazism meant renunciation of individual life in the name of devotion to the immortal community. Individuals come and go, but “a people” could last forever.

Johann Fichte was a prominent German nationalist writing in the early 19th century. In his “Addresses to the German Nation” (1807), he articulated the idea of the nation as a container for an immortal self. Fichte wrote that life as “mere continuance of changing existence,” never had any value for the “noble-minded man.” Rather, the noble-minded man embraces life only as the “source of what is permanent.”

Permanence is promised to this man by the “continuous and independent existence of his nation.” The “devouring flame of higher patriotism,” Fichte said, embraces the nation as “vesture for the eternal.”

The promise of a life extending beyond the period here on earth, Fichte observes—“that alone it is which can inspire men even unto death for the fatherland.” In other words, one is willing to devote oneself to one’s country, even to die for it, because one’s nation holds the promise of immortality. One’s nation represents the idea of the eternal contained within everyday reality, that which persists even as individuals die.

Human beings aspire to affect the course of history. Belief in the “eternal continuance of one’s influence on this earth” is founded in the hope of the “eternal continuance of the people from which one has developed.” Belief in the immortality of one’s nation provides inspiration, allowing us to “plan what is permanent;” to imagine our own life as an eternal life. The desire to comprehend one’s own life as an eternal life is the bond that “unites one’s own nation in a most intimate fashion with oneself.”

Driven by the denial of death and wish for immortality, people identify with their nations as “vesture for the eternal.” Human beings aspire to fuse with this object: bind their small bodies to an “omnipotent” body politic. Hitler waged a furious struggle to “maintain the life of the people” because he imagined that his own life and that of his people were one and the same. Hitler’s fantasy was that he would “live on” as part of the German nation and its history.

Many social movements are sustained by this dream of immortality. What distinguished Hitler’s ideology was the extent to which the idea of immortality was conceived in physical or bodily terms. Hitler’s fantasy revolved around the perpetuation of Germany as an actual body (politic). Hitler stated that what he had “called into life in these years”—his Nazi movement—would not be “an end in itself,” since “all can and will be transient.” What would endure was the “permanent element,” that is, the “substance of flesh and blood which we call the German people.”

The Nazi movement, Hitler insisted, did not regard position or standing in life as decisive, since such considerations “fade into insignificance before the millennia. Such things come—and go.” That which abided was the “substance itself —a substance of flesh and blood—our people.” It was the substance of the people, Hitler declared, that “truly exists, that remains,” and it was to this substance of the people that one should “feel oneself to be responsible.”

Hitler was not satisfied with the idea of the nation as an abstraction, or “imagined community” or social construction. He was an early embodiment theorist. According to his theory, Germany was a real body, a genuine “substance” of flesh and blood. It was to this actual body—the immortal body politic—than Hitler devoted his existence.