GRGR Re: German sadism

[Lorentzen / Nicklaus]

 Millison:

 > But, I
 > wonder if the German leadership could have sustained enough interest in
 > their genocide project, at every level of society necessary to implement
 > it, without appealing to sexuality and channeling it somehow into
 > extermination of the Other -- if so, use of the term "sadism" might be
 > appropriate. Psychologists and other specialists have studied this subject
 > extensively, I believe. 


   some remarks & questions:

     the more the war project on the eastern front failed the more ressources 
     were detoured into the holocaust.

     when you compare the german antisemitism in those days to the one in 
     countries like france (- dreyfus affair) or russia (- many spontaneous 
     pogroms), you'll hardly find a reason to call the german version, as 
     goldhagen does, especially "eliminatiory". & when you take a look at the 
     labor market data, you'll see that there was probably less structural 
     discrimination against jews in germany than in the usa or in gb. that's 
     also true for academia. 

     right in the heart of modernity dwells "the extermination of the other". 
     there are no dodos anymore. you may read zygmunt bauman's "modernity and 
     ambivalence" [1991]. & that's not something of the past ... these days 
     we're witnessing the take-off of those so called "life sciences" ... in an 
     interview in today's faz jeremy rifkin predicts "gene-wars" ... & of course 
     this whole issue has essentially to do with "eugenics" (- which, by the 
     way, weren't invented in germany) ... let's stop bio-technology now!       

     one word on german militarism (- a whole homegrown intellectual generation 
     spend their lifes evoking that ghost). is there anyone out there who 
     really believes that  t h i s  army and  t h e s e  politicians are able to 
     initiate a global war (- or: any war)?! like manuel castells said in the 
     "spiegel"-interview last week: "the europeans and the japanese simply have 
     decided not to spend so much money for armament, prefering to keep the 
     us-american mercenary troops. & they don't even pay well ..." the 
     significantly rising degree of global networking makes macro-destructions 
     from the type "ww" improbable anyway.   

     opportunities make perpetrators. in police stations all over this so called 
     civilized world migrants from the south are, in the very moment you read   
     this here, hit hard into the face ... cops, pimps, soldiers, dentists, 
     people working in certain branches of organized crime, they all have good 
     occasions to abreact something ...       

     another question is that of character-structures [- still the best book on 
     that is wilhelm reich's "character analysis". check out the revised & 
     enlarged edition, and you can see how he came from psychoanalysis to 
     bodywork]. very difficult issue. are there, in the professional groups i 
     named in the last paragraph, really more sadists than in other working 
     areas? & do they really, in these especially stressful situations, act 
     crueler than, say, hysterics or schizoids? perhaps these violent outbursts 
     in fullfilling the duty have a more diffuse abreactive quality and not an 
     especially sado-masochistic one? and, oh yes, what about - "clinically" 
     this is always the case - the mixing of sadist and masochist structures in 
     the concrete human being? is pauline réage german? can people use evil 
     institutional frames for good sexual intimacy? what does pynchon think 
     about it? & what does he say in gr? very difficult issue.

     [- in former list-discussions i recommended theweleit's "male fantasies". i 
     still think it to be a very creative and entertaining book. this certain   
     form of  psycho-biographical literature reading is definitely a fruitful   
     thing to do. but i'm not so sure anymore about the study's socio-historical 
     aspects ...]  

     actually the deportations weren't commented on in the radio or something. 
     but for most cases it's probably safe to say that people could get some 
     information about the holocaust if they wanted to. most did not want to. 
     when the deportations really happened there were single pogrom like scenes, 
     but most non-jewish germans simply shut the curtains & said something like 
     "this will have an evil end for us". & here the collective memory of 
     certain historical events like the reformation struggles, the thirty years 
     war or, nearer, the combination of high reperations & black friday, 
     played a significant role: "politics is a rotten business and in the end   
     it's always on the expense of the little man: leave me alone". also 
     contracted by angst - the bombennächte and the fathers, brothers and sons  
     who were dying somewhere out in the war -  there wasn't that much space   
     for schadenfreude. it was more like "at least they won't get me tonight". 
     note that people were also afraid to get arrested or even executed for     
     common little crimes like stealing from public goods for personal use or   
     telling hitler jokes. very few non-jewish germans did protest or work 
     against the deportations. & this has  a l s o  to do with that historical 
     collective memory of the german people. [- not only, in the other, occupied 
     european countries the non-jewish resistance against the holocaust was, 
     except for the dutch general strike in the february of 1941, not really 
     stronger. see the third part of raul hilberg's "perpetrators, victims, 
     bystanders", 1992]. 

     when people  d i d  help against the holocaust in one way or the other,    
     they often did  n o t  get into serious trouble. fear is failure. & that's 
     something we can learn ... 

                                              kai frederik lorentzen