Peter Matussek, Paul Matussek, Jan Marbach Affirming Psychosis. The Mass Appeal of Adolf Hitler |
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New York et al.: P. Lang 2007
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Preface The reasons for Hitler’s catastrophic impact in the public sphere have remained puzzling to this day. We still cannot grasp how this odd, provincial vagrant, who seemed doomed to failure from the very start, could have risen to power so abruptly and managed to initiate a human extermination program whose atrocity is beyond all comprehension. Although the scholarly literature on Hitler has meanwhile grown to fill entire libraries, it has not yet gleaned many clues to this dark mystery. For want of an explanation, the boldest speculations have been, and continue to be, put forward. Serious scholars who wish to have no part in this tend instead to the resigned verdict that the causes of Hitler’s hatred of the world and of humanity as well as the reasons for the horrifying eagerness of his followers must remain obscure. Radical evil, they suggest, is simply incomprehensible. The present study, which grew out of an interdisciplinary collaboration between a psychiatrist, a cultural studies scholar, and a sociologist, is not content with the alternative between speculation and resignation. It investigates the reasons for the previous difficulties in the interpretation of Hitler and derives from these the necessity for a new psycho-historical approach, which it implements by analyzing the course of Hitler’s mania as an interplay of biographical and sociohistorical factors. In essence, the book discusses the following four theses: 1. Since its inception, the field of Hitler studies has been struggling with a dilemma: either the Hitler phenomenon is explained on the grounds of his psychological abnormality which leaves open the question of how one individual could have had such tremendous public impact; or, Hitler’s rise is explained on the grounds of the socio-historical circumstances of his time whereby there is still no getting around the recognition that the mass murders would not have been possible without his pathological will to destruction. Although it is obvious that both approaches can only advance our understanding by mutually supplementing each other, they nonetheless continue to stand largely in unreconciled opposition. The “intentionalist” thesis “no Hitler, no Holocaust” (Himmelfarb 1984) and the “functionalist” thesis of the “cumulative radicalization” of the Germans (Mommsen 1997) have remained controversial to this day. 2. A new theoretical approach presents itself as a means of closing this everpresent gap between the socio-historical and the psychopathological orientations of Hitler studies. This approach has already proven fruitful in the investigation of psychoses (Paul Matussek 1992, 1997). Essentially, it is based on the observation that every life history is marked by a polarity between public and private self. A pathological preponderance of the private self goes hand in hand with depression, while a schizophrenic structure arises out of a preponderance of the public self. Empirical studies have shown that the thematic complex of compulsions in the former group is focused almost exclusively on content of a personal nature; in the latter group, in contrast, this complex is characterized by the striving for a spectacular exceptional status within the contemporary historico-political field. This mark of a schizophrenic structure was extremely pronounced in Hitler. 3. With the help of this new paradigm, it becomes apparent that Hitler’s development had tended from an early age toward a narcissistic fixation on a grandiose public self until not a trace remained of the private including the emotional- self. A series of deep humiliations engendered an enormous need for compensation that escalated into a delusional relationship to his environment with all the characteristics of a paranoid schizophrenic psychosis. In fact, these characteristics have been often observed before; however, scholars were usually unable to make the appropriate diagnosis because it has been difficult to explain how a schizophrenic could operate with such a great degree of success. In the light of our model, on the other hand, it can be demonstrated that Hitler’s pathologically hyperbolic mode of relating to the outside world escaped stigmatization because the historical arena he encountered affirmed his exceptional status. The great extent to which Hitler was accepted by the masses saved his mania from a complete break with reality, which would usually lead to clinical consequences in the case of acute psychoses. Investigations in the field of transcultural psychiatry confirm that allowing the idiosyncrasies of a schizophrenic the possibility for social integration leads to an abatement of symptomsso-called remissions (Jablensky et al. 1991). In trance cultures, for instance, schizophrenics are honored as mediums possessing higher powers, and are thus stabilized. Something similar occurred in Hitler’s case; however, the circumstances were such that the supportiveness of the social environment, which has a healing effect as rule, led here to a fatal intensification of the destructive drives. The “Third Reich” set the stage for the drama of a mutual validation of individual and collective delusions and in this context, it was precisely the peculiar vacuity of Hitler’s personality that made it particularly suitable for projecting superhuman qualities onto it. All cult objects owe their aura to just such a lack of individuality, which incites the recipient to a projectionary act of supplementation (Belting 1990, Peter Matussek 1998). In Hitler’s particular historical and ideological context these supplementary fantasies were of course nourished predominantly by aggressive and paranoid impulses. 4. Hitler was thus able to achieve the realization of his delusional ideas only thanks to the social environment’s affirmation of them. In order to comprehend this aspect of the interplay we must take a closer look at the contemporary cultural and socio-historical circumstances. The literature on this topic has also been extensive. We rely on recent findings without repeating them here in detail. Rather, we concentrate on aspects that have been previously neglected in the relevant scholarship. In the context of our analysis, this includes in particular the fact that the mass acceptance that stabilized Hitler’s psychosis was rooted in a pathological accord between biographical and social motivations: in both cases, the desire to ward off feelings of shame. The “Führer” feared nothing more than turning himself into a laughing stock by his strange phantasms of grandeur, and his individual craving for compensation encountered at the end of World War I a people that felt shamed and humiliated in its inflated national pride. The personal grounds for Hitler’s pathologically hyperbolic self-presentation were masked by the popular ideology of antisemitism, and it was this interplay that first led to the destructive concentration of forces that ended in collective mass murder. We do not intend for these theses to imply that the Hitler phenomenon can be entirely rationalized. It would be an illusion to believe that the course of history is an event whose intellectual comprehension can escape the violence that according to Adorno “vitiates such thinking in real terms” (1951, p. 94). Conversely, the old maxim still holds: Whoever doesn’t learn from history is condemned to repeat it. The misleading term Vergangenheitsbewältigung [“overcoming the past”] does not find its fulfilment in the final assessment of a bottom line, but rather only in the ceaseless efforts to enrich our remembrance of the past through interpretation, and so to remain on guard against the dangers of a recurrence of comparable processes. In full knowledge that it is impossible to resolve completely the question of the origins of the Nazi terror, we nevertheless hope that our theses will open up a wider horizon for the discussion surrounding the remembrance of the Holocaust. Our new psycho-historical approach to the investigation of Hitler seeks to avoid the one-sidedness of a mode that is either purely social-historical or purely psychiatric, and aims to heighten the awareness of the above-mentioned interactions, whose cultural-anthropological predisposition makes it possible for them to recur at any time. The question of guilt is in no sense relativized by this approach; it is precisely the combination of a cultural analysis with an analysis of personality that eschews the erroneous consequence of minimizing the historical responsibility of the Germans with allusions to the diminished accountability of the protagonists. Why this is the case will be demonstrated extensively in the concluding chapter. The object of our book, then, is not a pathography in the clinical sense. Psychiatric terminology is used only insofar as it is necessary to elucidate the interplay of individual and cultural factors, which we address in conjunction with the broad concept of “schizophrenic structure.” But the origins of this analysis do go back to a psychiatric concern: the improvement of therapy for schizophrenic psychoses (Paul Matussek 1976). With the current, one-sided preference toward biochemical treatments, we are in danger of losing sight of those aspects of mental illness that relate to a patient’s life history and circumstances. Ultimately, this also impairs the effectiveness of the pharmaceutical cure. And thus, the question of the psycho-historical factors of schizophrenia has prompted us to investigate it in the example of a particularly prominent case. The dynamic of Hitler’s delusional career highlights particularly clearly the interplay of individual and social mechanisms. I wrote the present study in close collaboration with Paul Matussek, using the psychiatric diagnostic models developed by him during his many years of clinical experience. Paul Matussek died in June of 2003, shortly after the publication of the German and Italian editions. In the days prior to his death he repeatedly expressed the wish that our book would also be made available to the Englishspeaking audience, so that it could be acknowledged as a German contribution to the international field of Hitler research. And thanks to the continued commitment of the Peter Lang publishing house, I am now in the fortunate position of being able to fulfill this quite literally final wish. Out of respect for our joint effort I have left the original content unchanged. This means that some four years of the most recent Hitler research have not been taken into account. However, in reviewing the current literature, I have ascertained that it tends to confirm rather than relativize the positions we have argued. Readers familiar with the field may judge for themselves whether I am correct in my assessment. As before, we would like to thank the numerous colleagues and friends, witnesses and experts who stood by us throughout the course of the project with encouragement and constructive criticism. We are tremendously grateful to them in particular, to Jan Marbach who provided preliminary materials relating to the socio-historical aspects of our subject; to Yvonne Kult, whose assistance during the research phase was invaluable; and especially to Anna Brailovsky for her great commitment and enthusiasm in the translation of our book. In addition we would like to thank John Becker, Hartmut Böhme, and Klaus Köhle for reading drafts of the manuscript as well as Jörg Bankmann and Bardia Khadjavi-Gontard of the Stiftung für analytische Psychiatrie for their generous support, without which this project could not have been realized. June 20006 Peter Matussek |
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