III. Welding the German People into One Body
Hitler’s ideology derived from his fantasy of the German nation as an enormous body politic consisting of citizens as “cells.” Hitler aspired to bring millions of German cells together to create a single, omnipotent organism.
By “welding men one to another,” Hitler believed, the German people would transform into a “single block of steel” creating an “unbreakable unity” capable of resisting the force of disintegration.
If the “will and the life-struggle of our people were split into forty or fifty sections,” Hitler said, Germany would fall apart. To achieve national unity, it was necessary to eliminate political organizations working toward “disunion and disintegration.”
If Germany succeeded in putting together a “body politic as hard as iron from the conglomeration of parties, associations, unions, concepts of the world and class,” then the nation would never again “break in pieces.” A nation that was totally united, Hitler believed, could not disintegrate.
Through his speeches and mass rallies, Hitler aspired to persuade millions of people to fuse into a “unity of spirit and will.” To resist forces working toward fragmentation, Hitler implored his people to grow nearer and closer to one another. The German people, he declared, had to be thrown into “the great melting pot, the nation” in order to be “purified and welded one to another.”
IV. Killing Death
Through the actualization of his ideology, Hitler sought to resolve the problem of death. By removing from within the nation elements that might cause weakness or disease, Hitler hoped to create a body politic that could never die.
The problem of death, however, contains no solution. Freud’s concept of the death instinct points to the fact that, whatever symbols human beings construct, organisms nevertheless move inevitably toward their demise.
Freud, like Hitler, conceived of human existence as a struggle of “life against death.” He observed that while organisms possess a life instinct working to “preserve living substance and to join it into ever larger units,” living creatures also possess a death instinct, an internal force working to “dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primeval, inorganic states.”
While the aim of the life instinct, Freud said, was is to establish “ever-greater unities and to preserve them thus”--to “bind together”--the aim of the death instinct is to “undo connections and so destroy things.”
In multicellular living organisms, the libido meets the death instinct that works to “disintegrate the cellular being and bring each elemental primary organism into a condition of inorganic stability.”
The life or sexual instincts active in each cell, Freud theorized, “take the (other) cells as their object.” They “partly neutralize the death instincts in these cells,” thus preserving their life. The life instinct, in short, acts to force or hold together “portions of living substance” within each organism, neutralizing the other force working to “disintegrate the cellular being.” The life instinct thus prevents the organism from falling into a condition of “inorganic stability.”
Freud’s depiction of the struggle taking place within organisms is nearly identical to Hitler’s description of the struggle occurring within Germany. Where Freud described the death instinct as a force working to “undo connections” and to “disintegrate the cellular being,” Hitler described Jews as “no element of organization,” but rather a “disintegrator of peoples” whose presence caused the “falling to pieces of the organic structure of the nation.”
Where Freud understood the death instinct as a force working to “dissolve living units and bring them back to their inorganic states,” Hitler divined a process within the nation threatening to “dissolve the German people into its basic elements.”
How may we account for this remarkable similarity between Freud’s theory and Hitler’s ideology? I hypothesize that each derived from experiences, observations and perceptions. Freud experienced or observed a force of disintegration acting within his own mind/body and that of his patients, and developed his theory that a force working toward death emanated from the inner world. Hitler similarly experienced or observed a force of disintegration. Unlike Freud, however, Hitler believed that the force working toward death emanated from the outer, rather than inner, world.
Rudolf Hess often declared at mass rallies, “Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler.” Hitler deeply identified his own body with the German body politic. It would appear that he relocated his body into the body politic, leading him to experience his own death instinct in the form of a projection--his belief that the German nation was disintegrating.
Each and every living organism eventually disintegrates and dies. Hitler aspired to create the German nation as a unique kind of organism: one that did not contain a death instinct and therefore was capable of living forever. Hitler’s odyssey constituted a struggle to defeat the death instinct, that is, to overcome the force of disintegration he imagined was working to destroy the German body politic. He aspired to shape Germany into a special kind of organism--one that would never die.
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