Psychoanalysis has in recent years greatly influenced thinking in such fields as anthropology and sociology; here is an example of its use in the writing of history. The present article embodies, in less technical form, material used in an article by Dr. Kurth that appeared in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Volume XVI, number I, 1947.
_____________
For hours,” says Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, “the black-haired Jew boy, diabolic joy in his face, waits in ambush for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood. . . .”
Most Hitler biographers and students of racial bias, in their quest for the origins and real nature of the Fuehrer’s peculiar brand of anti-Semitism, have come to feel that the answer lies hidden in this notorious passage. The most widely accepted interpretation is that of a kind of semi-deliberate turnabout, a change of roles, as it were. As Rudolf Olden, one of Hitler’s most conscientious biographers, puts it: “Was it perhaps someone else, dark-haired too, but Aryan, who ‘for hours lay in wait,’ while the girl he awaited in vain went off ‘unsuspectingly’ with a Jewish rival?”
A tempting surmise, but a far too superficial one. And from what is known of Hitler’s life there is not a shred of evidence to support it. One must delve into deeper layers of his mind if one hopes to unravel the meaning of this obviously pathological fantasy.
“The anti-Semitic attitude,” says Ernst Simmel in the introduction to Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, “obeys an irrational trend. . . . Freud, through the psychoanalytic method, discovered the natural laws governing the irrational trends in men. . . .”
The present analysis is an attempt to apply psychoanalytic methods to some of the Fuehrer’s biographical data in an effort to get behind the “black-haired Jew boy” and thus clarify the origins of Hitler’s all pervading and implacable anti-Semitism. The result will of necessity be somewhat conjectural—though considerably less so than the reader might suspect.
_____________
In the autobiographical sections of Mein Kampf, Hitler himself has established beyond doubt the time and place of the outbreak of his race hatred: “At home,” he says, “as long as my father lived, I cannot remember that I ever heard the word [Jew].” He also professes to have been ignorant of the existence of “organized hostility” toward Jews before he came to Vienna. The correctness of both these statements can be proved in a sense more subtle than the writer himself was aware of.
The Fuehrer’s father was a typical, though fairly broad-minded, Austrian civil servant. At the time of his retirement on pension in 1895—when he moved his family (including two children by a former marriage) to a village near Linz, the capital of Upper Austria—Alois Hitler held the position of a customs official, which he had attained after many years of hard work. His greatest ambition for his youngest son—the only one to survive of his third marriage—was to make a civil servant out of him. This ambition was thwarted, not only because his son, despite admitted “fear” of his father, stubbornly clung to his own hopes of becoming a painter, but probably also because his resistance was somehow supported by the mother, reciprocating her son’s unconditional love.
Hitler’s means of combating his father’s aims consisted in deliberately failing at school. While his reports from various public schools had hitherto been mostly “excellent,” from 1900 on he only learned what he “liked” in secondary school, “sabotaging” the rest. In 1903, the height of this “war” between father and son, the old man suddenly succumbed to pulmonary hemorrhage. A weak and doting mother was left who was unable to cope with her son’s mulish determination. He failed at school and thereafter spent the best part of four years at home, doing virtually nothing except for some fooling around with pencils, brushes, and paints. He took two trips to Vienna, in 1907 and 9008, to seek admittance to the Academy of Arts there, but was rejected both times. His mother died shortly before Christmas 1908, and at the beginning of 1909, that is, at the age of twenty, Adolf returned to Vienna, where he spent the following four years, certainly the hardest of his life.
What little money he had was soon spent and he sank into utter destitution. A cot in a flophouse must have seemed comfortable after several nights spent on park benches. He ate soup at a cloister, or what his companions-in-misery gave him out of the goodness of their hearts. He made his living any odd way, shoveling snow, carrying luggage at railroad stations, and allegedly by work on construction jobs. Only after another flophouse inhabitant, Reinhold Hanisch, had persuaded him to paint picture postcards and posters, which Hanisch then peddled around, did his lot improve somewhat. Finally, in May 91 3, Hitler left Vienna for Munich; there, on the outbreak of war in August 1914, he enlisted in the German army.
It was during those fateful four years in Vienna that Adolf Hitler became a conscious and violent anti-Semite. There, “organized hostility” toward the Jews could hardly escape notice. The Vienna of those days was under the domination of the Christian Social party, whose leader, the then mayor of Vienna, Dr. Karl Lueger, was a rabid anti-Semite. (That this anti-Semitism was religious and not yet racial has no immediate bearing upon our problem.) Hitler was a great admirer of Dr. Lueger and he also seems to have become a voracious reader of the Christian Social party’s anti-Semitic propaganda and of the writers this propaganda brought to his attention—Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and the like. All this must have contributed to the full flowering of his prejudice.
Yet if one reads Mein Kampf attentively, the impression that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was of “unmistakably sexual origin” (as Rudolf Olden expressed it) forces its way upon one. “In no other city,” says Hitler—and that was what he believed decided his stand—“could the relationship between Jewry and prostitution, and even now the white-slave traffic, be studied better than in Vienna. . . . An icy shudder ran down my spine when seeing the Jew for the first time as a cool, shameless, and calculating manager of this shocking vice. . . . But then my indignation flared up.”
And while Hitler dwells at great length upon all the other Jewish “crimes”—in politics, economy, and culture—never does he become so emotional, arbitrary, and absurd as when he discusses his absolute and overwhelming horror of sex relations between Jews and Germans. He persistently calls the Jews “the seducers of our people,” and equates “Rassenschande” (racial sin) with venereal disease: both lead to “blood poisoning.” For: “The sin against the blood and the degradation of the race are the hereditary sin of this world.” It is for the purpose of “unveiling” interracial sexual relations as a subtle and devilish plan on the part of “World Jewry” to undermine the racial vigor of other peoples that Hitler writes about his “black-haired Jew boy.” In the end we are asked to believe that it was his witnessing of such shocking occurrences that caused the Fuehrer to leave Vienna: “I detested the conglomerate of races that the . . . capital manifested . . . among them. . . . Jews and more Jews. To me the big city appeared as the personification of incest.”
Here is the key clue, and although Olden sensed the “undeniable, unmistakable connection” between the fantasy about the “black-haired Jew boy” and incest, he failed to integrate this connection in his interpretation.
_____________
The term “incest” strikes a familiar chord for anyone acquainted with relations in the Hitler family; these were, to quote Konrad Heiden, “so restricted as to border on incest . . the degree of which can only be surmised.” The blood relation between father and mother was so close as to require an episcopal dispensation for their marriage. Since Hitler’s father had himself been an illegitimate child (and had borne his mother’s maiden name of Schicklgruber till late in life), one is in doubt as to his paternity, and it is therefore uncertain whether Klara Hitler, twenty-three years her husband’s junior, was his second cousin or his niece.
When on top of this we discover an almost identical “incestuous” relationship on the part of the younger Hitler himself, the significance of the “incest” motif in his life is doubly underlined.
We know of only one great and passionate love affair in Hitler’s life. The heroine—a beautiful, buxom blonde, almost twenty years his junior—was his niece, Geli (Angela) Raubal, the daughter of his (then) widowed half-sister Angela. This love affair took place in the late 20’s, when Hitler had settled down to a more or less bourgeois life in Munich and on the Obersalzberg, where his half-sister (from his father’s second marriage) kept house for him. For a while “Uncle Alf” and Geli—who shared the apartment-were expected to get married. But the romance ended in tragedy when Geli, on the eve of her clandestine departure for Vienna—a step she had probably decided upon because of the steady deterioration of her relations with Hitler—was killed by a bullet. It has remained uncertain to this day whether her death was suicide or murder. In any case, Hitler was brokenhearted. And the fact that the girl’s bereaved mother stayed with him for many more years seems to absolve him of any direct responsibility for the girl’s death.
Here, then, we have a situation that corresponds strangely to that which is presented as the climax of Jewish depravity in Mein Kampf: a “dark-haired” man, “defiling incestuously” a blonde girl; presumably, the element of “diabolic joy” was not absent either. It may be objected that all this happened years after the publication of Mein Kampf. But this objection only indicates the necessity for pursuing the search for the real identity of the “black-haired Jew boy.”
_____________
Displacement of affection from mother to daughter is an old motif in literature, popular because it reflects a well-known human tendency. Turning, on this assumption, to Hitler’s relations with his half-sister Angela, one is not surprised to find that they offer certain remarkable features. Very little is known of the Fuehrer’s relations with his half-brother Alois and his only full sister, Paula. From the very lack of data it may be inferred that their relations were cool, if not hostile. But it was quite different with Angela, before the time when she was called upon to share his life, also.
The evidence takes us back to Vienna, to the time when Hitler and his friend Hanisch were planning their business association, with Hitler as the producer and Hanisch as the salesman of picture postcards and posters. The two lacked even the small funds necessary to start the enterprise by buying materials. Hanisch discovered at this point that Hitler, shortly before coming to Vienna, had signed over his share in his father’s estate—an income of seventeen kronen monthly—to his half-sister—who was just married and needed the money. Though Hitler neither immediately before nor for many years after this time kept in touch with his family, Hanisch succeeded in persuading him this once to turn to his half-sister, who actually sent him fifty kronen promptly; with this little capital the two vagrants started what turned out a fairly successful venture.
One has to picture fully Hitler’s situation at this time in order to realize how odd and illogical an act is uncovered here. Harried by hunger, cold, and hopelessness, he was on his way to the depths at a rapid pace. His share of his father’s estate (actually, the interest on the small capital yielded by the sale of the older Hitler’s home), small as it was, would have provided a monthly income in solid gold kronen that would have made all the difference between complete misery and moderate comfort. Yet he not only renounced what was his due, he almost threw it at his sister, who, from all that is known, was in no dire need of support and certainly much less so than Adolf himself. Nor was financial munificence a habit with the Fuehrer. At a later time, when he was fairly well off and his sister Paula was in very straitened circumstances, she was hardly able to secure even modest support from him. Thus his generosity toward Angela seems all the more surprising.
Yet, there can be no doubt of the truth of the matter. All investigations have confirmed it. Contemporaries and biographers appear equally puzzled. Psychoanalysis, however, will look for the unconscious motives of an irrational act. Keeping in mind the fact that Hitler’s gift to his sister shortly preceded the outbreak of his boundless hatred for the “incestuous” Jew, we here venture the guess that the gift may have signalized the operation of some violent—though naturally unconscious—feeling of guilt for which this generosity was an expiation. We may wonder whether Adolf Hitler himself had ever harbored a strong—unconscious—“incestuous” desire for this very sister whose daughter later affected him so strongly.
_____________
Almost every relationship between brother and sister retains throughout life faint traces of the infantile incestuous desires that tinge it in early childhood. However, only in rare instances will these drives, in later life, exert such considerable pressure out of their hiding places in the unconscious. Our quest will therefore have to be directed to the specific nature of the relation between Adolf and Angela Hitler, and to the reasons for its intensity and persistence.
In reconstructing the early domestic scene in the Hitler household, a picture emerges that seems to reveal the basis for the psychological pattern we have discovered. When Hitler was born, Angela was six, just able to help care for the baby and thus to draw upon herself a part of his affection. However, we know that every male’s infantile incestuous desires are directed first and foremost toward the mother and that this “love” reaches its climax in the so-called Oedipal crisis, at roughly five years of age. It is worth noting that when Hitler was five, a brother was born (who died at six). A rival for his mother’s love appeared in the form of this new brother, Edmund. It seems probable that the main care of the older boy was at this period shifted upon Angela, then aged eleven. What is more likely than that the displacement from mother to daughter—from mother to sister, that is—took place here for the first time? That the little boy Adolf, disappointed and slighted (as every child would feel in this situation), temporarily transferred at least part of his adoration from his mother to his sister?
The term “adoration,” at any rate, is not hypothetical. That the love between Hitler’s mother and her son was of uncommon intensity is an established fact. It was commented upon by all neighbors after old Hitler’s death, during the years of puberty that Adolf loafed away at home, spoiled and coddled by a mother whose love he reciprocated with striking fervor. “I have never witnessed a closer attachment. Some insist that this love verged on the pathological,” remarked Dr. Eduard Bloch (Collier’s, March 1941), the Hitlers’ family physician. In fact, the doctor’s description conveys an atmosphere of almost physical intimacy between mother and son, and this must have added considerable weight to both his revived incestuous Oedipal strivings and their concomitant guilt feelings. After four years of this “life with mother,” Klara Hitler died of cancer of the breast. Seen in this context, does it not assume particular significance that Adolf signed over his share of his father’s estate to his sister as soon as he learned of the fatal nature of his mother’s disease?
To put it more precisely: there is good reason to assume that not only did Adolf Hitler’s Oedipus complex remain unresolved in childhood, not only was it revived in puberty (as is normal), but that, above all, his attendant guilt feelings at this time were tremendously reinforced by three factors: his father’s sudden death at a moment when the son was openly at loggerheads with him, the ensuing years of living with and sponging on his mother, and, finally, her painful illness and slow death.
The last event, particularly, must have constituted a very deep trauma for the devoted son. Still under the impact of the shock, he went back to Vienna to be exposed to a veritable barrage of blows: utter loneliness, abject poverty, and, above all, failure in the entrance tests at the Academy—the final shattering of his dream of becoming an artist. It is said that the director of the Academy suggested architecture as better suited to Hitler’s abilities. But the candidate Adolf Hitler had “deliberately” flunked high school, and the School of Architecture was inaccessible without a high school diploma. Briefly, he should at this point have realized that in his attempt to defeat his father he had thoroughly defeated himself.
Adolf Hitler evidently avoided ever facing this conclusion. To understand how he protected himself against so painful an insight, it is necessary, under danger of repetitiousness, to formulate still more precisely just how the events of reality were reflected—and distorted—in Hitler’s unconscious until at last they probably assumed the following meaning: he had “murdered” his father, he had committed “incest” with his mother and thereby had become at least partly responsible for her death; consequently, his total failure was “punishment” for these “crimes.” His ego had remained fundamentally unequipped to deal with this conflict. Then, as at various other critical periods of his life when he presumably was threatened with some sort of “nervous” breakdown, he defended himself by a mechanism that psychoanalysis has come to term the projection of guilt (Anna Freud). By a kind of frantic and desperate act he threw his unconscious guilt—or, better, his self-hatred—upon the Jew.
Then it was no longer Adolf Hitler, it was the Jew who became the incestuous (“blood-poisoning”) murderer. This intro-psychic trick becomes all the more plausible if one remembers that Hitler was a typical “projector” throughout his life: whatever happened to him was the fault of the “bad world,” of the “other fellow,” at best of “fate.” (Thus in his autobiography he accounts for his final failure at school by a “severe pulmonary illness,” the existence of which is at least highly questionable in view of the fact that such a reliable witness as Dr. Bloch has told the writer that he never detected even the faint traces of such an ailment. For his political defeats before 1933 Hitler blamed his opponents, for his defeat at Stalingrad his generals, and for his final defeat he returned to the absolute enemy, the Jew. True, this projection became partly deliberate, but the emphasis is on partly.)
_____________
And so one catches a first glimpse of the role of the “black-haired Jew boy,” though none as yet of his identity. In seeking the latter, we are bound to ask ourselves two questions at this point: Why was the Jew chosen as the screen for this projection? And how does the concept of “blood-poisoning” fit into the scheme? The answers to both appear inextricably intertwined and may sound tentative. Yet, viewing the problem in its entirety, it is hard to account differently for the evidence.
Doubtless, various factors were influential in determining the choice of the Jew as the scapegoat; among them, the fact that the Vienna of Hitler’s time was a hothouse of anti-Semitism must have been of major importance. Everything, however, seems to become secondary to the crucial significance of Hitler’s first close personal contact with a Jew—the family physician, Dr. Eduard Bloch.
Once more it will be necessary to sift reality from its reflection in Hitler’s unconscious in order to estimate the doctor’s role in the Fuehrer’s life. All evidence points to the persistence in Hitler’s conscious mind of a sincere appreciation and gratitude for the solicitous unselfishness of the man who alleviated his beloved mother’s suffering to the best of his abilities, and at hardly a nominal fee. From the hand-painted postcards the youngster sent to Dr. Bloch from Vienna to the orders issued after the Anschluss with Austria to facilitate emigration for the doctor and his family, one is justified in assuming a consistently positive attitude on Hitler’s part toward the one Jew he referred to as an “Edeljude” (the term corresponds to “White Jew”). To show that Hitler’s unconscious must in this instance have taken an exactly opposite stand, one must go further in reconstructing his early childhood.
It is an undeniable fact that children know everything that adults would prefer them not to know. There is no reason to doubt that the little boy Adolf knew about the blood relationship between his parents. It is probable that the talk he heard about the episcopal dispensation earmarked “incest” as something highly improper, particularly in a predominantly Catholic country like Austria. He may have also heard remarks about the “danger” of marriages between near relatives: three of his mother’s five children had died! In conjunction with the notion of sexual intercourse as a brutal attack by the father, which is inherent in almost every little boy’s Oedipal fantasies, the incest motif was bound to assume for Adolf Hitler a meaning very much akin to that of “blood poisoning.”
Nor is this mere conjectural reconstruction. The Fuehrer himself has revealed that, as a little boy, he did conceive of sexual intercourse as a “brutal attack.” In what is clearly an autobiographical fantasy he describes (Mein Kampf, Chapter II) the evils of poverty, which force “a little boy” to grow up in all-too-crowded quarters, and he continues: “But when the parents fight almost daily, their brutality leaves nothing to the imagination . . . especially when the mutual differences express themselves in the form of brutal attacks on the part of the father toward the mother, or assaults due to drunkenness. The poor little boy, at the age of six, senses things which would make even a grown-up person shudder. . . .” Can there be any serious doubt that this shudder is identical with the one that used to “run down” Hitler’s spine whenever he “studied” relations between Jews and Gentiles in Vienna?
From what is known of the living conditions of the Hitler family, it is plausible that this is a genuine memory of the so-called primal scene—the child’s witnessing of the parents’ sexual intercourse. What it reveals-beyond question is Hitler’s unresolved Oedipal hatred of his father; what can be surmised without effort is the fear of both the physical and “physiological” dangers of “incest.”
_____________
Now, at the time of the pubertal resurgence of his Oedipal strivings, the original target of Hitler’s hatred, his father, was dead. But another man had actually become an integral member of the Hitler household, and several factors facilitated a very thorough transference of the paternal image to the Jewish doctor.
By its very nature, every patient-doctor relation contains elements of a child-father relation. In the present case, this may have been supported by a vague resemblance of type between the two men. Primarily, however, the doctor’s professional actions must, by virtue of their intrinsic symbolism, have led to what amounted almost to a confusion of the images of father and doctor: the operation on Klara Hitler’s breast may have been conducive to an identification with the physical “brutal assault,” while the daily morphine injections administered to relieve suffering may have served to crystallize the physiological dangers of “incest” around the concept of “blood poisoning.”
Thus, what had taken place in Hitler’s mind was actually a splitting of the doctor’s personality: Hitler’s conscious venerated all the “good” attributes of the doctor; his unconscious abhorred all the evil ones of the Jew. The dichotomy is less startling than would seem at first sight. In fact, it is no more than an exact but oversimplified (and the unconscious tends to just such oversimplifications) reflection of Hitler’s ambivalent feeling toward his father.
It should by no means be assumed that there had not been essential positive elements in the relation between father and son. In fact, the latter’s very emigration to Vienna to seek his fortune was clearly an act of identification with his father, who had done the same thing at the same age—and had succeeded. More precisely, going to Vienna meant identification with that part of his father’s personality that Hitler approved of and admired. Before he left, he signed his share of his inheritance over to his sister, who stood for his (dying) mother—an act of atonement, it seems, or a frantic effort to bribe fate at the last moment, to annul, as it were, his guilt of “parricide” and “incest.”
The young Hitler’s failure in Vienna then became for his conscience—or super-ego—a cruel punishment for having also emulated that part of his father’s personality which he not only rejected more or less consciously, but with which, unconsciously, he was most strictly forbidden to identify himself. This apparently insoluble and obviously unbearable conflict was solved by projection: that part of himself, actually, that he was no longer able to live with, Hitler projected upon—or, better, transformed into—the “black-haired Jew boy.” In this intra-psychic process, the doctor’s role had been that of a catalyst, as it were: Hitler’s contact with him had served to channelize the split, and the general anti-Semitic atmosphere of Vienna supplied the indispensable rationalizations for the choice of the Jew as target.
It can be surmised that this mechanism of projection worked with particular effectiveness in Hitler’s case. Apparently, he succeeded so thoroughly in separating himself from his alter ego, so complete was its ejection in the guise of the “black-haired Jew boy,” that he was free to take up “life with mother” again by having her substitute, his sister Angela, live with him and keep house for him; and beyond that, he was actually enabled to engage in sexual relations with his sister’s substitute—her daughter Geli. The “incest” he so feared and abhorred no longer referred to his own actions, but became definitely and exclusively identical with sexual relations between Gentiles and Jews.
_____________
Thus be said that the result of all this psychological detective work has been not so much to discover the real “self” behind the mysterious “black-haired Jew boy” as to establish a strange—though, in this domain, frequent—identity of villain and victim.
However, I wish to stress that what has been presented here does not entail any generalizations about the nature of anti-Semitism as such. All that can be pointed to here is its origin and mechanism as it operated in one man’s unconscious. This study is no more than a “case history” of a single anti-Semitic individual, and of course does not explain the devastating consequences of his particular anti-Semitism in Germany. The only connection I am bold enough to assert is that six million Jews were tortured and killed in the endeavor set in motion by the need to exterminate an incestuous, black-haired little monster that lived inside Adolf Hitler himself.
_____________
