This is the second LSS Newsletter providing extracts and a summary of Boaz Neumann's paper, The Phenomenology of the German People’s Body (Volkskörper) and the Extermination of the Jewish Body. To read the complete paper with footnotes, click the preceding link.

This paper follows my books, Hitler's Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology (1975. available as an ebook here) and Hitler's Ideology: Embodied Metaphor, Fantasy and History (2007, available as a paperback here) in hypothesizing that Nazism and the Final Solution built upon the bedrock of Hitler's experience and presentation of the German nation as a real body politic; an actual organism.

The essence of this idea is contained in this passage of a speech made by Hitler on January 27, 1934: "My movement encompasses ever aspect of the entire Volk. It conceives of Germany as a corporate body, as a single organism." 

Hitler goes on to say that there is "no such thing as non-responsibility in this organic begin, not a single cell which is not responsible, by its very existence, for the welfare and well being of the whole." Thus, according to Hitler, there is "not the least amount of room for apolitical people." 

Based on these sentences, it is not difficult to understand how totalitarianism followed based on Hitler's understanding of the German nation as an organism. For if the nation is a organism or real body politic, it follows that each individual within the nation is a cell within this organism. Thus, each cell within this body cannot help but be responsible for the totality of the organism.

It follows, additionally, there there can be "no room for apolitical people"--for to be apolitical person would imply that a cell can exist separately from the organism of which it is a part.

In a subsequent edition of the LSS Newsletter, I'll have more things to say about Neumann's paper.

Thanks,

Richard Koenigsberg

From Body to Fremdkörper; or, The Phenomenology of the Jewish Body in the Nazi Weltanschauung

Boaz Neumann

The Jewish body was an essential element in Nazi body politics. The Volkskörper could not (co)exist with the Jewish body. At the same time, it could not live without it. This is how I make sense of Victor Klemperer’s observation that “the Jew is the most important person in Hitler’s state.”

The scholarly literature has interpreted this body as an expression of “something else.” Like the prevalent view of the Volkskörper, the Jewish body, as a Fremdkörper, is commonly identified as a metaphor, nothing more than a semantic question. For some, this identification of the Jew with a Fremdkörper is nothing but a metaphor or an image by which the Nazis saw the Jew.

Actually, it makes no difference if the Jew is identified as a Fremdkörper or, alternately, as “parasitic,” “cancerous,” “vermin” (Ungeziefer), “bacteria” (Bazillen), or “bacillus.” The identification of the Jew as a Fremdkörper is also nothing more than a modern version of earlier views of the “Antichrist” or of “Satan,” among other variations of the same. ___________________________________________________________________

Definition of Fremkorper: foreign element. Thing that is out of place. Extraneous element; foreign body. Example: "This cell (e. g. a white blood cell) is looking for foreign objects, bacteria, things that it can find."
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I wish to argue against these historiographical clichés and reach, instead, an understanding of the Jewish body as a Fremdkörper in phenomenological terms, that is, as it manifested itself to the Nazis and, more specifically, as it manifested itself among or within the Volkskörper.

The Jewish body’s manifestation in the Nazi Weltanschauung was shaped by the threat it posed to the Volkskörper. Jewish propaganda, it was claimed, “Consciously aimed at hollowing out and splitting apart the Volkskörper.” These counteraccusations were aimed at a supposed attempt by Jews to deal a mortal blow to the Volkskörper. 

The Jewish body was also seen to have a parasitic relationship to the Volkskörper. The Jew, according to Hitler, is

always a parasite in the body of other peoples.They have lodged themselves in each and every people, live at the expense of the Volkskörper, weakening this body, just as every parasite-caused sickness debilitates the body of the host, causing a constant feeling of discomfort and discontent.

Shortly before his transportation to Buchenwald, Heinz Lewin was told by the Gestapo that “you Jews are all asocial elements who are sucking dry the German Volkskörper. That is why we will deal with you as you deserve.”

The Meyers Lexikon of 1940 held that the term parasitism embraced “elements which have penetrated into the organism of the Volk or state and are living at its expense, themselves not sedentary, not rooted to the soil and not acting to form the state.” In providing an example of parasitism “in the history of settlement and race,” the author pointed to the Jews.

The Jewish body was not just parasitic. An even greater danger was manifest in the fact that this body had actually penetrated the Volkskörper. In their commentaries on the Reich Citizenship Law from September 15, 1935, Wilhelm Stuckart and Hans Globke argued, “Every people is damaged in its vital capacities by absorption of alien blood into the Volkskörper. But one of its principal concerns should be to keep its blood pure.”

According to Himmler, the Third Reich would not have survived the difficult years of World War II, and particularly the bombing war, “if we still had this decomposing plague [of Jews] within our Volkskörper.” He thus concluded that “the Jews must be exterminated [ausgerottet].” The Jewish body was perceived as an internal threat in other ways as well: “The effect of the Jews on the German Volkskörper was like a decomposing poison.” The penetration by the Jewish body was also experienced as a cancerous invasion.

Perception of the Jew as a corporeal other was based on traditional Jew hatred. It was the basis of ongoing efforts to harm the Jew’s body, from harassment in the street to imprisonment, exile, and murder. But these were all still familiar practices. They cannot explain the unprecedented Nazi project of eradicating the Jewish ontology.

That mission was born of the fervent conviction that the Jews were actually losing their otherness, that they were capable of penetrating the Volkskörper, which, in fact, they were doing. As long as the Jews were seen as other, they remained the object of traditional attacks. Once they began to lose their alienness, they emerged as an existential threat to the Volkskörper.

The Nazis certainly perceived the Jews as losing their physical otherness because of assimilation, social integration, and even conscious efforts on their part to disguise themselves. Goebbels formulated the Jewish problem in these terms when he pronounced that “Judaism’s power resided in its anonymity.”

Here, according to the Nazis, is where the real Jewish problem lay. The Jews’ corporeal otherness was not the “problem.” As long as they maintained their identifiable otherness, it was easy to protect oneself and society from them. As other, the Jews could not penetrate the Volkskörper.

The “problem,” rather, arose the moment they lost that otherness and threatened to enter the German bloodstream. In losing their otherness, the Jews constituted a clear and present danger to the Nazi Weltanschauung, undermining its ability to observe and identify bodies.

It followed, then, that the Jews who were losing their bodily otherness faced intense efforts at exposure. Techniques of observation were central to racial practice. They sought to mobilize the eyes of all Germans as well as the politics of Anschaulichkeit (concreteness).

Thus, for example, a school lesson in comparative observation instructed pupils to “put on the board photographs of Jews. Now right next to them, put up and juxtapose the picture of a German. It won’t take long for there to be a flood of answers: ‘The Jews have different noses, different ears, different lips, a different chin, a totally different face than what Germans have’”.

Conclusion

In methodological terms, I have assumed that the Volkskörper was perceived, understood, and experienced in the Nazi world as a real, concrete body. The Volkskörper should not, in other words, be looked on as “something else,” as a symbol or metaphor of the body, a corporeal expression of the mythic or atavistic, or an expression of organicist visions of the state, society, and population.

Moreover, phenomenology allows us to reconceive the relationship between Nazi and Jew, and between their respective bodies. At first glance, it would seem to have been a straightforward relationship of “removal” and “distancing” (Entfernung). The Nazis moved the Jewish body away and in so doing drew the boundaries of their own bodies.

At the same time, a phenomenological study reveals a more complex relationship between the two. The Nazi body was not a simple function of Entfernung. Rather, it was a result of inclusion-exclusion. If the Entfernung of the Jewish body was, in fact, a necessary condition for creating a Nazi body, then the Jewish body also had to be present in that body. The Jewish body had to be present so that it could be pushed aside, allowing the Nazi body to manifest itself as such.

The place of the Jewish body in the Nazi Weltanschauung is best captured in the dual meaning of Entfernung, a concept that expresses both the act of distancing (Entfernung) and its annulment (Ent-fernung). The word Entfernung consists of two parts: Fern, or “distant,” “faraway,” or “far off,” and Ent, a prefix used to annul or inverse the meaning of the word it is affixed to. Entfernung thus means distance and removal.

Definition of Enterfernung: distance, removal, excision, expulsion.

The Jew at once inhabited the Nazi world and was situated outside it. The Nazis “needed” Jews in their body so that they could distance Jews and, by so doing, define their own body as “worthy” and “purged.”

Georg Simmel wrote, “It is not our task either to accuse or pardon, but only to understand.” This is the final sentence of his Metropolis and Mental Life, which appeared in 1903. There is no doubt that phenomenology neither accuses nor pardons but simply understands. I have built the present phenomenological investigation on a generally uncritical use of Nazi sources and language.

I have allowed the Nazis to speak in their own voice. At no point have I stopped them or silenced them. At no point have I criticized them. I have never considered their language, or the more specific phenomenon of the Volkskörper in their Weltanschauung, an expression of “something else.”

This phenomenological study does not seek to accuse and certainly does not intend to forgive. Instead, it strives to understand Nazism and the Nazi Weltanschauung, to enter deeply into this world, to learn its vocabulary and its syntax. As a historian desirous of understanding the Nazi Weltanschauung, I do not consider it my role to be their accuser, that is, to condemn them for what they were and for what they did, for their manipulations and their lies.