| Genocide |
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Nazi era as “like a dream.” He remained confused
by the power Hitler held over him, dating back from that first speech.
Speer was referring to the almost continuous sense of transcendence he
and other Germans experienced during the Nazi era. Given Hitler’s call for
a form of national “redemption,” for “a renewed spiritual Reich
realized in a political framework … yet also beyond politics,” every
small event, indeed every single moment, could be bound up with transcendence,
with the messianic purpose of the Thousand-Year Reich. This quality of
transcendence associated with the regime could help one avoid awareness of
one’s corrupt and self-serving behavior, as was surely the case with Speer
and others. |
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| The Continuous “High State” |
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The Nazis were heirs to an extreme form of romantic
nationalism, of worship of the “holy, divine Reich” called forth by
writers, philosophers, and youth-movement leaders over the previous century. It
had to do with “the intimate connection between political reaction and
literary romanticism” and included strong elements of Protestant pietism
as well as related Catholic religious emotions.38
All this combined with specific Nazi
ideological omnipotence to contribute to a sense of being those particular,
“children of the gods” who had the right to kill, in a spirit
described by one as: “If you will not be my brother, your head will be
dropped off your shoulders.”39 That
pattern was exemplified by the “oath-bound community” entered into by
SS members, so that they could, in their sense of special mission for the
Führer and the race, move toward their killing while psychologically
maintaining a “high state.”
Transcendence, like everything
else, became biologized — as in Ernst Haeckel’s “scientific
expressionism” (see pages 441-42) and in Fritz Lenz’s mystical
genetics (“Racial hygienists also want to be workers in God’s
vineyard” 40). Moreover, under the
Nazis, science was so molded that it not only failed to criticize the false
assumptions associated with these high states but itself joined the
transcendence. There was even an attempt to create an “Aryan physics”
with the claim that “scholarship — like everything else brought forth
by men — is conditioned by race and blood.”41
Goethe’s critique more than a
century earlier of German “transcendence hunger” was remarkable for
his inclusion in that category of not only transcendental philosophy but
Newtonian physics. He was probably the first to see that what was later to be
called positivism could itself be associated with mysticism and transcendence
42 — a pattern exemplified, for
instance, by Josef Mengele. Viewing himself as a scientific revolutionary,
Mengele could become “God playing doctor” by embracing the
transcendent state made available by a highly romanticized, positivistic, and
ultimately genocidal Nazi version of science. |
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