Shoah was a radically new and historically unprecedented situation that de-manded radical adaptation for survival.

The latent psychodynamic meaning which Bettelheim derived fromFreud’s postulate of the relationship of persecutor to victim, and which heapplied to the destruction of the European Jews, was that every aggressionand every violence requires at least an active and a passive actor. The clinicalscenarios of family violence, alcoholism, gambling, and drug addiction arethe psychodynamics of passive collusion and facilitation by »innocent« lovedones. Indeed the most difficult therapeutic task is to help the most innocentvictims to gain insight into their own unwillingness or refusal to take appro-priate protective measures. The very »goodness,« defenselessness, and lack ofknowledge or awareness of the victim is an essential component of the atro-city.

An indepth psychodynamic and historical understanding of these terribleevents we have recounted as a social and psychological preparation for dehu-manization and murder, may show us how to identify, contain, and preventsuch processes. For, while each historical situation is unique, the forces wehave considered are not. As Albert Camus concluded in his great allegory ofthe Shoah:

»the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; […] it can liedormant for years in furniture and linen chests; […] it bides its time inbedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; […] perhaps the day wouldcome when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse upits rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.«33

33 »Le bacille de la peste ne meurt ni ne disparaît jamais, qu’il peut rester pendant desdizaines d’années endormi dans les meubles et le linge, qu’il attend patiemmentdans les chambres, les caves, les malles, les mouchoirs et les paperasses, et que,peut-etre, le jour viendrait ou, pour le malheur et l’enseignement des hommes, lapeste reveillerait ses rats et les enverrait mourir dans une cité heureuse.« AlbertCamus, La Peste, Paris 1947; 1962, 1474 (The Plague, New York 1972, 287.)

sigmund freud, max weber and the shoah

José Brunner(Tel Aviv)

Humanizing Hitler:Psychohistory and the Making of a Monster1

1. Introduction: Medicalizing the Monster

This paper discusses psychohistorical attempts to reveal what turned Hitlerinto a monster. To say that Hitler was a monster means to apply to him aterm that denotes a huge, misshapen and frightening creature. Hitler was amisshapen human, in the sense of being viciously cruel, persecutionary anddestructive, a political leader of whom people were rightly frightened, whoseracist ideology, authoritarian rule and genocidal policies had a disastrous ef-fect on the entire world. Generally monsters are fabulous, mythical crea-tures, like ogres, dragons and giants. Hitler, unfortunately, was human andtherefore real.

Psychohistorians seek a path to Hitler before he became a monster, in or-der to pinpoint a transformative event that turned an Austrian drop-out intothe ruthless Führer. They assume that to decode his monstrosity, it is neces-sary to start by examining Hitler as an ordinary human being, a child concei-ved and born in a regular family, a son growing up with mom and dad. As weshall see, psychohistorians also tend to assume that they can bring to light asingle transformative event, having to do with the family in which he grewup, or with his bodily features, which turned Hitler into a monster. In thewords of Walter Langer, whose psychodiagnostic research into Hitler provi-ded the foundation of much of the psychohistorical literature that followed:»the problem of our study should be, then, not only whether Hitler is mad ornot, but what influences in his development have made him what he is.«2

Psychohistorical approaches to Hitler assume that – to paraphrase Simone deBeauvoir completely out of context – one is made a Führer and not born one.Hence psychohistorical accounts of Hitler are tales of a metamorphosis,though they invert the logic of fairy tales. Instead of a frog turned into abeautiful prince by a kiss, that is, by an expression of true love, they presenta provincial youngster who turns into a monstrous creature by far viler andmore destructive than a frog because of a disorder having to do with parental

1 Ideas contained in this paper were discussed with various classes in my seminars onpsychological theories of Nazism. I am grateful to the comments and criticisms mystudents made of my views and the texts we read, which contributed to my argu-ment.

2 Walter C. Langer, A Psychological Analysis of Adolph [sic] Hitler: His Life andLegend, Washington 1943, 139. http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/h/hitler-adolf/oss-papers/text/profile-index.html

love. In this sense, psychohistorical explanations of the Führer follow thelogic of Kafka’s famous short story, in which a son finds himself transformedinto an enormous, terribly disgusting insect.

Psychohistorians dealing with Hitler are always in search of an event, fi-gure, incident or fantasy, without which Adolf Hitler would not have turnedinto the Führer. In this way, psychohistorical explanations resemble classicmystery novels, in which a clever sleuth manages to discover and deciphertraces as clues to a dark secret from the criminal’s past, providing hithertoincomprehensible and unsolved crimes with an unsuspected motive, whichfinally allows catching the culprit and solving the crime. We will see that likeDashiell Hammett’s and Raymond Chandler’s private eyes, psychohistori-ans discern hints and traces that others have failed to notice, and are able tomake sense of expressions and actions that remained meaningless to others.3

Generally, detective novels contain certain set scenes and characters – such asfat men, sad but treacherous femmes fatales with bedroom eyes, and toughlonely heroes – but they inevitably lead to a past that is to explain crimes inthe present. This past can take a number of shapes, and while some do notcome as a surprise to the seasoned reader of the genre, others may be unex-pected or seem bizarre. As will become evident in the course of this essay, thepast presented by psychohistorians as constitutive of the worst criminal ofthem all may also take a number of forms, and while some can hardly asto-nish readers familiar with psychoanalytic literature, others may appear pecu-liar or eccentric.

As a rule, psychohistorical constructions fit into an Oedipal pattern.Thus, in most psychohistorical accounts of Hitler’s life, the Oedipal constel-lation assumes the role of a kind of transcendental nucleus of Hitler’s mind,located beyond the material furniture of Weimar Germany and the ThirdReich, turning the latter into symbols of a family drama being reenacted in-terminably and unknowingly by the Führer, endowing his ideology, policiesand actions with a hidden symbolic meaning, placed beyond the horizon ofhis own consciousness. Conversely to the famous feminist slogan, accordingto which the personal is the political, for psychohistorians the political is thepersonal. They take Hitler out of public history, as it were, placing him in thecircle of his family. They remove him from historical time and insert him intoa transcendental biographical realm, where childhood is never completelyover, where the past continuously repeats itself, and where family membersturn into characters of Greek drama. Mother Klara becomes an Austrian Jo-casta and father Alois a reincarnation of King Laius, while Adolf, of course,turns into a modern Oedipus, who is not only offered a throne since he

3. For the similarity of psychoanalytic accounts and detective stories, see: Carlo Ginz-burg, Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method, in idem:Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, Baltimore 1989.

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appears to be the wise savior of the people, as Oedipus did in Thebes, butwho in return also wreaks havoc on the city – and the entire world.

Since most psychohistorical accounts of Hitler are shaped in an Oedipalmould, they inevitably relate Hitler’s persecutionary qualities, his racism,genocidal aggressiveness and destructiveness as in some way stemming froma problem with his identity as a man, that is, with his desire, sexuality orgenitals. As will be detailed in the following four sections, though this basicOedipal grid creates a family resemblance among psychohistorical narra-tives, it does leave room for a number of options. While the gist of psychohi-storical explanations is predetermined by the principles of psychoanalysis, inwhich the Oedipus complex acts as a pivot of development, psychohistoricalnarratives may vary in the particular Oedipal drama that they present as con-stitutive of Hitler’s monstrosity.

All these dramas are tales of traumatic transformation, for only a traumaor a series of traumas, it seems, can be credited with the power to turn anordinary human into a monster. As this essay shows, the reasoning of psy-chohistorians is guided by the assumption that in order to become a monster,a person must either have undergone a monstrous experience of some kindand, perhaps, also have a bodily deformation. There are three possible typesof trauma that psychohistorians invoke as constitutive of Hitler’s transfor-mation from an innocuous child into a monster:

1. an original or core trauma in early childhood, having to do with a patho-logical parent-child relationship of one kind or another, to which all furt-her traumas are traced.

2. a secondary or supplementary trauma related to a genital defect, which,however, gains a pathogenic quality only within the framework of a prior-existing pathological parent-child relationship.

3. a concluding or clinching trauma occurring in late adolescence, whosemeaning and effects are determined by its unconscious association withthe core trauma.

Each of the following sections of this essay is devoted to a discussion of oneof these three traumas and the various ways in which it appears in the psy-chohistorical accounts of Hitler, for there are a number of narratives for eachof them. Moreover, as will be seen, some psychohistorians assume that Hitlerunderwent a tripartite series of traumatic experiences, while others hold oneor two of them for sufficient to account for his monstrous qualities in adult-hood.

However, as also will become apparent, there seems to be one lesson to bederived from the different accounts of trauma, which can be summed up asfollows: if one turns the entire world into an unbearable place, one does sobecause one cannot bear what is in one’s mind, which, in turn, is a conse-quence of what one saw in one’s parents and/or one’s body. The variouspsychohistorical narratives appear to teach that it needs something mon-

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strous – or at least something that is imagined to be monstrous – to turnsomebody into a monster, that abnormal minds are the consequence ofabnormal events and organs. Finally, the moral of psychohistorical interpre-tations of Hitler also is that one may become a criminal if one does not growout of the Oedipal triangle and submit to the incest taboo, renouncing lethalaggression against the father and the forbidden wish to possess the mother.

My approach to these psychohistorical stories is constructivist or con-structionist: it assumes that the pre-monstrous Hitler who is said to precedethe monstrous Führer has not been discovered by psychohistorians, as anearlier civilization has been discovered in an archeological dig, but that he isthe result of narrative constructions based far more on theoretical precon-ceptions, conjecture, speculation and prejudice than on historical evidence inthe traditional sense of the term. While I take note of the fact that some psy-chohistorians – though by no means all of them – conceive of their work interms of a scientific enterprise of discovery, I show that this rhetoric is part ofa literary practice that not only constructs the developmental processes andinvisible mental conflicts that are said to underlie Hitler’s monstrosity, butalso presents these constructions as scientific revelations and explanations.4

Though the narrative constructions provided by psychohistorians arecritically examined throughout this essay, I also argue that psychohistoricaldiscourse humanizes Hitler by revealing a vulnerable human being precedingor underlying the monster. Diagnostic labeling is an additional way in whichmedicalizing discourse humanizes his monstrosity. As we shall see, the firstdiagnosis of Hitler declared him a hysteric tending toward schizophrenia,but after seven decades of psychological interpretations of Hitler, many,though by no means all, contemporary psychohistorians seem to concur thatHitler had a borderline personality disorder, verging on the schizophrenic,without actually being psychotic. Erich Fromm, for instance, noted »thepresence of a psychotic, perhaps schizophrenic streak« in Hitler, but deniedthat he was psychotic or suffered of paranoia, arguing in particular that Hitler’ssuspiciousness was realistic, as the plots instigated against him proved.5

The 1977 publication of Robert Waite’s The Psychopathic God: Adolph[sic] Hitler diagnoses him already in its title as a psychopath, but the bookalso depicts him as a borderline personality, and highlights paranoid featuresin his outlook and actions.6 In the wake of Waite, most psychohistoriansseem to regard Hitler as a borderline paranoiac.7 Edleff Schwaab turned the

4. Hayden White, 1976. The Fictions of Factual Representation, in: Angus Fletcher(ed.), The Literature of Fact, New York 1976, 21-44.

5 Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Harmondsworth 1983.6 Robert G.L. Waite, The Psychopathic God Adolph [sic] Hitler, New York 1977,

432.7 See for example, Norbert Bromberg/Vera V. Small, Hitler’s Psychopathology, New

York 1983, 8, 13.

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assumption that Hitler was a paranoiac into the basis for his book Hitler’sMind: A Plunge into Madness,8 and Fritz Redlich declared paranoid delu-sions to be most significant psychopathological manifestations of Hitler’sderanged mind.9

One should note, however, that such labels – and above all the category ofborderline disorder – are rather vague. Often they are but psychiatric genera-lizations, by which, as Redlich – himself a psychiatrist – has rightly commen-ted, »nothing is gained […] but a false sense of knowledge.«10 Though mostpsychiatric diagnoses of Hitler tend to be strongly value-laden, precariousand unenlightening, and though they pathologize the Führer, my argument isthat their humanizing quality is a welcome antidote to the fashionable retreatto theological, mystical and other metaphysical presentations of Hitler as adevil of the twentieth century, who is said to be beyond the grasp of ordinaryhistorical, medical or social discourse.

In other words, though I do not think that any of the psychohistorians hasfound the key to open Hitler’s mind, I maintain that psychohistory can addrichness to descriptions of Hitler, accentuating that the mind in question isnot only monstrous, but also deeply human. As Yehuda Bauer has pointedout: »The murder was committed by humans, for irrational reasons that canbe rationally analysed […] the Holocaust is a human event, perpetrated forreasons that are, unfortunately, human and which can be explained, despitegreat difficulty in doing so, for emotional, or practical, or whatever rea-sons.«11

2. The Core Trauma

There are two basic versions of the original trauma that psychohistoriansassume to underlie Hitler’s adult monstrosity. One points at the father’s vio-lence as the main traumatizing factor, violence that is said to have expresseditself sexually against the mother and in physical abuse and punishmentagainst the son; the other singles out the mother’s allegedly excessive or ill-conceived care, which in turn is explained by her traumatization. But as weshall see, there are four stories that emerge from these two visions of an origi-nal childhood trauma shaping Hitler.

8 Edleff H. Schwaab, Hitler’s Mind: A Plunge into Madness, New York 1992.9 Fritz Redlich, Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet, Oxford 1998, 293-296

335-336.10 Ibid.11 Yehuda Bauer, On the Place of the Holocaust in History, in: Holocaust and Geno-

cide Studies 1 (1987), 209-220; see also Irving L. Horowitz, Genocide and theReconstruction of Social Theory: Observations on the Exclusivity of CollectiveDeath, in: Isidor Walliman/Michal N. Dobkowski (eds.), Genocide and theModern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, New York, 1987, 61-80.

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The earliest book-length psychodynamic narrative on Hitler was writtenin response to a request of General William Donovan, who recruited scholarsin the social sciences and humanities for the Office of Strategic Services(OSS), the World War II precursor of the CIA.12 When in spring 1943 Dono-van suggested to Boston psychoanalyst Walter Langer that he provide theOSS with a comprehensive evaluation of Hitler’s psyche, the result was adiagnosis that declared Hitler to be a severely mentally disturbed sexual per-vert.13

Langer gathered a team of researchers who perused the New York PublicLibrary for relevant material and interviewed people who knew Hitler, com-piling a source book of over eleven thousand pages. The material was re-viewed by Langer and three other senior psychoanalysts – Henry A. Murray,Ernst Kris and Bertram D. Lewin – and condensed by Langer into a secretreport that was submitted to the OSS. According to Langer’s typescript,»[t]here was unanimous agreement among the four psychoanalysts who havestudied the material that Hitler is an hysteric bordering on schizophrenia andnot a paranoiac as is so frequently supposed.«14 (The report remained classi-fied until 1972, when it was finally published under the title The Mind ofAdolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report. It is noteworthy that in contrast tothe original typescript, the published version of the above quoted passagelabels Hitler a »neurotic psychopath« rather than a hysteric and omits theclaim that Hitler was no paranoiac.15 In accordance with this change of dia-gnostic terminology, Langer declares in the Introduction to the 1972 bookthat a survey of the raw material on Hitler the team had collected was already»sufficient to convince us that he was, in all probability, a neurotic psycho-path.«16 Moreover, throughout the text, Langer made small modifications,replacing, for instance, the term »neurotics« by »psychopaths« to characteri-ze Hitler’s case17 and substituting the phrase »psychopathic people ofHitler’s type« for »neurotic people of Hitler’s type;«18 The shift from the1943 hysteria diagnosis to the 1972 psychopathy label is telling of Langer’sattempt to tailor the insight into Hitler’s personality according to diagnostic

12 Louise E. Hoffman, American Psychologists and Wartime Research on Germany,1941-1945, in: American Psychologist 47, 264-273.

13 Langer, Psychological Analysis (fn. 2); idem, The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The SecretWartime Report, New York 1972, 10.

14 Langer, Psychological Analysis (fn. 2), 127-128.15 Idem, Mind of Hitler (fn. 13),126.16 Ibid, 17.17 Langer, Psychological Analysis (fn. 2), 153; idem, Mind of Hitler (fn. 13), 145.18 Idem, Psychological Analysis (fn. 2), 156; idem, Mind of Hitler (fn. 13), 147. For

the controversy surrounding the various versions of the 1943 OSS report and its1972 publication as a book, see Hans W. Gatzke, Hitler and psychohistory, in: TheAmerican Historical Review 78 (1973), 396; Langer, Communication, in: AmericanHistorical Review, 1156-1158.

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fashion. By the seventies the diagnosis of hysteria was hardly used anymorein American psychoanalysis, while the category of psychopathy was extensi-vely applied to criminals in general and Nazi war criminals in particular. Forinstance, in The Nuremberg Mind Florence Miale and Michael Selzer decla-red the entire Nazi elite who stood trial in Nuremberg to be psychopaths. Asthey explained,

»The term »psychopath« generally refers to people who engage in anti-social activity with apparent absence of guilt, and who seem capable of noreal feeling for, or loyalty to, other human beings, and no realcommitment to principles or ideals. Actually, it is not that they are totallylacking in feelings or ideals; it is rather that these qualities operate at anextremely primitive level, so that feelings are highly egocentric, loyaltiesare to highly idealized hero figures, and ideals are ones like power and theoutward appearance of success. While the most extreme and easilyidentifiable psychopaths are criminals, imposters, confidence men, andsuch, psychopathy is sometimes a dominant characteristic in peoplewhose outer adaptation bespeaks conformity and social responsibility.«19

How, then, did Langer explain that Hitler became a hysteric or psychopathbordering on schizophrenia? Much of Langer’s analysis hinges on his inter-pretation of a lengthy passage in Mein Kampf, in which Hitler describes themiserable life of a working-class child. Langer reads Hitler’s portrayal of»brutal attacks on the part of the father toward the mother […] assaults dueto drunkenness,« as a thinly veiled autobiographical account of Hitler’s ownobservation of the »primal scene,« that is, of his parents having sex.20

It is important to note not only the content of Langer’s assertion, but alsothe rhetoric in which he clothes his interpretation of what he takes to be anautobiographical key passage in Mein Kampf. According to him it reveals»the fact that as a child he must have discovered his parents during intercour-se. An examination of the data makes this conclusion almost inescapable, andfrom our knowledge of his father’s character and past history it is not at allimprobable.«21 In fact, Langer adduces no data to substantiate his claim thatHitler witnessed parental intercourse, other than his decoding of a passage inMein Kampf, which can hardly suffice to lead to the »almost inescapable«conclusion that little Adolf »must have« observed his parents in bed. Moreo-ver, Langer does not only make far-reaching factual assertions concerningevents in Adolf’s early childhood, he also provides a rather detailed accountof the child’s purported emotional reaction to what he is supposed to haveseen:

19 Florence Miale/Michael Selzer, The Nuremberg Mind: The Psychology of theNazi

Leaders, New York 1975, 278.20 Langer, Mind of Hitler (fn. 13), 143.21 Ibid.; emphasis added.

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»It would seem that his feelings on this occasion were very mixed. On theone hand, he was indignant at this father for what he considered to be abrutal assault upon his mother. On the other hand, he was indignant withhis mother because she submitted so willingly to the father, and he wasindignant with himself because he was powerless to intervene […]Hehated his father for his brutality, he distrusted his mother for her lack ofloyalty, and despised himself for his weakness.«22

As a loyal Freudian, Langer assumes that Adolf’s observation of the »primalscene« was by no means unique. Moreover, Langer leaves open the questionof whether what Adolf witnessed was actually his father’s brutal assault onhis mother, or whether he interpreted a scene of consensual parental inter-course as an assault.23

Langer argues that Alois was more confusing to his son than most fathersare. While he was a whipping and otherwise violent and bullying sadist whenhe was drunk, when he was sober Alois insisted on propriety and decorum,placing an exaggerated weight on his dignity to the extent of wearing hiscustoms official uniform even after retirement, and demanding that ac-quaintances use his full title of Herr Oberoffizial, while his children had toaddress him as Herr Vater.24 According to Langer, by showing »himself to bea mass of contradictions,« Alois perplexed his son, preventing him frompsychic integration and social adjustment.25

One can hardly think of a starker contrast in the characterization ofparental figures, than that between the epithets Langer uses to describe Aloisand those he applies to Klara, whom he depicts as »decent,« »extremelyconscientious and hard-working,« »an exemplary housekeeper,« and »a verydevout Catholic.« Finally, Langer portrays her as »always extremely affec-tionate and generous« to her children.26

Ron Rosenbaum has pointed out that the known facts about Klara lendthemselves not only to the common depictions of her »as a simple, saintly,self-sacrificing servant of her husband and children.« As Rosenbaum stres-ses, Klara »was capable of participating in complicated, illicit, clandestine(and borderline incestuous) intrigues with the imperious head of the house-hold.«27 At the age of twenty-five she became the mistress of her marrieduncle Alois, who was twenty years her elder, moving into his quarters underthe pretext of being his serving maid, while taking care of his dying wife andchildren. She was pregnant by Alois by the time his wife – that is, his secondwife, Fanny – died of tuberculosis.

22 Ibid. , 151-152.23 Ibid. , 156.24 Ibid. , 104.25 Ibid. , 145-146.26 Ibid. , 149.27 Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler, New York 1998, 13.

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It is worthwhile to follow closely the way Langer reconstructs Klara’searly relationship with her son Adolf, who was her fourth child, born shortlyafter her three elder children had died of diphtheria. First, he states in a factu-al tone »every scrap of evidence indicates that there was an extremely strongattachment between herself and Adolf.«28 On the following page he addsmore cautiously, »[w]e may assume that during the first five years of Adolf’slife, he was the apple of his mother’s eye and that she lavished affection onhim.«29 Thus, he moves from a purportedly evidence-based detached des-cription to a somewhat more rhetorical and speculative assumption. Finally,he suggests as »almost certain that Adolf had temper tantrums during thistime but that these were not of a serious nature. Their immediate purposewas to get his own way with his mother and he undoubtedly succeeded inachieving this end.«30 One wonders how Langer can be almost certain aboutAdolf having temper tantrums, but it is truly amazing how he can know thatthey were simultaneously not serious and successful in achieving their end.

On the basis of this chain of conjectures, Langer reaches the conclusionthat Klara »frequently« allowed Adolf to do things that the father would nothave approved and even »may have become a partner in forbidden activitiesduring his father’s absence.« This combination of an affectionate, dotingmother who was ready to condone her son’s transgressions, and a vicious andabusive father, led to the formation of an especially intense attachment to themother with a concomitant wish to get rid of the father, that is to say, to anOedipal complex, which according to Langer developed »to an extraordina-ry degree.«31

This Oedipal conflict serves Langer as a template to decode the adolescentHitler’s readiness to fight for Germany in World War I as volunteering todefend a symbol of his mother, and to interpret the extreme and somewhathysterical way he reacted to the defeat of Germany as a sign that unconsci-ously he experienced the event as a repetition of the primal scene.

Langer suggests that in adulthood the combination of an intense attach-ment to his mother, her pregnancy with his younger brother when he wasfive, and his aggressive fantasies against his father, led Hitler to seek sexualgratification in an extreme form of masochistic perversion, by being urinatedor defecated upon by women squatting over him. According to Langer, Hit-ler did not permit himself to pursue this kind of satisfaction with many part-ners, but he indicates that whatever shape they took, sexual relations withHitler must have been an uncanny experience, for a number of his partnerscommitted or at least attempted suicide after or during their affairs withhim.32

28 Langer, Mind of Hitler (fn. 13),149; emphasis added.29 Ibid. , 150; emphasis added.30 Ibid; emphasis added.31 Ibid. , 150.32 Ibid. , 170-171.

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In Langer’s argument, sexual perversion constitutes the link betweenHitler’s traumatic childhood and his adult anti-Semitism. Langer claims thatsince Hitler was disgusted by his own perverse tendencies, he sought to di-sown them, projecting them upon the Jews. »By this process the Jew becamea symbol of everything that Hitler hated in himself … his own personal pro-blems and conflicts were transferred from within himself to the externalworld where they assumed the proportion of racial and national conflicts.«33

As we see, for Langer Hitler’s hatred of the Jews and his aggressive war poli-cies were but external manifestations of an upheaval in his inner world,caused by his perversion and the struggle against it, which, in turn, were theresult of an early childhood trauma.

Langer’s narrative has been given a close reading and detailed discussion,since it is exemplary for much of psychohistorical discourse and since it pro-vides the groundwork for much of the later psychohistorical literature onHitler. There is no doubt that Langer was highly selective in the choice ofevidence he adduced in his report, giving, as he explained, much greaterweight to data that suited his theoretical presuppositions, than that whichfailed to fit his presuppositions.34 Though this is a general feature of writinghistory and, indeed, of academic research in general, it does seem thatLanger’s argument relies on more than the usual share of uncorroboratedspeculation.

When Langer’s wartime report was published in 1972, it appeared with anafterword by Robert Waite, who published his own book-length psychohi-storical analysis of Hitler five years later. To a large extent, Waite’s narrativefollows Langer’s interpretive maneuvers. Already in his afterword toLanger’s book he endorses Langer’s interpretation of the passage in MeinKampf as pointing to the primal scene, calling it a »brilliant, and […]thorou-ghly convincing reconstruction.«35 Adopting Langer’s point of view also inhis book, Waite asserts, »Adolf at the age of three had seen – or imagined thathe had seen – his drunken father rape his beloved young mother.«36 Waitehesitates on the factuality of the rape, admitting in one instance, »we shallnever know with finality whether infant Adolf actually saw the scene of se-xual assault. But in fantasy he did, and it was for him › primal scene trau-ma.‹«37 While he denies the importance of this issue, explaining that from aFreudian point of view it is not significant whether Adolf saw or imaginedhis father attack his mother, he declares nevertheless that »in this instance,fantasy probably coincided with reality.«38 Though he insinuates that Hitler

33 Ibid. , 183.34 Ibid. , 17.35 Robert G. L. Waite, Afterword, in: ibid. , 226.36 Waite, The Psychopathic God (fn. 6), 165.37 Ibid. , 162.38 Ibid. , 195.

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really observed a rape, according to Waite »the historians’ job is not only todiscover with Ranke what actually happened. Often in history it is at least asimportant to discover what men believed happened. For men act upon theirbeliefs – whether they are objectively true or not matters little.«39 This dis-play of openness, uncertainty and circumspection concerning the factualityof the violence that Hitler is said to have attributed to his father in the primalscene is misleading, for while Waite flaunts his readiness to leave the questionof the reality of the rape open, he concomitantly insists on his ability to makeclaims not only concerning Hitler’s conscious beliefs, but also about a child-hood fantasy, for which he can offer only one, highly problematic clue: thepossible attribution of an autobiographical dimension to a paragraph in MeinKampf.

Waite is on equally shaky ground when he accepts Langer’s claim thatHitler’s »harrowing childhood memories of his primal scene experience« ledto a perverse sexuality, arguing like Langer »that Adolf Hitler, upon occa-sion, had young ladies urinate or defecate on his head.«40 Aware of the preca-rious nature of this claim, Waite explains:

»We are persuaded that he had this perversion not because the traditionaltype of evidence is completely convincing but because it is solidlyreinforced by psychological evidence. The perversion fits all that we knowabout Hitler’s private life and public performance. It was an expression ofthe fetid underside of his grandiose, moralistic public image; it expressedthe degraded, guilt- ridden self which pleaded for punishment andhumiliation. The impulse for self-punishment […] was to have historicconsequences.«41

As we see, Waite believes claims concerning Hitler’s sexual perversion becau-se they »fit« and provide a welcome counterpoint to Hitler’s public image.Like Langer, he maintains that a man displaying himself in public like Hitlerand pursuing destructive, genocidal policies must have a terribly dirty secret,and like Langer he infers the origins of this secret from an interpretation of apassage in Mein Kampf.

Waite departs from Langer by drawing an image Klara in shades markedlydifferent from Langer’s Madonna-like portrait of Hitler’s mother, he decla-res the relationship between Adolf and Klara to be »disturbed.«42 Placingmore emphasis on the successive deaths of her three elder children just beforeher pregnancy with Adolf that Langer had done, he presents her as lonely,

39 Robert G. L. Waite, Adolf Hitler’s Anti-Semitism: A Study in History and Psy-choanalysis, in: Benjamin B. Wolman (ed.), The Psychoanalytic Interpretation ofHistory, New York 1971, 212.

40 Waite, The Psychopathic God (fn. 6), 293.41 Ibid, 293.42 Idem, Afterword (fn. 39), 229.

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stressed and grieving, worried, consumed by guilt and fear-ridden, disap-pointed and depressed, as well as drained by four pregnancies within a shortperiod. He interprets Klara’s loving affection for Adolf as a way of assuagingguilt and shame, and as reaction formation against the resentment she mayhave felt unconsciously toward an overly demanding child.43 Thus, Waitewrites of the mother’s »overprotectiveness« and her »excessive maternal so-licitude,« suggesting that she may have been force-feeding her son.44 Notsurprisingly, therefore, Waite also discovers a strong ambivalence in Hitler’sexpressions of love for his mother.45

In Hitler Among the Germans Rudolph Binion places much weight on thepurported pathology of the Klara’s relationship with Adolf, suggesting, likeWaite, that her affection for her son was driven by the attempt to repair theloss of three children, whose »traumatic effect« she could not overcome.46 Ina detailed discussion of Klara’s breast-feeding practices Binion argues,»Adolf drank the maternal trauma with the mother’s milk. He was given, andhe took, the breast long and lustily enough to be fixated on it at the stage oforal aggression.«47 In fact, there is no evidence concerning Klara’s feedingpractices, thus we do not know whether Hitler was breast-fed at all and if hewas, for how long.

According to Binion, Hitler’s original trauma was to be born to a motherwho was preoccupied with an unbearable feeling of loss and thus »using andabusing Adolf for her traumatic reliving.«48 Helm Stierlin, too, blames theorigins of Hitler’s disorder on his mother’s experience of loss, arguing thatKlara used her son as a source of comfort and support, »delegating« him torescue her as he later sought to rescue Germany from contamination anddegradation by the extermination of the Jews – representing the bad father –in order to ensure the mother symbol’s purity, peace and tranquility.49

However, while Stierlin depicts Klara not only as using Adolf, but also asseeking to protect him from the violent father, in For Your Own Good AliceMiller maintains that only men could have drawn portraits of Klara as aloving, protective mother. She claims that after the loss of three children,Adolf’s birth »must have reactivated her recent shock, mobilizing her dee-pest fears and a feeling of great insecurity regarding her ability as a mo-ther.«50 Thus, like Waite, Binion and Stierlin, she argues that under thecircumstances, Adolf’s mother »was not capable of love,« but in contrast to

43 Idem, The Psychopathic God (fn. 6), 167-169.44 Ibid, 175-176.45 Ibid, 171-172.46 Rudolph Binion, Hitler Among the Germans, New York 1976, 65.47 Ibid, 55.48 Ibid, 56.49 Helm Stierlin, Adolf Hitler: A Family Perspective, New York 1976.50 Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: The Roots of Violence in Child-Rearing, Lon-

don 1988, 182.

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Binion and Waite, she asserts that Klara did not indulge her son; rather, allshe could do was »meticulously fulfill[ing] her duties. The condition shemust have imposed on her son was that he be a good boy and ›forgive andforget‹ his father’s cruelty toward him.«51

Quoting at great length various accounts of the frequent and severe bea-tings that Alois inflicted on all his children, but most of all on Adolf, Millerdepicts Hitler’s childhood as marked by humiliation and brutality in totalloneliness since, according to her, he was unable to trust even his mother,whom she depicts as Alois’ slave. Thus, Miller portrays Hitler’s childhoodtrauma as a result of the tragic combination of the father’s degrading andviolent treatment of his son and the mother’s inability to protect him fromthe former. Moreover, she takes Hitler’s continuous traumatization by thisoppressive and violent family regime to constitute the psychic origins of hispolitics. As she puts it: »Through the agency of his unconscious repetitioncompulsion, Hitler actually succeeded in transferring the trauma of his fami-ly life onto the entire German nation.«52

Thus, there are two tales of Hitler’s original trauma: one blames the fa-ther, the other the mother. It is interesting to note the structural differencesbetween the two: the tale of the father’s violence depends on textual inter-pretation and remains suspended between reality and fantasy, though it tendsto hint that the sexual violence that Hitler is said to have witnessed was real.With the exception of Alice Miller’s narrative, the other tale invokes directaccounts that are said to document motherly excess, such as her indulgence,overfeeding, or overprotectiveness. It does not waver between reality andfantasy, but while it uses the pathos of the real, it explains the mother’s pa-thological handling of her son by her traumatization. As we have seen, thetwo tales allow for the following four versions of Hitler’s original trauma:

a) Hitler was traumatized by having observed his father’s actual rape of hismother, while he was in a strongly Oedipal stage of his development.

b) Hitler observed his parents having sex, but fantasized this to be violent,precisely because he was in a strongly Oedipal stage of his development.

c) Hitler’s traumatization is above all the result of a pathological mother-sonrelationship, in which he in some way »inherited« his mother’s trauma oflosing three children.

d) Hitler’s traumatization stems from the combination of paternal violenceand maternal submission and malfunction, which made him grow up in alonely, persecutory environment.

Throughout my discussion of these narratives I have tried to show that thefactual evidence determines none of them. Either they portray behavior oremotional facts for which they cannot offer any documentation, or they

51 Ibid, 185-186.52 Ibid, 161.

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make highly selective choices from the available evidence, embellishing thegray shades of Hitler’s documented past by the vivid colors of imagination.

3. The Supplementary Trauma

While some psychohistorians, such as Langer and Miller, are satisfied withtracing Hitler’s genocidal obsessions to an original trauma, others, such asWaite, add a second trauma to their narrative, around which the purportedpathology of the mother-son relationship is said to achieve increased signifi-cance.

On the basis of the Red Army autopsy report of Hitler’s burnt corpse,which mentions that Hitler’s left testicle could not be found, Waite claimsthat Hitler had only one testicle. Moreover, although »[t]here is no evidenceof the way Klara responded to her son’s malformation,« Waite seems toknow that Hitler’s monorchism must have led to problems and that while hismother’s indulgence bound Hitler to her, unconsciously he also blamed herfor his anomaly and for the primal scene trauma: »… she had done an evilthing to him, which he would never forget or forgive. She had given him adefect at birth that would mar him for life.«53

Moreover, Waite assumes that Klara’s reaction to her son’s monorchismexacerbated the problems of their relationship: »One can speculate that sheperiodically felt the little boy’s scrotum, checking anxiously to see if the testishad descended. Such solicitous concern would have heightened Adolf’s in-fantile sexual feelings and increased the difficulty of a healthy mother-sonrelationship.«54 Waite stresses that »a missing or undescended testicle is notin itself pathogenic,« it is only so when this bodily phenomenon, to whichWaite explicitly refers as traumatic, occurs within a disturbed parent-childrelationship.55

Ultimately, Waite’s narrative attributes far-reaching psychical conse-quences to Hitler’s genital deformity, leading to a wide range of symptomsthat he assumes Hitler to have exhibited at some stage or other: temper tan-trums, mobility disturbance, hyperactivity, accident proneness, strong fee-lings of social inadequacy, extraordinary castration fantasies, a preoccupa-tion with breasts, insistence upon masculinity, ruthlessness, toughness anddestructiveness.

More than a decade after Waite, Fritz Redlich agrees with the basics of thishypothesis: »Weighing the pros and cons, it is likely that Hitler had a genitaldefect.«56 Rather than by a missing testicle, however, Redlich assumes thatHitler was plagued by hypospadia, that is, an anomaly whereby the urethra is

53 Waite, The Psychopathic God (fn. 6), 193.54 Ibid, 179-180; see also 193 and 201.55 Ibid. , 183; see also Waite, Afterword (fn. 35), 228-229.56 Redlich, Diagnosis (fn. 9), 229.

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located on the underside of the penis, which may cause leakage after urinati-on.57 Again, it is not the physical deformity in itself that is considered patho-genic, but in contrast to Waite, which placed Hitler’s purported genital an-omaly within the framework of pathological mother-son relations, Redlichassumes that Hitler may have feared that he had contracted this deformityby hereditary syphilis from his father. Like Waite, Redlich burdens Hitler’sphysical disorder with far-reaching consequences: »Perhaps the idea of pre-venting degeneration in other Germans led him to his vulgar Darwinism,eventually to the cruel and inhuman legislation on sterilization, and, ultima-tely, to euthanasia and elimination of the inferior by genocide.«58 About ahundred pages later Redlich elaborates on this causal speculation as follows:

»In the event that Hitler had a deformity and believed that it had beencaused by syphilis, it would have resulted in increased hatred of his fatherand the Jews. I assume that Hitler became possessed with the ideas ofsaving the Germans and eventually all of humanity, from the greatscourges – syphilis, Judaism, and its offspring Christianity – and that thiscontributed to his extraordinary sense of mission.«59

Let me note the various uncorroborated and unwarranted assumptions onehas to share with Redlich in order to accept chain of associations from hypo-spadia to the Holocaust: first, that Hitler had a genital defect at all; second,that he assumed his father to have been syphilitic; third, that he attributed hisdefect to a hereditary transmission of his father’s syphilis; fourth, that all thisdeveloped in an unfathomable manner into a genocidal paranoia directedagainst the Jews.

Be this as it may, in both Waite’s and Redlich’s narratives the genital trau-ma appears as a supplement, as it were, reinforcing and exacerbating a trau-matic parent-son relationship, achieving meaning and importance only wi-thin a pre-existing pathological Oedipal triangle. But while Waite speculatesthat Hitler blamed his mother for his genital deformation, Redlich assumesthat he blamed his father. Moreover, while Waite presents his argument inrhetoric of factuality, invoking the Russian pathology report as evidence,Redlich highlights the speculative and hypothetical nature of his assertion.But again there is something disingenuous in this display of caution, sinceRedlich nevertheless explores this avenue over the course of several pages,claiming that despite its precariousness it should be seriously consideredsince »it pulls together startling data, and enables us to understand Hitler’semerging sense of mission.«60

What is the consequence of psychohistorical narratives of this kind, whichattribute so much importance to an accident of birth? They seem to imply

57 Ibid, 230.58 Ibid.59 Ibid. , 326.60 Ibid.

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that historical developments are a result of chance and coincidence, as expres-sed in Pascal’s famous saying that if Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter, theface of the Earth would have changed.61 In the same vein, Waite and Redlichseem to suggest that if Hitler had two testicles or if his urethra would havebeen located a bit higher on his penis, the face of the Earth would look diffe-rent today. Let me just say that that such a frame of explanation seems hardlyadequate in the face of the ideas, processes and events that are to be accoun-ted for. Even if one is prepared to accept a shift from historical truth to nar-rative truth,62 there remains a critical weak spot that makes this type of psy-chohistorical reasoning highly arbitrary, for how can one plausibly establishthat a bodily feature is causally connected to the persecution of the Jews andtheir systematic extermination? In order to reinforce this fragile– to say theleast – element of their argument and make the transition from a trauma rela-ted to a physical deformation and its surrounding parent-child relations togenocidal ideology and policy more plausible, some psychohistorical ac-counts invoke a third, adolescent trauma, situated in a period in which, by hisown account, he underwent a momentous transformation. As he put it inMein Kampf: »This was the time in which the greatest change I was ever toexperience took place in me. From a feeble cosmopolite I had turned into afanatical anti-Semite.«63

4. The Clinching Trauma

The time referred to in the Hitler quote is early 1908, not long after hismother’s death in December 1907. In spring of that year, when Klara wasforty-seven and Adolf eighteen years old, she fell ill with breast cancer, ofwhich she was to die after a mastectomy, a prolonged period of suffering andsevere physical deterioration, during which she was treated by the Jewishfamily physician, Eduard Bloch, who regularly injected her with morphinein order to alleviate her pain. Adolf returned from Vienna to Linz when heheard that his mother was dying, sat at her bedside, taking care of her and

61 The aphorism means that if the Egyptian Queen – who is usually represented witha long, hooked nose – would have been less beautiful in Roman terms, MarcusAntonius might not have fallen in love with her, divorced Octavian’s sister in herfavor, and formed an alliance with Cleopatra to attack Octavian’s fleet at Actium.Antonius and Cleopatra’s defeat in the naval battle enabled Octavian to declarehimself Emperor Augustus, place the entire Roman Empire under his rule, whileannexing Egypt to it.

62 For the distinction between narrative truth and historical truth in psychoanalyticdiscourse, see Roy Schafer, Narrative Actions in Psychoanalysis (=Heinz WernerLecture Series 14), Worcester, MA 1981; and Donald P. Spence, Narrative Truthand Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis, New York1982.

63 Cited in Waite, Adolf Hitler’s Anti-Semitism (fn. 39), 208.

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sleeping in a tiny bedroom adjoining to hers, so that he could attend to her atany time during the night. There various accounts of Hitler’s devotion to hisdying mother, including one by Bloch, to whom Hitler expressed deep grati-tude for the treatment of his mother, sending him a picture postcard (?) thathe had painted himself and protecting him up to his emigration to the US,

Gertrud Kurth, who worked on Langer’s OSS report in 1943, was the firstto claim in a 1947 article that Hitler had been severely traumatized bywitnessing his mother’s suffering, deterioration and death. Typically for psy-chohistorians, Kurth argues both that she is » [f]ully aware of the hypotheti-cal nature of some of my deductions« and has »built a structure with fairlysolid main props.«64 Arguing that Hitler was incestuously fixated on hismother, she creates the usual Oedipal frame of reference for her argument,stating, »Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism originated as a projection of his ownguilt, deriving notably from his incestuous fixations and their disastrous con-sequences, onto the Jew.«65 According to Kurth, he perceived his mother’sdeath as the result of his own guilt, that is to say, his incestuous fixation onher, and from thereon his unresolved Oedipus complex haunted him.66

Kurth claims that Hitler was so strongly attached to his mother because hisown father died four years earlier, when he was 14. In addition to depictingHitler as being too close to his mother, Kurth also portrays the fatherless boyas tending to highly charged father transferences. Thus, when Bloch treatedhis mother for cancer, Hitler is said to have unconsciously experienced theablation of his mother’s breast as a brutal mutilation by a father substitute,and the doctor’s almost daily injections of morphine as her poisoning by aJew: »While Hitler was consciously imbued with gratitude towards the kinddoctor, unconsciously he made him the ›incestuous poisoning murderer‹ ofhis mother, the incestuous lascivious and aggressive father with whom hecould not identify himself […]

Since the mechanism of projection was his habitual method of defense, hisensuing, all pervading, unqualified and indestructible anti-Semitism was alogical and almost inevitable result.«67

Again one notes the paradoxical or dual rhetoric that is characteristic ofmuch of psychohistory, combining an admission that the entire theory ishypothetical, with an unequivocal assertion that the private cause invoked toexplain a public consequence led to the latter by a »logical and almost inevi-table« path.

Let it also be noted that the audacity of Kurth’s psychohistorical interpre-tation of Hitler’s reaction to Bloch’s treatment goes beyond that which cha-

64 XXXXXXXXXXX Bitte Fußnotentext ergänzen!!65 Gertrud Kurth, The Jew and Adolf Hitler, in: Psychoanalytic Quarterly 16 (1947),

24.66 Ibid, 22.67 Ibid, 29-30.

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racterized narratives of Hitler’s prior traumas. Langer and Waite relied onthe decoding of a text written by Hitler for their claims concerning the pri-mal scene trauma, attributing to his own experience what he claimed to haveseen in other homes. Waite and Redlich assumed a physical deformity for theassertion of a secondary trauma, for which they could adduce either scantyor no factual support. However, Kurth’s contention that unconsciously Hit-ler regarded the Jewish family physician as the murderer of his mother isadvanced in opposition to solid evidence and Bloch’s own testimony ofHitler’s unqualified benevolence toward the Jewish doctor. Nevertheless,Kurth’s argument has been taken up by a number of authors, among themWaite, who declared that »though Hitler had consciously expressed his grati-tude to Dr. Bloch, unconsciously the doctor had become the brutal attackerwho had finally mutilated and killed his beloved mother.«68 In the wake ofKurth’s argument, Waite and have also declared Klara’s death to have been»[t]he most formative psychological experience of Hitler’s youth.«69

In contrast to the primal scene, where the authors waver on the factualityof the violence that Hitler is said to have witnessed, accounts of Hitler’s ado-lescent trauma generally portray Bloch as a competent doctor and thereforewithout blame. They assume that Hitler fantasized him as the murderer ofhis mother, while the Jewish doctor sought to cure her. An exception to thisline of thought is Rudolph Binion’s Hitler Among the Germans, whichclaims that the Jewish physician tortured and killed his patient by a painfuland excessive iodoform (disinfectant) treatment. Binion found Bloch’s medi-cal case-book in the archives and goes into minute details to provide evidenceof Bloch’s alleged malpractice. Moreover, he blames the Jewish physician notonly for overdosing Klara with iodoform, but also for wildly overchargingthe Hitlers for his questionable services.70 Though Binion does not intend tojustify Hitler’s hatred of the Jews by his version of events, he argues that itwas Bloch’s malpractice that buttressed in Hitler’s unconscious a hateful ste-reotype associated with Jews, which can be discerned in the prevalence ofterms like »Jewish cancer,« »Jewish poison« and »Jewish profiteer« in thelatter’s rhetoric. Although he admits this is an oversimplification, Ron Rosen-baum sums up the gist of Binion’s argument by stating, simply, »[m]urderingthe Jews in the camps was the ultimate outcome.«71

To sum up: some psychohistorical narratives include in their portrayal ofAdolf Hitler’s transformation into a genocidal monster an account of Klara’s

68 Waite, Adolf Hitler’s Anti-Semitism (fn. 39), 209.69 Waite, The Psychopathic God (fn. 6), 216; see also: Richard A. Koenigsberg,

Hitler’sIdeology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology, New York 1976, 55.

70 Binion, Among the Germans (fn. 46), 14-21, 138-143; see also Rosenbaum, Explai-ning Hitler (fn. 27), 242- 250.

71 Rosenbaum, ibid. , 245.

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death as a clinching or closing event. All arguments leading from Hitler’smother’s death to the Holocaust follow the same logic; they all contend thatafter his real mother’s death, Hitler displaced his Oedipal, incestuous love toGermany, which, as psychohistorians like to stress, he tended to call Mutter-land (motherland) rather than using the more usual German term Vaterland(fatherland).72 Having witnessed the deterioration of his mother’s body, Hit-ler is said to have unconsciously revived her as Germany, construing thebody of the nation in analogy with his mother’s body as threatened by mali-gnant forces of destruction – the Jews – that had to be eliminated by drasticmeasures in order to save the symbolic mother from death. This, then, is howRichard Koenigsberg sums up the unconscious underpinnings of Hitler’sideology: »Where his mother died, Germany shall live.«73 Within this frameof reference it is again possible to distinguish four variations:

a) Kurth argues that Hitler’s experience of his mother’s suffering and theJewish doctor’s treatment was shaped by his earlier primal scene trauma,that is to say, that in Hitler’s unconscious the family physician appeared asa father substitute. Waite follows her in this assumption, describing ingraphic detail that »this Jewish doctor had done many of the things youngAdolf had seen his father do: he, too, had often entered his mother’sbedroom; he had seen her undressed; he had examined her breasts […]The incest and the poisoning of the blood, which Hitler feared so muchand for which […] he blamed his father, was now represented by thedoctor’s almost daily hypodermic injections of morphine […]«74 Thusboth Kurth and Waite decode Hitler’s racist world view and hisexterminationalist policies as projection of the wish to rescue his motherGermany from the father, »and to possess her himself.«75 As Waiteexplicates, his psychohistorical inquiry into Hitler reveals that »inattempting to destroy all the Jews, Hitler was attempting to destroy hisfather.«76

b) In addition, Waite also propounds the hypothesis originally advanced byLanger that »one of the reasons why [Hitler] hated the Jews with suchincandescent fury and sought to destroy them was because he felt anenormous burden of guilt and self-hatred because of his own aberrantsexual desires.«77

c) While Koenigsberg also links the trauma of Klara’s cancer to Hitler’straumatic observation of the primal scene, he maintains that it was his

72 See, for example, Langer, Mind of Adolf Hitler (fn. 13), 153; Waite, Hitler’s Anti-Semitism (fn. 209.

73 Koenigsberg, Hitler’s Ideology (fn. 69), 55-56.74 Waite, Hitler’s Anti-Semitism (fn. 39), 209.75 Idem, The Psychopathic God (fn. 6), 436.76 Ibid, 443.77 Waite, Hitler’s Anti-Semitism (fn. 39), 207.

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mother’s cancer, rather than Bloch’s treatment of his mother, which Hitlerexperienced as a repetition of the father’s – forced? – coital intrusion intothe mother’s body, to be removed in order to restore her purity.78

d) The fourth narrative on Hitler’s final trauma, put forward by Binion,proposes that Hitler’s rabid antisemitism can be traced at least in part to aJewish doctor’s misuse of a painful and poisonous substance. To claimthat Alois forced himself upon Klara, i.e. , that Hitler’s trauma had asubstrate in reality, probably did not strike any reader as politicallyproblematic. However, Binion’s argument, which runs parallel to this, isobviously highly politically charged and has elicited strong reactions.79

5. Conclusion: Between Hubris and Humanization

In the opening pages of Explaining Hitler, a collection of extended inter-views and thoughtful essays on the various attempts to explain the Führer,Ron Rosenbaum remarks that one of the most surprising things he discover-ed in the process of writing the book was the »depth and extremity of des-pair« that generally characterizes Hitler explainers, who all seem to agree inone way or another that it is impossible to satisfactorily explain the Hitlerphenomenon.80

Psychohistorians tend to be methodological optimists. Despite their de-clarations of caution and circumspection and their admission of conjectureand speculation, they seem to assume that they possess the method necessaryto draw a more or less complete picture of Hitler and to uncover the hidden,unconscious intentions underlying his ideology and policies. There is muchhubris in this position.

Psychohistorians regard events in public history as dim reflections of aninner, psychic and infantile reality that is hidden from the eyes of ordinarymortals, but accessible to those in possession of a special knowledge. Thisturns psychohistorians into practitioners of a Platonic craft. Psychohistori-ans, it seems, can become aware of the fact that what the uninitiated take tobe the real, material fittings of history, are but shadows projected on the wall,which common mortals, who live in the cave, mistake for the real thing. Byshedding light onto the shadows that appear as material facts, psychohistori-ans claim not only to be able to unmask them as such, but also to reveal thesecret significance of the public deeds that Hitler committed on the stage ofmodern history. According to Richard Koenigsberg, for instance, »Hitler’sperception of social reality is shaped by two central phantasies, which areprojected into the world […] his perceptions reflect not a description of ex-ternal reality, but a symbolic transformation of inner symbolic processes.

78 Koenigsberg, Hitler’s Ideology (fn. 69), 68, 69 n. 5.79 Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler (fn. 27), 239-350.80 Ibid, xv.

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Social reality serves, for Hitler, as a ›transference vehicle,‹ providing a screenupon which his unconscious phantasies may be projected.«81

The problem is, of course, that like Plato’s realm of ideas, Hitler’s mind isinvisible and that even psychohistorians like Langer, who wrote about himwhen he still was alive, could not examine Hitler’s mind directly. Access toits workings is possible only indirectly by the interpretation of evidence thatis said to provide proof of the hidden dynamics active in his inner world.Hence, as we have seen, much of this hermeneutic effort necessitates creativeguesswork and imaginative constructions that are to supplement what histo-rical data cannot deliver.

Throughout this essay I have shown that most psychohistorical explana-tory hypotheses, such as the psychical significance of Hitler’s alleged trau-matic early childhood experiences, a missing testicle or a misplaced urethra,as well as his purported resentment against the doctor treating his mother,are lacking in serious factual support, if indeed there is any evidence for themat all. Neither interpretationsof passages in Mein Kampf, nor rumors andhearsay, and not even a controversial autopsy report can solve such evidentialproblems of psychohistory.

I have also pointed out that the apparent backpedaling of psychohistoriansfrom assertions about behavioral facts to claims concerning Hitler’s phan-tasms does not solve this problem, for contentions concerning emotions andfantasies, wishes and fears are factual too. But psychohistorians know nomore about the young Hitler’s emotional and psychical reactions to eventsand deformations than about the events and physical defects themselves. Yet,we have seen that their hubris allows psychohistorians to develop a variety ofhypotheses about events and emotions characteristic of Hitler’s childhood,for which they have no empirical evidence. Consider, for instance, the follo-wing assertion made by Fritz Redlich: »It is almost certain that Hitler in hisearly childhood suffered from temper tantrums, nightmares, eating pro-blems, and perhaps – considering his excitability – nocturnal bedwetting, butno reports or observations to this effect exist.«82

If the work of psychohistorians does not conform to traditional standardsof history writing, by what reasoning do they justify their hypotheses? Whatallows them to hold on to their hubris? Generally the first defense of psy-chohistorical claims is pragmatic and narrative, concerned with the »fit« andfruitfulness of a hypothesis, rather than with its factual validation by evi-dence. The reasoning guiding psychohistorians in the creation of such hypo-theses is that which the American philosopher Charles Peirce has describedas »abduction.« As he explained, abductive reasoning infers from an obser-vable, but unexpected and unsettling phenomenon – such as the existence ofa human monster like Hitler, for example – by »reasoning backwards« to a

81 Koenigsberg, Hitler’s Ideology (fn. 69), 58-59.82 Redlich, Diagnosis (fn. 9), 332.

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presumed antecedent. Peirce describes the logic of abduction as follows:»The surprising fact, C, is observed; But if A were true, C would be a matterof course, Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.«83 Thus, abductivereasoning justifies a hypothesis on the grounds that it explains the availableevidence, such as when Waite states, »I believe Hitler had a perversion of thedimensions here described because such a perversion helps to explain the de-gree of self-loathing and the intensity of its projection onto the Jews.«84 Ac-cording to Peirce, abduction is guided by a »guessing instinct« and thereforehas to be supplemented by deduction and induction in order to be part ofscientific endeavor.85 In psychohistory, too, hypotheses have to be deduciblefrom the basic assumptions of the psychodynamic paradigm, whose discursi-ve and theoretical structure limits and direct the selection and the articulationof plausible hypotheses. For instance, any dynamically oriented practitionerwill readily agree with Waite that in view of Hitler’s pathological personalitytraits, he could not possibly have grown up in an idyllic or uneventful familysurroundings.86 Psychoanalytic theory demands a familial trauma as cause ofa personality disorder.

Induction also comes into play because psychohistorians tend to draw onclinical experience to back up their inferences from public behavior, expressi-ons and policies to underlying, hidden fantasies and sexual practices. Theability to point to clinical parallels, from one’s own practice or that of highlyreputed practitioners, plays an important role in endowing psychistoricalhypotheses with credibility. This, for example, is how Waite explains andjustifies Langer’s inferences concerning Hitler’s perversions: »He is con-vinced that the perversion existed because he knows as an experienced ana-lyst […] that many patients with the same patterns of behavior as Hitler haveexhibited a penchant for the same perversion.«87

Thus, the gist of psychohistorical abductions is as follows: they lead fromthe public to the private, from the present to the past and, ultimately, to acore trauma situated in an Oedipal constellation of one kind or another. Byand large, one can distinguish three stages, leading backward from

a) empirically verifiable public data, that is to say, Hitler’s documentedexpressions, policies and behavior, through

b) clinically inspired inferences about Hitler’s adult private life, that is, hisalleged secret sexual practices and purported psychic conflicts, to

c) theory-based conjectures concerning the child-rearing practices andconstitutive childhood experiences that must have given rise to the former.

83 Charles Sanders Peirce, in: Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (CharlesHartshorne/Paul Weiss, eds.), vol. 5, Cambridge, Mass. 1958 ff. , 189.

84 Waite, Hitler’s Anti-Semitism (fn. 39), 228, n. 63.85 Peirce (fn. 83), vol. 7, 46.86 Waite, The Psychopathic God (fn. 6), 174.87 Waite, Afterword (fn. 35), 228.

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The psychohistorical narratives discussed in this essay amply demonstratethat even though there are certain rules to psychohistory and it is, perhaps,not a total free-for-all, the nature of psychohistorical abduction is such thatalmost everything goes, since clinical parallels and psychoanalytic theory al-low for a wide range of arbitrary claims, permitting authors to posit facts,events, processes and experiences for which they have no factual support, orwhich even fly in the face of the existing factual evidence. Thus it is difficultto see why anyone should credit psychohistorical explanations with validity.

This is not the place to go further into the details of the manifold metho-dological defects of psychohistory, which have been extensively criticized byits detractors and mostly have been admitted by its more open-minded prac-titioners and supporter.88 Let me mention just one further aspect of what Iregard as the hubris of psychohistory, to which Peter Gay has referred as the»pressure toward reductionism.«89 This is the tendency of psychohistoriansto explain public events solely by the tools of their trade, that is to say, by aperson’s family background, early childhood and sexual proclivities, as wellas the psychical processes that are said to have arisen from these, withouttaking note of the role of social and intellectual history, culture, economicsand society. Even if some psychohistorical hypotheses about Hitler’s relati-onship to his father and mother were accurate – which nobody can possiblyknow – to explain his antisemitism exclusively by a series of unconsciousidentifications, transferences, projections and other defenses would still beintolerably arrogant and reductionist.

As a result of its arbitrariness, psychohistory has become rather noto-rious, but because it purports to unlock hidden chambers of the mind and toreveal secrets of deviant sexual practices, it ha also remained highly visible. Ithas been suggested, however, that history as a craft may be better off withoutpsychology and psychiatry and that it may serve both disciplines to sever thebond between them. Such a split would be misguided. As Saul Friedländerhas pointed out, though the importance of ideology and bureaucracy in theThird Reich cannot be denied, when reading historical accounts of the Holo-caust one is left with a sense of unease, a sense that something vital has beenleft unsaid. In his view, »an independent psychological residue seems to defy

88 For the wide-ranging debate on the merits and failings of psychohistory, seeJacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-History, Quanto-History and Hi-story, Chicago 1974; Geoffrey Cocks/T.L. Crosby (eds.), Psycho/History, NewHaven 1987; Saul Friedländer, History and Psychoanalysis, New York 1980; PeterGay, Freud for Historians, Oxford 1985; Sudhir Kakar, The Logic of Psychohis-tory, in: Journal of Interdisciplinary History 1 (1970), 187-194; T.A. Kohut, Psy-chohistory as History, in: American Historical Review 91 (1986), 336-346; DavidStannard, Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory, NewYork 1980; Benjamin B. Wolman (ed.), The Psychoanalytic Interpretation ofHistory, New York 1971.

89 Gay, Freud for Historians (fn. 89), 16-17.

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the historian,« but, as he comments, »the psychological dimension, wheneverrecognized, is usually reduced to a vague reference to the ›banality of evil.‹«90

Ironically, while there is no topic on which psychohistorians have writtenmore than the Third Reich and the Holocaust, much of traditional historywriting judiciously avoids explicit psychological references, preferring to fo-cus exclusively on structural, bureaucratic, linguistic, economic, social andideological determinants. In addition, phrases such as Arendt’s »banality ofevil« serve to foreclose psychological avenues by claiming that the minds ofthe perpetrators were shallow and empty, that there was no depth to theirdeeds. Finally, intellectuals like Claude Lanzmann with a penchant for themystical and metaphysical have argued that it is morally reprehensible toeven try to inquire into Hitler’s humanity and to explain his deeds. Lanz-mann justifies his principled hostility against attempts to explain Hitler bythe claim that all forms of explanation contain elements of exculpation, forgi-veness or even justification of what is being explained. Scandalized by thepublication of Hitler’s baby pictures, Lanzmann also condemns writingabout Hitler’s childhood as an obscenity. The baby pictures disturb Lanz-mann because they portray »Hitler as an innocent, Hitler before he becomesHitler.«91 Lanzmann’s attack on those who seek to understand the perpetra-tors of the Holocaust, including Hitler, as humans, is joined by Elie Wiesel,who asserts that »the Holocaust transcends history and that the dead are inpossession of a secret that we, the living, are neither worthy nor capable ofrecovering.«92

In my view, all these are strategies of dehumanization, which serve to keephistory of the Holocaust »thin« or to create an illusory »thickness« by allu-sions to transhistorical and transcendental forces. Such strategies allow oneto avoid having to face the human nature of the perpetrators and to come toterms with the fact that though Hitler was a monster, he was human, too,with parents, siblings, a childhood and traumas. However methodologicallyflawed the record of psychohistory may be, this is the reason that it deservesto be defended – in principle, if not in its specifics. It deserves defense as aproject that hammers the message of the humanity of the Nazis, stressingthat that Hitler was a real monster, rather than a mythic one, because he washuman – and that in fact he became a monster precisely because he was hu-man.

Let me restate this point for a somewhat different angle: psychohistorydeserves defense since it challenges us to be consistent where consistencymay be uncomfortable. It reminds us that if we believe that humans are to a

90 Saul Friedländer, The ›Final Solution‹: Unease in Interpretation, in: History &Memory – Studies in Representation of the Past 1 (1989).

91 Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler (fn. 27), xvi.92 Elie Wiesel, Trivializing the Holocaust: Semi-fact and semi-fiction, in: The New

York Times, April 16, 1978, section 2, 29.

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large extent shaped by early childhood experiences, than this must also betrue in the case of Hitler. Although it may be more comforting to assume thatwe share no feature with a ruthless genocidal dictator, psychohistory insiststhat if we believe that the stuff human minds are made of is composed ofmemories, fear, love, desire and guilt, then this, again, must also be true inHitler’s case. Obviously, this view of Nazism in general and Hitler in parti-cular as, sadly, a deeply human phenomenon, may be less soothing and moreunsettling than to declare Nazism as banal, an outgrowth of impersonal bu-reaucratic forces, or as an incarnation of some kind of metaphysical evil, butit is one that is both factually more accurate and ethically warranted. To und-erstand Hitler it is necessary to humanize him, and to fight and prevent othermonsters of his kind it is necessary to understand what makes them tick.Thus, while I discern methodological shortcomings and hubris on one side ofthe psychohistorical coin, on its other side I have found its salutary capacityto humanize historical actors, events and experiences. In order to fulfill theirrole of humanizers, thus contributing to »thick« descriptions of Nazism andits leadership, psychohistorians have to renounce their hubris. Rather thanspinning wild interpretations over hundreds of pages, providing comprehen-sive and self-contained, but reductionist and severely flawed narratives, theywould be well advised to adopt a more modest, but also more critical anddialogical mode of interpretation, which comes much closer to the traditionalrole of the analyst in the clinical setting. What I suggest for psychohistorians,then, is to renounce free-roaming monologue for the sake of a more cautiousand serious dialogue, adopting the secondary role of the kibitzer and critic,looking over the shoulders of traditional historians, asking questions, offe-ring possibilities, pointing to blind spots and criticizing unquestioned as-sumptions, whenever the humanity of historical actors is ignored.

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