Is Germany Incurable?

by RICHARD M. BRICKNER, M.D.

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AS a responsible physician practicing neurology and psychiatry, intimately acquainted with the sick minds that laymen call “crazy” or “insane” and that we call “psychotic, as well as with milder forms of irrationality, I can say: —

First, the national group we call Germany behaves and has long behaved startlingly like an individual involved in a dangerous mental trend. Although many individual Germans may not participate in this trend, the mass actions of the German nation are, and for over a century have been, typical of what the psychiatrist finds in certain highly alarming types of individual behavior.

Second, clinical experience can identify the specific condition that Germany’s mental trend approaches. It is paranoia, as grim an ill as mind is heir to, the most difficult to treat, the only mental condition that frightens the psychiatrist himself—because, unless checked, it may end in murder. Murder is the logical denouement of its special outlook on the world.

Identifying a paranoid trend, when one is dealing with a paranoid patient, is absolutely necessary, not only for the good of the patient, but also for the safety of those near him. He is by definition a potential killer, a bomb that any jar or change of mental environment may set off at any moment. Safety from his potential menace lies only in recognizing and treating it along established psychiatric lines.

Paranoia is not used here as an epithet, but as a responsible medical diagnosis. Laymen often know the major psychoses by name — the manic depressive state, schizophrenia (sometimes called dementia praecox, the “split personality” disease), and so forth — without realizing how clearly each can be distinguished by characteristic symptom-grouping. Although all classical symptoms are seldom present in a given case, evidence is often so preponderant that the psychiatrist can diagnose as surely as a heart specialist dealing with angina pectoris. There is also the “feel” of a case, the sum of tenuous small impressions made on sensitive clinical instincts. The German group — as a collective force, not necessarily as individuals — both “feels” paranoid and displays a remarkable number of the classical paranoid symptoms.

The paranoid is the megalomaniac, treating his environment exclusively as a device for his own aggrandizement and glorification. Grandiose mystic notions ot the cosmos, which nobody can refute, because they have no basis in everyday life, crop up in him — huge, worldembracing thoughts that make the thinker feel as big as the universe. He often develops a belief in Destiny or The Wave of the Future or a personal divine mission or an exclusive personal right to satiate all his desires and ambitions — although he is by definition incapable of satisfaction in any triumph. The failure of others to cooperate with him in his divine mission, he interprets as conspiracy to sabotage his self-aggrandizing programs. He develops a “persecution complex.” He is the “they ‘ man — “they” have it in for him, “they” whisper maliciously behind his back, “they are the malicious schemers who make sure that no job, deal, career, marriage, or project of his ever succeeds.

We do not yet know what causes paranoia, not even whether or not it is hereditary. Environment undoubtedly plays an important part. Possibly it springs from special inability to cope with the over-discussed “inferiority feeling” in early childhood. Most of us have something of that in our backgrounds, as we also have healed tuberculous lesions in our lungs. But, fortunately for society, such psychic lesions react on only a few to produce the steely, hard-cored, explosive paranoid — as sinisterly impressive, integrally designed, and dangerous as a block-buster bomb. For, when pushed too far, in order to do justice to his outraged majesty, in cold rage at the world’s diabolically malevolent thwarting, the paranoid kills, committing not a sudden crime passionnel, but a deliberate, well-executed, self-righteous murder. Grant the paranoid’s warped premises and it is all utterly logical.

This discussion is not directly concerned with whether or not Hitler is a mental case. No doubt he is — no doubt many of his chief supporters are also. But Hitler, Göring, the Nazi Party, the German Army, are important here only as their behavior meshes with the characteristic behavior of the German nation as a group, which tends to bring paranoid types to the top. Mr. Chamberlain was so notably unsuccessful in gaining his ends, not because he failed to diagnose Hitler individually, but because he did not realize that typical German techniques in diplomacy and internal politics alike, brought to a peak under the Nazi regime, are of grave psychiatric moment.

All Germany’s neighbor nations have made the same mistake, interpreting Germany’s conduct in the same naïve and failure-doomed way that leads the average patient’s family ast ray in dealing with paranoia. That is not surprising — important key figures in world affairs so frequently fail to recognize symptoms of mental troubles in members of their own families that there is little reason to suppose they would recognize them in international affairs disguised under layer after layer of traditional political and economic thinking. But such blindness, resulting from insufficient acquaintance with descriptive psychiatry, is just as dangerous internationally as domestically.

In the case of Germany we are not and never have been dealing with fascism or imperialism or aggression per se. Instead we are confronted with a group who employ whatever power they may have, under whatever system of government, in a strangely intense and terrifying manner. “Aggression” has been displayed for thousands of years, ever since national groups were sufficiently organized and developed to be able to take advantage of their neighbors. What distinguishes German aggression is the megalomania, the sense of mission, the fanatic violence, and above all the irrationality that invariably accompany it. Unremitting complaints about “unjust treatment,” “encirclement,” “need for Lebemsraum,” always couched in the idiom of the martyr, make German spokesmen sound remarkably like people typically involved in a paranoid trend.

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Actually the paranoid trend in Germany that has once more plunged the world into bloody warfare did not come into being with the advent of Hitler, but has been present through at least five generations of German history. Hitler and his associates, like some of their predecessors, are mere transient leaders of a type that a paranoid culture will inevitably seek or produce. There is not, for instance, a single sentiment voiced in Mein Kampf, nor a single feature of Hitler’s whole political program as originally formulated, that cannot be found in literature of the Pan-German League, which attained wide popularity in Germany in the latter years of the nineteenth century and the years preceding the First World War.

It is my purpose to show that the Nazi movement and its leaders are symptoms, not causes, of Germany’s trouble, the equivalent of the scabs on the body of a smallpox patient. To get rid of them and let it go at that would be like treating the scabs and ignoring the disease itself. Indeed there is so much evidence to show the existence of group paranoia in Germany long before the word “Nazi” was even coined that this book could have been written without any mention whatever of Hitler and company.

Internally Germany has long been turning itself into the kind of society that an individual paranoid would like to create. Such a society naturally rewards with social approval people to whom paranoid behavior is congenial. As a parallel to this internal situation, Germany has also been trying to impose a paranoid hierarchy on the whole world, devoting to the task the all-out energy, sense of timing, and ruthless logic that characteristically develop from the paranoid’s internal pressures. Germany believes that she is or ought to lie the father-emperor-schoolmaster-slaved rivergeneral-drillmaster-boss-hero of the universe. Since paranoid demands are by definition insatiable, every success merely whets her appetite for more.

Like the individual paranoid, Germany extends every concept far beyond the exigencies of any situation. Black is always extraordinarily black, white correspondingly white, the dividing line between them is uncompromising. Either you are a superman or a pariah, a chosen descendant of the gods or a worm to be trodden underfoot. This is not just a matter of what the sociologist calls in-groups versus out-groups, but of a constant need to assert and to prove, by extreme violence if necessary, transcendent superiority over everybody else.

This is the key to the disproportionate quality of German aggression. Economic distress may have helped to precipitate this particular outburst, but Germany has continued to use her distress as justification for striking east and west, north and south. In practically every country on earth, she has spies and secret organizations on a scale never before dreamed of. Deliberately, almost systematically, she has antagonized the whole world. While trying to hold the entire continent of Europe in subjugation, she has simultaneously invited additional wars with the Soviet Union and the United States. This is obviously no mere case of seeking resources, markets, or population outlets. Germany is trying to rule the world and, by the very megalomania of the conception, demonstrating the paranoid quality of her thinking.

Many people believe that, without a rational basis for discontent on Germany’s part, such a state of affairs could not exist. Her self-pitying evaluation of herself as a have-not nation is accepted at face value. Exponents of this theory never explain, though, how it is that in the years preceding 1914 Germany was behaving in virtually the same way as in the years preceding 1939. Germany was no international stepchild then. She had colonies, immense military power, tremendous intellectual prestige, a standard of living ranking among the world’s highest.

Wilfred Trotter, a pioneer in the psychological approach to groups, actually developed the theory that Germany’s pre-1914 paranoid behavior was due to her unprecedentedly brilliant success between 18GG and 1914, observing that winning three wars and organizing a large unified nation with so little difficulty could hardly help going to Germany’s head. At that very time, Germany was shouting just as loudly about “encirclement” as after the “humiliations” of the Treaty of Versailles. Whereas Switzerland, the possessor of exceedingly little Lebensraum and for five hundred years more densely encircled than Germany has ever been, has been uncomplainingly going about her business in a quiet, democratic way. All of which brings to mind a criminological commonplace: “Poverty alone will not incite to crime; it depends on who it is who is poor.”

When we speak of Germany as a paranoid society we do not mean that every German is paranoid — there are, in fact, many nonparanoid Germans. But there is ample evidence that they have been relatively impotent. Nor must the conception of Germany as a paranoid society be taken to mean that group paranoia does not exist in other countries. Any spread-eagle nationalism, for example, shows paranoid symptoms. Our own KnowNothing Party, Ku Klux Klan, and various “Shirt” movements have all been paranoid in character, and have influenced many Americans. This very fact — that many apparently everyday people take to paranoid behavior at the first opportunity — aids understanding of how the Germans, those good-natured, industrious, clever, able, valuable, and efficient exponents of so much of the best in modern culture, can behave in such an antisocial fashion as a group.

It is not my intention to indict a whole nation. It would be both inaccurate and unconstructive to employ the concept of group paranoid trends as a means of casting the whole German population in the role of villains. The present situation is far too serious for us to expand the huge web of fantasy already spun around the Germans both by themselves and by others. The dimensions of Germany’s threat to the world can best be understood if it is kept in mind that unchecked paranoia, allowed to develop like compound interest, has only one logical outcome: with an individual, murder; with a whole society, war.

Precautions must obviously be observed in applying knowledge of individual behavior to the behavior of groups as if no distinction existed between the two. But, since groups are composed of human beings, the legitimate subject of psychiatric research, group behavior — the sum of the behaviors of individuals in certain respects — should also be eligible for such research.

In speaking of the group called Germany, we are not speaking of some mystic whole, but of an organized congeries of individuals, sharing a common language and common traditions, who have been reared in a common, particular way, technically called a “culture,”so that they develop common, particular manners, morals, tastes in food, dress, and other departments of life.

Variations in these cultures result in the fact that human nature is not, as is so often remarked, “the same the world over.” The chances are — although nobody is yet certain on the point — that a German baby ten minutes old is free from paranoia. It is equally likely that, out of every million German-born babies, a certain number will develop enough resistance to the paranoid trends in German culture for their individual attitudes to correspond closely to those of, say, non-paranoid Swiss or Icelanders. Statistically, however, the odds are against any given German baby’s escaping this cultural “infection”; and this means that enough adult Germans in each generation will manifest paranoid behavior to make Germany behave in a paranoid fashion as a group.

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The keynote of every criticism is almost invariably: “How strange these Germans are!” It has been struck regularly by visitors to Germany for the last century without regard to what kind of government temporarily held the reins of state. When, for example, Lillian Mowrer asked her husband: “Do you think Germans are madder than any other people? They seem so unbalanced — so hysterical,” she was not talking about Hitler’s fanatic subjects. The year was 1925, the flag that flew over the Reichstag was the black, red, and gold of a government that called itself “the freest Republic in the world.” Mrs. Mowrer was marveling over the number of supposedly intelligent Germans who adhered to cults and crank movements, theosophy, nudism, or peculiar diets.

Graphology, astrology, and something called “ characterology ” had attained an astonishing degree of success in the country of Immanuel Kant and Albert Einstein. The pedestrian rationality ol the Republican government was regarded with universal scorn. Its citizens found far more potent appeal in the developing nationalist movements with their rabblerousing slogans and their bloody putsches. By 1924 three of these parties, including the Nazis, w ere gathering in 1,900,000 votes for their extremist programs and had thirty-six deputies in t he Reichstag. The paranoid’s preference for indulging in semi-occult rather than rational thinking was in evidence on all sides.

This habit of mind has often been identified by Germans themselves. Nietzsche deprecated it as the German “revolt against reason.” Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi philosopher, glorified it as thinking with the “subconscious blood” — a mystical procedure which only “racially pure” Germans are qualified to perform.

Even the vocabulary in which such thinking is expressed is often incomprehensible to the uninitiated. It is impossible, for instance, to derive from the homely English word “folk” the mystic connotations intended by Germans speaking in reverent tones of the German Volk. Race shaming (Rassenschande) and culture shaming (Kulturschande), both of which concepts long pre-date the Nazis, have an ineffable significance far better grasped by German grocers than by foreign Ph.D.’s. A monthly magazine founded in 1924 fairly rocks with this grandiose phraseology. The Weltkampf (world battle), as it is called, exhorts its readers to crusade against “world chaos,” “world Judaization,” and “world finance capitalism,” and teaches them to think in “world political thought grooves (Weltpolitische Gedankengänge). ”

Edgar Ansel Mowrer, one of the shrewdest observers of late Republic and early Nazi days, commented upon the Germans’ “distorted batlike fancies, illusions, madnesses” and called Germany “a country where men are continually flying to extremes.” Sober common sense and clear logical processes were an “iron collar to the Germans, who escaped from them as quickly as possible into that peculiar subjectivity in which alone they feel comfortable.” Many Americans visiting Germany in the preHitler years have described the chilling spectacle of hordes of German students parading the streets bawling the words of the famous Storm Trooper ballad: “We spit on freedom!” A young Nazi aviator told a British visitor how happy he was at last under Hitler to be free. “Free from what?” she asked, “Free from freedom!” was the exultant answer.

Awesome solemnity attends every German ritual from a. Sunday stroll in the park to a mass meeting in the Sporlspalast. Madeleine Kent, an English writer married to a German, has described the passion evinced even by the self-styled rationalists of Social Democratic days for making a “cause” of everything they did, organizing anything from personal tastes to political principles. When these missionaries went in for vegetarianism or a diet of raw food, when they espoused “rational dress” or practiced free love, they did it “not frivolously, but in the solemn conviction that they were thereby hastening the millennium and lifting mankind to a higher plane.”

This sense of mission reflected in both the behavior of individual Germans and the behavior of Germany as a nation is described by William L. Shirer in passages that could easily be excerpts from a psychiatrist’s files. The “feel” of paranoid mission, for instance, is unmistakable in Shirer’s description of an audience listening to Hitler at the Berlin Opera, their hands raised “in slavish salute, their faces now contorted with hysteria, their mouths wide open, shouting, shouting, their eyes burning with fanaticism, glued on the new god, the Messiah.”

The paranoid’s sense of justice — one rule for me, another for the rest of the world — is classically exemplified in the attitude of a German announcer showing uncensored newsreels at a press conference Shirer attended. Pictures of devastated Holland and Belgium inspired him to shout: “Thus do we deal death and destruction on our enemies!” Pictures of damage from English bombs at Freiburg brought forth a righteously indignant: “Thus do our brutal and unscrupulous enemies bomb and kill and murder innocent German children!”

The sense of the divine right of Germans, Shirer says, is nothing new. “Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Treitschke fired the German people with it in the last century . . . our century has not lacked for successors ... all these writings emphasized that Germany was entitled by the laws of history and nature to a space more adequate to its mission in life. That this space would have to be taken from others . . . made no difference . . . the‘lesser breed’ of Europeans are not entitled ... to the very towns and cities they have built up with their own sweat and toil, if a German covets them.”

The strange characteristics of the German conscience also struck the well-known British writer, Miss I. A. R. Wylie. Looking back with the perspective of maturity over eight youthful years in Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany, she noted that it is possible for a perfectly respectable German to “do atrocious things with a clear and shining conscience” since “ vice becomes virtue and virtue vice by simple decree if it serves the tribe.” In a people thus dedicated to a holy, national mission, individual conscience must necessarily wait upon the orders of the High Command.

This helps us to understand how the Germans, whose clothes, features, and general outward appearance closely resemble those of the inhabitants of other Western nations, can accept without visible demur their government’s policy of mass murder and mass starvation of thousands of other human beings. “Taught for generations before Hitler came,” wrote Madeleine Kent, “that the good of the race was infinitely more important than the happiness of the individual, they found nothing shocking in the Nazi claim that opponents of the State were ‘subhuman’ and their consequent sufferings ‘trifles,’”

German status-anxiety — the paranoid’s desire to define with intense rigidity just “where he stands” with relation to everybody he meets — has repeatedly been pointed out. Shirer said flatly that “German character is such that the German must either dominate or be dominated. He understands no other relation between human beings on this earth.” The English-born Daisy, Princess of Pless, whose German in-laws were always finding her insufficiently conscious of her husband’s high place in the world, described two complementary aspects of German character: the imperious aspect that has as motto “Live as I wish; move as I say; sit or stand as I order; think as I think; speak as I do,” and the leader-worshiping aspect which makes Germans “adore being ruled and kept in their places, and perspire with satisfaction when they get plentiful opportunities for heel-clicking and hand-kissing.”

These symptoms, of course, have not been noticed by foreigners alone. For over a century, Germans whose own vision was not clouded have struggled vainly against the rising tide of paranoia. The most famous of such vicwings-with-alarm is Heinrich Heine’s striking prophecy, first published in 1833. Christianity, Heine said, had subdued but not quenched “that ancient German eagerness for battle which combats not for the sake of destroying, not even for the sake of victory, but merely for the sake of the combat itself . . . when the Cross, that restraining talisman, falls to pieces, then will break forth again the ferocity of the old combatants, the frantic Berserker rage. . . . The old stone gods will then arise from the forgotten ruins and wipe from their eyes the dust of centuries, and Thor with his giant hammer will arise again, and he will shatter the Gothic cathedrals.”

The great Goethe too was gravely apprehensive of the growing fanatic nationalism, with its encouragement of the herd ideal, t hat he saw about him. With the same prophetic sense, he begged his increasingly chauvinistic countrymen always to bear in mind that “Germany is nothing. Every individual German is a great deal,” The Germans would not listen to Goethe. But a little over a century later they were listening with bated breath and uplifted arm to an ex-Austrian ex-corporal who taught them just the reverse: “Du bist nichts; dein Volk ist alles (Thou art nothing; thy Volk is everything).”

Nietzsche, that paradoxical thinker who railed at Germans in such an utterly German way, also took note of the straws in the wind from the Rhine. He called his compatriots “a dangerous people with a genius for intoxicating themselves,” sneered at the jingoism of such songs as “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” harped perpetually on the absurdity of German nationalism in all its manifestations. By 1889 he had grown so fearful of the effects of Germany’s coming “barbarism” that this fierce opponent of Christianity actually wrote the Pope begging him to sponsor some sort of league of nations to save civilization from this threat. Unfortunately some of the signs of Nietzsche’s impending mental illness were already upon him. The Pope could scarcely be expected to take seriously a letter signed “Nietzsche Caesar.” Yet in that letter, dismissed by historians as the ravings of a lunatic, Nietzsche had named as the ingredients of the developing “barbarism”: fanatic racism, fanatic nationalism, and tire Realpolitik of Bismarck which has been admired and imitated by the Nazis.

There again a sensitive observer, accumulating data and aware of their emotional content but not their scientific significance, has found characteristic German behavior sinister and disturbing. The reader, however, has in his hands a clew to the missing psychiatric knowledge that makes the puzzle pieces fall into alignment with eccentric human behavior in general.

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We can now take the accepted paranoid symptoms and match them against the collective voice of Germany. Diagnosis of group as ol individual paranoia must depend strictly on descriptive data — on what the patient says, what he indicates he would like to do, what he actually does. The paranoid can do no wrong, for the very fact that it is he who performs a given act clot lies its performance with moral sanctity and cosmic importance.

Thus a paranoid nation does not set out to seize the oil fields of a neighboring nation strictly because it would be more convenient to have her own oil supply under her own control. As she mobilizes her armies for the job, her leading spirits believe, and effectively influence many of the soldiers to believe, that it is a far, far better thing for tiie world in general that a superior nation like herself should have the disposal of such wealth. It is intolerable that the former nation-owner, insignificant folk with an impudent tendency to resist expropriation, should longer usurp a privilege obviously intended for their betters who have the job of raising a great nation to the pinnacle of world importance that is her cosmic due. Bloodshed involved in correcting one of nature’s more careless mistakes is not only permissible but sacred.

Adolf Hitler has often expressed his belief that the Nordic race has a right to dominate the world, and that consciousness of this right should be the guiding point of German foreign policy. A few years ago a good many people, who know better now, classified such remarks as “typically Hitlerian” exaggerations and cheerfully debated whether he “really meant” them or was just “talking to the gallery.” It had not yet been made clear by millions of casualties that he both meant them and was talking to a gallery that wanted to hear them and would get themselves mowed down in windrows by Russian machine-guns to prove it. Nor was it realized that their Führer’s highpitched, hysterical voice that has shouted down so many grave and suavely spoken non-German diplomats was only echoing generations of the German past.

Listen, for example, to the voice of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, first Rector of the University of Berlin, sometimes called “Germany’s first nationalist,” philosopher and war hawk of the German Erwachung (awakening) that swept Napoleon to the other side of the Rhine in 1813. In recommending Machiavellianism as a guiding policy for the Prussian state, Fichte explained that the king, while bound to observe law and order in his private life, is by no means obligated to do so in his relations with other states. “If you [the German people] sink into the depths, the whole of humanity sinks with you without hope of eventual restoration.”

In 1814, the poet and historian Ernst Moritz Arndt expressed German megalomania with a mixture of coarseness and intellectual snobbery: “Everything which is impure in the German philosophy comes from abroad. We rightly thrust all this dung from us, for it comes to us from abroad.” And again, the Germans are “a royal race, even a race of high priests; we administer the most holy priesthood, the oldest oracles and mysteries of the European world. What Delphi meant to Greece, Germany is to the North Europeans, the navel of the world of sciences and culture today, the center of the innermost spiritual movement and power.”

Toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the claims of superiority come thick and fast. One of the most influential authors was Otto Julius Langbehm, whose Rembrandt as a Teacher, first published in 1891, had run into sixty-two editions by 1925 and had precipitated the famous German Youth Movement. Langholm, pivoting his argument around what he called the truly Germanic figure of Rembrandt, counseled Germans to throw off the shackles of positivist reason and utilitarian science and return to “art and personality.” He advocated the cultivation of the “heroic German soul,” hinting that the rewards of so doing might be rich and juicy: “Perhaps before much time passes he [the German] as a ‘human being’ will govern the world.” He wrote ardently of the “mission of modern Germans . . . for which nature has created them.” This, it appears, is to “victoriously revolt against all other blood.”

After the outbreak of the First World War, Ernst Haeckel, the famous biologist, delivered himself of a strangely unbiological rhapsody: “One single highly cultured German soldier of those who are, alas! falling in thousands represents a higher intellectual and moral life value than hundreds of the uncivilized human beings (Naturmenschen) whom England and France, Russia and Italy, oppose to them.” “Germany is the center of God’s plans for the world,” thundered one pastor. “Germany is the religious heart of Europe,” chanted anot her.

The Gott mit uns, “we are the Lord’s anointed,” idea recurs like a Wagnerian motif in German thought. As early as 1810, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, “Vater Jahn,” the nationalist youth leader of the Erwachung, proclaimed that “the sacred races were formerly the Greeks . . . now in their turn the Germans.” Seventy years ago Kaiser Wilhelm I said, “Providence desired us to be its instrument.” Shouted Hitler: “I am certain that my name will never be forgotten as that of a great man of this country. I believe it was the will of God — the will of the Supreme Power was fulfilled through me.”

Perhaps the most intellectual documentation of the German mission is contained in Oswald Spengler’s famous The Decline of the West, published in 1918. A few quot ations set the tone of the book: “Three stages are clearly to be distinguished — the release from the Culture, the production of the thoroughbred Civilizationform, and the final hardening. For us this development has now set in, and as I see it, it is Germany that is destined, as the last nation of the West, to crown the mighty edifice.” This book is a beautiful sample of ostensibly profound and well-documented paranoid thinking in print. It might be called “the appeal to the inevitable.” Emotionally committed to admiration of a paranoid world, the thinker proceeds to prove to his own satisfaction, and that of anybody else emotionally inclined to see things his way, that what he would like to see happen is bound to happen. Since it is bound to happen, the only sensible thing to do is get aboard the steam-roller and help make it happen. This is not a logical conclusion, but it is firmly based on the psychological fact that something sold as inevitable exerts a fascinating attraction on many people.

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The need to dominate everyone, to control every situation in which he finds himself, is part and parcel of the paranoid’s megalomania. Indeed the desire for domination and the megalomania are so merged that they are indistinguishable from each other. The paranoid is desperately concerned with exactly which rung he occupies on the ladder, plotting incessantly how to get higher and higher, how to dislodge anybody who stands in his way.

The most organized, explicit expression of the German need for domination is found in the Pan-German League, the foundations of which were laid by Dr. Karl Peters in Berlin in 1886, when German pride was stiil swollen with the victories of 1870 and the unification of all the states under Bismarck. By the time of the First World War, it was said to have as members half a million of the “intellectuals of Germany.”

Ostensibly the League was devoted to fostering “Germanism” in every part of the world, supporting all German national movements in foreign countries, uniting all persons of German blood, but its exponents went much farther than that, many of them frankly demanding world hegemony for Germany. The particular prophet who most influenced its ideas was Heinrich von Trcitschke, the famous historian who passionately and incessantly preached Germany’s need and right to dominate other nations.

Von Treitschke is a veritable John the Baptist of the Pan-German attitude, calling his countrymen to repentance whenever they seemed hesitant to fulfill what he regards as their historic mission and instructing them in the “might makes right” morality that is a necessary concomitant.

Wilhelm Hohenzollern, a hereditary and not an appointed or elected official, was nevertheless so thoroughgoing a product of paranoid culture that he could epitomize German paranoid trends with the greatest effectiveness. The Kaiser made no secret of his est imate of his own and his country’s stature. At the turn of the century, he decided to construct and adorn an “Avenue of Victory” in Berlin. Tie himself drew up the general plans, selected the artists and sculptors to execute it, and gave a dinner for them. In a speech at that dinner, he spoke of great ideals that “have become for us Germans a permanent possession, while other nations have more or less lost them. The German nation is now the only people left which in the first instance is called upon to protect and cultivate and promote these great ideals.” Having thus set his gaze upon far horizons, he began to dream articulately of an empire “not less authoritative than the Roman world empire of old time.” These magniloquent words, according to such a distinguished historian as Pinnow, were widely applauded, especially by the middle classes and the Pan-Germans.

On the verge of putting his dream into effect, Wilhelm outdid himself in his proclamation to his eastern armies in 1914: “Remember that you are the chosen people! The spirit of the Lord has descended upon me, because I am Emperor of the Germans! I am the instrument of the Most High. I am His sword, His representative. Woe and death to all those who resist my will! Woe and death to those who do not believe in my mission! Woe and death to the cowards! May all the enemies of the German people perish! God demands their destruction — God who, through my mouth, commands you to execute His will.” Thus spoke the man whose spellbound subjects cheered him every time he appeared in public and rejected him only when, his mission having failed, they hungered after a new “instrument of the Most High.”

It is difficult to imagine a German leader preparing his men for battle with the words, so alien in their humanity to every paranoid ideal, used by the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States in addressing the 166th Ohio Regiment, August 22, 1864. Abraham Lincoln said in part: “I happen, temporarily, to occupy this White House. I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has. It is in order that each one of you may have, through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise, and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations. . . . It is for this the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthright.”

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Persecution complex and projection — these two symptoms melt together in the paranoid’s dour, guarded, easily inflammable relations with the world. Because he himself is so important, he is obviously destined to rule others who are less important. Because his superiority and potential power are so unmistakable in his eyes, he feels nobody can overlook them. All other people are naturally consumed with jealousy of him and hostility toward the inevitable consummation of his supremacy. In consequence they scheme against him and contrive ways to balk his present or projected domination of them as parts of the cosmos that is his rightful heritage. The paranoid inevitably attributes to his fancied enemies the very desires toward violent hostility that absorb him as uncrowned heir of the universe.

The German hullabaloo about the Versailles treaty loses much force when one realizes that this is only a sharper kind of whining that Germany had been indulging in long before the Sarajevo assassination. In 1803 Arndt was already maintaining that “Holland represents the most violent injury to Germany’s natural frontier” — sixty-eight years before there was any such working entity as Germany, one hundred and fifty-five years after the tough little Dutch st ates had convinced the world formally of their right to paddle their own canoe regardless of the German fiction of the Empire.

The Triple Entente made Germany froth at the month. A writer in one of the most conservative journals of the day observed that “no reasonable person” could possibly doubt that the Triple Entente intended to “annihilate us.” When, in 1913, England proposed a conference to arrange mutual limitation of naval armaments, the same paper called the proposal “as clumsily grotesque as it. is absurd” and demanded a guarantee that England “is not shamefully deceiving us in this matter.”

The word “encirclement,” dinned into the world’s ears to explain each fresh Nazi aggrandizement, was in circulation well before the First World War. One pre-war devotee of this idea was Ernst Hasse, a Reichstag deputy, “master mind” of the Pan-German League and editor of Alldeutsche Biätter, who wrote in 1907 that Germany needed war because she was “encircled by enemies! That’s what we have been since the beginning.”

This encirclement motif struck a fundamental chord in the hearts of paranoid-tending Germans, as it well might, considering the fundamental nature of its paranoid appeal. The irony of its obsessive use is heightened by the fact that at this time Germany was more prosperous and powerful than she had ever been in modern history. She had long since beaten Austria and France, unified the various German states into a strong and resilient whole, acquired a respectable number of potentially rich colonies, pushed into the front rank as a sea power, both militarily and commercially, developed a standard of living close to the highest in the world, arrived at international prestige for her scholarship, technical ingenuity, military genius, artistic achievements. From that setting, Wirth could write: “If anybody thinks wo are living in the best of worlds, we have to tell him that, since 1871, Germany has never been in a worse position. One thing is sure: we are encircled!”

It follows from paranoid reasoning that all nations are potential, if not yet actual, enemies. Wurth made this attitude notably clear when complaining that Germany had “ceded” military instructors to Japan and China, Greece and Turkey, Chile and Argentina; tens of thousands of merchants, tradesmen, and peasants to Russia, Algeria, Natal, Argentina, and the United States; thousands of doctors, jurists, philologuos, and electricians to various other foreign countries; he called it “a strange way to achieve domination, by strengthening our enemies at our expense!”

Two things are notable here: the assumption that every count ry on the globe, no matter how far away, is by definition an enemy of Germany; and the other assumption that the chief end of every German act is domination of other countries. The German megalomania and the German hypersuspiciousness merge in a few sentences into the unmistakable paranoid pattern.

Evidence of secret hostile plots is constantly being unearthed. “Plots” to achieve world domination by the Jews and the Freemasons have been “uncovered” regularly. In Berlin Diary, William Shircr gives some classic examples of newspaper headlines explaining Germany’s various acts of aggression by the Nazis’ use of projection. At the time of the Czech crisis, for example, the Berlin papers shrieked: “Bloody Regime — New Czech Murders of Germans, Extortion, Plundering, Shooting — Czech Terror in Sudetenland Grows Worse from Day to Day!” And at Poland’s eleventh hour: “Answer to Poland, the Runner-Amok (Amoklaufer) against Peace and Right in Europe!” “Warsaw Threatens Bombardment of Danzig!” “Unbelievable Agitation of the Polish Arch-Madness (Polnischen Grössenwahns)!” And even the fantastic accusation in one headline that “Poles Bombard Warsaw!” Unluckily the paranoid, typically lacking a sense of humor, is incapable of enjoying his own grim jokes.

7

“When have the German people ever broken their word?” asked Adolf Hitler in his speech to the Reichstag of May 21, 1935. Nearly every speech of Hitler’s leads off with a long period of blustering instruction for the world in the past history of Germany. The general theme is that Germany has never been defeated in a war. If, temporarily, Germany may appear to have been defeated, it is due to the machinations of plotters, always at work to discredit this great nation and, when opportunity arises, to stab her in the back.

According to this rewriting of history, Germany actually emerged victor from the First World War. For ten years the word “defeat” was taboo — when strictly necessary, one spoke of the “collapse” (Zusammenbruch). At a meeting held to celebrate the “Day of the German Soldier,” Prince August Wilhelm, the Kaiser’s grandson, announced that “the German soldier returned from the war unvanquished. In the last fourteen years the memory of the victory of the German heroes has been boycotted.” In 1924 General Ludcndorff, quondam supporter of the early Nazi movement and principal German military leader in the latter part of the First World War, contributed to an English compendium an article entitled “Germany Never Defeated!”

This particular kind of rejuggling of past events to suit emotional necessities is an integral part of the paranoid picture, technically known as retrospective falsification. Every human being probably does it to some extent — the paranoid has developed its technique into an essential ingredient of his life. He finds it indispensably handy in erecting elaborate structures of complaint about what his teeming enemies want to do to him, buttressed by elaborate accounts of what they have all done to him in the past, and in bolstering his conviction of the degeneracy of all other persons.

In instructing its citizens to believe that “all Jews are cowards,” for instance, the Nazi government was not long embarrassed by the fact that large numbers of German Jews had been decorated for valor during the First World War and owned medals and certificates to prove it. Paranoid techniques soon produced the glib explanation, widely circulated and accepted, that any such medal in the possession of a Jew had been bought from the needy widow of an “Aryan ” hero for a shamefully small sum, and that all such certificates were forgeries.

Eight hundred, one hundred, ten years ago, it is all the same to the paranoid — Germany must be glorified or depicted as a swindled stepchild. The ephemeral Hohenstaufen Empire, for all its rickety weaknesses and quick extinction, must stand as prototype of the solid, exultantly victorious glory that is the paranoid good-time-coming for all members of the Herrenvolk. For paranoids have long memories and will dig through any number of accumulated documents to find the nugget of justification for their conduct or the occasion for false rumination.

In order to explain the inexcusable hostility of the United States toward Germany during the First World War, Heinrich Class, for many years president of the Pan-German League, writing in 1920, had to develop facts that would have been hard to recognize in the United States of 1914: “The population, except for the Germans and Irish, stood entirely on the enemy’s side; it had for years been prepared in that sense by the press, which was entirely pro-British, and policy was determined by important financiers of Jewish and Anglo-Saxon origin, who, from the outset, would not allow a victory of the Central Powers.” This fantastic picture of Wall Street as a giant cobra reaching its poisoned fangs overseas to sting Germany to death is the stuff that Nazi ideology is made of. With such retrospective falsification as precedent, no wonder the Nazis can be so glib about their claims that, in actual fact, Germans played the paramount role in both the American Revolution and the national development that preceded and followed it.

In my second article I shall therefore outline a tentative program for “treatment” of the sort psychiatry might hopefully offer. Admittedly the cure will be difficult, and the victors may have to pay part of the cost of effecting it. But it will not be so difficult as coping with the results of allowing paranoia to flourish unabated inside Germany, nor so expensive as preparing for the Third Paranoid War we shall have to fight if it does.