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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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| Page
428 |
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| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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| Doubling as German? |
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Is there something especially German in doubling? Germany,
after all, is the land of the Doppelgänger, the double as
formalized in literature and humor. Otto Rank, while tracing the theme back to
Greek mythology and drama, stresses its special prominence in German literary
and philosophical romanticism, and refers to the “inner split personality,
characteristic of the romantic type.”33
That characterization, not only in literature but in political and social
thought, is consistent with such images as the “torn condition”
(Zerrissenheit), or “cleavage,” and the “passages and
galleries” of the German soul.34
Nietzsche asserted that duality in a personal way — by depicting himself
as both “the antichrist” and “the crucified”; and similar
principles of “duality-in-unity” can be traced to earlier
German writers and poets such as Hölderlin, Heine, and Kleist.35
Indeed, Goethe’s treatment of the
Faust legend is a story of German doubling: |
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Two souls, alas, reside within my breast
And
each withdraws from and repels its brother.36
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| And the original Faust, that doctor of magic, bears more
than a passing resemblance to his Nazi countrymen in Auschwitz. In
Goethe’s hands, Faust is inwardly divided into a prior self responsible to
worldly commitments, including those of love, and a second self characterized
by hubris in its quest for the supernatural power of “the higher ancestral
places.”* In a still earlier version of the legend, Faust acknowledges the
hegemony of his evil self by telling a would-be spiritual rescuer, “I have
gone further than you think and have pledged myself to the devil with my own
blood, to be his in eternity, body and soul.”38 Here his attitude resembles the Auschwitz
self’s fidelity to evil. And Thomas Mann’s specific application of
the Faust legend to the Nazi historical experience captures through a musician
protagonist the diabolical quest of the Auschwitz self for unlimited
“creative power”: the promise of absolute breakthrough, of |
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* The passage concerning the
“two souls” continues: |
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One with tenacious organs holds
in love
And clinging lust the world within its embraces.
The other
strongly sweeps this dust above
Into the higher ancestral places.
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| The historian of German literature Ronald
Gray finds patterns of “polarity and synthesis” in various spheres of
German culture: Luther’s concept of a God who “works by
contraries,” the Hegelian principle of thesis and antithesis and the
Marxist dialectic emerging from Hegel. In all of these, there is the
“fusion of opposites,” the rending of the individual as well as the
collective self, and the passionate quest for unity.37 One could almost say that the
German apocalyptic tradition — the Wagnerian “twilight of the
gods” and the general theme of the death-haunted collective end — may
be the “torn condition” extended into the realm of larger human
connectedness and disconnectedness. |
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THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
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