that he has much to teach us about the outlook and reasoning both of Hitler and of the party he founded. The main doubt I have concerning the paper under discussion is that it suggests the conclusion that if the Holocaust was indeed unique, it was so mainly because it was the sole creation of one man, Hitler, whose reason for hating the Jews—that they had introduced into Western culture the principle of the sanctity of life—was so singular as to be essentially sui generis.
That this is a direction in which Heinsohn wishes to move is evidenced by the fact that he quotes with approval the following sentence from an article in the New Yorker strongly criticizing Daniel Goldhagen’s (1996) Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust: “Hitler was the culprit who gave all the other culprits their chance.”30
The doubts I feel concerning this are fueled by the fact that aside from the issue of the sanctity of life, Hitler’s thoughts on the Jews, as Heinsohn develops and documents them, seem not to have been in the least singular but entirely consonant with the broad current of European antisemitism as that had developed during the previous century. Take, for example, the thought that the Jews are the source of a spiritual disease that cannot be cured without getting rid of the causative agents through which the body—the body politic in this case—is continually reinfected. We find the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein committing to his notebook in 1931 an observation very much along these lines, which he plainly regards as so familiar an aspect of the history of the Jews in Europe as to go almost without saying.
Within the history of the peoples of Europe the history of the Jews is not treated so circumstantially as their intervention in European affairs would actually merit, because within this history they are experienced as a sort of disease, and anomaly, & nobody wants to put a disease on the same level as normal life. (& nobody wants to speak of a disease as though it had the same rights as healthy bodily processes [even painful ones]).
We may say: people can only regard this tumour as a natural part of the body if their whole feeling for the body changes (if the whole national feeling for the body changes). Otherwise the best they can do is put up with it.
You may expect an individual man to display this sort of tolerance or else to disregard such things; but you cannot expect this of a nation, because it is precisely not disregarding such things that makes it a nation. I.e. there is a contradiction in expecting someone both to retain the aesthetic feeling of his body and also to make the tumour welcome.31
Let us look more closely at these remarks. When both Wittgenstein and Hitler proclaim, in an eerily harmonious chorus, that Jews cannot but be regarded by a nation as a disease, neither, it seems to me, can be regarded as making an empirical claim. Rather, as David Nirenberg’s historical analysis of what he calls “anti-Judaism” would suggest, both are exploring the internal logical structure of a complex myth. Wittgenstein says at one point in the passage cited earlier that one cannot expect a nation to tolerate the diseased state constituted by the presence of Jews, because “it is only a nation by virtue of not disregarding such things.” Not merely does this fail as an observation capable of persuading by its conformity with empirical evidence; it is not even faintly sensible. Why should the Jews be regarded as the agents of a spiritual disease fatal to the integrity of a nation, or perhaps as constituting the disease itself, when no European nation possesses historically the cultural and spiritual integrity presumed by these remarks of Wittgenstein’s? Why do the French not regard the Basques or the Bretons, or the English the Welsh, or the Scots the Orcadians or the Hebrideans as carriers of a spiritual disease? Perhaps it is because, in Wittgenstein’s terms, the former do not constitute (or perhaps do not yet constitute) nations or “real nations”? But if that is Wittgenstein’s answer, then it becomes clear that we are dealing here at best with a pair of arbitrary redefinitions of the terms disease and nation. Neither the experience of the Jew as a sort of disease nor the nation that must, according to Wittgenstein, “experience” Jews in this way are, in short, empirical realities. Rather, they are merely correlative poles within the arbitrary structure of mutually defining notions that serve to constitute the metaphor of “the Jew” as a form of cultural disease: notions provided with the appearance of sense and reference, that is to say, not by their correspondence with anything real but merely by the conventionally established relationships in which they stand to one another.
THE “DISEASE” METAPHOR AND ITS MOTIVATION
The analogy between the healthy state and the healthy human person is a common enough trope of Western political philosophy. Plato begins it with the analogy between the city and the soul in book 4 of the Republic. Analogies between the organization of the state and that of the body are to be found throughout the subsequent history of Western thought, in Cicero, John of Salisbury, Hobbes, Herbert Spencer, and many others. The idea that the healthy state is analogous to the healthy body is commonplace in such thinking, and since the analogical “organs” of the state are necessarily made up of subsets of its citizens, it is also commonplace for the deranged state to be explained in terms of the moral derangement of the citizens who make up such groupings. In Hamlet, Marcellus’s “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” is directly motivated by Claudius’s drunken revelry: the state is rotten not least because of the bodily vices of its present king.
In the bulk of such analogies, however, the individuals who constitute the disease of the state are in the full sense citizens of the state whose health their activities threaten. This is of course exceptionally true of Claudius, who, whatever his vices, is not merely a Dane but the Dane. Those citizens whose conduct threatens the health of the Platonic ideal city are Greeks and citizens like anybody else. When the Jews are, as Wittgenstein puts it, “experienced as a disease,” that is no longer the case. It is essential to the metaphor as a trope of antisemitism that the Jew, whatever his passport may say, is not a “real” citizen of the country that he affects as his own but an alien interloper.
This changes the whole force of the metaphor. It is no longer a matter, as it were, of an illness native to the body of the state: something analogous, say, to a failing heart valve or an ankle sprained through the foolhardiness of its owner. Rather, it is a matter of an invasion by some organism altogether alien to the body or institution it invades—as if the Jews were analogous to an infection of bacilli or trypanosomes in the bloodstream, or to rats in the walls of a hospital. T. S. Eliot’s poem “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar” famously contains an expression of the latter image that many have found offensive: “The rats are underneath the piles. / The Jew is underneath the lot.”
That is, the function of the metaphor is no longer to dramatize the idea that some flaw native to the state needs to be set right. On the contrary, its function is to dramatize the idea that the state in itself is without flaw: or would be if it were not for the activities of people who, while they may seem to belong to it as citizens, are in fact wholly alien to it.
The third of the questions raised in the last section but one was, in effect, cui bono: who benefits or profits from spreading the message of political antisemitism? The answer suggested by the foregoing thoughts would seem to be, anyone who has a vested interest in representing the social problems and vices of the age, not as inherent in the societies they disfigure but rather as due to an alien infestation that as such is capable of cure, provided only that sufficiently vigorous measures are taken against it. And if one looks around for people who might satisfy that description, it is tempting to locate them within any ruling group with a vested interest in preventing popular discontent from impacting it or its members.
Certainly, such an analysis seems to fit the National Socialist Party in the period 1933–45. On the one hand, there is the need to project both the party and the Third Reich as the expression of everything that is healthy, strong, energetic, and masculine in the German volk. On the other hand, there is the equally pressing need to represent any acts of the party to which domestic objections might be raised, up to and including war, as measures made
