Available for download at:
https://www.academia.edu/116716242/On_the_Psychopathology_of_Zionism
Call it the Tuna-fish Theory of History: that rancid feel that struggles at the back of your mind. The article that follows was drafted a few years back, long before the attack on Gaza, and I’d been thinking, and sharing with a few friends, its applicability to the present. The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has given me permission:
https://twitter.com/mikopeled/status/1766811473727103254
It’s time to begin to talk about “the beginning of the end of the Zionist project;” and the cause of its collapse; of the inability to let go; of its enablers.
Florian Huber. "Promise me you'll shoot yourself." The Mass Suicide of Ordinary Germans in 1945. Translated by Imogen Taylor. New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2019. Originally published in German under the title Kind, versprich mir, daß du dich erschießt. Berlin: Piper Verlag, 2015.
Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich. The Inability to Mourn : principles of collective behavior. Preface by Robert Jay Lifton; translated by Beverley R. Placzek. New York: Grove Press, 1975. Originally published in German under the title Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern. Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens. München: Piper Verlag, 1967.
“We may expect that one day someone will venture to embark upon a pathology of cultural communities.” Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents.
“The sinners in Zion are afraid; fearfulness hath surprised the hypocrites.”
פָּחֲד֤וּ בְצִיֹּון֙ חַטָּאִ֔ים אָחֲזָ֥ה רְעָדָ֖ה חֲנֵפִ֑ים מִ֣י ׀ יָג֣וּר לָ֗נוּ אֵ֚שׁ אֹוכֵלָ֔ה מִי־יָג֥וּר לָ֖נוּ מֹוקְדֵ֥י עֹולָֽם׃ (Isaiah 33:14)
I]
You’re halfway through Florian Huber’s book before you find out the small town of Demmin in Northeast German was a Nazi stronghold even before the Nazis. The town had “its own torchlight parade, its own communist hunt, its own Jewish pogrom, its own rallies.” [p. 183]. A bit of an understatement, that: long before Kristallnacht the town’s Jews had been expelled; the synagogue was turned into a factory; the gingerbread town of Demmin was a major supplier for, and beneficiary of, two nearby air bases. A telling oversight, because the first quarter of Promise me you’ll shoot yourself is devoted exclusively to Demmin in the last days of Nazi Germany, and you’d expect more than an anecdotal connection between the townspeople’s Springtime love of the goosestep and the subsequent events narrated here.
April 28 through May 2, 1945. In Berlin the Red Army is mopping up the last vestiges of resistance. On April 30 the Führer kills himself after killing his dog. (Pity about the dog.) Meanwhile in Demmin, as the Red Army closes in, a thousand or more out of a civilian population of 16,000 choose to kill themselves by poison, bullets, hanging or drowning. Choose is misleading: a substantial number of deaths are of children murdered by their parents, or family members shot or drowned by others family members.
From the first section of this book one might conclude the good little burgers of Demmin chose to end their days and the days of their loved ones out of single-minded fear of the Judeo-Bolshevik hordes bent on rape and pillage, the furthest reach of German historical self-reflection, similar to Zionists today for whom the enemies they have themselves constructed represent such a threat that they would rather kill their own than allow them to fall into their enemies’ hands. Neither readers nor reviewers of Promise me, least of all the publisher’s promotion, care to move beyond the assumption that fear alone, and not a long, earlier, psychological progression, was the motive of the actions of the good little burgers of Demmin, and the half-title helps to hinder. In German it reads Der Untergang der kleinen Leute, which translates roughly as “The Downfall of the Little People” without a cause ascribed, or responsibility. The American half-title reads The Mass Suicide of Ordinary Germans, presumably to distinguish them from those out-of-the-ordinary Germans known as Nazis. Only the Italian version tackles the question head-on: Nazisti fino alla morte, “Nazis unto Death.”
The question remains: how Nazi were these suicides? Was this behavior typical of a Nazi mindset, not just an “ordinary German” mindset? Or was that ordinary German mindset a Nazi mindset to begin with, a Nazi mindset still? And can one ask the same of Zionism? Far from a unique case in narrowly defined circumstances (the approaching Red Army), the suicides in Demmin were part of a rampage of self-destructiveness all over Germany, irrespective of a Russian presence and affecting tens of thousands. Later, on the author acknowledges that the motivation for suicide throughout Germany was not fear of the barbarian hordes; nor, he claims, was it too close an identification with the Führer’s own suicide, the ultimate Follow-the-Leader. Instead, he wants us to believe, the suicides came from ordinary Germans reacting as you’d expect ordinary Germans would to the collapse of their beloved world; plain-vanilla Germans so cruelly disappointed by the failures of the Regime that they had no other out than death:
“It was the tragic moment of collapse that shaped the way the Germans perceived themselves. They had all [sic] been afraid of the war; they hadn’t wanted it [sic again]. The worse their experiences, the more ill-used they felt, and from there it was only a short step to believing that they themselves had been targeted by the regime.” [p. 255.]
Their disappointment, Huber claims, had been exacerbated by the nice ways Germans “all” had been treated until then; Huber comes dangerously close to suggesting these ordinary Germans had been so thoroughly satisfied by the wonderful ways the Nazinanny State had met their emotional and practical needs that they were no longer capable of pulling themselves up by their own jackbootstraps. In self-destruction, then, they were no different from those ordinary Aztecs who in the days of the Conquista begged to be admitted to the charnel house, the “Place of Shards;” no different from those ordinary Balinese who even today re-enact the Puputan, the mass suicide of the nobility in colonial days. No different from suicides in societies where cultural and political collapse leads to massive dejection and suicide. The author spends the last three quarters of his book piling up evidence from Übernormies who felt at the time or in retrospect that they’d been seduced or induced or mesmerized by their Nazi masters, only to be abandoned in the end. The German word Untergang in the half-title underscores that argument, it doesn’t signify “death” but “downfall,” “dissolution,” “unraveling.”
For Huber the suicides aren’t symptoms of a deeply disturbed mentality, they’re extreme manifestations of the collapse of the Nazi Dream, as if the Dream itself were not proof of a disturbed mentality. The Untergang in question does not refer to the suicides in the first section but to the Germans in the second, in which the author makes extensive use of personal diaries and recollections to build his case, further blurring the line between Germans in general and that particular type of German who under certain specific circumstances commits suicide.
Writing of the days immediately following the collapse of the Aztec Empire, Anita Brenner describes two prevalent diseases among the indigenous people:
“Tlacolmiquiztli, which means, ills caused by love and desire… in excess or in lack of fulfilment… […] And the other is netepalhuiliztli, which means, dependence on another or rather, the ills caused by dependence.”
These symptoms are remarkably similar to those feelings of dependency and abandonment that, according to Huber, affected those who had lived under the Nazi Regime: “Of these sorrows they sickened and died.”1 Like the Zionists, the Nazis had promoted the principle of victimhoood from the outset, yet Huber never once addresses the specifically German concept of Ehrentod, “honorable death,” an expression traditionally applied to the praiseworthy self-sacrifice of soldiers but which in the militarized culture of Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany could equally refer to civilian suicide or death in battle. The concept was a throwback at once to Roman stoicism and to a capitalist assumption propagated by John Locke in the seventeenth century: since one’s body is one’s own property one may dispose of it as one pleases, provided one has the moral authority to do so—and parents, obviously, had the moral authority to dispose of their children’s lives, just as husbands over wives. The book’s title, Promise me you’ll kill yourself, comes from the words of a German father heading off to die fighting the Russians and asking his eleven-year old daughter to do herself in as well, the way you ask a child to do her homework, or a woman to preserve her honor.
Nazi Family Values: One husband shot his wife, then ran out of bullets for himself; he was acquitted after the war. Women threw themselves into the water with their children attached by ropes and then swam off, leaving the children to drown. Huber [p. 100] claims “women in particular saw no other way out than to kill themselves,” but clearly that was not the case. To quote a dark joke of the time, “I’d rather have a Russian on top of me than an Ami [American bomber pilot] above me.”
Simply put: some ordinary Germans were more prepared to resist the Nazi blandishments of death, some less. This is the variable Huber won’t address, as if suicide were the natural German norm. But as Émile Durkheim famously argued, suicide is a social fact: the sum of suicides within each distinct group within a given society inevitably points to one or several determining social factors that will vary according to the mindset of the group or sub-group to which the suicides belong.2
Durkheim begs to ask whether the mindset of those Germans who killed themselves or their loved ones can be placed on a spectrum extending from ordinary Germans to ordinary German psychotics, and what that spectrum was. The question inevitably raises another: does Jewish adherence to the Zionist project define one’s own Jewishness the way adherence to Nazi ideology made one German? For Nazis, for Huber and for many Zionists today there is no spectrum. For Huber as for many Zionists today there is no spectrum. Huber’s suicides are generic German monads led astray, passive recipients of propaganda and favors, sovereign citizens minus the free will, like the idealized natives of an old-fashioned anthropological survey: inconvenient facts to be explained away by the Nazi’s mysterious powers of persuasion, not by the particular psychic and social makeup of those who did commit suicide, or the role of the State and its values. It’s a question that can’t even begin to be addressed in Germany or Israel today because the entire weight of the political, legal, and cultural system is designed to thwart it: conceptually, one may not be or have been a little bit Nazi in Germany, or a little bit Jewish in Israel or America, note the odious reception given to the scholar Daniel Goldhagen when he suggested that the actions of the German extermination squads fell along a spectrum.3 By failing to connect the tendency to suicide with Nazism and its death cult; by failing to understand how the suicidal mindset grows out of the Nazi mindset, Huber rationalizes this mindset as a normal aspect of German national character, as German as apfelstrudel; and because he normalizes it, enables it. No wonder the book did so well in Germany.
Beyond easy categorizations, the phenomenon of Nazi suicides presents a psycho-social problem; it requires an interpretative framework that addresses the interplay of individual psychic dynamics with the psychodynamics of a given social group as a whole, along with a sense of those personal and interpersonal dynamics that define an individual’s relation to an organized society. One wishes the task had been handed to Ruth Benedict with her fine psycho-social nuances, or to Wilhelm Reich, the more so as Reich’s masterful Mass Psychology of Fascism dealt with the psycho-social successes of Nazism while Promise Me addresses a psycho-social collapse: suicide as a Totalitarian Social Fact.4 To grasp the shared mindset of these individuals in a dynamic, evolving relation with Society as a whole is a challenge only a dialectical approach (Freudian or other) can answer.
II]
Only a dialectical approach can accurately gauge the similarities and divergences on the spectrum of behaviors between two similar social groups, the ordinary Germans described by Huber and ordinary Zionists today. If we are to believe Huber the suicides in Demmin and elsewhere were merely the acts of ordinary Germans who supported the Nazis in varying degrees but were not themselves particularly active either in the military or as Party members; the same could be said in a preliminary attempt to define a certain type of ordinary Zionist: not necessarily active in the political or confessional institutions but defined and defining themselves by their over-identification with the Nation, its leader, or its ideological props. Neither group was initially predicted to engage in outright psychotic behavior, unless one counts a tendency toward nationalism, racism, philosemitism or anti-Semitism as more than neuroses. Nevertheless, in either case one may distinguish from the outset certain traits that consistently point the members of each group on that path—unless, like Huber and the apologists of Zionism, one is hell-bent on denying it. These traits are:
· 1] Proactive emotional investment in authoritarian personalities and thought, as distinct from the susceptibility to authoritarianism which has been analyzed, among others, by Wilhelm Reich and Adorno.5 This distinction serves to sidestep the artificial and misleading separation of guilty leaders and innocent led. In terms of the social and political system in America and Israel, it provides a consistent link between the outwardly rational actors (political or otherwise) and the psychotics they enable even as they benefit from their support.
· 2] Misdirected libido. Freud’s own psychological theory was distinctly economic, based on the concept of a displacement and channeling of a relatively fixed amount of energy, specifically sexual energy (libido). In this schema libido may be directed (empathy), misdirected (adulation) or dammed (repression). I am retaining this mechanistic abstraction as a useful descriptive device, without vouching for its biological or somatic accuracy.6
· 3] Impulsive interest to define, control and possess one’s own body and the bodies of others. This could include claims of absolute authority over one’s children; opposition to abortion; resentment of non-cisgendered behavior. It might also include an obsession with controlling the bodies of one’s perceived enemies, witness the numerous examples of Israeli soldiers parading in the lingerie of murdered Palestinian women. Here the Freudian insistence on the sexual basis of social behavior (no matter how sublimated) has a role to play.
· 4] Detachment from the Reality Principle. In Freudian terminology this expression describes the relative ability to assess the functions and effects of the external world, and to act upon them in an efficient manner. Freud originally proposed that the functions of the reality principle arose out of the ego’s own need to counter “hallucinatory wish-fulfillment,” the satisfying fantasies of the inner infant. While popular psychology is fond of stating that this ability is a function of the ego as opposed to the id, the situation may also arise (notably in Nazi Germany and in consumer Capitalism) where “hallucinatory wish-fulfillment,” far from being spontaneously produced as a function of the id, is carefully nurtured by the superego functions, that is the functions of the State and of Society at large.7
· 5] Affective compartmentalization functioning as a kind of socio-cultural base-structure, anchored in deeply rooted and now unconscious ideologies. I’m referring to Immanuel Kant’s functional distinction between affective and rational choices. Note, for instance, Heinrich Himmler’s infamous speech to the SS of October 4, 1943, congratulating the officers for having “remained decent” in the midst of rationally organized genocide. Si licet in parva, this attitude is no different from the “nice at all costs” attitude of a certain type of Midwestern Republican; or the pretense of sophisticated culture affected by Zionists and their enablers in all Europeanized nations.8 In Germany then as in Europe today the pathological was, and is, normalized under the guise of “essentialist nationalism,” the ideological contribution of the influential nineteenth-century historian Heinrich von Treitschke, one of the founders of modern anti-Semitism:
“Whenever a question of understanding the psychological motivations behind actions and decisions arises, German historians fall back on the broad general assumptions of that school: What Treitschke called ‘the nature of things’.”9
This normalizing of pathological behavior is carried out by a network of ideological enablers: academics, organic intellectuals, pop historians like Huber, political consultants and pundits, all invested in legitimizing the group by assimilating its behavior and values to those of the wider national group as a whole—or, in the case of Zionism in America, an often-reluctant and conflicted network of religious and cultural enablers. Far too little attention has been paid to the role of American and Israeli behaviorist psychology in validating various forms of neurotic or outright pathological behavior under the umbrella term of Values: neurosis as cultural norm. Huber’s book is not about suicides at all, it’s about those ordinary Germans who in the span of a generation were led to their deaths. The author’s attempt to shoehorn ordinariness into the despicable actions of the suicides of Demmin is the single purpose and appeal of Promise Me, whereas the purpose of the present paper is to identify the full spectrum of behaviors that lead from the merely obnoxious (hyper-nationalism, racism, philosemitism and anti-Semitism) to the psychotic (murder or suicide). What Freud called the “pathology of cultural communities” is subsumed under the category of national ordinariness.10 What can we project from the observable fact that Israel today, like Nazi Germany before it, is a psychotic nation?
III]
Start with the Inability to Mourn. This, according to Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, was the defining trait of the ordinary German after the fall of the Third Reich. In an influential book of that title published in 1967 the two psychoanalysts tackled the emotional blockage of Germans unable and unwilling still to come to terms with their own involvement with Nazism. Their own psychoanalytic approach, argued the authors, was the most fruitful one,
“a study of collective social conduct which is indebted neither to the behaviorism of a B. F. Skinner nor to the positivism of a Karl Popper but to the methodology of psychoanalysis.”11
Adding,
“It is necessary to distinguish among the very different sources from which the influences that distort behavior arise: these include highly cathected prejudices, collective fantasies of delusional intensity, material affluence coupled with emotional deprivation, fixation on infantile forms of need-gratification, and the like.” [p. xxvii.]
The value of this approach, like that attempted in the present study, lies in the so-called “multi-axial diagnosis” familiar today from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual [DSM]: the identification of a variety of symptoms helps to locate the patient’s malaise on a spectrum leading from neurotic discomfort to deep disturbance and occasionally to suicide.
The inability to mourn was and is still a behavioral norm in postwar Germany, a collusion between survivors, historians, filmmakers, narrators, and the ordinary German public to not address their own emotional detachment. The authors’ originality lay in their perception that this mass neurosis was not the sum of individual neuroses, as Freud had claimed, but a social neurosis indebted to the sociopolitical structure. Even today in Israel and Germany, gaslighting is not merely an idiosyncrasy, it’s social policy. Likewise, in Israel and wherever Zionists gather, the inability to mourn—that is, the inability to come to terms with and overcome a justified grief—is at once a State policy and a calling. A social system made up of individuals protects the individuals from themselves, and from confronting themselves. Of course, this could be said as well of any type of hypernationalism: all of them foster, to one degree or another, what Freud called the “narcissism of small differences.” The distinction, in 1945 Germany as in 2024 Israel, is when nationalistic neuroses grow into full-blown psychoses.
What is it then that perpetuates these neuroses? Keeps them alive until they explode into full-blown paranoiac ravings and destruction, even self-destruction? Huber provides a clue. Here is a quote from Promise Me, a passage from the diary of one Lore Walb, earlier an enthusiastic follower of Hitler. On hearing of the Führer’s suicide Walb writes:
“…for the rest of our lives, we and those who come after us must bear the burden he has inflicted on us… God seems not to love us anymore.” [p. 250.]
Huber has a bad habit of quoting from memoirs and diaries published long after the fact, ensuring that memories are carefully sifted, first by the survivor, next by historians like himself. The evidence he presents is the evidence previously interpreted by his sources for his readers, as reinterpreted by himself. Walb’s account, significantly half-titled Confrontation with my Diaries 1933-1945, was not published until 1997. Far from a spontaneous outpouring of feeling, it merely parrots the call to surrender issued on May 2, 1945, by Helmuth Weidling, commander of German forces in Berlin, a statement that, as a purely strategic matter, tossed the Führer on the dump heap:
“On 30 April 1945, the Führer committed suicide, and doing so he left those who had sworn loyalty to him in the lurch.”
„Am 30. April 1945 hat der Führer Selbstmord begangen und damit alle, die ihm Treue geschworen hatten, im Stich gelassen.“
Weidling’s speech is re-enacted at the conclusion of the 2004 film, Der Untergang (Downfall), notorious for its attempt to present Hitler as pathetic and confused (read: “human”), as if the failure of the German Revolution were to be blamed on the weakness of one man alone—a Nazi Netanyahu to those liberal politicians who hope to palm off their own responsibility on the father figure. Tellingly, Weidling’s speech plays over a confused sequence that seems to have been originally scripted to show a young boy confronting the suicide of his own parents Germans but has been edited to suggest these ordinary Germans had instead been murdered by Nazis.12 Even as late as 2004, ordinary Germans were desperate not to be held responsible for any deaths—not even their own. The movie concludes with a boy, an identical double to the one who has just seen the bodies of his dead parents, cycling off without a shred of feeling, “breaking all affective bridges linking [him] to the past.”13 It was this intolerable emotional deficiency that the Mitscherlichs addressed:
“In the last days of April 1945, it became clear that defeat was inevitable. There followed a panic of guilt and fear that compelled blind and dogged self-destruction and, during the years that ensued, a total outward withdrawal from any identification with Nazism.” [“Introduction,” p. xxvi.]
Contrary to the film’s happy ending, those who outlived their own love for the Führer were left with an intolerable burden, one that they imposed on themselves of course, but also upon others. As Robert Jay Lifton explains in his brilliant preface to the American edition of The Inability to Mourn,
“In the absence of such confrontation, a survivor must live in a state of de-sensitization, or what I term ’psychic numbing,’ and remain locked in silent and explosive conflict within himself.” [p. ix.]
“Explosive” may be the first word that comes to the mind of any Diaspora Jew who has ever had dealings with Zionists, whether (as in my own experience) in a confrontation with the notorious Jewish fascist Meir Kahane; or a screaming match with one’s settler cousins; or an outburst from Zionist Uncle at the Seder table. Just as, according to Mitscherlich, the Führer is the unforgiven parent, so, too the real object of the Zionist’s unquenchable rage is their Diaspora parents and relatives, those who, as they imagine, failed to protect them from extermination: “Why didn’t they fight back?” The arousal and quenching of that rage is a phase in the emotional development of almost every Diaspora Jew; very few can escape it; not all, however, have the ego strength to avoid its perpetuation from neurosis into psychosis. Note in this context, that Abraham Foxman, Director Emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League and the spearhead of the Zionist effort to condemn and isolate Diaspora Jews even at the expense of fighting anti-Semitism, was, literally, abandoned by his parents, who committed the unpardonable sin of placing him with a Christian foster family in order to enable him and themselves to survive the Holocaust. Paging Dr. Freud.
IV]
Inability to Mourn: Mitscherlich’s title refers to Freud’s definition of Melancholia in a key article, “Mourning and Melancholia.” To Freud the two afflictions were conjoined and yet distinct. Both are defined as a
“reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.”14
Mourning is “normal” in the sense that it involves a process of grief, reparation, healing and eventual acceptance of the reality of loss; Melancholia is a pathology, perhaps even worse, a psychosis, as it involves an inability or unwillingness to overcome one’s grievance. Freud is picking up on a distinction articulated three hundred years earlier in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Whereas the mourner may eventually achieve some form of balance, acceptance even, melancholics remain in a perpetual limbo, unable to heal or to move on, to the point of psychosis and occasionally suicide:
“This Melancholy of which we are to treat, is a habit, a serious ailment, a settled humour, as Aurelianus and others call it, not errant, but fixed: and as it was long increasing, so, now being (pleasant or painful) grown to a habit, it will hardly be removed.”15
Long before Freud, Burton had discerned the part played in Melancholia by repetition compulsion, not at all dissimilar to the pleasure derived from scratching a painful wound. The roots of Melancholia, according to Freud, lie in narcissism, a condition to which he had devoted a previous paper.16 Not that there’s anything pathological about narcissism per se. In its common form, narcissism or self-love is a normal and even a necessary process of self-protection, which Freud calls primary narcissism,
“a complement to the egoism of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature.”17
Narcissism is the vestigial trace of our reaction, at a very early age, to the painful awareness of external factors impinging on our fantasies of absolute power, the realization that these powers are invested in others not ourselves. Out of narcissism comes the search for an object outside ourselves that will fulfill the wish for a benevolent power capable of satisfying our wishes, leading to investment in a suitable “object”—or what some might call “Love” and Freud, the Ego-Ideal. As Freud saw it, narcissism plays a role in the choice of every love-object, whether of lovers for their lover or parents for their child or citizens for their nation. The problems associated with melancholia arise when we become over-invested in lovers or parents or nations, allowing them to assume functions and affects that we feel incapable or unworthy to direct ourselves or toward ourselves: self-love, in which we may feel deficient; or hatred, which we fear to direct at others:
“We have discovered, especially clearly in people whose libidinal development has suffered some disturbance […] that in their later choice of love-objects they have taken as a model […] their own selves.”18
Neurotics can only love themselves through those they choose to love them, leading to
“narcissistic neuroses, in which the subject's libido is attached to his own ego instead of an object.”19
What happens, then, when the Ego-ideal is withdrawn — through death, through loss in love, through failure in war? Freud offers a rough analogy, based on an economic model that assumes a displacement of energy within the psyche:
“Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachment to that object.”20
Freud’s not entirely satisfactory displacement model suggests that libido [sexual energy] first flows toward the Ego-Ideal. Then, having “transferred” all of their libido to another, to a faith or a nation, melancholics find themselves powerless, unable to love or even to mourn. The melancholic, according to Freud, is at bottom a person without a self:
“In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”21
In his poem Psalm, the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan offers a powerful illustration of the emptiness attendant on the loss of an Ego-Ideal:
No one kneads us again out of earth and of clay, No one breathes over our dust. No one.Praised be thou No One. For your love want we to bloom Up against you.A Naught were we, are we, shall we remain, in bloom: The Not, the No-One’s Rose[…]
Niemand knetet uns wieder aus Erde und Lehm, niemand bespricht unseren Staub. Niemand.Gelobt seist du, Niemand. Dir zulieb wollen wir blühn. Dir entgegen.Ein Nichts waren wir, sind wir, werden wir bleiben, blühend: die Nichts-, die Niemandsrose.[…]22
“Psalm” is a moving witness to the overpowering sense of powerlessness of the melancholic. Celan’s plant imagery conveys the organic, even mechanical aspect of the affliction; more accurately, it describes the power of the affliction and the powerlessness attendant on overcoming it. Likewise, Freud’s “displacement” approach focuses on the mechanical movement of libido towards or away from the ideal. In good scientific fashion it attempts to describe the process, and in so doing sidesteps the ethical aspects of the behavior itself. According to this particular approach of Freud’s, melancholia, unlike mourning, is independent of the conscious will,
“in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious.”23
Admittedly, there is something disquieting about the suggestion of an equivalence between the melancholia of the death-camp survivor and that of the beneficiaries of Nazi largesse: between the sense of powerlessness suffered and resisted by Celan (who himself died a suicide) and the pre-emptive act of self-victimhood assumed by Nazis and Zionists alike. Frau Walb’s initial reaction upon hearing of the Führer’s suicide is infected with a sense of helplessness similar to Celan’s, but it has none of Freud’s withdrawal from consciousness; one might say that the withdrawing of love from the Führer is a deliberate act, an act so much more deliberate for its pretense of helplessness: “But what about us? We’re adrift and abandoned…”24 Likewise, even today, the drawing of a false equivalence between the sufferings of the victims and the sufferings of the victimizers remains a staple of German and Austrian cultural politics—and of Zionists. As the Mitscherlichs noted with exasperation in their analytic practice with Germans of the post-war Era, the patients were actively involved in promoting their own powerlessness:
“After the idol has fallen, this weak ego again makes itself heard. It confesses to having succumbed to an overwhelming power; but, like a weak child, disclaims any responsibility for the mistaken educational practices of its elders.”25
It’s the business of psychoanalysis (as it is of the poet) to move from compulsion to insight, from powerlessness to choice. It should be the business of the politician. For it’s an accepted fact that narcissists make frustrating patients because they are happy to describe their affliction in great detail but unwilling to change it. To quote a staple of ‘sixties psych rock,
Straight from the shoulder I think like a soldier I know what's right and what's wrongI'm the original discriminating buffalo man And I'll do what's wrong as long as I can
After all, there’s a difference between the inability to mourn, and unwillingness. The first is the product of unconscious pressures, the other a conscious choice. There is a deep well of bad faith in that variant type of melancholia that assumes the trappings of melancholia for its own ends. And suicide, after all, is the ultimate choice of willed powerlessness, the ultimate end-game strategy.
But the Zionist has to want to change.
WOID XXIII-43
March 16, 2024
Anita Brenner, Idols behind Altars (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1929), p. 119.
Émile Durkheim. Suicide. A Study in Sociology. New York: Macmillan, 1951; first published as Le Suicide: Étude de sociologie [1897].
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Hitler's willing executioners. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
Ruth Benedict. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Patterns of Japanese culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946; Wilhelm Reich. The Mass Psychology of Fascism. New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970; first published as Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus [1933].
Reich. Mass Psychology; Theodor Adorno and others. The Authoritarian personality. New York: Harper, 1950.
Paul Ricœur. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977; first published as De l'Interprétation ; essai sur Freud [1965].
Sigmund Freud. “Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (London: the Hogarth Press, 1957), pp. 213-226; Adorno. The Authoritarian personality; Herbert Marcuse. Eros and civilization; a philosophical inquiry into Freud with a new preface by the author. Boston, Beacon Press, 1966.
Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The inability to mourn: principles of collective behavior. Preface by Robert Jay Lifton (New York: Grove Press, 1975), p. 19; Goldhagen, Hitler's willing executioners, p. 57. "From a Speech by Himmler Before Senior SS Officers in Poznan, October 4, 1943. Evacuation of the Jews." Shoah Resource Center, The International School for Holocaust Studies; https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%204029.pdf accessed March 14, 2024.
Mitscherlich, p. 54.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents in The Standard Edition Vol. XXI, p. 144.
Mitscherlich, “Author’s Foreword,” p. xv.
Der Untergang (Downfall), directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel; produced by Constantin Film AG et al., 2004.
Mitscherlich, quoted in Lifton “Preface,” p. ix.
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and melancholia” [1917] in The Standard Edition, Volume XIV, p. 243.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy [1621 and after], Part I, Sect. I, Member 1, Subsection 5 - “Melancholy in Disposition, improperly so called. Equivocations.”
Sigmund Freud. “On Narcissism. An Introduction” in the Standard Edition, Volume XIV (1914-1916) On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, pp. 73-102.
op. cit., p. 74.
op. cit, p. 88.
Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study, translated by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1935), p. 110.
“Mourning and Melancholia,” p. 244.
op. cit., p. 246.
Paul Celan, “Psalm,” Die Niemandsrose [1963] in Paul Celan, Die Gedichte. Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe, ed. Barbara Wiedemann, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), p. 133.
“Mourning and Melancholia,” p. 245.
Huber, op. cit., p. 250.
Mitscherlich, op. cit., p. 23.
Robin Williamson, Minotaur, performed by The Incredible String Band, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, Elektra Records, 1968.