Nations may be conceived as bodies. Nationalism represents a collective dream about geographic spaces consisting of masses of people constituting bodies politic.

The contribution of Hitler and the Nazis was to have insisted upon taking the dream of the nation more seriously than it had ever been taken before. They imagined Germany as a biological entity containing a disease that had to be removed if the nation was to survive. By articulating and acting upon their ideology, Hitler and the Nazis revealed the dream of the nation as a fantasy about the body.

The bodily dream of nationalism was the source of genocide and war. I reveal the grotesque biological fantasy that sustained the historical drama.

In Nazism, your body belongs to the state. Nazism imagines that all bodies within Germany fuse to create a national organism. By connecting with a nation, one embraces the fantasy that one’s actual body is fused with an omnipotent body.

Nationalism is the dream of the nation as an omnipotent extension of the self, building upon the fantasy that many bodies fuse to create one body. The idea of the nation comes into being when people embrace the fantasy that their bodies are bound to an omnipotent body politic.

Hitler’s extraordinary feat was to have put forth this view that the nation was a biological reality—and to have persuaded Germans to act upon this view.

He called himself the “doctor of the German people." Hitler’s view was that Jews were bacteria. Nazism meant destroying Jewish bacteria—the source of Germany’s disease—so that civilization could survive. The Holocaust was the "Final Solution."

Nations represent the fantasy of omnipotent bodies that  exist within a vast space (the world). Nearly everyone embraces this fantasy that  nations are concrete entities that substantially exist.

The Nazis aspired to kill death, kill Jews who symbolized the principle or source of death. Hitler’s project was to negate the reality that all bodies die; that death comes to each organic creature. Hitler put forth the “impossible dream” that some organisms are not subject to death and decay.

 Germany was imagined as a unique kind of organism, a body politic that unlike other bodies was not subject to death and decay. However, in spite of everything Hitler said and did, he could not escape his feeling that Germany was in the process of disintegrating.

Abstract concepts cannot be separate from their source within organisms. Bodies politic cannot be detached  from actual bodies. Hitler's own experience of disease and disintegration was projected outward. His experience of his own body was externalized into the body politic.

Hitler’s project was an endless struggle to destroy death—the death he experienced within his own body. Hitler projected the idea of death into Jews, imagining he could kill death by killing Jews.

However, since Hitler’s political perceptions emanated from within his own mind and body, Hitler could not rid himself of the idea of death—no matter how many Jews he killed. The Nazi movement was an endless—futile—struggle to kill death.

Nazism was a spiritual movement seeking eternal life through identification with Germany an immortal body that could never die. The Jew was the principle of  “world affirmation,” as Hitler’s mentor Dietrich Eckhart put it. Nazism was “other worldly,” even as it was part of the world.

In nationalism, the idea of one’s self or body is “split off.” One imagines that one exists as a projective symbol of one’s self: “Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler.” Identification with one’s nation means that a massive body politic replaces—stands in for—one’s own body.

The sense that one is “oppressed” is the result of this fantasy of a massive body bound to one’s own body: experience of an omnipotent body politic fused to the self. The omnipotent body with which one imagines oneself to be connected weighs one down. One imagines that one is “bigger” than one actually is, but also smaller. One is diminished by the massive object with which one has identified.

In the Nazi fantasy of the nation as an organism, the individual is conceived as a cell within a gigantic body; a leaf upon a tree. Thus, one cannot exist or operate in a condition of separateness from this organism. 

The German Volk constituted a double of the self. Identification with Hitler was equivalent to identification with Germany. Just as Hitler was Germany, so every German was Hitler.

Totalitarianism means that everyone has to identify with the state. For Germany, this meant there could be only one body, one Reich, one Fuhrer and one people. Everything that existed was contained within or encompassed by this single body. Each human being within Germany (cells of the body politic) had to exist in a state of fusion with the national organism.