Nazi Psychoanalysis: Response to Werner Bohleber Laurence A. Rickels Channeling To clear the static on the direct lines between reunification of the Germanies and the return of German nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism, Werner Bohleber makes the Germans a “Presence of the Past.” * But midway he proposes a group-level intervention which responds to the worldwide recycling of World War Two since the end of the Cold War. As has been documented elsewhere, for example in a 1992 volume on anti-Semitism edited by Bohleber, the outbreak of stray, projected hostilities in Germany after the fall of the wall was symptomatically in sync with the eternal rerun of total war phantasms we watched during the Gulf War. From the German response to the opening shot of the war, which followed the leader, to the phantasm of portable gas chambers (made in Germany) strapped to the buzz bombs of the Battle of Britain: World War Two was back on the air. But it wasn’t only this media war that stayed tuned to receptions that were decontextualized and haunting precisely to the extent that, according to Theodor Adorno’s reckoning (112), they referred to the recent past, the past that always flashes back as primal; on another channel we found ourselves watching the old programs or pogroms that were rerunning all over Europe following the end of the divide between the two Germanies. Television was not the “liberator” of the Eastern-European countries (which we had last visited, while they were still safely behind the Iron Curtain, in Shoah). In Eastern Europe the rise [End Page 345] of group psychopathology issued its repress releases via live transmissions at once occult and techno-mediatic, morbid and immortalizing. Painting by the number of racisms and nationalisms that were going down in the missing place of the superego, portraits of the vampire were drawn into relations with the father-leader and (as with the AIDS-infected babies of Rumania) from the blood bond with mother. The Gulf War too mixed receptions between something new and something (the same thing) that’s ancient. Was it possible that, in spite of the diversification of new multicultural tensions that took left wing during the anti-Vietnam-war reunion, the only racism that was back on the air for all to watch (just follow the bouncing bombs) targeted the Jews? Both the renewal of Eastern Europe and the Gulf War tuned or turned into the at once technological and group-psychological reception of phantasms, phantoms, doubles still coming home from the Second World War. Psy War Within the media-war contexts that keep coming complete with their own pop-psychological reception of just how to relate to gadgets (namely by following, from trauma to love, the beat of identification), anti-Semitism makes ghost appearances on the season finales of ancient history by taking a spin around the metabolism of modern psychological warfare, a spin cycle with its own recent and primal history. What the U.S. Experts were soon referring to, in short hand, as “psy war” was the group-sized legacy of an internalization, technologization, metabolization of trauma that first stood to analytic attention case by case during the World War One outbreak of war neurosis. Just look at German Expressionist cinema, the sensurround of shell shock and unacknowledgable losses: where there’s doubling, monstrosity, and other literal limits of “assimilation,” of “becoming image,” the Jewish cemetery (in The Student of Prague) or ghetto (in The Golem) can serve as backdrop for the final suicidal showdown. The Jews were special featured in the German total wars right from the start, but on a continuum with philo-Semitism, [End Page 346] which was the look the projection or propaganda had during the First World War. Before General Ludendorff’s 1935 secondary elaboration of the German loss of the war as the melting plot of Jews and Catholics, his first second thought, right after the war, was that the British really beat the Germans when they jumped the gun and stole the fire from German propaganda initiatives by authorizing Jewish colonization of Palestine (Lasswell 176). The World War One phase of German propaganda or idealism can be tracked in...
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Aug 1, 1996
R Köhling + 3
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