Is Germany Incurable? The Treatment

by RICHARD M. BRICKNER, M.D.

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THE world’s long-standing bewilderment over Germany’s behavior has been more marked since Hitler came to power. People have been posing awkward questions reflecting habits of thought prevalent since the last war: “Aren’t the Germans just being hoodwinked by the Nazis into outrageous behavior?” “Wasn’t the last war futile? If so, why isn’t it futile to fight another against the same enemy?” “Why can’t you do business with Hitler, if you handle him cleverly — or with the Germans, if Hitler is eliminated?” And so forth.

The psychiatric diagnosis of Germany made in my article in the March Atlantic — that the emotional core of German culture is and has long been growingly and menacingly paranoid in character — resolves the problems posed in these questions. Once you know that you are dealing with paranoia manifested in cultural trends and spreading by example, prestige, and conditioning through more and more people in each succeeding generation of Germans; that these trends have been developing steadily through more than a century of German history; and that the behavior of the Germany - group shows all the classical symptoms of paranoia as the doctor sees them in individual patients, you can answer questions that were formerly baffling.

The Nazis, for instance, are only a symptom of the paranoid emotional core of Germany’s culture. They cannot be dissected out from the Germany-group as specially responsible for Germany’s destructive conduct. Their actions are so extreme because German paranoid trends have been growing steadily stronger, as a salt lake grows saltier every day, year, or century. Similarly, you can’t do business with Hitler, or with a paranoid Germany lacking Hitler, because the paranoid’s idea of a deal is not a mutually advantageous exchange but a manifestation of his dominance over the other party in terms of his illusory immediate wants. And, unmistakably, the last war was not futile. Although it did not reverse the German paranoid trend — because of the Allies’ inadequate understanding of what was wrong with Germany, it could not have been expected to — it did reduce German strength for a generation and so permit non-paranoid values to be preserved elsewhere.

Light also appears on such current problems as whether or not the United Nations should bring Nazi leaders to trial and punishment after the war. The thought of Hitler, Goebbels, and Göring arraigned before an international tribunal and receiving solemn sentence, as the world’s response to their villainy, is simple and deeply satisfying. In their cases, of course, the problem is somewhat academic. None of the three would be likely to survive a collapse of the Nazi regime long enough to get safely into the custody of the United Nations. But smaller fry — the officers who ordered the annihilation of Lidice, for instance — pose essentially the same question.

From the psychiatrist’s point of view, such trials and punishments would be futile. The problem cannot intelligently be stated in such elementary terms, with punitive justice catching up with the bloodthirsty villain. Group paranoid trends are necessarily hydra-headed. To hang Heydrich’s avengers would accomplish nothing toward reducing the paranoid tendency that lay behind the Lidice crime. To cast its authors as principals in an internationally sponsored courtroom drama would, in fact, go far to make them martyrs whose memories would serve as rallying points in the next frenetic development of German paranoia. After all, the Nazis have made a tremendous and highly useful hero out of Horst Wessel, thug and panderer. In a Germany under mental reconstruction — the only kind of Germany that holds out much hope for future peace — Nazi killers would have to be handled in a way that relegated them to oblivion without melodrama.

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The problem of what to do after the war is over is simplified by the painful clarity of what would happen if the Axis should win. In short order the United States and all other defeated powers would be suffocating in the all-enveloping vapor of paranoia pumped by forced draft throughout the world from conquering Germany. From then on, non-paranoid cultures would have no more problems to decide, no more puzzling responsibilities, no more option as to what to do next. We wasted the opportunity to recognize and treat German cultural paranoia that came with victory in the First World War. This time, even a draw, with both sides temporarily exhausted, would do no good. Wrestling a paranoid to a draw merely postpones his next attack. The chips are down and we are playing for keeps.

Victory for our side, the other alternative, carries huge responsibilities and an awkwardly large number of options. Having won, we can return to the principles used in the 1919 treaties; or, in a vengeful or precautionary mood, exterminate the Germans; or make a scientific effort to check Germany’s paranoid trends. The first might be called the Versailles method; the second, the Cato and Carthage method; the third, the behavioral method.

It may sound ungenerous to put the Versailles label on present peace-planning efforts from such responsible and experienced hands as those that framed the Atlantic Charter. Such current attempts at intelligent foresight often contain important and valuable reminders that this time a calm approach to world problems in terms of raw materials, armaments, and standards of living must permit no vindictiveness in remaking the post-war world; that revenge, no matter how tempting, must be eschewed — a point on which the Versailles Treaty had its shortcomings. The document that the Germans finally signed in the Hall of Mirrors was unnecessarily useful as grounds for paranoid whining because it contained so miserable a mixture of the theoretical and the punitive.

In one sense, however, the Atlantic Charter and the Versailles Treaty are fundamentally works of the same school. Both assume that aggression develops solely from material factors and that, provided the right formula is arrived at, readjustment of boundaries, markets, and social strains can provide a solution. Proper attention to political groupings, economic lines of stress, and governmental devices is obviously necessary but not the whole answer— merely a preliminary for arriving at the answer.

The inevitable denouement of the Versailles method, as the psychiatrist sees it, is another war a generation hence, as, once again, paranoid pressures pile up within Germany — probably a still more horrible war with Western civilization’s chances of survival practically nil. Scotched again, not killed, the snake would return to the attack stronger and more venomous than ever. To paranoid-tending Germans, disarmament imposed on a defeated Germany would again appear as a particularly shameful outward and visible sign of persecution. Again the victors, lacking knowledge of what lay behind German pressure, would be exposed to paranoid whining. The next generation always forgets — if it is not a paranoid generation. Gradually paranoid complaints and opportunism would confuse the outside world into permitting Germany to rearm — German efforts to restore the country’s self-respect would sound as well in 1961 as in 1935 — and then God help us all once more.

The bare idea of deliberate massacre of all Germans is intolerable, even in talk. By token of that very fact, any wholesale extermination of our conquered enemies would amount to psychological suicide for our prevailingly nonparanoid culture. It would do such violence to our consciences, conditioned to respect for human life, that our own cultural values would never stand the strain. Paranoid SS-troopers can sleep nights after planning and carrying out mass slaughter of the defenseless — not we. Out of pure self-interest, intimately connected with the non-paranoid ethos, we must keep violence in its proper place.

Naturally, however, we shall have to carry out measures that may appear punitive to the defeated. Too tender a conscience toward the underdog is itself a sign of neurotic feelings of guilt. No psychiatrist can quarrel, for instance, with the Atlantic Charter’s insistence on completely disarming Germany. Any attempt at weaning Germany away from paranoid values necessarily implies depriving her of deadly weapons. Unless you take away a paranoid’s gun before sending him to a doctor, there will presently be no doctor to treat him.

Psychiatry would also heartily endorse the Atlantic Charter’s stipulation of economic arrangements to make a decent minimum living available for all, victors and defeated alike. It is difficult to get results from psychiatric treatment offered to a patient shivering with cold and gnawed by hunger. Let it be repeated, once and for all, that after this war the world will need all possible realism and intelligence applied to economic and social rehabilitation. If the job should stop there, however, it might just as well have never been done at all.

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Our own emotional bent eliminates the Cato and Carthage method; and the Versailles method, although offering preliminary utility, is inadequate by itself. The behavioral approach alone takes care of the crucial factor in the problem.

It will be hard for our culture to make up its mind to the therapeutic strategy that is implied. An intrinsic if unformulated part of the philosophy of democracy is the absence of any expectation of paranoid behavior. Democratic postulates vaguely assume that, other things being equal, good-will and rational actions can be counted on.

Yet it was an egregious psychiatric mistake to expect a democracy to flourish in post-1918 Germany in competition with so many longstanding paranoid elements remaining unmolested in German culture. By the millions the army officer, the Pan-German-minded professor, the iron-jawed father, went instinctively to work to undermine what little strength the Weimar Constitution ever possessed. The Nazis could and did openly twit the Republic with its ironical obligation to pay salaries and traveling expenses to the very Nazi Reichstag deputies who were sworn to overthrow the Republic as soon as possible.

The same exultant jeers would apply to us here and now. We are not yet fighting to eject the paranoid from the floor of the world meeting place. Until victory comes, we are fighting merely to keep our own place in that assembly. After victory will come the second phase — the struggle to eliminate German paranoid trends as a future world-factor.

To encourage a post-war rehabilitation of Germany while allowing her to retain her taste for paranoid behavior would be like paying the Brown Shirts salaries to disrupt the proceedings of the Reichstag. We must assume that our non-paranoid values promise more for the human race than do violent paranoid values; that a demonstrably paranoid culture appertaining to a powerful and enterprising people is necessarily a menace to the human race; and that, since paranoia is fundamentally a psychiatric problem, not an economic or a political one, only psychiatric methods will act as a pertinent protective device.

The psychiatrist’s grand strategy assumes that there will probably be a revolution within Germany after her defeat. But, aware of the striking degree to which paranoid values have permeated German culture, the psychiatrist can hardly hope that any government formed within a defeated Germany in horrible economic straits and crushed by failure would have the resources or imagination to put into effect a program of psychiatric rehabilitation aimed directly at attacking paranoia. Those resources and that imagination must come from outside — from among the victors, whose stake in the job is superlatively great.

In suggesting an indefinite post-war period without final treaty-signing, to enable the world situation to settle down before trying to formulate it, Mr. Sumner Welles has offered the time-opportunity for starting psychiatry’s work. During such an extended period, with power and responsibility concentrated in the hands of the United Nations, the victors must cast Germany in the role of ward of the world and diligently lay the groundwork for reducing her paranoid tendencies to a point where she would become a reasonably safe neighbor. The best time to start would be the day after the collapse of the Nazi regime, for then German minds and institutions, thrown into confusion by the discrediting of what had sustained them, would be most easily reoriented. At any rate, plans for the psychiatric campaign should be prepared as far in advance as those for military occupation.

Such a projected psychiatric therapy for a whole nation is, as it happens, not so new as it appears. The paranoid attack from within on other nations amounts in essence to a use of psychiatric therapy to alter the emotional cores of alien cultures. The technique is used for destructive purposes, but it is much the same for all that, and picks much the same points of attack. If Germany wins this war, much more grandiose campaigns of paranoia-stimulating institutional revolutions can be expected under Nazi auspices in defeated countries. These techniques are a weapon that we can either use for our own defense or have our enemies use against us. Even if we choose to let the whole idea alone, our enemies have no such intention.

Our greatest tactical advantage in such a post-war campaign to keep German groupparanoid trends from setting the world on fire again would lie in the very fact that, for the first time in history, the outside world would know what it is up against. If the world becomes sufficiently aware that the Germanygroup’s behavior means a mounting paranoia, the chances of keeping Germany from doing more international damage are immensely greater.

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Given the diagnosis, a guide to broad procedures lies in the current treatment for individual paranoids. The crucial factor in an individual case is the presence of a sufficient mental area remaining clear — that is, free of paranoid reactions — to act as a point of departure for treatment. If the Germany-group contains a sizable number of individuals, however unorganized and unaware of one another, whose emotional values are prevailingly nonparanoid, the outside world has a clear area at hand to work with and out from in treating the German-group case.

The indubitable existence of such a group within Germany is one reason — besides the demands of fairness and accuracy — why I have insisted that calling Germany a paranoid-tending group does not outlaw the belief that a great many Germans have little or nothing to do with the national paranoid trend. Anybody who knows anything of Germans should not need demonstration that there are millions of non-paranoid countrymen of Lessing and Goethe as well as millions of paranoid countrymen of Wagner and Vater Jahn. Thousands of voluntary exiles, taking their chances in a strange land rather than submitting to the growing German paranoid trend, prove the point currently. Many more thousands, plain people not quite so courageous or farseeing, stayed home, existing passively but with small liking among the same influences. They are inconspicuous not only because they lack the talents that would make them conspicuous but because paranoia, in both individuals and groups, has a way of dominating other trait patterns.

No amount of ingenuity or force can hold the German paranoid trend down forever, if it continues unchecked. Efforts to check that trend, to head the Germans round the other way toward non-paranoid international behavior, need this multi-individual clear area for raw material. The bulk of the clear individuals must become the vehicle of new nonparanoid culture values, and from among them must come the new non-paranoid leadership with the emotional habits, based on the new culture values, that will reform Germany’s international behavior.

The new Germany will have diplomats and politicians like any other nation. But the only way to produce them free of dangerous paranoid tendencies is to establish a Germany that has renounced its emotional taste for such things. Genuine leaders, significant and practical, cannot be imposed from outside — they must appear from within a culture as spontaneous expressions of tendencies prevalent among their constituents.

So it is the primary objective of the behavioral approach to the German problem to foster the clear Germans and then gradually draw into their group all possible marginal cases. This means that clear behavior must become emotionally attractive to more and more Germans, on both the individual and the national scale, receiving rewards in success and respect parallel to those formerly accorded paranoid behavior.

In this respect the world made a grievous mistake in the 1920’s. Confused and illthought-out though it was, the Weimar Republic did present clear aspects and might have been successful. But we allowed this clear trend to be identified in the average German’s mind with coincidental deprivation — with hunger, unemployment, inflation. Thus no positive trend away from paranoid reactions could be set up. (This fact makes fulfillment of the economic promises of the Atlantic Charter doubly necessary.)

In treating the paranoid Germany-group, we must make sure not only that clear individuals arrive at and remain in power, but also that the population in general associates tangible rewards with the new regime. The purpose is not to reward previously paranoid Germany for destructive behavior, but rather to recognize that, in treating a difficult case, all the therapeutic conditions must be as near the optimum as possible. It merely happens that one of the most important of those conditions makes it necessary for Germans in general to experience a coincidence of greater security and more harmonious living with a regime that does not conceive Germany as plotted against and held down; that does not consider the chief end of human endeavor to be the demonstration of one group’s superiority so that all others are reduced to a subhuman pulp. Only then can true leaders — in the democratic, not the Führer-Duce sense — appear; only then can the world gradually withdraw from its guardianship. The clear area will be on the upbeat and paranoid trends will be on the way to vestigial status.

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None of this program can be accomplished without serious outside interference. In order to develop, the Germany-group’s clear area requires an artificial atmosphere, as a premature baby needs an incubator. That atmosphere must consist of two interacting ingredients: (1) devices to render harmless individual sources of paranoid contagion within Germany — the negative end of the job; and (2) devices to help marginally paranoid Germans substitute nonparanoid for paranoid values — the positive, clear-trending end.

Beyond that no clinical psychiatrist should try to go. Just what programs will be advisable or necessary, how much farther and deeper into German life outside interference may have to go, will depend obviously on how the world shapes toward the end of this war, what has happened inside Germany in the meantime, and other factors unpredictable now.

So far as I know, no international group of men of good-will will ever before have organized a program remotely approaching what this objective will require. How it should be done is a job for experts in a dozen different fields —— anthropology, law, sociology, nutrition, transport, propaganda, psychology, economics, as well as psychiatry.

The psychiatrist is expert in only one field. He does, however, know several things crucially important in approaching the problem: namely, that his knowledge of how paranoia can be combated in individuals makes the omens good enough for combating it in groups; that a vivid realization of this diagnosis of paranoia is the sine qua non of any success whatsoever in dealing with post-war Germany; and that the clear area of non-paranoid Germans within the Germany-group is the strategic key to the whole.

To many the mere suggestion of such schemes will sound absurdly impractical. Patronizingly, they will consider them just what one might expect when a doctor starts daydreaming in his scientific ivory tower, aloof from the real things that happen in the world of wars and cartels and class struggles.

The answer is sharp and simple. So far, “hard-headed,” “practical,” “realistic” handling of world problems has been an appalling monument to impracticality. A deeper practicality recognizes all the factors in a world situation and does something about them — emotional factors included. As for the doctor’s insulation from the practical world, I can assure the layman that the psychiatrist’s office is no ivory tower. In it the doctor has constant, absorbing, and down-to-earth contact with the realest things that exist — the involutions of human behavior. The man in the ivory tower is actually the practical man of affairs.