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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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468 |
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| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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pre-Hitler Germanic ideology The Politics of Cultural
Despair. And he ascribed to a leading creator of that ideology, Paul de
Lagarde, the motivation of a “mounting disgust with modernity” which
led him to explore over several decades “the causes, the symptoms, and the
cure of Germany’s spiritual collapse.”7
Post-First World War confusion, the
experience of the Weimar Republic as “an era of dissolution, without
guidance,” was at least in part a continuation of that earlier process. By
then German culture had begun to divide itself into two camps: the artistic and
social experimentalists who tried out every variety of new form in a great rush
of creativity and excess; and the right-wing political restorationists who
“despised … precisely this free-floating spirit of
experimentation.”8
Both camps
were dealing with an intense experience of loss. There was an immediate sense
of disintegration, separation, and stasis; and an ultimate breakdown in larger
human connection, in the symbolization of cultural continuity or of collective
immortality. Thus one historian could describe the political atmosphere in
Germany from 1919 to 1923 as “oppressive with doom, almost
eschatological.”9 The atmosphere, that
is, was dominated by "last things,” by both death and a sense of doom.
The pattern was intensified by the perpetual German cultural sense of
“cleavage,” or the “torn condition” mentioned previously.
Also important is a cultural corollary, what could be called a German
immortality hunger; the constant quest for experiences of transcendence and
affirmations of ultimate meaning and connectedness. Goethe mocked that
immortality hunger when he declared in 1826, “It is now about twenty years
since the whole race of Germans began to ‘transcend.’ Should they
ever wake up to this fact, they will look very odd to themselves.”10* |
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| Failed Regeneration |
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But the First World War holds the key to the pre-Nazi,
Nazi pre-genocidal German perception of collective historical illness. For in
that experience we find not only death immersion on an extraordinary scale but
a survivor, experience so intense as to remain even now difficult to grasp. The
First World War for Germany represented still another crucial psychological
dimension, the profound experience of failed regeneration.
The
outbreak of the war was marked by exultation or “war fever” |
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* Here I follow a
long-standing principle of a trinity of influences affecting all collective
behavior: psychobiological universals (that which is common to all people in
all cultures in all eras); cultural emphasis (that which is given particularly
intense expression over a long course of cultural experience); and recent
historical forces (those currents of a specific, identifiable historical period
that act upon the other two parts of the trinity). In this case the
psychobiological universal would be susceptibility to death imagery in response
to impairments at both proximate and ultimate levels of psychological function;
the cultural emphasis would be the perennially “torn condition” of
the German self; and the relevant historical forces would be the rapid
industrialization and modernization of the latter part of the nineteenth
century and the inundation with death and disillusionment in association with
the First World War. |
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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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