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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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478 |
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| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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| for Germany as victimizer is its function as “the land
of anti-Semitic myths.” The myth of the Wandering Jew, while anticipated
earlier, took shape in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Germany: the
gaunt, old, white-haired man with a long beard condemned to roam the earth
until Jesus’ Second Coming for having in his youth mocked him and
enthusiastically joined the crowd chanting “Crucify him!” The German
term for “Wandering Jew,” der ewige Jude, means “Eternal
Jew”; this is an accursed specter, a figure who can neither live nor die
and remains an amalgam of murderer, corpse, and survivor-remnant. He is
death-tainted but survives everyone (the Wandering Jew was described as having
“buried the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans”) and therefore
represents the ultimate embodiment of survivor contagion, of a carrier of
deadly infection.53 |
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| The Threatened Community |
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A second, powerful German cultural emphasis in its
historical relation to Jews is its victimization of them on a communal and
ultimately biological basis. The situation begins with Jews having not just
integrated themselves into modern German culture but having helped to shape it,
so that as emancipated Jews gained intellectual respect as Goethe and Kant
scholars, they were viewed in another corner of the German mind as
“upstarts … sons and grandsons of the ghetto,”54 as a fundamentally alien people all the more
threatening because of the depth of their apparent cultural integration.
That tendency to understand the idea of community, or
Gemeinschaft, in terms of biological romanticism lent itself readily not
only to “race mysticism” but to invoking the authority of science to
denigrate the Jews. The German coining of the term “anti-Semitism"
(Antisemitismus) in 1879 was in fact a claim to a scientific position of
the necessity of excluding Jews from the threatened German Gemeinschaft.
And by 1886, Paul de Lagarde, a distinguished professor of oriental studies and
a prominent Christian thinker, could denounce Jews as “aliens” and
“nothing but carriers of decomposition,” and went on in terms with
which we are familiar to declare that “with trichinae and bacilli one does
not negotiate, … they are exterminated as quickly and thoroughly as
possible.”55 That medical imagery, and
other references to the threat of “blood poisoning” by “the new
Judaized Germanness,” maintained the claim to science and even to
high-minded humanitarianism.56 Thus one
turn-of-the- century educational reformer wished to combine an “organic
state” overcoming class differences with a means of freeing Germany from
the “Jewish spirit.”57 Even the
seemingly mild lament by the historian Treitschke — “The Jews are our
misfortune” — was part of a Gemeinschaft- centered tract
expressing an underlying fear of racial death — a fear verbalized directly
by Richard Wagner: “That we Germans especially will perish because of them
is certain.”58 |
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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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Page 478 |
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