| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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| Many artists struggled against this totalism by opening
themselves to pain and death (Max Beckmann’s painting from his
“spiritual wound” of the First World War) and maintaining a spirit of
exploration and play. Other artists felt the lure of the absolute. It was Hans
Johst, an Expressionist novelist and playwright and later head of the Nazi
Chamber of Literature, who first used the phrase later made famous by
Göring: “When I hear the word culture, I draw my revolver.”*
That was the only cure for Germany’s disease. |
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| The Dispensing of Existence |
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Totalistic ideology avoids the sting of death in its claim
to invincibility and omnipotence. It puts forward its own claim to immortality
and exclusive truth in specific psychological manipulations of the environment
I have delineated elsewhere; milieu control (of all communication); mystical
manipulation (continuous efforts at behavior control from above while
maintaining the appearance of spontaneity from below); demand for purity
(constant accusations of guilt and shame in the name of an unrealizable ideal
of absolute devotion and self-sacrifice); the cult of confession (ritual
self-exposure to the totalistic “owner” of every sell); the sacred
science (combining deification of the Word with the claim of equally absolute
secular scientific authority); loading, of the language (into definitive,
thought-terminating solutions for the most complex human problems); doctrine
over person (so that the evidence of individual experience must be subsumed to
or negated by the idea system); and the dispensing of existence (the ultimate
and inevitable line drawn between those with a right to exist and those who
possess no such right)28 The last, the
dispensing of existence, is the larger principle that encompasses all of the
others, whether expressed in merely metaphorical or, as in the case of the
Nazis in directly murderous ways.
Indeed, the Nazi movement brought a
new literalism to the dispensing of existence by making the existence of each
individual a matter of either harm or benefit to the biological health of the
group.
Only this totalized approach can heal the sickness, so that the
Führer principle, the apex of Nazi totalism, could be embraced not
only by the uneducated but by intellectuals who felt keenly their “torn
condition” — as by the internationally known economist and economic
historian who declared in 1935: |
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The art of discussion is gone. Not discussion but
decision now dominates the scene. The creation of a political will comes about
today by quite another way. It is no longer the indirect way of influencing
public opinion but the direct way of the Führer principle. This is
a fact which |
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* Johst’s original
phrase was: “When I hear the word culture, I slip back the safety catch of
my revolver.” 27
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