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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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469 |
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| Genocide |
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among most of the belligerents. But for Germany the
situation was quickly transcendent, so that “regardless of social station
or political conviction, August 1914 was a sacred experience.” Even Stefan
Zweig, the Austrian-Jewish writer later associated with intense anti-war
sentiment, said at the time, “Each one of us is called upon to cast his
infinitesimal self into the glowing mass there to be purified of all
selfishness.”11
Thomas Mann,
characteristically convoluted, referred to the war as “brutality for
intellectual reasons, an intellectually based will to become worthy of the
world, to qualify in the world,” and concluded that “Germany’s
whole virtue and beauty … is unfolded only in war.”12 And the related Expressionist literature of the
time — whose catchword, Rausch, meant “intoxication” or
“ecstasy” — had a vision of “war as an Armageddon whose end
must mean a rebirth into a better world,” the creation of a “New
Man,” a “union with all mankind,” or some related combination of
wallowing in death with “a welcome … to extinction” and
“the mystical union with the cosmos.”13
Nor were social theorists and
intellectual leaders such as Max Weber, Friedrich Meinecke, or even Sigmund
Freud immune from the intoxication. Weber pointed with pride at Germans as
“people of great culture … human beings who live amidst a refined
culture, yet who can even stand up to the horrors of war (which is no
achievement for a Senegalese!) and then, in spite of it, return basically
decent like the majority of our soldiers — this is genuinely
humane.”14 (However reluctant one may be
to compare Max Weber with Heinrich Himmler, there is a clear parallel here with
the latter's orations on the nobility of the German accomplishment in killing
so many Jews and remaining “decent.”) Meinecke was still more
extreme, recalling thirty years and two wars later that “the exultation of
the August days of 1914 [was] one of the most precious and unforgettable
memories of the highest sort” because it contained within it the
anticipation of “an inner renovation of our whole state and
culture.”15 And for about two weeks
Freud was “quite carried away … excitable, irritable, and made slips
of the tongue all day long”; he was disturbed by Austrian defeats but
“rejoic[ed] in German victories.”16
With the defeat, adult Germans were to become the most devastated
survivors: of the killing and dying on an unprecedented scale, and of the
equally traumatic death of national and social visions, of meaning itself.
There were individual breakdowns, notably among artists who served in. the war.
A prominent example was Max Beckmann who described having experienced no
physical wounds but rather “injuries of the soul”: grotesque death
imagery that subsequently haunted all of his life and art. Other Expressionist
artists experienced similar “spiritual wounds,” creating “an
atmosphere of painful contrivance … hysterical abandonment to the wildest
hopes and the unlikeliest despair.”17
But there was also a more brutalized survivor response, as exemplified
by Hitler’s own sequence: First, his memory of how “those hours [the
beginning of the war] seemed like … a release … [and] I fell down on
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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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Back |
Page 469 |
Forward |
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