▶︎ 0:00 This will be a lecture on Adolf Hitler. Look, the point of this lecture, this gets pretty heavy at times, and I'll try to leaven it with a few jokes. The point of this literature is that we've seen this literature of degeneration, which, from the 19th century, which has been largely lost and covered over. And it's been partly covered over because it was at least an enabling condition for certain things that happened in the 20th century, for instance, the mass murders of the Holocaust.
▶︎ 0:30 I wanna be very clear. I'm not saying degeneration literature had to lead to the Holocaust. That is not a claim I would want to make at all. What I wanna say, it's one of the conditions of possibility. It enables it. When you can label people as degenerate, as a disease, that opens up a particular logic.
▶︎ 0:52 Remember, I said the logic of the enlightenment was people are evil because they have the wrong thoughts. The natural trajectory of that is, let's correct their thoughts. Let's educate them. But if you think people are evil because they got the wrong physiognomy, or the wrong blood, or whatever, that doesn't open up the idea of amelioration through education. That opens up the worry, "Am I going to be infected? Am I going to be poisoned? What can I do?"
▶︎ 1:15 And I say the rhetoric of degeneration is what I call an enabling condition. You needed a lot of other things to explain the events of the 20th century. You need, for instance, incredible economic dislocation of the great inflations that infected Germanys in the '20s and the '30s. You also need, for instance, Germany's loss in World War I. So yes, I'm not saying degeneration theory is a straight line to the atrocity of the 20th century. I do say it opened up a conceptual space.
▶︎ 1:47 And the real part of what I want to say in this lecture is, when you read Hitler, when you read his main work, his main theoretical work, Mein Kampf, you see, there's just nothing new there. He talks about poisons, parasites, infection, but these are the very metaphors we saw that were so active in so much of the degenerationist literature. What I can say, what is particular about Hitler, is that by and large, he does something which I call the literalization of the metaphors.
▶︎ 2:14 That is, in a lot of the 19th century literature, they talked about such and so, so and so. "The Jews as a poison," Nietzsche says. But he doesn't mean it literally. It's not something you ingest and get killed by. But with Hitler, you get a much more literal reading of it, that they're really liking contamination, that mixing our blood with their blood will poison us. So he took the degenerationist literature, I would say, the metaphors hover between both a metaphorical and a literal reading. Hitler, it's by and large the literal reading.
▶︎ 2:47 Normally at this point, if I was teaching the course, I'd have a blackboard or a projector behind me and I'd project someone telling this following joke. I like to leaven it with a few jokes. This is heavy duty stuff. And I had this video of this comedian. I think he was on The Tonight Show. And apparently, at one point, Trump, President Trump, this was in his first term, was meant to have some comment about, "Hitler didn't, Hitler actually did a few good things." So this comedian comes on and said, "No, Trump's wrong. Hitler only did one good thing. He killed Hitler." Because Hitler famously committed suicide. I like that Hitler joke. Now to get down to the business.
▶︎ 3:32 I have to tell you a bit of Hitler's background. In 1923, he had a very famous Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. And he's a very minor figure then, and he thought he could get people to have a revolt in Munich and go to the capital of Berlin and take over. He tried to take over the Bavarian government as a basically prelude to taking over Germany.
▶︎ 3:53 Why is that important? Because he was sentenced to five years in prison. He only actually spent a year in prison, and it's during that time he composed his most important theoretical work called Mein Kampf, which in English would mean "my struggle." He published the first volume in 1925 and the second volume in 1926.
▶︎ 4:17 Hitler came into power in 1933. He didn't win a majority of the vote. He won the plurality. That means his party got the most votes in that election, and he was asked by the president, Hindenburg, to become the chancellor.
▶︎ 4:33 In 1937, he had this very important art exhibition called, it was originally in Munich. It was called The Degenerate Art Exhibition, in German, Entartete, Entartete Kunst. It showed 650 works, and it traveled throughout Germany. It was a very, very important exhibition. For a lot of Germans, that's the first, and for some of them, the only time they'd ever gone to an art gallery. You can see pictures of when it was in Munich, queues going around the corner. It was one of the most famous exhibitions, successful exhibitions of all time, et cetera, et cetera.
▶︎ 5:08 So what Hitler did, remember, Hitler himself was a wannabe artist. He tried to be an artist, but he was a failure at it. But then, and he did realistic pictures. He looked at people who did non-realistic pictures, like say Picasso with cubism. He looked at Dadaism, surrealism, impressionism, expressionism, and he said, "These are all examples of degenerate art." Now obviously, he was very, very influenced by Max Nordau, who much earlier in the century had written this book which was super famous called Degeneration. Of course, Hitler never references Nordau because Nordau himself was a Jew, and Hitler didn't like to do that. But he ran with Nordau's idea that there are these degenerate people in the arts world and literature, and they're leading to the enfeeblement of the race.
▶︎ 5:58 So the exhibition emphasized both the Jewish, the alleged Jewish sick and perverse nature of such art. So there were slogans written on the wall of this degenerate art exhibition which traveled all over Europe. Normally, I show a whole lot of slides of the pictures of this, but we can't do it in this setting. Some of the slogans painted on the wall, walls included, "Revelation of the Jewish racial soul." Or another slogan that was written on the wall, "The ideal cretin and whore," or "Madness becomes method," or "Nature as seen by sick minds."
▶︎ 6:32 By the way, a lot of these paintings weren't, they weren't all done by Jews. A lot of the artists were Jews, a lot of them were not. In fact, there was this expressionist, Emil Nolde, who himself was a proto-Nazi and a raving anti-Semite, yet over a thousand of his paintings were taken from various German museums and a lot of them were destroyed. I'll just read again from
▶︎ 6:55 Nordau's concluding chapter. "Degenerates lisp and stammer. Instead of speaking, they utter monosyllabic cries. Instead of constructing grammatically and symmetrically articulated sentences, they draw and paint like children who dirty tables and walls with mischievous hands. Every one of their qualities is atavistic, and we know moreover that atavism is one of the most constant marks of degeneracy. Lombroso has convincingly demonstrated that many peculiarities of the born criminals described by him are also atavisms."
▶︎ 7:31 And further on in the same passage, "Such is the treatment of the disease of the age which I hold to be efficacious. Characterization of the leading degenerates as mentally diseased, unmasking and stigmatizing of their imitators as enemies to society, cautioning the public against these lies of these parasites."
▶︎ 7:54 You can see this kind of thinking was extremely influential in Hitler and he was putting into practice Nordau's program. He was saying, "Here is this degenerate art. This is making us sick. These people are parasites, I'm going to eliminate it." And a lot of the stuff he exhibited was subsequently destroyed.
▶︎ 8:12 One thing we should say about Hitler is that his program began a lot earlier, that his program of dealing with the so-called degenerates. Everyone knows about, for instance, extermination of the gypsies, extermination of the Jews during the war, but actually in his earliest laws was the Laws of 1933, very soon after he came into power, called The Law For The, I'm just going to read the English translation, The Law of the Prevention of Diseased Offspring.
▶︎ 8:40 And that law allowed for the sterilization of those who were categorized as having various defects, congenital mental deficiency, schizophrenia, manic depressive insanity, hereditary epilepsy, hereditary chorea, that's called Huntington's Disease today, hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness or severe deformations, or those with severe alcoholism. This law from 1933 only got repealed by the end of the war, 1945. By that time, over 400,000 had been sterilized.
▶︎ 9:15 It's interesting that the things I mentioned on this, hereditary epilepsy, hereditary alcoholism, these are the kind of things that were mentioned in Morel's original treaties on degeneracy. They were part of his concern. One thing that people don't know that is really
▶︎ 9:30 Important is that The Law for the Prevention of Diseased Offspring was actually based on laws that were first promulgated in America. That is, it was based on the knowledge of Henry Laughlin's Model Sterilization Law of 1922, which actually Laughlin later on published in 1929 a German version of this Model Sterilization Law, and that's why Hitler, as soon as he came into power, could already have a law for the prevention of diseased offspring, because he was just putting into effect the American law that Laughlin had designed for various states.
▶︎ 10:10 I want to go back, I want to also mention, go a bit back earlier, because we think of this kind of idea of sterilization as something old, as something the Nazis did, but it actually started much earlier. It actually started in America. There is a very famous case that is still on the books today, and it was very influenced by the same person, that is this McLaughlin character, the guy who wrote the Model Sterilization Law that Hitler put into effect in Germany.
▶︎ 10:36 And in this case, this was a case that's called Buck versus Bell, and in it basically, there was this girl, actually she came from a very, very poor background, she'd been sexually molested, I believe she'd been raped, et cetera, and the state wanted to intervene and actually sterilize her. It was this notion that we have to sterilize people who are morally unfit. Because they saw her as the cause, they didn't look at the rapist or anything like that. And they thought of her, they had these categories of mental imbecile, of moral imbecile, and they applied those to her, and they said, "Well, for the good of the state, maybe we need to sterilize such people."
▶︎ 11:20 And it was in America, before Germany that they did this sterilization of the so-called morally unfit, the morally undesirable, et cetera. Also the sterilization of people who were considered cretins, people with, say, cerebral palsy. And I've quoted from that law, and this was done by a jurist who is revered to this day, one of the great High Court judges, Oliver Wendell Holmes. He said, "It is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principles of state compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbecile are enough."
▶︎ 12:12 This is because in presenting the case, the prosecution said, "Not just this woman needs to be sterilized, but we can see that her mother and her grandmother, they're all mentally feeble." So the idea of sterilization to stop the degeneration of the race, it was implemented in America before it was implemented in Germany.
▶︎ 12:33 And a related point, in the Nuremberg trials, after the war, a lot of these Nazi doctors were convicted of war crimes. It's interesting in the trials, there's not a single use of the word eugenics. Why? Well, there was an attempt to prosecute some of the Nazi doctors who were responsible for the program implemented by the doctors of the sterilizations, these theoreticians of eugenics.
▶︎ 13:04 For instance, there's a famous German scientist, Ernst Rüdin, who actually was the teacher of Joseph Mengele, a famous Nazi doctor. Mengele did get prosecuted. Rüdin didn't get prosecuted. Why? Because when they went after these German theoreticians of eugenics, they said they could produce all these letters. "I'm talking to professor so-and-so from Stanford. I'm talking to this professor so-and-so from Cambridge, from Oxford. What I was doing was just normal science."
▶︎ 13:36 This idea of getting rid of the degenerates, this idea of eugenics, that was science common to all the Western world. So the originators of the theory of eugenics in Germany actually never stood trial because they could implicate so many people in the Anglo world. In fact, it's worth noting that one of
▶︎ 13:54 The most famous resistors of Hitler, namely Churchill, wrote the following to Asquith in December 1910, and he states, quote, "The unnatural and rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic, and superior stock, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate." So we think of Churchill as a great opponent of National Socialism, but it's important to realize he also was incredibly susceptible to this eugenic notion and to this literature of degeneration. It wasn't just in Germany.
▶︎ 14:40 In fact, Churchill backed an act called the 1930 Mental Deficiency Act, which, who was it? A very famous writer who I forget called it the Feebleminded Act, meaning the people who put this act in were feebleminded. And it actually called for the so-called idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded persons, and moral imbeciles to be sterilized. In the end, it wasn't passed, the strong version of it that Churchill favored.
▶︎ 15:15 Now, I'm just trying to say here that these degenerate ideas, the idea of culling the population, wasn't just happening in Germany. It was actually, some of it was already being implemented in countries like America. Not so much England. That's a complicated question which I don't have time for.
▶︎ 15:34 Hitler's famous hatred of the Jews. Where does it come from? Really bloody hard to know. I wasted a year of my life trying to read all the stuff that Hitler read. And he'd read serious biological books like Rassenhygiene by Fisher, Bauer, Lentz that was actually given to him by his publisher while he was in prison after the Munich Putsch. They were serious books. They were taken as serious biological textbooks in the day. Today, we'd have a much lesser opinion. But he also read Guido List, who was an absolutely weird astrologer. He was a magpie. He read all kinds of stuff. It's hard to say what his influences was.
▶︎ 16:13 He claims he was an anti-Semite from an early age, but there's a book by a woman, Brigitte Hamann, called Hitler's Vienna: The Portrait of a Tyrant as a Young Man, and that's when he was an unsuccessful painter, in Munich in 1909 to 1913, and there it's pretty clear he didn't exhibit any deep antisemitism. But what did happen in Vienna is that he witnessed antisemitism. There were two famous anti-Semites in Vienna. One was the actual mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger.
▶︎ 16:45 Now, Vienna was then home to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a famous mess. For instance, in the parliaments there were Croatians, there were Hungarians, there were Slovenians, there were people of a German background, there were people from all different countries and actually in the parliament, they all spoke different languages so they couldn't understand each other. It was a complete zoo. Hitler sometimes used to go to that parliament, and interestingly, Hitler originally liked the idea of parliamentary democracy because he thought of England.
▶︎ 17:20 Then he went to the parliament in Vienna, which actually didn't really have real power because the emperor had all the power, but they allowed this parliament to exist, and he saw this theater of people, actually, sometimes when the Czechs would speak in Czech, the Hungarians would play drums. When the Hungarians played, the Serbs would play flutes. It was just this complete circus. That helped convince Hitler that democracy didn't work.
▶︎ 17:44 But the experience that I want to get to mainly is that he saw this mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, who had to deal with all these different people, and one way Karl Lueger, it's very, very hard to know if he really was an anti-Semite, but what he did is he used a lot of anti-Semitic rhetoric because he said, "Look, the one way I can get all these people to work together, the Croats, the Serbians, the Hungarians, the Austrians, is by saying..." Jews. None of us are Jews, right? And Lueger actually said to some of his Jewish friends, of which he had quite a few, "Don't worry, there's not a hair on a Jewish head that's going to be hurt. I'm just using this as a way of creating unity." Possibly Hitler learned a lesson from that.
▶︎ 18:28 The other person he would have seen in Vienna is Lueger's famous opponent, Georg Schönerer. He's very famous for he really led what we might call the Peasants' Party, the Workers' Party, the Peasants' Party. He invented the so-called Führerprinzip, meaning everyone has to bow down to the leader, that they need one person. And he was the one who first had the Heil, as in the Sieg Heil greeting, which was later taken up by the National Socialists. So the thing that Hitler seems to have learned from Schönerer is to focus the masses on one nominated enemy, the Jews. Schönerer was a genuine anti-Semite.
▶︎ 19:07 What's also important for his development of anti-Semitism is that after the World War I, where he served in and got wounded, General Ludendorff has this famous Stoss in der Rücken, stab-in-the-back theory, which claims that the reason we lost the First World War is because the Jews betrayed us. It's a very, very complicated story. I can't go into it. There were some Jewish figures involved in weapons procurement in World War I. I'm thinking of a famous one who got assassinated, but his name escapes me. But he was not a traitor, he was actually trying to help Germany as much as possible. But it was easy for people to appeal to this idea that there was some secret orchestration behind our backs and the Jews behind it between our loss in World War II. Hitler was also very influenced
▶︎ 20:00 Henry Ford, I mentioned this earlier, was a raving anti-Semite. He paid for multiple publications of this book called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And he had a series of articles called The International Jew, and they were translated into German and they were very vitriolic against the Jews. As I said earlier in some of the earlier lectures, Ford was anti-Semitic partially because he was anti the world of finance and he identified the world of finance with the Jews.
▶︎ 20:32 As I mentioned before, Hitler had read Madison Grant's book from the 1920s, The Passing of the Great Race, and he said, "It's my Bible." Remember, The Passing of the Great Race was the one that nominated the Scandinavian countries as the best of the best, the Nordic people. Then the northern Germans. No. Yes, the Germans and the Austrians, the Swiss as the Alpine, they're pretty good, they're not first-rate, and then the Mediterranean Jews, they're the lowest of the lows. And Madison Grant was scared that America was being swamped by them, and that led to the 1924 Johnson-Reed Exclusion Act, which stopped the immigration of basically Italians and Jews and other people, a lot of people from Southern Europe. Hitler thought of that as his Bible.
▶︎ 21:22 And I'm going to quote to you a bit from Ford's work. This is a work that Hitler read. Ford said, "A Jewish-American is a mere amateur gentile, doomed to be a parasite forever. These people," meaning members of the Jewish race, "are the true parasites of the Wall Street environment." So what we'll see is Hitler takes these metaphors and incorporates them into his own work and very literally starts talking of infection, poison, poisoning of the blood. It's worth noting that in the early 1920s,
▶︎ 21:57 The very first manifesto of the Nazi parties, he references Jews negatively in both a biological way but also in a spiritual way. This was typical of the metaphors used by degenerationists, these metaphors of disease, infection, poison, and blood. This is from Article 4 of the early manifesto, the 1920 manifesto of the Nazi party.
▶︎ 22:26 "Only those who are fellow countrymen can become citizens. Only those who have German blood, regardless of creed, can be our countrymen. Hence no Jew can be a countryman." So there he's characterizing the Jew in a clearly biological way, in terms of blood.
▶︎ 22:45 But here, from Article 24, "We demand freedom from all religious faiths in the state, insofar as they do not endanger its existence or offend the moral and ethical sense of the Germanic race. The party as such represents the point of view of positive Christianity without bringing itself to any one particular denomination. It fights against the Jewish-materialist spirit within and without."
▶︎ 23:14 So here you see, remember when we talked about Wagner and we talked about Marx? The Jew is seen as a spiritual condition, that is a condition of materialism. So Hitler uses both versions of the metaphor, the literal one saying we're being poisoned by blood, the more metaphorical one, well, it's our spirits that's being altered by the Jews.
▶︎ 23:41 I now want to look at some passages from Mein Kampf. This is going to be a horror story of readings, but just to show you how these metaphors that we originally saw in degeneration theory reappear in Hitler's writings. This is where he talks about poisonous fluids, unnatural selection, and the need to eliminate degenerates.
▶︎ 24:03 "How then did it happen that the political instincts of this very German people became so sick? For it is not merely one isolated phenomenon which points to this decadence, but morbid symptoms eating into the body of the nation like a gangrenous ulcer." "It seems as if some all-pervading stream of poison has been injected by some secret power into the bloodstream."
▶︎ 24:28 And further on, he says, "But man restricts the procreative faculty and strives obstinately to keep alive at any cost whatever has once been born. The natural struggle for existence which allows only healthy and strong individuals to survive is replaced by a sheer craze to save the feeble and even diseased creatures at any cost. And thus, the seeds are sown for a human progeny which will become more and more miserable from one generation to another as long as nature's will is scorned."
▶︎ 25:01 This is very much the degeneration of rhetoric, remember? It hearkens back to that, what I call the purple passage from Darwin, where Darwin says, "Anyone involved in breeding horses would know what would happen if we let the worst members of the flock, breed." And he goes on to say, "If only for a period of 600 years those individuals would be sterilized who are physically degenerate or mentally diseased, humanity would not only be delivered from an immense misfortune but also restored to a state of general health such as we at present can hardly imagine."
▶︎ 25:37 And then, of course, he does go on to vilify the Jewish people and he actually deals with this problem of the survival of the unfittest. He says, "There is probably no other people in the world who have so developed their, as a so-called chosen people. The best proof of this statement is found in the fact that this race still exists. Where can another people be found that in the course of the last 2,000 years has undergone so few changes in mental outlook and the character of the Jewish people?" They've not gone through changes. In other words, they belong in the past. In other words, he's cottoning on to the degeneration of theme. They are atavistic.
▶︎ 26:24 And so now we'll go through his characterization of the Jews as lacking originality, lacking idealism. He says of the Jew, "His intellectual powers, however, are not the result of an inner evolution; rather they have been shaped by the object lessons which the Jew has received from others. Since the Jew, for reasons that I shall deal with immediately, never had a culture of his own, he's always been furnished by others with the basis of his intellectual work, his intellect has always developed by the use of those cultural achievements which he has found ready to hand around him. That is why the Jewish people, despite the intellectual powers with which they are apparently endowed, have no culture, certainly not a culture of their own. The culture which the Jews enjoys today is a product of the work of others and this product is debased in the hands of the Jews."
▶︎ 27:22 This is a big, big theme, by the way, in a lot of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism, which I haven't touched on before. In German you'd say, Wir haben Kultur, sie haben nur Zivilation. And that in English that is, "We have culture. They only have civilization." Civilization belongs to the rootless cosmopolitan Jew. Civilization is seen as something superficial. Because the idea of culture, this is a very big influence of German romanticism, culture can only come from a land, from a genuine language, from an authentic language.
▶︎ 27:56 And, of course, what was said about the Jews is they don't really have a language. Remember, at this time, Hebrew was not the spoken language of the Jews. The Jews tended to speak the language of the people they were in or they spoke Yiddish which was seen as a debased form of German, and they didn't obviously have a land.
▶︎ 28:12 Hitler again has this theme repeated that Jews lack a genuine culture. "We must bear in mind," I'm quoting from my favorite book, Mein Kampf, "We must bear in mind the essential fact that there never has been any Jewish art and consequently that nothing of this kind exists today. We must realize that especially in those two royal domains of art, namely architecture and music, the Jew has done no original creative work." Remember, this was also a theme of Wagner's in his Judaism in Music, that there can't be genuinely Jewish creative composers. And, of course, Wagner was an utter, utter hero to Hitler.
▶︎ 28:54 He refers to the Jew, he says, "He is nothing better than a kind of juggler, or perhaps correctly speaking, a kind of monkey imitator, for in his domain he also lacks the creative elan which is necessary for the production of all really great works of art. He is not a creative genius but rather a superficial imitator." Remember, I refer to Kafka had already had this idea of the Jew as ape, but there he's making fun of the Germans' attitude to the Jew. But Hitler takes this same theme, the Jew is a monkey. The monkey is someone who plays and looks like being. He's uncannily like a human, but we know he's not really a human. That was Hitler's attitude to the Jews. "He is nothing more than a low-class mimic," says Hitler.
▶︎ 29:44 Not only did he deny their creative abilities, but he says they lack idealism. This is a recapitulation that the Jews are concerned with the material world, they can't go to the spiritual world. That's a known trope of Christian anti-Semitism. I'm quoting, "No, the Jews have no creative abilities which are necessary to the founding of a culture, for in them there is not and never has been that spirit of idealism which is an absolute necessity, necessary element in the high development of mankind. Therefore, the Jewish intellect will never be constructive, but always destructive." Actually, that's a pretty poor translation, but it gets the gist of what he was saying.
▶︎ 30:25 Okay, so this is the theme that we've seen in a lot of the degenerationist literature, that the degenerationist, they're degenerate, cannot be creative, they cannot be originary. And remember, I said, that's why I love Baudelaire, Freud, and Nietzsche, because they use a lot of the degenerationist tropes, but they turn it on their head. They say, "Actually no, the sign of degeneration, the sign of infection is a sign of heightened creativity." But Hitler has the flat reading, "If you're degenerate, nothing positive can come from you." There are
▶︎ 30:58 Tons of characterizations in Mein Kampf of the Jew as a parasite, as a germ, as contaminating, infection, also as a vampire, from Mein Kampf. "He is and remains the eternal parasite, a sponger, who like a pernicious bacillus," German, "spreads ever wider and wider, according to some favorable area attracts him." So here you really see that the Jew is seen as a germ who is infecting more and more of us. Now the fear is that the Jew will contaminate us all. The degenerate will contaminate us all.
▶︎ 31:38 If you listened carefully, you would've noticed I said Hitler called him the eternal parasite. And so the eternal parasite is a reference to this Christian antisemitic notion, I remember before, of the wandering Jew, Asheren. Remember there was this Jew who, Jesus was being taken to Calvary to be crucified, and he got in the way of this guy, and this guy, the guy says, "Look, I'm in a hurry. Could you bloody get out of the way with your stupid cross?" And Jesus said, "Well, I will go, but you will remain." And that's the Jew, Asheren, who's doomed to wander the earth eternally, until the second coming, till the Messiah reappears. Well, Hitler sneaks in certain references like that by referring to the eternal parasite.
▶︎ 32:27 More from Mein Kampf, "Culturally, his activity consists in contaminating art, literature, and theater." This is straight Nordau, by the way, "Holding the expressions of national sentiment up to scorn, overturning all concepts of the sublime and the beautiful, the worthy and the good, finally dragging the people to the level of his own mentality." So you can see, Hitler is obsessed with us being affected by Jewishness, both literally being infected by their blood, but also being infected by their ideas.
▶︎ 33:00 He says, "For as long as the people remain racially pure and are conscious of the treasure of their blood, they can never be overcome by the Jew. Never in the world can the Jew become master of any people, except a bastardized people. That is why the Jews systematically endeavors to lower the racial quality of the people by permanently poisoning the blood of the individuals who make up the people." I don't know how much more of this I can read without feeling sick. Okay, I'm gonna skip a fair bit now.
▶︎ 33:31 But it's interesting to know that he recapitulates another trope of the degeneration theory. Remember, degeneration theory said, these people who are sick and degenerate, but at the same time it shows an incredible fear of their power and how they're going to bring us all down. But at the same time, it says these degenerate people, because they are so feeble, they tend to breed themselves out, they tend towards sterilization according to Morel.
▶︎ 33:57 Hitler echoes the same point, "The final consequence is not merely that people lose all their freedoms under the domination of the Jews, but in the end, these parasites themselves disappear. The death of the victim is followed sooner or later by that of the vampire." So the Jews as configured as a vampire, but he's also taking these degenerationist theme that because they're weak and degenerate, they themselves should breed out. But then you wonder, well, is it, that's the logic of hatred, it can entail X and the opposite of X. These people are all powerful, they're contaminating us. These people are weak and are going to disappear. The theme of the parasite that brings about its own death is repeated by Hitler in various places, but that I will not quote.
▶︎ 34:44 I'll deal with a few more themes and then I've got to stop, because there's only so much Hitler I can take in one day. He often configures in Mein Kampf the Jew as sexually perverse, and he makes him associated with syphilis. And also, he has an identification of Jews and Blacks. Of course, for the National Socialists and in Mein Kampf, Blacks also are considered degenerate.
▶︎ 35:14 Remember, in this course, I haven't dealt with the characterization of Blacks as degenerate. I'm dealing with a European context, that was more an American context, and it's very triggering for a lot of us, but Hitler does go there. And you'll see how he does it, he configures the Jew as Black. There are famous images of the Jew as Black in Nazi antisemitic propaganda.
▶︎ 35:37 He says, and I quote, "The black-haired Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end, satanically glaring at and spying on the unsuspicious girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood and removing her from the bosom of her own people. The Jew uses every possible means to undermine the racial foundation of the subjugated people." And then he goes on to say, "In the case of syphilis especially, the attitude of the state and the public bodies was one of absolute capitulation."
▶︎ 36:09 And the degenerationists had a lot of fear of syphilis as a means of contamination, of the means of making a race degenerate. "Here, the only course is to attack the disease at its cause rather than its symptoms, for the moral havoc that results from this degeneration must be stopped." "This Jewification of our spiritual life and mammonizing of our natural instincts for procreation will sooner or later wreak havoc within our whole posterity."
▶︎ 36:39 So he has this theme of, you associate syphilis with the over-sexualized Jew and he associates the Jew with this contamination of our spiritual life. So this desire to eliminate Jewification can easily suggest, it naturally suggests, a need to eliminate actual Jews. That's what Hitler hovered between, the metaphorical reading of Jewification of our spirit by the financial world and then the elimination of actual Jews.
▶︎ 37:11 Another of the tropes that we've seen used is about the notion of concealment. This was very important for Hitler. He also said the Jews tried to conceal their intentions. And remember, the Jew and the woman are often figured as those people who are familiar to us, but are uncannily unfamiliar. Who knows what the Jew is really trying to do? When he says X, does it really mean X or does it mean Y? When a woman says X, does it mean X or does it mean Y?
▶︎ 37:39 From Mein Kampf, "One of the further lies, for example, is in connection with the language spoken by the Jew. For him, language is not an instrument of the expression of his inner thoughts, but rather a means of cloaking them."
▶︎ 37:56 Lastly, I'll talk very little about the demand for purity of blood. "Out of every oppression, those forces can develop which bring about a new rebirth of our national soul, provided always that the racial blood is kept pure." So he says, "The loss of racial purity will wreck inner happiness forever. It degrades men for all time. The conglomerate spectacle of heterogeneous races which the capital of the Dual Monarchy presented..." He's talking about the Austro-Hungarian Empire. "This monarchy of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs, and Croats, and always that basilisk," that is, that germ, "which is the solvent of human society, the Jew. Here, there, and everywhere, the whole spectacle was repugnant to me. The gigantic city," meaning Vienna, "seemed to be an incarnation of mongrel depravity."
▶︎ 38:50 That's a reference to Vienna or of the Austro-Hungarian Hitler. It's a symbol of modernity gone wrong. Okay, that's about as much of Hitler I can do in one day.
▶︎ 39:03 But what I want you to see is that in his language of poisoning, in his language of contamination, in his language of blood impurities, et cetera, he's taking a metaphoric that was already developed in the 19th century. There is really nothing new there in those metaphors. He is just taking it to an extreme. And I go back to the point I began this lecture in, I'm not claiming that degeneration theory had to end up in the atrocities of national socialism. I'm saying degeneration theory opened up a conceptual possibility. And that conceptual possibility was important to the events, the horrible events of the 20th century.
▶︎ 39:48 The conceptual possibility that degeneration theory opens up is to nominate certain groups, certain people, certain races, people of a certain religion, as a site of possible infection and disease. And it opens up the worry of going backwards. That is, remember the Enlightenment rhetoric was basically positive, the light of reason spreads out and takes more and more people in its cone. Once the light of reason is turned on, there's nothing that can turn it off. But if you think evil is not a matter of ignorance, having the wrong representations to be corrected by education, but you think evil is a matter of contamination, then there's a worry, "What if we're all contaminated with this? What if we all get the disease? What if we all become degenerate?" And that opens up the logical space where you want to treat those you consider evil by either isolation or by elimination.
▶︎ 40:43 There's one final point I want to make. When I originally started teaching this course, which was way back at Yale in 1895, I often found it was hard to motivate my students, because they'd think this was all 19th-century stuff, this is all long gone, et cetera. One of the ways I'd try to motivate, I'd say, "Look, these metaphors are very deep and a lot of them are still with us today. Think about everyday things you hear. Oh, someone who's very emotional is displaying their female side, or men tend to be more rational and reasonable and concerned with arguments, et cetera." Those are recapitulating tropes and metaphors of 19th century degeneration theory, which configured women as ultimately irrational and relying on emotion, and men at the level of abstract reason. These are deep metaphors and they move us in ways that we are often not aware of, and they have deep resonances that we're not aware of.
▶︎ 41:38 I used to say things like that to my class. But today, we're in a totally different world. Today, we literally see these metaphors, we see this degeneration theory without using that particular word degenerate, appearing to us. That is, for instance, Katie Hopkins can talk about foreigners coming over the boats into England as rats, as vermin. Now we see those same metaphors being retailed again, that foreigners are a disease, that foreigners are an infection. This has a long history and a very repeatable history, and it's a metaphoric that seems never to die. Remember how I began this course? I quoted Borges, who said, "Perhaps universal history is the intonation given, the different intonation given to a handful of metaphors."