Anyone following recent political events in the United States will have a feeling of what it means to say that a nation is falling apart. Given this experience, one can begin to comprehend Adolf Hitler—whose entire political career originated in his belief that Germany was “disintegrating.”
Hitler’s Ideology presents and analyzes the central images and metaphors in Hitler’s writings and speeches. Hitler’s rhetoric often refers to the “disintegration” of Germany. In my book, Hitler’s statements clustering around this term appear in a table entitled “The Disintegration of the National Body.”
Hitler wrote and spoke about the “decomposition” of the German nation, and of the “splitting up of the body politic.” He stated that the German people found itself in the midst of a “process of dissolution,” observing that “internally the body of the people began to dissolve.” It was a “chaos of views and concepts,” Hitler believed, that had “torn asunder the German people.”
According to Hitler, the bourgeois world had failed to notice the beginnings of a process that threatened to “dissolve the German people once more into its basic elements.” This increasingly rapid “falling to pieces of the organic structure of the nation” acted to “destroy the people’s trust in their leaders.”
Hitler became profoundly anxious reflecting upon Germany’s incipient decomposition or disintegration. What to do? Hitler’s response to this question was the source of everything that followed. His career revolved around his determination to prevent or reverse the process of German disintegration.
Rudolf Hess often introduced his Fuehrer’s speeches with the phrase, “Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler.” Perhaps few people have ever identified as deeply with their nation as Hitler did. He experienced himself as being “at one” with his nation. Germany existed within the fabric of his being.
Hitler spoke of Germany as if it were an actual physical entity. What was disintegrating when the nation was falling apart—was the German body. What more, Hitler identified his own body with the body politic. When he claimed that Germany was disintegrating, it is likely that he experienced this disintegration as a condition of his own body. Thus, from Hitler’s perspective, the “falling to pieces” of the German nation was simultaneously a world historic event and a personal one.
The following passages provide a sense of the immense power that Hitler attributed to the destructive force attacking Germany, and of the cosmic threat that he believed it posed:
This attack is levelled against the very substance of peoples as peoples, against their internal organization: it is levelled, too, against the leaders of these peoples, against those who represent each people’s own race, against their intellectual life, against their traditions, against their economic life, in a word against all those other institutions which determine the picture of the individuality, the character, and the life of these peoples and States. This attack is so embracing that it draws into the field of its action almost all the functions of life, while no one can tell how long this fight may last.
It is only rarely that the life of peoples suffers from such convulsions that the deepest foundations of the edifice of social order are shaken and that this social order itself is threatened or destroyed. But to-day who will refuse to see or even deny that we find ourselves in the midst of a struggle which is not concerned merely with the problems of frontiers between peoples or States but rather with the question of the maintenance or the annihilation of the whole inherited human order of society and its civilizations? The organization of human society is threatened.
According to Hitler, the attack taking place was directed not only against Germany, but against races, peoples and states. What was at stake was the survival or annihilation of the “whole inherited human order of society and civilization.”
Hitler was unique in that he believed that it was his personal responsibility to rescue Germany—and Western civilization. Germany was falling apart. Society was disintegrating. Hitler was an activist who refused to sit back while the world collapsed. He made it his business to “do something” to rectify the situation.
At the moment Hitler perceived the incipient breakdown of civilization—this is when violence enters the picture—based on his belief that he had identified the cause of national disintegration. Hitler believed that communism, or the Jew, was responsible. Doing something about Germany’s plight, therefore, meant taking action against communism and the Jew.
Hitler claimed that Marxism was a conception of the world with disintegration as its aim—leading to the “splitting up of the body politic.” The Jew, he felt, was a “ferment of decomposition” among races—a “dissolver of human culture.” The Jewish “demon of disintegration” symbolized the “unceasing destruction of peoples’ lives.”
Modern political structures grow out of the individual’s willingness to “identify with the nation.” Nationalism is a cultural form with profound psychological implications. As people are expected to devote themselves to their countries, so is the nation incorporated into the self.
Individuals vary in the degree to which they identify with their nations. What characterized Hitler was the depth of his attachment: the degree to which he equated own being and body with Germany.
Hitler explained to his people, “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” Hitler applied this proposition to himself. He was willing to become nothing in order to be everything. One became everything to the extent that one identified with one’s nation. Hitler projected his self entirely into Germany.
Thus, his struggle for survival (Mein Kampf) was simultaneously a struggle for the survival of the German nation. The Jewish force of disintegration within Germany was within Hitler’s body. If the nation was to survive—if Hitler was to survive—the Jewish force of destruction had to be removed— from within Hitler’s body, from within Germany, and from the world.
Hitler’s struggle was to keep Germany—and himself—alive. Given that this was a question of “life against death,” no actions were off-limits. Thus followed the fundamental premise of Nazi morality:
We want to prevent our Germany from suffering, as Another did, the death upon the cross. We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany, we have achieved the greatest deed in the world.