Sick Heil: Self and Illness in Nazi Germany

Abstract

Illness in Nazi Germany was a site of contestation around the existing modem self. The Nazis mobilized the professions of medicine and psychology, two disciplines built around self, to exploit physical and mental capacity. Nazi projects thus instrumentalized the individual and essentialized a self of race and will. A cruel and anxious obsession with health as a means of racial exclusion was a monstrous form of the modern turn inward to agency of body and mind. The Nazis regulated the individual through family and factory (social control), areas of ordinary life in which modernity located human activity and meaning, and propagandized traditional values the populace internalized (social discipline). A Nazi premodern warrior ethos was served by a liberal ethic of productivity and an absolutist tradition of state control. Medicalization and commodification of health was continuous with modern trends and became a wartime site of attempted well-being of the self at the expense of the Nazi ethnic community.