Routledge Critical Studies in Discourse

E dited by M ichelle M. L a z a r, National University of Singapore

Metaphor, Nation
1. Framing Discourse on the
Environment and the Holocaust
A Critical Discourse Approach -
Richard J. Alexander The Concept of the Body Politic
2. Language and the Market Society
Critical Reflections on Discourse and
Dominance
Gerlinde Mautner

3. Metaphor, Nation and the

Holocaust
The Concept of the Body Politic
Andreas Musolff Andreas Musolff

Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group
New York London
\c 3 [p

Contents

First published 2010

by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Simultaneously published in the UK

by Routledge List o f Tables vii
2 Park Square, M ilton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X 14-4RN Acknowledgments ix

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business 1 Introduction: Deadly Metaphors That Won’t Die? Bodies and
Parasites as Concepts of Political Discourse 1

© 2010 Taylor & Francis

The right of Andreas Musolff to be identified as author of this w ork has been asserted
PA R TI
by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents .
Act 1988.
2 The Cognitive Import of Metaphor in Nazi Ideology 11
Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global.
Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by IBT Global.
3 Body, Nature and Disease as Political Categories in Mein
All rights reserved. N o part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised Kam pf 23
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereaf­
ter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. 4 The Public Presentation and Reception of Anti-Semitic Imagery
in Nazi Germany 43
Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trade­
marks, and are used only for identification and explanation w ithout intent to infringe. 5 Methodological Reflection: Body and Illness Metaphors in the
Evolution of Western Political Thought and Discourse 69
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Musolff, Andreas.
Metaphor, nation and the holocaust: the concept of the body politic / by Andreas PART II
Musolff.
p. cm. — {Routledge critical studies in discourse ; 3)
Includes bibliographical references and index. 6'J Solidarity and Hierarchy: The Body-State Metaphor in the
1. Discourse analysis—Political aspects. 2. Metaphor. 3. Analogy. 4. Holocaust, Middle Ages _ 81
Jewish {1939-1945) I. Tide.
P302.77.M874 2010
320 .0 1 '4 -d c2 2 7 Concepts of Healing the Body Politic in the Renaissance 99
2010002457 I IjW lVFRSlTY
8 From Political Anatomy to Social Pathology: Modern Scenarios
ISBN13: 978-0-415-80119-5 {hbk) of the Body Politic and its Therapy 107
ISBN13: 978-0-203-84728-2 {ebk) 560 (3i|
<SoD-Vw\(xn
vi Contents
9 German Conceptual and Discursive Traditions of the Body
Politic Metaphor 221 Tables
10 Conclusion: Metaphor in Discourse History 137

Notes 247
Bibliography 279
Index 299

3.1 Body-Nation NLappings in Mein Kampf 26

3.2 Event Structure of Body-Nation Mappings 27

3.3 Basic Scenario Structure of Body-Nation Mappings in Mein
Kampf 35
3.4 Extended Scenario Structure of Body-Nation Mappings in
Mein Kampf 40
6.1 Body-State Correspondences in Policraticus 88
6.2 Body-State Scenarios in Policraticus 88
8.1 Political Body Parts/Fluids in 109
8.2 Political Life Functions in 110
8.3 Political Illnesses/Diseases in 114
Acknowledgments

So many friends, colleagues and students have contributed to this book that
it is impossible to acknowledge them all by name. However, without the help
of some it would have been impossible to finish this book. Saskia Daalder,
my partner, put up with years of discussions about Holocaust ideology
and kept me from losing faith in the project. My colleague Felicity Rash
offered expert advice and read the final manuscript, greatly improving its
content and ordering. David Baguley, Edward Budaev, Jonathan Charteris-
Black, Carlo Caruso, Paul Chilton, David Cowling, Roslyn Frank, Rudiger
Corner, Zoltan Kovecses, Fiona MacArthur Purdon, Barbara Rosenbaum,
Josephine Tudor, Arachne and Philip van der Eijk, M artin Wengeler, Bet-
tina Ziegler and Jorg Zinken gave generously of their time, experience and
advice to help me in assembling and interpreting the material, and provided
constructive criticism and comments on draft chapters. Research leave
from Durham University, support by the Arts and Humanities Research
Board, and a Visiting Fellowship at Queen Mary University of London
were instrumental in finalising the book.
1 Introduction
Deadly Metaphors That Won’t Die?
Bodies and Parasites as Concepts of
Political Discourse

1.1 THE BODY POLITIC AND THE HOLOCAUST

The phrase body politic belongs to a field of cliched metaphors in English

that refer to political entities and issues in terms of bodily organs and func­
tions, such as head o f state, head o f government, long arm o f the law,
organ (of a party), sclerosis or tumour (of the body politic), heart o f Brit-
ain/Europe} It is used by British and American media and politicians, e.g.
in formulations such as “Europe could cease to be the cyanide in the British
body politic”; “voices in the body politic”; “disembowelling the body poli­
tic”, “campaign culture metastasize[d] throughout the entire body politic”.^
The Conservative politician and mayor of London, Boris Johnson, even
described himself tongue-in-cheek as “a mere toenail in the body politic”.^
In German public discourse, by comparison, the idea of society and/or
the nation or state as a body is perceived as highly problematic. The term
Volkskdrper (“people’s body”, or “national body”), in particular, is stigma­
tized. In 1998, for instance, the conservative German politician J. Schon-
bohm was heavily criticised for having invoked the ideal of a homogeneous
German “people’s body” as opposed to the notion of a “multi-cultural”
society in the public debate about immigration. According to one of his
critics, the notion of bodily homogeneity for the nation was likely to “kin­
dle the fire” of inter-ethnic conflict.^ Eight yeajsJater, an.aftieie4n the daily
newspaper Die Welt discussed the low birtlyfate in Germany under the title
“A hurt soul in the sick nation’s body [Volkskorper]”.^ Again, the notion of
the nation’s or the people’s body was viewed as alluding to “the German
traumata of the twentieth century”. Those who discussed demographic
decline in terms of a threat to the national body’s health were suffering, the
author asserted, from a hysteria similar to that which had motivated previ­
ous “bio-political” attempts to cure the people’s body.^ Evidently, the term
Volkskdrper still reminds parts of the German public of statements such as
the following which were made by Adolf Hitler and his propaganda chief
Joseph Goebbels in the 1920s and 1940s: - ^
2 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
[the Jew] has always been a parasite in the body o f other peoplesJ
1914 witnessed the last flicker of the national instinct for self-preserva­
tion in opposition to the progressive paralysis o f our people's body.^
. . .th e Jew represents an infectious illness . .. Germany has no inten-
- tion of giving in to this Jewish threat but intends to oppose it in time,
if necessary by the means of its most complete and radical extermin-,
eh, elimination.^
Statements such as these, which were taken from Mein Kampf and from
Goebbels’s infamous “total war” speech of 1943, were not just meant as
insults of Jewish people. They implied a genocidal policy that ended in the
Holocaust: the victims were treated as if they were agents o f disease and
parasites that threatened the German national body's health and therefore
had to be annihilated. Goebbels’s false start, Ausrott[-ung] {“extermina­
tion”) in the third example, gives away his knowledge about the ongoing
genocide but also illustrates the effort to avoid unequivocal references to
killing and mass murder. The vague notion of “getting rid” of the victims,
which is implied in the term Ausschaltung (“elimination”, “removal”), was
meant to leave room for a non-genocidal interpretation. However, the met­
aphor of an infectious illness leaves little doubt that a complete destruction
of the agent o f the illness was envisaged, or else the supposed infection
would not be eradicated. The “logic” of the illness-cure imagery based
on the body-state metaphor thus gives the lie to the dissimulating talk of
“elimination”.
How could the conceptualization of a socio-political entity as a human
body acquire such sinister connotations? Is it a specific historical phenom­
enon of German political culture in the 20th century? Or is the metaphor
inherently racist, suggesting as it does a physical/physiological concreteness
of politics, which perhaps “lends itself” to physical “solutions” of any per­
ceived problems? Should anyone who employs body-ielated metaphors in
politics be viewed as a potential advocate of genocide? These are some of
the questions that this book will engage with, with a view to determining
the function of metaphor in political communication, i.e. the basic issue
of how a metaphorical concept can impact on people’s political perception
and behaviour, even turn them into genocide perpetrators (or at least, pas­
sive bystanders).
The imagery used by the Nazis to legitimize their genocidal policies
provides us with an extreme “test-case”, so to speak, of a metaphor that
was turned into the horrendous reality of World War and Holocaust. We
may ask, however, whether we are dealing with a “metaphor” at all. Stan­
dard definitions of “metaphor” describe it as the designation of a meaning
unit by words taken from a different domain of meaning. This definition
can seemingly be applied without great difficulty to our case: a social or
Introduction 3
political entity is usually not considered to belong in the category of biolog­
ical bodies, and a group of people in it is not an illness or parasite. Hence,
the semantic transfer of bodily expressions to political and social issues
would appear to qualify for “metaphor” status. However, in regard of the
Nazi use of body-illness-parasite imagery, we have to take into account the
fact that they applied it in a horrifically “literal” sense by trying to physi­
cally destroy and eliminate Jewish people. Neil Gregor has aptly put this
problem in the form of a paradox: “it is not possible to see in Mein Kampf
. . . a set of plans or a blueprint for mass murder in any specific way. . . .
But, equally, we should not regard Hitler’s metaphors merely as metaphors:
for him, they described reality.”^’ We thus seem to be dealing with a form
of (discourse that is non-literal and at the same time “literal” (in a poignant
historical and political sense). How can this contradiction be resolved?
One way of dealing with this dilemma would be to assume that the meta­
phor of the supposed Jewish “race” as an illness or parasite on the German
nation's body was known to be just part of propagandistic jargon both by its
users (i.e. the Nazis) and its receivers (i.e. the German public and everyone
within the reach of Nazi propaganda), and really meant something else, i.e.
genocide. In this case, the metaphor could be assigned the same semantic
status as euphemisms or camouflage words, such as deportation {Deporta­
tion, Umsiedlung), special treatment (Sonderbehandlung) or final solution
{Endlosung), which the Nazis used in administrative or legal documents
when referring to their murderous practices. Such camouflage vocabulary
was not primarily intended to be persuasive; rather, it was meant to misin­
form those who were deemed outsiders or enemies, depending on the partic­
ular circumstances and the phase of policy implementation. The “insiders”
would know what was meant and needed no persuasion: the camouflage
language was just a ruse to cover their tracks (and, perhaps, to suppress the
-perpetrators’ own troubling emotions of empathy or guilt).
If the bodylparasite metaphor complex as used by the Nazis were on a
par with such terminology it would not in fact be metaphorical. On closer
inspection, however, this interpretation seems implausible. Camouflage
terms such as final solution or removal referring to genocide are deliber­
ately abstract, vague and general: they are d e sig i^ t<^ide any concrete,
vivid form of reference. But denouncing a^foup of people as a parasite
and describing one’s nation as a body that is in danger o f perishing are not
abstract or vague descriptions; on the contrary, they are striking and spec­
tacular. The statements that included such metaphors were not confined to
incidental, infrejquent forms of “background” propaganda; as we shall see
in detail later, they were carefully crafted and presented as “highlights” in
the Nazi leaders’ speeches. Anyone living under the Nazi regime or being
aware of it could not help but notice them as key elements of their ideol­
ogy and propaganda. The metaphor was recognised as a core belief held by
all the leading Nazis. That still does not mean that people mistook it for
a literal description of political issues, or else it would have been regarded
 4 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
simply as a grotesque category mistake. So, if it was neither that nor a lie,
how can we describe its meaning, both as a semantic category and as a
pragmatic, political tool to advocate genocide.^
Some of the confusion about the semantic status of the bodylparasite
“metaphor” can be avoided if we follow the insights of modern metaphor
theories that have developed a notion of metaphor as a cognitive “fram-
- ing” strategy to provide access to innovative perspectives for the concep­
tualisation and the discursive negotiation of all kinds of experience. In
the metaphorical frame, new concepts are integrated into familiar sets of
assumptions about classifications of entities, events and actions and their
evaluations. With regard to Nazi metaphors, we have to investigate the
frames that enabled their users to believe in assumptions that made the
project of murdering all Jewish people in Europe seem possible, justifiable
and necessary. It is this inferential cognitive link between assumptions
embodied in the “source” concepts of bodies, illnesses and parasites and
the political conclusions at the “target” level of genocidal ideology {and
practice) that is at the centre of the first part of this study. In the follow­
ing chapters I shall propose a cognitive analysis of the mappings of body-
illness-parasite concepts onto politics as they appear in key texts produced
by the Nazis and in documented contemporary reactions and comments,
with a view to establishing the conceptual and argumentative framework in
which the Holocaust would appear as a national healing exercise to the per­
petrators and their audience.^^ However, an analysis based on the corpus
of texts from the Nazi period itself can only show its synchronic structure
and function in its respective historical period. As we saw from our initial
examples, the same metaphor complex is still being used in public discourse
but it carries a kind of historical index of being related to the Nazi period.
We therefore also need to look at its diachronic development.
1.2 A METAPHOR WITH A PAST
To depict societies, states and/or nations as a body is a metaphoric fram­
ing that has a long and famous pedigree in the history of ideas. Histori­
cal overviews’^ locate its origins in pre-Socratic thinking and highlight a
first flourishing of such-metaphors in the writings of Plato and Aristotle
(with The Republic and Timaios, Politics and On the movement o f animals
being the respective key texts). They were followed by a series of Hellenistic
and Roman philosophers, the Stoics, Neoplatonists and mixed with Bibli­
cal traditions {especially St. Paul’s Epistles to the Romans and Corinthi­
ans), which were taken up by the “Church Fathers” and many political and
social theorists from the early Middle Ages onwards, continuing up to the
twentieth century.
Closely connected is the tradition of the so-called “fable of the belly”,
which has its beginnings in Aesopian texts dating back to the fifth century
Introduction 5
BC and was handed down by historians and philosophers as a political les­
son to avoid a rebellion.’^ The fable tells the story of a rebellion against the
belly by other “members” of the body, which is motivated by their anger
over the injustice that the seemingly idle belly/stomach takes all nourish­
ment. The rebellion ends in disaster because without the belly first receiving
and then redistributing all the food, the other members get no nourishment
either and so the whole body perishes.’* The standard political application
of the fable is a vindication of the ruler’s right to receive all the revenues
of the state, so that he in turn can allocate them (justly) to all other organs
of the body politic. One of its most famous formulations can be found in
Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, where the Roman senator Menenius uses it to
qujell a Plebeian rebellion:
Menenius: There was a time when all the body’s members/ Rebell’d
against the belly; thus accused it:/That only like a gulf it did remain/ T
the midst o’ the body, idle and unactive,/ Still cupboarding the viand,
never bearing/Like labour with the rest, . . . / The belly answered .. .
‘True is it, my incorporate friends’, quoth he,/ ‘That I receive the gen­
eral food at first,/ Which you do live upon; and fit it is;/ Because I am
the store-house and the shop/ Of the whole body: but if you do remem­
ber,/ I send it through the rivers of your blood,/ Even to the court, the
heart, to the seat o’ the brain;.. . /The senators of Rome are this good
belly,/ And you the mutinous members;’^
After having stopped the unruly crowd in their tracks by telling the fable,
Menenius singles out the leader of the rebellion (the “First Citizen” in the
play) for humiliation. He calls him the “great toe of this assembly” on
account of his “being one o’ the lowest, basest, poorest, Of this most wise
'rebellion” and still having the nerve to “[go] foremost”.^®The literal and
figurative “forwardness” of the toelFirst Citizen is thus utilized by Mene­
nius to isolate and ridicule him. Perhaps B. Johnson’s above-quoted self­
description as the “toenail of the body politic” was owed to his knowledge
of Shakespeare (and even intended to demonstrate that). Another incidence
of erudite reference to the “fable of the belly” c a n ^ f o u ^ i n ^ e autobiog­
raphy of the painter Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), who described the last
decades of the Habsburg Empire before World War I as a time of continu­
ous crisis dufing which the various nationalities “forgot the parable of the
Roman statesman that body members which are separated from the body
are not capable of life”.^’
Such implicit or explicit “inter-textual” allusions are not essential, how­
ever, for the understanding of the metaphor. Any competent adult speaker
of English and German can in principle make sense of Johnson’s and Koko­
schka’s statements or other uses of body imagery in politics without mak­
ing the connection to the tradition of the fable. After all, the knowledge
that body parts cannot normally exist if separated from the whole body.
 6 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
and that toes or toenails are less important body members than, say, the
head, belongs to our everyday “encyclopaedic” and practical knowledge of
the world. Shakespearean scholars and conceptual historians will of course
recognise the image and reconstruct the links with ancient and modern
uses to further its understanding, but this happens at a secondary level of
interpretation. It may add to the intellectual and aesthetic appreciation of
- the text in question but it is not needed for the basic understanding of the
metaphor.
Clearly, the Nazis and their audience did not have to rely on a two-
thousand-year-old philosophical tradition to motivate their wish to mur­
der all Jewish people in Europe. Like the interdependence and the relative
importance of parts of the body, the dangers of illness and the benefits of
a cure are common knowledge, and racists of 'all times have employed that
knowledge to denounce their enemies as agents o/'(political/social) disease.
This does not, however, exclude the possibility that a special, vulgarised
version of some of the theoretical and textual traditions mentioned earlier
was accessed around the turn of the last century by Hitler and other Nazi
ideologues, in a way similar to the pseudo-scientific theories on human
“races” that influenced Hitler during his formative years in Vienna and
Munich.^^ They co.uld in fact hardly have existed without the input from
an "authoritative” tradition that had already established the metaphorical
concept of the body, its organs and functions and its state of health as a
model for thinking and talking about politics. These beliefs would have
provided the semantic-ideological space in which Hitler’s political body
and parasite metaphors could resonate.
In order to substantiate this hypothesis, we have to investigate those
strands of the metaphor tradition that are most likely to have informed the
sedimented political assumptions in the early twentieth century, in par­
ticular, conceptual and textual traditions of body politic theories and dis­
cussions in German-speaking political culture. German traditions of this
metaphor complex have been less well researched than, for instance, the
English- and French-speaking histories; it has even been claimed that Ger­
man political literature lacked the equivalent of body politic imagery.^^ As
we shall see later on, this assumption is unwarranted; in fact, the tradition
of corporeal imagery in German political philosophy and discourse can be
traced back to the early sixteenth century, i.e. to the same time when the
phrase body politic itself became established in England and when similar
terminological and conceptual developments took place in other European
languages and political cultures.
These long-standing metaphor traditions not only informed the popular
attitudes and opinions of the period until 1945; they still exert an influence
on current discourse, albeit as an undercurrent that is overlaid, as it were, by
the -stigma-laden meniory of the use of illness/parasite imagery in Nazi ideol­
ogy. As we saw in the few examples from contemporary German discourse
quoted earlier, journalists and politicians still expect the German public to
Introduction 1
understand allusions to the Nazi uses, which seems to indicate that some
kind of a “discourse memory” relating to Nazi-typical metaphors still exists.
Right-wing and Neo-Nazi groups still make use of bodylparasite imagery as
if nothing had happened, so to speak,^^ but this lack of distance from Nazi
jargon has probably helped to bar them from having a significant influence
on post-war German political culture. The public judgement that a person or
political group uses terminology and imagery comparable to that employed
by the Nazis still serves as a powerful stigmatisation.^^ For German politi­
cians, to invoke body-parasite imagery when dealing with socio-political and
ethnic conflicts and to feign ignorance of the Nazi precedent is disingenu­
ous and/or potentially self-defeating as long as they want to remain part of
the mainstream public political discourse.^^ So, why do body-illness-parasite
metaphors continue to be employed? By looking at the long-term history of
body-based political thought and discourse we hope to find answers to this
question; i.e. we not only try to understand the reasons for its historical “suc­
cess” in persuading a majority the German public to participate in or at least
tolerate the Holocaust but also the role that body-based metaphors generally
play in current racist discourse and thought.
Given the vastness of the material, the selection of textual and concep­
tual traditions presented here can only claim to be a sample of the huge field
of research (a cautious first estimate based on conceptual history research
indicates the existence of at least 250 primary key texts ranging from antiq­
uity to present-day texts in several European languages). The following
chapters can thus not claim to be representative but only aim at providing
insights into major continuities and discontinuities of the various strands
of this metaphor leading up to {and beyond) its instrumentalisation by the
Nazis. Some of these traditions were, as we shall see, explicitly connected
to Nazi ideology, others seem to have only implicit and fragmentary links,
and further strands even point to the ideological opposite of racism-, i.e. an
enlightened, tolerant vision of society and politics.
The chapters are roughly ordered as follows. In the chapter introduc­
ing Part I we establish the methodological implications of the cognitively
oriented approach to metaphor analysis through its comparison with tradi­
tional analyses of Nazi imagery as a “mere” rhetorical trick that was inci­
dental to Hitler’s ideology and actual policy. By c o h tra s ^ u r analysis tries
to demonstrate that his body-illness-parasite metaphors provided not just
a propaganda ornament but were at the core of his racist ideology. Chapter
3 studies this conceptual core in detail by way of a close reading of Hitler’s
statements on race in Mein Kampf; Chapter 4 investigates how the Nazi
ideologues and propagandists announced and presented the genocide as a
therapy for the German national body while they were in power. Chapter
5 provides a methodological reflection of the results of our analyses and
relates them to the second part, which investigates the body-state meta­
phor’s roots in Western cultural history. Chapters 6-9 proceed in a loosely
chronological order from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance to the
8 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
twentieth century and provide cross-references to conceptual strands taken
up by the Nazis. The last chapter discusses the implications of this history
for the assessment of the -body-based political metaphors in creating and
shaping racist attitudes.
2 The Cognitive Import of
Metaphor in Nazi Ideology’

This chapter approaches the cognitive dimension of Nazi anti-Semitic

imagery by reviewing historical and linguistic research on Nazi discourse.
Much of post-war research treated the Nazis’ metaphors and other facets
of their political discourse either as “demagogic”, “manipulative” abuses
of language or as “literally” true expressions of racist ideology. Both these
approaches highlight important aspects but, apart from contradicting each
other, neither of them explains the extraordinary public appeal of the Nazi
anti-Semitic imagery, its seeming plausibility and conclusiveness, which
made the implementation of its genocidal implications in the Holocaust
possible. This aspect has been brought to the fore in recent cognitive studies
which have proposed various avenues of investigating the “mapping” and/
or “blending” mechanisms involved in constructing the Nazi image of “the
Jew” as a parasite; they provide a platform for the systematic analysis of
Hitler’s body-based imagery as a cognitive framework for genocide legiti­
mization in the subsequent chapters.

2.1 HITLER’S METAPHORS AS OBJECTS OF

HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL STUDY

Hitler and the Nazis’ use of imagery has been an object of comment and
analysis since the 1930s.^ One highlight of the early crr^al.anaiyses was
Kenneth Burke’s 1939 essay “The Rhetoric "of Hitler’s ‘Battle’”, which
focused on Hitler’s technique of “projecting” a religious category, i.e. the
devil, onto a “visible, point-to-able form of people with a certain kind of
‘blood’”.^ According to Burke, this transfer of religious categories onto the
socio-political level enabled Hitler to present his genocidal plans against
“the Jew” as a promise of purification.^ In the following chapter we shall
argue that the “religious” projection aspect is only a secondary part of
the system of metaphors that Hitler operated and, thus relativise Burke’s
conclusions to some extent. It is, however, important to recognize that, in
highlighting the “projection” strategy, Burke provided an early model for
an integrated analysis of content and style features of the “Rhetoric” of
 12 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
Mein Kampfth&t pointed to a deeper understanding of the Nazis’ cognitive
framing strategies.
Soon after the war, two studies of Nazi discourse appeared in the occu­
pied zones of Germany: one was entitled “The Language of the Third
Reich” {LTI, short for Latin Lingua Tertii Imperii) by the Holocaust sur­
vivor and Romance philologist Victor Klemperer;^ the other was a series
' of articles by the political scientists and journalists Gerhard Storz, Dolf
Sternberger and Walter E. Siiskind, which was later re-edited as the “Dic­
tionary of Inhumanity” {Worterbuch des Unmenschen).^ The main theo­
retical paradigm of these and most of the following interpretations was the
conception of metaphor as a device of manipulative propaganda. In LTI,
Klemperer cites Hitler’s bio-imagery in detail, including that of “the Jew”
as a maggot in the rotting corpse or as pestilence and he identifies as its
sources Hitler’s early political idols, the Austrian politicians Karl Lueger
(1844-1910) and Georg von Schonerer (1842-1921).^ Their and his “sty­
listic device” [Stilform) of combining utmost “derision” and panic “ter­
ror” was, in Klemperer’s assessment, proof of their “primitive” xenophobic
instincts; and its success in Nazi Germany depended on the affinity of these
instincts with those of the “dumbest masses” in Germany.® As these masses
were assumed to form the majority of the populace, no further explanation
of Hitler’s propagandistic success as such was needed; what remained to do
was to enlighten and educate the misguided populace, so that xenophobic
rhetoric and imagery would never again have a chance of success.^
Motivated by a broadly similar aim, Storz, Sternberger and Siiskind
analyse key words that indicate the inhuman spirit of Nazism and its legacy:
the jargon of political management and administration that treats people
as objects rather than as agents. Metaphors play no prominent role in the
dictionary-style word-explanations, but the authors give an in-depth analy­
sis of the cynical assumptions underlying the terminology of “dealing with”
humans such as betreuen, behandeln, sonderbehandeln (“care for”, “treat”,
“give special treatment”), which referred to acts of persecution and murder.’®
The underlying semantic transfer from the domain of dealing with inanimate
and animate objects to that of engaging with humans can be viewed as a
“metaphorical” cognitive operation, but this aspect is not discussed in detail
by the authors; they focus instead on its manipulative function and criticise
its continued use after 1945, for instance, in administrative, advertising and
media language. ” Further studies of Nazi discourse and vocabulary from the
following decades, which included racist metaphors, have further elucidated
their historical origins and specific applications in detail, but did not tran­
scend significantly the “imagery-as-propaganda rhetoric” paradigm.’^
It was therefore left mainly to historians to highlight the fact that, once in
power, the Nazis tailored their “real” actions to Hitler’s illness/parasite met­
aphors by “literally” murdering millions of Jewish people and other groups
they deemed to be “not worthy to be alive”. They treated their victims as
if they were indeed non-human “parasite” organisms, even using similar
The Cognitive Import o f Metaphor in Nazi Ideology 13
technical devices of vermin extinction, such as poison gas. In his seminal
study of “Hitler’s world-view”, Eberhard Jackel concluded that Hitler, in his
plans to eliminate the Jews, the "incurably ill” and all those he held respon­
sible for Germany’s defeat in WWI as laid out in Mein Kampf “indubitably
meant what he said quite literally”.’^Similarly, Hermann Greive, in his over­
view of the history of modern anti-Semitism, speaks of “bloody seriousness”
{der blutige Ernst), which “cannot be argued away”.’*’
Such “literalness” can, however, be understood either as seriousness of
hateful intent or, in a more tenuous sense, as a weird “category mistake” that
literally confused the domains of humans and of (non-human) animals,’^
due to the fanatical ideology held by the Nazis. Such an extreme stance is
psychologically improbable and, as the following chapters will show, is far
too simplistic to account for the conceptual range and textual/argumentative
elaboration of Hitler’s metaphor system. However, in principle it is conceiv­
able, and it seems that Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, in his bestselling book Hit­
ler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, comes
close to taking such a “category mistake” view when he labels the “organic
metaphors of decomposition” by which the Nazis referred to Jews a “set of
cognitions”,’'^albeit ones that were “absolutely fantastical, the.sort of beliefs
that ordinarily only madmen have of others”.”' He also maintains that the
product of this belief, i.e. “eliminationist” racial anti-Semitism, was shared
by the vast majority of “ordinary Germans” of the day as an uncontested
“cultural model”, which only had to be “channelled in a genocidal direction
and activated” by the Nazis to be implemented in Holocaust.’®Goldhagen’s
methodology and his conclusions have been criticized by historians;’^ for our
purposes its most significant aspect is its assumption of a cognitive frame­
work of “eliminatory anti-Semitism” that governed the thoughts and actions
of tens of millions of people. This constitutes the maximum position, as it
were, of a stance that takes Hitler’s racist metaphor system literally and in
addition assumes its cognitive domination over the whole of the German
nation up until 1945. By taking Nazi pronouncements at face value, Goldha­
gen short-circuits the problem of determining the eliminationist “set of cogni­
tions” that was expressed in Nazi imagery. He presupposes a “wild, ‘magical
thinkir^’” on the part of the Nazi leadership and the Gerniau people and an
“incapacity for ‘reality testing’” that “generally distinguishes them from the
perpetrators of other mass slaughters”.^®
This presupposition is, however, by no means self-evident. After all,
at least up until 1933, the German public did have access to competing
media, political statements and ideological frameworks. “Eliminationist
anti-Semitism” was one among many stances on racial and social issues,
doubtless prominent among the Nazi movement, but not among the gen­
eral public. Even if we assume, for argument’s sake, that the Nazi view of
the necessity to eliminate the Jewish “parasite” became consensus during
the Third Reich, this had to be achieved by a campaign of persuasion—
which brings us back to the manipulation/propaganda hypothesis. That
14 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
such a sustained propaganda campaign did in fact take place is not in any
way contentious;^’ what is in question is the issue of its cognitive impact
or “success”.
In order to investigate (rather than presume) a genocidal “set of cogni­
tions” on the basis of Hitler’s imagery, we have to explain what we mean by
characterising it as "cognition” in the first place. This problem has gener­
ated a substantial body of research over the past decades, which has spe­
cifically focused on metaphors as cognitive phenomena. From the cognitive
viewpoint, metaphors and other so-called “rhetorical” figures of speech
such as metonymy, simile, etc., are more than stylistic “ornaments” that
add some extra associative or emotional value to the “core meaning” of
a proposition. Instead, they are seen as fundamental cognitive processes,
i.e. as “mappings”^^ or “blendings”^^ of conceptual inputs from varying
domains, which provide new perspectives for categorizing and reasoning
about our experiences.
As regards the critical analysis of political language use, this claim by
cognitivists to go beyond “rhetorical” analysis is of particular significance.
If metaphors structure our worldviews, they are clearly of fundamental
importance in political ideology and their critical analysis can provide
“particular insight into why the rhetoric of political leaders is successful”.^*'
Hitler’s imagery in Mein Kam pf has therefore been made the object of a
number of studies that claim to provide a specifically cognitive analysis,
which goes beyond the earlier studies discussed earlier.
2.2 HITLER’S ANTI-SEMITIC ILLNESS/PAJRASITE IMAGERY AS
A “COGNITIVE MODEL” OF DISCRIMINATORY IDEOLOGY
Recent cognitively oriented publications often focus on Hitler’s anti-Semitic
imagery as a kind of negative yardstick of racist or discriminatory ideology.
Hawkins (2001), for instance, envisages a “cognitive sociolinguistics” that
“can help us understand how ca.tegorization is manipulated to establish
social dynamics which privilege certain groupings of experience and dis­
miss other such groupings”.^^ He views “iconographic reference”'as such a
technique of manipulative categorization, i.e. the use of “simplistic images
of our experiences” that are associated with “familiar values”, with the aim
of establishing “a powerful conceptual link between the referent and a par­
ticular value judgment”.^^ Among the examples he discusses is a translated
text passage from Mein Kampf, quoted after Bosmajian’s The Language o f
Oppression (1983):
This contamination of our people is carried on systematically by the
Jew today. Systematically these black parasites of the nation defile o^r
inexperienced young blonde girls and thereby destroy something that
can no longer be replaced in this world.
The Cognitive Import of Metaphor in Nazi Ideology 15
In his analysis, Hawkins focuses on Hitler’s characterisation of the Jews
as “black parasites” along three “iconographic frames of reference”—the
light/colour spectrum, the Great Chain o f Being, and the Human Body. As
regards the first dimension, he highlights the perceptual-physiological and
cultural values that are associated with the colour contrast black-white:
whiteness is causally linked to the experience of sunlight and with life (as
its effect) and hence with positive emotions; its opposite, i.e. blackness, is
associated with death and negative emotions and experiences (as reflected
in many idioms such as black sheep, blackmail, etc.).^* Goatly (2007) has
pointed out a further link in regard to the conceptual metaphor goodness is
purity: a white surface is considered to be spoilt if there are black marks on
it.j^ Any mixing of “pure” substances, including human “races”, can thus
be conceptualized as an act of pollution and defilement.^''
This metaphorical white-black opposition is routinely projected onto
stereotyped skin colours of humans by racists. However, this does not
explain the blackness of Jewish people in Hitler’s anti-Semitic metaphor
system. Hitler, as a racist of his time, also held white supremacist views,
but there is no indication in Mein Kampf t)i3X Jews are portrayed as being
on the same racial level as African people. The latter, labelled “Negroes”
(German: Neger), were deemed to be inferior and only capable, as “cul­
ture-carriers” {Kulturtrdger), of assisting higher races (first and foremost
Aryans) in their “culture-building” {kulturschaffend) work.^’ The many
disparaging remarks in Mein Kampf about “Negroes” clearly show that
they occupy the bottom rank of Hitler’s hierarchy of races.H ow ever, they
are not on the same level with the “Jews”. The “Negroes” appear as hapless
beings, slavishly obeying whichever master is in charge.
The “Jews”, by contrast, are depicted not just as an inferior race but as
the Aryans’ irredeemable opposite, the “destroyer of culture” {Kulturzer-
storer) in world h isto ry .T h ey are even blamed for cunningly “bringing
the Negro to the Rhine” (during the allied occupation of the Rhineland),
in order to precipitate the racial downfall of the Germans.^*’ Unlike the
supposedly “naive”, passive Negro races, the Jewish “race” was regarded
by Hitler as an active force of evil. No constructive relationship was con­
ceivable between Aryans and Jews, not even ^atof^ajlculm rerbuilding”
master race towards slaves. Furthermore, Jn contradiction to the colour
frame, non-Jewish people who were seen as enemies of the Nazi state could
be denounced as “white Jews”, e.g. academics who had not distanced them­
selves sufficiently from “Jewish” emigrant scientists such as Albert Einstein,
as happened in an article published under the title “White Jews in Science”
{Weifle Juden in der Wissenschaft) in the SS journal “The Black Corps”
{Das schwarze Korps).^^ As the very title of this journal (and the uniform of
the SS) suggests, blackness was in certain contexts an attractive symbol for
the Nazis themselves. These special aspects of what one might call “Nazi
aesthetics” do not invalidate Hawkins’s cognitive analysis of the standard
associations of colour-based “iconographic references” that inform racist
 16 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
ideologies, but they do show that in the specific case of National Socialist
im apry, citing a few “fitting” text passages is not sufficient evidence to
motivate generalising conclusions that they have the same conceptual basis
as other forms of racism. What is needed instead is a comprehensive survey
of the metaphor system operated by Hitler and other leading Nazis, to pro­
vide a basis on which their public reception can be assessed.
Besides the colour frame, the Aryan-Jew contrast is integrated, accord­
ing to Hawkins, into two further iconographic frames: the Great Chain
o f Being and the human body. In referring to the Great Chain o f Being,
Hawkins builds on Lakoff and Turner’s (1989) analysis of that concept
complex as a cultural model that concerns kinds of beings and their prop­
erties and places them on a vertical scale”.^^ This cultural model, which
has its roots in ancient philosophy, is still “indispensable to our under­
standing of ourselves, our world, and our language” to d a y .I n its “clas­
sic versions, the Chain o f Being connected the various levels of creation,
ranging from heavenly “bodies” (stars etc.) to socio-political “bodies” (the
Christian Church, worldly kingdoms and social estates) to the sub-human
sphere of animals, plants and even inorganic matter. The different levels
were graded in value but also continuous with each other, and each was
indispensable for the balance and plenitude of the cosmos.^® The Chain
o j Being’s "continuity-within-discontinuity” allowed for correspondences
“between macrocosm, body politic, and microcosm”,w h i c h in turn made
it possible to explain events on one level (e.g. upheavals in society and poli­
tics) in terms of another level (e.g. extraordinary movements of the stars
or animal behaviour). Hawkins points out that in the Nazi version of the
Chain o f Being as a hierarchy of human races, “Aryan Germans assiime the
lofty status of superhumans”, whereas “the Jews are reduced iconographi-
cally to subhuman beings, ‘parasites’”, which makes them "at best . . . a
lower animal”, "at w o rst. . . a plant of some kind”.'^'' This corresponds to
the colour hierarchy with “pure” whiteness at the top and blackness at the
bottom.”*^
The third aspect of “body iconography” adds a further “measure of the
negativity” to the lowly status of parasites in the Chain, because in popular
understanding parasites “maintain life within their own bodies by sucking
life-sustaining nutrients out of some other body”.''^ Hawkins thus identifies
the parasite-host body relationship as a further crucial source concept that
motivated the Holocaust, for, from the Nazi point of view, the German host
nation was perfectly entitled to defend itself against the dangerous "Jew­
ish” parasite. This extreme form of stigmatization can be found, according
to Hawkins, not just in Nazi ideology but also in present-day media, and
It IS with regard to such topical cases that “cognitive sociolinguistics” can
enlighten the public about the dangers of racist iconographies."*^
In a similar vein, Charteris-Black (2005) regards “European fascist dis­
course of the twentieth century” and, specifically, the Nazi conceptualiza­
tion of “Jews” as parasitic animals as a prototype for more recent uses, e.g.
The Cognitive Import of Metaphor in Nazi Ideology 17
US politicians’ rhetoric in the “war against terror” that portrayed terror­
ists as ‘“parasites’ in need of total elimination”."*"*Again, the Nazi example
serves as a warning from history concerning the cognitive impact of racist
imagery, with an implicit appeal to avoid its genocidal consequences that
were so starkly realized in the Holocaust. It is, of course, tempting to use
the Nazis’ racist metaphor system, on account of its “literal” genocidal
application as an “example” of the worst possible outcome of denigrating,
discriminating rhetoric and to highlight their alignment of various frames
of hierarchical social ordering as evidence of their extraordinarily vicious
racism. However, as indicated already in the discussion of blackness as a
racist category of denigration, the cognitive motivation of standard racist
associations is not sufficient to identify the specific character of Nazi imag­
ery. Likewise, the claims that parasite status in the modern version of the
Great Chain o f Being defines “the Jew” in Nazi imagery is a proposition
that has to be critically analysed rather than presumed.
2.3 HITLER’S MEINKAMPF AS A TWISTED
VERSION OF THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING}
By providing a searchable database and a systematic overview over the
whole range of metaphors in Hitler’s Mein Kam pf Felicity Rash (2005a, b,
2006) has given a new empirical grounding to political metaphor research
in general and the study of Hitler’s imagery in particular. By relating Hit­
ler’s metaphors to idioms and further lexicographic and phraseological evi­
dence, and by contrasting the German original text with its main English
translations, as well as by indicating Hitler’s borrowings from Houston
Stuart Chamberlain and Richard Wagner’s writings. Rash provides an
excellent basis for all further in-depth discourse analysis of Hitler’s work.
First of all, she has convincingly shown that almost none of the metaphors
that Hitler employed were particularly original; on the contrary, they either
consisted of well-worn phrases and idioms that were used in general parlance
or were prefigured in anti-Semitic and xenophobic hate speech well before
Hitler’s time."*^ Relying on the Lakoff/Johnson model of cognitive metaphor
analysis. Rash groups the metaphor material oiMein main
groups: “Container Metaphors”, “Metaphoj-s of Location and Movement”,
and the “Great Chain of Being”. Of these, it is the last group that she inves­
tigates in most detail and observes that “^as we descend through the hierar­
chy of THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING we notice among the images used a higher
proportion of metaphors referring to Jews.”^®Rash states that “Hitler’s most
repulsive metaphors are his most imaginative . . . and distinctive”, i.e. of Jews
as “slime, maggots, bacteria”, which- epitomizes Hitler’s depraved view of
the world."*^ The main “creative” aspect in Hitler’s use of Chain o f Being
imagery to denigrate Jews thus lies in its intensity, underscored by repetition,
hyperbole and combination with “personification”."** So, one might ask, is
18 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
there anything at all that significantly distinguishes Hitler’s use of the Chain
o f Being metaphor complex from other racist applications?
Rash points to a specific aspect of Hitler’s Chain o f Being imagery that
is overlooked if one only wants to find evidence of its general racist applica­
tions. His metaphors are based on an absolute contrast rather than a graded
difference between Germans and Jews: “The original great chain was
characterized by the principle of ‘continuity’ . .. each level in the chain is
seamlessly connected with the next level. .. Hitler, on the other hand, pro­
claimed a discontinuity between Aryan and Jew: there was a gulf between
the two, one race being good and the otheT evil.”'*^ This finding confirms a
conclusion from our earlier discussion of the cognitive import of the black
status of Jews: Hitler may have agreed with some kind of “continuity” of
human races (starting at the top with the Aryan race, of which the German
nation was supposed to have the largest stock, down to “primitive races”
such as “Negroes”), but this hierarchy, which was racist enough in a gen­
eral sense, did not include the Jewish “race”. Jews were utterly disqualified
from being part of the Great Chain: they were outside/off any conceivable
continuum that would connect them with the Aryans races.
Thus, even if Hitler’s metaphorical characterisations of “the Jew” as
lowly creatures resembled traditional Chain o f Being hierarchy, they were
explicitly re-interpreted in Mein K am pf in such a way that they contra­
dicted the “continuity” principle of the Chain o f Being (and, implicitly,
the very notion of a Chain, as it is continuous by definition). In fact.
Hitler’s metaphors had little to do with the classic tradition of the Great
Chain o f Being idea as analysed by Arthur O. Lovejoy (1936). Lovejoy
had told the history of this idea as if it was the “life story” spanning
almost two millennia, from its Platonist and Aristotelian beginnings,
through the reformulations in Neoplatonist, medieval and Renaissance
philosophy up to the late eighteenth century and to early evolution theory.
At the core of the tradition lay, according to Lovejoy, a “conception of the
universe” that was “composed of an immense . .. number of links rang­
ing in hierarchical order from the meagerest kind of existents . . . through
‘every possible’ grade up to the e_ns perfectissimum''J^Loveioy identified
three basic principles that formed the conceptual core of this philosophi­
cal tradition; besides “continuity”- and “gradation”, it included also the
principle of “plenitude”, i.e. the concept that all parts of the universe—
from the “lowest” to the “highest”—were necessary, in a logical as well
as ontological sense, to its being well-ordered and complete.^’ Compared
with this vision. Hitler’s hate-filled view of “the Jew” as the absolute
“Other” of the Aryans that had to be destroyed if they were to survive
not only violated the notion of continuity, as pointed out by Rash, but
also the principle of plenitude: for him, the universe was “complete” in a
positive sense only without “the Jew”.
In view of the violation of two out of three principles of the traditional
Chain o f Being notion, the “iconographic references” in Mein Kampf thax
The Cognitive Import o f Metaphor in Nazi Ideology 19
appear at first sight to tie in with it cannot be interpreted as evidence of
any “straightforward” application of that notion. A “discontinuous chain”
of races in a “complete” universe, which must nevertheless be rid of one
of these races—these implications of Hitler’s metaphor use are conceptu­
ally neither coherent in terms of their source concepts nor consistent with
any systematic version of the Chain o f Being notion.^^ This negative result
does not invalidate the identification of the Chain o f Being as a frame of
reference in which to place Hitler’s anti-Semitism, but it serves as a warn­
ing against premature inferences from isolated text passages. Hitler picked
and chose the source notions of animal and body hierarchies that suited
him to depict the target concepts of various human races. Within this ad
hoc framework, images of Jews as black parasites, agents o f illness or of
decomposition from the bottom ranks of the Chain o f Being metaphor
stock could be employed to arouse revulsion and hatred, but that did not
commit him to assume continuity or plenitude of the universe as he wanted
to shape it in his mind. This is, after all, what the conceptual structure of
metaphor as a “perspective” makes possible: it is not a static notion or set
of notions that is blindly “copied” from one domain to another but a flex­
ible cognitive “frame of reference” in which conceptual variation, innova­
tion and reinterpretation are possible.
2.4 NAZI METAPHORS AS “VIRUSES OF THE MIND”
Variation phenomena in metaphorical and other cognitive structures have
been given special prominence in the Conceptual “Blending Theory”, a
more recent version of cognitive metaphor theory that has been developed
by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner.^^ Rather than assuming binary
relationships of “source”-”target” mappings between perceptual and cpn-
ceptual domains, they operate a more flexible theory of “mental spaces”
that serve as “input” into the “conceptual integration” mechanisms that
characterize the workings of the human mind. The input spaces can be
more than two and, crucially, they are seen as giving rise not only to a
“generic” network that encompasses the shared concepttlal'sfructure of the
input spaces but also to a “blended space”^"that contains new, “emergent”
structure when different or even contradictory input frames are merged:
“[the input spaces and their] organizing frames make central contribu­
tions to the blend, and their sharp differences offer the possibilities of rich
clashes” which present “challenges to the imagination: indeed, the resulting
blends can be highly creative”.^**
Paul Chilton (2005) makes use of this concept of conceptual blending in
his analysis of the “race” chapter in Mein Kampf (Chapter 11 of volume
1). One key example of the emergence of an ideological blending in Hitler’s
text is the cumulative effect of equivocations between biological and social
categorizations of “the Jew”, as in the following passage:
20 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
[The Jew] was never a nomad, but only and always a parasite in the
body of other peoples. That he sometimes left his previous living space
has nothing to do with his own purpose, but results from the fact that
from time to time he was thrown out by the host nations he had mis­
used. His spreading is a typical phenomenon for all parasites; he always
seeks a new feeding ground {Ndhrboden) for his race.^^
Chilton points out that “the first occurrence of he is associated not just with
‘the Jew’, but with a blended concept: Jew-parasite, or some such”, and “the
successive clauses predicate actions and properties that are metaphorically
isomorphic with the actions and properties of biological parasites”.^^ The
Jew-parasite blend is thus built up and reinforced grammatically within the
text so that its chances of becoming a memorable notion are maximised.
Once the blend is established, it can be filled in further within the “disease
and medicine frames” and their specific “aetiologies”: it then “follows”
in the blend that the “host people” are in danger of dying out if they are
overrun by a parasite, and “that the fatal disease caused in the host can be
cured by removing it or destroying the parasite”.^^ Due to the continuous
build-up of the socio-biological blending, the “parasite actually is the Jew
in the blend, not ‘mere metaphor’ This analysis goes some way towards
resolving the “literally-understood” metaphor paradox mentioned in the
preceding chapter. From the cognitive perspective, the blended concept
Jew-parasite has an underlying metaphoric structure but at the same time
it is condensed sufficiently to be memorable as a seemingly substantive,
“real” concept.
Chilton builds on this analysis to explain why Hitler was so horren­
dously successful in propagating his blended bio-social/political worldview.
He links the results of his close reading of the key passages from Mein
Kampf with the “naturalist” approach to cultural history developed by
Richard Dawkins, Susan Blackmore, Dan Sperber and others.^^ In his 1976
bestseller The Selfish Gene, Dawkins had proposed a view of cultural con­
structs as “replicators” in analogy to genetic replication and had coined the
neologism “meme” for this cultural gene equivalent.^° Dawkins’s analogy is
based on a complex metaphor: not only is the meme conceived of as a hypo­
thetical cultural counterpart of the gene, but the latter is itself viewed meta­
phorically as a “selfish” agent. In view of the tenuousness of the analogy,
Dan Sperber (1996, 2000) has demanded a reorientation of the “memetic”
approach, chiefly on the grounds that cultural constructs, including con­
ceptual representations, depend for their propagation on inter-personal
communication. Unlike biological evolution, the evolution of concepts' is
not determined just by the need to survive and propagate, but depends on
the continuous transformation from “mental” to “public representations”
and vice versa, with a tendency towards the production of “contents that
require lesser mental effort and provide greater cognitive effects”. T h e
rate of innovation in concept replication is therefore much higher than in
The Cognitive Import o f Metaphor in Nazi Ideology 21
the standard model of genetic mutation, and this likens concept evolution,
in Sperber’s view, to that of viruses rather than to that of genes.D aw kins
and others have also adapted the virus analogy: viruses, as parasitic rep­
licators at the genetic level, can be applied to the domains of technology
and psychology, e.g. in the metaphors of “computer viruses” or of “mind
viruses” that infect whole human groups and populations driving them to
destructive behaviour.^^The example of Nazi ideology as such a mind virus
is again mentioned by Dawkins, alongside other instances of racism and
religious fanaticism.^'*
But like the gene-meme analogy, the virus metaphor has to be used with
care, as its meaning oscillates between scientific and colloquial registers
and it suggests easy generalisations that gloss over important empirical dif­
ferences. In common language, the term virus has negative connotations on
account of its connection with illness (and is therefore a favourite source
concept for racist and xenophobic metaphors). In biological terms, how­
ever, viruses are seen as types of non-cellular life forms that are “parasitic”
in the sense that they depend for their reproduction on other organisms.
Inasmuch as ideologies depend on human brains to entertain and (re-)pro-
duce them, they can be considered to be “parasitic” in this latter sense, but
so are all other types of concepts, regardless of whether they are useful
or harmful.- Apart from the irony that Nazi racism may itself be labelled
a viruSf the analogy appears to be of limited explanatory value for the
analysis of their specific ideology and its propagandists success.
It seems, for instance, doubtful whether the strong textual coherence in
Mein Kampf, which Chilton has so convincingly demonstrated in his close
reading of Chapter 11, is conclusive evidence of its conceptual “meme”-or
“virus”-status. In order to connect Hitler’s representation of the Jew/
parasite concept with the representations of the readers, Chilton assumes
that the notion of “parasites” (and connected aetiological and therapeu­
tic aspects) was readily available for the recipients: “conceptual constructs
become meme-like and ‘infect’ the mind (under the right social condi­
tions) when they have complex blending potential that recruits fundamen­
tal knowledge domains along with the core mechanisms of metaphor.”^^
The qualifying specification of the “right socialj:5nditions!lioirL.triggering
an actual “mind-infection” reintroduces the'laistorical dimension that the
memetic/naturalist approach promised to bypass. If “mental” meme/virus
status is dependent on social conditions, its cognitive framing and textual
pf-esentation by the speaker are at best pre-conditions for its success, but
not sufficient conditions in themselves.
Moreover, it is also debatable whether medical “parasitological” knowl­
edge, even in popularized form, constituted “fundamental knowledge” for
Hitler’s audience (or for modern audiences, for that matter). Viruses, para­
sites, bacilli, etc. are hardly ever directly “experienced”; any knowledge
about them as causes of illnesses has been acquired as part of socialization
processes that involve the reception of (popularized) scientific terminology
22 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
and its historical interpretations. In the case of Mein Kampf we know
that the extensive terminology from the fields of medicine and hygiene that
Hitler used was concocted from popular sources dating back to his Vienna
years/^ which were “updated” by specialized literature sent to him dur­
ing the writing ,and editing of the book by sympathizers {such as the pub­
lisher of medical and scientific books and supporter of eugenics, Julius F.
Lehmann).®^ The aetiology of parasites that Hitler transferred on to the
"target domain of “racial hygiene” was not “experientially” available to him
or to his readers; instead, it had been construed and explicated in a complex
textual tradition.
We can thus discern the limits of extrapolating from (supposedly, gen­
eral) domain knowledge to text-specific cognitive intentions and effects.
Doubtless, by the time that Hitler composed Mein Kampf, a host of “elimi-
nationist” implications of the body-nation and parasite-Jew mappings had
already been propagated by the pseudo-scientific “experts” of race hygiene
and eugenics whose ascent in German academia and popular culture in the
latter half of the nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth century had
been phenomenal, e.g. the “authoritative” books by Gunther (1922) and
by Baur, Fischer and Lenz (1923).^^ Hitler was clearly influenced by popu­
larized versions of their speculations, though the multitude and obscurity,
of many of his sources make it difficult to reconstruct a precise lineage of
influences.However, even if these details were fully known, they would
still only represent the material “input” into Hitler’s ideology: the system
in which they appear in Mein Kampf CAnnox be derived or predicted from
them but has to be the object of an empirical text-based analysis that recon­
structs the cognitive framework of the body-nation metaphor as used by
Hitler.
As we have seen, the evidence of a few quotations is not sufficient for a
systematic cognitive analysis because it does not show the conceptual and
argumentative patterns that the metaphor is part of. We therefore need a
substantially broader text basis. From a philological point of view, it would
be ideal to provide a complete account of all figuratively phrased anti-Semitic
statements made by Hitler between 1919 and 1945 on the basis of the exist­
ing critical text collections,^^ Rash’s database, which is comprehensive for
Mein Kampf, and philologically orientated special dictionaries. How­
ever, as the aim here is analysis rather than documentation, we shall concen­
trate on exploring the conceptual range of the bio-political metaphor system
in Nazi key texts and, where available, evidence of their reception, starting
with Mein Kampf
3 Body, Nature and Disease as Political
Categories in Mein Kampf
As'the most substantial public enunciation of Hitler’s “worldview” (Jackel
1981), Mein Kampf prowided the benchmark, so to speak, for uses of the
body-nation metaphor in Nazi propaganda up until 1945.^ Its thus provides
us with a platform for investigating the cognitive import of his metaphor
system by studying the overall conceptual range of his source images and
their target applications, the argumentative patterns in which they appear,
and the explicit and implicit conclusions drawn by Hitler. This study does
not in itself present new material or insights into the core ideological con­
tent of Mein Kampf, its main aim is to reconstruct the “ontology” underly­
ing his worldview in the form that Hitler was happy to admit to in public.
To even assume the existence of an “ontological” structure (and thus, a
certain rationality) may seem perverse and bordering on conveying some
intellectual or even political legitimacy on Nazi anti-Semitism. However, to
deny any rationality or ontological order to the Nazi worldview for the sake
of outraged “attitudinizing” (K. Burke) would be tantamount to giving up
analysing it at all. As Christopher Browning remarked in his seminal study
of the “ordinary men” who actually carried out much of the Holocaust
killing: “Explaining is not excusing, understanding is not forgiving. Not
trying to understand the perpetrators in human terms would make impos­
sible . . . any history of Holocaust perpetrators that sought to go beyond
one-dimensional caricature.”^
Hitler’s imagery rested, as we shall see shortly, on a complex system of
analogies that showed a high degree of ontological-coherence-onee its basic
premises were granted. Such an evaluation cannot in any degree detract from
the fundamental immorality and factual inaccuracy of those premises, but to
comprehend the analogies’ attractiveness for so many followers it is essential
to take their argumentative value seriously.^ Our aim is to understand the
structural patterns that made it possible for Hitler’s imagery to be believable
to the point of quasi-literal acceptance by large pafts of the German public.
Whilst the textual manifestations and the historical implementation of Nazi
racism are a thing of the past, the underlying cognitive patterns that under­
pinned them can be assumed to be typical for many more extremist world­
views, including future ones, and thus of general relevance.
24 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
As a first step to generate a reliable corpus of bio-political imagery in
Mein Kampf, the original German text and its most accessible English
translation (by Manheim) were searched for biological, medical and physi­
ological terminology, most of which turned out to be used metaphorically,
i.e. referring to socio-political issues rather than to “real” bio-medical
topics. The resulting list of key-words includes 207 (93 German and 114
English) expressions from five conceptual sub-domains, each with further
sub-complexes of concepts, as indicated in the following list (the relevant
German lexical items are given in the notes):
a) general biological categories (e.g. nature^'^ {host-)organism,^ drive/
instinct,^ species/ race/ birth, ^ generation/’^ breeding^^)
b) organs, functions and health of bodies {body,^^ h e a r t,v e in s /
arteries,blood,strength,^^ health^'^)
c) illnesses and other pathological phenomena {illness/disease,^^
blood(-race) mix,^^ monster,^° sclerosis,^^ paralysis,pestilence,
syphilis,^'* cancer,grow th/tum our,^^ impotence,^"^ death,
decomposition^^)
d) illness-inducing agents {poison,^’^ viper,parasite-bloodsucker/
vampire-leech-sponger,bacillus/germ (carrier),vermin^"-)
e) cure/therapy (medical treatment (pejorative),^^ prescription/
medicine,regeneration^'^).
Whilst this list gives us an overview of the terminological and conceptual
range of “source” inputs for the body-state metaphor in Mein K am pf its
cognitive patterns can only be identified from their conceptual and argu­
mentative “target” applications. In order to achieve this, we need to estab­
lish the core mappings of the metaphor complex from key statements in the
text that demonstrate the main lines of argumentation that Hitler pursued
to develop the body-nation analogy.
3.1 HITLER^S BIO-POLinCAL SCENARIO: HEALING
THE BODY OF THE GERMAN NATION
A first cluster of relevant quotations can be found in Hitler’s account of the
military and political collapse of the German Empire in 1918:
[This military defeat] was only the result of many manifestations of
disease [Krankheitserscheinungen] and their underlying causes, which
even in peacetime had disturbed the German nation. This was the first
consequence, catastrophic and visible to all, of an ethical and moral
poisoning [Yergiftung], of a diminution in the instinct of self-preser­
vation and its preconditions, which had been undermining the founda­
tions of the people and the Reich for many years.
Body, Nature and Disease in Mein Kampf 25
It may almost be considered a good fortune for the German people
that its period of creeping sickness [schleichende Erkrankung] was sud­
denly cut short by so terrible a catastrophe, for otherwise the nation
would have gone under more slowly perhaps, but all the more certainly.
The disease [Krankheit] would have become chronic, while in the acute
form of the collapse it at least became clearly and distinctly recognis­
able. . . . It was no accident that man mastered the plague more easily
than tuberculosis. . . . The same is true of diseases of the bodies of na­
tions [Erkrankungen von Volkskdrpern]. If the disease does not take
the form of catastrophe at the onset, man slowly begins to get accus­
tomed to it and at length, though it may take some time, perishes all
the more certainly of it.^^
This poison [Gift] [“of the press—mainly that of Jewish origin”] was
able to penetrate the bloodstream of our people [Blutkreislauf unseres
Volkes] unhindered and to do its work, and the state was not strong
enough to master the disease [Krankheit], Tfie threat of a decline [Ver-
fall] of the Reich became obvious in the ridiculous half-measures that
it usecFagainst that disease.'’^
From these quotations we can already distil a preliminary schema of Hitler’s
view of-the Germ&n nation's body. Since before World War I, the nation was
suffering from a general disease that had been caused by Jewish blood poi­
soning. Pre-war politicians had failed to heal the body, due to their ignorance
of the cause', instead, they had been tinkering around [herumdokterten] on it,
treating as they did only the symptoms but leaving the original agent [Erreger]
untouched.**^ By providing this superior “in-depth” diagnosis, Hitler implic­
itly claims to be best qualified to heal the nation’s body, although he does not
style himself explicitly as the doctor operating on the body (as we shall see
soon, he reserves an even grander version than that of a national healer for
himself). The acute health crisis of the German nation's body is itself just
one symptom, one case of a universal disease that threatens all nations:
[The Jew] was . . . always a parasite in the, bcidy'tjf other peoples [Parasit
im Korper anderer Yolker].. . . He is and remains the typical parasite, a
sponger who like an infectious bacillus keeps spreading [der typische Par­
asit, ein Schmarotzer, der wie ein schadlicher BazHlus sich immer mehr
ausbreitet] as soon as a favourable medium invites him. And the effect of
his existence is also similar to that of spongers: wherever he appears, the
host nation [das Wirtsvolk\ dies out after a shorter or longer period.**^
As the studies reviewed in the preceding chapter have shown, cognitive
analysis can plausibly argue that what Hitler is doing in these passages is
more than merely using body imagery to liven up his racist rhetoric. Rather,
he invokes a whole conceptual domain as a frame of reference, namely that
26 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
of the human body which, as part of the natural world, is born, grows up,
can fall ill and die, as well as the sub-frames of an attack by a parasite that
feeds on the body until it has destroyed it, and that of a cure, namely the
radical, complete removal o f the parasite. To summarise these conceptual
relationships from our set of examples, we can draw up a schema of key
mappings between source and target domains of body and nation concepts,
-respectively, as seen in Table 3.1
This table of metaphorical inter-domain mappings gives an overview of
the basic conceptual correspondences, but it hardly conveys their argumen­
tative and practical implications. The source cluster of body-illness-cure
concepts in Mein Kampf is not an arbitrary constellation of notional ele­
ments but a complex, narrative/scenic schema or “scenario”^^ that tells a
mini-story, complete with causal explanations and with conclusions about
its outcome (here, the story of “a body suffering illness because of poison­
ing and therefore needing a radical cure”). This scenario is mapped as a
whole onto the target domain, leading the reader towards the expectation
that a healer will appear who will cure the national illness. It includes, as
a tacit assumption on the basis of “commonsense” human self-interest, an
evaluation, i.e. the conviction that securing and/or restoring the health of
someone’s body is physically, emotionally, and ethically a good thing. The
scenario serves as a justification for all the actions that are deemed to be
necessary to achieve the overall therapeutic aim.
These commonsense assumptions imbue Hitler’s line, of argument with a
seemingly indisputable conclusiveness. If one accepts his tacit premises that
there is such a thing as a national body in the first place and that that body
has fallen ill, then the need to find a cure appears to be uncontroversial,
and so does the necessity to destroy the parasite that has caused the illness.
This analogical argument implied in the metaphor scenario links a highly
Table 3.1 Body-Nation M appings in Mein Kampf
Source Domain Target Domain
Body (German) nation
Ulness/disease D im inution of the instinct of self-preservation
Body, Nature and Disease in Mein Kampf 27
complex socio-political issue (Germany’s socio-political and economic cri­
sis since 1918) to everyday world knowledge (i.e. diagnosis of an acute,
potentially fatal illness that requires immediate medical intervention). This
scenario structure fuses the source and target concepts so that they lead
the readers to a specific inference: national cure = elimination of “the Jew”.
The inference is not “automatic” in the sense of a tautological truth; rather,
it is suggestive of a seemingly plausible, analogical conclusion.
To capture this scenario dimension of biological/medical metaphors in
Mein Kampf, we need to amend the simple mapping schema of Table 3.1 by
matching source and target concepts to their slots in the illness-cure nar­
rative. For the “knowledge” that is presupposed in the source scenario and
mapped onto the target is not restricted to a general ontology of disease/
illness; it also includes an anticipatory plan or “script” of cause-effect rela­
tionships and a resulting course of a c tio n ,i.e . an “event-structure” that is
used to predict (and to promise) consequences. Table 3.2 aims to visualize
this narrative-predictive structure in Hitler’s bio-pblitical metaphors.
Table 3.2 demonstrates how much Hitler’s political target-level argu­
ment depends on the commonsense logic of the source scenario. The arrows
in bold signify cause-effect relations; the empty arrows represent inferences
that are suggested by way of analogy. The only “hard” historical fact that
Hitler is able to refer to is Germany’s post-World War I crisis. The meta­
phorical interpretation of this crisis as an illness, which is indicated by the
symbol HI, sets off two argumentative moves, both of which are based on
analogical conclusions (■=>). One move is the search for the cause o f the ill­
ness. The author chooses from the illness source scenario the aspect that
fits his purpose of depicting the target level match, “the Jew”, as negatively
as possible; hence the choice of the extremely dangerous, potentially deadly
Table 3.2 Event Structure of Body-Nation M appings
Domains Underlying Cause Present Situation Action Needed
Source Poisoning by a ^ Body suffering ^ The cure of the
parasitic ‘alien from a severe, illness consists in
body’ {bacillus, deadly illness____ ^ _..^he-f€m oval of its
virus, sponger) (Blood poisoning) cause by a com ­
petent healer

Sympton of illness N ational downfall (especially, the m ilitary col­ HI

lapse o f 1918) and its consequences
Target Destructive force ^ N ational crisis of ^ Germany m ust
Cause of illnees: poisoning Jewish press of the Jewish G erm any (visible em power a
press and the since 1918) politician w ho is
Agent of illness: bacillus, virus, “T he Jew ” general influence able to effect the
sponger, parasite of Jews on Ger­ rem oval of Jews
m an society from German
Cure of illness Removal of all Jews from Germany society
28 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
blood-poisoning agent as the source equivalent of the target concept.
Unless readers reject it out of hand, this choice activates their everyday
“knowledge” about illnesses in general and blood poisoning in particular.
This knowledge in turn yields the analogical warrant: “just as every illness
(including blood poisoning) must have an underlying cause and, thus, some
illness-causing agent, so the national crisis must have a cause and a culprit
who can be held responsible.”
The other argumentative move for Hitler, after having determined the
cause o f the illness, is the practical conclusion, i.e. the necessity/urgency
of medical treatment. Again, experience-based source-domain knowledge,
i.e. that an illness normally requires a cure by a competent doctor. Is used
by Hitler to suggest himself as the healer o f the suffering patient, the Ger­
man nation. This suggested conclusion carries with it a host of further
presuppositions, e.g. that the illness is in principle curable, that the therapy
is worth the effort, that the healer has been rightly identified, etc. These
assumptions are “straightforward” only at the source level (of a benevolent
medical science and practice), whereas they are extremely problematic at
the target level and would normally require extensive argumentative back­
ing for each step in the argument. However, within the analogical argu­
mentation context of the metaphor scenario, these presuppositions can be
taken for granted as a whole. The nation thus becomes the patient that
urgently needs the cure; the healer is present, the diagnosis is clear: the
treatment is without alternative.
We can connect this basic illness-cure scenario that Hitler used to justify
his hatred of Jews to its characterisation as a distinctively radical “redemp­
tive”, “exterminatory” or “eliminationist” version of anti-Semitism, as pro­
posed by Holocaust researchers such as .Yehuda Bauer, Christopher Browning,
Saul Friedlander and Daniel J. Goldhagen.*^^ These explanations all refer to
the outcome of the cure that Hitler planned for the German national body.
Whilst the categorisation as “exterminatory”/“eliminationist” is mainly based
on the hindsight knowledge about the genocidal result of that cure, the term
“redemptive” seems more apt as a characterization of how Hitler presented
his policies to his contemporaries in Mein Kampf It also points to a further
conceptual dimension of his metaphor system. “Redemption” presupposes
not just a national crisis but rather a universal catastrophe that demands a
universal healing process.
3.2 NATURE’S GARDEN AND HITLER’S
UNDERSTANDING OF THE CREATOR’S DESIGN
Hitler’s most elaborate attempt to give such a universalist underpinning to
the illness-cure scenario can be found in Chapter .11 of Mein Kampf, enti­
tled “Nation and Race” {‘^Volk und Rasse”). A first glance at the introduc­
tion to the chapter, however, may well impress the reader as a grotesquely
Body, Nature and Disease in Mein Kampf 29
oversimplified account of heredity in the animal kingdom, rather than a
political treatise. The opening paragraph starts with a childish-sounding
introduction to the fact that sexual reproduction among the “higher” ani­
mals is usually confined to members of the same species:
There are some truths that are so obvious that for this very reason they
are not seen or at least not recognized by ordinary people... . [people]
wander about in the garden of Nature; they imagine that they know
practically everything and yet, with few exceptions, they pass blindly
by one of the most patent principles of Nature’s rule: the inner segrega­
tion of the species of all living beings on this earth. . .. Blue tit seeks
blue tit, finch goes to finch, stork to stork, field mouse to field mouse,
dormouse to dormouse, he-wolf to she-wolf, etc.**^
Even a very naive reader might wonder why Hitler would assume that this
truth is not at all known to “ordinary people” who “wander about in the
garden of Nature”—after all, his insights into the life of blue tits and finches
are not that original. Within a couple of pages, however, after dealing per­
functorily with the most glaring exceptions to that “most patent principle”.
Hitler gets to his main point: just like animals, he alleges, humans of differ­
ent races are not supposed to mate with each other:
Historical experience . .. shows with terrifying clarity that in every
mingling of Aryan blood [Blutsvertfiengung des Ariers] with that of
lower peoples the result was the end of the cultured people.. . . Briefly,
the result of all racial crossing is therefore always the following:
(a) Lowering of the level of the higher race;
(b) Physical and intellectual regression and hence the beginning of a
slowly but surely progressing sickness [eines, wenn auch langsam, so
doch sicher fortschreitenden Siechtums],
To bring about such a development is therefore nothing else but to sin
against the will of the eternal creator [Sunde treiben wider den Willen
des ewigen Schopfers].'^^
Hitler’s crude equivocation between animal “species” and hurnan “races”
has baffled even readers who tried to take, his worldview as seriously as
possible. Eberhard Jackel considered this notion of race beneath con­
tempt: “There is no need to comment on the nonsensicality of this kind
of argument.”**^ Others, such as Alan Bullock, Ian Kershaw and Richard
J. Evans, have spoken of “enter[ing] the world of the insane”, an “over­
riding and all-embracing obsession” or a “paranoid conviction”.T h e s e
psycho-pathological characterisations of Hitler’s racist beliefs are certainly
appropriate as regards the “target” content of these beliefs but help little
to explain their appeal for Hitler’s followers and the catastrophic conse­
quences. By focusing on their function as metaphorical mappings, however,
30 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
we can analyse their (analogical) conclusiveness. We thus need to inves­
tigate the source domain inputs that these metaphors activate as well as
the emerging “blended” mental spaces on their own terms (i.e. suspending
for the sake of the analysis our knowledge about'their “nonsensicality” in
target logic).
The first input domain to consider here is that of popularized biological
^nd medical knowledge that can be assumed to have been available to Hitlef.
In their attempts to explain the appeal of Hitler’s especially extreme “racism”,
historians have pointed to the links between his pronouncements on “race”
and the contemporary “eugenics” movement as well as to the larger intel-
lectual/political tendencies of “social Darwinism” that had become estab­
lished in Western culture ahd especially in Germany since the latter decades
of the nineteenth century. In view of Hitler’s well-documented acquaintance
with vulgarized versions of social Darwinism in his Vienna years, his contact
with and support for academic representatives of “racial hygiene” and of the
involvement of German biological and medical scientists in the Nazis’ eugen-
icist and genocidal programmes, Nazi racism has even been interpreted as a
special, vicious variant of “social Darwinism”.^^ Hitler repeatedly claimed
that his racially defined anti-Semitism was based on “rational”, scientific
insights rather than on “mere emotions”,^^ and polemicised against “old-
fashioned” non-racially motivated forms of anti-Semitism.^^
However, that “scientific” basis turns out to be fictitious as regards even
the most basic categories, i.e. “species and “races”. Whilst Hitler regarded
these categories as self-evident, even modern evolutionists concede that the
emergence of distinct species from sub-varieties/races of any one originator
species is far from obvious; instead, it presents a “fundamental problem”,
for the “division of living organisms intro discrefe species is . . . not an
obviously necessary state of affairs” and in principle it would be “easy to
imagine a world without such sharp differences”.^"*This problem also lies at
the heart of Charles Darwin’s The Origin o f Species, which we shall briefly
discuss to highlight its implications for racist ideologies, without suggesting
that Hitler knew Darwin’s work from his own study.
Darwin himself drew no sharp dividing line between a species and any
sub-varieties that evolved from it: if “species are only strongly marked and
permanent varieties, and . . . each species first existed as a variety”, then
“no line of demarcation can be drawn between species, commonly supposed
to have been produced by special acts of creation, and varieties which are
acknowledged to have been produced by secondary laws.”^^ In The Descent
o f Man, he applied this notion of the continuum of varieties and species to
“differences between the so-called races of man” ^^and stated that in prin­
ciple it was “almost a matter of indifference whether the so-called races of
man are thus designated, or are ranked as species or sub-species”; still, “the
latter term” appeared to him to be “the more appropriate”.^^
Darwin even went to considerable length to deal with the “polygen-
ist” theory of a creation of several “species” of humans (which would be
Body, Nature and Disease itj Mein Kampf 31
favoured by extreme racists) only to underline that its proponents were
engaged in an irrational enterprise: “Those who do not admit the principle
of evolution, must look at species as separate creations . . . ; and they must
decide what forms of man they will consider as species by the analogy of the
method commonly pursued in ranking other organic beings as species. But
it is a hopeless endeavour to decide this point, until some definition of the
term ‘species’ is generally accepted; and the definition must not include an
indeterminate element such as an act of creation. .. . Those naturalists, on
the other hand, who admit the principle of evolution . .. will feel no doubt
that all the races of man are descended from a single primitive stock.”^®The
whole question of whether the different varieties of humans constituted
species or races was therefore only of secondary importance to Darwin. For
him, this was a question of more or less emphasis on differences between
existing varieties; in his model, all species had been at a previous point in
time “sub-varieties” (or “so-called races”) of earlier species.
In terminology that would count today as highly “politically incorrect”,
Darwin even asserted that some human races, for instance, “the Negro and
European, are so distinct that, if specimens had been brought to a natural­
ist without further information, they would undoubtedly have been consid­
ered by him as good and true species.”^^ On the other hand, he stressed that
“all the races agree in so many unimportant details of structure and in so
many mental peculiarities, that these can be accounted for only by inheri­
tance from a common progenitor.” In a similar dialectical argument, he
claims that “American aborigines, Negroes and Europeans are as different
from each other in mind as any three races that can be named”,^' only to
then highlight their similarities: “yet I was incessantly struck, whilst living
with the Fuegians . . . , with the many little traits of character, shewing [sic]
how similar their minds were to ours; and so it was with a full-blooded
Negro with whom I once happened to be intiraate”.^^
For Hitler, to assert kinship (or friendship) with “Fuegians” or “full-
blooded Negroes” would have been anathema. His interest in blurring the
lines between race and species was not motivated by a wish to emphasise
evolutionary continuity but, on the contrary, to make contrasts between
human “races” appear as discontinuous as possible. Despite his preten­
sion to “rational”, scientific standards, Hi;ler’s-notion-©f-^face” was
based on the supposed “culture-building!’' abilities of the human races
as “founders”, “bearers” and “destroyers of culture” [Kulturbegriinder,
-trdger, -zerstorer).^^ This tripartite distinction comes down to a simple
opposition in one dimension: of all human races in the world, only one
qualifies as the founder of culture, i.e. the Aryan race, and again only one
bears the stigma of the destroyer of culture, “the Jew”. All other races
and peoples are just intermediates, i.e. mere bearers of the founders’ cul­
ture to a higher or lesser degree.
The concept of the fundamental “racial” opposition “Aryan”- “Jew” (and
of the Jew-exclusive hierarchy of “creator”-and “bearer”-races) has no basis
32 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
in any biological source knowledge, however biased and popularized,^** but
amounts to no more than an assemblage of arbitrary and contradictory
assertions on cultural differences. In this respect, its (dis-)qualification as
“nonsensical” is justified, but this only shows that further inputs have to
be taken into consideration. The second main input domain, which has to
make up, so to speak, for the deficiency of the pseudo-biological notion of
-“race” difference, is the notion of an absolute contrast between Devil and
God, as derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition of religious eschato­
logical thought.^^ In this framework, the notion of any “crossing” between
Aryans and Jews was a cosmic abomination, a monstrous violation against
the design of “the eternal creator”. In fact, any racial mixing was not
meant to be and it was the duty of anyone who tried to help the wprk o f the
Lord to eliminate its “mongrel” offspring*^^ and help “Nature” in her work
of “higher breeding”.^®
The outlines of the biblical account of man's fall and redemption pro­
vided a familiar metaphysical event-structure for Hitler’s scenario of the
fight between the elite race of Aryans as men made in the Lord's image,
endowed with a god-like genius,^^ against the devil [Teufel] race of “the
Jew” that tried to prevent the Aryan’s work by fostering racial mixing and
world revolution.^® The danger allegedly posed by the Devil-Jew was so
grave that a redeemer was called for in order to save not just the German
people but the Aryan race and even human life on earth: this was the role
that Hitler explicitly claimed for himself:
If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the
other nations of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of
humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move
through the ether devoid of men. Therefore, today I believe that I
am acting in accordance with the will o f the Almighty Creator: by
defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work o f the
Lord?'"
It is on account of this metaphysical dimension of Hitler’s bio-political sce­
nario that Burke (1939) characterises the anti-Semitism of Mein Kampfas
the “materialization of a religious pattern”,^^ that Friedlander (1998) speaks
of the “redemptive” aspect of Nazi anti-Semitism,^® and that Barsch (2002)
views the National Socialist ideology as a “political religion”.^**Barsch puts
Hitler’s references to biblical and religious topics in the context of writ­
ings by other National Socialist ideologues such as Dietrich Eckart, Joseph
Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg, and he concludes that the “religious con­
tent” was a central feature of Nazi anti-Semitism and a decisive factor in
securing support for it.^® It is, however, debatable to what degree Hitler’s
rather unspecific and sporadic use of religious terms {devilish Jews, god­
like or divine Aryans, the Lord's work, God's will, creator, omnipotent,
paradise, providence, our creed, sin) in Mein Kampf constitutes a coherent
Body, Nature and Disease in Mein Kampf 33
politico-religious framework. Even Barsch comes up with only about two
dozen brief quotations from both volumes of Hitler’s book, which does
not seem to indicate a high degree of “religious content”.’^ The much more
extensive and systematically developed references to Bible texts in Rosen­
berg and Eckart’s writings and Goebbels’s religious family and education
backgrounds^ make them more likely candidates for advancing politico-
religious versions of Nazi-ideology than Hitler, who is reported to have
stated that Rosenberg’s The Myth o f the Twentieth Century was too arcane
to be of much propagandistic value.s®
For Hitler, ideological-propagandistic effectiveness was the main
quality criterion that mattered, and it was in this technical sense that
he wanted his followers to emulate the intensity of religious convictions
and that he praised what he saw as propagandistic feats of the Catholic
Church.^^ The echoes of biblical textual traditions in Mein Kampf thus
have to be interpreted with a view to their propagandistic function. The
religious term redemption (Erldsung), for instance, changes its mean­
ing radically if, instead of a metaphysical figure, the leader of a political
party ascribes to himself the role of its agent and if it is furthermore
integrated into a scenario that has as its central principle not an ethical
or theological imperative but the “struggle for self-preservation” or for
“existence on this earth” {Kampf fur Selbsterhaltung/um das Dasein auf
dieser We/i).®®
The concept of the struggle for existence takes us back to the pseudo-
biological aspect of “social Darwinism” in Hitler’s anti-Semitism. As in
the case of race, Hitler also bent the biological concept of the struggle for
existence to suit his own purposes. Darwin had used the phrase struggle
for existence in The Origin o f Species and had endorsed Herbert Spen­
cer’s concept of the “survival of the fittest”.®’ He was, however, aware of
the possibility of misunderstandings of these notions and emphasized that
he employed the phrase struggle for existence “in a large and metaphori­
cal sense including dependence of one being to another, and including
(which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success
in leaving progeny”,®^ i.e. in an essentially statistical sense.®®
Hitler’s view of struggle for existence, on the other hand, was based
exclusively on the notion of “fighting” (RfJwp/jrFTifler'useR Kampfas the
central expression for his own political biography and it was for him a
source of pride: all masters, geniuses and heroes, he assumed, had had to
conquer “weaker” beings, and would always have to prove themselves in
fighting.®** He, too, had been able to lay the “granite foundation” of his
worldview only through suffering and fighting in his Viennese years,®®
and this fight would continue.®^ Similarly, Aryans, when “liberated” from
“the Jew”, would have to go on conquering other races to give “them a
fate that was better than their previous so-called ‘freedom’ Those
who did not acknowledge this “iron law” of eternal fighting were weak­
lings and/or liars and their existence was useless:
34 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust Body, Nature and Disease in Mein Kampf 35
The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacri­ Table 3.3 Basic Scenario Structure of Body-Nation M appings in Mein Kampf
ficing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, Event Structure
but he after all is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not
prevail, any conceivable higher development of organic beings would Domains Underlying Cause Present Situation Action Needed
be unthinkable.®®
Source Poisoning by Body suffering Cure of the illness
an ‘alien body’ from a severe, through removal
. . . to preserve a certain culture, the man who creates it must be pre­ (bacillus, virus, deadly illness of its cause
served. This preservation is bound up with the iron law of necessity sponger)
and the right to victory of the best and stronger in this world. Those
who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in -0- a-
this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.®^ Target I Destructive influ­ G erm any’s Em pow erm ent of
(Germany) ence of Jews on national crisis a m an able to
Cultural “improvement”, the great prerogative of the Aryans, was o'nly pos­ German society following the remove “the Jew ”
sible as a result of continuous fighting against other races, but there was no defeat in 1918 from the G erm an
coherent notion of evolutionary development in this conception: neither as nation
regards the races, which had been there since the beginning of the world, nor ■0-
as regards individual existences. In this eternal fight, the winner “took all”,
the loser could only hope to survive as the victor’s slave, and if he was lucky Target II Devilish forces Threat to creator’s A redeemer is
enough to have Aryans as his masters, he might participate in their culture (Universe) foster unnatural plans of continu­ needed to enforce
mixing of hum an ous improvement the creator’s uni­
provided he never tried to join the master race. Catastrophe ensued if the species/races of species/races versal design
Aryan—too nice for his own good, as it were—lowered the race/blood barri­
ers and mingled with the lower race: by committing this fateful error, he “lost
his right to stay in the paradise that he had created for himself”.^® By comparison with the already tenuous analogical inferences between
The German people provided a special case of this general picture. The the primary source and target levels, the mappings underlying target level
Germans were not a uniform racial group but contained the most ancient II are based on sheer speculative extrapolation from the national crisis to a
“Aryan” traits.^^ They had forfeited their chance of “putting the world into universal drama (symbolised by the empty “down” and “across” arrows).
the service of a higher culture” by indulging in racial mixing and there­ Nevertheless, in the “analogical logic” of the metaphor scenario, even these
fore losing the First "World War, suffering as they did then from the lack of a speculations retain a vestige of conclusiveness. Target level II “inherits”, as
proper “herd instinct based on unity of the blood”.^®However, all hop? was it were, from level I the grounding in the illness-cure scenario. As the source
not lost, for although inter-racial mixing had damaged the nation’s body, level is further removed than from level I, the derived event structure of level
there were still “great unmixed stocks of Nordic-Germanic people whom II may appear less plausible, but it is still present. The pseudo-religious nar­
we may consider the most precious treasure for our future”.^'^ The earthly rative of mankind’s fall (= "sin” of racial mixing), followed by suffering and
paradise of Aryan world power and “culture-building” could therefore still repentance (= post-WWI crisis) and redemption (= elimination of “the Jew”)
be regained if only racial mingling could be stopped and healed by way is broadly compatible with the primary scenario levels, infection-illness-cure
of removing its agent, “the Jew”, for good. This promise of final redemp­ (source), and Jewish influence on German socie^, (Q\\oYip3hY-national cri­
tion contradicted, strictly speaking, the even more cynical notion of eternal sis, followed by liberation-through-elimination o f Jewry (target level I). The
fighting; but again, as in the case of Hitler’s reinterpretation of biological strict parallelisation suggests coherence and comprehensiveness of the overall
concepts, we must not search for an internal logical consistency in his argu­ scenario and imbues its core mappings with a global dynamic.
mentation. For his purposes, it was sufficient that the two “universalist”
domains of race theory and religion were combined to add a global, even
cosmic dimension to his scenario, even if they were incoherent on their own 3.3 GENOCIDE AS THE ONLY THERAPY
terms and contradicted each other. What mattered was that their combi­ FOR RACIAL BLOOD POISONING
nation, however crude, mirrored the event structure of the first, national-
political target level and thus provided a further general level, which is Overblown and menacing as it was. Hitler’s diagnosis of a disease threat­
visualized in Table 3.3 as follows: ening the body politic still did not warrant a complete annihilation of the
 36 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
supposed agent o f disease. After all, even a life-threatening illness (in the
literal sense) can be treated without necessarily eliminating all of its agents,
and the same might be assumed to hold for illnesses that threaten the body
politic. According to Susan Sontag (1978), in “classical” political theory
up to the Enlightenment, disease metaphors served mainly the purpose of
“encourag[ing] rulers to pursue a more rational policy” and were not nor­
mally used to suggest the complete destruction of social groups, nations or
- races.^^ We shall examine Sontag’s historical claims in detail in subsequent
chapters and critique it with regard to specific historical examples, but gen­
erally she is right that socio-political illness imagery does not necessarily
entail genocidal therapy solutions.
Hitler, however, clearly aimed to draw the most drastic conclusions from
the worst possible illness scenario; in his view, the entirety of Jewish peo­
ple were puppets of a worldwide conspiracy, as outlined in the infamous
forgery of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”.^^ To integrate the notion
of eliminating all Jews into his metaphor scenario. Hitler needed to rely
on source concepts that had an irredeemably negative value and could be
projected onto “the Jew” as a collective entity. The illness-cure scenario
provided a slot for suggesting a radical cure by identifying blood poisoning
as the cause of the disease,-which enabled him to conceptualize “the Jew”
as the blood poisoning agent.
This metaphorical characterisation had the advantage of functioning at
various levels of the scenario structure. In the most basic version, Hitler lik­
ened “the Jew” to a viper, or an adder whose bite directly induced venom into
the bloodstream of the victim.^® At a second level, “the Jew” was depicted as
a bloodsucker, leech and generally as a parasite {Parasit, Schmarotzer).^^ The
bloodsucker-parasite metaphor in particular fused the two aspects of (1) an
organism that takes advantage o f or lives at the expense of another organism
(the sense in which parasite/parasitic is still used today as a routine figure of
abuse)’°° and (2) poisoning as a potentially fatal threat. In this scenario ver­
sion, the host organism is deprived of some of its own blood by the parasite;
through the contact with it the remaining blood is at the same time infected:
the alleged damage is thus multiplied.^°^
At a third, more abstract level, “the Jew” was depicted as the bacillus or germ
carrier or agent o f disease {Bazillus, BazUlentrdger, Erreger).^°^ This general
qualification linked to the scenario of decomposition [Zersetzung, Fdulnis), in
which “the Jew” had the role of the decomposing agent {Zersetzer, Ferment
der Zersetzung), for instance, as a bacterium {Spaltpilz) or maggot {Made),
or figured as a multiplying agent, i.e. vermin, especially rats {Ungeziefer, Rat­
ten) that spread the products of decomposition [Leichengift).^^^ The infection
scenario was also compatible with that of an epidemic (Seuche), which Hitler
used to describe Jewish influence in society, e.g. pestilence [Pest, Pestilenz,
Verpestung) and syphilis (Syphilis, Versyphilitisierung).^^'^
These varying scenarios do not form a taxonomically consistent source
domain, but they do invoke an ensemble of causeslagents o f illness that fit
Body, Nature and Disease in Mein Kampf 37
together to suggest the imminent danger of a deadly, disgusting, univer­
sal disease. Even where the scenarios contradict each other (e.g. infectious
disease v. acute poisoning v. decomposition), the role slot for “the Jew”
remains the same: he only changes his metaphoric appearance. Whether he
is depicted as a viper, a bacillus, a leech, a fungus or a rat, he is in every case
the parasitical driving force. This role was, according to Hitler, unchange­
able: it could not be affected by any change of circumstances other than
complete destruction either through a “politico-medical” intervention,
such as the one Hitler himself hoped to bring about, or in an apocalyptic
scenario, as the inadvertent result of “the Jew’s” final victory:
. . the blood-Jew [Blutjude] tries to exterminate the national intel­
ligentsia and, by robbing the peoples of their natural intellectual lead­
ership, makes them ripe for the slave’s lot of permanent subjugation.
.. . The end, however, is not only the end of the liberty of the peoples
oppressed by the Jew, but also the end of this parasite upon the nations
[Volkerparasit] itself. After the death of his victim, the vampire sooner
or later dies too.^°^
Within this complex of parasitological, pathological and medical scenarios,
the notion of blgod is of special importance. It is, in the first place, the
immediate source of the blood-poisoning metaphor, which appears in two
forms: a) as the bite of a poisonous snake, and b) as a by-product of para­
sitical activity, e.g. a bloodsucker’s bite, which introduces toxic substances
into the bloodstream. At a second, symbolic level, blood was for Hitler the
carrier of heredity and racial identity. Procreation among members of dif­
ferent races always resulted in a mingling o f blood, and such racial crossing
led to “physical and intellectual regression” and was “the beginning of a
slowly but surely progressing sickness”.
This belief in the hereditary importance of blood was not an idiosyn­
cratic superstition on the part of Hitler but was in line with traditional folk-
theoretical assumptions that an offspring’s blood was a mix of the parents’
blood, and with it their inheritance. The remnants of this tradition can be
seen in idioms such as being o f or sharing the same blood, blood relations,
of blood being thicker than water, or of noble blood, which are in use to
this day.^°^ These phrases are remnants of pre^modern eoflceptrof blood as
a “life force” and one of the “four humour^” and the belief that a person’s
character was a mix of his or her parents’ blood. It was only at the turn
of the twentieth century that the “blood myth” of heredity was experi­
mentally falsified by Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822-1911),
ironically, as it were, for Galton was also the founder of the eugenics move-
ment.’°^ But despite experiments such as Gabon’s and despite the growing
public awareness of Gregor Mendel’s (1822—1884) theory of genetics, the
conceptual linkage of blood with heredity persisted into the twentieth cen-
tury.“ ° In writing Mein Kampf, Hitler could rely on his readers to accept
38 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
the blood = heredity equation as a conventional way of speaking about
individual and racial heredity.
As a corollary of this equation, the notion of poisoned blood entailed
that of poisoned heredity. The supposed blood-poisoning agent of the
German nation’s body (as well as of the Aryan race and, ultimately, the
world), i.e. “the Jew”, was a danger not just for one generation but forever.
This long-term threat made the elimination of all forms of the supposed
■Jewish poisoning agent, i.e. of all the bacilli, vipers, leeches, parasites and
vermin, even more urgent. However, in terms of Hitler’s analogical argu­
ment, a crucial element in the illness-cure scenario was still missing that
would make cure-by-elimination an absolutely binding imperative. The
missing element is the aspect of ethical or moral responsibility. Actual
bacilli, vipers, leeches, parasites and vermin may be called agents of dis­
ease and their effects evil or even cruel when viewed with a conscious,
anthropocentric interest. However, as organisms without consciousness
or conscience, they are, of course, not held literally responsible for the
results of their “behaviour”. But when Hitler applied these moral cat­
egories to racial parasites, he meant their anthropomorphic assessments
in earnest. The argument that “allowed” him to treat the Jews as if they
were blood-poisoning agents that caused death and decomposition on
purpose was his particular “explanation” of how such a poisonous racial
mix had come about.
Hitler explained the supposedly “unnatural” fact of such a mix by
enriching his basic scenario with accounts of actual inter-racial Jewish-
German/Aryan contacts, both in the form of allegedly self-witnessed
scenes in pre-World War I 'Vienna and Munich, and during the war,
and in a historical overview spanning a millennium, which occupies large
parts of Chapter 11 of Mein Kampfa.nd is divided in twelve phases,^’^ His
general “explanation” of Jewish-German marriages and sexual contacts
came down to the allegation that “the Jew” had a cunning stratagem to
ensure maximum hereditary racial advantage by keeping his own male
bloodline pure whilst poisoning other races through intermarriage in the
female line: “The Jew almost never marries a Christian woman; it is the
Christian who marries a Jewess. Yet, the bastards'take after the Jewish
side.”’' '
This combination of racist suspicion, sexism and factual errors as
regards Jewish heredity laws was typically dismissive but still conven­
tional. “The Jew” was the agent but the “Aryan” partners were viewed as
collaborators: moral responsibility thus lay with both parties. In order to
demonstrate the necessity of destroying “the Jew” as an evil force threat­
ening the Aryan race and the German people. Hitler had to come up with
a more specific scenario of inter-racial blood poisoning as a one-sided
act of aggression. This he did in the passages cited in the last chapter
and analysed by Bosmajian (1983), Hawkins (2001) and Chilton (2005)
but furthermore in an even more “concrete” and possibly more repulsive
version:
Body, Nature and Disease in Mein Kampf 39
With Satanic, joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks for
hours in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood
[mit seinem Blute schdndet], thus stealing her from her people. With
• every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he
has set out to subjugate. Just as he himself systematically ruins women
and girls, he does not shrink back from pulling down the blood barri­
ers )^lutschranken] for others, even on a large scale.” '*
Hitler introduces this scene in the context of discussing the penultimate stage
of his pseudo-history of German-Jewish relations in Chapter 11 of Mein
Kampf. The conceit of historical specificity is, of course, vacuous: it could be
located at any “stage” of his narrative and Hitler makes no attempt to give
any kind of documented, empirical reference for such a scene. The factual
veracity of the account is clearly irrelevant for Hitler: he is enunciating a
“prototypical” scene of German-Jewish relations as imagined by anti-Sem­
ites, irrespective of any evidence.”' The essence of this horror-version of the
blood poisoning scenario is the contrast between the deliberate, predatory
aggression on the part of the “black-haired Jewish youth” and the innocence
of the “unsuspecting girl”. The defilement ofnon-Jewish blood by “the Jew”
is thus presented as a totally one-sided attack, which morally justifies any
defence, either by the victim herself or any saviour who comes to her rescue.
Again, the interplay between a supposedly descriptive account, racist
imagery and the text-specific scenario system of Mein Kampf is crucial. In
isolation, the phrases defilement o f blood or defilement of race [Blut-, Ras-
senschande) were at the time conventional labels for undesirable forms of
inter-racial sexual contact” ^ and, as metaphors, not even particularly vivid,
but they had a special appeal when they were applied to the scene depicted
in the preceding quotation. Hitler construes here an exact parallel to the
biological source scenario at the target level of his metaphor, but with an
added moral dimension. The scene is that of an act of “blood poisoning”;
however, not a “simple” poisoning as the result of a metaphorical viper or
bloodsucker’s bite. Rather, the conventional metaphor is underwritten and
reinvigorated by the account of a supposedly real sexual attack.
This prototypical scenario of Jewish aggression against non-Jewish victim,
together with its implicit appeal for rescue, formed_a com presupposition in
Hitler’s concept of bloodirace defilement. The.parallelisation of the biological/
medical concept of blood poisoning and the ethical concept blood defilement
matched and complemented the notion of race defilement both at the national
and the universal levels. It thus allowed Hitler to pass between source and
target domain levels without further argumentation. The boundaries between
biological, ethical, socio-political and metaphysical concepts were effectively
eliminated. Whenever Hitler called “the Jew” a poisonous parasite, he uttered
what was for him a truthful characterization that fitted the scenario versions
at all domain levels. This conceptual addition requires, as a last amendment
of our scenario schema, the introduction of an intermediate layer between the
main source and target levels, as shown in Table 3.4.
I
40 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust Body, Nature and Disease in Mein Kampf 41
Table 3.4 Extended Scenario Structure of Body-Nation M appings in Mein Kampf could be dismissed as the product of cunning deception practised by “the
Jew” as “the great master of lying”.^^®
Event Structure By following up the implications of the politico-medical metaphor sce­
nario in Mein Kampf, we have reached the core, or in Hitler’s words, the
Domains Underlying Cause Present Situation Action N eeded
“granite foundations”, of his specific, vicious anti-Semitism.” ^ They centred
Source Poisoning by Body suffering Cure by w ay of a on the notion of an irreconcilable antagonism between Aryans/Germans
an ‘alien body’ from a severe, complete removal and “the Jew”, the responsibility for which lay wholly with “the Jew”. It
(bacillus, virus, deadly illness, i.e. of the cause of was he and he alone who had launched a deadly attack in the form of blood
sponger) blood poisoning the illness poisoning against the German nation’s body at least at three levels: a) as a
supposedly real act of blood defilement, i.e. rape or seduction, b) as cause
of the German nation’s illness, and c) as a devilish conspiracy against the
Target Race defilement i=D> D estruction of The girl m ust be creator’s design. “The Jew” was portrayed as an eternal agent of destruc­
Level la of innocent girl hereditary foun­ saved from the
tion, which, unlike an unconsciously “acting” bio-parasite (a virus or bacil­
by Jewish rapist dations of the rapist
girl’s race/people lus), would deliberately invade as many host populations as possible.
The apparent conclusiveness of this conceptual framework suggestive of
■0 -Q-1 f}r genocide derived not so much from the individual “content” of Hitler’s meta-
phorization of Jews as parasites but from its integration in scenarios that
Target Destructive influ­ ■=> Germany’s dow n­ =J> Elim ination of
Level lb ence of Jews on fall following the Jews from Ger­ had their own internal event-structure logic. The basic mapping (see Tables
German society defeat in World m an society/ 3.1, 3.2) allowed inferences from the domain of popular biological, medical
W ar I Europe and hygienic knowledge (“necessity to remove a parasitic agent of disease”)
to be transferred to the target level of politics (“necessity to fight against the
alleged Jewish influence”). This mapping and its implications did not as such
Target Devilish forces T he'natural A redeemer has traTnscend the conventional cliches of anti-Semitic discourse 'at the time (as
Level 2 foster unnatural course of to enforce the we shall see later, the parasite image had become established in German body
mixing of hum an im provem ent of creator’s cosmic politic conceptualisations much earlier and had gained central importance
species/races species-races is design
p u t in jeopardy
by the end of thee nineteenth century).” ®Hitler, however, did not stop at
exploiting the standard implications of this analogy. By including a second­
ary target level, of cosmic-metaphysical “redemption-through-annihilation”
In terms of this'last scenario version, “the Jew” was seen as an essen­ and an intermediate pseudo-realistic level between source and target sce­
tially a«t/-human parasitic species, which, unlike an unconsciously acting narios (see Tables 3.3, 3.4), he managed to insinuate that the alleged crime of
bio-parasite, deliberately tried to invade as many host populations as pos­ blood poisoning was “literally” true as well as being the overarching concep­
sible. As the infection was lethal for all its hosts, its own victory would also tual frame for the Jewish role in humanity at large.
be its own nemesis: it would perish together with the last host it had con­ The analysis of this multilayered conceptual structure of the chief causal
quered. “The Jew” thus became a kind of universal super-parasite that event in the illness-cure scenario helps to explain the peculiar “metaphori­
not only had the will to destroy other races but would do this, as it were, on cal” status of Nazi anti-Semitism as far as it appesrrin Mi^it Kampf, whilst
principle, i.e. even risking its own destruction in the process. In this cosmic fully recognising its function as a real policy model for what the Nazis
scenario framework, all conceptual boundaries between source and target would later call the “Final Solution”. The blood-poisoning scenario was
domains were erased: for Hitler, any German-Jewish contact was blood considered to be truthful both at the level of experienced reality and in the
mix, hence blood defilement and blood poisoning. The conceptual and metaphorical/allegorical applications of that concept. This alleged act of
epistemological difference of source and target levels was short-circuited deliberate parasitic aggression justified in the eyes of Hitler and his follow­
and the result was a closed belief system of extreme apparent coherence, ers any inhuman behaviour towards “the Jew” as an altruistic act of life­
as the different scenario levels could be used to corroborate each other. saving help for his supposed victims, i.e. any innocent Aryan girl, which at
Any claims that might seem problematic at target level were thus “proven” the same time symbolized the German national body, the whole o f human­
at source level—and vice versa. Outside facts that did not fit the scenario ity and even the cosmic order.
 42 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
These results cast a new light on several central topics of Holocaust
research that have been discussed among historians and in the wider pub­
lic. First, in the context of the long-standing debates between ‘intentional- '
ist’ and ‘functionalist’ explanations of the origins of the H o lo c a u s t,th e
cognitive study of the inner coherence of Hitler’s ideology reinforces the
view that Hitler favoured a genocidal “solution” of “the Jewish question”
- already by the time of writing Mein Kampf, for in this book he explained
the solution in terms of extermination scenarios that were meant in earnest,
and not just fanciful rhetoric. The implementation of his genocidal plans
would thus have been for him more a matter of timing and opportunity,
rather than merely one possible option among many. At the time of publica­
tion, i.e. the mid-1920s and for some years to come, this conceptual frame­
work was taken by many as the ranting of a failed putschist that might
inspire a few individual acts of racist violence but was without a chance of
influencing the wider public, let alone lead to a real genocide. In order to
better understand how it was transformed Into a public consensus we need
to show a) that this metaphor system was actually operated by Hitler to
prepare the implementation of his “redemptive” anti-Semitism once he had
full access to the public and b) how it was received by the public in such
a way as to allow the Nazis to implement the desired genocidal outcome
and to convince ordinary Germans to support or at least tolerate it. These
issues, which were crucial for the execution of the genocide, will be studied
in the following chapter.
4 The Public Presentation and
Reception of Anti-Semitic Imagery in
Nazi Germany
Wliat role did the body-parasite metaphor complex play during the rule of
National Socialism in Germany? Was it only a rehash of the imagery used
in Mein Kampf or did it undergo changes that can be related to political
developments over the period 1933-1945.? What discernible impact did it
have on the public: was it just a sinister accompaniment of the Holocaust
or was it instrumental in indoctrinating Germans to participate in or at
least tolerate the unfolding genocide? Physically, the Holocaust could have
happened without any propaganda (metaphorical or otherwise), but such a
“mute” genocide is extremely implausible given that the regime needed the
active participation of hundreds of thousands and the support, or at least
tacit toleration, of millions of Germans in their execution of the genocidal
programme. Research into the primary evidence, i.e. the secret intelligence
reports of popular opinion compiled by the GESTAPO and the SS’s spe­
cial “security service” [Sicherheitsdienst, short SD) as well as those by the
exiled Social Democrats [Sopade) until 1940,^ and from diaries, letters, etc.,
has established beyond doubt that the supposition of ignorance about the
Nazis’ anti-Jewish policy among a majority of Germany’s adult population
is a.myth.^ Even though these primary sources cannot be used uncritically,
due^ to the respective political bias of exaggerating the perceived political
consensus or dissent, depending on institutional and personal interests and
the limited knowledge of the authors,^ they reveal widespread awareness
of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish propaganda campaign and repressive/genocidal
policies, including numerous reports about mass-shootmgs“.
Crucially, tliey also contain evidence that the regime’s official “justi­
fication” of their anti-Semitic policies by way of framing their policy
announcements in the body-parasite scenario was taken up in the popu­
lation. Although Nazi propaganda has generally been well researched,'^
this role of body-related metaphors has largely been left unexplored. The
purpose of the following discussion is to establish to what degree these
metaphors were present in the public domain and how they were received.
As regards the first aspect, we shall focus on Hitler’s speeches and also on
some by his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Their use of body, ill­
ness and parasite imagery when referring to the relationship between the
44 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
German nation and “the Jew” was relayed endlessly by the controlled mass
media and was therefore sure to find a wide national and international
audience. Regarding the reception, we shall take the aforementioned secret
reports into consideration, as well as the secret diaries of Victor Klemperer,
a professor at Dresden University until 1935, who was considered to be
racially Jewish by the Nazis but survived the Nazi period thanks to being
married to a non-Jewish wife who stood by him. His secret diary, published
posthumously,^ provided the material for his 1945 analysis of the Language
o f the Third Reich.^ The period covered is that between 1930, when the
NSDAP won a significant share of votes in the general election of 17 Sep­
tember (18.3%, compared with 2.6% previously) and the end of World War
II in May 1945.
4.1 PREPARING THE PUBLIC FOR THE GENOCIDE:
THE BODY-PARASrrE SCENARIO IN NAZI
ANTI-SEMITIC PROPAGANDA, 1933-1939
The extreme socio-economic crisis in Germany that ensued as part of the
worldwide recession following the bank crash of 1929 lent itself, so to speak,
to the use of illness imagery. Even the plain-talking conservative chancel­
lor of the Centre Party, Heinrich Bruning, spoke of the urgent heed for a
political and social recovery {Gesundung) of the nation as a precondition for
regaining the ability to engage in reform policies.^ It was he, however, who
was the main target of Hitler and Goebbels’s accusations that the govern­
ment treated the “wounds on the German people’s body” by just “putting on
sticking plaster”,®instead of ridding the nation’s body of parasites.^ In a par­
liamentary speech in 1932, Goebbels attacked Briining’s austerity measures
as the equivalent of a “scientifically correct operation” that had “left the
patient dead”.^“ In the summer of that year, during the last general election
campaign of the Weimar Republic, he depicted the Reichstag parliament as
a “carcass” (Parlamentskadaver) whose “carrion stench” {Aasgestank) was
polluting the people and had to (be made to) disappear.^’
When he was finally appointed chancellor in January 1933, Hitler,
swiftly followed by Goebbels, proclaimed his government’s determination
to restore the nation’s body through a “reform of head and limbs [Refottn
an Haupt und Gliedern), echoing the famous formula from the time of
the Church Reformation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.’^ Three
months later, after a first nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses, Goeb­
bels declared German Jewry to be an “alien, separate nation with parasitic
characteristics” [artfremdes, streng abgeschlossenes Volk mit parasitdren
Eigenschaften), intent on sabotaging the national reform/healing process.^^
The boycott appears to have met with widespread indifference in the general
population and was called off after just one day^'* but was terrifying to Jew-
' ish people.i^ combination with the legal and professional discrimination
Presentation and Reception o f Anti-Semitic Imagery 45
against Jews (exclusion from the civil service including the whole of the
education system), continuous harassment, arbitrary arrests and a barrage
of radical, if vague, insults, it helped to drive 37,000 Jews out of Germany
within a year.^^
As regards public perception, it is difficult to gauge the salience of the
specifically anti-Semitic measures vis-a-vis the repression of other groups
such as Communists, Social Democrats and other political enemies of the
Nazis (who accounted for the vast majority of arrests, beatings and killings
in the “wild” torture chambers and camps and the circa 100,000 incarcera­
tions in concentrations camps over the course of 1933).*^ Among the politi­
cal poisons and illnesses that Hitler vowed to fight at the Nuremberg party
conference in September 1933,^® he named “Bolshevism” as the most dan­
gerous one. In Hitler’s belief system, Bolshevism was, of course, invented
by “the Jew”; hence Jews were the implicit target. They formed the core,
so to speak, of the vast group of targets/victims who stood in the way of
the Nazis’ vision of a homogeneous society. These groups also included the
physically and mentally disabled, the further supposed “race” of “gypsies”,
the Nazis’ “official” political adversaries (mainly socialists and commu­
nists but also members of other parties as well as clerics who refused to
acknowledge the supreme authority of the Nazi state), socially marginal
groups (“work-shy” people, beggars, vagrants, prostitutes), criminals and
the sexually “deviant” (mainly male homosexuals). All of them were stig­
matized and persecuted as parasites or pests- {Volksschadlinge) that dam­
aged the nation’s body^^
Zygmunt Baumann (2000) has described this forcible “re-formation” of
the German body politic as an “exercise in social engineering on a gran­
diose scale”. T h e lead metaphor of his analysis is that of “gardening” as
a characteristic of modern culture, intent as it is on creating an artificial
order: “The order, first conceived of as a design, determines what is a
tool, .what is a raw material, what is useless, what is irrelevant, what is
harmful, what is a weed or pest. It classifies all elements of the universe
by their relation to itself... . Modern genocide . . . is a gardener’s job. It is
just one of the many chores that people who treat society as a garden need
to undertake.” This characterisation emphasises-the-^eomple^nentary”
nature of repressive and genocidal policies that corresponds to the “con­
structive” aspects of the Nazis’ “perfectionist” design of an ideal society.
A^such, the gardening metaphor is compatible with the hygienic-medical
parasite-as-illness-agent metaphors: “Gardening and medicine are func­
tionally distinct forms of the same activity of separating and setting apart
useful elements destined to live and thrive, from harmful and morbid
ones, which ought to be exterminated. However, whilst the “gardening”
imagery aims to justify repressive and genocidal measures as “necessary
evils” of an overarching endeavour to achieve a perfect society, the special
function of body-based bio-medical imagery lies in the urgency
of radical exterminatory intervention. The danger posed by a parasite on
46 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
one's own body that is about to poison one’s bloodstream is of a different
order of intensity than that of a garden weed. The defensive reaction by the
host organism is also different: it is instinctive, immediate, involves terror,
revulsion and righteous aggression, and will not rest until the last vestiges
of the parasite are eliminated.
Baumann is, however, fight to stress that the genocidal “cleansing” ide­
ology, whether botanical or zoological in its source input, was not reserved
for Jewish targets alone but for all supposed forms of life “unworthy to
live” in the Nazi state. In the second year of his rule. Hitler even made an
example of his own comrades falling under the cleansing-as-extermination
maxim. In the so-called “Night of Long Knives” (30 June 1934) almost all
the leaders of the “storm troopers” [Sturmabteilung, SA), as well as a num­
ber of alleged co-conspirators (including Hitler’s immediate predecessor as
Re/c^s-Chancellor, General von Schleicher and his wife), were murdered
on the pretence of an alleged plot to overthrow his government. In the
Reichstag, Hitler presented the executions, which had taken place on his
orders but without any formal legal authority, as the “burning out, down
to the raw flesh” of “ulcers” [Geschwure) that had been caused to grow by
“poisoning”, specifically, “well-poisoning” {Brunnenvergiftung), echoing
the age-old anti-Jewish alleg atio n .T h e ambitious SA leadership under
Ernst Rohm may have indeed formed a threat to his own rule, but accord­
ing to Hitler it was the nation’s life that was in danger:
The nation must know that no one can threaten her existence . . . A na­
tion only has itself to blame if she does not find the strength to defend
herself against such parasites [Schddlinge].”'^"'
If Hitler was ready to sacrifice his own comrades as well as incur the oppro­
brium attendant on ordering the killing of members of the top ranks of the
traditional military and political establishment on account of their being
Schadlinge, then it was plain to all that inclusion in the parasite category
amounted to nothing less than a latent death warrant. The German pub­
lic, presented with the tale of an attempted coup d’etat (as well as with
lurid hints of “unspeakable” scenes in which SA leaders had been found
on arrest), showed for the most part relief as to the ensuing restriction of
the SA’s “rowdy” violence and admiration for the Fiihrer’s decisiveness in
cleansing {Sduberung, Reinigung) his own movement of Schadlinge, accord­
ing to underground rep o rts.V icto r Klemperer noted that the lack of legal
grounds for the executions was accepted as irrelevant on account of Hit­
ler’s authority as Fiihrer. He also reported that Goebbels attempted to link
the attempted coup d’etat to Jews.^^ A more tenuous connection—between
Jewish emigrants and the leadership of the SA, of all people—could hardly
be imagined. Most importantly, however, Hitler came out of the affair as
being resolute and “consistent”: he was regarded as having proven himself
firm enough to destroy any illnesses and parasites on the nation’s body,
Presentation and Reception of Anti-Semitic Imagery 47
even if it meant sacrificing his own comrades. He had acted as a heroic
healer who did not shy away from, eliminating parts of his own party’s
body to save the nation’s greater body. In this perspective, the Night of the
Long Knives needed no legal justification: it was an act of self-defence.
If in 1934 the National Socialist government had demonstrated its abil­
ity to cleanse itself, the Nuremberg Party rally of the following year pro­
ceeded to lay the legal foundation for, disposing of all alien bodies in the
nation. The party and in its wake the Reichstag passed the race laws “for
the Protection of German Blood and Honour” and a newly defined citizen­
ship, which excluded Jews from German citizenship and from marriage
or sexual relations with Germans; associated deprees stigmatized “less
valuable” handicapped people as well as “Gypsies, Negroes, and their
bastards”.^^ According to Hitler’s proclamation, “Jewish Marxism” was
the core “enemy within” which was now to'be fought relentlessly,^® whereas
other countries (“when we look around us”) still contained the “ferments
of decomposition” and the “elements of destruction”, on account of the
activities of Jewish emigrants.
In technical legal terms, the Nuremberg laws may have been over­
complicated as the supposed racial Jewish heredity was solely defined in
terms of ancestors’ religion. The resulting calculations of degrees of blood
admixture for anyone but a “full” Jew were the subject of endless debates
among Nazi jurists and administrators (up to the “Wannsee conference”
of 20 January 1942, which coordinated the already ongoing genocide).®^
Notwithstanding these technical problems, the laws sufficed to ensure that
“proof that one was not of Jewish origin or did not belong to any ‘less valu­
able’ group became essential for a normal existence in the Third Reich”.
Any connection with Jews now carried the threat of criminalisation. For
Jews were not just being segregated from German society; they were now
systematically linked to crime and deviancy under the parasite/pest label
in police reports, party speeches and the Nazi press.®^ Particular emphasis
was laid on the link to sex crimes. The “prototypical” blood-poisoning sce­
nario of the rape and/or seduction of non-Jewish victims by Jews, which, as
we-saw, occupied a central place in Hitler’s imagination was continuously
reinforced by the “popular” outlets of anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda, such
as Julius Streicher’s Der StMrwen”
With the Nuremberg laws, the Reich’s highest legal experts went to great
lengths to describe precisely all sexual activities that might be subsumed
uif^der the label of Rassenschande.^^ With such official backing, party mem­
bers as well as “ordinary” citizens now engaged in the business of denun­
ciations.®^ The pornographic racist “male fantasies” (Theweleit 1980) that
had always been a central part of anti-Semites’ obsessions were made legal
and social reality. In order to fit “real” experiences to the stereotype of
“the Jew” as a sexual parasite and predator, the Nazis did not shy away
from provoking or enacting the supposedly “typical” behaviour. Sopade
reports mention, for instance, the “coincidental” public kissing of a Jewish
 Presentation and Reception o f Anti-Semitic Imagery 49
48 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
approach to public opinion management as regards the “Jewish question”.
doctor by two female patients to effect his arrest as a race defiler^ and
Goebbels uses the insider knowledge of his audience of party propaganda
the case of two teenage sweethearts being chased by Nazis into a dark
experts about anti-Jewish policies to instruct them to (mis-)inform the Ger­
alleyway to justify their arrest of the Jewish boy on a charge of attempted
man and international public on a cynically applied “need-to-know” basis.
rape.^^ The “Jewish question” was now inextricably tied to the taboo area
He lays the main emphasis on deceiving Jews who are still living in Nazi
of criminal(ised) sexuality; Jewish people and anyone who might befriend
Germany, but underlying this trick is a differentiation of the general public
them were constantly threatened with public humiliation, conviction for
into groups of distinct degrees of political understanding. Going from the
- race defilement and subsequent transportation to a concentration camp.^^
centre to the periphery, these groups would include: 1) the innermost circle
The multiple source-target blend of the blood-poisoning-parasite scenario
of the party and SS leaders who were agreed on eliminating Jews from
had become a self-fulfilling stigmatization technique: the (metaphorical)
the German nation, 2) the colluding members of the old elites (in military,
Jewish parasite identity was linked to supposedly real criminal behaviour
administrative, legal, and economic functions, who were needed—and gen­
and this in turn was portrayed as particularly abhorrent due to its alleged
erally willing—to “work towards the Fuhret”), 3) various circles of party
link with the “Jewish” core parasite group.
officials and members who were relatively well-informed as regards Nazi
At the same time, despite the maximally stigmatizing rhetoric and the
policy aims but had to be kept under discipline until violent action would
legally binding force of the Nuremberg decrees. Hitler was careful not to
become opportune, 4) the general, non-committed German and interna­
spell out all the genocidal consequences of the body-parasite scenario just
tional public, 5) resistance and victim groups who should be kept in the
yet. No less a propaganda expert than Goebbels provides us with an expla­
dark until it was too late for them to take counter-measures.**®
nation of this aspect in a special, non-public speech to party functionaries
Goebbels’s praise for Hitler’s 1935 speech at Nuremberg as a model of
at the Nuremberg rally of 1935. He hailed Hitler’s speech as exemplary
how to present measures against the Jewish parasite appears to have been
because it introduced the most stringent and menacing anti-Jewish mea­
proven right by the public reaction. The Nuremberg race laws were seen as
sures by way of a drip-feed tactic designed to address at the same time
reining in the “rowdy” violence of local party groups, which though ideo­
several audiences (including the victims!) and satisfy their needs to know
logically “on the right lines”, proved embarrassing for the Nazi leadership
and to hope: due to their ostentatious, savage violence. Both the SD and the resistance
reports note tacit approval among large parts of the public as the legisla­
[You have to always leave the ending open] just as the FUhrer did in
tion was expected “to restore calm to the street”. Even people who were
his masterly speech yesterday: ‘We hope that the laws concerning the
neutral to or critical of the Nazi regime were taken in by the Nazi leaders’
Jews have opened the chance for a tolerable relationship between the
assurances that reports about state terror, torture and race hatred against
German and the Jewish peoples and . . . ’ [laughter]. That’s what I call
the Jews were “atrocity propaganda” and that the Nazi “revolution” was
skill'. That works'. But if one had said immediately afterwards: Well,
these are today’s laws for the Jews; don’t think that’s everything; next the “least bloody” in world history.**^
month . . . there’ll be new ones so that in the end you’ll be back to be­ The control that Hitler and Goebbels had over the mass media meant
ing beggars in the ghetto—then it’s no surprise the Jews mobilize the that Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda could be turned on and off according to
whole world against us. But if you leave a little chance open to them, the need of differentially addressing the diverse layers of public opinion in
Germany and the world. In 1936, for instance, during the Olympic Games,
then the Jews will say, ‘Hey, if we start atrocity propaganda from out­
copies of Der Sturmer disappeared from display in Berlin, as a gesture
side, it’ll be worse, so let’s keep quiet, and maybe we can go on after
to placate international opinion. Even the assassinatipju>f--th&.Nazi rep­
air [laughter, applause].^®
resentative Wilhelm Gustloff by a Jewish student in Switzerland in Febru­
ary 1936 did not trigger anti-Jewish actions, on express orders.**^ One year
As their reactions show, no-one in Goebbels’s audience of party function­
later, however, the rabidly racist touring pseudo-documentary exhibition
aries was in any doubt that the destruction of the Jews’ social existence in
The Eternal Jew {Der ewige Jude) started to be shown throughout Ger­
Germany at the very least was the goal of the decrees proclaimed the day
many until 1939.*’“' At local and regional level, the terror against Jews and
before by the FUhrer. Spelling out their final outcome was, however, coun­
other groups defined as Schadlinge continued unabated.**^
ter-productive, according to Goebbels’s advice: it would be a premature
The overall success of this flexible strategy can be observed at the cli­
warning for the Jews inside Germany and alienate world opinion, which
max of pre-war public anti-Jewish policies in Nazi Germany, the so-called
could damage the still fragile German economic recovery. We have here
“Crystal Night” pogrom of 9-10 November 1938, which was staged as a
an instance not only of the general technique of tailoring propaganda and
“spontaneous” outbreak of popular fury over the assassination of Ernst
information policies to popular o p in io n ,b u t also of the differentiated
 50 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
vom Rath, a German Embassy official in Paris, by the seventeen-year-old
Pole Herschel Grynspan (whose family had been among 16,000 people
forcibly deported to Poland in October, as part of the Third Reich’s mea­
sures to expel Jews)/^ To keep up the pretence of spontaneity, Hitler did
not issue official orders in his capacity as Chancellor of the Reich and it was
not the ordinary “order police” but SA, SS and GESTAPO who carried out
the burning of synagogues and Jewish shops in cities, towns and villages
-up and down the country, the ransacking of homes and violence that cost
hundreds of lives and led to the arrest of about 30,000 Jewish men, as well
as 300-500 suicides."*^ The violence had been as ostentatious as possible
in order to “intimidate as many Jews as possible into leaving Germany”/®
Reactions in the German public, as recorded by the SD and GESTAPO
and in the Social Democrat resistance reports, ranged from isolated offers
of help and protests over displays of shame and embarrassed silence to
expressions of fear of negative foreign reactions and anger at the wanton
destruction of property and, from the Nazi faithful, wholehearted endorse­
ment of utmost brutality/^ Still, the chief Nazi (and by then, national) daily
newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, claimed that “not a single hair had
been touched on a Jewish head”/° Such brazen denial can hardly count
as an efficient attempt at covering up the extreme violence vis-a-vis either
the German or the world public/^ Rather, it turned the victims and their
treatment, in the words of the historian Marion A. Kaplan, “into the object
of a general, hateful taboo’V^ k®- ^ very special kind of “open secret” that
was commonly known but unspeakable and thus, not truly “open”—in
fact, even its status as a secret was, officially, secret/^ Less paradoxically,
Kershaw (2008) speaks of the “exceptional sphere of politics” to which
the whole “Jewish question” belonged (together with the Fiihrer myth as
its opposite), as distinct from “everyday” culture in Nazi Germany, which
allowed for a relatively high degree of conflict, dissent and complaint/** By
contrast, the “exceptional sphere” comprised core topics and attitudes that
were focused on “distant utopian goals” and in relation to which “rejection
of National Socialism and opposition to its policies played as good as no
role whatsoever”/^ From the Nazi propaganda viewpoint, the Kristallnacht
pogrom would then have been problematic insofar as it brought the perse­
cution of Jews back into the sphere of “everyday” experience and made its
brutality visible to too many people who were still outsiders.
It was the Fiihrer himself who, true to Goebbels’s praise back in 1935,
would provide an example of how to reveal parts of the “open taboo”
whilst still keeping it safely in the “exceptional sphere” of the nation’s
“highest” concerns. And again, it was his use of the body-parasite sce­
nario that was instrumental in achieving this effect. A little more than
two months after the Kristallnacht pogrom, on 30 January 1939, Hitler
addressed the Reichstag on the occasion of the sixth anniversary of his
accession to power, listing for more than two hours his seemingly trium­
phant achievements. For the future, he promised more of the same, even
Presentation and Reception of Anti-Semitic Imagery 51
if Germany should be “dragged into a w ar” (which had only narrowly
been avoided in the Sudetenland crisis in the preceding year). For such an
eventuality, he had a “prophecy” that would be fulfilled as precisely as all
his other predictions always had been:
I have very often in my lifetime been a prophet and have been mostly
derided. At the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance
the Jews who only greeted with laughter my prophecies that I would
some day take over the leadership of the state and of the entire people of
Germany and then, among other things, also bring the Jewish problem
to its solution. I believe that this hollow laughter of Jewry in Germany
has already stuck in its throat. I want today to be a prophet again: if
international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed
in'plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be
not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Europe,
but the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Europe!^^
This threat of extermination has often been quoted as the definite announce­
ment of Hitler’s genocidal intentions against the European Jews,^^ and it
is not just with the benefit of hindsight that such an interpretation seems
correct. After all, at the start of 1939 the “outbreak” of a war was not
exactly unlikely, as Hitler’s annexations in 1938 had only been achieved on
the basis of massive threats of military aggression. It was also well known
that Hitler regarded Jews at the very least as a liability for Germany at
war, given their supposed track record of treason in World War I.^® The
“prophecy” was the climax of an extended passage in Hitler’s speech that
dealt almost exclusively with the “Jewish question”. Starting with a sar­
castic allusion to the hypocrisy of “democratic states” that “shed crocodile
tears for the poor, oppressed Jewish people” but were so “hard-hearted
as to eschew their duty to help them”,^^ Hitler portrayed Germany as a
nation that over the centuries had allowed the Jews, who “had nothing
of their own, except for political and sanitary diseases”, to infiltrate and
sponge off it until they had turned the Germans into beggars in their own
country. Hitler paid lip service to the principle that the earth might “have
roqm enough to accommodate the Jews”, but he insisted that the condi­
tion for a satisfactory solution of the “Jewish '^estldfi’n iad to be the end
of the misconception “that the good Lord had meant the Jewish nation to
spqnge off a certain percentage of the body and productive work of other
nations” {Nutzniefler am Korper und an der produktiven Arbeit anderer
Volker zu sein)A^ If Jewry would not join the “constructive work of other
peoples”, however, it would “succumb to a crisis of unimaginable sever­
ity” {Krise von unvorstellbarem Ausma(^e)A^ This prediction was followed
by the “prophecy”; and it, in turn, was reiterated with the slight variation
that in case of a new “senseless” war “that only served Jewish interests”,
the world would see the same result of an “enlightenment” about their
52 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
true aims as had been effected in Germany within a few years, i.e. Jewry’s
“complete demise”/^
With the historical hindsight of what happened after 1939, it is almost
impossible not to read Hitler’s "prophecy” as a kind of precis of the geno­
cide to come, phrased, of course, with his own ideological “spin” of blaming
the Jews in advance for what he wanted to do to them later. In the context
of the speech and the historical situation, however, the prophecy is based
on the metaphoric scenario of Hitler’s anti-Semitic core ideology that had
been established since the 1920s, complete with the body-parasite source,
its political application, its metaphysical extrapolation to God’s plan for the
peoples of the earth, and the apocalyptic goal of a “purifying” catastrophe,
i.e. the complete destruction of the parasite. The prophecy is thus almost
tautological in view of the preceding prediction of a “crisis of unimaginable
severity” for Jewry; it only specifies one precise further condition, i.e. the
outbreak of a world war. The main difference to the scenario exposition in
Mein Kampf was thus not the content of the prophecy but its topicality in
view of the impending world war.
By leaving a minimal room of conditionality and the need to “trans­
late” the figurative into literal “annihilation”, the 1939 prophecy still con­
formed to the tactics that Goebbels had praised so highly in '1935. Even
Victor Klemperer appears to have attached no special ominous significance
to it, although he noted the speech in his diary as an instance of Hitler’s
trick “to make all his enemies into Jews”.^** The prime audience who were
intended to embrace the “disingenuous” but logically still possible reading
of a last hope for avoiding an “annihilation” outcome were, however, no
longer Jews in Germany but the general populace, who did not want to
believe that a world war was close. Foreign reporters such as the American
William Shirer as well as the secret reports of the exiled Social Democrats
and the SS Sicherheitsdienst all indicate widespread anxiety at the prospect
of war in September 1938 during the Sudetenland crisis and massive relief
and hope for a lasting peace after its seeming “resolution” in the Treaty of
Munich.^^ In the run-up to the following “crises” over the fate of the remain­
ing Czechoslovakian state and the Danzig/“corridor” conflict with Poland,
the pretence of striving for a peaceful resolution was kept up.^^ Those who
wanted to believe in the Nazi leadership’s “peaceful” intentions—even if
only out of sheer despair—could still dismiss the prophecy as exaggerated
propaganda oratory. On the other hand, the predictions of annihilation/
demise/crisis of unimaginable severity were strong enough to indicate to
anyone that engaging with the “Jewish question” was “exceptional”, a mat­
ter of the highest importance. The status of the Jews as a “hateful taboo”
was thus reinforced for various audiences at the same time: fervent Nazis
(and anyone with the ambition to make a career in the state apparatus) were
encouraged in redoubling their efforts to join in anti-Semitic actions; mod­
erate supporters and non-committed citizens were reassured that the state
would find a “solution” for the “Jewish question”; sceptics and doubters
Presentation and Reception o f Anti-Semitic Imagery 53
-were warned to leave this non-negotiable core concern of Nazi ideology to
those in power; and those who considered opposing the Nazi regime were
left in no doubt as to the fateful consequences for themselves were they to -
hinder the regime in carrying out its genocidal intentions.
4.2 FULFILLING THE PROPHECY OF PARASITE ANNIHILATION:
VICTORY AS RACIAL THERAPY, 1939-1943
The 1939 prophecy must have been an object of considerable pride for
Hitler, for he referred to it later several times, especially in the anniver­
sary speeches of 30 January 1941 and 1942. Hitler consistently misdated
the prophecy to 1 September 1939, i.e. the day of the attack on Poland,
which started the Second World War.^^ His error was telling, if not delib­
erate: by 1941/42, Hitler considered his prophecy’s premise—of the out­
break of a new world war that had been started by the Jews—as fulfilled
and therefore saw himself as legitimised to carry out its conclusion, i.e.
the therapy of Europe’s illness by way of genocide. In January 1941, in a
speech predominantly devoted to attacking Britain for its unwillingness
to accept his various “peace offers”, Hitler used a slightly vaguer formula­
tion than “annihilation”: now, he spoke of his “hint” {Hinweis) of 1939
that “the whole of Jewry will have ceased to play a role in Europe” {das
gesamte Judentum [wird] seine Rolle in Europa ausgespielt haben).^^ The
“evidence” he cited for the prediction coming true is the assertion that one
nation after another was accepting the German “understanding of raCce”
(Rassenerkenntnis)-, only British politicians, due to “softening of the brain”
caused by Jewish emigrants, were unable to see this “truth”, but he hoped
that even “those who were still enemies at present” would one day recog­
nize their true “inner enemy”.^^
This 1941 version of the prophecy fits in with the ongoing relentless pro­
paganda effort of reinforcing the two key tenets of supposedly corroborat­
ing evidence for the Nazi interpretation of the war at that stage: 1) German
superiority, as “demonstrated” by the successful military campaigns in
Poland, Benelux, France, Denmark, Norway dj^n g 1939:::4D,Z£.and 2) the
depravity of Jewish parasite that waa close to meeting its deserved come­
uppance at the hands of the victorious German forces. This triumphant
confirmation -of the Fuhrer’s prophecy probably found its most explicit
articulation in the film The eternal Jew {Der ewige Jude), which together
with The Rothschilds {Die Rothschilds) and Jew Siiss {Jud Siiss) formed the
infamous mini-series of three films commissioned by Goebbels in 1939 to
bolster anti-Semitism.^^
By late autumn 1940, when The Eternal Jew appeared in the cinemas,
“ordinary” Germans had witnessed an extraordinary year. The country had
been at war since September 1939, and had witnessed a series of Blitzkrieg-
triumphs that were without precedent and put most of continental Europe
54 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
between the Atlantic and the borderline with Soviet Russia under direct
German control. By autumn 1940, the only enemy nation that had entered
the war in 1939 that was left was the United Kingdom, which according
to Nazi propaganda was isolated and certain to surrender at some point.
Relations with the USSR were officially amicable, with foreign affairs com­
missary Molotov visiting Berlin in November. Secretly, the Nazi leadership
was making plans for the invasion of the USSR but these were obviously
not publicised. In terms of the general strategic situation, the Reich thus
seemed secure, almost unassailable.
As regards the Jewish population, the Altreich had seen the first mass
deportations in February 1940 from Pomerania to the Lublin ghetto in
occupied Poland, and in October from Baden and the Palatinate to occu­
pied F ra n c e ,a s well as a series of anti-Jewish laws and administrative
regulations that furthered their systematic isolation from the non-Jewish
population. They included the introduction of the “Jewish” names “Israel”
and “Sara” on identification documents and the forced removal to the
so-called JudenhduserJ^ Whilst real Jewish people were forced to retreat
and disappear from actual public life, their supposed collective identity
was reinvented according to the Nazi ideological model in the three
above-mentioned anti-Semitic propaganda filrns.^^ The three films were
accorded massive resources as well as careful planning, with detailed input
from both Goebbels and Hitler.^®
Whilst the most successful of the three films, Jud Suss, concentrated on
the biography of one individual, i.e. the negative hero Joseph Suss-Oppen-
heimer, and the much less successful (and subsequently rewritten and re-re-
leased) Die Rothschildts provided a historical sketch of the bankii^ family’s
rise to financial world domination at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, The
Eternal Jew was presented as a documentary, as its sub-title asserts: “A film
contribution to the problem of world Jewry” {Ein Filmbeitrag zum Problem
des Weltjudentums). The film promised to reveal the “true” identity of “the
Jew”, which was not easily visible from the “civilised” West and Central
European, including German, Jewry due to their clever camouflage.
This revelation of the “true” Jewish national/racial character had been
made possible by the German victory over Poland: only now could the Jews
be seen, according to the voice-over, at their “nesting site” (Niststdtte).
The film introduces Jews as the “origin of plague in humanity” [Pestherd
der Menschheit). In the first place, this is visualised by pictures of “dirty
and neglected” Jewish living quarters—schmutzig und verwahrlost, as the
speaker states. Soon afterwards, the “systematic” categorisation follows:
Jews are proclaimed to be a “people of parasites” (ein Volk von Parasiten),
followed by the “explanation” (referenced to a quotation from Richard
Wagner’s anti-Semitic writings) that “wherever a sore has opened on a
nation’s body, they will settle and feed on the decaying organism” (Immer
dort wo sich am Volkskorper eine Wunde zeigt, setzen sie sich fest und
ziehen aus dem verfallenden Organismus ihre Nahrung). The motifs of
Presentation and Reception of Anti-Semitic Imagery 55
sponging, decay, decomposition and illness are continued throughout the
film and applied to religious, artistic, economic and political issues.
The myth of the “Wandering Jew” (Ahasverus) is not dwelt on as such,
but the theme of Jewish migration forms a central motif of the film. It is
conceptually reinforced at three levels:
a) Jewish ethnic migration over the past 4,000 years, starting from
Mesopotamia, via Egypt, Canaan and later advancing through the
Greek and Roman empires to all of Europe and, after reconsoli­
dation in Eastern Europe (following the “defensive” anti-Jewish
medieval pogroms in Western Europe), across the world.
b) The “exemplary” case of the famous Rothschild family, whose
banking empire has migrated and spread from one banking house
in Frankfurt first over Europe and then the whole world; they
represent the prototype of the alleged global influence of finance
Jewry, whose catastrophic consequences for all nations are illus­
trated by the banking crises of the 1920s.
c) In direct analogy and supported by inter-cutting and commentary
assertions, Jewish migration patterns are identified with the migra­
tion patterns of parasitizing vermin, specifically rats that spread
diseases such as “plague, leprosy, typhoid, cholera, dysentery”.
The analogy of Jews-as-race/nation and Jews-as-a-clan/class with illness­
spreading rats formed a concentrated filmic visualisation of the body-par­
asite scenario that lay at the core narrative of the Nazi ’’solution” of the
"Jewish problem”.’^ The only possible inference from this analogy was that
the recipe for success in combating epidemic-spreading vermin had to be
applied to their supposed human counterparts, i.e. annihilation. Whilst
the images of rats may have been “topped” in terms of sheer gore by the
reconstruction scenes of ritual cattle slaughter (which were advertised as
such through special captions warning the “sensitive” parts of the audience
to look away and were omitted from screenings for youths), the illness­
spreading migration o f parasites formed the conceptual basis for charac­
terising Jewry as a mortal danger: it identified the featuresj)£.an, “eternal
parasitic existence” as the features of the ,‘^Eternal Jew” (Die Ziige des
ewigen Schmarotzertums— die Ziige des Ewigen Juden).
The end of the film, in the words of the contemporary review magazine
u e r deutsche Film, provided “a return to the light” for the audience. “Ger­
man people and German life surround us once more. It is as if we have
travelled to distant parts and we feel the difference that separates us from
the Jew with a horrifying shudder.”^^ The Fiihrer’s measures to deal with
the parasite are recalled: prohibition of kosher slaughtering in 1933, the
Nuremberg laws of 1935 and as the climax, the clip of his 1939 prophecy,
announcing the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. After that, the
film wallows in pictures of Aryan boys and girls, banners, marching music
56 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
and marching troops that take the German viewers back into the present
of autumn 1940.
Was The Eternal Jew just a filmic repeat, then, of Hitler’s previous state­
ments, or did it make a new contribution to the propagandistic preparation
of the Holocaust? Generally, its themes would have been familiar to anyone
in Germany who had been exposed to Nazi propaganda in the years before.
The scenes from Polish ghettos, supposedly giving an objective impression
of Jewish life there, had been shown in many a Wochenschau reel as well
as in the campaign “documentary” Feldzug in Polen, which was directed
by the same director as The Eternal Jew, Fritz Hippier.®*^ The equation of
Jews and illness-carrying parasites could not have come as a surprise to
anyone who had lived consciously through the preceding years. But the
film’s “innovative” contribution to the campaign of familiarising Germans
with the plan for genocide lay in the direct link it constructed between the
body-parasite scenario and Hitler’s prophecy.
This link had been included already in his 1939 speech itself but was
implicit in the extended passage vilifying the Jews, which as a whole was
“par for the course” of Nazi anti-Semitic rhetoric.®^ Crucially, at that time
the possibility of war was a threat, not reality. Since then, the antecedent
of his conditional statement had become true: war had broken out. In this
context, Hitler’s misdating of the speech to 1 September 1939 is significant:
apparently, he wanted the prophecy to have been made on the occasion of
the outbreak of war, so that the consequence—annihilation of all Jewish
people in Europe—would be more noticeable. The film, corrected, as it
were, the mis-timed announcement by re-contextualising both the scenario
and the prophecy of the situation in the new time frame of autumn 1940.
Now the parasite race was exposed for what it was: its trail of migration
and devastation throughout the world could be “scientifically” proven, and
the prophecy could be corroborated by evidence. What remained to do was
to -draw the practical conclusion from it and make the Eiihrer’s prediction
come true completely.
The film opened on 28 November 1940 in thirty-six cinemas in Berlin
alone®^ and on the same day in film theatres all over Germany, accompa­
nied by a huge advertising campaign in -the form of posters, promotional
material and newspaper reviews. Following on from Die Rothschilds
{released in July) and Jud Siiss (released in September), it was doubtless
intended to put the finishing touches to the anti-Semitic indoctrination of
the general populace. However, the ticket sales soon fell off, as the film
followed too soon after the popular success of JudSuss.^^ The Eternal Jew
had been released into an already partly saturated market and it made less
easy viewing than Jud Siiss’ with its engrossing plot and the vivid, engaging
performances by popular actors such as Ferdinand Marian, Werner Krauss
and Kristina Soderbaum. Hence, the audiences for The Eternal Jew were
from the start smaller than those for Jud Siiss and fell away after the initial
performances.®*’
Presentation and Reception o f Anti-Semitic Imagery 57
However, as Saul Friedlander has emphasized, “the commercial success
of Jud Siiss and the limited commercial appeal of Der Ewige Jude should
not be viewed as contrary results in terms of Goebbels’s intentions . . . both
films can be considered two different facets of an endlessly renewed stream
of anti-Jewish horror stories, images, and arguments”.®^ Where Jud Siiss
told an engaging human story, Der Ewige Jude purported to be informa­
tive, objective, scientific. It could not be expected to become a blockbuster
but was still a perfect blueprint for genocide propaganda “in the age of
technical reproduction” (Walter Benjamin): its images reappeared in count­
less posters and pamphlets. Prior to and during the onslaught on the Soviet
Union in 1941 the film was shown to the Wehrmacht and police units that
were directly involved in the mass murders of Jewish civilians; it even found
its way into the killers’ training journals and manuals:
The word of the Fiihrer that a new war, instigated by Jewry, will not
bring about the destruction of anti-Semitic Germany but rather the
end of Jewry is now being carried out. The gigantic spaces of the east,
which Germany and Europe have now at their disposition for coloniza­
tion, also facilitate the definitive solution of the Jewish problem in the
near future. This means not only removing the race of parasites from
power, but its elimination from the family of European peoples.®^
For the perpetrators, then, the combination of parasite scenario and Fiihrer
prophecy was a succinct and stimulating affirmation of what they were
engaging in, i.e. the genocidal killing of all Jewish persons they could get
hold of. However, what did "ordinary” bystanders, in Raul Hilberg’s
words,®^ or in the case of cinema audiences, spectators, make of this film
version of the parasite-annihilation scenario? The reports on popular opin­
ion compiled by the SS Sicherheitsdienst as well as by police divisions and
local or regional Nazi Party organizations give us a detailed, though not
necessarily objective or representative, picture. In January 1941, the SD
drew a first resume from the reports that had come in from all over the
Reich. Singled out for praise were the “proofs” that Eastern and Western
Jews were of the same race “deep down”, despite their differing outward
appearances, and that vermin and Jewish mi^mtion patterns and effects
were congruent. Hitler’s announcement of the “Jewish question’s” solu­
tion was said to have elicited “relieved and enthusiastic” applause.®® On
the other hand, the report conceded that the film attracted mainly the
“politically active” part of the population, whereas “the typical cinema-
goer”,- who had liked Jud Siiss, did not attend in greater numbers and was
indeed scared off by rumours about the disgusting slaughter scenes. The
demonstration of such “Jewish filth” was deemed unnecessary.®^ A local
report from rural Westphalia, where slaughter scenes would not have been
particularly shocking to the largely farming population, even came up with
the assessment that the film contents were all “well and good” but the form

58 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
of presentation rather “boring” {Das Dargestellte sei alles gut und richtig,
aber in der gebrachten Form etwas langweilig gewesen)?^
What is conspicuous by its absence is any hint of political comment,
let alone dissent. Of course, it is debatable to which degree such criticism
would have found entry into the SD reports. Any serious opponents or dis­
sidents would have been unlikely to attend such a film in the first place; if
they did, they would have been on their guard with regard to voicing their
true feelings to anyone beyond a small circle of friends, given the high levels
of surveillance, oppression and denunciation in Nazi public life/Neverthe­
less, the SD reports do contain reports of popular distancing behaviour
on other occasions, for instance, during the November 1938 pogroms and
also later during the war, when Goebbels’s attempts to denounce the Allied
bombing campaign or to exploit Soviet war atrocities as evidence of Jewish-
Bolshevik cruelty were not only met with scepticism but even relativised by
damning comparisons between these crimes and German treatment of the
Jews as well as of Polish and Russian civilians.^^ After all, the reports were
not intended in the first place to serve as evidence in the active prosecution
of opponents and dissidents but to “feel the pulse” of the populace. The
covert elicitation and evaluation of the reports was designed to circumvent
the caution that would prevent people from voicing dissent publicly.
Although it is notoriously difficult to draw conclusions from negative
evidence, the absence of any major dissenting voices from the film audiences
of 1940/41 can be interpreted at the very least as evidence that the message
of the Jew-as-parasite concept in The Eternal Jew did not strike the view­
ers as exceptional. Fervent Nazis (and anyone with the ambition to make a
career in the state and party apparatus) could feel encouraged in redoubling
their efforts to cleanse Germany of "the Jew”. Moderate supporters and
non-committed citizens were at least reassured that the Fiihrer had found
and was now implementing the final “solution” of the “Jewish question”;
for uncertain or wavering spectators, the combination of parasite imagery
and Fiihrer’s prophecy was at least sufficiently unambiguous to know in
general terms that the treatment of the parasitic Jews lay at the core of Nazi
rule and was therefore not to be interfered with. The sceptics and doubters
were warned to leave this non-negotiable part of Nazi ideology to those in
power. Anyone who contemplated opposing the Nazi regime’s core project
or thwart the Fiihrer was left in no doubt as to the fateful consequences for
themselves and their family and friends. The combination of the prophecy
and the body-parasite scenario thus still fulfilled the remit set by Hitler and
Goebbels: whilst being unambiguously encouraging for their followers, it
also catered for the different audiences across the whole spectrum of Ger­
man popular opinion.
The Eternal Jew spelt out the necessity of genocide in “graphic” detail—
but still only in the form of an analogy. Following the analogical argument,
everyone could know what the “real” application of the racial parasite ther­
apy implied, i.e. genocide, but on the other hand, the film, just as a speech
Presentation and Reception o f Anti-Semitic Imagery 59
or text based on the analogy, still demanded a minimum of inferential
operation on the part of the audience in order to be fully “understood”. The
public were led to the intended conclusion but had to make the crucial infer­
ence (i.e. from the body-parasite scenario to the annihilation outcome) for
themselves. This inference from analogy demanded more cognitive effort
than the reception of a non-literal statement about the genocide (which was
never officially made) would have demanded.^^ The film thus left no doubt
about what the Nazis were planning for the Jews but the responsibility for
accepting this knowledge was left with the audience, thus making them
accomplices of the genocide.
After the invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941, which was to deliver an
additional 2.5 million Jews into his h a n d s,H itle r repeated his trick from
1939 of blaming the whole conflict on “world Jewry”;^*^ but now he could
set in motion a truly Europe-wide campaign of destruction against the par­
asite race. Accordingly, during the summer and autumn of 1941, SS Ein-
satzgruppen, police reserve battalions, and Wehrmacht troops started mass
killings that quickly developed into the wholesale annihilation of local and
regional communities.^^ During the campaign, Hitler’s 1939 “prophecy”
about the annihilation of Jewry, linked to references to Jews as parasites,
appeared time and again in the letters of perpetrators and training journals
for Order Police units.^^
After-the defeat of the German offensive outside Moscow and the United
States’ entry into the war in December 1941, however, the context of the
genocidal campaign and its propagandist^ support changed. The suppos­
edly Jewish-controlled USSR had shown its ability to fight back, which
even Hitler had to acknowledge in p u b lic ,a n d the Western war coalition
had strengthened immeasurably. The threat to eliminate the European Jews
had no further use as a means of blackmailing or intimidating other states,
nor could the mass murder be postponed so as to provide an “addendum”
to a quickly completed military victory, for it was evident that the war
would last for a considerably longer period.^®
Hitler implicitly admitted as much in his speech to a popular rally in
Berlin on 30 January 1942 when he presented the alternative that the war
could only end “either with the obliteration.©f'th'e'rAry^peoples or the
disappearance of Jewry from Europe” {dafS'entweder die arischen Volker
ausgerottet werden oder dafl das Judentum aus Europa verschwindet).
His response to the rhetorical question—’’which outcome .would it be?”—
was to recite his prophecy of “annihilation”, this time embellishing it with
the reference to the “truly ancient Jewish law ‘An eye for an eye, and a
tooth for a tooth’”, which he promised to apply “for the first time” to the
Jews themselves. All of this was topped up with a further prediction that
the hour would come “when the most evil world enemy of all times will
have ended his role for a thousand years”.A c c o r d in g to Sicherheitsdienst
reports, the broadcasted speech was praised and the accusations against
. the Jews with the specific emphasis on the ‘Eye for an eye . . . ’ phrase were
60 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
interpreted as an indication that the Fiihrer’s “fight against the Jew was
being conducted with utmost consequence to its end and that soon the last
Jew would be deported {vertrieben) from the European continent”.^'^^ By
this time, the public evidence of the “utmost consequences” was unavoid­
able: since autumn 1941, the remaining German Jews had to wear the open
stigma of the yellow star and their numbers dwindled due to the ever-ac­
celerating deportations to the East. From October 1941 onwards, any
public show of friendly relations or pity towards Jews by non-Jewish Ger­
mans was deemed an offence worthy of arrest and, in “serious cases”, of
imprisonment in a concentration camp.’°^
Hitler’s repeated public references to the “fulfilment” of the annihilation
prophecy against European Jewry as a therapy of Germany and Europe’s
illness in 1941-42, which were recycled time and again by Goebbels,^®** left
no doubt that he regarded the now ongoing genocide as the realization of
his greatest ambition and as “doing the Lord’s work”. The annihilation of
the Jewish parasite race was now made public to anybody who wished to
listen to it. In his Reichstag speech of 26 April 1942, Hitler reconfirmed
his redemptive-therapeutic scenario of what he saw as “world history in the
making” in such an emphatic manner that it left little room for any non-
genocidal interpretation:
Politically, this war is no longer about the interests of individual na­
tions but a conflict between those nations that want to assure their
members’ right to exist on this earth and those that have become the
will-less instruments of an international world-parasite [Weltparasit].
The true character of this Jewish international war-mongering has now
been revealed to the German soldiers and their allies in that country
where Jewry exerts its exclusive dictatorship .. . We know the theo­
retical principles and the cruel truth underlying the aims of this world
pestilence [Weltpest], Its name is “dictatorship of the proletariat” but
its reality is the dictatorship of the JewE°^
Even if Bolshevik Russia is at the moment the tangible product of this
Jewish infection, we must not forget that it is democratic capitalism that
provides the conditions for such an outcome. . . . In the first phase of
this process [the Jews] debase the masses of millions of people to help­
less slaves . . . Later, this is followed by the extermination of the people’s
national intelligentsia . . . What remains [of the people] is the beast in
man plus a Jewish class that, once it has taken over, will eventually, as
parasites [als Parasit], destroy the own host on which it has grown.^®^
These words echo the passages of Mein Kampf that we analysed earlier. In
contrast to its use in Mein Kam pf however, the body-parasite scenario is
presented here no longer as a general law or a prediction but as a fact that
Presentation and Reception of Anti-Semitic Imagery 61
can now be acknowledged. For Hitler, the Jewish parasite was now reap­
ing the just rewards for starting the new world war, and it would perish
together with its host nation. Germany’s war effort, led by its redeemer-
Fiihrer, was the surgical intervention that brought to fruition what was
in any case inevitable. This was Hitler’s own “truth” about the unfolding
Holocaust at the height of its implementation: still couched in parasite-
’’metaphoric” language but ostentatiously murderous.
Victor Klemperer saw in Hitler’s speech of April “intensification of
hatred to the highest degree of madness”, brought about by the method
of “combining secrecy and open threat”.^®’ He read it as a sign that the
“end” was imminent, not “five minutes before twelve” but “11.59 o’clock”
and whether Jews “would still live to the end of the day” was dubious.'
After he heard an older worker shouting at him “You Jewish swine” {Du
Judenluder), he concluded that for Jews perhaps even “11.59 o’clock” was
no longer the correct time.’°^ Nazis were evidently reassured by the speech,
as it “blamed the Jews for the military losses and the devastation inflicted
by the Allied bombing campaign”^® and thus confirmed the overall cogni­
tive frame in which the war against the Jewish world enemy was just and
successful. Caught in the middle, “ordinary Germans” were on the one
hand “no longer impressed by the propaganda” but unable to voice opposi­
tion, which would invariably elicit immediate prosecution; instead, tacit
opposition was visible from large-scale apathy and growing fears that the
genocide of the Jews would lead to Allied retaliation.” ^
However, during the summer of 1942, with both the systematic mass mur­
der of Jews and the new offensives in southern Russia advancing relentlessly,” ^
Hitler was still sufficiently confident to continue boasting of his prophecy
and to publicly emphasize its consequences with sadistic pleasure. At the end
of September, with the 6th Army seemingly poised to conquer Stalingrad, he
harked back to the alleged “mockery” of his prophecy by the Jews before he
came to power, a topic that had figured also in his 1939 and 1941 speech­
es.”!^ He facetiously wondered about “whether by now there were any left
who were still laughing at him” and promised that they would soon stop:
not just in Germany but “everywhere”.” ** Friedlander calls the prophecy’s
function by this time that of a “mantra announcing to all and sundry that
the fate of the Jews was sealed and soon none ^^uld^J:emaH^:44^^served as
a quasi-magical incantation to reassert Hitler’s double strategy of war and
genocide. In the anti-Semitic scenario as applied to the war situation, victory
on the battlefield ensured annihilation of the Jews by making their deporta-
tion/mass murder physically possible; the genocide, on the other hand, was
thought necessary to secure military success because it guaranteed, suppos­
edly, that there would be no resistance or “stabbing-in-the-back”.
However, with the catastrophic turnaround in Germany’s military for­
tunes at the battles of El Alamein and Stalingrad in late 1942/early 1943,
the strategic context changed irredeemably, whilst eyewitness reports and
62 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
rumours about the mass killings of Jews in occupied Poland and Russia
spread ever more widely in Germany.” ^ From this time onwards, Hitler’s
references to his 1939 prophecy seem to have ceased. Its propagandistic
usefulness had ended. With military victory over the Allies becoming less
likely if not impossible, the nexus between the prophecy’s two aspects—
military victory and “annihilation” of the European Jews—was broken.
As a consequence, the scenario started to be used on its own: no longer
a fulfilled promise of victory, it was now being presented as an insurance
against total defeat.
4.3 RACIAL THERAPY THROUGH GENOCIDE AS
AN END IN ITSELF: BODY-PARASITE IMAGERY
FOR THE “FINAL SOLUTION”, 1943-1945
On 30 January 1943, when the anniversary of the Nazi “power seizure”
effectively coincided with the final capitulation of the 6th Army at Stalin­
grad, Hitler’s ritual anniversary speech, read over the radio by Goebbels,
stated that only the National Socialist idea could put an end to “the Jew’s”
warmongering and its effects of “tearing apart” [zerfleischen] and “decom­
posing” {zersetzen) humanity.” ^ The same imagery was used by Goebbels
in his infamous “total war” speech of 18 February 1943, in which he inter­
preted the loss of the 6th Army as a “sacrifice” that could only be honoured
if the rest of the nation fought on with “total” commitment, lest a truly
apocalyptic alternative to a German victory should become reality (which
uncannily resembled the actual devastation wrought by Nazi Germany on
Europe at the time):
Behind the advancing Soviet divisions we can already see the Jewish exe­
cution commandos and behind them we see the terror, the spectre of mil­
lions starving and complete anarchy in Europe. International Jewry thus
proves itself to be the devilish ferment of decomposition [das teuflische
Ferment der Dekomposition], feeling as it does an outright cynical plea­
sure in plunging the world into the deepest chaos and causing the demise
of age-old civilizations, which it never had a part in.“ ®
With breathtaking rhetorical and ideological audacity, Goebbels transformed
the Soviet victory, which had just resulted in the loss of 300,000 men and a
major retreat of the German forces, into a negative “proof” of the truth of the
body-parasite scenario: it showed what a complete defeat of German forces
would result in, i.e. the destruction of European/German civilization by the
ferment of decomposition. This confirmation of the real possibility of a cata­
strophic outcome was, of course, still linked to the reassurance that Germany
had a chance to avoid it: if only the whole nation followed the Fiihrer and
intensified her war effort, she would still win through. The radical measures
Presentation and Reception of Anti-Semitic Imagery 63
necessary to stop the “Jewish infection” and the sacrifices that the nation
would have to make would amount to a “surgical intervention” [operativen
Schnitt] that might feel and look gruesome but that was absolutely necessary
if the redeemer-healer were to save the patient.^^^
Goebbels’s speech was meant to “defeat defeatism” inside Germany
and convince the enemies that any hope of a German surrender or immi­
nent collapse was futile.^^° Klemperer, who read it in a Dresden newspaper
(to which he had only access through a sympathising lawyer), noted the
implicit double threat against the remaining Jews and all Germans who
might stand in the way of a “total war”.^^’ For all the emphasis on the “cer­
tainty” of a final therapy, the very urgency of Goebbels’s “appeal-by-way-
of-threat” underlined the probability of the apocalyptic scenario-outcome,
i.e. total defeat. There is evidence that such disingenuous reception of Nazi
propaganda was not confined to special, particularly sensitive readers such
as Klemperer but became more widespread over the course of 1943. Goeb­
bels’s attempt later that year to utilize the discovery of the remains of several
thousand Polish officers in Katyn as “proof” of Bolshevik-Jewish atrocities,
for instance, appears to have largely backfired. The huge publicity given to
the finds created genuine fear of Soviet-Jewish revenge atrocities following
a defeat of Germany and led to comparisons between the murder of the
Polish officers and the German “treatment” of Jews, and even to suspicions
that the mass graves had been made for Jews.’^^ For such a comparison to
be made, knowledge of the Jewish holocaust and of its ethical status as an
atrocity had to be presupposed. The chief implementers of the genocide
acknowledged as much when they emphasised the need to maintain secrecy
about the actual (“literal”) killings. In the summer of 1943, M artin Bor-
mann, chief of the “party chancellory”, gave orders to ensure that NSDAP
officials only referred to the “conscription” of Jews for “deployment of
labour” in the East,^^^ and in October of that year, the Keichsfiihrer SS,
Heinrich Himmler, told the top brass of the SS that the extermination of
the Jews would was a “page of glory” in their history that had to remain
publicly unmentionable forever.’^'’
At the same time, the regime redoubled its efforts to inculcate,in the
German public opinion the absolute necessity of the annihilation of the
Jewish parasite, e.g. by way of “information” gampaigns-such-as-one enti­
tled “The Jew as World Parasite” [Der Jude als Weltparasit). Even these
campaigns, however, elicited ambivalent, or at best “politically correct”,
responses, according to the secret party and SD reports.^^^ Again it was not
the scenario as such that was doubted but the specific outcome: victory for
Germany or victory for “the Jew”. One report from Franconia in August
1944 went so far as to spell out the “negative” outcome as a summary of
general opinion:
The people are convinced that in case of a victory of the others \in-
folge eines nicht unserigen Sieges], Jewry will pounce on the German
64 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
people’s body [sich . .. auf den deutschen Volkskorper stiirzen] and
will make all its devilish and bestial plans, which have been publicized
by our press, reality. Therefore, our motto [must be]: death and annihi­
lation to the Jew; for us, the future and life.’^^
The report asserts that the view of “the Jew” as a threat to the German
nation’s body had finally found resonance in the population by 1944, but
only to lead them to the fatalistic expectation of a grim fate. The party had
little else to offer in response than the ritual reiteration of its “motto” with­
out outlining any strategy other than the murder of the Jews. If the report
could be taken as representative, it would indicate that the “annihilation”
of the Jews at the hands of the Germans was now seen as the initial part of
a total confrontation that was likely to bring down an apocalyptic revenge
upon the Germans (and which had already partly materialized in the Allied
bombing campaign).’^^ On the one hand, this conclusion might be called a
“success” of the sustained propaganda effort in favour of the annihilation
scenario; on the other hand, the fatalistic conclusion was the opposite of
the intended effect.
Even Goebbels and Hitler’s own use of body-illness/parasite scenario
seems to have been affected by the lack of a plausible victorious scenario
outcome from 1943 onwards. Goebbels favoured metaphors and similes
of Germany at this stage of the war as a sportsman (e.g. a long-distance
runner or boxer) whose body was totally exhausted and covered in injuries
but who could still win if only he managed to endure one minute lon­
ger than the opponents; the alternative would be the nation’s “biological
annihilation”.^^®Not only was the source concept of roughly equal bodily
strength between competitors misleading in view of the Allies’ vast superi­
ority over Germany in man- and firepower but the whole scenario was con­
tradictory. A contest of sheer endurance, which everyone can still survive,
is fundamentally different from a fight to the death in which only one of
the combatants survives at the expense of the other’s life. In the latter case,
injuries and exhaustion signal impending collapse and defeat. In the con­
text of German retreats on all fronts, Goebbels’s emphasis on the exhaus­
tion aspects and his warning of Germany’s own biological annihilation at
the hand of “the Jew” as parasite/enemy would most likely have triggered
despondency and fatalism rather than a renewal of the will to fight for the
Nazi cause. The basic scenario of a physical struggle o f the nation’s body
was thus still maintained but the prospect of its “inevitable” outcome was
certainly disheartening from the Nazi viewpoint.
The imagery of Hitler’s last speeches also suffered from inconsistencies
that exposed the appeal to pursue the survival/therapy-by-extinction as the
ravings of a “madman” (Klemperer),^^? ^hich made no attempt to sound
plausible. In the anniversary speech of 30 January 1944, Hitler included
an ironically intended depiction of enemy nations as slaves of interna­
tional Jewry who tried to “detoxify” their “home-grown Jewish bacteria”
Presentation and Reception o f Anti-Semitic Imagery 65
by submitting to them (literally, “stroking them”: . .. man [glaubt] .. . ,
durch untertdniges Streicheln die selbstgezuchteten jiidischen Bakterien
vielleicht entgiften zu konnen)}^^ Thanks to his own leadership, Germany,
on the other hand, was able to take decisive measures against the bacte-
riaP'^ Whilst the target-level reference of this metaphor application can be
assumed to be the parts of European Jewry who had survived the German
onslaught, including people freed by the Allies in their advance over previ­
ously German-held te rrito rie s,th e absurd source notion of “stroking bac­
teria” betrays the disintegration of Hitler’s bio-political scenario. Stroking
one’s own bacteria would have been implausible at any scenario level, even
within the conceptual metaphor system as outlined in Mein Kampf
Hitler’s broadcasted speech on the last anniversary of the 1933 “power
seizure” in January 1945 also lacked internal consistency, although he
no longer claimed that the enemies were stroking their bacteria. Instead,
he asserted that Britain as well as all European continental nations that
surrendered to the Allies would eventually suffer the fate of progressive
destruction and subsequent annihilation on account of the destructive (lit­
erally, decomposing) illness (auflosende Krankheit) of Bolshevism spread
by the “Kremlin’s Jews”.^^^ So far, the original scenario remained intact,
as a reiteration of the standard anti-Semitic illness narrative, with a cata­
strophic outcome. However, Hitler could not admit that this was truly the
end; he had to maintain that Germany would be exempt from the dire fate
of the other European nations and that the desperate urgency of its crisis
was at the same time the sign of Germany’s recovery.^^'^ This double target
application split the outcome of the body-parasite scenario into two mutu­
ally incompatible versions: annihilation of Europe that was surrendering to
“the Jew” and at the same time, the rescue of Germany (and following its
recovery that of Europe).
Hitler’s other recorded statements in the time up to his suicide on 30
April 1945, e.g. his proclamations to the party on 24 February, to the sol­
diers on the Eastern front on 13 April (by then some twenty miles from Ber­
lin) and his “political testament” of 29 April 1945 still condemned the Jews
as a “pestilence”, or “world poisoner” {Weltvergifter) but failed to give
any plausible narrative of how the desperate crisis of the illness that they
had allegedly caused would end; the speeches^Rly-containednhe manic
invocations of his will to avoid defeat.^^^ Xbe idea of rescuing Germany,
Europe and ultimately the whole world through annihilating the Jewish
parasite had turned into a reiteration of insults. Meanwhile, during the
last months and weeks of the war, SS and Gestapo, aided in some cases
by the Wehrmacht and police troops, completed as much of the originally
envisaged scenario implementation as possible by murdering as many of the
remaining Jewish prisoners as they could.^^^
Right up to the unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945, some people
still accepted fragments of the scenario narrative, e.g. that the German
defeat was a “victory of Bolshevism and international Jewry”,^®^ as noted
66 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
during the last months of the war by Victor Klemperer (who, together with
his wife, survived the bombing of Dresden on 13-14 Februaryand man­
aged to escape to Bavaria). As Klemperer noted, it was only the actual
experience of foreign occupation that generated retrospective sympathies
for resistance against Hitler’s regime (as well as a widespread sudden amne­
sia about Nazi persecution of Jews).^^® Having devoted, perforce, the past
twelve years under persecution to studying the language of his persecu­
tors, Klemperer had little hope that Nazi terminology and the ideology
contained in it would disappear overnight. When publishing his analysis of
“The Language of the Third Reich” in 1946-47, he noted that his young
post-war students continued to use Nazi jargon, seemingly unaware of its
murderous implications.^®^ Similar findings motivated Sternberger, Storz
and Siiskind to publish their articles on the “Lexicon of Inhumanity”.^“°
Research in the US occupation zone in 1946 documented anti-Semitic atti­
tudes among three fifths of the German population. Are such findings
proof that the Nazi “worldview” of the nation fighting for its life against
the Jewish parasite, as outlined in Mein Katnpf had remained unchanged
over the whole period of Nazi rule?
4.4 CONCLUSION
The evidence presented in this chapter indicates that whilst the core con­
cept of Jews as parasites on the body o f the nation remained unchanged
for the Nazi leadership throughout their rule, its public presentation as
part of the illness-therapy narrative changed in relation to the needs and
opportunities of its reception in the German populace. We can distinguish
three main phases in the “discourse career” of the body-parasite scenario
in-Nazi rhetoric. During the years 1933-1939, we find continued use of the
scenario in its “canonical”, fully fledged form, ranging over all source and
target levels from pseudo-metaphysical visions of fulfilling the “Creator s
will” by “removing” the Jew/parasite through associations with repulsive
physical illnesses and diseases to specific target-level allegations of criminal
acts, including “race- defilement”. This constant invocation of the body-
parasite scenario was coupled with ever more detailed legal, political and
socio-econpmic measures designed to destroy Jewish civil existence in Ger­
many. At the same time, however, given.the overall political context of
international appeasement policy, the Nazi leaders kept on denying and
camouflaging their anti-Semitic campaigns. As Goebbels stated in his unof­
ficial 1935 lecture on anti-Semitic propaganda tricks, the aim was to lull the
German populace, foreign states and even the Jews who were living inside
Germany into a false sense of security whilst preparing the onslaught.
' This pretence was still kept up even on the occasion of the “Crystal
Night” pogrom: the outright violence of the SS and GESTAPO and the
hate-filled rhetoric of Nazi speeches and campaigns such as The Eternal
Presentation and Reception o f Anti-Semitic Imagery 67
Jew left no doubt about the desired outcome of the German-Jewish rela­
tionship as envisaged by the Fiihrer, but official government statements and
the state-controlled media claimed that “not a hair had been touched” on a
Jew’s head and that arrests were only made to protect Jews from “popular”
wrath.
All this changed with the imminence of the world war, to which Hitler,
referred at the earliest opportunity, i.e. in the speech of 30 January 1939,
with the promulgation of his prophecy that linked the body-parasite sce­
nario to the prediction of the complete annihilation of European Jewry.
Its reiteration and boastful referencing in speeches up to autumn 1942
marks the second phase of an ostentatious, uninhibited announcement of
the genocide-in-progress as the victorious elimination of the world pesti­
lence or world parasite (see Hitler in April and September 1942, as quoted
earlier). From the SD reports and Klemperer’s notes it is evident that such
speeches and their incessant reinforcement by the party-controlled mass
media were received by an audience who through rumours, soldier’s reports
or listening to forejgn broadcasts gradually learnt of the genocide unfolding
in Eastern Europe and who began to associate the ever-increasing impact
of the Allied war effort, especially the bombing raids, with the persecution
of the Jews. The target level meaning of the body-parasite scenario, i.e. the
implementation of racial therapy by way of mass murder, was clearly no
longer the “insider knowledge” of some dedicated perpetrators but slowly
became accessible to large sections of the general population.
Whilst the “metaphoric” status of the scenario was still upheld in official
rhetoric, its target application had become transparent, so that a simple
“camouflage” effect can hardly be assumed to pertain to its reception by
the majority of Germans during this phase. At the same time, however, the
continued use of the body-parasite scenario and its gruesome “outcome”
descriptions {annihilation, destruction, extermination o f the parasite) sig­
nalled the Holocaust’s political taboo status: it served as a warning to anyone
who wanted to engage with the “Jewish question” without acknowledging
the Nazis’ authority in defining and treating that question that they were
playing with fire. The metaphoric reference could thus also be understood
as an invitation to disengage and turn a blind'eye~to its'actual~genocidai
target level implementation.
After the defeat at Stalingrad and the further military setbacks from
1943 onward. Hitler’s boastful references to the double fulfilment of the
prophecy, i.e. military victory plus annihilation of the Jew/parasite in
Europe, ceased. Strategic developments were from now on conceptualized
in “defence” rhetoric. The main remaining link between the military situ­
ation and the “Jewish question” was the abstract notion that “the Jew”
was the secret power behind all enemy forces. The anti-Semitic parasite-
pestilence-poisoner imagery continued to be employed, but now against
the background of fears of an impending military collapse. The propagan-
distic and political function of the body-parasite scenario was thus turned
 68 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
on its head: in its former manifestation since the 1920s, it had triumphantly
announced the imminent completion of victory in the race war; now it epit­ 5 Methodological Reflection
omized the concentration of Germany’s war effort to continue the destruc­
tion of “the Jew” for as long as possible until its military power was spent. Body and Illness Metaphors in the
Now, given the ever-increasing knowledge about the genocide both inside
Germany and among its enemies and the signs of a military collapse, the
Evolution of Western Political Thought
_ “alternative” outcome of the scenario, i.e. the annihilation of Germany, and Discourse
began to dominate popular opinion. The regime’s assertions that it would
continue its fight against the Jewish parasite to the end turned the German
populace into accomplices of the genocide and at the same time into hos­
tages of their own national catastrophe.

Having studied several crucial phases in the development and reception

of the body-parasite metaphor scenario in Nazi Germany over the period
1930-1945, we can return to the question of how to explicate its cognitive
import, i.e. the way in which it was understood by its users and hearers as
a meaningful depiction of politics that could even motivate them to engage
in specific actions. In view of the historical consequences, the answer to
this question is far from trivial; however, at first glance, those text passages
from Nazi discourse (whether from Mein Kampf or from later speeches)
that contain relevant metaphor uses seem so absurd that it is difficult to
take them seriously. The descriptions of social and national groups in terms
of animal organisms and the practical conclusions that the Nazis drew
from them are so obsessive and grotesque that their rational discussion
seems impossible. Hence, historians have described their content as “enter­
ing the world of the insane” or sheer “nonsensicality”. Indeed, when analy­
sed stringently for logical consistency at either the source level of biology
and medicine or at the target level of politics, the metaphor scenario of the
German nation’s fight for its life against the Jewish parasite race is riddled
with contradictions and non sequiturs. However, when analysed as a meta­
phoric blend that “created” its own meaning system, the scenario did show
a high degree of internal coherence and also an enormous scope that ranged
from accounts of alleged crimes over socio-political analyses and overviews
of German national history to eschatological and cosmic visions (see Chap­
ter 3). Hitler used it as a conceptually closed^^niversallrame of reference
to perform his political speech acts of warning, threatening and promising/
prophesying. At the time of writing Mein Kampf, he could do no more than
perform these speech acts in theory, as he was imprisoned. But the “action
points” of his metaphorical scenario spelt out what would be carried out
if and when he acquired the political power to fulfil his “vision”, as was
demonstrated in all its.genocidal consequences during 1933-45.
With the hindsight knowledge about these consequences, some histori­
ans have treated the body-parasite scenario and its eliminatory outcome as
not being metaphoric at all, i.e. either as a “literal” blueprint or as camou­
flage phraseology that was meant to hide the intended target result of the

70 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
Holocaust. However, neither of these solutions is truly plausible. As we
saw from the history of the Nazis’ anti-Semitic discourse during the period
when they were in power, Hitler and Goebbels were clearly aware of dealing
with human victims who had to be deceived by way of sophisticated propa-
gandistic exercises before they could be murdered, even up to the point of
“soliciting the co-operation of the victims” (Baumann 2000)—if they had
“literally” mistaken them for “mere” animals they need not have bothered
to attempt such a deceit. Furthermore, the notion of morally responsible
“parasite” organisms, which was the basis for the Nazis’ wish to kill them
all (see Section 3.3), is a contradiction in terms, and whilst it is clear that
the Nazis made use of such an implausible notion, its literal interpretation
is simply impossible.
The opposite evaluation of the metaphor scenario as a lie or camouflage,
on a par with terms such as final solution, special treatment^ etc., is not
satisfactory either. At first, i.e. during the 1920s and even during the first
years of the Nazi regime, many people, including even future victims, may
have misunderstood and underestimated the body-illness-parasite imag­
ery as “wild talk”. However, after the “Crystal Night” pogroms and at
the latest after war had started. Hitler’s reiterated statements about the
fulfilment of his prophecy concerning the annihilation of European Jewry
left no doubt that the premise for the prophecy had come into effect and
that its completion was therefore imminent. Whilst the precise scale of the
genocide and the details of extermination camps were concealed by the
regime, ordinary Germans became increasingly aware of mass killings of
Jews in Eastern Europe during the war; they also could not help but notice
the “disappearance” of all Jews from the Reich, and they are on record for
associating military setbacks as well as the allied bombing campaign with
national responsibility for what “happened to the Jews”. In the latter part
of the war, the genocidal outcome scenario of the body-parasite fight was
so emphatically highlighted by Hitler and Goebbels (speeches after Stalin­
grad, complete extermination as the alternative to “stroking one’s bacte­
ria”, etc.) that its “misunderstanding” as mere rhetoric is highly improbable
(even if it was claimed after 1945 by many Germans for obvious reasons).
Even where such a misunderstanding occurred genuinely, its causes would
have to be sought in psychological and sociological conditions of non-belief
in a genocide being perpetrated by one’s own people rather than as a con­
sequence of the metaphoricity of Nazi anti-Semitism.
This body-parasite scenario as sustained in Hitler’s speeches up to the
end of the war did not hide or cover up the genocidal implications but
instead highlighted and foregrounded them. If anyone was uncertain about
the fate of the Jews in German-controlled Europe (on ac.count of only par­
tial experience of general disbelief), Hitler’s announcements and proud
assertions of the “annihilation” outcome right up to the end of the war
left no doubt as to what was happening to the Jews. The evidence from the
secret SD reports and Klemperer’s diary demonstrates that the threat of
I
Methodological Reflection 71
extermination against “the Jewish race in Europe” that was implied in the
promise of national/racial therapy and redemption was understood.
If we therefore reject “literalness”, “camouflage” or “misunderstanding”
as categories to characterise the cognitive import for Nsizi parasite imagery,
we have to search for other explanations of its politico-discursive “suc­
cess”. Some researchers have pointed to the historical precursors of Nazi
anti-Semitism, i.e. the development of “racially” motivated anti-Semitism
siilce the second half of the nineteenth century, which is supposed to have
provided the precondition of Nazi success. Goldhagen (2003) suggested
that it generated a predisposition for the acceptance of an “eliminationist”
anti-Semitism in the general public, so that by the outbreak of World War
I, “k stable framework with widely accepted reference points, images, and
explicit elaborations—had for over thirty years been in place with regard to
the Jews.”^ In the context of the post-World War I crisis of Germany, this
radical anti-Semitic “framework” is assumed to have become mass consen­
sus.^ Goldhagen’s critics have pointed out that this hypothesis glosses over
crucial developments of anti-Semitism in Germany between the 1860s and
the 1930s in such a sweeping manner as to invalidate his generalizations.^
That a violent, racially motivated anti-Semitism was on the rise in Germany
since the latter half of the nineteenth century is uncontroversial since Han­
nah Arendt’s studies on the Origins of Totalitarianism from the 1950s, but
it is also undisputed that this was not a special German phenomenon.'* The
question of whether the Germans at some point became “eliminationist”
anti-Semitic racists revisits some of the controversies about the search for
“the man” (or several men) “who gave Hitler his ideas” (Daim 1958), which
occupied early researchers of Nazi ideology. The answers provided then, i.e.
interpretations of Hitler’s references in Mein Kampf to nineteenth-century
anti-Semitism in Austria, to Richard Wagner, Dietrich Eckart and Houston
Stewart Chamberlain, as well as to social Darwinist theories and apocalyp­
tic religious traditions, are pertinent and backed up by evidence but still not
conclusive. They hardly explain the strength and ubiquity of the genocidal
impulse among the contemporary German public. Any attempt at an expla­
nation has to take into account the disturbing unresolved issue at the cen­
tre of Holocaust ideology: how could a worldvrewijased^iTaiT Analogical
mapping of bio-medical onto socio-politicarconcepts become so powerful
and be taken so seriously that it actually turned into the reality of genocide
and world war? Clearly, historical “conditioning” of the German public has
to play a role in the explanation of the ideological-propagandistic success
of Nazi anti-Semitism; but to restrict the search for “precursor concepts”
to the pre-twentieth-century “race” theories or anti-Semitic tendencies in
German history amounts to an artificial exclusion of the main conceptual
complex that the Nazis themselves used and that, as we have argued earlier,
was understood by the German populace, i.e. the complex of biologically
and medically based metaphors referring.to political issues in general and
national identity in particular. We therefore have to consider the possibility
72 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
of explaining some of the cognitive import and forcefulness of Nazi imag­
ery by reflecting on the history of this metaphor complex.
5.1 POLITICAL BODY IMAGERY IN THE “HISTORY OF IDEAS”
"The mapping between the source domain of the body and the target
domain of politics and the nation-state was by no means an original idea
of Hitler’s. As mentioned earlier, it has a long history in Western politi­
cal thought that is closely connected to the Great Chain o f Being con­
cept, whose origins have been traced back by Arthur O. Lovejoy (1936)
and other historians of thought to Neoplatonist philosophy in antiquity
and its reformulations and re-interpretations during the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance, and reaching into the nineteenth and twentieth centu­
ries. Within the paradigm of the “History of Ideas”, Lovejoy retraced
step by step, as it were, the permutations of the Great Chain o f Being
idea, whilst E. M. W. Tillyard (1982) proposed the .general hypothesis
that the system of correspondences between all levels of the Great Chain
o f Being, i.e. those of human, social, and heavenly bodies, was believed
in in a quasi-literal sense as representing the God-given order of the
world up to and during the Middle Ages. In the course of the Renais­
sance, however, it was transformed into an inventory of rhetorical/poetic
metaphors: “the correspondence between macrocosm, body politic, and
microcosm” still “served, as in medieval times, to express the idea of a
cosmic order, but [Elizabethans] no longer allowed the details to take the
form of minute mathematical equivalences . . . equivalences shaded off
into resemblances”.^ Viewed from this perspective, modern versions of
body-state metaphors, including their twentieth-century versions, have a
conceptually different status from those of pre-modern times.
A further major hypothesis concerning a hiatus in long-term conceptual
history with special reference to body politic imagery was formulated by
Susan Sontag, in her celebrated essay Illness as Metaphor, first published
in 1978. Sontag claimed that there was a qualitative difference between
“classical”, i.e. pre-Enlightenment, and “modern” uses of political health-
illness imagery: “classical formulations which analogize a political disorder
to an illness—from Plato to, say, Hobbes—presuppose the classical medical
(and political) idea of balance. . . . The prognosis is always, in principle,
optimistic. Society, by definition, never catches a fatal disease.”^ From the
Enlightenment onward, however, “the use of disease imagery in political
rhetoric [implied] other, less lenient assumptions”, and the modern idea of
revolution “shattered the old, optimistic use of disease metaphors”.^ During
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “master illnesses” such as tubercu­
losis and cancer, which required matching radical cures, became the sta­
ple of revolutionary, authoritarian and ultimately totalitarian discourse.®
Sontag’s account can be read as a specification of Tillyard’s hypothesis:
Methodological Reflection 73
if combined, they could underpin a perspective, in which the turn from
the Renaissance to the early Enlightenment appears as a watershed that
separated the traditional focus of political body- and illness-based imagery
on maintaining or restoring a balance in society from “modern” uses that
articulate radical, even “exterminatory” verdicts on whether a given socio­
political entity deserves to exist at all.
It might appear tempting to integrate the Nazi version of the body-na­
tion metaphor in such a long-term perspective: either as a perverse twist
at the end of the history of a once great idea, in the tradition of Lovejoy
and Tillyard, or, following Sontag, as the “totalitarian” version of “mas­
ter illness” metaphors in modern political thought. However, an uncritical
application of early history-of-ideas models c i political theory develop­
ment would be methodologically highly problematic. In the first place,
traditional history-of-ideas approaches concentrated on texts from the top
layer of philosophical, poetic and scientific formulations of a set canon of
famous concepts. However, as Quentin Skinner (1978), followed by other
critics, has pointed out, it is hard to see how we can hope to reach an
understanding of a historical period if we “focus our main attention on
those who discussed the problems of political life at a level of abstraction
and intelligence unmatched by any of their contemporaries”.^ In later stud­
ies, this problem has been tackled by including further texts from popular
political culture, such as pamphlets and other popular media genres and
registers, but its application to long-term developments such as that of the
body-nation metaphor complex in Western political thought has its own
practical problems connected with the sheer volume of the relevant text
material, its heterogeneity in terms of registers, diversification through bor­
rowing across different languages, etc.
Secondly, the relationship of Hitler and Goebbels’s political body-par­
asite scenario and the famous tradition of body-politic theories, as pro­
posed by John of Salisbury and Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli and Hobbes,
Rousseau, Kant, Herder and many others, is clearly not a straightforward
one. Even if we take into consideration the effects of “sedimentation” and
“vulgarization” of political theory “down” to the level of folk theories and
popular pamphlet and brochure culture, the notion of Na^ijr^gigery as a
direct “descendant” of the body-politic traditjon'Ts absurd, for it would beg
the crucial question of its reception (and “implementation”) by the Ger­
man public of the first half of the twentieth century. If the implications
of the body-parasite scenario had been always available, why were they
so singularly “successful” then and not before.’ As we shall consider later
on (Chapter 9), even the most ambitious attempt to match Hitler’s view of
the nation’s body defending itself against the Jewish poison to the history
of political theories based on body imagery, undertaken in 1938 by the
Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, had to short-circuit three centuries in order to
“reclaim” a heavily biased version of Hobbes’s Leviathan concept for the
Nazis, only to end in failure.
74 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
To draw any direct link between the historical metaphor tradition and
its use by the Nazis would amount to attempting to convey an aura of
respectability to the latter, which might seem desirable from a neo-Nazi
propagandistic viewpoint but evidently has got nothing to do with any seri­
ous endeavour to reconstruct and understand the conceptual and discursive
history of this metaphor complex. On the other hand, to deny any link
'between the tradition and its manifestations in Nazi ideology is akin to
cherry-picking supposedly “respectable” parts of the body-illness metaphor
complex and excluding its unsavoury aspects, thus truncating the analysis
of its semantic and political range of implications. Acknowledging that the
Nazis and their audiences are not likely to have consciously followed in the
footsteps of philosophical discussions does not preclude the investigation
of their dependence on aspects of these conceptual and cultural traditions.
Our guiding principle for the following chapters is therefore to look for
conceptual and discursive traditions in the use of the metaphor to which
the Nazis could attach their notions of a racial therapy for the German
nation’s body.
5:2 AN EVOLUTIONARY ACCOUNT OF
POLITICAL BODY METAPHORS
One central challenge for providing a cognitive account of the histori­
cal development of the conceptual metaphor complex surrounding the
notion of the state or nation as a body lies in the problem of formulating
a perspective for the conceptualization of long-term semantic change.
Cognitive metaphor analysis in its early phase did not make historical
investigations its foremost concern. Even if the historicity of conceptual
metaphor systems such as the Great Chain o f Being was acknowledged,
as in Lakoff and Turner (1989),’*’ the main emphasis was on the syn­
chronic investigation of the metaphor’s “basic version” that is “largely
unconscious and so fundamental to our thinking that we barely notice
it” and that “occurs throughout a wide range of the world’s cultures”.
In the context of cognitive “embodiment” theory, the role of the body as
the experiential and physiological basis of perception and conceptualiza­
tion has been explored further, with special regard to neurophysiological
structures and to primary experiential scenes in ontogenesis.^^ On this
basis, we can,de-construct the body-nation metaphor as the complexion
of the general concept of complex (social) systems as bodies and the
metonymy of bodies-persons. In an ahistorical approach, it might then
be argued that all uses of a metaphor mapping, such as that between
nation and body, are mere re-occurrences of a universal conceptual unit
that as such has no history other than a chronological series of mani­
festations, which would be produced automatically, unconsciously and
spontaneously.
Methodological Reflection 75
Over the past decade or so, however, a renewed interest in the dia­
chronic dimension of cognitive phenomena has emerged. On the one hand,
the early focus on universal conceptual structures has led to investigations
into cross-cultural distribution—and variation—of metaphor systems. The
conceptual metaphor Emotions Are Fluids in a Container, which has been
found in many European languages, for instance, appears to be linked to
the concept of four bodily “humors” that dominated Western culture for
more than a millennium and whose terminological traces can still be found
in the vocabulary of the “temperaments”.^^ By contrast, Chinese idioms
seem to rely on the metaphor Anger Is Gas in a Heated Container, which
is related to traditional Chinese philosophy and medicine.*'* Other meta­
phors, e.g. Quality Is Wealth, or Politics Is War, have also been linked to
specific theories or ideologies that were developed in the West-.*^ Further­
more, even in a predominantly synchronic analysis, conceptual metaphors,
especially body-based ones, are not “determined” by a fixed, universal
“primary” experience but vary across cultures, national languages and
discourse formations and registers.*^ Kovecses (2009) aptly concludes that
“cultural models can be both created by metaphors and at the same time
can determine (or select) the metaphors we use in discourse”.*^ It follows
that the cognitive analysis cannot dismiss the culture-specific implications
df metaphors as extras that can be separated from their “core meaning”.
Instead, these implications, together with their socio-historical indexical-
ity, have to be treated as integral aspects of the semantics of the metaphor
in question.
If even general conceptual metaphors can only be understood as embed­
ded in culture-specific historical traditions, such specificity can be assumed
a fortiori for a more concrete metaphor scenario such as Hitler’s genocidal
concept of a therapy o f the body politic through annihilation o f a supposed
parasite race. As we have seen (Chapters 2, 3), this scenario was in fact a
complex and quite elaborate combination of folk-theoretical, historical and
ideological propositions that were built on various, partially contradictory
traditions of religious, scientific and neo-mythical thought. Hitler did not
claim to have “researched” these “insights” all alone by himself, but he cer­
tainly claimed possessing the genius to fit them into a convincing, system­
atic framework (whidi we reconstructed in the-^t^de'd's^nario structure
in Table 3.4), which formed the “granite foundation” of his political vision
and which would motivate the German people to act accordingly. But if the
implications of political body-parasite metaph6rs had always been “auto­
matically” present to everyone, there would have been no need for Hitler
(or any other political propagandist) to explicate them, and they would
be fundamentally identical across all ages. There is, however, no histori­
cal evidence to support the contention that each and every use of political
body-parasite imagery is automatically genocidal; it is therefore incumbent
on an analysis intent on explaining the cognitive import of Nazi imagery to
identify and analyse those cultural traditions that specifically informed it.
76 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
In order to combine cultural-historical and cognitive perspectives in
our analysis, we can make use of a modified version of the “naturalist”
approach to conceptual history that builds on analyses of cultural develop­
ment as an evolutionary phenomenon, some of which we briefly reviewed in
Chapter 2. We have already noticed that the gene- or virus-based analogies
-for cultural phenomena that underpin such approaches may iji fact beg cru­
cial questions about differences between conceptual and biological forms
of “reproduction” and about the relationship between the experiential basis
of a metaphor and its historically situated application. Croft (2000) takes
some of these concerns into consideration and proposes a refinement of the
naturalist approach for the purpose of a cognitive explanation of language
change. Building on Hull’s (1988) application of the “memetic” approach
to the history of science, Croft develops a “two-step” model of innova­
tion (“altered replication”) and selection (“differential replication”).'® In
this perspective, the smallest meaningful elements of utterances, dubbed
linguemeSy are the cognitive replicators whose “reproduction”, instead of
being the equivalent of a simple replication, has to be modelled in every
case as a function of both innovation and “entrenchment” in the socio-
communicative context.’^
The methodological consequence of this distinction, i.e. the differentiation
between the investigation of the emergence of new linguemes and their vari­
ants, on the one hand, and the investigation of their entrenchment in discourse
and social dissemination, on the other, is applied to metaphor in Croft and
Cruse’s (2004) overview of Cognitive Linguistics. When a metaphor “is first
coined . . . the only way to interpret it is to employ one’s innate metaphorical
strategy, which is subject to a wide range of contextual and communicative
constraints”.^*^But once it “takes hold in a speech community. . . its meaning
becomes circumscribed relative to the freshly coined metaphor,. . . it begins
. . . a process of semantic drift, which can weaken or obscure its metaphori­
cal origins”.^' In contrast to a simple “linear” model, this two-step model of
innovation and selection-propagation can help to differentiate between the
investigation of the creation and change of the metaphor and its scenario ver­
sions, and the study of the socio-historical conditions of its diffusion in spe­
cific discourse communities, such as those in German political public under
Nazi rule.Tt is one thing to motivate the anti-Semitic body-parasite imagery
by recourse to general cognitive strategies such as the mapping or blending of
certain conceptual inputs to achieve a semantic innovation in the form of key
scenarios. It is a different rnethodical approach to study these metaphors as
“discourse metaphors”-(Zinken 2007; Zinken et al. 2008) to explicate the pat­
terns of their propagation in specific situational and socio-cultural contexts.
The preceding chapters have included our proposals for such a “two-step”
account of a) Hitler’s body-parasite scenario as political-semantic innovation
and b) its micro-development during the Third Reich. The following chapters
aim to retrace European and, specifically, German traditions of the body-
state metaphor that the Nazis built on. It remains to be seen whether these
Methodological Reflection 77
historical data bear out the neat distinction of innovation and propagation
in metaphor evolution.
Together with this distinction, Croft and Cruse’s approach has inher­
ited from the “memetic” approach a degree of reification of linguemes as
entities that remain somehow “the same” whilst occasionally undergo­
ing mutations and being subjected to the selection pressures of different
socio-discursive environments. They thus speak of the “life history of a
metaphor”, a s if they were dealing with a living organism: “at the begin­
ning of its life, even if it is being laid down as an item in the mental lexi­
con, speakers are very conscious of its status as a metaphor. . . . As time
passes, however, the sense of the expression’s metaphorical nature fades
and eventually disappears. . .. Once that happens, the expression is no
different from a literal expression, and only etymologists and historians of
language can recreate the path of derivation. At some point along this path
of change, the expression acquires a capability to act as a literal basis for
further metaphorical extensions
This account of a long-term semantic development of metaphors as
a “life story” from “cradle to grave” covers only the “genetic” side, as
it were, and has to be complemented by the socio-historical selection/
dissemination account, lest we run the risk of falling back into a linear
narrative that would repeat in naturalist terminology the reifications of
early history-of-ideas accounts. As it is only in socio-culturally embed­
ded utterances that new lingueme variants are coined and that they are
accepted or rejected, almost every replication of an utterance is in itself
a re-creation, and thus a subtle innovation, of concepts. The discursive
history of political body imagery is therefore unlikely to follow a con­
tinuous path of change; rather, it constitutes a collage of re-interpreted
facets of diverse strands in the conceptual and discursive traditions of this
metaphor complex. Older traditions of the body-state metaphor did not
suddenly disappear but only gradually gave way to newer versions, so that
various versions co-existed for ce n tu rie s.T h e resultant historical narra­
tive is not one of cumulative conceptual growth or steady decline, nor a
Hegeliah dialectic from “thesis” to “antithesis” to “s y n ^ s i i ^ rather
the sketch of a “complex adaptive system”, “ where meaning changes are
neither completely random nor teleological but express shifts in dominant
distribution patterns.
In the following second part of our study we shall focus on several
important stages in the discourse tradition of political body metaphors
in European political thought since the Middle Ages. The aim is not to
give a comprehensive overview of the metaphor’s conceptual “career”, but
rather to provide case studies of primary texts and their interpretation,
in order to sketch the contours of the conceptual background on which
National Socialist anti-Semitism could build its genocidal body-parasite
scenario. Of course, the ancient, medieval, Renaissance or Enlightenment
authors who-employed political body metaphors could not foresee later
78 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
(ab-)uses of that metaphor, and there are significant contrasts that allow
us to highlight the characteristics of Nazi use. It is in order to be able
to identify such contrasts, as well as some significant parallels, that we
engage in the diachronic analysis.
6 Solidarity and Hierarchy
The Body-State Metaphor in the
Middle Ages

When Arthur O. Lovejoy set out to describe the “life history” of the Great
Chain o f Being concept, he saw it as a complexion of “ideas which have,
throughout the greater part of the history of the West, been so closely and
constantly associated that they have often operated as a unit”,' and he
located the origins of that combination in Neoplatonic thought.^ For the
reasons mentioned in the last chapter, retelling conceptual history as the
“life and adventures” of ideas is no longer feasible, and irrelevant for the
metaphor of the state as a body. Even the assumption of a distinct starting •
point in the work of one author (or group of authors) would be fallacious.
The beginnings of the body-state metaphor in Western culture have been
traced back to early ancient Greek political philosophy, but even earlier
sources can be identified in the Indo-European foundation myths of tribes
and nations (as well as of royal and caste lineages as descendants of the
body parts of mythical founder figures)^^owever, as our concern is spe­
cifically with the metaphor versions that may have been relevant for Nazi
ideology, we shall confine our study to Western traditions that are most
likely to have served as inputs to political theory and discourse in Germany
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Among Platonic texts, it is the Republic, Crito, Timaios and The Laws
that articulated a concern for the state’s health and showed a critical focus
on the rulership systems of specific Greek city-states as types of political dis­
eases.^ Aristotle explained the polis as a “thing that exists by nature”, which
motivated his definition of man as a political animaP and the proposition
that the origins of political rule can be found irfnatufe,"nScSar as the soul
governs the movements of animal bodies (including those of the “political
animals”}.^ It follows that every polis can be compared to a body and its
growth, which determines its state of health: “A'body is composed of parts,
and must grow proportionately if symmetry is to be maintained. . . . The
same is true of a city. It, too, is composed of parts; and one of the parts may
often grow imperceptibly out of proportion.”^ Through the continuation of
these analogies in the works of the Stoics, Neoplatonism, and boosted by the
rediscovery of Platonic and Aristotelian texts, the conceptualisation of poli­
tics in terms of anatomy and medicine became an integral part of political
thought in medieval and early modern Europe.®
 82 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
A second major strand of the body-nationistate metaphor tradition was
— formed by the narrative of the “fable of the belly”, which first appeared in
texts attributed to Aesop and was retold in varying forms by Livy, Dio­
nysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch and o th e rs ^ ts vindication of the only
seemingly idle belly’s right to receive all food first because it is the organ
that makes the food available to all the other part's of the body seems to
“ have an inherently conservative bias. It denounces any.rebellion against the
central organ’s authority in order to maintain balance and harmony. This
conservative sense is certainly conveyed in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus by
the representative of the senate, Menenius (see Chapter 1). However, as we
shall see later on, even the Middle Ages knew other, less one-sidedly argu­
ing versions of the fable.
The third major strand that fed into the conceptual complex of political
body concepts originated in patristic interpretations of biblical texts, in par­
ticular, Paul’s Epistles to the Romans and Corinthians, which defined the
Church as Christ’s Body as a binding reason for demanding unity,'mutual
care and discipline among church members of all ranks.^° This image had to
be reconciled with other corporeal concepts in the Bible, e.g. that of Adam
having been made in God’s “image” and after his “likeness” (in Genesis
1:26-27), and that of Christ as the head (therefore, strictly speaking, just
one, albeit the most important, body part) of the church (1 Corinthians
11:3, 23-29 and,15:44; Ephesians 4:15-16; Colossians 2:19) and the dis­
tinction between Christ’s human, i.e. natural body, which was sacrificed at
crucifixion (and, symbolically, at the Last Supper and the church’s Eucha­
rist in the form of bread and wine) on the one hand, and Christ’s separate
spiritual body on the other.^^
Besides the theological and Christological implications, the image also pro­
vided the basis of a re-conceptualisation of the political sphere as part of the
Christian universe. In the fifth century, St. Augustine of Hippo, in The City of
God {De Civitate Dei), presented a system of rational order that encompassed
body, soul, the human and the heavenly polis in one cosmic hierarchy, created
arid overseen by God. Within that system, the human body and the human
cit^ were defined as corresponding systems of order: “the peace of the body is
the'balanced ordering of its parts . . . the peace of the city is an ordered con-
I cord, with' respect to command and obedience, of the citizens’XlD
This concept of the Christian state as a body comprising members of
different status and function and striving to emulate the “perfectly ordered
and perfectly harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God and one
another in God” in the Heavenly City^^ provided the frame of reference for
medieval political philosophers who attempted to accommodate in it the
new social and political entities that had arisen in Europe since the fall of
the ancient Roman- Empire.^*’ The debates and conflicts over spiritual and
worldly headship of that “mystical body” {corpus mysticum) of Christen­
dom shaped the course of history for centuries and prepared the ground for
the emergence of the modern understanding of politics.*^
Solidarity and Hierarchy 83
It would, however, be misleading to posit a fusion of these three con­
ceptual traditions—that of a state or society.’s health and illness, the fable
of the belly, and the concept of Christendom as a body—in a similar
way as Lovejoy sees a merger of the principles of gradation, continuity
and plenitude merging in the Great Chain o f Being concept in Neopla­
tonism.^® The various strands of mappings between corporeal-medical
source and socio-political target domains did influence each other but
had different textual and ideological functions. Apart from its Christo­
logical complications, the source concept of th^ body could apply to the
church (in which case Christ was the head, represented by the pope), the
worldly empire or state (with the emperor or king as the head), or other
public “corporations”^such as universities.^^ Some authors even operated t
different aspects of these traditions in one. and the same text and used the
different traditions for varying, sometimes contradictory, purposes. In
view of this wealth of conceptual variation, any streamlined account of
the metaphor’s “life history” would clearly be inappropriate; any remain­
ing “biographical” Conceit in the historical narrative can therefore only
be that of the “picaresque” progress. ' ^
6.1 POLITICAL p h y s io l o g y IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY:
JOHN OF SALISBURY’S POUCRATICUS
In medieval European political thought, the conceptualisation of state and
society in terms of the human anatomy appears to have found its first elab­
orated version in the Latin treatise Policraticus sive De nugis Curialium et
vestigiis philosophorum {Policraticus. O f the Frivolities o f Courtiers and
the Footprints ofPhilosophers)^^niten at around 1159-1160 by the Ang­
lo-Norman cleric, diplomat and philosopher John of Salisbury (c. 1115-
1180). As secretary to the successive archbishops of Canterbury, Theobald
and Thomas Becket, John was involved in the conflict between the English
king and the church, which led to him being exiled in France (and which
later would lead to the assassination of Becket).*^ During his exile he wrote,
and dedicated to Becket, the Policraticus, conttastingy^s-the-subtitle states,
the “frivolities of courtiers” (to be avoided)-with the “footprints of phi­
losophers” (to be follow ed).In Books V and VI of<the Policraticus, John
develops the notion of the state {res publica) in its medieval feudal form in
terms of the analogy with the human body, on the supposed authority of an
“instruction” to the Roman emperor Trajan by Plutarch.^’
We can analyse this use of the analogy from around the middle of the
twelfth century as a kind of “test case” for the degree of its integration into
a supposedly stable, literal worldview, as claimed by Tillyard (1982), and
also for the optimistic bias in favour of restoring balance in a state, which
has been deemed to be typical of “pre-modern” thought by Sontag (1978).
After introducing the pseudo-Plutarchian letter in a quasi-philological
84 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
manner by citing its supposed address to Trajan, John incorporates its con­
tent into his treatise in Chapter 2 of Book V;
For a republic is, as Plutarch declares, a sort of body which is animated
by the grant of divine reward . .. The position of the head of the repub-
" lie is occupied . . . by a prince subject only to God and to those who
act in His place on earth, inasmuch as in the human body the head is
stimulated and ruled by the soul. The place of the heart is occupied by
the senate, from which proceeds the beginning of good and bad works.
The duties of the ears, eyes and mouth are claimed by the judges and
governors of the provinces. The hands coincide with officials and sol­
diers. Those who always assist the prince are comparable to the flanks.
Treasurers and record keepers . .. resemble the shape of the stomach
and intestines; these, if they accumulate with great avidity and tena­
ciously preserve their accumulation, engender innumerable and incur­
able diseases so that their infection threatens to ruin the whole body.
Furthermore, the feet coincide with peasants perpetually bound to the
soil, for whom it is all the more necessary that the head take precau­
tions, in that they more often meet with accidents while they walk
on the earth in bodily subservience; and those who erect, sustain and
move forward the mass of the whole body are justly owed shelter and
support. Remove from the fittest body the aid of the feet; it does not
proceed under its own power, but either crawls shamefully, uselessly
and offensively on its hands or else is moved with the assistance of
brute animals.
In this presentation of the body-state analogy, we find a succinct and well-
explained hierarchical perspective from the lyead “down” to the feet, com­
bined with commonsense advice to the prince to avoid a malfunctioning of
the sromflcWtreasurers and to look after the /cef/peasants. The specifica­
tions that the headlpnxict is ruled by the so«//church and is assisted by the
heartlstnaxt show that his position is not that of an “absolute” monarch
in a modern sense but is instead viewed, unsurprisingly for the historical
context, in a church-oriented perspective. This latter point has drawn the
attention of historians interested in the conflicts between monarchical and
church power, especially in connection with John’s condemnation of tyr­
anny” as opposed to lawful kingship and his involvement in the conflict
between Kings Stephen and Henry II and the church as represented by the
archbishops of Canterbury.” A further focus of historical interest has been
John’s attention to the problems caused by the stomach and the concern for
the feet. In this respect, the influence of John’s teachers in Paris and at the
School of Chartres, notably Robertus Pullus (1080-1154) and Guillaume
de Conches (c. 1080-1154), has been cited; some historians see John even
as part of the reformist movement of “medieval humanism” that challenged
the established feudal concepts of state and society.” At the very least it
Solidarity and Hierarchy 85
can be said that the Policraticus explicitly and repeatedly emphasises one
“lesson” to be drawn from the body-state analogy, i.e. that notwithstand­
ing their hierarchical relationships, all members depend on each other and
must “work” together in order to enable the whole body of the res publica
to stay healthy and function properly:
The health of the whole republic will only be secure and splendid if the
superior members devote themselves to the inferiors and the inferiors
respond likewise to the legal rights of their superiors, so that each in­
dividual may be likened to a part of the others reciprocally and each
believes what is to his own advantage to be determined by that which
he recognises to be most useful to others.
Thus far, the body-state metaphor in Policraticus seems to fit well into
the schema of a “medieval-as-pre-modern” view of socio-political entities
as integral parts of the Great Chain o f Being. For this reason, Tillyard
regarded John’s treatise as “one of the most elaborate medieval statements”
of the body-state analogy within the context of microcosm-macrocosm
correspondences.” However, there are some ways in which the analogy is
elaborated in Policraticus that are not consistent with such an harmony-
oriented interpretation. One first complication is caused by an apparently
competing version of the analogy to the head-to-feet model in the form
of the “fable of the belly”, which appears in the Policraticus as a “les­
son” taught to the author by none less than the then reigning pope, Adrian
IV, in a purported conversation with John. At the pope’s bidding, John
reports complaints against the church concerning corruption and simony
and goes on to challenge the (deputy) head and father of the mystical body
of the church: " . . . why do you accept presents and payments from your
children?”” The pope responds by telling the fable in'its traditional ver­
sion, in which the organs rebel against the stomach and end up enduring
a severe health crisis: “This was suffered on the first day; on the following
day it was more annoying. On the third day it was so pernicious that nearly
all showed signs of faintness.” After drawing out the analogy in graphic
detail and also invoking the classical authority of Quintus Serenus Sam-
monicus, the pope deduces the “obvious” conclusronr^^MeasurTfieither our
harshness nor that of secular princes, but atfend to the utility of all.””
The fact that the most important organ in the fable, as retold by John, is
the belly or stomach, instead of the head, has been noted as a discrepancy
by some researchers.Viewed from a discourse-oriented perspective, how­
ever, this variation hardly causes a conflict of meaning. In the first place,
the purported contexts for the two metaphor versions are different: one is
a quotation from (pseudo)-Plutarch, the other a report of an alleged con­
versation with the pope. John uses the fable as a separate “example”, which
he could assume to be known to his learned readers:^^ it thus “amplifies”
rather than contradicts the head-to-feet analogy. Secondly, the respective
 86 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
target referents are not the same: one is the (secular) prince; the other is the
pope, who as we have seen in the first quotation from Policraticus is viewed
as deputising for the soul (God) that “rules” the head/prince. John is thus
talking about two distinct, though related, institutions.
There is, however, a more fundamental tension between the two meta­
phor versions of head-to-feet and belly-v.-organs. The presentation of the
body anatomy in the pseudo-Plutarch stresses the ideal of co-operation and
interdependence among all members, whereas the fable of the belly thema-
tises a near-fatal crisis, which only the pope can cure (and by somewhat
dubious means!). At the source domain level, the difference seems not to
be dramatic, because even the main head-to-feet analogy quoted earlier
includes a hint of an illness scenario with reference to the stomach and
intestines, i.e. roughly the same source concept as in the f a b l e . I n both
cases— stomachHntestines keeping all food for themselves (in the head-to-
foot analogy) or starving (in the fable)—the malfunctioning of digestive
organs “engender[s] innumerable and incurable diseases so that their infec­
tion threatens to ruin the whole body”.^^ The need for a properly func­
tioning stomach is therefore a special case of the general principle that
cooperation among all memberslorgans is essential for the whole body’s
survival.
In terms of narrative and argumentative emphasis, however, the discrep­
ancy between the anatomical analogy and the illness-cure scenario of the
fable is more significant. The former highlights the well-functioning, harmo­
nious state of a stable political body, thus confirming an optimistic viewpoint
that includes the notion of malfunction only as a possibility that should be
avoided. The latter, however, sees that body as a fundamentally instable,
insecure entity. The fable in Policraticus, focusing as it does on the Pope’s
remedy for Christendom, still envisages an almost automatic cure, but the
text also contains quite drastic illness-cure scenarios for the worldly state.
John gives the example of an oppressive magistrate being equal to a “swollen
head” that makes it "impossible for the members of the body to endure it”
and even leads them to suicide, for “if the affliction would be incurable, it
is more miserable to live than to die”.^'’ Later on in the text of Policraticus,
^ he asserts the dangers of injury to the whole body if the supreme head is
NtDOH? wounded: “a blow to the head, as we have already said, is carried back to all
the members and a wound unjustly afflicted upon any member whomsoever
tends to the injury of the head”jS iu t if the life o f the organism as d whole is
at stake due to a rebellion, all members are dispensable, and it is the prince’s
duty to amputate and eliminate them. Invoking biblical authority (Matthew
18:9), John insists on the most radical form of therapy:
That the members are likewise to be removed is clear from that which
is written: ‘If your eye or your foot offend you, root it out and cast it
away from you.’ I think this is fo be observed by the prince in regard
to all of the members to the extent that not only are they to be rooted
Solidarity and Hierarchy 87
out, broken off and thrown far away, if they give offence to the faith or
public security, but they are to be destroyed utterly so that the security
of the corporate community may be procured by the extermination of
the one member. Who will be spared, I say, by him who is commanded
to do violence against even his own eyes? Indeed, neither the ears nor
the tongue nor whatever else subsists within the body of the republic
is safe if it revolts against the soul for whose sake the eyes themselves
are gouged out.^^
The reason that John provides for his zealous plea in favour of amputation
is the fact that the injury of rebellion directly concerns the soul, as a case
“when God is offended . . . or the Church is spurned”.^^ An attack on the
church is not merely a danger for a particular organ of the state. The enor­
mity of the therapy can hardly be surpassed and its description certainly
shows little sign of optimism or concern for balanced disease management.
The epitome of this darker, more pessimistic vision can be found in Book
8, Chapter 17, of the Policraticus, where John depicts the counter-image of
a proper political body, namely the “republic of the impious”:
Its tyrannical head, therefore, is the image of the devil; its soul is formed
of heretical, schismatic and sacrilegious priests and, to use the words of
Plutarch, prefects of religion, ^ssailing the laws of the Lord; the heart
of impious counsellors is like a senate of iniquity; its eyes, ears, tongue
and unarmed hand are unjust officials, judges and laws; its armed hand
is violent soldiers, whom Cicero labels mercenaries; its feet are those
among the more humble occupations who oppose the precepts of the
Lord and legitimate institutions.^*
In this quotation, the body-state analogy is as complete as the “proper”
body model in the “pseudo-Plutarch” version, but it conveys the opposite of
any optimistic evaluation. From the head down to the feet, the devil’s anti-
state forms a body mirroring that of the proper state but now the function
of every body part is unhealthy and destructive. Thus, the same source sce­
nario as that of the healthy res publica is employed by John a l ^ to depict
the opposite target notion of a tyrannical staterTabte'6Tl'’summarizes the
conceptual elements of the analogy. Table 6.^ its scenario implications.
Tables 6.1 and 6.2 show the immense differences of John of Salisbury’s
conception from the therapy/redemption scenario that we derived from
Mein Kampf (see Chapter 3). This finding is, of course, to be expected
but by no means trivial, for in terms of the basic mappings, there is not
that much of a difference: in both cases concepts of the body, its health
and therapy are applied to a worldly state and the universal, even mystical
whole of creation under God’s rule. Even the role-slot for a “devil” figure
(and the implication that he must be combated at all cost) is present in both
scenarios.
 eta o ation and oloca st Solidarity and Hierarchy 89
Table od fate Correspondences in olic atic s instead, he assumes their existence as a matter of course {within his reli­
gious worldview) and concentrates on showing what must be done to check
Source Target Counter-Target them in principle. Within this rather rigid overall scenario, however, he is
Soul (holding supreme G od/C hurch (Principle of Devil/Heretics/Rebels ready to consider the possibility of every part of the body being liable to
responsibility for body) Universal Order) (causing Universal Dis­ fall ill and deserve amputation, even the head (i.e. a tyrannical ruler). The
order) devil is not identifiable as a particular group of people, a race, or a nation;
he can be represented by any member of society, even clerics.T he supreme
— Head/Belly (Command Prince/Pope (Political and Tyranny
spiritual authority on
authority of the soul lies ultimately with God, represented by the pope
over other body mem­
bers) earth (who is, however, not beyond suspicion, even for John); any assumption
of this role by the worldly head or ruler, comparable to Hitler’s assump­
H eart Senate Senate of iniquity tion to do “the work of the Lord”, would have been a blasphemy for the
Judges, governors U njust officials, judges
medieval cleric. Thus, quite apart from the lack of an explicit anti-Semitic
Eyes, ears, tongue
and laws bias, the whole “ontology” and value system attached to John of Salisbury’s
body-state analogy is fundamentally different in terms of its argumentation
H ands Soldiers M ercenaries structure from Hitler’s. This discrepancy underlines the necessity for the
State officials C orrupt State officials
cognitive analysis of metaphor to go beyond a mere comparison of source-
Sides
target mappings and relate their implications by way of scenario analysis to
Stomach/intestines Financial officers C orrupt Financial officers the historically and socially situated presuppositions.
With regard to Tillyard’s (1982) characterisation of medieval and Renais­
Feet Farmers Rebellious people
sance thought as a system of micro- and macrocosrnic correspondences, the
Folicraticus proves to be “a case in point” only to a certain degree. John’s
Table od tate Scenarios in olic atic $ pseudo-Plutarchian vision of the head-to-feet hierarchy indeed confirms
Tillyard’s description, but the existence of a parallel devil’s counter-uni-
• Source Target Counter-Target verse, with its diseased bodies, tyrannical or rebellious societies and gen­
Bodily H ealth based on Peaceful es blica, ' Tyrannical state o r civil eral chaos, puts the vision of human society matching the harmony of God’s
co-ordination of all based on m utual help w ar rule into question. Obviously, there is not the slightest hint of its endorse­
body members by head/ of all p arts of society ment by John, but still, to admit and describe in detail its existence, must
soul under just ruler: duty of have been deeply disturbing to him and his contemporaries. The devil’s
obedience on the p art of
counter-world is only there, of course, as a “worst-case scenario”, depicted
all subjects
in all its horror to warn against rebellion or lax government that plight fail
Medical care to avoid or D uty of care on the p art Neglect of society and to fqlfil its duty of care and therapy of the body politic.
combat diseases (swollen of ruler to prevent/cor- state; corruption Such a warning partly fits Sontag’s hypothesis that “classical” formula­
head, infection, injury, rect any dysfunctional tions aim to “encourage rulers to pursue a more rational policy”,'*®as the
affliction) social o r political devel­
opments
analogy in Folicraticus clearly serves to advise the leadership of state and
Church on how to avoid and manage political d i^A ^s. Npnetheless, John’s
Amputation of any body Removal of tyrant Tyrannical rule Vr emphasis on the ruler’s duty to amputate rebellious members and the sub­
part, even of parts of the ject’s duty to remove a swollen head and even destroy a tyrant*^ are remind­
head, if offensive to soul ers that for John the devil’s tyranny was not a just a theoretical possibility
but aj:eal danger.
However, these similarities are undermined by wholly different sets of In terms of its discursive presentation, John’s vivid, occasionally crass,
underlying presuppositions. In the first place, the target levels that Hitler depiction of political illnesses, injuries and therapies in Folicraticus shows
construed as mutually confirming sets of data are conflated in the olic ati that he was keen to use every rhetorical trick to twist and turn the core con­
c s into one rigid category, which makes no distinction between empirical- cept of this metaphor to drive home his message. Nor did he shy away from
factual and mystical-metaphysical arguments. John of Salisbury makes no employing different source aspects (e.g. head v. belly) for similar argumen­
pretence of “proving” empirically (i.e. by reference to supposed social facts) tative purposes or from mixing his body-state analogy with other meta­
that devilish forces are at work and must be destroyed at a given moment; phors, such as those of rulers as fathers,'*^ of the king as an image o f equity
90 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
or justice*^ or of the state as a beehive^* He even acknowledged the limits
of some analogies: in order to capture all of the “lower” ranks of society
he extended the concept of the feet beyond farmers (who had a transparent
tertium comparationis with the feet, i.e. walking the soil) and applied it
to all “who exercise the humbler duties”, including, for instance, weavers,
artisans, servants, procurers of food and managers of private households
-As a result, the source concept becomes grotesquely distorted, which gives
John a chance to poke fun at his own metaphor: “there are so many of these
occupations that the number of feet in the republic surpasses not only the
eight-footed crab, but even the centipede.”'*^
John’s own thematisation of the absurdity of counting all the feet of the
republic can be seen as evidence, that even for him the body-state analogy
was not at all a matter of minute “equivalences” that had to be believed
literally, but a rhetorical figure that served its purpose up to a certain point
and could be turned into a joke. John was also clearly aware of the con­
ceptual and literary traditions, as illustrated by the use of the fable of the
belly and a host of further biblical and classical references. He probably
even invented a classical authority for his main analogy, i.e. the pseudo-
Plutarchian “Instruction to Trajan”, to create a tradition where there had
been none. John never uses the body-state analogy as a rigid classificatory
schema but as an argumentative warrant for socio-political conditions for
the well-being of the commonweal. It thus seems difficult to subsume his
use of the body-state analogy under the stereotyping notion of a medi­
eval belief system, which, as Tillyard claimed, continued to be “taken for
j granted” even by the Elizabethans.'*^Instead, John’s flexible, inventive, and
I in places playful, variations on the traditional metaphor topos of the state
I as a body in Policraticus are testimony to the medieval humanism that pre-
. ceded the rigid systems of scholastic philosophy in the following centuries.
John of Salisbury was neither a heretic nor a revolutionary (even though
he was forced into exile), and he probably shared many Neoplatonic pre­
suppositions of the Great Chain o f Being and of Pauline Christology as
passed on by the church fathers, i.e. the concept of .Christ as the head of
the mystical body of the church and its manifestation in medieval empires.
But these presuppositions, and the metaphorical arguments based on them,
were not static or uncontested and could hardly be taken for granted, for
they were at the centre of conflicts between the highest authorities on earth
at that time, i.e. the kings/emperors of the emerging medieval states and
the pope. John’s use of the body-state analogy was but a foretaste of the
conceptual battles that were to follow.
6.2 THE “COMMON GOOD” OF THE POLITICAL
BODY'. SCHOLASTIC ARGUMENTS
A new impetus for the corporeal analogy during the Middle Ages was the
reception of Aristotle’s Politics, together with his Ethics and Rhetoric, after
Solidarity and Hierarchy 91
these texts had been translated, partly from Arabic sources, into Latin from
the 1240s onwards.”*®Leading theologians at the University of Paris, such
as Albert the Great (c. 1200-1280) and his disciple Thomas Aquinas (c.
1225-1274), made the integration of Aristotle’s thought into the existing
Christian philosophical traditions the centre of what was to become the
“scholastic” synthesis of theological and secular thought.”*^Aristotle’s com­
parison of the polis with a body that comprises different parts which form
a self-contained whole inspired the scholastics to redefine the state as
a “corporation” alongside the church, whose own “mystical” body-status
was well established on the authority of Paul’s epistles and Augustine’s De
Civitate Dei.^^ Aristotle’s body-state analogy was thus integrated with the
Pauline-Augustinian-patristic tradition: its emphasis now lay on the obliga­
tion of all members of the state body to help each other so as to achieve
the common good [bonum commune).^^ In the treatise “On Kingship” [De
Regno ad Regem Cyprii), which was posthumously ascribed to Thomas
Aquinas and integrated into Ptolemy of Lucca’s De Regimine Principium,^^
the king’s command over the political body neatly fitted into a system
of corresponding layers of a rational world order that did indeed match
Tillyard’s schema of a universe in harmony under God:,
But the particular rulership, which is found in humans, is in fact most
like the divine rulership; on account of this, the human being is called
a smaller w orld... . For just as the universe of corporeal creatures and
all spiritual powers are contained under the divine government, so in
this way are the members of the body and other powers of the soul
ruled by reason; . .. But because human beings are by nature social
animals living in a multitude, . . . a likeness to the divine rulership is
found among human beings not only insofar as one person is ruled
by reason, but also inasmuch as a multitude is governed through the
reason of a single person . . . the king ought to recognize that . . . he
exists in his kingdom just the same way as the soul exists in his body
and God exists in the world. If he carefully reflects upon this, from one
side, a zeal for justice will be kindled in him .. . and from another, he
will acquire the gentleness of mildness and clemency, when he consid­
ers those individuals who are subject to his'governme^nf'Eo"be like his
own members.^”*
The socio-political body of a Christian state was thought to function
in harmony with the church, which was the “body of Christ”.^^ In less
theologically orientated works, such as Brunetto Latini’s Book of Trea­
sure (1260-1266), the head-body relationship was praised for being mutu­
ally beneficial and this practical/functional evaluation was also explicitly
applied to elected rulers of medieval city-republics.^® In the further devel­
opment of scholasticism, however, the implications of the analogy started
to.be examined critically. The part-whole relationship as a central tertium
comparationis between members of a body and members of a political
92 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
community was in need of further explication, on account of the incongru­
ence between the way in which a limb automatically “follows” the will of
the soul and the obedience that a Christian owed to the ruler. To solve this
problem, Giles of Rome (c. 1247-1316) and Henry of Ghent (c. 1217-1293)
endeavoured to define more precisely the “common good” as the basis on
which socio-political obedience to the worldly ruler could be justified. His
-right to command and tax everyone was derived from his function to ben­
efit the whole of the political body, even if this diminished the personal
good(s) of the individual.
This principle was, however, put in question as a result of the conflicts
between the French King, Philip IV (“the Fair”), and the church over inves­
titure and taxation, which developed towards the end of the thirteenth
century. Who was to be in command of the body of Christianity (and its
national sub-units)? In 1302, Pope Boniface VIII reasserted the church’s
claim to ultimate power {plenitudo potestatis) in his bull Unam sanctam.
According to the bull, the church represented “one mystical body” [unum
corpus mysticum), “whose head was Christ” {cuius caput Christus): he had
delegated his authority to St. Peter and to each of his successors, respec­
tively, as the sole head of Christendom, without allowing for any compet­
ing second head.^* The pope’s “spiritual” authority was therefore superior
to the “worldly” authority of any prince. This proposition was backed up
by references to the traditional body-church analogy, e.g. in the writings of
Giles of Rome {De Ecclestastica Potestate, 1302) and of James of Viterbo
(c. 1255-1308; P)e Regimine Christiano, 1302).^^ Reasserting some of John
of Salisbury’s views, they emphasized the obligation for all members of the
body of the church, including worldly rulers, to obey the commands of its
soul, i.e. the pope.^°
The corporeal analogy was, however, also employed to argue for the
opposite solution in favour of ultimate authority lying with the Christian
worldly ruler. Using Godfrey of Fontaines’s (c. 1250-1309) argument that
a.ruler’s taxes, if used “for the good of the community”, are the sustenance
of the state’s body/^ John of Paris (c. 1255-1306) asserted that any human
body, whether individual or collective, “would pass away unless there
were some common force within the body which directed it towards the
common good of all the members” and identified the king as that force.^^
An even more radical stance was taken by Marsilius of Padua (c. 1275-c.
1342), who in his “Defender of the Peace” {Defensor Pads, 1324) turned
the “papalist argument on its head”.^^ With reference to Books I and V
of Aristotle’s Politics, Marsilius used the analogy between the health o f a
body and the “tranquillity” of a state^^' to draw the conclusion that only a
worldly authority could act as “Defender of the Peace”, and that the pope’s
claim to this role represented a “pernicious plague”.'^^ In a further twist to
the argument about the st^tdbody’s “tranquillity”, however, Remigio dei
Girolami (c. 1235-1319), with reference to Augustine’s De Civitate Dei,
put the sublime peace of the spiritual kingdom above worldly peace: papal
Solidarity and Hierarchy 93
authority was “concerned with heavenly things and the soul” whilst “the
authority of temporal rulers [was] concerned with earthly things and the
body”; hence, “the latter should be ordered towards the former as it would
be towards something superior”.'^®
The corporeal analogy could cut both ways in the debates about the
“common good” and “the two kingdoms” between the scholastic advisers
of kings and popes. In contrast to the creative exploitation of the full range
of source concepts by John of Salisbury, however, the scholastics used the
metaphor in a more schematic way and restricted it largely to the head/
soul-body relationship, which was only varied in terms of the target notion
(worldly ruler vs. pope/church). The illness-cure event structure, too, was
alluded to only as an abstract threat, with barely a mention of drastic cures
such as a m p u ta tio n .A further contrast to John’s Policraticus are the ref­
erences to the Aristotle’s Politics as a well-established “authority” on a par
with the Bible and Augustine’s De Civitate (not to mention a fictitious text
such as Plutarch’s letter to Trajan). The discourse tradition of the body-
state metaphor was thus newly cross-referenced with regard to canonical
predecessor texts to strengthen the analogical arguments derived from it.
6.3 CHALLENGES TO THE POLITICAL BODY
HIERARCHY IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES
With the waning of both the papal and imperial powers after the thirteenth
century, the focus of political body theory gradually shifted away from
the competition between rival heads (pope v. emperor/king) towards the-
relationship between the head and the rest o f the body.’Yh.e change waSj
by no means abrupt; papal arid imperial claims to headship still occupied,
for instance, William of Ockham (c. 1285-1347) and Bartolus of Saxo-
ferrato (1314-1357). They still made use of scholastic formulations about
the “regular” working of a Christian monarchy in terms of the body-state
analogy but now applied them to decide “irregular” questions, such as the
systematic theory of the right to resist or depose rulers. In his Eight Ques­
tions on the Power o f the Pope, William of Ocjd^m ^ g ued that as “in
a natural body, when one limb beconies defe^ive, tlie rest make up the
deficiency if they are able”, so in a worldfy universitas-''wh^n one part
becomes defective, the other parts, if they have the natural power, ought to
make up the deficiency”.^^[He concludes that in the desperate emergency of
the supreme head of the empire behaving as a tyrant, he may be removed
“by those who Represent the peoples subject to the Roman Imperium”, in
particular “by the elector-princes” as the “chief ‘limbs’ or ‘members’ of the
body of the EmpJre”.^^^artolus asserted that any “right of judgment” held
by elected rulers “was only delegated to them {concessum est) by the sov­
ereign body of the populace”.^®By the mid-fourteenth century, such limita­
tions of the imperial head’s supreme command even found their way into

94 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
the formulations of the Holy Roman Empire’s constitution as laid down
in the “Golden Bull” of 1356. Here, the “prince-electors” of the empire
were depicted metaphorically as being "the chief columns” that “sustain”
the empire and at the same time “the chief members of its mystical body”,
whose consensus was essential “if ‘Imperial honour’ as well as Imperial
unity were to be preserved”.^^
It was not just the head-kukrship of Christendom or the “Holy Roman
Empire” that was subjected to critical scrutiny through the applications
of body imagery (though the respective debates continued long into the
fifteenth century, e.g. in the context of the conciliarist movement).^^ The
national monarchies of France and England, engaged as they were in The
Hundred Years War” as well as in internal dynastic conflicts, were chal­
lenged in two famous reformulations of the body-state analogy. In 1406,
during the reign of King Charles VI of France, who faced challenges from
\ successive English kings as well as from powerful French dukes, Christine
de Pizan (c. 1364-c. 1430) wrote the Book o f the Body Politic [hivre de
Corps de Folicie), dedicated to the king and the princes, with particular
benefit for the Dauphin, Louis of GuyenneF%ome sixty-five years later, Sir
John Fortescue (c. 1395-c. 1477), attending the exiled English Queen Mar­
garet of Anjou and her son Edward, whose father. King Henry VI, had been
taken prisoner by the (Yorkist) King Edward composed in Latin a trea­
tise in “Praise of the Laws of England” (De laudibus legum Anglie). Here,
the body-state analogy was used as a frame for lessons by the “Chancellor
(the mouthpiece of Fortescue) to the Prince of Wales on the constitution of
his nation as a “political and royal dominion”.^^ Both Pizan and Fortescue’s
texts adapted the metaphor concept of the Christian state as a body to the
changing political context of their age and in the process changed the meta­
phor’s cognitive import in significant ways.
Christine de Pizan’s Livre de Corps de Bolide is construed, as its title
suggests, as an explication of the body-state analogy and introduces it right
at the start in Chapter 1. Without naming John of Salisbury,^^ she takes
over his conceit of Plutarch’s letter to Trajan, in which he compared the
polity to a body having life”:
There the prince and princes hold the place of the head in as much as
they are or should be sovereign and from them ought to come par­
ticular institutions just as from the mind of a person spring forth the
external deeds that the limbs achieve. The knights and nobles take the
place of the hands and arms. Just as a person’s arms have to be strong
in order to endure labor, so they have the burden of defending the law
of the prince and the polity. They are also the hands, because just as
the hands push aside harmful things, so they ought push all harmful
and useless things aside. The other kinds of people are like the belly,
the feet and the legs. Just as the belly receives all that the head and the
limbs prepare for it, so, too, the activity of the prince and nobles ought
Solidarity and Hierarchy 95
to return to the public good, as will be better explained later. Just as
the legs and feet sustain the human body, so, too, the laborers sustain
all the other estates.'^^
Although this exposition of the head-to-feet hierarchy at first sight appears
to be quite similar to John of Salisbury’s, two crucial elements are missing;
the soullchurch and the heart/senate analogies are left out and they do not
appear in later chapters. Thus, a little more than a century after the papal
claim of supreme headship over the mystical body of Christendom and in .
particular over worldly emperors and kings, little was left of the hierocratic
application of the corporeal analogy, even if the Livre de Corps de Policte
still contained references to the canonical text tradition (i.e. Paul s epis­
tles Aristotle’s Ethics, Politics and Rhetoric and Augustine’s
Dei) Christine combines the head/body-im^gery with that of the ‘ good
shepherd”, taken from the New Testament.^^|The princelhead is first and
foremost obliged to stay healthy, “that is, virtuous”, by following Christ s
model as a good shepherd, for if the head “is ill, the whole body will feel
it’w C hristine admits that the good prince “should be feared” on account
of his “virtue” and “justice”, i.e. his determination to give “the same right
to everyone”,®’ but she insists that this authority must be coupled with kind­
ness and mercy.®2 The good prince must therefore not aim to rule by him­
self i e tyrannically, but in consultation and continuous discussion with
his advisors and nobles, thus also supporting and practicing eloquence and
learnedness as key skills of politics.®^
What happens to a prince who does not care about achieving consensus
and who has an over-suspicious or hostile attitude towards his s^t>jects is
made abundantly clear in Christine’s version of the “fable of the belly ,
which is notably different from the previous medieval uses that took only
the side of prince:
Once upon a time there was a great disagreement between the belly of
a human body and its limbs. The belly complained loudly about the
limbs and said that they thought badly of it and that they did take
care of it and feed as well as they should. On t_hejDtherJiand,3e limbs
said they were all exhausted from work, ^ndyet despite all their labor,
coming and going and working, the belly wanted to have everything
^nd was never satisfied. The limbs then decided that they would no
longer suffer such pain and labor, since nothing they did satisfied the
belly. So they would stop their work and let the belly get along as best
it might. The limbs stopped their work and the belly was no longer
nourished. So it began to get thinner, and the limbs began to fail and
weaken, and so, to spite one another, the whole body died.®"*
In this version of the fable, it is the belly that initiates the conflict by,-com-
plaining about the alleged laziness of the limbs and thus provokes the
 Solidarity and Hierarchy 97
96 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
is accorded functional precedence. It is not the head/pnnce's autonomous
conflict.” The limbs' counter-complaint carries at least as much plausi­
will that directs the political body but he is dependent on the supply of the,
bility as his. Their ensuing rebellion is ultimately self-destructive; here
blood of “political provision for the interest of the people” in order to be y
Christine’s version conforms to the tradition. But the responsibility for the
able to govern in the proper way. This limitation of the head/prince's role is
catastrophe is shared between limbs and belly. Christine explicitly draws
further reinforced in the paragraph that follows the previous passage:
the conclusion that just as in the fable “when a prince requires more than a
people can bear, then the people complain against the prince and rebel by
The law . .. resembles the sinews of the physical body, for just as the
disobedience”, with the outcome that “they all perish together”, whereas
body is held together by the sinews, so this body mystical [of the people]
“agreement preserves the whole body politic”.®^ This is a far cry from John
is bound together and preserved as one by law . . . and the members
of Salisbury’s vivid description of the head's duty to implement therapy-
and bones of this body, which signify the solid basis of truth by which
by-amputation or the tacit obedience requested by the pope’s version of the
the community is sustained, preserve their rights through' the laws, as
fable in the purported conversation with John.” The head/belly of the body
the body natural does through the sinews. And just as the head of the
politic that Christine described was doubtless in a position of authority, but
physical body is unable to change its sinews, or to deny its members
not of autocracy or godlike rulership; the Livre de Corps de PoUde thus
proper strength and due nourishment of blood, so a king who is head
marks an important step in the secularisation of the concept of political
of the body politic is unable to change the laws of that body, or to
headship. deprive that same people of their'own substance uninvited or against
Our second key text to illustrate the range of conceptual shifts in. the
body-state analogy during the late medieval period, John Fortescue’s Praise their wills.^'*
o f the Laws o f England, is a didactic dialogue in which the “Chancellor”
Not only is the head/prince not autonomous but he is depicted as being even
convinces the “Prince” to immerse himself in the study of the customary
unable to change the smew^s/laws substantially because they are integral
English laws in addition to the universal, God-given laws.” Such knowl­
parts of his own body. Furthermore, Fortescue also emphasises their lon­
edge of the national laws founded on traditional customs and statutes should
gevity and anteriority to any dynasty by asserting their existence since the
enable the Prince to rule “politically”, i.e. in consensus with his nation, rather
nation’s legendary foundation by exiled Trojans, through British, Roman,
than “only royally” {i.e. by sheer royal power).^^ The central justification for
Saxon, Danish and Norman rule.” This “argument from antiquity” invokes
this approach is spelt out in the Chancellor’s'explanation of “how kingdoms
the historical track record of the nation’s “own” laws as an argument for
ruled politically first began”.^“ Fortescue starts with a rather crude demon­
their authority.^^ At the same time, it reinforces the conclusiveness of the
stration of the necessity of a political head for the political body, because
corporeal analogy: if the nation is a political, “mystical” body, it must
“just as in natural things, what is left over after decapitation is not a body,
have come into life, with the heart!ptop\t's intention being its “first living
but what we call a trunk, so p o litic a l things, a community without a head
thing”, nourishing the body’s sinews. Their longevity is evidence of the
is not by any means a b o d y . ^ o far, the analogy is explicated in the tradi­
body’s.general health; hence, if the head/pr'mce wishes to care for the body
tional manner and backed up by references to Aristotle and A ugustine,but
of the nation, he had better learn and observe the customs that have kept it
it soon serves as a platform for innovative explorations:
in good health for so long.^^.
Christine de Pizan and John Fortescue’s conceptualisations of the state
Just as . . . the physical body grows out of the embryo, regulated by one
as a body are perhaps the most “balanced” acco.untS'^rtenrls'ofThsrrela­
head, so the kingdom issues from the people, and exists as a body mys­
tionship between the roX^t-organ {head/belly) and the other members that
tical, governed by one man as head. And just as in the body natural, as
we have come across so far. The limbs’ duty to obey the authority of the
the Philosopher [i.e. Aristotle] said, the heart is the first living thing,
head/belly is still maintained but the whole body’s health is of paramount
having in itself the blood, which it sends forth to all the members,
whereby they are quickened and live, so in the body politic the inten­ importance and overrides any ambitions or prerogatives that the head^may
. claim. In this regard they come close to Susan Sontag’s notion of the "clas­
tion of the people is the first living thing, having in it the blood, namely
political provision for the interest of the people, which it transmits to sical” tradition of corporeal and medical metaphors for the state being
premised on the assumption that the “prognosis” for the body politic is
the head and all the members of the body, by which the body is nour­
always, in principle, optimistic” and is primarily intended “to encourage
ished and quickened.^^
rulers to pursue a more rational policy”.^® According to Sontag’s model,
these late medieval versions of the body-state analogy would thus be
The head's principal ruler-authority is acknowledged but the heart, as “the
grouped together with earlier medieval versions, e.g. by John of Salisbury
first living thing” in the body and representing the people’s “intention”.
98 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
and the scholastics. This generalization is, however, not borne out by the
texts. Despite referring to John of Salisbury and other medieval thinkers (as 7 Concepts of Healing the Body
well as to the classical authorities of Aristotle, Augustine, etc.), Christine
de Pizan and John Fortescue changed the discourse about the body politic
Politic in the Renaissance
significantly by retelling the “fable of the belly” in a more evenly weighted
account of responsibility for the body politicos health or lack of it (Pizan),
and by affirming the functional precedence of the nation’s heart over its
head (Fortescue). The latter version might be regarded as being reminiscent
of John of Salisbury’s limitation of the head's rulership by the heart-as-
senate, were it not for the fact that the Anglo-Norman bishop gave absolute
priority to the so«//church over both the headlprxnzt and the heartlsen-
ate.^^ These differences show that there was in fact no fixed pre-modern or
“classical” model that mapped roughly the same corporeal concepts onto By the early sixteenth century, the notion of the ruler, whether Pope,
roughly the same target notions of state/society. Rather, the whole concep­ Emperor, King or other worldly prince, as the head of ‘his’ political entity
tual complex, involving both source and target levels, exhibits a consider­ was a well-established commonplace that co-existed alongside the older
able range of synchronic and diachronic variation. This variation was by hierocratic and legal notions. The commonsense implication was that the
no means random but reflected the changing socio-political contexts for the ruler was an integral part of the body and therefore dependent on its gen­
application of the metaphor, from an early focus on the Christian Empire eral health. If the body died, the head (or, in the “fable” tradition, the belly)
as a “mystical body” to justifications over competing claims to supreme would perish with it. In the following two centuries this assumption was
headship between pope and emperor or dynastic prince to political theories to change drastically. The assumption of the interdependence of all body
for worldly states, in which the head's rule over the other members had politic members including the head o f state gave way to new concepts that
to be re-conceptualised and re-legitimised in terms of the whole national served the ideological needs of rulers who were able to make a bid for more
body's needs. absolute power. The metaphorical framing of these changes forms the topic
of this chapter.^

7.1 SHAKESPEARE’S UBIQUITOUS BODY POLITIC

During the “Autumn of the Middle Ages” (Huizinga), the internal conflicts
of church and empire, the reformation and the discoveries in all fields of
the arts, geography and the (proto-)sciences had put the notion of a stable
Great Chain o f Being system in question. Its socio-political application by
way of interpreting the state as a body that corresponded to human physical
bodies as well as to celestial cosmic bodies had been adapted to all manner
of pragmatic-rhetorical and political interests.JSIey£rtheles&5-aa“^(flexible)
frame of reference for rhetorical and poetic ;rietaphors, the system was still
functional and experienced its own special “renaissance” in the sixteenth
an,d seventeenth centuries.
In English literature, Shakespeare’s dramas are the classic locus for many
political applications of the Great Chain o f Being system. In Coriolanus,
the character of Menenius, who tells of the “fable of the belly”,^ is by no
means the only one using body politic imagery. Just when he is about to
giVe voice to the belly's reply to the mutinous members, the First Citizen,
who depicts another vision of a body politic, in which the belly's answer
would have little or no significance, interrupts him: ^
100 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
Your belly’s answer—what? / The kingly crown’d head, the vigilant
eye, / The counsellor heart, the arm our soldier, / Our steed the leg, the
tongue our trum peter,. . . if that they— . .. / Should by the cormorant
belly be restrain’d, / Who is the sink o’ the body,— . .. / The former
agents, if they did complain, / What could the belly answer?'*
-The First Citizen’s rhetorical question implies that the “cormorant” (ever-
hungry) belly, the “sink o’ the body” would have no right to speak at all
in the illustrious company of the previously mentioned “higher” organs of
state. Menenius’s reply seems to disabuse him of this assumption only to
confirm the traditional hierarchy (the authority of the senate) by validat­
ing the belly as “the store-house and the shop / Of the whole body”, i.e. as
being indispensable for the well-being of the whole organism, and later by
humiliating the First Citizen as “the great toe”. ^ The potential plebeian
complaint about being discriminated against by the belly-a.na\ogy is thus
averted. Later in the drama, the pro-plebeian Tribunes develop an illness-
amputation scenario to justify the banishment of the patrician Coriolanus
by likening him to a “disease that must be cut away”, a “gangren’d foot”,
and an “infection” that, “being of a catching nature”, endangers the whole
body politic.^
The ruler’s role is further thematised in other Shakespearean plays: in
Hamlet, he is conceived of as the “head” (i.e. integral part of the body)
when Laertes warns Ophelia that the prince’s decisions cannot be only
for his own person, “for on his choice depends / The sanity and health of
this whole state; / And therefore must his choice be circumscrib’d / Unto
the voice and yielding of that body / Whereof he is the head”.^ Richard II
has been interpreted by Kantorowicz as the “tragedy of the King’s Two
Bodies”,®on account of the piecemeal self-degradation of Richard: with his
own hands, he undoes his transcendental body politic, including the sym­
bols of his dignity, and thus reduces himself to his own body natural, which
then can be easily disposed of by Bolingbroke, the future king, Henry IV. ^
In Richard III, the Duke of Gloucester is entreated by his supporter Buck­
ingham to take up the kingship, in order to “recure” the state of England:
“The noble isle doth want her proper limbs; / Her face defac’d with scars
of infamy, / Her royal stock graft with ignoble plants”.^°The imagery here
invokes the traditional commonplace assumptions, but the character that
employs it not only does so fraudulently but is himself deceived by Richard,
who later has him executed. For the audience, it is imagery used by a liar,
not a truthful representation of a valid, stable belief system.
This fundamental ambivalence of both the body politic and Chain of
Being concepts is also exploited in Ulysses’ speech on “degree” in Troilus
and Cressida, which Tillyard read as an exemplary declaration expound­
ing a “conception of order” that was “part of the collective mind of the
people” in Shakespeare’s time.^^ The speech indeed begins with the solemn
invocation of universal order (“The heavens themselves, the planets and
Concepts o/^Healing the Body Politic in the Renaissance 101
this centre / Observe degree, priority and place”)^^, only to then depict in
detail the disasters that befall the body politic in correspondence with the
macrocosm:
. . . when the planets / In evil mixture to disorder wander, / What
plagues and what portents, what mutiny, .. . / Divert and crack, rend
and deracinate / The unity and married calm of states / Quite from
their fixture. . .. / Take but degree away, untune that string, / And
hark! What discord follows.*^
Ulysses’ speech, together with the wealth of references to the Great Chain
system in Shakespeare and his contemporaries’ works (e.g. Spenser’s works,
Raleigh’s History o f the World, Elyot’s The Book Named the Governor and
the Laws o f Ecclesiastical Polity), served Tillyard as evidence that the prin­
ciple of degree in the Chain o f Being was “taken for granted” by “all Eliza­
bethans of even modest intelligence-”*'* and was still defended against all
misgivings of impending destabilization.*^ Quentin Skinner, however, reads
Ulysses’ speech on degree “more as a reflection of the resulting confusions
than a straightforward restatement of the old commonplaces”.*^ Skinner’s
critique of the over-generalizations of the older history-of-ideas tradition is
justified at the methodological level, insofar as Tillyard’s selection of quo­
tations from the top layer of literary and philosophical works can hardly
be regarded as representative for the state of a whole national culture in a
particular period. With regard to the body-politic metaphor tradition, an
even more radical critique seems to be called for: from the Middle Ages
onwards, this metaphor complex was never fixated on or dominated by one
meaning alone but lent itself, so to speak, to being used and exploited by
all sides of topical political conflicts. In the Renaissance, this susceptibility
to semantic flexibility and variation led to a truly innovative emphasis on
healing the body politic.
7.2 HEAD AND HEALER: NEW ROLES FOR
THE RULER OF THE BODY POLITIC ______ _
When King Henry VIII of England asserted his own status as “supreme
Head” of the English body politic in the 1530s,*^ he also assumed reli­
gious headship. *®This claim was different from that of earlier debates,
e.g. Marsilius of Padua’s arguments in defence of the emperor (as head
and “Defensor Pacis” of Christendom) or the French King Philip the Fair’s
challenge to papal supremacy, even if the body-head imagery was remi­
niscent of medieval debates. Where the earlier debates had focused on the
question of the prince’s right to rule as the head of his worldly imperium
without interference from the pope, Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell’s
legislation redefined the national body politic belonging to the royal head
102 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
as being a religious body. The king was therefore head of a national state
and church; hence, the “fusion of bodies politic and spiritual was absolute
and complete”2^
Whilst the target level implications of this change of head/hody imagery
affected first and foremost the conceptualisation of relations between state
and church, the newly enhanced royal headship of the body politic could
also include a healing function. Healing, as a form of divine empowerment,
“associated with the anointing as part of the coronation ceremonies, had
long been part of the King’s “mystical” n a t u r e . B u t this healing tradi­
tionally concerned the natural bodies of the King’s subjects from diseases
such as scrofula and epilepsy. What was in question now was the power
of healing the body politic. Whilst defenders of the traditional political
body-head concept {and of the traditional state-church relationship), such
as Sir Thomas More, Sir Thomas Elyot, Cardinal Reginald Pole and Bishop
John Fisher (and indeed Henry VIII himself in his proclamations before the
break with Rome), spoke of royal headship as included in the whole body,^’
the King’s chaplain, Thomas Starkey (1495-1537), introduced—cautious-
■ly—a new perspective on the relationship of king and body politic in his
Dialogue between Pole and Lupset (written c. 1529-1532, later dedicated
to Henry VIII).^^
Starkey had his one dialogue partner, Cardinal Reginald Pole, invoke
Pauline and Platonic references and the humoral theory as his frame
of reference for eight chief political maladies:^^ meagreness—lack of
populace,^** dropsy—negligent or lazy p o p u la c e ,palsy—social unrest,
pestilence—political d i s c o r d , deformity—imbalances in society,^®
weakness—inability of a nation to defend itself,^^ frenzy—irrational
go ver nme nt , an d gout—bad conditions for farmers and workers who
sustain the basis of soci et y. Thi s list of socio-political was clearly
based on traditional notions of an ideal balance and proportion of bodies
natural and politic.
The state’s head, i.e. “offycerys Sc rularys” could fall ill from frenzy—
but even that was curable. Starkey thus appears to fulfil Sontag’s (1978)
concept of political illnesses as imbalances in the body politic that can all
in principle be remedied. His reformist proposals—i.e. equitable taxation,
measures to increase the population, banishment of malcontents, improved
education and, in particular, the prevention of sedition^^—all betrayed a
pragmatic orientation.
Whilst Starkey’s political illness metaphors were perfectly traditional in '
applying the “humoral” system and were compatible with the notion of a
powerful ruler-healer in principle, they did not chime with the principle of
renewed, emphatic spiritual-cum-political headship, which, as we saw, was
non-negotiable for King Henry VIII. Starkey therefore had to be extremely
careful: he left the king out of the list of parts-of the body politic that
attracted the aforementioned chief political illnesses: the king was not the
head (which might fall ill from frenzy) but the heart of the state’s body.^^
Concepts o/" Healing the Body Politic in the Renaissance 103
Starkey also allowed for that heart to be made up of “many” persons, either
a council of wise men or the whole people.^^ He then had the dialogue part­
ners agree on a “tempered” monarchical rule combining king, constable,
council and parliament as providing the best cure for the body politic.^^
Starkey’s Pole portrayed the competent healer as helping nature: it suffices
for the physician to remove the main cause of illness: then the body can
recover by itself. Starkey’s conceptualisation of the body politic hovered
midway between the older notion of the king as integral part of that body
and that of him as part of a team of healers, which must have been rather
risque in view of Henry VIITs autocratic tendencies. The meticulous refer­
ence to the “four humours” theory tradition as the framework for a system
of political “illnesses” and “cures” may have been intended to tone down
(or possibly, disguise) its revolutionary implications for the understanding
of the powers of the ruler.
The first theory that appears systematically to ascribe the power of heal­
ing the body politic to the ruler was the one developed by Starkey’s Italian
contemporary, Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527). In the last chapter of The
Prince {II Principe, composed in 1513, published posthumously in 1532),
after diagnosing that Italy had “great virtue in the limbs, were it not for
the lack of virtue in the heads”, Machiavelli voiced his fervent longing for
the advent of a national healer figure, who might heal Italy’s “wounds . . .
and who can cure her of those sores that have been festering for so long”.^®
Earlier on, he had analogised “consumptive illnesses” with dangers to the
state: just as the former are in the beginning “easy to cure but difficult to
diagnose”, but if not recognised or treated at the outset, become “easy to
diagnose but difficult to cure”, so also political “evils” that are foreseen “in
advance (a gift granted only to the prudent ruler),.. . can be cured quickly;
but when they are .. . left to grow to such an extent that everyone recogn­
ises them, there is no longer any remedy”.
Sontag reads this use of the illness metaphor as being “not so. much
about society as about statecraft (conceived as a therapeutic art): as pru­
dence is needed to control serious diseases, so foresight is needed to control
social crises”; hence she counts Machiavelli amongst the “optimistic”,
classical thinkers: “the presumption is that the disease can be cured.”
However, it is surprising that Machiavelli’s call for foresight in The Prince
leaves out any concrete description of the thernpy~^ndTln p^ticulai, any
specification of how drastic it may have to be. The Prince does not explain
the precise nature of the envisaged “therapeutic art” in politics; instead, it
giifes a rather general (and almost tautological) calculation of the chances
of success: these are good, if the illness is diagnosed early enough; if the
diagnosis is left too late, “there is no longer any remedy”.
In order to understand more clearly what Machiavelli had in mind as
political cures, we have to consult his Discourses on the First Ten Books
of Livy {Discorsi, first published in 1531), where he discusses remedies for
maladies of the state in detail. These remedies, exemplified by events from
104 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
Roman history, include draconian measures such as “judicial sentence of
death on a whole legion at a time, or on a city”, mass banishments and deci­
mation, as well as prudent constitutional changes that prevent “corruption”
of the body politic.^^ The former cures are obviously far from benign; in
fact, they are deliberately intended to be “terrifying”/^ Other references to
political diseases in the Discourses reiterate the need for immediate action,
once political illness symptoms have been identified,for instance, with
regard to the potential of ambition to grow into a disease that can cause
the destruction o f a state,^^ or the unwillingness to prepare for war as a
malady that can be cured only by a strong government,^® Machiavelli also
compares republican and princely maladies and their respective therapies:
“a licentious and turbulent populace, when a good man can obtain a hear­
ing, can easily be brought to behave itself; but there is no one to talk to a
bad prince, nor is there any remedy except the sword”/^ The inference that
Machiavelli draws in the Discorsi is “that the greater the cure, the greater
the fault’V® hence, a diseased form of princely rule is worse for the body
politic and requires the ultimate remedy of “the sword”, in contrast to the
more easily manageable diseases caused by popular unrest.
Machiavelli clearly did envisage life‘threatening and incurable diseases
of the state and the respective radical counter-measures. In his reflections
on the transition from a tyranny to a republic, in Chapters 16-18 of the
Discourses, he proposes a kind of inverse relationship between the gravity
and the curability of political corruption in princely and republican states.
Princely corruption is most dangerous and can lead to the destruction of
the state but it is curable, albeit by radical, violent means {the sword). On
the other hand, if the people themselves have become corrupt, “neither in
Rome nor anywhere else would remedies adequate for its existence have
been found”.'*^ A populace that has become a republic but “has been accus­
tomed to live under a prince” (and hence, corrupted) will therefore “return
to the yoke” at the next opportunity.®'^ Therefore, the republic, whilst being
in principle a healthier state than a principality (due to its capability to
listen to sober criticism and advice and effect reforms),®^ is doomed if cor­
ruption has spread to all or most of her members and even “penetrated to
the bowels”.®^
The systematic classification of political maladies according to dif­
ferent criteria—primary victim (prince or people), form of government,
gravity of corruption—and the explicit specification of some illnesses that
are only curable “by the sword” put into question the interpretation of
Machiavelli’s political theory as an example of the “classical” concept of
political concepts, as suggested by Sontag. ®®For this reason, other
commentators have stressed the ruthlessness of Machiavelli’s proposals
for political and social therapies. Isaiah Berlin interpreted Machiavelli’s
“secular, humanistic, naturalistic morality” as implying that “Once you
embark on a plan for the transformation of a society you must carry it
through no matter at what cost: to fumble, to retreat, to be overcome
Concepts o/" Healing the Body Politic in the Renaissance 105
by scruples is to betray your chosen cause. To be a physician is to be a
professional, ready to burn, to cauterize, to amputate; if that is what the
disease requires, then to stop halfway because of personal qualms, or
some rule unrelated to your art and its technique, is a sign of muddle and
weakness, and will always give you the worst of both worlds”.®'^ Skinner
likewise views Machiavelli as demanding from “men of the highest virtu”
that they must “be capable, when the situation requires it, of behaving in
a completely vicious way”.®®
Such an emphasis on Machiavelli’s supposed endorsement of complete
ruthlessness and “viciousness” in applying political therapy may, however,
be just as much an exaggeration of its pessimistic, or cynical, aspects as
Sontag’s reading of it as an example of “classical” optimism. Overall, pol­
itics is conceived by Machiavelli as the art of gaining, maintaining and
perfecting government against the contingency of Fortune by combating,
through renewed virtii, the maladies that befall every state over time.®®
In the context of this argument, the body-illness-cure scenario serves to
explain politicians’ ability to effect the renewal of virtue and foresee, pre­
vent and, if needs be, diagnose and cure political maladies; it is neither a
guarantee for the success of the cure nor a fatalistic endorsement of radical
policies that must be carried through “no matter at what cost”.
This pragmatic line of argument is taken up'(with explicit reference to
Machiavelli) by Francis Bacon (1561-1626) in his Essays, in particular
Essay XV: O f Seditions and Troubles.^'^ Bacon distinguishes between two
kinds of seditions, the first one being caused by “much poverty” (“rebel­
lions of the belly”—a neat metonymical inversion of the rebellion against
the belly fable) and the second by “discontentments”.®®The latter are lik­
ened, in accordance with the traditional imagery, “to humours in the natu­
ral [body], which are apt to gather a preternatural heat and to inflame”.®^
However, Bacon makes no attempt to invoke a symmetrical system of bio­
medical concepts comparable, for instance, to Starkey’s account (nor to
“modern” scientific accounts, either).®'* What matters most for Bacon, as
for Machiavelli, is the distinction between proper healers of the body poli­
tic and quacks: “as there are mountebanks for the natural body, so there
are mountebanks for the politic body; men that undertake great cures, and
perhaps have been lucky in two or three experiments^burWanttKe grounds
of science, and therefore cannot hold out.”®'
In Machiavelli’s and Bacon’s (and implicitly perhaps also in Starkey’s)
perspective, it was no longer sufficient for the ruler to be a healthy part
o f the body politic, whether as head or as belly. His new essential quality
was that he functioned as a competent healer, as a benign authority that
could identify the right medicine and effect the right treatment when
threatened. Machiavelli’s and Bacon’s innovations vis-a-vis the traditional
body-state analogy lay not so much in the repudiation or denial of the
“humoral” understanding of the body politic—as we have seen, this sys­
tem had already lost some of its rigidity and validity earlier on—but in the
106 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
emphasis on the healer role. In the following chapter we will discuss how
this healer concept was further developed in the analysis of political lead­ 8 From Political Anatomy to Social
ership put forward by Bacon’s friend and temporary amanuensis, Thomas
Hobbes, in Leviathan. Pathology
Modern Scenarios of the Body Politic and
Its Therapy

Thomas Hobbes’s (1588-1679) version of the body politic metaphor in

Leviathan (1651) has been described variously as marking the final phase
of the classical commonplace metaphor of the state as a human body or as
the start of a new tradition in the history of thought, reflecting as it does the
change from the ancient humoral model of disease to a more “modern” one
that was inspired by new mechanistic and scientific re-conceptualisations
of both physical and social bodies.^ Whilst these periodizing perspectives
articulate important insights into a major discontinuity between traditional
and modern versions of the metaphor in terms of its conceptual elements,
they tend to gloss over the argumentative implications that follow from the
main argumentative scenarios in which the metaphor is employed. In this
chapter, these implications will be highlighted and characterised as laying
the stress on a pathological view of the staxt-body, with view to linking
them to metaphor versions that were formulated later during the Enlight­
enment and in the run-up to the French Revolution. The claim is not that
Hobbes’s concept of the body politic in Leviathan directly informed or
inspired the implicitly or explicitly regicide applications of the metaphor
but that it opened the way for a thoroughly sceptical attitude towards the
traditional head (= Prince)’s competence to effect necessary cures o f the
body politic once the latter had seriously fallen ill.

8.1 THE BODY POLITIC AND ITS DISEASES IN HOBJBESiR^

LEVIATHAN: “ARTIFICIALL MAN” OR JWO-HEADED MONSTER

Hobbes’s treatise has as its very introduction a drawn-out metaphor-cum-

allegory of the state as a human body, which may at first sight look like an
extended version of John of Salisbury’s pseudo-PIutarchian body analogy,
albeit not ordered from “head to toe” but biographically from “the cradle
to the grave”:

. . . by Art is created that great L eviathan called a C ommon -wealth ,

or State, . . . which is but an Artificial! Man; though of greater stature

108 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
and strength than the Naturall, . . . ; and in which the Soveraignty is
an Artificial! Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; The
Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and Execution, artificial!
Joynts; Reward and Punishment (by which fastned to the seate of the
Soveraignty, every joynt and member is moved to performe his duty)
are the Nerves, that do the same in the Body Naturall; The Wealth and
Riches of all the particular members, are the Strength', Salus Populi
(the peoples safety) its Businesse; Counsellors, by whom all things
needfull for it to know, are suggested unto it, are the Memory; Equity
and Lawes, an artificial! Reason and Will; Concord,- Health; Sedition,
Sicknesse; and Civill war. Death. Lastly, the Pacts and Covenants, by
which the parts of this Body Politique were at first made, set together,
and united, resemble that Fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced
by God in the Creation. ^
The body-state metaphor pervades the remainder of Leviathan, to the
extent that without it the whole treatise would, in the words of Prokhovnik
(1991), “consist of a set of doctrines without a cohering philosophy, and
its rhetoric would lack its central feature”.^ Overall, as Johnston (1986)
observes, Leviathan is “rhetorical in character throughout”, and “simile
and metaphor are in constant use”.*’ Besides the body politic, Skinner (1996)
counts five further major metaphorical themes: reading (of Man’s charac­
ter), physical movement, use o f arms in combat, building-architecture, and
enslavement-physical constraint.^ Not only are metaphors in abundance;
the latter parts of the treatise (III and IV) also abound in comments on
whether specific biblical passages should or should not be read metaphori­
cally, with Hobbes’s argumentation again exploiting the whole range of
rhetorical tropes.
Far from earning him a reputation as a sophisticated rhetorician, Hob­
bes’s abundant use of imagery has led to accusations of methodological
inconsistency, in view of his own explicit denunciation of “metaphor” in
Leviathan (and elsewhere) as an “abuse” of words, which, like “senslesse
and ambiguous words”, functions as intellectual “/gwes fatui” (i.e. will-
o’-the-wisps): “reasoning upon them is wandering amongst innumerable
absurdities”; whoever follows them ends in “contention and sedition, or
contempt”.^ Some cognitive metaphor researchers have seen in Hobbes’s
apparent “anti-metaphor” stance “the most complete and clear exam­
ple of the epistemological basis for the empiricist attack on metaphor”,^
whilst others view him as a metaphor critic who did not follow his own
recipe.®
On closer inspection, though, the contradiction between Hobbes’s con­
demnation of “metaphor” and his own frequent use of it reveals itself to
be something of a myth. Basically, the term metaphor in Leviathan has
a special meaning that was based on the classic rhetorical and humanist
tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and had got little to do
\
From Political Anatomy to Social Pathology 109
with the modern usage of the term.^ Hobbes indeed criticises “metaphor”
but endorses explicitly what he calls “similitude”—i.e. in modern termi­
nology, simile (which counts in cognitive theory as a conceptual mapping
just as a metaphor). He sees in “similitudes” not an abuse but, on the con­
trary, a helpful tool to “open up” the understanding in “Demonstration,
in Councell, and all rigourous search of Truth”.^° Similitudes show good
wit, and “rarity of . .. invention”.” Modern criticism of Hobbes as being
“anti-metaphor” thus rests on an anachronistic confusion of his special use
of the term metaphor in the sense as an “abuse” of speech and, the cogni­
tive meaning of “metaphor” as a conceptual operation that would have
included what he endorsed as “similitude”.
Besides the above-quoted introduction. Leviathan contains one fur­
ther passage that depicts the state as a human body in Chapter 23, which
treats “O/"the publique ministers o f Soveraign Power”. A few other refer­
ences to organs and functions of the body politic are scattered through­
out the book. Tables 8.1 and 8.2 give an overview over these conceptual
mappings.
Some salient body parts, e.g. head, heart and feet, which had hitherto
always been included in traditional versions of the body-state analogy,
are missing, and there is one minor discrepancy: the source concept of
nerves is used to depict both a political function and the functionaries
{Publique ministers) themselves. Furthermore, the second list contains
as many psychological and social qualities of human beings as physi­
cal ones. It is therefore evident that there is no systematic anatomical
Table 8.1 Political Body Parts/Fluids in Leviathan
Source Concepts Target Concepts
Body Common-W ealth
Soul Soveraignty
Joynts M agistrates
Nerves rew ard, p u n i s l ^ ^ t
Publique Ministers: Protectors, Vice-Roys, and
Governors
Hands Publique M inisters: executioners etc.
Eyes Publique M inisters: Governm ent Spies
Fare Publique M inisters: Receivers of petitions
Blood mony, gold and silver
Muscles lawful Systemes, and Assemblyes of People
 110 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust From Political Anatomy to Social Pathology 111
Table 8.2 Political Life Functions in Leviathan Oliver Cromwell’s “Common-Wealth”, to the fact that the previous Head
Source Concepts o f State, King Charles I, had literally been decapitated two years earlier,
Target Concepts
and jump to the conclusion “that the metaphor of the body politic died
Strength w ealth, riches with the king at Whitehall”.'^ However, even during the English civil war,
Safety the head of the King as the ‘King body politic’ (in contrast to the actual
businesse
bodily King), was still retained by Parliment as a symbol on the great
Memory counsellors seal and coins, as Kantorowicz has ponted out: “the king body natural in
Oxford had become a nuisance to Parliament; but the King body politic
Reason and will equity and laws was still useful: he was still present in Parliament, though only in his seal
Health concord
image”. N e i t h e r was a head required for the “Soveraign” of Hobbes’s
Leviathan—what mattered was the “constructedness” of the “Artificial!
Death civill w ar Man'’— head and all—as is highlighted in the exposition of the whole
God's Fiat (Genesis) analogy, which precedes the above-quoted body politic passage:
pacts, covenants
Voice judges N ature (the Art whereby God hath made and governes the World) is by
the Art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it
Nutritive faculty Power of levying mony can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs,
Motive faculty Power of conduct and com m and
the beginning whereof is in some principall part within; why may we
not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs
Rationall faculty Power of m aking Lawes and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificial! life?'^
Procreation, children colonies
The “Artificial Animal” of the body politic is a human imitation of the nat­
ural body, which itself is an artifice made by God. Where God only needed
account of the body politic in terms of a 1:1 correspondence in Levi­ to utter his command to create a human being, man is forced to put together
athan— a. fact that motivated David Hale in particular to list Hobbes laboriously a socio-political construction though covenants.'* Much has
among those who put "an end to sustained or serious use of organic been made of Hobbes’s acknowledgment of contemporary machine concep­
imagery in political discussion”.'^ But then Hobbes nowhere pretended tions of the body, as promoted by Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and Wil­
to aim for comprehensiveness in this respect: his considerable interest in liam Harvey (1578-1657).'^ But the application of the latest physiological
(natural) sciences centred on mathematics and physics, not biology or insights onto politics was surely not the main concern for Hobbes. What
medicine.'^ To decide whether nerves were factually “parts organicall” recommended the mechanical perspective of contemporary medicine and
was not his concern: all that he needed for his argument in Leviathan science to him was rather the fact that it suited his argument. Hobbes’s
were source concepts that fitted the intended target concept of the state theory of the “Common-wealth” as being based on an artificial covenant
in its structural complexity. contradicted any attempt to derive'it from the “state of nature”. The cov­
Even if some prominent body parts are missing at the source level, the enant would relieve men from that state of nature, which was viewed by
body politic depicted in Leviathan is as complex as that on the famous Hobbes famously as continuous warfare, in whix:h-Iife-was^olitafy, poore,
frontispiece of the book, which shows (against varying emblematic back­ nasty, brutish, and short”.^° ''
grounds, depending on the year of the imprint) a crowned figure of a The correspondences between anatomic and functional aspects of the
man from the waist upwards, holding a sword and a crosier in his hands, human body and the state that we have sketched so far are neither sys­
with arms and the trunk consisting of a multitude of miniature heads tematic nor innovative as regards the source concepts: Hobbes picks and
that represent the people.'** If we assume that the frontispiece figure was chooses from the metaphor tradition what is suitable for his analysis of
meant to complement the textual metaphor, we can interpret the crowned the state as a hierarchical and functional whole. However, his analogies
head as containing the state’s soul that is mentioned in the introduc­ are not exhausted by these general references. Leviathan also includes a
tion and represents the sovereign’s will. We should thus be cautious to vivid account of the body politic’s illnesses, which we need to take into
read too much into the “headlessness” of the body politic in Leviathan, consideration in order to assess the overall argumentative import of the
even though it may be tempting to link its publication in 1651, i.e. under metaphor.
112 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
Hobbes devotes a whole chapter of Leviathan to "things that Weaken,
or tend to the DissoimiON o f a Common-wealth” The chapter is
roughly structured by the stages of the life cycle and the degree of dan­
ger of illnesses in the body politic. First, Hobbes discusses Defectuous
Procreation, i.e. “Imperfect Institution” of states, which he equates with
the lack of power and resources of the sovereign.Secondly, he con­
siders “Diseases of a Common-wealth, that proceed from the poyson
of seditious doctrines”. A f t e r refuting six such doctrines, which put
the sovereign’s ultimate authority into question, Hobbes analyses the
underlying causes of sedition. Here, illness imagery plays a central role.
The first cause that he highlights is the “Example of different Govern­
ment” in other n a tio n s,w h ic h is so seductive that people cannot leave
it be “though they be grieved with the continuance of disorder; like hot
blouds, that having gotten the itch, tear themselves with their own nay-
les, till they can endure the smart no longer.”^^ The reference to hot
blouds appears to be an allusion to the theory of the four humours,
which surfaces in Leviathan in a few other instances, e.g. when unlawful
assemblies are described as “Wens, Biles, and Apostemes, engendered
by the unnaturall conflux of evill humours”. T h e hot blouds passage,
however, evidently achieves its rhetorical effect less through the reference
to humoral medicine than the graphic account of scratching an itching
wound.
This focus on the graphic depiction of illness symptoms is also promi­
nent in the discussion of the second cause of political poisoning, i.e. “the
Reading of the books of Policy, and Histories of the antient Greeks, and
Romans” that incite “young men and all others that are unprovided of
the Antidote of solid Reason” to emulate their reb ellio n s.In particular,
ancient republicanism appears poisonous to Hobbes, justifying as it does
regicide: this “Venime” he “will not doubt to compare to the biting of a
mad Dogge, which is a disease the Physicians call Hydrophobia, or fear
o f Water”. Hobbes parallelises the symptoms of this political illness in a
strictly analogical and at the same time fanciful way:
For as he that is so bitten, has a continuall torment of thirst, and yet
abhorreth water; and is in such an estate, as if the poison endeavoureth
to convert him into a Dogge: So when a Monarchy is once bitten to
the quick, by those Democraticall writers, that continually snarle at
that estate; it wanteth nothing more than a strong Monarch, which
neverthelesse out of a certain Tyrannophobia, or fear of being strongly
governed, when they have him, they abhorre.
This horror scenario of snarling “Democraticall writers” that can bite a
state to the quick calls into question not only Hale’s assertion that in Levia­
than the body-state “comparisons are not insisted upon”,^"^but also Sontag’s
inclusion of Hobbes in the list of pre-modern thinkers who optimistically
Prom Political Anatomy to Social Pathology 113
employed illness metaphors mainly to encourage “rulers to pursue a more
rational policy”.^^ By comparing his ideological adversaries to mad dogs
that can bite a state to the quick and kill it, Hobbes comes close to suggest­
ing that such dangerous beasts must be put down, lest they ruin the body
politic.
Hobbes’s discussion of the third type of serious political diseases harks
back to medico-philosophical speculation: as there “have been Doctors,
that hold there be three Soules in a man: so there be also that think there
may be more Soules (that is, more Soveraigns,) than one, in a Common­
wealth”.^^ The import of this comparison is an attack on the church’s
claims to “Supremacy against the Soveraignty”, which Hobbes sees as
bne of the causes of fanaticism that leads to civil war. In his view,
“this is a Disease which not unfitly may be compared to the Epilepsie,
or Falling-sicknesse”: an “unnaturall spirit” causes “violent, and irregu­
lar motions” of the members, which puts the victim (person or state) in
danger of falling either into fire/water or into “the Fire of Civill warre”.^"*
The implication is that the sovereign must remain the sole soul of the
state; any other rival authority is seen as a mortal danger to'the health of
the body politic. Lastly among the major challenges to the state’s health,
Hobbes considers the idea of dividing government between two or thrfee
constitutional powers, which are loosely likened to life functions, i.e. the
powers of “levying mony, (which is the Nutritive faculty)”, “of conduct
and command, (which is the Motive faculty)” and “of making Lawes,
(which is the Rational! Faculty)”. A s with the “State v. Church” rivalry
for the soul of the body politic, Hobbes dismisses any such arrangement
as an “irregularity of Common-wealth”.^^
After having discussed defective procreation, poisoning and rivalry
of souls in one body politic as diseases “of the greatest and most present
danger”, Hobbes goes on to describe less dangerous but still important
anomalous conditions, which “are not unfit to be o b serv ed ".O f these
he notes seven: 1) “difficulty of raising Mony” (“Ague caused by con­
gested arteries obstructing the passage for the Bloud”); 2) monopolies
that hoard “the treasure of the Common-wealth” (“pleurisie”, i.e. intru­
sion of blood into the lungs); 3) “Popularity of a potent Subject” that
tempts him to become leader of a rebellion (“effects of Witchcraft”); 4)
immoderate growth of towns, corporations aiTd concblmtant^^iberty of
Disputing” (“wormes in the entryles”); 5)'expansionist policies (“Buli­
mia”), which in their consequence, lead to “Wounds . . . received from
the enemy; and the Wens, of ununited conquests”; 6) excessive “Ease”
(“Lethargy”) and 7) “Riot and Vain Expense” (“Consumption”).^®Hob­
bes rounds off the discussion of detrimental and destructive develop­
ments in political bodies with a description of a defeat in war as the
state’s dissolution, because the sovereign, its soul, loses command of its
members and only leaves the “carcasse” of the s ta te .( s e e overview in
Table 8.3).
114 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
From Political Anatomy to Social Pathology 115
Table 8.3 Political Illnesses/Diseases in Leviathan. It is evident from the overlaps between different categories and the
Source Concepts Target Concepts mix of concepts from various medical theories {humours, blood circula­
tion, witchcraft, bulimia etc.) that, as in the case of anatomical and func­
Disease, infirmities Things that weaken the Common-wealth tional aspects, there is no pretence of a systematic medical or pathological
Sicknesse account at the source level. Whereas Starkey, in the 1530s, had made sys­
Sedition ■
tematic use of humoral principles, Hobbes, like Bacon, pays little attention
~Unlawfull conflux of evill unlawful assemblies in common-wealth to a consistent analysis of political illnesses as disturbances of the humoral
humours equilibrium, even if he occasionally slips in references to “humours”. The
Hot blouds main contemporary “scientific” alternative to humoral medicine, i.e. Har­
desire of novelty vey’s theory of blood circularion, is also referred to in Leviathan, i.e. in the
Defectuous Procreation Imperfect Institution depiction of the state’s strength as the '‘Wealth and Riches” of money
circulation (“Sanguification of the Common-wealth”),'” and of its impedi­
Biting of Mad Dogge, Tyrannophobia ment by ague or pleurisy.^^ However, it would be a gross misrepresenta­
Hydrophobia tion to claim that this one aspect structures the whole account of political
Epilepsie, or Falling-sicknesse illnesses in Leviathan. It is just one of several source frames of reference,
Belief in Ghostly Kingdome
which, strictly speaking, are incompatible with each other in terms of their
Conjoined twins mixt government medical source notions.
Hobbes’s lack of commitment to a systematic medical underpinning for
Ague (obstructed Heart difficulty of raising Mony his body-state analogies has irritated some modern critics. Hale (1971) found
arteries)
his list of diseases o f the body politic “heterogeneous” and unspecific;'’^H ar­
Pleurisie Monopolies ris (1998) contends that Hobbes did “not have a live humoral vocabulary
with which he might image the commonwealth’s ‘internal diseases’” and
Witchcraft Rebellion by charismatic army leaders that this “predicament” was notable from his inability to find the equiva­
Wormes in entryles lent of the defect of the division of the powers of levying money, of (execu­
liberties of great towns, corporations, liberty tive) command and of making laws.'*'’ To prove the point, Harris quotes
to Dispute
Hobbes’s “admission”; “To what Disease of the Naturall Body of man I
Bulimia appetite of enlarging Dominion may exactly compare this irregularity of a Common-iyealth [i.e. three-way
division of powers], I know not”.'’^ However, Harris omits Hobbes’s further
Wens conquests explanation, which does in fact provide an approximate source equivalent
of the target notion:
unlawfull systemes in the Common-wealth
Biles unlawfull systemes in the Common-wealth But I have seen a man, that had another man growing out of his side,
with an head, armes, breast, and stomach, of his own. If he had had
Apostemes unlawfull systemes in the Common-wealth another man growing out of his other side, th^compa risorumight then
Lethargy have been exact.'*®
Ease
Consumption Riot and Vain Expense In this “admission” of his supposed “predicament” of humoral ignorance,
Hobbes compared what he saw as an unworkable political organisation,
Poyson, venime seditious doctrines i.e. a three-way division of powers in a state, to a condition that would be
- contagion Greek dsemonology met in source terms by conjoined triplets: only they apparently did not exist
in his experience. The next best image was therefore the existing metaphor
■antidote Reason of conjoined twins.*'^ As source input for his simile, this indication was
sufficient to convey what mattered to Hobbes, i.e. the disqualification of
Dissolution, Carcasse Destruction of state through war divided sovereignty as an apparently unworkable (and “unlivable”) mon­
strous body. Instead of “failing” to match source and target inputs, Hobbes
116 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
achieved his aim by “blending” the closest source approximation with the
target referent of different political powers to explicate in his view that
these powers should always be united in one sovereign, at least as far as
worldly rulership was concerned: “In the Kingdome of God, there may be
three Persons independent, without breach of unity in God that Reigneth;
but where men Reigne, that be subject to diversity of opinions, it cannot
be so”/®
Any competition of political powers within one body politic consti­
tutes, in Hobbes’s view, a fundamental defect and monstrosity that shows
the limits of what is politically manageable. Whatever the official nomen­
clature and titular terminology may say: “if the King bear the person of
the People, and another Assembly bear the person of a Part of the people,
they are not one Person, nor one Soveraign, but three Persons, and three
Soveraigns”. The outcome of such competing sovereignty can only be
the dissolution of the political “person” of the “Common-wealth” as an
identifiable body.
Hobbes’s supposed “failure” to account for mixed government in terms
of medical imagery is thus not motivated by any insufficiency of the source
domain vocabulary but by the fact that such conditions reach and possibly
transcend the limits of political science. Any fundamentally heterogeneous
body politic has the status of a chaotic, irregular phenomenon, the very
opposite of rational political order. What is beyond the limits of conceiv-
ability is, a fortiori, also beyond the'limits of political government and
even redemption. The prudent healer figure that is implicitly omnipresent
in Hobbes’s account (but not depicted in action) would waste his^efforts on
such a monstrous state that was doomed to perish. The only constructive
solution for the monstrous body politic lies in its destruction and the con­
stitution of a completely new “Commonwealth”.
Even such a radical scenario might still be fitted into Sontag’s concept of
“classical” political thought that can foresee and forestall any political ill-
ness, i.e. as a “worst-case scenario”. Such an interpretation would, however,
run counter to the main line-of argument and emphasis in Hobbes’s treat­
ment of Things that weaken or tend to the dissolution o f a commonwealth.
Hobbes does of course acknowledge that there are manageable and curable
illnesses o f the state that can be regulated by the political equivalent of
rebalancing the humours in the body natural or, in the physio-mechanistic
paradigm, of restoring a proper blood circulation. However, the chief infir­
mities that he identifies—mixed government, fanatical sedition and divided
sovereignty or power—are compared to diseases that could only conceiv­
ably be prevented by a miraculously prescient rultr-healer but which are
in fact incurable once the body politic has contracted them. In extreme
manifestations, as in the case of a three-way split of political powers, they
transcend the limits of conceivable political illnesses and instead indicate
the “Other” of rational politic theory and practice—the monstrous body
politic that defies the best efforts of any political healer.
From Political Anatomy to Social Pathology 117
8.2 HOBBES’S HERITAGE IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT
AND AFTER: THE DEMISE OF THE HEAD OF THE BODY
POLITIC AND THE RADICALISATION OF HEALERSHIP
Despite many fundamental differences to Hobbes’s concept of the “Artifi­
cial! M an”, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s {1712-1778) re-configuration of the
contract-based theory of the state, in his Social Contract of 1762,^° puts
similar emphasis on the principle of sovereignty being created through oblig­
ing all citizens to put their person and power “under the supreme direction
of the general will”, so that all members “as a body [en corps] receive each
member as an indivisible part of the whole”. A s in Leviathan, there is no
systematic anatomy of the body politic {corps politique). Its main organs
are identified as the mindibrain (i.e., the executive power) and the heart
(i.e., the legislative power), and of these it is the latter that matters most:
The mind may be unable to function yet the individual can still be
alive. A man can be mindless and live, but as soon as the heart ceases
to work the animal is dead. It is not by its laws that the state subsists
but by the legislative power . .. wherever the laws are weakened by age
it is a proof that the legislative power has gone, and that the state is
without life.^^
Rousseau also follows Hobbes in stressing the artificial character of
the body politic without seeing this as a contradiction to the corporeal
im ag ery ,b u t he applies this characterization also to the government: it is
a political “body” on a small scale,^^ contained within the national body
politic and created by it artificially, just as the body politic is itself an arti­
ficial body,^^ designed to unite the primary social entity, i.e. the “body of
society” {corps social) , “body of the nation” {corps de la nation)^^ or
“body of the people” {corps du peuple).^^
This emphasis on the people/nation/society as the entity that is consti­
tuted as a body politic marks Rousseau’s break with the traditional (includ­
ing Hobbes’s) reference to the state as the “target” of 6ody-based political
imagery. It changes the status of the head or the brain (which was still
conceivable as being represented by a prince or Jjingl-back-tcrtlrarDf an inte­
gral part of the body that lives and dies with the rest of the organism: the
ambivalence of the head/king also being the (external) healer o f the body
is thus revoked. Whatever and whoever is part of the body politic is part of
the nation and is defined by its function in it. Like a natural human body,
the nation’s body politic “begins to die as soon as it is born”, but through
prudent planning its life can be extended “for the longest time possible by
endowing it with the best constitution that it can have”.^®
The schema of the life cycle also informs Rousseau’s discussion of ill­
nesses o f the body politic', when relatively young, nations are amenable to
reforms, but once any dysfunctional “customs” have become established,
 118 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
From Political Anatomy to Social Pathology 119
"the people cannot bear to have the disease treated, like those stupid and This inter-personal, discursive operation of the legislative heart of the
fearful patients who tremble at the sight of the physician’’/^ Even the out­
body politic distinguishes Rousseau’s concepts from the conceptualisa­
break of a serious illness in the body politic can, however, still lead to a
tions of the state as the object of revolutionary therapy that became dom­
recovery as a rebirth: in revolution and “the flames of civil war”, the state
inant in the 1780s and 1790s, even though these were claimed by some
recovers Its youthful strength”.^ This image of revolution as a medical
to be based on his “naturalist” understanding of society and the political
crisis, which can turn either into the death o f the body politic or into its sal­
p r o c e s s .In the context of these revolutionary discourses, the purge of
vation, allows in principle for a healing of the nation’s body, though not on
the body politic became the focus of naturalist imagery, and it is here
account of a restoration by an able healer figure (e.g. in previous accounts,
that we find early uses of the parasite metaphor. According to Abbe Sie-
by the rationally acting prince); rather, it is presented as the product of a
yes (1748-1836), the whole system of feudal privileges formed “parasitic
desperate crisis, which if unchecked can destroy the whole body. Rousseau’s
growths that cannot live except on the sap of plants that they exhaust and
insistence on the real possibility of the catastrophic outcome of a political
deplete”.^®Whilst Sieyes’s analogy was originally drawn from botanical
illness would have met with Hobbes’s approval but the conceptualization
concepts, its parasite-privilege equation was soon combined with corpo­
of a revolution as a possibly salutary crisis certainly would not: Hobbes’s
real bloodsucker and vampire imagery. Its targets were all those linked
head/healer-soverdgn could hardly be expected to endorse his own demise
and bring back the “state of nature”. to the system of privileges, i.e. in the first place the king and queen (who
had been stripped of any head or healer status by way of denunciation
In Rousseau’s system, on the other hand, the healer role is fully externa-
for impotence, sexual illness and perversity) and the nobility, but also
h s e d -it now falls to the political philosopher, whose competence is deter­
the “farmers-general” and tax collectors.^^ During the reign of terror
mined by his capability of conceiving the state properly, i.e. as the nation’s
(1792-94), the parasite stigma for “enemies of the people” implied a de
body. Rousseau criticizes traditional political theorists as being nowhere
facto death sentence. A t the international level, supporters of the Revo­
dose to achieving even this basic task, due to their misguided attempts to
lution, such as Thomas Paine in Britain and Georg Forster in Germany,
divide the sovereign body o f the people: “The sovereign is made into a fan­
borrowed it in order to explain excesses of revolutionary violence and
tastic patchwork: it is as if they had made a man composed of more than
warfare,^° whereas its detractors, such as Edmund Burke, denounced it as
^ e body, one having eyes, another arms, another feet, and nothing else”.^^
“a medicine of the state corrupted into its poison”.^^ In the following cen­
He likens such theories to the feats of Japanese magicians who seem to “dis­
turies, the denunciation of social/political parasites by the Jacobins would
member a child before the audience’s eyes, and then throwing all its limbs serve as a model for condemnations of whole social classes by revolution­
one after another mto the air, . . . bring it down alive again”; similarly, the
aries such as Karl M arx (1818-1883), who depicted the bourgeois bureau­
conjuring tricks of traditional political theory consist in “chopplingl up cracy as a “parasite body” [Parasitenkorper],'^^ and Lenin (1870-1924),
the body social by a sleight of hand worthy of a fairground showman”.« By who portrayed the bourgeois state as a “parasitic organism” that fed on
contrast, a new, properly conceived political science has to (re)conceptualise the people.^® In the Soviet Union, the category of social parasite even
the social-national body as an indivisible natural entity. In doing so Rous- became a legally defined term to designate alleged enemies of socialism/
seau naturalises” not only the concepts of state, society and nation but also communism who had to be isolated and imprisoned or expelled.^*^
political theory itself: it cannot fulfil its task, i.e. help the of the
Having reviewed some of the self-conscious “modern”, even “revolution­
pei^le s body, as long as it does not understand its natural working
ary”, theories of state and politics with regard to i//«ess-imagery, Sontag’s
To understand the functioning of the body social, the political physician
(1978) verdict that it assumes “in modern political_^sco_mse._.^^_punitive
has to focus on the assembly of voters as “a moral and collective body
notion: of the disease not as a punishment b^t'*^ a sign of evil, something
which . . . is endowed with its unity, its common self, its life, and its will.”«
to be punished” seems to be broadly confirmed, even if we have to pre­
n practice, this ideal assembly of the whole body politic has to be enacted
date its emergence to Hobbes’s political pathology (which Sontag had still
by an assembly of deputies who should, however, be considered not so
included in the classical tradition). The emphasis in modern uses is on an
much as the people’s “representatives” but as their “agents”.^^ Rousseau
imminent, fundamental crisis of the whole political-social body, caused by
admits that such agency is difficult to realize in larger nations and he leaves
constitutional deficiencies, poisoning or parasitic organisms, which need to
the solution of this problem to a future work containing the theory of fed-
be treated by a competent healer with ruthless consequence. Although the
eratmn But whatever the formal arrangements, the lawgiving assembly,
imagery of purging, amputation or radical therapy was by no means spe­
as the heart of the body politic, must provide a room for free debate and
cifically “modern”, insofar as we have found it being used in graphic detail
equa voting rights; only in this way, i.e. as the result of a discourse among
equals, does the body politic truly come to life. in medieval and Renaissance texts, it appears to become more predominant
and systematically elaborated.
 120 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
We might be tempted to draw a direct link from this imagery to Nazi
rhetoric: the basic scenario of parasite-induced disease and its cure through
parasite-elimination would remain the same, but the target referents would
change from the “privileged” estates of the Ancien Regime to the “racial
misfits” of Nazi ideology. Hitler’s adaptation of this scenario in Mein
Kam pf as explicated in Chapter 3, would then constitute merely an ideo-
-logically elaborated version, which on account of particularly unfortunate
historical circumstances was given a chance to be implemented in the form
of genocide. However, apart from the general methodological problems
which we have considered {see Chapter 5), it is prima facie improbable that
the Nazis took as their model Hobbes’s or Rousseau’s body politic imagery
or even the parasite terminology of French revolutionaries, let alone that of
communist ideologues. It is much more plausible that any conceptual and
discursive traditions they based their own use on (and which they could rely
on to be understood by their audience) would have been those developed
in German political history. The following chapter will therefore concen­
trate on body-illness-parasite metaphor use in the development of German
political culture, with the twofold aim of explicating its links with the
“common” European heritage of this metaphor complex, as sketched in the
preceding chapters, and of tracing the crucial development from politico-
social to racial definitions of the body politic.
9 German Conceptual and Discursive
Traditions of the Body Politic
Metaphor
>
At the beginning of this book we referred to recent debates in Germany
about the term Volkskdrper (literally, the people's or nation's body), and
its associations with racist discourse and Nazi jargon. This stigma of a
“Nazi jargon” echo attaches, to be sure, only to the specific expression
Volkskdrper (as well as to further Nazi-characteristic applications of the
body-nation metaphor such as talk about social groups as parasites or
vermin) but not to other expressions from that lexical field, let alone the
underlying general conceptual metaphor, which could be paraphrased as A
political entity is a body. Thus, we can find uses of the body-statelnation
metaphor that are not “tainted” by any Nazi stigma and are used as politi­
cally unproblematic, even neutral ways of referring to political entities, as
in the following examples:
A jury of critics discusses the ten most significant theatre productions
of this season. They speak of the ‘body of the stage’ and the ‘body of
the nation’ [vom "nationalen JCdrper”]—society has become the giant
body that theatre dissects^ (article on unification of East and West Ger­
man theatre cultures).
Around 450 AD Germanic power-centres had become established in
the vast [Roman] Empire. They were effectively ulcers in the body
politic [Staatskorper] of Rome. During the fourth and Wth centuries,
Germanic tribes invaded the Roman Empire.^Soonthey fomied inde­
pendent uncontrollable centres of power—the germs of the Empire’s
dow nfall (article on an exhibition of Germanic cultural artefacts).
In the same way as the body politic [Korper des Staates] needed reform­
ing in the long term, it was necessary to conquer one’s own body natu­
ral, with its many enormous deficiencies^ (characterisation of Friedrich
Schiller’s attitudes).
Unlike the idiomatically fixed English expression body politic, the match­
ing German terminology is thus characterised by a degree of heterogeneity:
122 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
Volkskorper competes with terms such as nationaler Korper (“national/the
nation’s body”), Staatskorper (“state’s body”) and politischer Korper (“polit­
ical body”) and further morphological variants (e.g. “possessive” construc­
tions of the type Korper + genitive noun phrase such as Korper des Staates).
Whilst the general mapping of the source concept of the body onto the target
concept of the “(nation) state” can be assumed to be the same, the qualifying
morphemes, i.e. Volk-, Staat-, national and politisch, respectively, not only
provide different lexical meaning nuances but, at least in the case of Volk-,
also distinct ideological and historical associations. The diachronic analysis
has to take these various semantic strands into consideration if it wants to
chart the development of the metaphor, or else it would be reduced to giving
only the history of an isolated lexical item.'* (This is, of course, not a special­
ity of the German language but can be found in other language histories
too; French examples in preceding chapters, for instance, showed variation
between corps de policie, corps politique, corps social.) In the following sec­
tions we will therefore look at both the lexical and semantic history of the
metaphor to sketch some of the major developments and turning points of
the discourse traditions that can be compared to the Nazi use of that meta­
phor.
9.1 THE GERMAN BODY POLITIC, 1500-1806: FROM
CHRISTIAN IMPERIAL BODY TO HEADLESS RVMP
During the Middle Ages, philosophers of German origin, such as Albertus
Magnus and Nicolas of Cusa had participated in the late Latin traditions
of European political philosophy, including the tradition of conceptual­
ising the relations between spiritual and worldly powers in terms of the
body-state metaphor (see Chapters 6, 7). When public debates began to be
conducted in the vernacular languages during the Renaissance and Refor­
mation, the Latin terminology of corpus mysticum and corpus politicum
was accordingly translated. In Germany it appears to have been Martin
Luther (1483-1546) who was, among other things, the first to employ
German corporeal vocabulary to express his vision of a reformed church
and state, in his “Address to the Christian Nobility of German Nation,
about the reformation of the Christian Estate” [An den christlichen Adel
deutscher Nation von des christlichen Standes Besserung, 1520).^ On the
basis of St. Paul’s and St. Peter’s Epistles (whose translation into German
he published two years later), Luther emphasized a Christian ruler’s duty
to exercise his power in the worldly realm without interference from the
church authorities:
for worldly government has become a member of the Christian body,
. . . its work shall be carried out freely and without hindrance in all
members of the whole body, to punish or to prosecute people, as far as
German Conceptual and Discursive Traditions 123
guilt or emergency demand, irrespective of whether it concerns a pope,
a bishop or priest—they may threaten or interdict it as much as they
like.®
Luther took up the long-standing conflict between the spiritual and worldly
“swords” again, only to resolve it by completely handing over “the indepen­
dent jurisdictions of the sacerdotium . . . to the secular authorities”.^ His
reasoning was that all Christians, whatever their social rank, were mem­
bers (“mitglid”) of the same body (“corper”), of which Christ is the only
head.^ For him, as for previous critics of papal claims to supreme ruler-head
power, such as William of Ockham and Marsilius of Padua, Christ’s repre­
sentative in the body of the Holy Roman Empire was the emperor, not the
pope.^ Adherents of the pope’s authority over the emperor and other “her­
etics”, in particular Jews as the “enemies of Christ”, were for Luther ill­
nesses on the Christian people’s body, akin to plague and pestilence, which
needed to be eradicated.
In contrast to the emerging national monarchies that had adopted
Protestantism, e.g. England, Denmark and Sweden,^^ however, the hope
of resolving the headship for state and church bodies remained elusive in
the “Holy Roman Empire of German Nation”, for the Catholic Habsburg
emperors would not accept the Lutheran re-definition of their role. More­
over, the emperor’s rule was already limited by the empire’s constitution
as an elective monarchy, with relative autonomy of the territorial princes
(as laid down in the “Golden Bull” of T365). The political and religious
compromises that the emperor and the Protestant princes of the empire
entered into after the “Schmalkaldian war” (1546-1547) and in the “Peace
of Augsburg” of 1555 showed that neither side could gain supremacy and
that the notion of the empire as a unitary imperial body ruled by a single
worldly (let alone, spiritual) head/ruler had become highly problematic.
Assertions of the bodily unity of the empire thus acquired normative
status. In their supplications to the imperial courts regarding the emper­
or’s infringements of their rights, for instance, Protestant German estates
regularly invoked the body image to demand that all its parts, including
the emperor, ought to lend each other a hand (“die Hand bieten”) as so
closely related members o f one body (“als so nafiewerwandtCGlteder eines
Leibes”).^^ A few years before the outbreak of the Thirty Years War (1618-
1648), Christian Werner Friedtlieb, in his book Prudentia Politica Chris­
tiana, based the ideal Christian state on the body-state mapping, stressing
the usefulness of the metaphoric model as a means of popularising political
theory:
Just as the excellent and famous old philosopher Aristotle likens man
to the world and calls him a small 'world, so we can compare a good
Christian Commonwealth to a human body and its main members,
and that is the best way to explain it to the common man or layman.^^
124 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
Friedtlieb places the emphasis in his body description on a well-ordered,
harmonious state under one prince and regent (“just as any human body
has only one head, which holds the brain, the seat of the mind and the eyes,
which see everything”), in which all limbs are content to fulfil their pre-or­
dained function.^'^ Other publications using body imagery in the early seven­
teenth century include Paul Negelein’s Vom Burgerlichen Stand (1616) and
Georg Engelhard Lohneyss’s Aulico Politica (1622), which concentrated on
the eye. With reference to King Salomon’s wisdom, Lohneyss compared the
all-seeing eye, the “finest and noblest part of the body”, to state author­
ity (“Obrigkeit”), while the subject (“Unterthan”) was represented by the
receptive ear.'^^ In Daniel Casper von Lohenstein’s patriotic novel Gross-
miithiger Feldherr Arminius (1689), eyes and ears both belonged to the
prince, informing him of future developments and dangers so that his heart
could make the right decisions.^^ The moralising novels and rhetorical trea­
tises of Christian Weise (1642-1708) thematised political illnesses at court
as well as their treatment by competent doctors and warn against politi­
cal quacks [Quacksalber). By the end of the century, the metaphor was
so commonplace that Stieler’s dictionary of 1691 included the synonyms
Staatskorper and Staatsleib.'^^
The most famous (to some, infamous) seventeenth-century German
application of the body-state metaphor, however, was Samuel von Pufen-
dorf’s comparison of the empire in its state after the Thirty Years War as a
monstrous body in his treatise “On the State of the German Empire” [De
Statu Imperii Germanici), which he published in Latin in 1667 (German
and French translations in 1669):
There is now nothing left for us to say, but that Germany is an Irregu­
lar Body, and like some mis-shapen Monster [irregulare aliquod corpus
et monstro simile] if . . . it be measured by the common Rules of Poli­
ticks and Civil Prudence, and that nothing similar to it, in my opinion,
exists anywhere else on the whole globe.
In Pufendorf’s view, the empire was no longer one coherent, centralised
national state nor was it (yet) a confederation of independent states. The
emperor was head o f state but could not interfere in the other body mem­
bers’ internal affairs; they in turn were obliged in principle to come to the
head’s assistance when it called for help but in fact they had the power to
enter allegiances and even engage in war against that same head o f state.
This fundamental “irregularity” in the Empire’s constitution caused “an
inextricable and incurable Disease”, for “whilst the Emperon [was] alwaies
labouring to reduce it to the condition of a Regular Empire, Kingdom,
or Monarchy . .. the States on the other side [were] restlesly acquiring to
themselves a full and perfect Liberty”.
Pufendorf’s critical analysis of the empire, which scandalised contem­
porary political debate in Germany,^^ continues to exercise historians
German Conceptual and Discursive Traditions 125
to this day. Hofmann (1976b), for instance, attacks Pufendorf for alleg­
edly not being able to grasp the “living imperial organism” {lebendiger
Reichsorganismus) inherited from the Middle Ages,^^ whereas Schilling
(1994) relates the monstrosity verdict to the inflexibility of the consti­
tutional arrangements in the empire that preserved medieval structures
when confronted with the necessity of rapid modernisation.” Berschin
(2002), on the other hand, argues that the “monstro simile” formula was
only meant to stress the singularity of the Reich as fulfilment of the bib­
lical “Fourth Eschatological Empire”, which had been predicted in the
vision of Daniel and was unlike the preceding,empires; he therefore reads
the empire-monster comparison as a mere resemblance between the state
and a fabulous creature (“Fabelwesen”).”
However, whether it was seen as monstrous in the senses of an ill-shaped
and doomed body or as a fabulous creature^ the Holy Roman Empire
continued to exist and to be referred to as a “state body” [Staatskorper]
throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the wars between
Prussia and Austria under the Habsburg dynasty, for instance, the fic­
tion of the imperial body and head was used by the Frederick II of Prussia
to gain propagandistic advantage. Eager to justify his military offensive
against Austria in the Second Silesian War (1744-45), Frederick presented
his own actions as the altruistic defence of the then head of the empire,
the Bavarian Emperor Charles VII, after the latter’s defeat by the Aus­
trian army: “neither I nor any other Prince in the Empire would ever toler­
ate an attack on the head of the German body politic [das H a u p t. . . des
teutschen Staatskorpers]”.^^ From Frederick’s point of view, his own attack
on Austria was only one body member doing its duty to preserve the head
(which did not hinder him from attacking Austria again later, despite the
Habsburgs having regained head-empeior status in the meantime).
When the German (“Holy Roman”) Empire finally collapsed in the wake
of repeated military defeats at the hands of Napoleon’s French Empire,
the last emperor, Francis II, declared his status and obligations as Head of
the empire [reichsoberhauptliche A m t und Wiirde) as null and void.^^ He
accused those smaller West German states that had formed the “Rhenish
Confederation” [Rheinbund] under French protection of having broken the
bonds that had once united the Siijafs^orper.iirtheir-owirdectaration of
secession, the Rheinbund confederates had4ndeed stated that the empire
as one body was effectively dissolved. They explained that the preceding
wars, all of which had been won by their new protector, Napoleon, had
demonstrated this “truth” so clearly that there was no point in prolonging
the agony:
The past three wars, which have disturbed Germany almost without
interruption, have exposed the tragic truth that the bond that was sup­
posed to unite the different members of the German body politic [Glie-
der des deutschen Staatskorpers] was no longer sufficient or, rather.
 126 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
was indeed already broken-----It was futile to look for Germany any­
where in the body of the Empire [Reichskorper].^^
The abdication of Francis II provided a kind of death certificate for the body
politic of the “Holy Roman Empire”, which has entered German public mem-
ory.2® At the 200th anniversary of its demise in 2006, the magazine Der Spie­
gel quoted the nostalgic interpretation of the imperial abdication by Goethe’s
mother in a letter to her son: “it felt as if you have received a message that
an old friend who the doctors had already given up on has finally died: you
know he was dying but you are still shaken by the news of his death”.^^'
9.2 COSMOPOLITAN VS. NATIONALIST
CONCEPTS OF THE BODY POLITIC IN THE
GERMAN ENLIGHTENMENT AND AFTER
Whilst the term Reichskbrper lost its specific topical relevance with the
j ! Holy Roman Empire’s” dissolution, the more general term Staatskorper
seems to have become the main lexicalised expression for the abstract con­
cept of the state as a body since the end of the seventeenth century. We
thus find Staatskorper in the writings of the philosopher Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804) and the poet and publicist Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-
1813), not just as descriptive terms for any form of state but in the context
of enlightened designs for world peace and a cosmopolitan culture:
Finally war becomes . . . such an uncertain . . . and disturbing enter­
prise for all states that they . . . make preparations for a future great
united state body [einem kiinftigen grofien Staatskorper]. Even though
at the moment such a state body exists only as a blueprint, a feeling of
concern for the preservation of the whole [Erhaltung des Ganzen] is
stirring in its members [in alien Gliedern].^^
It is in the interest of humanity and every single nation, every single
state body and every individual human being that as many of such trea­
tises [on the knowledge of humanity] as possible are being deposited in
the inventory of general knowledge.^*
Kant and Wieland both used Staatskorper as denoting the generic, abstract
form of a state; the bodily source aspect played little if any role in their
conceptualisations of existing or ideal states. At about the same time when
they formulated their utopias of an enlightened global state and culture,
however, a radically new interpretation of the political body metaphor
was introduced in German thought that would prove to be historically
more influential—and more ambivalent: the idea of the nation as an ethnic
body. Building on Rousseau’s concept of a "national physiology” Johann
I
German Conceptual and Discursive Traditions 127
Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) put forward the idea of “a physiology of the
whole national body [Physiologie des ganzen NationalkorpersT' instead
of the outdated descriptions of the medieval Holy Roman Empire that
dealt mostly with the “pathology of the head, i.e. the Emperor and some
Estates”.^^
Herder developed and established an interest in all nations—and their
languages and cultures—as organic wholes and, consequently, in their
physiological explanation. As Isaiah Berlin (1976) has pointed out, there
was “no Pavoritvolk" for Herder; his “use of ‘organic’ and ‘organism’ [was]
still wholly metaphorical and not, as in later, more metaphysical thinkers,
only half metaphorical”.” However, it was also Herder who first described
the Jews as a parasitical plant or growth on other nations:
God’s own people who were once given their fatherland as a divine
present have been, almost since their inception, a parasitic plant on
the stems of other nations [eine parasitische Pflanze auf den Stdmmen
anderer Nationen].^*
When comparing such a formulation with later anti-Semitic texts, it is
important to bear in mind that Herder did not connect the parasite plant
with the idea of a human or animal body: the host of the “Jewish parasite”,
as he saw it, was another plant, e.g. a tree. The source domain for the
parasite image was still botany (as in the case of Sieyes’s accusation against
the privileged classes),” not human physiology. It would therefore be mis­
leading, as well as anachronistic, to'blame Herder for later versions of the
body-parasite scenario.
Soon, however, the combination of the metaphor of the nation’s body
and the scenario of a parasite-induced illness was to become a more potent
and dangerous conceptual mixture in the context of “naturalized” con­
cepts of society and history. The new term Volkskorper began to replace
Nationalkorper, emphasizing the physical presence of the people.^'^ Once
the parasite concept was remapped into the source frame of human physi­
ology, the focus shifted to the parasite’s allegedly destructive, poisonous
effect on the host, as statements from the middle of the nineteenth century
onwards show. In the run-up to the revolutioi^of- 184S^he-naHonalistic
publicist Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860) depicted “Jews and their fellows-
in-arms” as working incessantly “towards the decomposition and destruc­
tion [Zersetzung und Auflosung] of . . . the love for the fatherland and the
fear of God”.” The Prussian court preacher Adolf Stocker (1835-1909)
denounced "modern Jewry” as an “alien drop of blood in our national
body [ein fremder Blutstropfen in unserem Volkskorper] . . . a destruc­
tive, wholly destructive force”.^®In his 1881 book On the Jewish Question,
Eugen Karl Diihring (1833-1921) declared that “the Jew comes into his
own” when he can “act as a parasite in an existing or impending process
of corruption”. He concluded that “wherever [the Jew] has made his home
 128 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
in the nations’ flesh [im Fleische der Yolker], one needs to looks closely
whether it is still healthy”.^^
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, uses of the body metaphor
in German political discourse were increasingly informed by an ethnicised
notion of the body politic as a Volkskdrper that had to guard itself against
alien bodies from both inside and outside. In 1918, then, the diagnosis o f a
life-threatening crisis o f national health caused by parasites seemed to be
confirmed by the “evidence” of Imperial Germany’s defeat. But how could
this largely theoretical metaphor tradition be linked to concrete, suggestive
scenarios, such as those in Hitler’s Mein Kampf which were to incite its
genocidal implementation? In the following section we shall analyse the
attempt by Carl Schmitt to provide a theoretically “respectable” reading of
the body-politic tradition to fit the requirements of the “total state” under
H itle r ,a s well as counter-readings of that tradition by emigrants from
Nazi Germany.
9.3 HOBBES REVISITED: THE BODIES OF
LEVIATHAN AND BEHEMOTH AS CONCEPTUAL
MODELS OF THE “THIRD REICH”
In 1936 and 1938, two reassessments of Hobbes’s theory of the state-as-a-
body by German political theorists appeared, both written with view to an
application to the contemporary existence of a “total” political system, i.e.
Nazi Germany. The earlier book, which gave a general account of the Polit­
ical Philosophy o f Hobbes: Its Basis and Genesis, was authored by Leo
' Strauss (1899-1973), at that time a refugee from Nazi Germany in Britain.**^
The latter, under the programmatic title The Leviathan in the State Theory
o f Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure o f a Political Symbol (Der Levia­
than in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes: Sinn und Fehlschlag eines
politischen SymbolsY^ was published by Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), profes­
sor of law in Berlin and a member of the Nazi party, who, on account of his
contribution to the constitutional dismantling of the Weimar Republic and
his subsequent praise of Hitler’s dictatorship, has been dubbed the “crown
jurist” of the “Third Reich”.'*^
Four years later, with the Second World War raging, another emigrant,
Franz Neumann (1900-1954), published a sociological analysis of Nazi
Germany under the title Behemoth, the other monster besides Leviathan
mentioned in the book of Job, whose name Hobbes had used'as a title for
his account of the English Civil War, Behemoth, or the Long Parliament.
Like Leviathan, but operating on land rather than a't sea (“it eats grass like
an ox”)'*^, the Behemoth is of super-human strength'*^ and he, too, is used to
demonstrate the absolute superiority of God’s power over man.'’^ Neumann
explicitly referred to Hobbes’s use of the Behemoth imagery of terrifying
destructive power in the preface to his 1942 book,‘^^ thus continuing the
German Conceptual and Discursive Traditions 129
“revival” of Hobbes’s political theory with regard to Nazi politics, which
Strauss and Schmitt had begun. What was it that made two obscure mon­
ster symbols from the book of Job, in their Hobbesian version, attractive
for analyses of Nazi Germany?
In his 1936 book, Leo Strauss discussed the corporeal imagery of Levia­
than in the context of his argument that, contrary to traditional assess­
ments, “the real basis of [Hobbes’s] political philosophy [was] not modern
science”, but was instead a strong “moral basis” deriving from his human­
ist roots, which was partly obscured in the famous treatise of 1651.^°
This conclusion is important to our discussion not so much as an exegetical
hypothesis, but insofar as it is based on Strauss’s reading of the body-state
allegory: the main tertium comparationis between Leviathan and the State
was, according to Strauss, not “mighty power as such . . . but the mighty
power which subdues the proud”.^^ Later in his book, Strauss built an intri­
cate argument about the apparent lack of the traditional head = sovereign
analogy in Hobbes’s body politic concept:^^ “The holder of the sovereign
power is not the ‘head’, that is the capacity to deliberate and plan, but the
‘soul’, that is the capacity to command, in the State.”^^ He regarded this
distinction as indicative of Hobbes’s “break with rationalism”, which fore­
shadowed “Rousseau’s theory that the origin and seat of sovereignty is la
volonte generale”.^'^ Later Strauss retracted the assessment of Hobbes “as
the originator of modern political philosophy”, for which the distinction
.between the sovereign = head v. sovereign =soul analogies was supposed to
be evidence,but his reading became important for the strongly metaphor-
and symbol-focused interpretation in Carl Schmitt’s 1938 book. We need
to look briefly at the link between the two thinkers’ biographies in order to
gauge the seemingly paradoxical common interest in Hobbes’s Leviathan,
shared by an emigrant from Nazi Germany on the one hand and its “crown
jurist” on the other, a connection that has exercised Strauss’s and Schmitt’s
disciples and opponents to this day.^^
Strauss’s research on Hobbes, which resulted in his 1936 book, was
based on a project that had been co-refereed in 1932 by Schmitt (together
with Strauss’s PhD supervisor, and later fellow emigrant, the philosopher
Ernst Cassirer, 1874-1945) for a grant from th^RGGkefellerFotmdation.^^
It was this grant that allowed Strauss to liv6 and work outside Germany
from 1932 onwards, first in France and then in Britain, and to prepare
the/publication of the 1936 book.^® Strauss, for his part, had written a
detailed review of Schmitt’s seminal treatise “The Concept of the Politi­
cal” (Der Begriff des Politischen), first published in 1927 and reissued
in revised form in 1932. In this treatise, Schmitt set out to redefine the
political sphere “in its own right” on the basis of the distinction of friend
and foe, in opposition to liberal political theory that defined politics indi­
rectly and derived it from social categ o ries.T h e friend-foe relationship
does not necessarily include hatred or hostility,^® but always implies that
the foe is “in a particularly intensive sense an existentially other and
 130 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
German Conceptual and Discursive Traditions 131
stranger”, so that the conflict with him is not soluble or reconcilable by
liquidation of the “Rohm-Putsch”^^ and praised the 1935 Nuremberg race
recourse to shared norms or to an impartial arbiter.^' Schmitt connected
laws as advancing a “constitution of liberty”. A t the zenith of his career,
this fundamental conflict with Hobbes’s theory of the “state of nature”
in 1936, acting as a Prussian “State councillor” and leader of the university
where “every one is at war with every one else”,^^ in order to be able to
section of the National Socialist lawyers’ federation, Schmitt organised a
invoke Hobbes as a witness against what he saw as the “facile optimism”
conference on Jewry in the Study of Law” in Berlin. The meeting took its
of both the revolutionary-utopian and the liberal definitions of politics
motto from Hitler’s statement that the fight “against the Jew” was “doing
_Agamst this optimistic bias, Schmitt set a “realistic” pessimistic view of the Lord’s work”.^^
humanity that took the possibility of war into account and he insisted on
However, Schmitt’s seemingly impeccable Nazi credentials proved to
the interdependence of protection and obedience as the source of all sov­
be dubious, after all. Since 1933, emigrants, such as Schmitt’s former dis­
ereignty. Viewed from this perspective, the history of political thought
ciple Waldemar Gurian, had attacked and exposed him as an opportunist
smce the enlightenment was—with few exceptions^**—one of continuous
who before 1933 had supported parts of the anti-Weimar political right
neutralization” and “de-politicization”, an erosion of the political to the
advantage of the social.^^ other than the National Socialists.These attacks provided ammunition to
Schmitt’s rivals in the Nazi legal establishment and in the SS. They saw in
In his review, Strauss explicitly acknowledged the importance of
him not just a less-than-fully committed “fellow-traveller” but a potentially
Schmitt’s critique of liberalism for an “appropriate understanding of
dangerous conservative double-dealer who might change sides again.^^
Hobbes this latter task was for him a pre-condition to gaining a “per­
Shortly after the seeming triumph of the 1936 Berlin conference, the SS
spective beyond liberalism”.^^ So far, both thinkers seem to have been in
organ The Black Corps (“Das schwarze Korps”) denounced Schmitt; this
agreement; however, there was a fundamental difference in their aims of
and pressure from the head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), Reinhard Hey-
using Hobbes’s theories. Whereas Strauss hoped to recover the “human­
drich (1904-1942) were sufficient to force his resignation from all offices
istic” aspects of Hobbes’s system in order to reach beyond liberalism
within party-affiliated legal institutions.^® Behind-the-scenes protection
Schmitt aimed to re-found political theory on the friend-foe distinction
from other Nazi leaders such as justice minister Hans Frank (1900-1946)
and reclaim” Hobbes for such a stance. Schmitt had based his reading of
and Hermann Goring (1893-1946) saved him from further persecution: he
. Hobbes s concept of war as a fundamental political category on the idea
could remain a National Socialist party member and Prussian state coun­
of a nation-state asserting its identity by distinguishing friend and foe;
cillor and kept his chair at the University of Berlin but played no further
the foe could be another state, or a section of the community, or an indi­ active role in shaping Nazi legal policy.^^
vidual. Strauss, however, highlighted the fact that Hobbes’s definition of
It was in this situation, i.e. after having been sidelined and under pres­
war was first and foremost that of a condition holding between individu­
sure to prove his Nazi credentials, that Schmitt published the Leviathan
als. Hobbes’s own conclusion was, according to Strauss, the opposite to
book. Immediately in the first paragraph of the introduction, he announced
the one drawn by Schmitt: “the characterization of the state of nature as
his interest in the concept of “Leviathan” as something “more than just
the war of everyone against everyone is meant to motivate the relinquish-
an illustration of a thought or a comparison”; instead, he invoked it as
ment of the state of nature”,®^ i.e. not to perpetuate it as the basis of the
political, as Schmitt would have it. “a mythic symbol”. H i s first chapter recounted parts of the conceptual
history of the symbol before its use by Hobbes, with special emphasis on
Despite this difference, Strauss’s recognition of Schmitt as the pioneer
Christian and Jewish theological interpretations in the Middle Ages.®*
of a critique of liberalism that would prepare the ground for a redefinition
According to Schmitt, the “Jewish-cabbalistic”jxadition-viewecH:eviathan
of pohti^cal theory^s was sufficient for Schmitt to write a positive Rocke-
and Behemoth as representing the gentile peoples (which could be sepa­
M e r reference.65 However, by the time Schmitt published his own book on
rated in sea- and land-based powers); he then linked this tradition with the
Hobbes s Leviathan, any understanding that had existed between the two
Talmudic story that the flesh of the Leviathan would serve as a dish at a
thinkers before 1933 had become, at best, a “hidden dialogue”.^®Whilst
feast for the “just” (Jews) in paradise,®^ in order to demonstrate “the totally
Strauss went into academic and political exile to Britain and then to the
singular, incomparable .. . and abnormal situation and attitude of the Jew­
United States, Schmitt experienced the highs and the lows of ansacademic ish people to all other nations”:®®
and (temporarily) public career in Nazi Germany.^* Following the acces­
sion of Hitler to the Reic/^s-chancellorship at the end of January 1933 he
The Jews stand and watch how the nations of the earth kill each other;
immediately supported in articles the "purge” of Jewish academics,’the
and for them this mutual “ritual killing and slaughtering” is lawful and
empowerment” law and the "right” of the Nazi revolution.^^ He became
“kosher”. For this reason, they eat the flesh of the slaughtered nations
a member of the NSDAP, hailed the Fuhrer^s “defence of the right” in the and live from it.®**
132 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
From the start, Schmitt’s associations showed a radically anti-Semitic bent:
Behemoth and Leviathan, as politico-theological symbols, were supposed
to be “Jewish myths of combat, of the highest order”.®^ Arbitrarily, Hebrew
and Jewish(-German) literary traditions®^ were reinterpreted to fit a conclu­
sion that could have sprung from the pages of Mein Kampf, i.e. a projection
of the “reconstructed” Jewish myth “onto the allegedly real influence of
Jews on the history of the Christian peoples”.®^ Following this expository
depiction of the Leviathan story as a Jewish “combat myth”, Schmitt asked
what bearing Hobbes’s choice of the Leviathan as a symbol of pure state
power had on the distinction of friend versus /be.®® The answer was only
partially positive: Hobbes succeeded in defining the contemporary Roman
papacy as the foe of an ideal “Commonwealth” that would unite state and
church; his use of the Leviathan symbol, however, had made that very the­
ory vulnerable to a “Judeo-Christian” separation of political sovereignty
and religion by the “Jewish thinker” Baruch de Spinoza.®’
This alleged vulnerability of Hobbes’s theory to a Jewish symbol tradi­
tion, of which Spinoza represents the beginning, has no basis in the text of
the 1651 Leviathan.^^ For Schmitt, however, it was the key to the history of
a gradual “de-construction” of the theory of the state at the hands of “Jew­
ish thinkers”: Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Friedrich Julius Stahl (whom
Schmitt insisted on calling Stahl-Jolson),’^ and a group of further suspects
united supposedly by their Jewishness: “the young Rothschilds, Karl Marx,
Borne, Heine, Meyerbeer and many others”.’^ Hobbes’s Leviathan imagery
was thus supposedly “revealed” by Schmitt as an unfortunate choice of
symbol that made the unitary concept of the state the victim of subversive
“Jewish thought”.’®
The anti-Semitic bias—and, significantly, its expression in terms of
the pathological bio-imagery of decomposition—is the only aspect that
provides a modicum of coherence for Schmitt’s selective history of state-
as-Leviathan theories. Spinoza’s relation to Hobbes, for instance, was
not analysed in any detail but just presented as the story of the “Jewish
thinker” taking advantage of a vulnerable point in Hobbes’s theory, i.e. the
difference between a subject’s inner commitment and outward obeisance
to the sovereign, and bringing this “germ” of decomposition to full frui­
tion until, in contrast to Hobbes’s supposedly “authentic” idea, the state/
Leviathan has been destroyed, “deprived of his soul from within”.’**In the
eighteenth centufy, Moses Mendelssohn, though allegedly a “much inferior
intellect” compared to Spinoza, “instinctively” continued his destructive
work by widening the gap between religious belief and state sovereignty,
so as “to undermine and hollow out the state’s power and to strengthen his
own [Jewish] people’s status”.” The coup de grace for the concept of the
state was delivered, according to Schmitt, by the nineteenth-century politi­
cal theorist Julius Friedrich Stahl. He “alienated” subjects and sovereigns
through his theory of “constitutional monarchy” and, in particular, “con­
fused” and “paralysed spiritually” the “inner core of the Prussian State, the
German Conceptual and Discursive Traditions 133
king, the nobility and the protestant church from within”.’^ The Prussian
State-Leviathan, which was still “full of life”, was “castrated” by “Stahl-
Jolson”.’^ Following on after this main “breach” of Hobbes’s “authentic”
idea of the state, a host of Jewish intellectuals (i.e. the Rothschilds, etc., see
earlier) “[broke] into the European nations”; each one occupied a “zone of
operation in the economy, in journalism, in the arts and in the sciences”.’®
The institutions of individual freedom that these “liberals” created were
the “knives with which anti-individualistic powers cut up the body of the
Leviathan and divided his flesh between them. Thus, the mortal God died
a second death”.” In his denunciation of the supposed liberal-Jewish plot
to castrate, kill and devour the state-Leviathan, Schmitt provided a high­
brow version of Nazi-typical historiographies of “the Jew” as the decom­
posing agent in European culture. There were no explicit endorsements of
Nazi policy in Schmitt’s Leviathan, but his consistent use of scenarios of
decomposition and parasitic destruction as the subtext for his conceptual
history strongly resembled Hitler’s scenario of an illness o f the body politic
caused by “the Jew” that necessitated a radical therapy. It also fitted into
Schmitt’s professed admiration of Hitler’s Fiihrer-competence on account
of his proven ability “to distinguish who is friend and who is foe”.^°®
In his theory of the homo sacer, which is informed by a detailed cri­
tique of Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben has shown that the sovereign’s power
to stigmatize a subject as a homo sacer, i.e. as someone “who may be killed
but not sacrificed”, is even “more original”, more basic “than the Schmit-
tian opposition between friend and enemy, fellow citizen and foreigner”.^®*
This stigmatizing and destructive use of power to deprive subjects of all
rights, was, needless to say, characteristic of Nazi Germany: its victims
were no mere “foes” in the sense of strangers or “honourable” adversaries
(as Schmitt would pretend) but instead “bare”, dispensable life that could
be extinguished without guilt, life “that did not deserve to live” {lebensun-
wertes Leben).^°^
Agamben criticizes Schmitt not so much for being too radical or cyni­
cal but for not being radical enough in conceptualising the structure and
effects of unrestricted state power. Unlike the “heroic” Schmittian sover­
eign who defined friend and foe to assert his own id ^ it y J n j h e ensu­
ing fight, Agamben’s sovereign (as well as ^'Kat of Hobbes in Agamben’s
reading)^®® is defined by his self-decreed fight to declare a total ban on
the homo sacer that allows him “to kill without comrpitting homicide and
vyithout celebrating a sacrifice”.^®**As a consequence, Agamben gives a fur­
ther twist to the interpretation of the figure in the frontispiece of Leviathan:
the “Common-wealth’s” artificial body politic that is formed of the “bare
life” of individual persons signifies nothing but “the absolute capacity of
the subjects’ bodies to be killed”.®°’ The utterly defenceless existence of the
prisoner in a Nazi concentration or extermination camp is the manifesta­
tion of this “new political body”, and this concept is complemented by that
of the Fiihrer, who, unlike princes, kings and emperors of old, is “neither
 134 M.etaphof, Nation and Holocaust
private nor public and whose life is in itself supremely political” and is
m fact identified with the very biological life of the German people”
The Fuhrer represents the new unity of body politic and race/nation and is
therefore perfectly entitled to those meta-constitutional powers that Hitler
did, in fact, assume: immediate executive, legislative and judicial command
without recourse to mediating procedures or institutions. The Fiihrer's
_identihcation of agents o f illness, parasites or alien bodies, which we find
m M em Kampf instantaneously transformed their bearers into “bare life”
that had to be eliminated if the nation’s body was to survive.
/r monster that “makes the deep to boil like a pot”
{Job 41:31) provided the central point of reference for Schmitt’s attempts
to vindicate his anti-liberal and anti-Semitic reading of Hobbes, the second
mythical fi^ re that Hobbes borrowed from the Bible, Behemoth, was the
symbol of Nazi Germany as viewed by the emigrant lawyer and sociolo­
gist Franz L. Neumann; “a non-state, a chaos, a rule of lawlessness and
anarchy, which has swallowed’ the rights and dignity of man, and is out to
transform the world into a chaos”.^07 Neumann was well aware of Schmitt’s
writings, but insisted that the “National Socialist state [was] no Levia­
than in Hobbes’s sense, for his “Leviathan, although it swallows society
does not swallow all of it”.^<’^ In Hobbes’s vision, the power of the sover­
eign was enormous but was still “merely a part of the bargain in which
the sovereign has to fulfil his obligations, that is preserve order and secu-
rity. . . . If the sovereign cannot fulfil his side of the bargain he forfeits his
sovereignty. In comparison with such a rational, if pessimistic, concept
of the state as a Leviathan, National Socialism was wholly unprincipled- its
coMections with traditional ideologies were “mere arcana dominationis
techniques of domination”^!’ that could be discarded if they became incon­
venient. As evidence, Neumann pointed to the unrestricted power of the
FM^rer as the personification of Germany’s national body, which destroyed
even the last vestiges of a rational form of state: Nazi Germany’s power
rested solely “in the Leader, who [was] not the organ of the state but . . .
t e community, not acting as its organ but as its personification”."^ The
FuFrer-embodied Nazi state, as Behemoth, had no further purpose than
acting out Its own destructive power; in terms of body politic imagery
the only remaining quality it had was its sheer terror-inspiring strength.
The emergence of competing reinterpretations of Hobbes’s monster
symbols for the body politic in the historical context of National Socialist
rule in Germany was no accident. Hobbes’s theory of the “war of every­
one a p in st everyone” as the (negative) motivation for men to surrender
their natural ’ freedom to a protector-sovereign was an important point
of reference for any analysis of dictatorship, and its combination with bib­
lical symbolism and body politic imagery provided a conceptual space of
enormous historical, literary and political depth. It had enabled Hobbes
to explore the boundaries of conceivable political theory by constructing
imaginative notions of the absolute Other of rational political order- the
German Conceptual and Discursive Traditions 135
monstrous body politic that was beyond the control of even the most pru­
dent political healers}^'^
In its “revival” after almost three centuries at the time of the Nazi dicta­
torship, this political monster scenario was open to contradictory readings.
Leo Strauss, in some way pre-figuring Susan Sontag’s stance, put the main
emphasis- on the cautionary lesson for rational politics. From this perspec­
tive, Hobbes’s depiction of incurable diseases of the body politic was meant
to warn rulers and their advisors never to, let the'state’s health deteriorate
that far: instead, at the first recognition of any symptoms, they had to
combat the illness by all means available to the Leviathan-state. Strauss
claimed this “humanistic” Hobbes for the project of a new political theory
that would empower a rational state order to go beyond the mere mediation
of different socio-economic interests, as envisaged by classical liberalism.
Schmitt’s interpretation, on the other hand, was informed by a markedly
different, “anti-liberal” vision: he admired Hobbes’s Leviathan for its unity
and strength, which needed to be reasserted against the efforts to divide,
weaken and castrate it that had allegedly been perpetrated by generations
of “Jewish thinkers”. Schmitt abandoned the traditional source domain of
human physiology for the body politic imagery and concentrated on the
unity o f the animal body of the Leviathan. In doing so, he surrendered the
last vestiges of a humanistic vision of the body politic. In the end, however,
it was his own forced “re-construction” of the Leviathan against the sup­
posed Jewish conspiracy, not Hobbes’s original one, that “failed to restore
the natural unity of the state”."^ Lastly, Neumann, in order to achieve a
similar effect from the opposite. Nazi-critical perspective, chose the sym­
bol of Behemoth to denounce the destructive strength of National Social­
ism. For him, the monstrous aspect of the Nazi body, as personified in the
Fuhrer, lay in the utter lack of any constructive vision of politics: for the
same reason, the Nazi-Behemoth, though formidable, was doomed to per­
ish eventually.
These opposing re-applications of Hobbes’s body-state' metaphor to
Nazi Germany are of course not representative of any popular conceptu­
alisations among the German public at the time: Strauss’s and Neumann’s
analyses were restricted to a reception in acadejnically orientated-emigrant
circles and political scientists; Schmitt’s laboured re-appropriation of Hob­
bes was not even attractive to the Nazi elites that it was meant to placate.
The references to the arcane biblical monsters Leviathan and Behemoth
were esoteric and. speculative and their i?ody-metaphorical characterisa­
tion remained highly abstract: all that was left of their “nature” was sheer
strength or force, which was viewed by Schmitt with nostalgic fascina­
tion, by Neumann with horror, and in Strauss “humanistic” interpretation
was being relativised as much as philologically possible. Nevertheless, in
their focus on the dehumanised Fiihrer-state the three opposing readings
“shared” an interest in redefining the nature of the body politic that was
uncannily topical in the context of a regime that specialised in defining its
 136 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
foes and reducing them to bare, i.e. destroyable, life. And by linking or at
east referencing their interpretations to Hobbes’s version of the h o ly poli-
d is m u T ^ T ’ temporal and concepmal
distance between the seventeenth century and their own historical con-
text, a connection could be made between the corporeal theories of Euro-
ideology of a new
National s t k t e ’' by the
Their acknowledgment of such a link between the past and contemno-
mry metaphor scenarios did not entail a material endorsement of its target
meaning as envisaged by the Nazis—on the contrary! For Strauss and Nra-
mann, the Nazi version of body imagery was a manifestation of the mon-
strous state-feody which Hobhes had warned against. Even Schmittfeh
unable to declare the idea of a unitary, all-powerful “total” state an unmiti­
gated success; in fact, he called it a “failure” but tried to shift the blame for
1 fe’’ h u m r ' “bare
life humans escaped him; instead, he harked back to the romanticised
notion of a heroic confrontation with an honourable foe
of the “total’’ s ? 7 ' m e t a p h o r for the theory
of the total state was, of course, in addition to its racist bias, also flawed
as a historical account, due of the uncritical assumption of an immanent
eaae^nThTf metaphor’s history (i.e. its supposed Jewish-cabbalistic bag-
ft ^ Levtathan symbol). This bias is so transparent thft
may b^e easily avoided today, but the damage it did to Schmitt’s con-
“S r h assumption of immanence in the
life history of conceptual metaphors. An alternative reification could for
I ^ 'b e notion that political body-parasite-therapy scenarios
N r z f H d o l u s r s h“ ’’iustification”, as demonstrated in the
Nazi Holocaust. Such a perspective would just exchange one flawed teleol-
ogy of the metaphor’s semantic drift for another. The concluding chapter
™ll discuss the implications of our findings for the prospect of a non-tele-
ological perspective in discourse history.
10 Conclusion
Metaphor in Discourse History
The body-state metaphor and its illness and parasite scenarios have been
declared “dead”, “moribund” or at least deserving to be extinct in several
schools of conceptual history. Its anti-Semitic associations have made it
suspect on account of the memory of its use by the Nazis.^ Its semantic
coherence has been seen as being weakened in the modern era due to the
demise of the humoral source knowledge system and its replacement by
new, mechanically orientated scientific paradigms.^ Some historians have
claimed that body-state imagery was developed from a semantically flex­
ible metaphor complex to an institutional and scientific (especially, socio­
logical) terminology during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.^ In this
view, the metaphor has lost most of its iconicity and suffered what Croft
and Cruise (2004) have called a “semantic drift” to a point where it is "no
different from a literal expression, and only etymologists and historians of
language can recreate the path of derivation”.**
Such “obituaries” of the metaphor have concentrated on changes to
its corporeal-medical source-level aspects. By comparison, target-related
criticisms on account of changes in state and society are rare but can also
b?en found. In 1987, the German writer and critic Hans-Magnus Enzens-
berger provided an example of target-related criticism of the metaphor
when he declared the body-state metaphor “dead” because it assumed
the existence of an identifiable head/brain (= central control organ) of the
state, which no longer applied to modern politics.^ Among the^uthors we
have cited earlier, Susan Sontag did acknowle^e^and'anatyse fKTpromi-
nence of the body politic metaphor’s illness ejttensions in the modern era
but assumed a kind of ethical decline after the seventeenth century. Her
hypothesis that since then, and especially in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, pathological and medical imagery in political discourse had
assumed “a punitive notion; of the disease not as a punishment but as
a sign of evil, something to be punished”^ is certainly borne out by the
use of illness and parasite metaphors in Nazi ideology and propaganda,
which we studied in Part I of this book. In National Socialist ideology, the
foody-based metaphor scenario of therapy-through-elimination became a
self-asserting ideology that reduced its targets to mere "bare life”, which
138 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
had to be eliminated so as to preserve the body politic of the Nazi Behe­
moth (in Neumann’s reading).
However, as the texts from the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Enlight­
enment have shown, uses of pathological and radical surgical.metaphors
can be traced to a time long before the advent of modern medicine and
parasitology or “master illnesses”. Thus, one-dimensional accounts, either
of the linear increase or decrease of specific manifestations of the meta­
phor, of de- or re-metaphorisation, are not borne out by the historical find­
ings. Neither, as we have seen in the last chapter, would it be justified to
posit a special national path, e.g. in German political culture: though the
development of expressions for the body-state analogy is different from the
conceptual history of the body politic phrase in British and American Eng­
lish, the contrast is by no means a straightforward one of, say, a tendency
towards or a preponderance of “racial” versus “social” definitions (except
for the official discourse during the twelve years of Nazi rule in Germany).
The history of uses of the body-state analogy in German political thought
and discourse reaches back to the early sixteenth century and shows just as
much diachronic variation since then as other vernacular traditions of its
use in European languages and political cultures.
In view of this result, we need to take up once again the general question
of what we mean if we speak of the “history” of the metaphor complex. To
answer this question, we need to distinguish several levels of analysis. The
basic conceptual mapping that matches the outward appearance and main
functional aspects of the human body to the socio-political entities appears
to be near universal: it is certainly attested beyond Western culture^ and is
as accessible today as it was in the Middle Ages and before. However, this
general perspective does not justify the conclusion that the metaphor has no
history at all, or that its history is a mere chronological series of instantia­
tions of one and the same mapping, for its continued use has been shown to
be based upon and indeed manifested by its conceptual-discursive develop­
ment. Without at least some—more or less conscious—awareness of that
tradition on the part of its users, the body-state image should have faded
after the demise of humoral medicine and would only be manifest in a few
lexicalised “dead” metaphoric expressions such as head o f state. But if our
analyses have demonstrated anything, it is the emphatic, creative exploita­
tion of its conceptual potential that characterizes its function in philosophi­
cal arguments, political theory and polemics to this day.
In its use by the Nazis, the metaphor helped to advance a genocidal
ideology in its most brutal form, which is still remembered. As a result,
parasitological scenarios have become stigmatised in German and, to some
extent, international public debates on politics and societ. But the “Ger­
man case” is not unique: Native speakers of British English who employ
the phrase body politic may not be aware of all the'historical details from
the metaphor’s heyday during the Tudor Renaissance, but they will recog­
nise it as a special phrase (if only due to its archaic morphology) and may
Conclusion 139
associate it with Shakespeare’s texts.® In US American English, body politic
has its own characteristic connotations that invoke an inclusive view of
society (as in President Obama’s appeal to overcome “racial and religious
tensions within the body politic”).^ In political science and philosophy, the
metaphor has also been employed to denote notions of inclusiveness, e.g.
in debates about globalisation and the phenomenological critique of the
theory of sovereignty.^® In France, Rousseau’s notions of the social body of
the people are still being invoked to promote patriotic solidarity, e.g. in an
article by Michel Guenaire welcoming the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as
president in 2007 as an opportunity to put “le vieux corps social fran^ais”
in order and to rediscover “son propre genie”.”
Not only do such allusions demonstrate a degree of popular memorising
of famous and infamous historical formulations of the metaphor but, more
importantly, they derive their very pragmatic and political import from this
historical “resonance”. To invoke the body politic today would probably be
viewed as a laboured effort to use archaic language, were it not for the fact
that speakers and writers know that they will be understood as referring
to a conceptual-discursive tradition that is still relevant for their audience.
The historicity of the body-state metaphor, however vaguely remembered
by members of the public, is part of its attractiveness for continued uses,
interpretations and reinterpretations in public discourse. For this reason,
the historical indexicality of the metaphor cannot be excluded from its cog­
nitive analysis. If the grounding of the body-state mapping in experientially
based schemas is the necessary condition for its successful use in all kinds
of expressions and scenarios, its historicity and discursive “situatedness”
(Frank 2008) provide the necessary complement to reach a sufficient expla­
nation of its variation patterns. In the remainder of this chapter we will dis­
cuss the implications of this programmatic statement for the further study
of the body-state metaphor and of political metaphor in general.
In the first place, our overview of the various manifestations and sce­
narios of the body-state metaphor has shown that cognitive analysis has
to take into account the full range of its semantic variation as regards the
source domain. It is evident that there are vast differences in the anatomi­
cal, functional and medical understanding of even the most basic source
concepts of body-related metaphors (e.g. anatoffiicahpa'fts, main organs
and their functions) in antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the
Enlightenment and modern science. As for specialised notions, such as
parasites, cancer, AIDS, viruses, etc., they could serve as source input for
metaphorical use only after these concepts had entered popular knowledge.
The “paths” of their semantic development and entry into public conscious­
ness can be very complicated and are by no means only unidirectional (in
the sense of body knowledge being “first” and its socio-political application
coming “afterwards”). In the case of English parasite and German Para-
sit, for instance, etymological studies have shown that their Greek source
term parasitos denoted "a person allowed to share in the food provided
 140 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
for a public official, or in the feast after a sacrifice”; i.e. the human social
domain seems to have been the earlier domain of usage, and bio-medical
applications are only recorded since the eighteenth century.’^ Whilst such
detailed etymological knowledge can be assumed to be largely irrelevant
for modern users, it demonstrates that the physical or physiological domain
is npt necessarily the historically primary or original source of metaphor
. mappings and that source-target directions are reversible, at least from a
diachronic viewpoint.
The parasite metaphor even appears to have changed its mapping direc­
tion twice: in the eighteenth century, the social category of a person who
lives at the expense of another person' (which was based on the historical
notion of a person allowed to share in the food of another, as inherited
from ancient Greek culture)’^ was applied to the newly conceptualised rela­
tions between organisms in the natural world, especially to plants. By the
end of that century, however, it was re-applied from that botanic source to
the concept of peoples as organisms, as we saw, for instance, in Herder’s
statements from the 1770s-80s quoted in the preceding chapter. The fur­
ther development of this “re-mapped” metaphor in social Darwinist and
racist discourses of the nineteenth century was informed by the then topical
hygienic, virological and bacteriological insights, so that the notions about
the relative danger that parasites pose for their host organisms and about
the methods of medical intervention were substantially different from those
of earlier parasite metaphors. As we saw in Part I, it was these “modern”
implications that were transferred in Hitler’s scenario of a supposed Jew­
ish parasite attack on the German body politic, rather than the older, less
dramatic connotations.^'*
In one sense, therefore, the history of body and illness metaphors can be
written as a story of medical and scientific advances, insofar as they have
been popularised in a given discourse community. Popular “knowledge”
concerning body and health issues varies through the centuries depending
on received scientific consensus, and, as we have already observed, even
officially discarded conceptual traditions such as humoral medicine and
the notion of a hierarchy of parts of the body can have a long “afterlife”
in common language use, with varying degrees of semantic and etymo­
logical transparency. The impact of scientific “breakthroughs” for popular
metaphorical conceptualisations of the body and its state of health must
therefore not be exaggerated. Whilst the Great Chain o f Being system that
surrounded the humoral.medical philosophy of the Middle Ages has largely
disappeared by now, some of its conceptual and terminological elements
have remained in use. The notion of blood as a substance that defines a per­
son or a group’s inheritance and identity, for instance, has survived in folk
theories, idioms and in public discourse until today. Usage patterns of body
and health-illness metaphors are thus not only wide-ranging in terms of the
conceptual source input but are made more complex by the simultaneous
co-existence of several metaphor versions from different periods of origin
Conclusion 141
in the various layers of popular knowledge frameworks.^^ Such simultane­
ous use of source inputs with diachronically diverse origins provides the
basis of semantic metaphor variation that constitutes a vast field for further
research.
A second main question we have raised concerns the “cognitive import”
of the body-state metaphor when we consider its central role in Nazi anti-
Semitic ideology. In Part I we explicated the various layers of source and
target inputs in detail to show the internal systematicity and range of Hit­
ler’s imagery as a basis for an elaborate argument-by-analogy, which per­
vaded both Mein Kampf and his later rhetoric up to the end of the “Third
Reich”. It is obvious and. has never been contentious that the body-parasite
scenario is present in these texts; what has been contentious is its cognitive
and pragmatic function: was it a “mere” propaganda slogan to accompany,
and perhaps camouflage, the “real” Nazi policies of genocide and war, or
was it an integral part of the ideology that was necessary to make the Holo­
caust happen? We considered (Chapter 2) diverse hypotheses that assumed
the latter case with view to the following question: How were the recipi­
ents, i.e. in the first place, the German public, supposed to have understood
the meaning of the metaphor? The initial answers—that the metaphor was
understood as a “literal” blueprint for genocide, or as a “code” to hide its
true nature—turned out to be disappointing. As a literally true descrip­
tion the body-parasite scenario makes no sense; as a camouflage “code” it
would have had to be more terminologically fixed and abstract (like, e.g.,
“special treatment” or “deportation”) to be functional. Instead, the sce­
nario appeared in the Fuhrer’s speeches and speeches by other party “lead­
ers” of all ranks as well as newspapers, books, pamphlets, radio and film
propaganda as a vivid and emphatic announcement of genocidal intentions.
This publicity was, however, counteracted by the policy of strict secrecy
practised by the agencies of perpetrators (SS, SD, Gestapo etc.). There are
statements by Goebbels and Himmler to the effect that the German peo­
ple were not (yet) ready for the full knowledge of what “happened to the
Jews”, and we have detailed data from diaries and secret reports about the
popular rumours of mass killings, which fell short of providing detailed
information especially about the extermination camps but which do show
a general awareness of the enormous dimensi<3n~oFthe genocide. On the
basis of these data, we can conclude that the'raetaphor scenario supporting
the genocide was integrated into a systematically distorted discourse that
treated the murder of European Jewry (as well as of other groups) as an
“open secret”.
In this discourse the metaphor of parasite annihilation played the central
role of naming, explaining (and supposedly justifying) the core content of
Nazi policy against Jews, which was “taboo” for identification in literal
terminology (apart from some cases of internal communication among the
perpetrators). Depending on situational context, social identity and per­
sonal interests, members of the general public could, as it were, choose from
142 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust
an array of interpretative “versions” that ranged from dismissive attitudes
towards it as mere “wild” or “ugly” rhetoric over semi-informed suspicion
of its “true” meaning to knowing complicity with (or, in incomparably
fewer cases, resistance against) its “practical” genocidal implications. In
the latter cases, the official insistence on continuing the “annihilation of the
Jewish parasite race” as a means to “save the German nation’s body" (and,
for good measure, also the wider European body politic) must be assumed
to have been easily comprehensible as a paraphrase for a statement that the
genocide was ongoing (even after the chances of military victory, for which
it was supposedly a precondition, were disappearing).
Whilst the Nazi leaders and their audience did not need to have detailed
knowledge of the long history of political body imagery in Western political
philosophy and public discourse in order to “understand” the genocide they
were perpetrating and/or witnessing, the famous traditions of conceptualis­
ing state, society or nation as a body certainly had a reinforcing and famil­
iarising effect on their use. Our sketches of the discursive and conceptual
changes of body-state imagery in the preceding chapters have shown that
this history is not amenable to a one-dimensional interpretation in the sense
of a linear development, but that does not mean it is un-interpretable. The
main contrast between the political therapy scenarios employed by John of
Salisbury and Christine de Pizan, Starkey and Machiavelli, and Hobbes,
Rousseau, Kant and Herder and those used by Hitler and his acolytes does
not lie in the source knowledge or in the supposedly more “optimistic”
view of the severity of political illness, but in the degree of commitment
that they impose on speakers and hearers.
In what Sontag called the “classical” tradition, the scenario of a maxi­
mally invasive and aggressive therapy (e.g. amputation, radical surgery)
was present, but it did not figure as the only possible “solution”; rather, it
was the means of last resort. It was conceivable, but it was certainly not
considered to be desirable or necessary except in desperate, “monstrous”
circumstances that were themselves to be avoided at all cost. For this rea­
son, classical scenarios of the body-state metaphor used to be couched in
hedging formulations; e.g. similes, exemplary stories (e.g. the “fable of
the belly”), referenced quotatipns from ancient and famous authors and
explicitly argued analogies that stressed a relational rather than substantive
similarity between the body and the state. Hitler and the Nazi’s scenario
of national and cosmic therapy^ by contrast, knew only one outcome, one
therapy and one course of action for the healer, in order to solve the alleged
extreme crisis of the body politic, i.e. its cure-through-elimination of the
parasite. This therapy was understood by Hitler and his followers in the
sense of an elimination of all individuals of the supposed parasite organ­
ism. As the scenario analysis in Chapter 3 showed, the source and target
levels in Mein Kampf were so intricately fused that the distinction of literal
and figurative meanings of the bodylnation-v.-parasiteljew mapping was
rendered meaningless.
Conclusion 143
Carl Schmitt’s biased reconstruction of Hobbes’s Leviathan showed that
the attempt was made to connect the “respectable” philosophical body
politic tradition with the notion of a “total” state that gained its identity
only through combating an existential foe. The permanent crisis of such a
state founded pn conflict, which classical thinkers considered mainly as a
limiting concept for a situation that had to be avoided, was for Schmitt the
pre-condition of all political activity. So it was for Hitler and the Nazis,
but they drew from it the ultimate conclusion which Schmitt himself did
not (dare to?) consider: the absolute necessity for the national body politic
to destroy the foe as a parasite life form that was “unworthy to live”. The
basis for such a conclusion was of course not Schmitt’s attempted recon­
struction of Hobbes’s theory but the popularized “sedimented” tradition of
body-state analogies.
Our historical analyses in Part II have revealed that whilst a relatively
wide range of conceptual/lexical source elements can be found in the rel­
evant texts, only a handful of thematic clusters appear repeatedly and
prominently: the hierarchically ordered anatomy o f parts o f the body,
their mutual interdependence, the life cycle o f the whole organism and
the illness-diagnosis-cure scenario. These key themes and scenarios carry
evaluative and emotive associations with them, as well as assumptions
about preferred and feared consequences and courses of action, which
are understood as evaluations of solutions of political crises. Whilst
they may appear to be nothing but commonsense concepts grounded in
bodily experience and pre- or folk-theoretical assumptions, we can in fact
trace them back to philosophically and even theologically oriented tradi­
tions reaching back to concepts of Christ’s/God’s body and its manifold
worldly manifestations (e.g. as the “mystical body” of the church with
the pope as its head, or as the emperor, or as the king in his “body poli­
tic”, or as the “sovereign” as the principle of the state, the people’s body,
etc.). Long after the ancient cosmological and theological frameworks
that sustained these notions have disappeared or have been relativised to
the point where they can no longer be considered belief systems that mem­
bers of a particular national or religious culture adhere to uncritically, the
“holiness” of the collective (social and/or political) body remains. It was
and still is this holiness of the body politic that-has-had-terbe-defended at
all costs, against devilish inspired heretics Jti the Middle Ages, humoral
imbalances in the Renaissance, rabid dogs that can bite a state “to the
quick” for Hobbes, or racial vermin and agents o f decomposition, in the
Nazi worldview.
Hitler’s “diagnosis” of Germany’s post-World War I crisis thus
sounded plausible not despite but because o f its metaphoric character
and history. This apparent plausibility was grounded in its familiarity as
an age-old, tried and tested commonsense analogy. It provided the Ger­
man public with a conceptual and argumentative space to reason about
the socio-economic and political hardships they were experiencing and
 144 Metaphor, Nation and Holocaust Conclusion 145
to trust Hitler with applying the therapy that would end those hardships However, as the examples of Rousseau’s corps de la nation concept in its
and prevent them in future. As a means to achieve the common good application during the French Revolution, Herder’s idea of parasite nations
tor the nation, these measures could be interpreted as ethically accept- in its later distortions and Hobbes’s theory of the sta.te-SiS-Leviathan in
able, even if they included hardships and sacrifices (hence Himmler and Schmitt’s biased re-interpretation have shown, not even truly rationally
other SS-leaders’ self-stylisation as carrying out an unpleasant, almost oriented versions of the body-state metaphor are immune to being recon­
sacrificial task m perpetrating the genocide). The function of the body- figured as closed scenarios that legitimise murderous policies. The body-
parastte scenario as employed by the Nazi elite was to make the geno­ state metaphor complex is neither a superficial rhetorical ornament nor just
cide appear as the inevitable “solution” for Germany’s crisis. They stuck an ahistoric, universal conceptual structure: in all its uses it provides an
with this scenario through the changing fortunes of war. As the secretly opportunity and a challenge for the respective body politic and its public
recorded statements of popular opinion show, its genocidal agenda was “voices” to reflect on the ethical implications of their self-presentation and
understood by the majority German populace sufficiently to at least “tol­ -interpretation. The metaphors by which nations define their destiny have
erate”, if not participate, in that final solution. This astonishing persua­ the potential to shape that destiny.
siveness of the cure-by-elimination scenario remains inexplicable if we
dismiss It as a propagandistic extra to Hitler’s “real” policies or view it as
the re-manifestation of a “mind virus” (in an accidental, tragic ■historical
context). Our findings show that Hitler’s metaphorical presentation of
parasite annihilation as a natural, self-evident and necessary therapy for
the existential problems of the German body politic convinced the public
of his genocidal agenda.
The comparison of Hitler’s scenarios with those promoted by medieval
theologians, humanists and enlightened thinkers would seem at first sight to
be almost an “open and shut” case of contrasting a conceptually incoherent
and ethically depraved use with a highly respectable philosophical tradition
of political thought. However, we have seen that not only the range of source
domain concepts and scenarios can be shown to be similar but also that even
respectable” authors often come dangerously close to suggesting radical and
potentially genocidal cures for perceived political illnesses.
It is only through the explicit comparison and historical reconstruction
that the differences between their uses of the metaphor and Hitler’s version
become visible;

• Where Hitler’s metaphor system is a closed set of “self-fulfilling”

mutually reinforcing scenarios and “prophecies”, classical and also
many modern uses are embedded in textual structures that highlight
their figurative status (e.g. simile, quotation, “exemplum”).
• Where the Nazis depicted the worst-possible scenario outcome
{destruction and decomposition o f the body politic) as an imminent
and inevitable danger, most other uses portray it as a potential, but
not inevitable, worst-case scenario that can and should be avoided.
• The therapy “offered” by the Nazi body-parasite scenario is a precise
match of the supposed extreme danger to the body, i.e. complete anni­
hilation of the supposed illness-inducing agent as a “final solution”,
whereas in classical and enlightened scenario applications, extreme
therapies are mentioned mainly as deterrents to underline the neces­
sity to avoid such a negative outcome.
Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1
1 For dictionary entries on body politic and fu rth er political body imagery see
* D eignan 1995, p. 2; Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable 1999, pp. 149,
713- for analyses see Pauwels an d Vandenbergen 1995; M usolff 2 0 0 4 a, b.
2. The Guardian, 18 January 1996; The Observer, 13 N ovem ber 2005; The Times
Higher Education Supplement, 2 2 N ovember 1996; O bam a 2007, p. 16.
3 Independent on Sunday, 20 N ovem ber 2005 an d again on the BBC p ro ­
gram m e Newsnight (5 O ctober 2009: “ . . . he said ‘as a mere M ayor of
L ondon, as a mere toenail in the body politic, it m ay be difficult to have a
referendum ’”. ,7 n i
4. DieZeit, IS Ju n e 1998: “Wer d ieH o m o g en itatern es‘deutschenV olkskorpers
ins Feld fu h rt, der gieSt O l ins Feuer der G h etto s”.
5. Die Welt, 26 M arch 2006: “ Im kran k en V olkskorper steckt eine verletzte

6 . D ieWelt, 26 M arch 2006; “ Die D ebatte um den nationalen V olkskorper ist

Symptom einer H ysteric, die die deutsche Gesellschaft fallweise immer
w ieder erfafit.” , , ,
7 H itler 1933, p. 334 (comp. 1992, p. 276}: “ [der Jude] w ar . . . im m er nur
Parasit im K orper anderer V olker”. T he English translations here an d in the
follow ing examples are by the author; in th e case of quotations from Mein
Kampf they are for th e m ost p a rt based on th e tran slatio n by R alph M anheim
of 1943 b ut in some cases modified. T he page references give relevant pages
of the original G erm an tex t (23rd edition, of 1933) an d the 1992 reprint
of the M anheim translation. Em phasis th ro u g h italicization of m etaphoric
terms in the examples and the main text are b y ^ h e ^ t h o r r " ’
8 H itler 1933, p. 361 (1992, p. 298): “1914 . erfolgte . . . das letzte Aufflack-
ern des nationalen Selbsterhaltungstriebes gegenuber der fortschreitenden
. . . L ahm ung u nseres V olkskdrpers.” . f 1 ...
9. G oebbels 1971, vol. 2, pp. 182-188: “D as Judentum stellt eine mfektiose
E rkrankung dar, die ansteckend w irkt. . . . D eutschland h at jedenfalls nicht
die A bsicht, sich dieser jiidischen Bedrohung zu beugen, sondern vielmeht
die, ih t rechtzeitig, w enn notig unter vollkom m ener u n d radikalster Ausrott-,
A usschaltung des Judentum s, entgegenzutreten!”
10. See R aul H ilberg’s definitions of the categories of perpetrators and bystand­
ers in H ilberg 1992, pp. IX -X II.
11. G regor 2005, p. 67. • , m/ ■u
12. A ccording to Peter Longerich (2003), term s such as annihilation {Vermch-
tung), ‘ex tirp atio n ’ {Ausrottung), ‘final solution’ {Endlosung), ‘removal
148 Notes Notes 149
[Entfernung], ‘resettlem ent’ {Umsiedlung) or ‘evacuation’ {Evakuierung) and/or racists. T hus, the weekly new spaper Die Zeit w arned against N eo-
changed their m eanings several tim es: in the first phase, from the 1920s to N azis "penetrating the capillaries of society in some p arts of Saxony” {Die
the m id-1930s, the N azis “used the term s w ith reference to the Jews but Zeit, 24 February 2005: “ [es] ist den R echtsextrem en g elungen,. . . in bestim-
w ithout necessarily implying a program m e o f m ass m urder”; after th a t until m ten Gegenden [Sachsens] tief in die K apillaren der Gesellschaft einzudrin-
late 1941, their vocabulary “denoted the idea of a geographical relocation gen” ) an d the British daily The Independent ascribed to “ far rig h t” parties
of a m ass of people” and increasingly “incorporated the perspective of the in Europe the ability to act as “a virus w hich spreads th ro u g h the dem ocratic
physical end of the Jews in E urope”; in the last phase until 1945, these term s institutions th a t if abhors like some k in d of superbug, a political ‘M RSA’ ”
were “ increasingly used as synonyms for m ass m urder” (Longerich 2003, pp. {The Independent, 16 Jan u ary 2007).
2 4-25).
13. Longerich points out th a t even in H itler’s ow n circle, the H olocaust w as
referred to only in figurative o r abstract term s, probably so as to avoid
NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
“tak[ing] in the reality of the m urder of m illions of people” and “ [keeping]
the horror of it a t a distance” (Longerich 2 0 0 3 , p. 23).
14. T his em phasis on the “perspectivisation’^ function o f m etaphor has been 1. An earlier version of this chapter was published in the journal Critical
em phasized in cognitive approaches to m etaphor (Lakoff an d Johnson 1980;
Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines, vol. 2/2 (2008): 1-10,
Lakoff 1987; Kovecses 2002; Fauconnier an d Turner 2002), b ut is equally
under the title “What Can Critical Metaphor Analysis Add to the Under­
recognised in newer sem antic and pragm atic/discursive accounts (Stern standing of Racist Ideology?”
2000; Tendahl an d Gibbs 20 0 8 ; Z in k en an d M usolff 2009). 2. For early comments see Tucholsky [1930] 1960, vol. 8, pp. 129-133, Olden
15. O ur study does not deal w ith the issue of how the N ational Socialists pic­
1936, p. 140; Paechter 1944, Fischer 1945; Pechau 1935 provides a self-con­
tu red their ideal of a healthy n atural hu m an body, w hich is, of course, linked gratulatory Nazi comment. For the early post-war period, see Michael and
to their source concepts for the nation’s body politic. The N azi body ideal Doerr 2002; Niven 2002; Deissler 2003.
and its counter-im age of “the Jew ”, as depicted in literature and films as well 3. Burke 1984, p. 71.
as in all kinds of pictorial and sculptural m anifestations, has been studied in 4. Burke 1984, pp. 63-68.
detail (see, e.g., Theweleit 1980; G ilm an 1991; Alkemeyer 1996; W ildm ann 5. Klemperer 1975; English translation: 2000 (for a thorough critique, see Ind-
1998; Linke 1999). T he relationship betw een the individual an d the body sley 2004).
ideal and the collective body {Volkskdrper), however, is n o t one of identity 6. Sternberger, Storz and Siiskind 1989. These analyses were, like Klemperer’s,
but required its ow n argum entative buttressing. The study presented here based on pre-1945 studies; see Dodd 2003, 2007.
thus needs to be com plem ented by an exploration of th at relationship in N azi 7. Klemperer 1975, p. 185.
ideology and propaganda, so as to give a com plete picture of the literal and 8. Klemperer 1975, pp. 185-186.
m etaphorical applications of body concepts in N atio n al Socialism. 9. Klemperer 1975, pp. 7-14; 273-300.
16. See Coker 1910; A rcham bault 1967; H ale 1971; D h o rn van Rossum and 10. Sternberger, Storz and Siiskind 1989, pp. 33,135.
Bockenforde 1978; Sontag 1 9 7 8 ,1 9 9 1 ; Sawday 1995; K antorow icz 1997; De 11. Sternberger, Storz and Siiskind 1989, pp. 126-136; see also documents from
Baecque 1997; Peil 1983; H arris 1998; G uldin 2 0 0 0 ; M aitlan d 2003; N eder- the subsequent debate about their critique of Nazi- or Nazi-like language,
m an 2 0 0 4 ; Koschorke et al. 2007; M outon 2009. ibid., pp. 229-339.
17. See N estle 1927; H ale 1971, pp. 2 6 -2 9 ; Peil 1985, Patterson 1991; G uldin 12. See Seidel and Seidel-Slotty 1961; Bosmajian 1983; Volmert 1989; Schmitz-
2000, pp. 101-103; K oschorke et al. 2007, pp. 1 5 -26. Berning 2000.
18. Aesop 2 0 0 2 , p. 35 (fable no. 66). 13. Jackell981,p. 58.
19. Shakespeare, Coriolanus, Act I, Scene 1: 95-1 4 8 (quoted from .Shakespeare 14. Greive 1983, p. 128.
1976).-
15. For a theory of category mistakes in truth-value semantic terms, see Ryle
20. Shakespeare, Corioldnus, A ct I, Scene 1 :1 5 4 -1 5 7 . 1949.
21. See K okoschka 1971, quoted after H a m a n n 1996, p. 429.
16. Goldhagen 2003, p. 127. -------- —^
22. See H am an n 1996, pp. 2 8 5 -3 3 6 ; K ershaw 1999, pp. 71-106. 17. Goldhagen 2003, p. 412. /
23. See G anz 1957, p. 175. 18. Goldhagen 2003, p. 128.
24. See Levitas 1986; Linke 1999; Tow nsend 2005; K ienpointner 2005, pp.
19. See Schoeps 1996; Browning 2001, pp. 191-221; Browning 2004, pp.
226-227.
463-466.
25. Occasionally, such criticism has the pow er to ru in a politician’s career, as 20. Goldhagen 2003, p. 412.
in the case of the W est G erm an Parliam ent’s president, Philipp Jenninger,
21. See Bussemer 2000; Hachmeister and Kloft 2005; Herf 2006; Kallis 2008.
w ho had to resign after a com m em oration speech th a t w as deemed by many 22. See Lakoff and Johnson 1980.
to contain N azi vocabulary; see Ensink 1992; Krebs 1993; Siever 2001; for
23. See Fauconnier and Turner 2002.
overall assessments see Steiner 197 9 ,1 9 8 7 ; S t6 tze ri9 8 9 ; N iven 2 0 0 2 , 2006; 24. Charteris-Black 2005, p. 197.
Eitz and Stotzel 2007. 25. Hawkins 2001, p. 49.
26. T he use of such im agery for the purpose o f criticism (as in the above-m en­ 26. Hawkins 2001, p. 32.
tioned censure of the term Volkskdrper), is, of course, considered to be politi­
27. Hawkins 2001, p. 37; compare Hitler 1992 (Manheim translation), p. 512.
cally correct, as is, interestingly, its use to denounce right-w ing extrem ists 28. Hawkins 2001, pp. 36, 38-40.
150 Notes
29. G oatly 2007, p. 47.
30. For the conceptual history o f the idea of supposedly hereditary “racial”
purity, see Jones 2 000, pp. 10-11 , 3 8 -3 9 , 2 5 3 -2 6 4 .
31. See H itler 1933, pp. 313-319; 1992, pp. 2 6 0 -2 6 9 .
32. See H itler 1933, pp. 76, 107, 307, 421, 428, 436, 4 4 6 , 478, 488, 704 711
730, 741; 1992, pp. 64, 254, 295, 353, 359, 3 6 6 -3 6 7 , 391, 399, 569, 574’
598.
33. H itler 1933, p. 332; 1992, pp. 273-274.
34. See H itler 1933, p. 357; 1992, p. 295.
35. See A nonym us 1937. Simon (2009) m akes the conjecture th a t the article
w as probably penned by the editor in chief of Das schwarze Korps, G unter
d’Alquen.
36. L akoff and Turner 1989, p. 166.
37. L akoff and Turner 1989, p. 167.
38. Lovejoy 1936, pp. 2 5 -5 5 .
39. T illyard 1982, p. 107.
40. H aw kins 2001, p. 45.
41. H aw kins 2001, pp. 4 2 , 44.
42. H aw kins 2001, p. 46.
43. H aw kins 2001, pp. 2 7 -2 9
44. C harteris-Black 2005, pp. 182-184. T he body-parasite relation as the basis
of H itler’s racist ideology is again highlighted in several, m ainly Internet-
based publications by R ichard Koenigsberg (1986, 1992, 2 0 0 4 a, b, 2005a,
b), w hich repeatedly h int a t a “cognitive” perspective. H is analyses are, how ­
ever, focused m am ly on a psychoanalytic investigation of H itler’s “paranoid
belief system , w hich according to Koenigsberg had its centre in the w ish “to
solve the problem of death by destroying Jew s, w ho symbolized the death-in­
stinct— the reality th a t bodies eventually disintegrate” (2004a); the evidence
for this psychological conclusion seems to be rath er thin.
45. See R ash 2 006, pp. 31-41.
46. R ash 2006,-p. 155.
47. R ash 2 0 0 6 , p. 174.
48. R ash 2 0 0 6 , pp. 169-172.
49. R ash 2006, p. 116. G oldhagen (2003, p. 411) highlights the sam e p o in t by
stating th a t on. the scale of hum an nations assum ed in N azi-ideology, Jews
“w ere not even accorded a place on the continuum ”.
50. Lovejoy,1936, p. 59.
51. Lovejoy 1936, p. 20.
52. Lovejoy himself and another famous historian of ideas of his day, E. M . W.
Tillyard, did hint at a conceptual link between the Great Chain of Being
m etaphor and the racist ideology of N azi G erm any of which they were con­
temporaries. Lovejoy saw the gradation principle of the Great Chain in nine­
teenth-tw entieth century (German) rom antic thought perverted into a “kind of
collective vanity , the “tragic outcome” of w hich had “ been seen, and expe­
rienced, by all of us in our ow n tim e” (1936, p. 313); and Tillyard noted, at
the end of The Elizabethan World Picture (first published in 1943), th at “ [the
medieval/Renaissance habit of mind] resembles certain trends of thought in
central Europe, the ignoring of which by our scientifically m inded intellectuals
has helped not a little to bring the w orld into its present conflicts and distresses”
(1982, pp. 116-117). For both historians, N azi G erm any’s use of aspects of the
Great Chain tradition was a perverted, viciously tw isted version and a sad end­
ing to a long conceptual career; Lovejoy explicitly concluded: “the history of the
idea of the Chain of Being . . . is the history of a failure” (1936, p. 329). C om ­
pare Spitzer 1944 for an early critique of such “linear” conceptual history.
Notes 151
53. Fauconnier and Turner 1998, 2002; Turner and Fauconnier 2003; for a criti­
cal comparison with the “conceptual metaphor theory” paradigm of Lakoff
and Johnson, see Grady, Oakley and Coulson 1999.
54. Fauconnier and Turner 2002,131.
55. Chilton 2005, 39; compare Hitler 1933, p. 334; 1992, p. 276.
56. Chilton 2005, p. 39. Chilton also highlights the apparent oddity of “he”
as a “masculine” anaphoric reference to the parasite in English (2005, pp.
39-40). However, this is not an issue in the original German text, because
“der Parasit” has a grammatically binding masculine gender in German, just
as does “der Jude”—their formal congruence is grammatical not semantic.
57. Chilton 2005, p. 39.
58. Chilton 2005, p. 39.
59. See Dawkins 1989,1999, 2004; Blackmore 1999; Sperber 1996, 2000.
60. Dawkins 1989, p. 192.
61. Sperber 1996,p. 53.
62. Sperber 1996, pp. 25,102-104.
63. See Brodie 1996; Dawkins 2004.
64. See Dawkins 2004, pp. 166-171; 2005, p. 415.
65. See Dawkins 1989, pp. 182, 192; Charlesworth and Charlesworth 2003, p.
19.
66. Chilton 2005, p. 42.
67. See Hamann 1996, pp. 285-336.
68. See Stark 1981; Kershaw 1999, p. 138; Weikart 2004, pp. 220-225.
69. For historical overviews, see Proctor 1988; Weindling 1989; Weikart 2004.
70. Hamann 1996, pp. 264-283, 333-336.
71. See Domarus 1965, Jackel and Kuhn 1980; Hitler 1992-1998; Weinberg
1961.
72. Rash 2005a.
73. See, for instance, Schmitz-Berning 2000; Michael and Doerr 2002.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 3
1. The fact that the sales figures of Mein Kampf remained rather limited before
1933 and that estimates of readers’ numbers are still debated (Kershaw 1999,
pp. 241-243; Rash 2006, p. 20) is of little concern here: its bio-political
conceptualisations of the German nation and of Jews, which are the object
of our analysis, were indubitably in the public domain from the moment
that the first edition was distributed. Hitler’s so-called “Second Book” is, of
course, essential for the comprehensive understanding ^ h is political ideol­
ogy (Jackel 1981; Weinberg 1961), but as itx^ihaihed'unpublish^ it cannot
be regarded as having shaped the public consciousness and acceptance of his
anti-Semitic bio-political metaphors.
2. Browning 2001, p. xviii.
3. For the classical topos of argumentation-by-analogy as a form of metaphori­
cal language use, see Aristotle Poef/cs, 57b (Aristotle 1996, p. 34). For mod­
ern theories of analogical reasoning that thematise its relation to metaphor,
see Centner, Holyoak and Kokinov 2001; Steen 2009, pp. 26-30; Barnden
2009, p. 80); for its application in political discourse, see Musolff 2004a,
pp. 173-177.
4. Relevant German lexical items: Natur, Naturgesetz.
5. Organismus, organisch, Nahrboden, Wirtsvolk.
6. Selbsterhaltungstrieb, Trieb zur Rassenreinheit, Instinkt.
 152 Notes Notes 153
7. Art, Geschlecht. 45. For the relationship of m ental “ scripts” to conceptual schemas a n d scenarios,
a. Rasse, Rasseinstinkt, Rasseneinheit, Rassenunterschiede, Rassekern, ras- see S chank and Abelson 1977, pp. 3 6 -6 8 ; Taylor 1995, pp. 81-92.
senmdfiig, rasserein, Rassenkonglomerat, rassisch. 46. See Brow ning 1992, 2 004; G oldhagen 2003; Friedlander 1998, 2007; and
9. Wiedergeburt, Werden. Bauer 2001.
10. Geschlecht. 47. H itler 1933, p. 311; 1992, p. 258.
11. Hoherziichtung, Kreuzung, Mischprodukt. 48. H itler 1933, p. 313; 1992, p. 260. H itler’s “evidence” for this universal “ his­
12. Volkskdrper, staatliche Korper, wirtschaftliche Korper, Riesenkorper torical experience” w as an alleged difference in th e colonialist history of
13. Herz., South and N o rth A m erica. In South A m erica, the descendants of the colonial
~ 14. Lebensadern. invaders of “ R om anic” stock h ad fatefully m ixed w ith the aboriginal peoples
15. Blutlauf Blutopfer, blutsmd^ig, Blutseinheit, Blutsreinheit, to a large extent an d thus lost their cultural-racial advantage, w hilst in N o rth
Blutzufuhr, Herrenblut, Stimme des Blutes. A m erica th e E uropeans m aintained th eir “m aster”-status, due to racial seg­
16. Kraft. regation from indigenous peoples as well as im ported “N egro” slaves (ibid.).
17. Gesundheit, Volksgesundheit, gesund. From this, H itler drew the conclusion th a t “blood m ix tu re and the resultant
18. Erkrankung, Krankheit. (das) Krdnkliche, Seuche, Siechtum Verseuchung drop in the racial level” was “ the sole cause of th e demise of old cultures;
verseucht. for m en do n ot perish as a result of lost w ars, but by the loss of th a t force
19. Blutschande, Blutsumpf Blutsvermengung, Blutsvermischung, Rassenkreu- of resistance w hich is contained only in p ure blood” (1933, p. 324; 1992, p.
zung, Rassenschande, Bastard, Bastardisierung. 269).
20. Mifigeburt. 49. Jackel 1981, p. 89.
21. Erstarrung, Verknocherung. . 50. Bullock 1962, p. 40; Kershaw 1999, p. 244;.Evans 2003, p. 198.
22. Ldhmung. 51. See, e.g., Z m arzlik 1963; Baader and Schultz 1980; Kelly 1981; Wein-
23. Pest, Pestilenz, Verpestung. g art, K roll an d Bayertz 1988; P roctor 1988; W eindling 1989; Vogel 1992;
24. Syphilis, Versyphilitisierung. These terms can be interpreted both literally H am an n 1996, pp. 28 5 -3 1 9 ; Cornw ell 2 0 0 3 , pp. 7 1 -9 2 ; W eikart 2004. For
and metaphorically: in some passages of Mein Kampf they are linked to the a th o ro u g h critique of simplistic assum ptions ab o u t “d irect” links betw een
notion of an alleged Jewish-led rise of prostitution, but they are also used as social D arw inism and N ational Socialism, see Evans 1997.
general characterisations of the overall deplorable state of the nation’s body 52. S eeH itler’s l9 1 9 I e tte r to Adolf G em lich, in Jackel an d K uhn 1980, pp. 8 8 -9 0 ;
due to Jewish influence (see Hitler 1933, pp. 269, 271-274 278- 1992 d d for the context, Fest 1974, pp. 167-168; K ershaw 1999, pp. 1 2 4-125.
224,226-228,231-232). ’ 53. H itler 1933, pp. 130-132; 1992, pp. 109-110; compare also his account of “get­
25. Soziale Krebsschdden. ting to know ” Jews in Vienna, H itler 1933, pp. 59-70; 1992, pp. 5 3 -6 0 . Like
26. Polypen, Geschwulst. other apparently autobiographical aspects of Mein Kampf H itler’s account of
27. Impotenz. how his ow n opinions were formed in is a highly stylized legend rather th an a
28. Tod, Alterstod, Totenkranz der Menschheit, Vergehen Totengrdberarbeit, tru th fu l account (see Kershaw 1999, p. 11; H am an n 1996, pp. 500-502).
Verlust seines irdischen Daseins. 54. C harlesw orth and C harlesw orth 2003, p. 91. See also G ould 2 0 0 0 , pp.
29. (Fermente der) Zersetzung, Zersetzer, Spaltpilz, Fdulnis, Made im faulen- 4 9 -5 2 ; Rose 1998, pp. 33-47.
den Leibe. 55. D arw in 1901, p. 644.
30. Gift, giftig, Infizierung, Volkergift,(Bluts-)Vergiftung, Yolksvergifter. 56. D arw in 2 0 0 4 , p. 18.
31. Viper, Kreuzotter, Schlange, Schlangennest. 57. D arw in 2004, p. 210.
32. Parasit, Parasitentum, Schmarotzer, Schddling anfressen, Drohne, Bluiegel, 58. D arw in 2 0 0 4 , p. 205.
Blutjude, blutsaugerisch, Vampir. 59. D arw in 2 0 0 4 , p. 678
33. Bazillus, Bazillentrdger, Erreger. 60. D arw in 2 0 0 4 , p. 678
34. Ungeziefer. 61. D arw in 2 0 0 4 , p. 207.
35. herumdoktern. 62. D arw in 2 0 0 4 , p. 207. _
36. Rezept, Radikalmittel. 63. Hitler 1933, 317-337; 1992, pp. 263-279.
37. Regeneration, Heilung. 64. D uring the T h ird Reich, the absence o f ^ n y biological definition of race
38. See Hitler 1933, p. 252; 1992, p. 210. w ould lead to th e grotesque calculation of “full”, “ h alf” and “q u arte r” Jews
39. See Hitler 1933, pp. 253-254; 1992, pp. 211-212. based solely on th e religious affiliation of g randparents (as form ulated in the
40. See Hitler 1933, pp. 268; 1992, pp. 223. N urem berg race laws); see Friedlander 1997, pp. 144-170.
41. See Hitler 1933, p. 360; 1992, p. 298. 65. Obviously, the “Ju d ean ” aspect of this trad itio n w as absent in H itler’s and
42. Kershaw (1999, pp. 224-254) shows in detail that Hitler came to see himself any N azi version; the basis for such an anti-Sem itic “ interpretation” of the
as the one and only “leader” of Germany’s recovery only in the wake of the biblical source tex t h ad been laid by nineteenth-century and early tw entieth-
trial for the 1923 putsch attempt, i.e. during the time of his imprisonment cen tu ry w riters w ho alleged an “A ryan” background of the “historical Jesus”
and writing of Mein Kampf (see Fenske 2005 for the theological debates; fo r their reception by H itler, see
43. See Hitler 1933, p. 334; 1992, p. 111. H am a n n 1996, pp. 333-334).
. 44. For the semantic characteristics of “metaphor scenarios”, see Musolff 2006- 66. H itler 1933, p. 313; 1992, p. 260.
Semino 2008, pp. 218-222. 67. See H itler 1933, p. 70; 1992, p. 60.
154 Notes
68. See H itler 1933, p. 313; 1992, p. 260.
69. See H itler 1933, p. 318; 1992, p. 263; for the im plications of the depiction of
the A ryan as a “G od-child”, see Barsch 2 0 0 2 , pp. 3 0 8 -3 1 2 .
70. See H itler 1933, pp. 340, 351, 752; 1992, pp. 59, 282, 294, 605.
71. See H itler 1933, p. 70; 1992, p. 60 (emphasis in the original).
72. Burke 1982, p. 63.
73. Friedlander 1998, p. 87.
- 74. Barsch 2 0 0 2 , pp. 41-51, 1 38-142 , 3 6 8 -381. For the w ider debate, see also
Ach and Pentrop 2001; Fenske 2005.
75. Barsch 2 002, p. 380.
76. Barsch 2 002, pp. 271-319. For a com plete overview over all biblical allu­
sions in Mein Katnpf, see R ash 200 5 a, pp. 2 2 -2 7 ; on other general religious/
m ythological term s, ibid., pp. 14-21 an d 2 8 -3 3 ; for discussion, see also
G regor 2005, p. 77; and Greive 1983, pp. 1 2 6-128.
77. See Barsch 2 002, pp. 6 0 -1 3 7 ,1 9 2 -2 7 1 .
78. See Fest 1974, pp. 202, 732; Speer 1975, pp. 2 2 , 30; Picker 2003, pp. 3 0 0 -
301 (conversation note no. 74, o f 11 A pril 1942).
79. H itler 1933, pp. 481, 512-513; 1992, pp. 393, 417-418.
80. See H itler 1933, pp. 145,195, 324; 1992, pp. 1 2 2 ,1 6 2 , 269.
81. D arw in 1901, p. 77 and passim.
82. D arw in 1901, p. 78.
83. D arw in applied this notion of “struggle” as statistical com petition to hum an
history; in The Descent of Man he asserted th a t “the civilised races of man
w ill certainly exterm inate, and replace, the savage races th ro u g h o u t the
w orld” (2004, p. 183). This statem ent w as based on the evidence of h is­
torical extinctions of ethnic com m unities, e.g. M elanesian an d A ustronesian
populations after contact w ith E uropeans. D arw in attrib u ted such cases not
just to defeat in m ilitary confrontations b u t proposed th a t, “if savages o f any
race are induced to suddenly change th eir habits of life, they become m ore
or less sterile, an d their young offspring suffer in health” (ibid., p. 220).
The survival success of “civilised races” w as thus not due to any inherent
“higher” values but to accidentally improved resilience under changing living
conditions, w hich m ade D arw in com pare them to “dom esticated anim als,
for though the latter sometim es suffer in health . . . , they are rarely rendered
sterile” (ibid.).
84. See the depiction of the emergence of the genius and the hero, w hich “can
best be observed in w a r”; in H itler 1933, pp. 321-322; 1992, pp. 2 6 6 -267.
85. H itler 1933, pp. 21, 361; 1992, pp. 21, 299.
86. H itler 1933, p. 232; 1992, p. 193.
87. H itler 1933, pp. 3 2 3 -3 2 4 ; 1992, p. 268.
88. H itler 1933, p. 312; 1992, p. 259.
89. H itler 1933, pp. 316-317; 1992, p. 262.
90. H itler 1933, pp. 3 2 3 -3 2 4 ; 1992, pp. 2 6 8-269.
91. H itler 1933, pp. 4 3 6 -4 3 8 ; 1992, pp. 3 6 0 -3 6 2 .
92. H itler 1933, p. 437; 1992, p. 360.
93. H itler 1933, p. 437; 1992, p. 360.
94. H itler 1933, p. 438; 1992, p. 361.
95. Sontag 1978, pp. 71-76.
96. H itler 1933, p. 337; 1992, p. 279.
97. See H itler 1933, pp. 2 6 6 -2 6 8 ; 1992, pp. 2 2 2 -2 2 3 .
98. See, e.g.. H itler 1933, pp. 268, 316, 346, 751; 1992, pp. 2 2 3 - 2 2 4 ,2 6 2 ,2 6 8 -
269, 288, 605.
99. See, e.g.. H itler 1933, pp. 334, 335, 339, 3 40; 1992, pp. 276, 281, 282,
296.
Notes 155
100. See Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 2002, vol. 2, p. 2096.
101. This doubly stigmatizing force of the bloodsucker metaphor probably
accounts for its long tradition of use as a pejorative term; see Brewer’s Dic-
• tionary of Phrase and Fable, 2000, p. 142; for German, see Grimm 1984,
vol. 2 [1860], p. 190.
102. See, e.g., Hitler 1933, pp. 62, 334, 360; 1992, pp. 54, 277, 298.
103. See, e.g., Hitler 1933, pp. 135,186, 331, 361; 1992, pp. 113,155, 274, 298.
104. See, e.g.. Hitler 1933, pp. 63,269,272; 1992, pp. 54, 224, 226. Tuberculosis,
which figured in Hitler’s anti-Semitic metaphors in earlier writings, is men­
tioned only in “literally” medical contexts and explicit comparison in Mein
Kampf\ see Hitler 1933, pp.-253, 269; 1992, pp. 211, 224.
105. Hitler 1933, p. 358; 1992, p. 296. The historical precedent of such an out­
come was, in Hitler’s view, Soviet Russia, where “the Jew”, once he had
gained power through the Bolshevik revolution, had “killed or starved about
thirty million people with positively fanatical savagery, in part under inhu­
man tortures, in order to give a gang of Jewish journalists and stock exchange
bandits domination over a great people” (ibid.).
106. See Hitler 1933, p. 313; 1992, p. 260.
107. See Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 2001, vol. 1, pp. 250-251; Brewer's
Dictionary of Phrase and Fable 1999, pp. 141-142.
108. See Jones 1996, pp. 3-15; 2000, pp. 19-36.
109. See Jones 2000, p. 39.
110. See Jones 2000, pp. 38-40; Kevles 1985, pp. 3-19.
111. See Hitler 1933, Chapters 2, 3, 4, 7; for their dubious quality as an autobio­
graphical account, see Gregor 2005, pp. 18-21.
112. Hitler 1933, pp. 338-361. For differences in the list count in various edi­
tions, see Manheim’s footnote in Hitler 1992, p. 296.
113. Hitler 1933, p. 346; 1992, p. 286.
114. Hitler 1933, p. 357; 1992, p. 295.
115. For the sources of the denunciation of Jews as sexual predators in racial anti-
Semitic literature available to Hitler, see Hamann 1996, pp. 472-487.
116. Originally, the term Blutschande appears to have meant only “incest” but
was then extended metonymically; see Grimm 1984, vol. 2, pp. 190-191.
117. See Hitler 1933, p. 334; 1992, p. 277.
118. Hitler 1933, pp. 253, 335; 1992, pp. 277, 289.
119. Hitler 1933, pp. 22, 361; 1992, pp. 21, 299.
120. See Chapter 9 following.
121. For overviews of the intentionalist-v.-functionalist debate in Holocaust stud­
ies, see Browning 1992, pp. 86-121; Cesarani 1996, pp. 1-29; Kershaw
2000, pp. 93-133; Friedlander 2000; Longerich 2005, pp. 11,14-17.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 4
1. See Behnken 1980; Boberach 1984; Kulka and Jackel 2004.
2. See Laqueur 1980; Kershaw 1983, 2008; Hilberg 1992, 2003; Gellately
1990, 2001; Bankier 1992,1996; Friedlander 1998, 2007; Longerich 2005,
2006; Evans 2005, 2008.
3. For the methodological problems connected with use of SD and Sopade
reports, see Kulka and Jackel 2004, pp. 15-21; Longerich 2006, pp. 218-
222; Kershaw 2008, pp. 121-123.
4. See Sington and Weidenfeld 1942; Diller 1980; Frei and Schmitz 1989; Abel
1968; Longerich .1987; Balistier 1996; Bussemer 2000; Bytwerk 1996, 2001,
156 Notes
■ 2004; Hachmeister and Kloft 2005; Herf 2006; Kallis 2008; Bachrach and
Luckert 2009.
5. See Klemperer 1995. For its historical significance, see Friedlander 1998, pp.
58-59; for linguistic assessment, see Kamper 1996, 2001; Mieder 2000.
6. Klemperer 1975 (see earlier. Chapter 2).
7. Briining, Declaration (3. Sitzung, 16 October 1930), Verhandlungen des
Reichstags, vol. 444, p. 19.
8. Speech of 11 May 1930 in Goebbels 1933, p. 28.
9. In the same speech of 11 May 1930, Goebbels alleged that the already weak­
ened and badly treated nation was now under further attack from the Jewish
“tuberculosis bacillus” (Goebbels 1933, pp. 28-30). See also Hitler’s famous
speech at the Industrieklub in Dusseldorf on 17 January 1932 (Domarus
1965, pp. 88-89; for the historical context and Hitler’s (limited) success in
winning direct contributions from the industrialists, see Kershaw 1999, pp.
355-360.
10. Speech of 23 February 1932 in the Reichstag, in Goebbels 1933, p. 44;
reprinted (with minor modifications based on an audio recording) in Goeb­
bels 1971, vol. 1, p. 7.
11. Speech on 31 July 1932, in Goebbels 1933, pp. 92-96.
12. See Hitler’s proclamation of 1 February 1933, in Domarus 1965, p. 193;
Goebbels on 30 January 1933 (Goebbels 1933, p. 125) and on 21 February
1933 (Goebbels 1939, vol. 2, p. 365); for the history of the phrase Reform an
Haupt und Gliedern, see Rohrich, 2001, vol. 2, p. 677.
13. See Goebbels’s speech to the press on 6 April 1933, quoted after Schmitz-
Berning 2000, p. 463.
14. See Friedlander 1998, pp. 22-23; Longerich 2006, pp. 65-66.
15. Victor Klemperer, for instance, felt as if he was experiencing “a pogrom in
the deepest Middle Ages or tsarist Russia” and being under “worse pressure
than as a soldier during the war” (Klemperer 1995, vol. 1, pp. 15-19 (30
March-7 April 1933).
16. See Evans 2005, p. 15; see also Burleigh 2001, pp. 281-285; Gellately 2001,
pp. 26-28.
17. See Gellately 2001, pp. 9-59.
18. See Domarus 1965, p. 299: “Indem wir uns so der Pflege des uns vom Schick-
sal anvertrauten eigenen Blutes hingeben, helfen wir am besten mit, auch
andere Volker vor Krankheiten zu bewahren, die . . . von Volk auf Volk
iiberspringen”.
19. See Gellately 2001, pp. 48-49, 67, 80-83, 184-188.
20. Baumann 2000, p. 66.
21. Baumann 2000, p. 92.
22. Baumann 2000, p. 70 (emphasis in the original).
23. See Hitler’s declaration of 13 July 1934, in Domarus 1965, p. 421.
24. See Domarus 1965, pp. 421-422.
25. See Behnken 1980, vol. 1, pp. 197-203; Kershaw 1999, pp. 519-522; Evans
2005, pp. 36-41.
26. See Klemperer 1995, vol. 1, p. 121.
27. See Kershaw 1999, pp. 568-573; Friedlander 1998, pp. 146-170; Longerich
2006, pp. 92-100.
28. Hitler’s Proclamation on 11 September 1935, in Domarus 1965, p. 525.
29. Hitler’s Proclamation on 11 September 1935, in Domarus 1965, pp.
525-526.
30. See Evans 2005, pp. 547-548; for the respective discussions at the Wannsee
conference, see Patzold and Schwarz 1992; Roseman 2002, pp. 55-107;
Friedlander 2007, pp. 349-353.
Notes 157
31. Friedlander 1998, p. 153.
32. Gellately 2001, p. 49.
33. O n Streicher an d Der Sturmer, see Bytwerk 2001.
34. See Friedlander 1998, pp. 159-161; Przyrem bel 2003.
35. See K ulka and Jackel 2004, pp. 1 1 2 ,1 2 9 ,1 4 8 -1 4 9 ,1 5 4 (complaints about race
defilement hysteria [“Rassenschandepsychose”] by the GESTAPO), pp. 1 5 9 -
160; see also Gellately 2001, pp. 1 3 4 -141,145; Evans 2005, pp. 550-554.
36. See Behnken 1980, vol. 2 , pp. 1037,1042.
37. See published photographs of “race offenders”, in Schoenberner 1980, p. 35.
In the w ake of the 1935 N urem berg rally, nationw ide cam paigns against
alleged Jew ish Rassenschande were stepped up on a massive scale, as the
reports of the social D em ocrat resistance groups show (Behnken 1980, vol. 2,
pp. 1028-1042); see also G ellately 2001, p. 63; Evans 2005, pp. 551-553.
38. See G oebbels 1971, vol. 1, p. 249; em phasis m arked by italics and audi­
ence’s reactions (in square brackets) as in the G erm an tex t edition based on
recordings.
39. See Kershaw 1983; Bankier 1996; Evans 2005; Longerich 2006.
40. T his rough typology has sim ilarities to the classifications of G erm an atti­
tudes tow ards “the Jew ish Q uestion” th a t have been proposed by K ulka and
Rodrigue (1984) an d Kwiet an d Eschwege (1995, pp. 4 2 -4 4 ); for critical
discussion, see Kershaw 2 0 0 8 , pp. 2 1 2-214. The degree of inform edness
obviously has a bearing on opinion building, but it is still im p o rtan t to dis­
tinguish the tw o aspects. The m ain concern here is th e inform ation value of
N azi policy announcem ents on the “Jew ish question” in H itler’s speeches
insofar as they were fram ed by the body-parasite m etaphor scenario, an d the
public reception of this fram ing.
41. See Bankier 1992, pp. 72 -7 5 , 77; Longerich 2 0 0 6 , pp. 7 5 -9 2 ; Gellately
2001, pp. 1 2 2 -1 2 3 ; for a different em phasis on “ indifference an d passivity”,
see Evans 2005, p. 548. For a firsthand account from th e Jewish perspective,
see Klem perer 1995, vol. 1, pp. 2 0 8 -2 2 3 .
42. Behnken 1980, vol. 3, pp. 9 -1 0 , 2 0 -4 2 .
43. See Behnken 1980, vol. 3, pp. 28, 973, 982, 1648; Friedlander 1997, pp.
180-182; Evans 2005, pp. 5 7 0 -5 7 3 .
44. See K lem perer 1995, vol. 1, p. 467; Friedlander 1997, pp. 2 5 3 -2 5 4 ; Kallis
2 0 0 8 , pp. 1 9 4 -1 9 5 ,1 9 9 .
45. See th e Sopade rep o rts, w hich from M arch 1935 on include special chapters
on the “te rro r” an d from July of th a t year extensive e x tra chapters dealing
w ith the “te rro r ag ain st Jew s” or “persecutions of Jew s” (Behnken 1980,
vol. 2 , pp. 8 0 0 -8 1 3 , 9 2 0 -9 3 7 , 9 9 6 -9 9 7 , 1 0 2 6 -1 0 4 4 ; vol. 3, pp. 2 0 -4 1 ,
9 7 3 -9 9 3 ,1 6 4 8 -1 6 6 4 ; vol. 4, pp. 9 3 1 -9 4 7 ,1 5 6 3 -1 5 7 6 ; vol. 5, pp. 176-207,
7 3 2 -7 7 1 , 1177-1210, 1329-1357; vol. 6, p p ._ 2 _ 0 1 -2 ^, ,89 8 - 9 4 0; vol. 7,
pp. 2 5 6 -2 6 8 . -
46. See M airg u n th er 1987; O bst 1991; G ilbert 2007; Friedlander 1997, pp.
2 6 7 -2 6 8 .
47. See Gellately 2001, p. 128; Longerich 2005, pp. 6 0 -6 3 .
48. Evans 2005, p. 581. T he fu rth er m easures tak en by the N azi governm ent
after “C rystal N ig h t” left no d oubt th a t it w anted to be seen to capitalize
on the results in m ore th a n one sense. W hilst the arrested men were quickly
released on the condition th a t they em igrate, G erm an Jew ry as a whole was
fined one billion Reichsm ark and ordered to pay for all the dam age, which
largely destroyed their economic basis. Soon they were b anned from pub­
lic facilities, tran sp o rt, state education, social w elfare, and th eir businesses
were subjected to “A ryanization”, i.e. the forced sale at knockdow n prices
(Friedlander 1997, pp. 2 5 7 -2 6 8 , 308-326).
158 Notes
49. See Behnken 1980, vol. 5, pp. 1204-1211; vol. 6, pp. 211-226; Bankier 1992,
pp. 86-88; Friedlander 1997, pp. 295-298; Gellately 2001,' pp. 127-129;
Kershaw 2005, pp. 587-592; 2008, pp. 173-182.
50. Volkischer Beobachter, 11 November 1938.
51. The international public, of course, did not rely on the Nazi press’s version:
- foreign journalists, tourists and diplomatic staff had plenty of opportunities
to observe the main events and were relatively free to report these at home
even if the Nazis were unhappy about it. Still, the world public was arguably
one of the-main addressees of the Nazi message of Kristallnacht, as a cyni­
cal response to the “League of Nations” conference at Evian in July 1938,
which had failed to offer any significant emigration route for Jews from Nazi
Germany (see Friedlander 1997, pp. 248-250).
52. Kaplan 1998, p. 44.
53. See Laqueur 1980, pp. 17-40, for the discussion of the strange “secrecy”
status of the Flolocaust in Germany.
54. Kershaw 2008, pp. 129-130.
55. Kershaw 2008, p. 130.
56. Hitler on 30 January 1939, Domarus 1965, p. 105; translation after Herf
2006, p. 52.
57. See, e.g., Friedlander 1997, p. 310; Kershaw 2000, pp. 152-153; Burleigh
2001, p. 340; Longerich 2005, pp. 70-71; Evans 2005, pp. 604-605; Herf
2006, pp. 5-6,52-53.
58. See Evans 2003, pp. 60-76; Chickering 2004, pp. 189-192.
59. Domarus 1965, p. 1056. , 80. See H ippier 1981, pp. 187-189; Welch 2007, pp. 16 6 ,1 7 3 .
60. Domarus 1965, pp. 1056-1057.
61. Domarus 1965, p. 1057.
62. Domarus 1965, p. 1057.
63. Domarus 1965, p. 1058.
64. Klemperer 1995, vol. 1, p. 461 (entry of 5 February 1939). By this time,
Klemperer was under no illusions as to the general threat to his wife and
himself and any Jews in Germany; since November 1938 he had been making
increasingly desperate efforts to emigrate (see ibid., pp. 436-460).
65. See Shirer 1999, p. 25; Boberach 1984, vol. 2, pp. 367-390, and Behnken
1980; vol. 5, pp. 684-699, 809-841, 913-918 (for the disappointment of
German opposition groups over the Western powers’ retreat before Hitler’s
threats, see ibid., pp. 939-947). During the negotiations over the Sudeten-
landy Hitler, to his chagrin, had been forced to accept an internationally
guaranteed treaty and to pretend in public that he, too, wanted to preserve
“peace in our time”, like the British, French and Italian politicians who co­
signed the Munich Treaty (see Klemperer 1995, pp. 425-427; Kershaw 2000,
pp. 122-123; Evans 2005, pp. 676-678).
66. See Domarus 1965, pp. 1307, 1312-1307; Shirer 1999, pp. 68-75; Kershaw
2000, pp. 197-230.
67. See Domarus 1965, pp. 1163,1829; for interpretations, see Domarus 1965,
p. 28; Kershaw 1999, pp. 152-153; 487,494; Friedlander 1998, p. 309; 2007,
pp. 132, 331-333; Longerich 2006, pp. 201-204.
68. Domarus 1965, p. 1663; Friedlander (2007, p. 132) emphasizes the (relative)
vagueness of the threat at this point but leaves it open whether the “change
of vocabulary was intentional or not”. The issue is not a change in Hitler’s
genocidal intentions but rather the fact that before the attack on the USSR
the fate of the Jews of continental Europe simply was not yet in Hitler’s
hands.
69. See Domarus 1965, pp. 1663-1664.
Notes 159
70. See, e.g., the newsreel-based film Campaign in Poland {Peldzug in Polen),
directed by Fritz H ippier; see http://w w w .im db.com /title/tt0199517/; for an
overview over N azi w ar p ropaganda, see K allis 2008.
71. For overviews, see W ulf 1966; H ollstein 1971; M annes 1999; Tegel 2007;
Welch 2007; Vande W inkel and Welch 2007.
72. See Evans 2 0 0 8 , p. 161.
73. See Brow ning 1992, pp. 1-27; K ulka and Jackel 2 0 0 4 , pp. 6 3 4 -6 3 6 .
74. See K ulka and Jackel 2 0 0 4 , pp. 6 2 6 -6 3 2 ; Friedlander 2007, pp. 53-127.
75. T h e m ini-series co n stitu tes an exception am o n g th e film p ro d u ctio n o f the
T h ird R eich, th e vast m ajo rity o f w hich w as devoted to the glorification
of G erm an /A ry an heroism , co m radeship an d leadership on th e one h an d ,
an d escapist en tertain m en t films on th e o th e r (W elch 2007, pp. 2 6 6 -2 2 7 ;
V ande W inkel an d W elch 2007, p. 14).
76. See Welch 2007, pp. 2 2 2 -2 2 9 , 2 3 9 -2 5 7 ; Tegel 2007, pp. 151-153. A fter the
. w ar, Fritz H ippier, th e filmjs director an d chief of film production under the
N azis from 1939 until 1943, w ho also directed the early Blitzkrieg docum en­
taries, used H itler an d G oebbels’ input to claim th a t he had had practically
no in p u t in The Eternal Jew an d w as “em barrassed to get the credit” fo r the
film (H ippier 1981, p. 207). T he scenes from the ghettos in occupied Poland
h ad , however, been filmed under his personal direction (ibid., pp. 187-189).
77. See C hilton 2005; R ash 2 0 0 6 , pp. 172-181; M usolff 2007, pp. 3 4 -4 0 .
78. See Tegel 2007, p. 153.
79. Der Deutsche Film, 6 Decem ber 1940, quoted after Welck 2007, p. 252.
81. Longerich (2003, p. 71) accords a “new q u ality ” to the 1939 prophecy
because “it no longer was aim ed only a t p u ttin g fu rth er pressure on the Jews
for em igration” b u t threatened to use them “as hostages an d thereby prevent
an intervention by the W estern pow ers against his w ar policy”. T his is a
plausible interpretation o f the N azis’ short-term intentions in 1939 b ut the
explicit “an n ih ilatio n ” th rea t p o in ts to a com prehensive genocidal agenda.
82. See Tegel 2007, pp. 166-167; Friedlander 2007, pp. 101-103. A ccording to
N azi p ropaganda, the figure fo r Berlin cinem as in w hich the film opened was
sixty-six (see W ulf 1966, p. 457).
83. Welch 2007, pp. 2 4 4 -2 4 5 ; Tegel 2007, p. 166.
84. Welch 2007, pp. 2 5 2 -2 5 3 ; see also Evans 2 0 0 8 , pp. 5 7 1-572.
85. Friedlander 2007, p. 102.
86. Mitteilungsbldtter fur die weltanschauliche Schulung der Ordnungspolizei,
Folge 27; 1 D ecem ber 1941; quoted after M atth au s 2 0 0 4 , p. 3 00; see also
Brow ning 2001, p. 179.
87. See H ilberg 1992.
88. See K ulka an d Jackel 2 0 0 4 , p. 4 4 0 ; B oberach-1984,-pp.-t917= 1^9.
89. See K ulka an d Jackel 2004, p. 441.
90. SD Aufienstelle H oxter, 7^ February 1941, in K ulka an d Jackel 2 0 0 4 , p. 441.
91. See, e.g., the reports in K ulka an d Jackel 2 0 0 4 , pp. 5 1 6 -5 2 0 , 525, 546.
92. T his difference is exploited, disingenuously, by H olocaust deniers still to this
day (Lipstadt 1995; Longerich 2003, pp. 8-19): they insist on the pretence
th a t the ostentatious justification an d prophecy, o f the genocide in the term s
of a n analogical argum ent had “o nly” figurative m eaning, i.e. no “tru th -
value” in the sense of ethical or political com m itm ents.
93'. Friedlander 2007, pp. 2 0 8 -2 0 9 .
94. H itler speeches on 2 an d 3 O ctober; see D om arus 1965, pp. 1756,1760.
95. See Brow ning 1992, pp. 8 6 -1 2 1 ; 2 0 0 4 , pp. 3 0 9 -3 5 2 , M atth au s 2 0 0 4 , pp.
2 5 3 -3 0 8 . ^
 Notes 161
160 Notes
112. See Friedlander 2007, pp. 330-447.
96. See Browning 2001, p. 179 and 2 0 0 4 , pp. 2 9 9 -3 0 0 . 113. Speech of 30 September 1942, see Domarus 1965, p. 1920; compare also
97. See his speech on “heroes’ rem em brance d ay ”, 15 M arch 1942, in w hich he
adm itted th a t for the p ast four m onths, i.e. since N ovem ber 1941, the adver­
ibid., pp. 1058,1163.
sary had been able to enforce a m ilitary “ tu rn a ro u n d ” {[Zeit fiir den Gegner]
114. Domarus 1965, p. 1920.
seinerseits die Wende in diesem . . . Ringen herbeizufuhren)-, th is change 115. Friedlander 2007, p. 402. j • c
116. See SD reports on and subsequent “rumours” of genocide in Germany trom
w ould be reversed in the com ing G erm an sum m er offensive (D om arus 1965, 1942 onwards in Kulka and Jackel 2004, pp. 489, 491, 510, 528-529, 531,
p. 1850). 533.
’9'8. T he significance of the 1941 setbacks in th e Russian cam paign an d the US’s
entry into the w ar for N azi propaganda an d public perception of it m ust n ot
117. See Domarus 1965, p. 1978.
be confused w ith the theory th a t the H olocaust w as only decided upon in
118. Goebbels 1971, vol. 2, pp. 178-179.
119. Goebbels 1971, vol. 2, pp. 182,188. • ^ , , qqo
Decem ber 1941; see Brow ning 1992, pp. 7 7 -8 5 ; for the dating of the final 120 See Goebbels’ diary entries from January to March 1943, in Goebbels lyyS
decision to put the com plete genocide of E uropean Jew ry into practice in the ' 2004, part II, vol. 7, pp. 368-374; for analyses of the public impact, see
context of the victory euphoria of Ju ly -early O ctober 1941, see Browning Moltmann 1964; Fetscher 1998, pp. 125-159; Hachmeister and Kloft 2005;
2 004, pp. 309-329. O n 22 July 1941, H itler is on record for explaining to
a visiting C roatian m arshal th e necessity of a pan-E uropean destruction of
Kallis 2005, pp. 130-137.
121. Klemperer 1995, vol. 2, pp. 332-333. , . ,
Jew ry in term s of the bacillus m etaphor: “ if even just one state . . . tolerates 122. See Kulka and Jackel 2004, pp. 516-520,525. For evidence of similarly scep­
one Jew ish fam ily in it, then this w ill become the bacillus for a new decom ­ tical reactions to the Nazi propaganda use of discoveries of Soviet atrocities
position” (ibid., p. 315). against Germans in Nemmersdorf, Eastern Prussia, in late 1944, see ibid., p.
99. See D om arus 1965, pp. 1828-1829.
100. See D om arus 1965, p. 1829. In his message of 24 February to the p arty faith ­ 546.
ful on the anniversary of the foundation of the NSDAP, H itler reiterated his
123. See Steinert 1970, p. 257. _
124. IMT (1948), vol. 29, pp. 145-146 (1919-PS); see also Friedlander 2007, pp.
m ix of annihilation prophecy and peace-through-victory prom ise, w hich he
542-544; Kershaw 2008, pp. 206-207.
then neatly rounded off in the clinical image o f “elim ination” (Beseitigung)
125. See Kulka and Jackel 2004, pp. 524-525, 535,537, 540, 547; Kershaw 2008,
of th e (ibid., p. 1844).
101. SD report of 2 February 1942, in Boberach 1984, pp. 3 2 3 3 -3 2 3 5 ; in K ulka
p. 202.
126. See Kulka and Jackel 2004, p. 543. •
and Jackel 2 004, p. 485. 127. See SD reports documenting popular opinions that the Allied bombing raids
102. See Friedlander 2007, pp. 2 5 1 -2 5 3 , 2 6 3 -2 6 4 , 3 0 6 -3 1 4 ; Bankier 1992, pp. were meant to revenge the German persecution of the Jews (Kulka and Jackel
124-138; Brow ning 2 004, pp. 111-151. 2004, pp. 526, 528, 540; also Bankier 1992, pp. 144-146).
103. See Gellately 2001, p. 142; Friedlander 2007, p. 289. 128 See Goebbels’ speeches on 5 November 1943, 3 October 1944, 28 Febru­
104. See Das Reich 16 N ovem ber 1941, “ It’s the Jew s’ fault” (Die Juden sind ary 1945 in Goebbels 1971, vol. 2, pp. 286-304, 405-446; on the function
schuld). The annihilation prophecy also appeared in G oebbels’ diaries, cul­ of sports imagery for Nazi propaganda, see Klemperer 1975, pp. 246-249;
m inating in the entry of 7 M arch 1942, w hen he recorded the adm inistrative on its use in Goebbels’ speech in February 1945, which he interprets as an
blueprint for the genocide agreed by the T h ird Reich’s top SS-and civilian expression of “sheer desperation” (vollige Verzweiflung), see Klemperer
jurists and adm inistrators a t the so-called “W annsee conference” on 20
January 1942 (i.e. system atic deportation of all E uropean Jews to the East,
1995, vol. 2, pp. 689-690.
their tem porary use as w orkers, eventual killing of all Jew ish persons). In his
129. Klemperer 1995, vol. 2, p. 251.
diary, he hailed it as the best possible outcom e of the “life-or-death struggle
T30. Domarus 1965, p. 2083.
betw een th e A ryan race and the Jewish bacillus” (see G oebbels 1 9 9 3 -2 0 0 4 ,
131. Domarus 1965, p. 2084. 1 • c.
132 Klemperer noted the well-publicized Nazi rage at Allied declarations after
p a rt II, vol. 1. p. 269; vol. 3, p. 561; for the "W annsee conference”, see the Normandy landings, which nullified all laws discriminating Jews (see
Friedlander 2007, pp. 339-3 4 3 ; Rosem an 2 0 0 2 , pp. 4 8 -5 4 , 68-107). entry for 20 July 1944, in Klemperer 1995, vol. 2, p. 5 4 7 ^ .
105. D om arus 1965, p. 1867. 133. Domarus 1965, pp. 2196-2197. '
106. D om arus 1965, pp. 1868-1869. 134. Domarus 1965, p. 2196.
107. Klem perer 1995, vol. 2, p. 74. 135. See Domarus 1965, pp. 2203-2207, 2223-2224, 2236-2239.
108. Klem perer 1995, vol. 2, p. 75. T he m ain topic of the diaries during this 136. See Gellately 2001, pp. 242-255; Friedlander 2007, pp. 648-656.
period is the massive increase of suicides of Jewish people fearing im m i­ 137. Klemperer 1995, vol. 2, pp. 721; see also ibid., pp. 704, 709, 732.
nent “d eportation” or reeling from the nightm arish experience of “house 138. See Klemperer 1995, vol. 2, pp. 755, 759, 761, 768-769, 773, 797.
searches”, w hich included n o t just the devastation of houses an d apartm ents
but beatings and open hum iliation of Jew s and their “A ryan” p artn ers, and
139. Klemperer 1975, pp. 8-14. , • 1 goo ^
140 See “Preface, 1945” in Sternberger, Storz and Suskind 1989, p. /.
often led to arrest, to rtu re, concentration cam p and “d ep o rtatio n ” (ibid., pp. 141. See Kershaw 2008, p. 206. In view of this devastating and relentless expo­
75-128). sure to the application of the genocidal scenario in the Nazi discourse during
109. Klem perer 1995, vol. 2 , p. 75. the last war years, the denial and suppression of Holocaust memories by
110. Bankier 1992, pp. 141-142. large sections of the population (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 1967; Niven
111. See Bankier 1992, pp. 140-145; Klem perer 1995, vol. 2, pp. 7 9 -8 0 , 122, 2002, 2006; Longerich 2006) becomes psychologically plausible: admission
153; K ulka and Jackel 2004, pp. 500, 503, 506.
162 Notes
of factual know ledge in com bination w ith th e (undeniable) aw areness of the
state leaders’- continuous prom ises of therapy-by-annihilation w ould have
m ade it difficult to m aintain the stance th a t the general genocidal dim ensions
of the H olocaust w ere “inconceivable” for o rd in ary G erm ans.
Notes 163
the French Revolution, see H odson 2 0 0 7 (especially pp. 115-148) on the use
of m etaphors.
25. For the application of “adaptive com plex system s” theory to diachronic lin­
guistics and discourse history, see F rank 2 0 0 8 , 2009.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

1. Goldhagen 2003, p. 80.
2. Goldhagen 2003, pp. 81-87.
3. See Evans 1997, pp. 149-180; Browning 2001, pp. 191-223; Friedlander
2007, p . X X .
4. See Arendt 1973; Poliakov 1974/75, vol. 3; Birnbaum 1992; Milfull 1993-
Winock 1998; Lindemann 2001; Kertzer 2003.
5. Tillyard 1982, p. 107.
6. Sontag 1978, p. 75.
7. Sontag 1978, p. 78.
8. Sontag 1978, pp. 71-72. Since the publication of Sontag’s essay, the ideo-
^gically and ethically dubious status of bio-medical metaphors in public
discourse has become an object of intensive study in “Critical Discourse
Analysis”; see Charteris-Black 2005; Chilton 2005; Guldin 2000: Hawkins
2001; Musolff 2003, 2004a, b, 2005; Niemeier 2000; Pauwels and Simon-
Vandenbergen 1995; Peries 1991.
9. Skinner^1978, p. xi. For further methodological criticism of traditional “History
of Ideas” approaches, see also Hampsher-Monk, Tilmans and van Vree 1998.
10. Lakoff and Turner 1989, pp. 166-167.
11. Lakoff and Turner 1989, p. 167.
12. See Johnson 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Grady and Johnson 2003-
Gibbs 2005.
Kovecses 1995, 2005, 2006; Geeraerts and Grondelaers 1995; Gevaert
14. See Yu 2008.
15. See Fabiszak 2007; Goatly 2007.
16. See Kdvecses 2009; Shogimen 2008; Foolen 2008; Semino 2008; Musolff
and Zinken 2009; Mouton 2009.
17. Kovecses 2009, pp. 22-23.
18. Croft 2000, pp. 23-29.
19. Croft 2000, p. 38.
20. Croft and Cruse 2004, p. 204.
21. Croft and Cruse 2004, pp-204-220.^ The methodological corollary of this
approach is a change of focus in metaphor studies: whereas “Lakoff argues
that It is precisely because metaphors . . . have become fixed in the lan­
guage (and because they are so widespread) that they'. .. reflect fundamen­
tal properties of the human mind”, Croft and Cruse point out that there is
a “separate and worthwhile study to be done on novel metaphors” (ibid., p.
206).
22. Croft and Cruse 2004, p. 204.
23. Croft and Cruse 2004, p. 205.
24. To assess the relative strength of the different metaphor versions in public
discourse would involve quantitative, statistical investigation, which would
be desirable but cannot be provided here. For an insightful exploration of
quantitative analysis with regard to British political discourse at the time of
1. Lovejoy 1936, pp. 2 0 -2 1 .
2. Lovejoy 1936, pp. 61 -6 6 .
3. See Lincoln 1986; G uldin 2 0 0 0 . pp. 2 9 -3 2 . Such m yths are o f course not
an Indo-E uropean specialism eitner b ut caiTbe found in m any cultures. For
body-based m yths of ancient M exico, for instance, see M iller an d Taube
’ 1993, pp. 4 5 -4 6 , 91-97.
4. The Republic, 5 5 4 ', in Plato 1993, p. 278. For pre-Socratic notions o f the
body of the state, e.g. in the Areopagiticus of Isocrates, see H ale 1971, pp.
1 9 -2 0 ; G uldin 2 0 0 0 , pp. 3 9 -4 8 .
5. Politics, C hapter 1.2; 1253^2, in A ristotle 1995, p. 10.
6. Politics, C hapter 1.5; 1254'’2, in A ristotle 1995, p. 16; and On the Movement
of Animals, quoted in H ale 1971, p. 24; com pare also G uldin 2 0 0 0 , p. 49.
7. Politics, C hapter 'V.3; 1302'’33, in A ristotle 1995, p. 184.
^ See Z avadil 2009, pp. 2 2 0 -2 2 3 .
^ F o r the “fable of the belly” trad itio n , see Aesop 2 0 0 2 , p. 35. For its concep­
tu al history see N estle 1927: Peil 1985: Schoenfeldt 1997; G uldin 2 0 0 0 , pp.
101-103; K oschorke et al. 2007, pp. 32 -3 5 .
10. See the Bible (2001), Romans 1 2 :4 -5 ; 1 Corinthians 12:12-28; for analyses,
see H ale 1971, pp. 2 9 -3 2 ; Bass 1997, pp. 2 0 1 -2 0 2 ; K antorow icz 1997, pp.
7 1 -7 3 ,1 7 6 , 209.
’ 11. See H ale 1971, pp. 2 8 -3 2 ; C aird 1980, pp. 153, 187; Bass 1997, pp. 2 0 1 -
202; K antorow icz 1997, pp. 87-93.
12. A ugustine 1998, p. 938 {De Civitate Dei, X IX .13); see also Kempshall 1997,
pp. 3 2 4 -3 2 6 ; G uldin 2 0 0 0 , pp. 5 4 -5 5 ; Z avadil 2009, p. 229.
13. A ugustine 1998, p. 938.
14. See Skinner 1978, vol.T , pp. 3 -1 2 .
15. See K antorow icz 1997, pp. 4 9 6 -5 0 6 ; Skinner 1978, vol. 1, pp. 1 -6 5 ; Kemp­
shall 1997, p. 3 4 8 -3 6 2 ; Struve 1978, passim.
16. Lovejoy 1936, p. 59.
See K antorow icz 1 9 y , pp. 1 3 9 -231, 2 7 3 -3 1 0 ; M a itla n d 2003, pp. 32-37.
t Jo h n of Salisbury 1990 (English translation), L atin edition by W ^ b : see John
of Salisbury 1965 (= reprint of 1909 edition).^ ---------- ' "
19. For Jo h n of S alisbury’s life an d career, see W ilks 1984; N ederm an 1990, pp.
xv i-x v iii; for the te x tu al history of Policraticus, see N ederm an 1990, pp.
x v iii-x ix .
20. Jo h n of Salisbury 1990, p. 230; ap a rt from T hom as Beckett, the Policraticus
w ould presum ably have been accessible m ainly to high-ranking clerics and
’ courtiers.
21. Liebeschutz (1950, pp. 2 3 -2 4 ) declared the “in stru ctio n ” to be a literary fic­
tion designed “to disguise the personal character of his political criticism ”.
K antorow icz (1997, p. 199); H ale (1971, pp. 39 -4 1 ); N ederm an (1990, p.
xxi); an d K oschorke et al. (2007, p. 78) accept this interpretation; for a dif­
fering view com pare Bass (1997, p. 206).
22. Jo h n of Salisbury 1990, pp. 6 6 -6 7 .
164 Notes
23. See K antotow icz 1997, pp. 9 4 -9 7 , 1 9 4 -2 0 0 ; H ale 1971, p. 4 0; N ederm an
1 9 8 8 ,1 9 9 0 .
24. See H u izin g a 1933; L iebeschutz 1950, p. 2 2 - 2 4 ; S o u th ern 1970; N ed er-
m an 1990, p. xvi; Bass 1997, pp. 2 0 3 -2 0 6 . For a stro n g em phasis on
Jo h n ’s “rad ically inn o v atin g and com p assio n ate social visio n ”, see Bass
(1997, pp. 2 0 7 -2 1 0 ). K antorow icz (1997, pp. 2 0 0 , 311), on th e oth er
h a n d , highlights Jo h n ’s dependence on th e P auline co n cep t of th e church
~ as C h rist’s body; likew ise, Struve (1984, p. 309) an d H ale (1971, pp.
3 9 -4 0 ) underline Jo h n ’s unflinching belief in hierarchy an d lo y alty to
church and state au th o rity ; G u ld in (2 0 0 0 , pp. 5 7 -5 8 ) specifically stresses
th e “p a te rn a listic ” tenor.
25. Jo h n of Salisbury 1990, p. 126.
26. Tillyard 1982, p. 103.
27. Jo h n o f Salisbury 1990, p. 135.
28. Jo h n o f Salisbury 1990, p. 135.
29. John o f Salisbury 1990, p. 136.
30. See H ale 1971, p. 4 0 , and G uldin 2 0 0 0 , pp. 57-58.
31. See the use of the fable by Jo h n ’s contem porary M arie de France (1993, p.
25).
32. In term s of target concepts, thb m ain m odel depicts the state’s “treasurers
and record-keepers”, w hilst the fable targets the p o p e’s adm in istratio n , but
despite this difference, the im port of the tw o passages is fairly sim ilar; they
explain the dangers th a t arise if the digestive system of the political body
does n o t function properly.
33. Jo h n of Salisbury 1990, p. 67.
34. Jo h n of Salisbury 1990, p. 63.
John of Salisbury 1990, p. 137. For general w arnings about injuries to the
body of the res publica see ibid., pp. 8 4 ,1 2 6 .
36. John of Salisbury 1990, pp. 140-141.
37. John of Salisbury 1990, p. 141.
38. John of Salisbury 1990, pp. 193-194.
39. See Jo h n ’s criticism of am bitious an d/or hypocritical clerics th a t £ause
“calam ities in the H ouse of G od”: C hapters 17, 21 in Book VII of th e Poli-
craticus (1990, pp. 162-175).
40. Sontag 1978, p. 76.
41. See Jo h n ’s fam ous exhortation in favour of tyrannicide (under th e right cir­
cum stances) in Book V III of the Policraticus (1990, pp. 190-225).
42. John o f Salisbury 1990, pp. 81,135 .
43. John of Salisbury 1990, pp. 2 8 -3 8 .
44. Jo h n of Salisbury 1990, pp. 127-132.
45. John of Salisbury 1990, p. 125.
46. Jo h n of Salisbury 1990, p. 126.
47. T illyard 1982, p. 7.
48. See Skinner 1978, vol. 1, pp. 4 7-51 ; Kempshall 1997, pp. 2 7 -2 8 ,1 3 1 -1 3 3 .
49. See Kempshall 1978, pp. 2 6 -130.
50. A ristotle 1995, p. 184 {Politics, C hapter V.3; 1302'=33).
51. See Kempshall 1997, pp. 2 0 -2 1 , 257,
52. See texts form A lbertus M agnus, Politicorum Libri Octo, Super Ethica com-
mentum et quaestiones\ T hom as A quinas, Summa contra Gentiles, Summa
Theologica in N ederm an and Forhan 1993, pp. 97-148; see also Kempshall
1997, pp. 33, 41, 9 4 ,1 1 1 -1 1 2 ,1 2 2 ; K antorow icz 1997, p. 478.
53. See K em pshall 1997, pp. 132-133, especially footnote 13 ibid.
54. N ederm an and Forhan 1993, p. 113.
55. T hom as A quinas, Summa Theologica, quoted after N ederm an and Forhan
1993, p. 135.
Notes 165
56. See Latini, Li livre dou Tresor; quoted after Nederman and Forhan 1993, p.
73; for the politico-philosophical background of Latini, see Skinner 1978,
vol. l,pp. 36-41,44-48.
57. See Kempshall 1997, pp. 130-203.
58. Boniface 1959, pp. 1245-1246.
59. See Kempshall 1997, p. 265.
60. See Kempshall 1997, pp. 147-148, 267-271, 272-273,
61. See Kempshall 1997, p. 249.
62. John of Paris, De Potestate Regia et Papali (1302/3), quoted after Nederman
and Forhan 1993, p. 162. See also Kempshall 1997, pp. 282-292.
63. Kempshall 1997, p. 355.
64. Marsilius of Padua 2005, p. 12: “A city and its parts would . . . seem to be in
the same relation to tranquility as an animal and its parts is to health.. . . For
. . . health is an animal’s optimal condition according to nature, and likewise
. . . tranquility is the optimal condition of the city established according to
reason.”
65. Marsilius of Padua 2005, p. 136; compare also Nederman and Forhan 1993,
p. 198. For the political context see Skinner 1978,1, pp. 56-62.
66. Remigio dei Girolami, De Bono Communi, De Bono Pads, Contra Falsos
Ecclesie Professores, quoted after Kempshall 1997, p. 335.
67. See Albertus Magnus’s comments on Aristotle’s Ethics, Super Ethica, quoted
in Kempshall 1997, p. 111.
68. William of Ockham, Eight Questions on the Power of the Pope, quoted after
Skinner 1978,1, p. 130.
William of Ockham, Eight Questions on the Power of the Pope, quoted after
^ Skinner 1978,1, pp. 130-131.
70. Bartolus of Saxoferrato, Commentaries on the Second Part of the New
Digest; quoted after Skinner 1978,1, p. 131.
71. The Golden Bull of the Emperor Charles IV, quoted after Skinner 1978,1, p.
131.
72. See Dhorn van Rossum and Bockenforde 1978, pp. 546-548, 552-554;
Koschorke et al. 2007, pp. 91-92) for the uses of body imagery on late-medi­
eval debates about the relationship between pope, empire and Christendom,
especially in the writings of Juan de Torquemada (1388-1468) and Nicholas
of Cusa (1401-1464).
( f p Forhan 1994, pp. xvi-xvii.
For biographical and political details, see Lockwood 1997, pp. xvi-xvii.
75. Fortescue 1997, pp. 20-21.
76. The Policraticus, however, is mentioned in the Livre de Corps de Policie
(Christine de Pizan 1994, p. 27).
77. Christine de Pizan 1994, p. 4. -----— ^
78. See e.g., Christine de Pizan 1994, pp. 4-5, 15, 93, 105. In addition to her
wide-ranging knowledge of the classical authors and John of Salisbury’s
Policraticus, Christine de Pizan was also familiar with Giles of Rome and
Brunetto Latini’s works, which were directly pertinent to the metaphor tradi­
tion; see Forhan 1994, p. xxi.
Matthew 2:6, 26:31; John 10:11; Hebrews 13:20; 1 Peter 5:4.
ir'Ut-Jcri'n^. Pi75>n 1 Q'54 r> 4- for T . a r i n i . Nederman and Forhan 1993. D.
^^73.
81. Christine de Pizan 1994, p. 38.
82. Christine de Pizan 1994, p. 38.
v 83. Christine de Pizan 1994, Chapters 22-26, pp. 39-46.
84. Christine de Pizan 1994, p. 91. Note also the earlier reference to the gist of
the fable of the belly in the initial prince-head analogy quoted earlier (1994,
p. 4)
 166 Notes
Notes 167
85. Christine’s Book of the Body Politic inherits from John of Salisbury’s PoU T hom as N o rth ’s 1579 English translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, see
craticus the inconsistency of using the belly as source input for two different Spurgeon 1935, pp. 34 7 -3 4 8 ; however, for its conceptual and literary inno­
vations com p. M otohashi 1994; Peltonen 2009.
e ruler (in the fable). As in the Poltcraticus, however, this inconsistencv 3. Peltonen (2009, pp. 251-252) points to sim ilarly pejorative references to the
^ substantive contradiction, for the source-target relationship is belly image in contem porary literature on versions of the fable.
^86. C h risd n eT p 7 zl'l9 9 t disambiguates any potential equivocation. 4. Coriolanus, 1 , 1 ,1 1 3 -1 2 4 .
87. John of Salisbury 1990, pp. 136, 140-141 5. Coriolanus, 1 ,1 ,1 3 2 ,1 5 5 .
6. Coriolanus, III, I, 2 9 2-307.
Deuteronomy 7. Hamlet, I, 3, 2 0 -2 4 (this an d the follow ing references to Shakespeare’s plays
generalizes them into “laws of nature’’ are quoted after Shakespeare 1983).
or. religions” (ibid., pp. 24-26) 8. K antorow icz 1997, p. 26.
89. Fortescue 1997, pp. 24-29. ^
Fortescue 1997, p. 20. 9. Richard II, IV, 1, 203 -2 1 1 ; see K antorow icz 1997, pp. 2 4 -4 0 .
(2 )J Fortescue 1997, p. 20. 10. Richard III, III, 7 ,1 2 4 -1 2 6 .
11. Tillyard 1982, p. 17. For Shakespeare’s use of th e body politic m etaphor in
l^rlTn^A references to Aristotle’s Politics and On the fu rth er plays, see H u n t 2 002; Spied 2007.
Animals and Augustine’s City of God 12. Troilus and Cressida, I, 3, 8 5 -8 6 .
93. Fortescue 1997, pp. 20-21.
94. Fortescue 1997, p. 21. 13. Troilus and Cressida, 1 ,3 ,9 4 -1 1 0 . An exam ple of such “discord” in the body
politic an d the whole Great Chain is provided by B rutus’s contem plation of
s^mrt1np7rom^A ^ t' inscribes himself in a tradition C aesar’s assassination in Julius Caesar, w hich he him self likens to the in te r­
k w -v i^ hrS ®"d continuing to Burke that links the idea of national nal conflict of a state: here the individual state o f m ind is likened to a politi­
noinfc n dy imagery to that of popular custom, which, as Pocock (2003) cal entity: “T he genius and the m o rtal instrum ents / Are then in council; and
points out, IS seen as the expression of “a particular judgment to which so the state of m an, / Like to a little kingdom , suffers then / The n atu re of an
many men’s experience testifies, that the probability of its conthiSng to give insurrection” {Julius Caesar, II, 1, 6 6 -6 9 ).
96. P o c S o a . 'p . " ! " ''' P- 14. T illyard 1982, pp. 17, 20.
15. T illyard 1982, pp. 2 3 -2 4 : “If the Elizabethans believed in an ideal order a n i­
97. In Fortescue’s didactic frame, the “argument from antiquity” serves to auell m ating earth ly order, they were terrified lest it should be upset, and appalled
counter-arguments: against the weight of collLtive experience by the visible tokens of disorder th a t suggested its upsetting. T hey were
that has been accumulated from the earliest times of the English body poli- obsessed by the fear of chaos an d the fact of m utability; and the obsession
th?r royal “apprentice” is forced to conceL w as pow erful in p ro portion as their faith in the cosm ic order w as strong”.
that he is persuaded to devote himself to the study of the laws as well as 16. Skinner 1 9 7 8 ,1, p. 239.
of leaving to his judges the detailed and definitive skill” of interpreting and 17. See H ale 1971, pp. 4 8 -5 0 ; com p, also Skinner 1978, II, pp. 85-89^ H ughes
applying the laws (Fortescue 1997, p 79) Hirerpreting and
98. Sontag 1978, pp. 75-76. 1988, p. 86; K antorow icz 1997, pp. 2 2 5 -2 3 1 ; M aitlan d 2003, p. 34.
18. We leave aside a fu rth e r “ex tern alisatio n ” aspect in early m odern concep­
99. Furthermore the Policraticus in itself was far from endorsing a simple onri- tu alisatio n s of th e body politic, i.e. th a t o f th e k ing as husband o f the body
emphasize the need for extreme, “unbLl- politic, as his wife. T his “gendered” version of the body-politic concept
^ e b e llin g S ? ’. "complete destruction” of any w as on th e one h an d com patible in principle w ith headship-, in the Pauline
trad itio n , th e h usband, .as head, w as also ruler of his w ife {Epistle to the
Ephesians 5 :2 3 -2 4 ); on the other h an d , th is ex tern alized , possessive stance
to w ard s th e head to its “fem inized” body politic w ould come to play a
NOTES TO CHAPTER 7 m ajor role in legitim ising absolutist ru le as in K ing Jam es I’s address to his
t p arliam en t tw o generations later: “I am th e H u sb an d , an d the w hole Isle is
1. With the exception of the discussion of Machiavelli’s innovation in concep­ my law full W ife; I am the head an d it is m y body” (M cHwacthTPlRjp. 272).
tualising the ruler as a healer this chapter concentrates on E^hsh sources For the gendered body politic trad itio n see'A x to n 1977; H arris 1998, pp.
This IS not intended to give the impression that English disco^se traditions 107-140.
represented or dominated all debates abopt the body politic in Renaissance 19. K antorow icz 1997, p. 229. T he blend of political and spiritual headship in
the new concept o f the King in tu rn m ade it possible to apply the much older
L'^indud^d®^’"' ^ ^“1 national strands would of course have to C hristological distinction betw een body natural an d body mystical directly
^ included, especially statements by thinkers such as, inter alia Bodin L d
to the King, w hich inspired the research in to the fam ous “Two Bodies”
w l5 7 6 metaphor (in Six livres de la Repub- trad itio n by M aitlan d , K antorow icz, Bertelli an d others. U nder the Tudor
C h l 1 9 7 0 -H a lfs 'S ■ international resonance (see m onarchs, it developed into an intricate legal system fo r distinguishing the
2007- Banks 2009 Koschorke et al. 2007, pp. 93-100; RobUs personal {body natural) an d political {body politic) obligations of the crown
2UU/, Banks 2009). For German contributions, see Chapter 9.
(see K antorow icz 1997, pp. 7 -2 5 ; 4 0 1 -4 0 9 ).
2. Coriolanusy 1,1,95-157; see also Chapter 1 above. For a reading ofShakfe-
speare s use of the body politic metaphor in Coriolanus as derivative of 20. See Bloch 1961; Bertelli 2001, pp. 2 6 -2 9 .
21. See H ale 1971, pp. 4 9 -5 1 ; Skinner 1978, II, p. 87.
168 Notes
22. For the dating of text and dedication, see M ayer 1989a, pp. x -x ii; com pare
H errtage 1878, pp. Ixxi-lxxii.
23. See H ale 1971, pp. 63, 6 7 -6 8 ; T illyard 1982, pp. 105-106; H arris 1998, pp.
35-36.
24. Starkey 1989, p. 48: “sklendurnes . . . groundyd in the lake of pepul”.
25. Starkey 1989, p. 54: “for lyke . . . the body . . . w ith yl humorys lyth id u l. . .,
so ys a com m ynalty replenysched w ith neclygent 8c idul pepul”.
26. Starkey 1989, p. 55: “for lyke . . . some p arty s be ever movyng &C shakyng
. . ., so in ou r com m ynalty certain p arty s therbe, w ych ever be m ovyng 6c
sterryng”.
27. Starkey 1989, p. 56: “dyscord &Cdebate in a com m ynalty”.
28. Starkey 1989, pp. 56-57: “the p arty s of thys body be n ot proportyonabul one
to a nother”.
29. Starkey 1989, p. 57: “nother so abul to defend o u r selfe from injurys of ene-
mys, nother of other by featys of arm ys to recover our ryght agayn”.
30. Starkey 1989, p. 58: “for lyke . . . a m an consydereth n ot hymselfe nor can
tel w hat ys gud nother for hymselfe . . . so dow o u r offycerys & rularys,
. . ; apply them selfe to the fulfyllyng of theyr vayn pleasurys 6c folysch
fantasye”.
31. Starkey 1989, p. 58. “as hyt w ere, a com m yn disease for bothe the fete 6c
they handys to w hom e I resemblyd plow m en 6c laburarys of the gro u n d ”.
32. Starkey 1989, p. 48: “general fautys 6c m ysordurys 6c unyversal dekeys of
the com m yn wele”.
33. See Starkey 1989, pp. 6 0 -1 2 2 .
34. Starkey 1989, p. 33.
35. Starkey 1989, p. 33: “conseyl o f certayn w yse m en” o r “the hole pepul
togyddur”.
36. Starkey 1989, p. 123: “ thys is undow tydly tro th . . . yf thys <ground> were
stablyschd 6c surely set, the cure of al other m ysordurys wych we notyd
before w old by 6c by follow <6c easely insue>“. See also H errtag e 1878;
M ayer 1989a, 1989b, pp. 247-277.
37. Starkey 1989, p. 123: “th a t ys <troth> . . . for as physycyonys say, w hen they
have removyd the <chefe> cause of the m alady <6c disease in the body> by
lytyl 6c lytyl then nature hyrsulfe cu ry th the p aty en t”.
38. M achiavelli 2005, pp. 88-89.
39. M achiavelli 2005, p 12. See also his later reference to the quoted passage,
w here he reinforces the im portance of the prince’s com petence to identify
early any “poison concealed u n dern eath ” th e body politic: “A nd thus anyone
w ho does not diagnose the ills w hen they arise in a principality is n o t really
w ise, and this talent is given to few men” (2005, p. 49).
40. Sontag 1978, p. 76.
41. Sontag 1978, p. 75.
42. See M achiavelli 2003, pp. 5 2 6 -5 2 8 .
43. M achiavelli 2003, p. 527.
44. M achiavelli 2003, pp. 157-15 9 ,1 9 3 .
45. M achiavelli 2003, p. 201.
46. M achiavelli 2003, p. 208.
47. M achiavelli 2003, p. 256.
48. M achiavelli 2003, p. 257.
49. M achiavelli 2003, p. 157.
50. M achiavelli 2003, p. 153. A ccording to M achiavelli, the R om an republic was
only spared th at fate because, w hen it had liberated itself from the Tarquin-
ian kings after a relatively short tim e, it w as n o t yet corrupted by servitude,*
so “since th e head w as lost w hile th e tru n k rem ained whole it w as easily
Notes 169
possible to recover a free and ordered mode of life” (ibid., p. 157). Machia-
velli’s notion of a headless but uncorrupted trunk that can survive and flour­
ish successfully also puts paid to the idea that Renaissance writers were fully
committed to humoral theory: in this instance, he clearly wasted no thought
on maintaining anatomical or medical source consistency. His one reference
to “malignant humors” (ibid., p. 127) is unspecific and refers to a general
human condition.
51. Machiavelli 2003, pp. 254-257
52. Machiavelli 2003, p. 159.
53. Sontag 1978, pp. 76-77.
54. Berlin 1971, pp. 24-25.
55. See Skinner 1978,1, p. 138; comp, also Skinner 2000, pp. 63-66, and Pocock
2003, pp. 204-311.
56. Machiavelli 2005, pp. 21-30, 84-89; 2003, pp. 270-273; see also Skinner
2000, pp. 62-64.
57. Bacon 1972, p. 43.
58. Bacon 1972, p. 44.
59. Bacon 1972, p. 44. The overheated humours may be given “moderate lib­
erty . . . to evaporate”, for holding them back “maketh the wound bleed
inwards” and thus “endangereth malign ulcers and pernicious impostuma-
tions” (p. 46). For other references to the humours, see Essays III (p. 8) and
XXXVI (p. 113).
60. Hale (1971, p. 108) claims that Bacon’s “materialism and rejection of the
Paracelsans destroy[ed] the philosophical underpinnings of the validity of
the [body-state] analogy”, but this interpretation is highly tenuous, as it begs
the question of consistency between Bacon’s epistemological theories of sci­
ence and his rhetorical practice. As Bacon’s (fragmentary) use of humoral
terminology in the Essays shows, he was far from using only scientific cat­
egories. For a thorough critique of attempts to neatly distinguish “pre-sci-
entific” from “science”-iiispired foody-state analogies in the early modern
period, see Harris 1998, pp. 22-30.
61. Bacon 1972, p. 35.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 8
1. For the former view, see, e.g., Strauss 1963; Hale 1971, pp. 128-130; Sontag
1978, pp. 77-78; for the latter, Harris 1998, pp. 141-143.
2. Hobbes 1996, pp. 9-10.
3. Prokhovnik 1991, p. 218; see also Baumgold 198§i_Mimz-1982;.Martinich
1992, pp. 48-49.
4. Johnston 1986, p. 67.
5. Skinner 1996, pp. 384-390.
6. Hobbes 1996, p. 36. For further criticisms of metaphor as deceptive and
misleading in Leviathan, see ibid., pp. 26, 31, 35, 48, 52,177,180.
7. Johnson 1981, p. 11; see also Lakoff and Johnson 1980, pp. 11-12; Leezen-
berg 2001, p. 1; Goatly 2007, p. 2.
8. See Cooper 1986, pp. 17-18; Bertau 1986, pp. 81-87; Muller-Richter 1998,
p. 11; for the rebuttal of earlier arguments in the same vein, see Prokhovnik
1991, pp. 110-117; Skinner 1996, p. 363, notes 151-156.
9. See Johnston 1986, pp. 66-91; Skinner 1996, pp. 343-390, Feldman 2001;
Musolff 2004c, pp. 100-119.
10. Hobbes 1996, p. 52.
170 Notes
11. H obbes 1996, pp. 50 -5 1 . T he distinction betw een misleading “m etaphor”
and helpful “sim ilitude” also reflects changes in H obbes’s ow n term inology.
In his English version of A ristotle’s Rhetoric, published in 1637, H obbes
treated similitude as differing from m etaphor only m inim ally, i.e. by the pro­
vision of “such Particles of Com parison, as these. As; Even as; So; Even so";
it is “a Metaphor dilated, and it does w ell in an O ration, so it be n ot too
frequent; fo r ’tis Poeticall” (H obbes 1986, p. 110; for the influence of A ris­
totle’s Rhetorics on H obbes, see Strauss 1963, pp. 3 5 -3 6 ; H arw o o d 1986,
pp. 1 3 -3 2 ; Skinner 1996, pp. 239-242). By the tim e of w riting Leviathan,
he had, however, developed a m ore critical view of “m etap h o r” as serving to
confuse, w ith the purpose of deception (H obbes 1996, pp. 26, 36), but his
unchanged positive concept of similitude as a m eans to achieve argum enta­
tive perspicuity still covered the non-deceptive uses of “m etaphor” in the
cognitive sense, i.e. any kind o f inter-dom ain m apping o r blending (comp.
H obbes 1986, p. 109 and 1996, p. 36).
12. H ale 1971, p. 130.
13. See M artinich 1997, pp. 8 6 -9 8 ,1 0 0 -1 0 7 , Skinner 2 0 0 2 , pp. 5-37.
14. For detailed analyses of the frontispiece, see B randt 1987; M in tz 1989; M al­
colm 2002.
15. H ale 1971, p. 108.
16. See K antorow icz 1997, pp. 2 0 -2 3 .
17. H obbes 1996, p. 9.
18. H obbes 1996, pp. 9 ,1 1 7 -1 2 0 .
19. See H ale 1971, pp. 109, 129 -1 3 0 ; Jo h n sto n 1986, p. 124; G uldin 2 0 0 0 , pp.
8 0 -8 9 ; G oatly 2007, pp. 3 62-363. C unningham (2004, pp. 176-177) has,
how ever, highlighted the problem s o f sim plistic notions of th e “m oderniza­
tio n ” of m edicine in the early seventeenth century. T his m odernization was
by no m eans a unitary enterprise: far fro m accepting D escartes’s m echanis­
tic views, H arvey, for instance, saw his ow n discovery o f blood circulation
as a reassertion o f A ristotle’s understanding of the functions of the heart.
T he m echanistic interpretation w as th u s a later reassessm ent, w hich cannot
be projected retrospectively onto H arvey’s discovery, let alone attributed to
H obbes’s knowledge of it. T he fu rth er assum ption of a m etaphorical transfer
of the presum ed new body concept o nto political th eo ry w ould appear to be
even m ore speculative.
20. H obbes 1996, p. 89.
21. H obbes 1996, C hapter 29 (pp. 221-230).
22. H obbes 1996, p. 22 2 . Procreation here is equivalent to conception, whereas
in an earlier chapter H obbes used this term m etonym ically as a synonym for
the “Children of a Com m on-w ealth”, i.e. a t the targ et level, “Plantations, or
Colonies” (Hobbes 1996, p. 175).
23. H obbes 1996, p. 223.
24. H obbes provides historical and contem porary examples (e.g. the Low C o u n ­
tries as a m odel for English revolutionaries [H obbes 1996, pp. 2251).
25. H obbes 1996, p. 225.
26. H obbes 1996, p. 165; see also H obbes’s reference to the link betw een the dif­
ferent kinds of “M adnesse”, including “ m elancholy”, of individuals and an
“evill constitution of the organs of th e Body” (H obbes 1996, p. 54).
27. H obbes 1996, pp. 2 2 5 -2 2 6 .
28. H obbes 1996, p. 226.
29. H obbes 1996, p. 226.
30. H ale 1971, p. 128.
31. Sontag 1978, pp. 75-76.
32. H obbes 1996, p. 226.
Notes 171
33. Hobbes 1996, pp. 226-227.
34. Hobbes 1996, p. 228.
35. Hobbes 1996, p. 228.
36. Hobbes 1996, p. 228.
37. Hobbes 1996, p. 228.
38. Hobbes 1996, pp. 229-230.
39. Hobbes 1996, p. 230.
40. Hobbes 1996, p. 9.
41. Hobbes 1996, pp. 174-175.
42. In the case of the ague, the consequences of a blood blockage are “a cold
contraction, and trembling of the limbes; and afterwards a hot, and strong
endeavour of the Heart, to force a passage. . . till (if Nature be strong enough)
It break at last the contumacy of the parts obstructed, and dissipateth the
venome into sweat; or (if Nature be too weak) the Patient dyeth”; in the case
of pleurisy, the effects are less fatal but also very painful: the “Blood
getting into the Membrane of the breast, breedeth there an Inflammation,
accompanied with a Fever, and painfull stitches” (Hobbes 1996. d 229)
43. Hale 1971, p. 128. ^
44. Harris 1998, p. 143.
45. Compare Hobbes (1996, p. 228) and Harris (1998, p. 143). Harris’s remark
is part of an argument that reads Hobbes’s political pathology as indicative
of an alleged gradual “breakdown not only of the logic of correspondence,
but also to the endogenous pathological discourses which modelled disease
as an internal bodily state rather than as a determinate foreign body” (Har­
ris 1998, p. 143). However, Harris himself notes the “exception” of epilepsy
(1998, p. 175, note 4); Table 8.3 shows that, if anything, internal diseases
outweigh exogenous ones.
46. Hobbes 1996, p. 228.
47. Hobbes’s reference to conjoined siblings may have been influenced by Mon­
taigne’s interpretation of the case of such a “monstrous” child as a good
omen for the king’s supreme reign over diverse bodies in Essays (Montaiene
1965, II, pp. 480-481).
48. Hobbes 1996, p. 228.
49. Hobbes 1996, p. 228.
50. See Rousseau 1994a; for the French original, see Rousseau 1990. ‘
51. Rousseau 1994a, p. 55; see also ibid., p. 67.
52. Rousseau 1994a, pp. 121-122 (1990, pp. 256-258). Rousseau’s essay on
Political Economy for Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedic contains a
more detailed list identifying the sovereign as the head, the laws as the brain,
the working of the will as the nervous system, judges and public officers
as the organs, commerce, industry and agriculture as mouth Ar^_siom.ach,
public finances as the blood and the citizens as t^fTimbs', Butlte expli«tly
characterizes it as not particularly precise and being mainly of didactic value
(see Rousseau 1994b, p. 6).
53. Rousseau 1994a, p. 76,104-105.
54. Rousseau 1994a, p. 95.
55. Rousseau 1994a, p. 96.
56. Rousseau 1994a, pp. 68, 75.
57. Rousseau 1994a, p. 69.
58. Rousseau 1994a, p. 64.
59. Rousseau 1994a, p. 121.
60. Rousseau 1994a, p. 80; for Rousseau’s political illness imagery, see Starobin-
ski 1989, Ch. 5, and Harris 1998, pp. 144-145.
61. Rousseau 1994a, p. 80.

172 Notes
62. Rousseau 1994a, p. 64.
63. Rousseau 1994a, p. 64. • il j - ■ i
64. Rousseau 1994a, p. 56; see also 1994b, p. 7: The political body . . . is also
a moral being which has a will; and this general will, which tends always to
the conservation and well-being of the whole and of each part of it . . . is, tor
all members of the state and in relation to it and them, the rule of what is just
65. - S ^ u 1994a, p. 127; see also p. 125: “On the instant that the people
is lawfully assembled as the sovereign body, all governmental jurisdiction
ceases .. the executive power is suspended . . . because in the place where
the body represented meets, there can be no representative.”
66. Rousseau 1994a, p. 129. ,, , , .u u *
67 For the impact of Rousseau’s use of nature and body metaphors on the rhet-
■oric and propaganda of the French Revolution and
fhoueht see laser 1971, pp. 12-47, 79-113; Koselleck 1973, pp. 133-142;
Arendt 1974, pp. 69-70; Kelly 1986; Blum 1986; Schama 1989, p. 770; Guil-
haumou 1989; Cooper 1999; Derathe 2000. ^ 12. See Lorenz 1991, pp. 65, 159 [Complaints from Protestant States, 1608),
68. Abbe Sieyes, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers Etatf, see Sieyes 1989, p. 30.
69. See Flunt 1984,1991; Schama 1989, pp. 72-73; Desmet, Rooryck and Swig-
gers 1990, pp. 185-186; Walzer 1992, p. 191; de Baecque 1997, pp. 85,
70. See Paine 1891, p. 19; Forster, Parisische Umrisse [1793], in Forster 1990,
71. Burke Reflectiom on the Revolution in France [1790] in Burke 1986, p. 126;
see also ibid.,p. 158. • xx
72. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [1852], m Marx I960,
73. Lenin, State and Revolution [1917], in Lenin 1963-69, vol. 25, Chap­
ters 2 and 3.
74. See Beermann 1964; Gitelmann 2001, p. 168. .
NOTES TO CHAPTER 9
1. Die Zeit, 19. May 2005: “Fine Kritikerjury prasentiert die zehn
‘bemerkenswertesten Inszenierungen’ der Saison.. . . Sie sprechen vom Buh-
nenkorper’ und vom ‘nationalen Korper’—Gesellschaft 1st der groKe Leib,
uber den sich das Theater beugt.” ., . . x 26. See H o fm an n 1976a, p. 395.
2. Der Spiegel 11/2007: “Urn 450 nach Christus hatten sich in dem weiten Impe-
rium germanische Machtzentren abgekapselt. Letztiich waren es Geschwure
im Staatskbrper von Rom.. . . Im 4. und 5. Jahrhundert drangen germanische
Stamme ins Romische Imperium ein. Sie bildeten eigenstandige und bald
nicht mehr kontrollierbare Machtzentren—Keimzellen des Untergangs.
3. Die Zeit, Ze/t-Geschichte, November 2009: “So wie es den Korper des
Staates a la longue zu bessern gait, gait es iiber den individuellen, mit semen
ungeheuren Unzulanglichkeiten zu triumphieren.”
4 Peter F Ganz’s (1957, p. 175) statement that, apart from an isolated occur-
' rence in a translation of Shaftesbury’s “Characteristicks”, no German loan
translation of body politic as politischer Korper is attested, thus oidy refers to
that particular phrase; as we shall see, other loan items (e.g. Staatskorper) are
well attested. It is true, however, that no one term that would be comperable
to the phrase body politic, has dominated German political discourse over
centuries.
Notes 173
5. L uther 1917, vol. l , p p . 147-236. , . .... , ,
6 Luther 1917, vol. 1, p. 155: “w eltlich hirrschafft 1st em m itglid w orden des
’ christlichen corpers, d aru m b yhr w erck sol frey unvorhindert gehen in alle
glidmaB des gantzen corpers, straffen und treyben, w o es die schuld vordienet
odder n o t foddert, unangesehen Bapst, Bischoff, priester, sie drew en odder
bannen, wie sie w ollen.”
7. Skinner 1978, II, p. 15.
8. L uther 1917, vol. 1, p. 153. tc 1 ^u.,*
9 The w orldly disenfranchisem ent of the church did n o t entail for Luther that
' the em peror should assume also full spiritual authority, b ut “ his duty |w as]
simply to foster the teaching of the gospel an d to uphold the tru e faith and
he had “ the right to appoint and dism iss the officers, as well as to control and
dispose of the Church’s property” (Skinner 1 9 7 8 ,1, p. 15).
10 See L uther’s notorious pam phlet O f the Jews and Their Lies ( V o n d en Juden
' und iren Lugen”), of 1543; for its theologically, n ot racially m otivated, rad i­
cal anti-Sem itism , see H ilberg 2 0 0 3 ,1, pp. 13-14.
11. Skinner 1978, vol. 1, pp. 81-108. * * c* #
112 (Declaration of the Margrave of Brandenburg and the Palatine Duke).
13. Friedtlieb 1614, p. 1, quoted in Friihsorge 1974, p. 63.
14. Friedtlieb 1614, p. 12; quoted in Fruhsorge 1974, p. 65; see also Schulze
’ 1986, p. 601.
15. Lohneyss 1622, p. 98, quoted in Fruhsorge 1974, p. 67.
16. Lohenstein 1689,1; Teil, 7; Buch 1102, quoted m Fruhsorge 1974, p. 118. For
the corporeal/sexual im agery in Lohenstein’s tragedies, see K oschorke et al.
2007, pp. 159-177.
17. Weise 1686, p. 132-133 quoted in Fruhsorge 1974, p. 190.
18. See Stieler 1968, pp. 1 0 1 5 ,1132. , • . t- j a -d u \ 17^
19 Pufendorf 2 0 0 7 (reprint of the 1696 tran slatio n by E dm und Bohun), p. 1/t.
For the L atin original and a m odern G erm an translation, see Pufendorf
1994.
20. Pufendorf 2007, p. 177. r -ji -mA-?
21. For the reception history, see Schilling 1994, pp. 9 4 -9 5 ; Seidler 2007, pp.
x ii-x x .
22. H o fm an n 1976b, pp. x v i-ii.
23. Schilling 1994, pp. 95 -9 6 .
24 See Berschin 2 0 0 2 . For fu rth er interpretations of the monster com parison,
’ see Schnettger 2002; Stolleis 1988, 2 004; W ilson 2006.
25. See Jessen 1965, pp. 192-193.
27. See H o fm an n 1976a, p. 392. , • u j
28. A ttem pts to reaw aken the idea of a G erm an Reich'in -toe-m neteentn-ana
tw entieth centuries, including the N azis’ self-presentation of their regime
as the “T h ird Reich”, were th u s n ot m eant to resuscitate the corpse of the
“H oly R om an Empire of G erm an N atio n ”; rath er, they were attem pts to
instrum entalise the “ m yth of the Reich” (Kettenaeker 1983) w ith its associa­
tions of m edieval glory. From today’s perspective, the “ H oly R om an Empire
appears to be firmly historicised.
29. Der Spiegel, 32/2006. *u • u,»
30. K ant, “Idee zu einer allgemeinen G eschichte in weltburgerlicher Absicht .
Berlinische Monatsschrift [November 1784]. In K ant 1983, vol. 9, p. 47. K ant
also used Staatskorper to denote the nation state; see ibid., pp. 42, 48. In his
Critique of Judgement, published in l7 9 0 , K ant even gave the French revo­
lutionaries the benefit of assum ing th a t their predilection for “orgttwismic”
174 Notes
terminology in naming the institutions of their new state was indicative of
their interest in the participation of each member of the state body could
have “in creating the whole of the body” (1983, vol. 8, pp. 487-488. For the
influence of Kant’s concept of the state as an organic, autopoietic whole on
German idealism, see Ludemann 2007, pp. 178-179.
31. See Wieland 1797, p. 143.
32. Herder, Deutsches Museum. Von der Ahnlichkeit der mittleren englischen
und deutschen Dichtkunst, nebst Verschiednem, das daraus folget (1777),
quoted in Schmitz-Berning 2000, p. 667.
33. Berlin 1976, p. 198.
34. Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-91),
quoted in Schmitz-Berning 2000, p. 460.
35. See Sieyes 1989, p. 30, and references quoted earlier.
36. Grimm (1984, vol. 26, p. 486) quotes the earliest source, a passage from F.
C. Dahlmann’s History of the French Revolution (1844-45), which speaks
of a “healthy principle of state” that “invigorates the blood circulation in the
whole national body” {ein gesundes staatsprinzip . . . erfrischt zugleich den
blutumlaufim ganzen volkskdrper).
37. See Arndt, Reden und Glossen. Leipzig 1848; quoted in Schmitz-Bernine
2000, p. 700.
38. See Stocker, speech on 4 February 1880, quoted in Schmitz-Bernine 2000,
pp. 667-668.
39. See Diihring. Die Judenfrage als Racen-, Sitten- und Culturfrage (1881),
quoted in: Schmitz-Berning 2000, p. 461; for the development of the body-
parasite scenario as a pseudo-scientific justification in nineteenth-century
anti-Semitic literature, see also Bein 1965, pp. 128-129.
40. For the concept of the “total state” as a positively valued category in Schmitt’s
public statements from 1932 onwards, see Gross 2000, pp. 97-98.
41. Strauss 1963.
42. Schmitt 2003; English translation 2008.
43. Gurian 1934; for historical assessments, see Koenen 1995, pp. 631-635;
Gross 2000, pp. 158-163; and Stirk 2005.
44. See Hobbes 1969. Hobbes finished the Behemoth book by 1668 but it was
not licensed to be printed and appeared in an unauthorized version in 1679;
see Hobbes’s letters 206, 208 in Hobbes 1994, II, pp. 771-773; see also Skin­
ner 2002, p. 29.
45. Bible 2001 Job 40:15.
46. Bible 2001 Job 40:16-24.
47. For the mythological background and rabbinical, messianic and gnostic inter­
pretations of these biblical figures, see Brodye, Hirsch, Kohler and Schechter
1904.
48. Neumann 1942, p. 5.
49. Strauss 1963, pp. ix, 167-170.
50. Despite acknowledging Leviathan to be Hobbes’s “most mature” work, Strauss
judged it to be “by no means an adequate source for an understanding of Hob­
bes’s moral and political ideas” and that “in the earlier presentations the original
motives of Hobbes’s political philosophy [were] generally more clearly shown”
(Strauss 1963, p. 170). For a recent interpretation that highlights humanistic
aspects of Leviathan in both early and later works of Hobbes’s development of
a “civil science”, see Skinner 1996, pp. 327-375; 2002, pp. 66-86.
51. Strauss 1963, p. 13.
52. But see the argument put forward in Chapter 7 that the “head” imagery was
not of central significance for Hobbes or, indeed, for the revolutionaries. In
Notes 175
any case, in the conceptual and tex tu al traditions since the M iddle Ages,
head an d soul of the body politic w ere closely linked. ’
53. Strauss 1963, p. 160.
54. Strauss 1963, p. 160.
55. In the preface to the A m erican edition: Strauss 1963, p. xv.
56. T he continuing debate about Strauss, Schm itt an d th eir biographical and
intellectual connections rests to no sm all extent on th e perception th a t b oth
thinkers were exceptionally influential in p o st-W W II Europe and the US.
In the case of Strauss, this aspect concerns in p articu la r his alleged influ­
ence on th e “neo-conservative” policies; in the case of Schm itt, his alleged
hidden influence on W est G erm an and W est E uropean political thought; see
M eier 1998; G ross 2 0 0 0 ; B alakrishnan 2 0 0 0 , pp. 2 0 9 -2 1 6 ; N o rto n 2004
pp. 3 7 -4 2 ; M uller 2 003; Z uckert an d Z uckert 2 0 0 6 . *
57. See M eier 1998, p. 17, note 11.
58. See the 1936 preface in Strauss 1963, p. xiv, an d Strauss’s letters to Schm itt
from M arch 1932, Septem ber 1932 an d 10 July 1933, in M eier 1998 dd
131-135.
59. See Schm itt 2 0 0 2 , p. 26 passim. I find the translation o f Schm itt’s term
“ Fem d” by foe preferable to enemy, because the form er highlights the “com ­
b at” aspect, w hich is centrally im p o rtan t for Schm itt; see his insistence on
the “real possibility of physical killing” (2002, p. 33) an d his explication th at
he m eans Feind in the sense of L atin hostis, n ot the m ore general a n d abstract
inimicus (2002, p. 29).
60. Schm itt 2 0 0 2 , p. 27.
61. Schm itt 2 0 0 2 , p. 27.
62. Schm itt 2 0 0 2 , pp, 53, 6 4 - 6 6 , 82; comp, also Schm itt 2003, pp. 17-18, 34.
In co n trast to H obbes, Schm itt’s notion of w ar w as, however, based on w ar
fought betw een nations as the paradigm atic form : civil w ar and the deadly
“ ban n in g ” of individuals are m entioned as special sub-cases (2002 dd 29
3 2 ,4 7 ,5 3 ). ' .P P >
63. Schm itt 2 0 0 2 , pp. 53, 66,
64. As examples of such exceptions, Schm itt lists Bossuet, Fichte, de M aistre,
D onoso C ortes and H . Taine, and, w ith reservations, Hegel (Schmitt 2002
p. 61)
65. Schm itt 2 0 0 2 , p. 94.
66. Strauss 1998, p. 125.
67. Strauss 1998, p. 107; see also M eier 1998, pp. 3 9 -4 1 .
68. See Strauss 1998, p. 125; for criticism o f am biguities in S chm itt’s treatise, in
p articu lar in relation to H obbes, see ibid., pp. 121-123.
69. See M eier 1998, pp. 16-17,
70. M eier 1998.
71. Schm itt 1936; for detailed historical analysis and-assesTm enCTee K oenen
1995; Gross 2 0 0 0 ; Blasius 2001.
72. Schm itt 1933a, b.
73. Schm itt 1934.
74. Schm itt 1935.
75. Schm itt 1936. T h e congress program m e has been deemed (Balakrishnan
2000, p. 207) to be “ little m ore th a n a call fo r a w ell-organized intellectual
pogrom ”; see also Behnken 1980, vol. 3, p. 1684; Koenen 1995, dp. 709-715-
G ross 2000, pp. 120-134.
76. See G u rian 1934, Koenen 1995, pp. 7 2 0 -7 2 3 , 7 3 2 -7 3 6 .
77. See B alakrishnan 2 0 0 0 , pp. 201-207.
78. Koenen 1995, pp. 714-746.

176 Notes
79. Balakrishnan 2000, p. 207; Koenen 1995, pp. 752-764.
80. Schmitt 2003, p. 9.
l l . Schmitt ?003,^p. 18. For the detailed analysis of Schmitt’s “cabbalistic”
sources and their varying presentation in Schmitt s works during the Third
Reich and in the excised post-1945 versions, see Gross 2000, pp. 272 278.
83. Schmitt 2003, p. 16.
84f Schmitt 2003, p. 18.
86 L e Heinrich Heine’s ironic poem Disputation, in which the Leviathan serves
as the name for a recipe promoted by the “Rabbi Juda to convert Goyim
(Heine 1976, vol. 11, pp. 167-168). In post-1945 editions of Schmitt s Land
und Meer, Heine is given even more prominence as an important source for
the myth (see Gross 2000, p. 274, note 30).
87 Gross 2000, p. 277; see also Muller 2003, p. 41. For contemporary reac
tions, such as the enthusiastic approval from the Nazi Institute for Race
Theory, Anthropological Biology and Rural Sociology, see Gross 2000, pp.
277-279.
89! Schmitt ^2^^^ 20-21. The distinction of “heathen-Chnstian” and
“Tudeo-Christian” traditions occupies a central position in the development
of Schmitt’s'“political theology” as well as in his post-1945 attempts to dis­
tance his “anti-Judaism” from Nazi-specific
Gross 2000, pp. 366-373, 378-382; apologetically: Maschke 2003, pp.
90 E™^Schmitt had to admit that “the only authentic” references to Jewish
traditions in Hobbes’s text were the quotations from Job, and that the mam
feature of the biblical Leviathan was its unsurpassable stren^h (Schmitt
2003 D 35) To compensate for the lack of evidence of mythical or theologi­
cal perspectives on Leviathan in Hobbes’s text, he quoted contemporaries of
Hobbes who did refer to mythical aspects in varying degrees, e.g. in Bible
commentaries and in poetry (ibid., 36-45) and hinted mystifying y at a spe­
cial significance” of the fact that Hobbes “as an Englishman of the seven­
teenth century” used Leviathan as a symbol of peace-giving political order,
for “Leviathan, the ‘big whale’, was particularly close to the imagination of
the English people” (ibid., pp. 34 and 43-45).
91. See Schmitt 2003, pp. 86-110,126. • ■ u- f Ahmadinejad of Iran’s reported statement “that the tumour
92 Schmitt 2003, p. 108. For the inconsistencies and anti-Semitic bias ot this
“history”, see Habermas 1982, pp, 72-74, Rumpf W72; Koenen 1995 pp,
808-816), Gross (2000, pp. 267-284), Balakrishnan (2000, pp. 209-220).
Even the Schmitt-loyal Maschke (2003, pp: 207-209) calls the alleged Jewish -
conspiracy against Leviathan a “strangely heterogeneous group and con­
cedes an anti-Judaistic bias, but he excuses Schmitt by speculating that he
compensated for having used Jewish sources in the first place and that in his
post-1936 situation he had to protect himself by “token anti-Semitism.
93. Schmitt 2003, pp. 130-132.
94. Schmitt 2003, p. 87. i n ^,-rr
95 Schmitt 2003, pp. 92-93. Mendelssohn’s contemporary, Johann Georg
. Hamann (1730-1788), was hailed by Schmitt as the only German thinker
who dared to oppose the “sophistries of the enlightened Jew , but apparently
to little avail (pp. 93-94).
96. Schm itt 2003, p. 108. . , . , ••£,• „ t
97. Schmitt 2003, p. 110; “.. . hat er .. . mitgewirkt, emen lebenskraftigen Levi­
athan zu verschneiden”.
Notes 177
98. Schmitt 2003, p. 108.
99. Schmitt 2003, p. 118.
100. Schmitt 2003, p. 67 and Schmitt 1934.
101 . Agamben 1998, p. 110. , if c ,u
102. See Agamben 1998, pp. 136-144. Schmitt himself was not unaware of the
eenocidal tendencies of Nazi Germany (with the benefit of post-1945 hmd-
sieht), but he located the origin of the the transformation of the real into
an “absolute” concept of the foe in the “global civil war of revolutionary
class-hatred” resulting from World War I, i.e. not in Nazism (see Schmitt
2006, p. 96).
103. See Agamben 1998, pp. 105-107,125.
104. Agamben 1998, p. 83.
105. Agamben 1998, p. 125.
106. A gam ben 1998, p. 148. u uu ’ d i,
107 Neumann 1942, p. 5. The tertium comparatioms to Hobbess Behemoth
■was that in his account of the English civil war the English philosopher too
had concentrated on the breakdown of the body politic into a non-state, a
chaos, a situation of lawlessness, disorder, and anarchy” (ibid., P- •5)-^
108. See his frequent references to Schmitt, especially the chapters on the Totali­
tarian State” (Neumann 1942, pp. 41-72), the Reich idea (pp. 110-153), and
“National Socialist Law and Terror” (pp. 359-347) as well as in the conclu­
sion (p. 383).
109. Neumann 1942, p. 375.
110. Neumann 1942, p. 375.
111. Neumann 1942, p. 381.
112. Neumann 1942, pp. 383-384.
113. See Neumann 1942, pp. 359-374, 384-389.
114. See above, chapter 8.
115. Schmitt 2003, p. 130.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 10
1. See examples in Chapter 1. The memory of the Nazi associations of bio-
Dolitical imagery is of course not restricted to Germany. For instances ot
international protest against its use, see the public outcry over President
should be removed from Palestine {The Times, 9 December 2005) and
denunciations of xenophobic and racist propaganda that included the
description of Jews to “warts on a man’s body” {The Independent, 16 Janu-
2007)
2 See Hale 1971, p. 108; Dhorn van Rossum ,ahd Bockenforde 1978, pp.
549-552.
3 See Coker 1910; Dhorn van Rossum and Bockenforde 1978, pp. 586-622;
■Koschorke et al. 2007, pp. 319-382. For a thorough critique and analysis of
modern legal-sociological applications of the analogy, which demons^ates
their unbroken metaphoricity (and ideological bias), see Mouton 2009, pp.
274-353.
4. Croft and Cruse 2004, p. 205. iu j » •
5. See Der Spiegel 4/1987; “Die Gesellschaft isr keine Hammelherde , interview
with Hans Magnus Enzensberger: “Im alten Europa hat man das Geman-
wesen immer nach dem Modell des menschlichen Korpers beschneben. Die
Regierung war das Oberhaupt, der Kopf. Diese Metapher ist endgultig passe.
178 Notes
Ein Zentrum, das alles vorhersieht, steuert und entscheidet, ist nicht mehr
vorhanden.”
6. Sontag 1978, p. 78.
7. SeeShogimen2008.
8. See examples in Chapter 1; also Johnston 1998; Karwowsky 2004 and topi­
cal Internet Web sites such http://www.phrases.org.Uk/bulletin_board/5/
messages/1281.html (accessed 20 November 2009).
. 2^See Obama 2007, p. 10; comp, also Shields 2004; Internet sites such as http://
www.bodypolitic.com/ (accessed 20 November 2009).
10. See Falk 2008, p. 219 and Mensch 2009, especially pp. 69-71; 126.
11. Le Figaro, 7 May 2007.
12. See Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 2002, vol. 2, p. 2096.
13. For the use of the generalized concept of someone who lives off others and
profits from their patronage, see Ben Jonson’s play Volpone, of 1607 (Jonson
1966) with “Mosca, the Parasite” as one of its chief characters.
14. The term Schmarotzer, which Hitler used interchangeably with Farasit,
appears to have retained (since its first recorded occurrences in the fifteenth
century) a general social meaning but, through a parallel eighteenth-century
semantic extension to that of Farasit, the term has also became available
for botanical and zoological applications; see Grimm 1984, vol. 15, pp.
937-942.
15. Depending on the period of origin of use, the various source inputs (and
hence their mappings) may be wholly or partly incompatible in scientific
terms. For non-experts, however, such inconsistencies can be made to appear
compatible by rhetorical sleight-of-hand, which is of course, typical for polit­
ical demagoguery.
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Beri°nTunsttin ■ ‘”' F'^nkLt/Main, Vienna,
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drC ruT ter^st^W :
Zavadil Jeffery (2009). Bodies Politic and Bodies Cosmic: The Roman Stoic The
A Bacon, Francis, 105-106,115,
"pil23S.E'rs^^^^^ Abel, Karl'Dietrich, 155
Zinken, Jorg and Andreas Musolff (2009) A Disconrce r#.ntr:»,4 v Abelson, Robert P., 153
^ n k t < s; » “ d UndLran’d 4 ° r r d S r M t & ^ ^ ^ Ach, Manfred, 154
Zmken (eds.). Metaphor and Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan! Adrian IV (Pope), 85
Aesop, 4, 82,148,163
Zinken, Jorg, Ima Hellsten and Brigitte Nerlich (2008). Discourse Metanhors Tn- Agamben, Giorgio, 133,177
Roslyn Frank, Rene Dirven, Tom Ziemke and Enrique Bernardez (eds ) Bod^i Albertus Magnus, 122,164n52,165n67
S .I-?.dnessT er£:‘t'u to n “t Alkemeyer, Thomas, 148
analogy/analogical argument. See
metaphor
geschichtliches 246 ^73 anti-Semitism, 11-23, 28, 30, 32-33,
41^5, 47, 49, 51-57, 59, 61,
63, 65-67, 70-71, 76-77, 89,
127,132,134,137,153n65,
155nl04, 173nl0,174n39,
176n89, 176n92. See also Holo­
caust, National Socialism, racism
elminationist, 13, 28, 71
intentionalist v. functionalist explana­
tions of, 42, 51,53,158n68
Jewish question, 42, 48-52, 57-58,
67,127,157n40
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 36
redemptive, 28, 32-35, 41-42, 60,
71, 87,116
Archambault, Paul, 148nl6
Arendt, Hannah, 71,162n4,172n67
Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 127,174n37
Aristotle, 4,18, 81, 90-93, 95-96, 98,
123,151n3,163nn5-7,164n50,
166n95,169nll, 170nl9
Axton, Marie, 167nl8
Augustine (of Hippo), 82, 91-93,
95-96, 98,163nnl2-13
B Genesis, 82,100
Baader, Gerhard, 153n51
Bachrach, Susan, 156n4
169nn58-62
Balakrishnan, Gopal, 175n56,175n75,
175n79,176n92
Balistier, Thomas, 155n4
Bankier, David, 155n2,157n39,
157n41,158n49,160nl02,
160nll0,161nl27
Banks, Kathryn, 166nl
Barnden, John, 151n3
Barsch, Claus-Ekkehard, 32-33,
154n69,154nn74-77
Bartolus of Saxoferrato, 95,165n70
Bass, Allen M., 163nnl0-ll, 163n24,
164n24
Bauer, Yehuda, 28,153n46
Baumann, Zygmunt, 45-46, 70,
156nn20-22
Baumgold, Deborah, 169n3
Baur, Erwin, 22
Bayerlz, Kurt, 153n51
Beermann, R. 172n74
Behemoth, 128,131-132,134-135,
138,174n44,177nl07
Behnken, Klaus, 155-158,175n75
Bein, Alexand^l74ji39__-—-—-—
Benjamin, \^Iter, 57
Berlin, Isaiah, 104,127-128,174n33
Berschin, Walter, 125,173n24
Bertau, Marie-Cecile, 169n8
Bertelli, Sergio, 167nnl9-20
Bible, 4, 32-33, 82, 86, 90, 93,108,
125,134-135,153n65,154n76,
163nl0, 166n88,174nn45-I7,
176n90
Deuteronomy, 166
Job, 128-129,134,174nn45-46,
176n90
 200 Index
Paul’s Epistles, 4, 82, 90-91, 95,102,
122,164n24,167nl8
Peter’s Epistles, 92,122,156n79
biology/biological metaphors. See also
body metaphors, disease/illness
metaphors, medical metaphors
animal metaphors, 13, 16, 29, 69-70
81, 91, 111, 117135
. -leech, 24, 36-38
maggot, 12,17, 36
rats, 36, 55
vermin, 13,24,3 6 ,3 8 ,5 5 ,5 7 ,
121, 143
viper, 24, 36-39
bacillus, 21, 24-27, 35-38, 40,
156n9,160n98,160nl04
bacterium, 17, 36, 64-65,140
evolution, 18, 20-21, 30-32, 34, 69,
74, 76-77
instinct, 2,12, 24, 26, 34
nature,23-42, 81,91,103, 111,
118, 130,135,165n64,166n88,
171n42,172n67
organism/host organism, 12,16,
21, 24-25, 30-31, 34, 36, 38,
46, 54, 69-70,110,117,119,
125,127,131,140,142-143,
173-174
parasite, 1 ^ , 6-7, 11-17,19-22,
24-26, 36-41, 43-50, 52-71,
73, 75-77, 119-121,127-128,
134,136-137, 139-145,
150n44,151n56,157n40,
160nl00,174n39,178nl3
bloodsucker, 24, 36-37, 39
119,155nl01
vampire, 24, 37,119
plant, 16,100,119,127,140
race, 3, 6, 7,13,15-16,18-20, 24
28^0, 45,47-49, 51-53, 55, 57,
59-60, 66, 68-69, 71, 75-76, 81,
89,131,134,138,142,153n64,
154n83,157n35,157n37,
160nl04 (see also racism)
species, 24, 29-31, 35, 40,
struggle for existence, 33
virus, 19, 21, 26-27, 35, 40^1, 76
139,144, 149n25
Birnbaum, Pierre, 162n4
Blackmore, Susan, 20,151n59
Blasius, Dirk, 176n71
blending theory. See cognitive theory
Bloch, Marc, 167n20
Blum, Carol, 172n67
Boberach, Heinz, 155nl, 158n65,
159n88,160nl01
Bockenforde, Ernst-Wolfgang, 148nl6
165n72, 177nn2-3
Bodin,Jean, 166nl
body metaphors, 1-8,11,14-16
19-20,22-29,31, 34-41,’
43-48, 50-52, 55-56, 58-60,
62, 64-67, 69-10, 72-77,
81-105, 107-113,115-129,
133-145,147-148,150-152,
i p , 163-174,177-178. See
also biology, disease/illness meta­
phors, medical metaphors
arm (of the law), 1, 94, 100,110
115,118
arteries, 24,113-114
belly/stomach, 4-5, 82-83, 85-86
88-90, 94-100,105,142,163n9,
165nn84-85,167h3,171n52
,birth/rebirth, 24, 118
blood/bloodstream, 5,11, 24-25
29, 34-41, 46-49, 96-97,109,
113,115-116,119,127, 140,
153n48,170nl9,171n42,
174n36. See also disease/illness
metaphors, blood mix, blood
poisoning, bloodsucker
bowels/intestines/entrails, 84, 86 88
104, 113-114
brain, 5, 117, 124,137, 171n52
capillaries, 149n26
carcass, 44, 113-114
corpse, 12,173n28
decomposition, 13,19, 24, 36-38
47, 55, 62, 65,127,132-133,
143-144
ear, 84, 87, 88, 124
foot, 84-90, 94-95,100,109,118
hand, 84, 87-88,94,109,123
head, 1, 6, 44, 82-103,105,107
109-111,115,117-119, 122-
125,127, 129,137-138,143,
165n84, 167nnl8-19,168n51,
171n52,174n52,
health, 1-2, 6, 24-26, 72, 81, 83, 85
87-88, 92,95, 97-100,104-
105,108,110,113, 128,135,
140,148nl5,165n64,174n36
heart, 1,5, 24, 30, 84, 87-88,
95-98,100,102-103,109,114
117-119,124,170nl9, l-71n42’
leg, 94-95,100
life cycle, 112, 117,143
member/limb, 5-6, 82, 85-89,
91-94, 96-97, 99,104,108,
^ 113,117,122-123,125-126,
172n64,173n30
mouth, 84,171n52
nerves, 108-110
organ, 1, 5-6, 82, 85-87, 97,100,
109-110,117,134,137,139,
170n26, 171n52
procreation, 110-114, 170n22
sinews, 97
strength, 24, 46, 64, 97,108,110,
115,118,134-135,176n90
soul, 1, 81-82, 84, 86-89, 91-93,
95, 98,108-110,113,129,132,
174n52
toe/toenail, 1,5-6,100,107,147n3
tongue, 87-88,100
veins, 24
Bohun, Edmund, 173nl9
Boniface VIII, Pope, 92, 165n58
Borne, Ludwig, 132
Bosmajian, Haig, 14, 38,149nl2 ’
Bossuet, Jacques Benigne, 175n64
Brandt, Reinhart, 170nl4,
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and
Fable, 147nl, 155nl01,
155nl07
Brodie, Richard, 151n63
Brodye, Isaac, 174n47
Browning, Christopher, 23, 28,149nl9,
151n2,153n46,155nl21,
159n73, 159n86,159n95,
160n96,160n98,160nl02,
162n3
Bruning, Heinrich, 44,156n7
Brunetto Latini, 91,165n78
Bullock,'Alan, 29 ,153n50
Burke, Edmund, 119,166n95,172n71
Burke, Kenneth, 11, 23, 32,149nn2-3
Burleigh, Michael, 156nl6, 158n57
Bussemer, Thymian, 149n21,155n4
Bytwerk, Randall L., 155n4,157n33
C colour, 15-17
Caird, G.B., 183nll
camouflage terminology; 3, 66-67,
70-71,141. See also holocaust,
final solution
deportation, 3, 60,141,160nl08
special treatment, 3,12, 70,141
Cassirer, Ernst, 129
Cesarani, David, 155nl21,
Chamberlain, Houston Stuart, 17, 71
Index 201
Charles I, King of England, 111
Charles VI, King of France, 94
Charles IV, Emperor of the Holy
Roman Empire, 156n71
Charles VII, Emperor of the Holy
Roman Empire, 125
Charlesworth, Brian and Deborah,
151n65,153n54
Charteris-Black, Jonathan, 16,149n24,
150n44, 162n8
Chickering, Roger, 158n58
Chilton, Paul, 19-21, 38,151nn55-58,
151n66,159n77,162n8
Christ. See also religion
body of, 82-83, 91-92, 95,122,143,
164n24,167nl9
C. as head of the Church, 82-83, 90,
92,123
C. as the good Shepherd, 95
Christine de Pizan, 94-97,142,
165nn77-78, 165nn80-85,
166n86
Cicero, 87
Clark, Carol E., 166nl
Coker, Francis W., 148nl6,177n3
cognitive theory/linguistics, 4, 7,11,
13-25, 59, 74-75, 76, 89,
108-109,139,148nl4,170nll.
See also metaphor, semantics
blending, 11, 14,19-21, 30, 48, 69,
76,116,167nl9,170nll,
conceptual/mental space, 6,14,19,
30,134,143
framing, 4,12,19, 21-22, 23-24
cognitive import, 11,14,17-18, 23,
69, 71-72, 75, 94,141
embodiment, 4, 74,134
entrenchment, 76
mapping, 11,14,19, 22, 24, 26-27,
30, 35,40^1,71,72, 74, 83,
87, 89r469;'12-2-l^ 13^140,
142,'170nll, 178nl5
projection, 11, 15, 36,132
schema, 26-27, 39,117,139,153n45
black—white, 14-19, 39
common good, the, 90-93,144
commonplace, 99-101,107,124
Cooper, David E., 169n8
Cooper, Laurence, 172n67
Cornwell, John, 153n51
Coulson, Seana, 151n53
Croft, William, 76-77, 137,
162nnl8-23,177n4
 202 Index
Cromwell, Oliver, 111
Cromwell, Thomas, 101
Cruse, D. Alan, 76-77,137,
162nnl8-23,177n4
culture, 45, 50, 74-75,101, 121,
126-127,138,143,163n3
cultural model, 13,16
political, 6, 73, 120,138
popular, 22,
National Socialist view of, 15, 29,
31, 34, 153n48
Western, 30, 75, 81,133,138, 140
Cunningham, Andrew, 170nl9
D cancer, 24, 72,139
d’Alembert, Jean Baptiste le Rond,
171n52
d’Alquen, Gunther, 150n35
Dahlmann, Friedrich Christoph,
174n36
Daim, Wilfried, 71
Darwin, Charles, 30-31, 33, 37, .
153nn55-62,154nn81-83
Dawkins, Richard, 20-21,
151nn59-60,151nn63-65
de Baecque, Antoine, 172n69
de Maistre, Joseph, 175n64
Deignan, Alice, 174nl
Deissler, Dirk, 149n2
Derathe, Robert, 172n67
Descartes, Rene, 111, 170nl9
Desmet, Pierre, 172n69
Dhorn-van-Rossum, Gerhard, 148nl6,
165n72,177nn2-3
Diderot, Denis, 171n52
Diller, Ansgar, 155n4
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 82
discourse, 1-8, 69-78, 81, 85, 98, 118:
171n45
' analysis of, 11-12,149nl, 162n8
d. career, 66
d. community, 76,140
d. history/tradition, 7, 77, 93,122,
136-145,163n25,166nl
d. memory, 6-7,137,177nl
d. metaphor {see metaphor)
political, 1, 7,11-12, 41, 69-70, 72,
119,121, 128,138,140-141,
151n3, 161nl41,162n24
public, 4,139,140,142, 162n8,
162n24
disease/iUness metaphors, 2-3, 6,12,
20, 23-27, 29,31,33,35-42,
55, 66, 72, 81, 84, 86-89,100,
Index 203
102-105,107,112-116,118- blood poisoning, 25, 27-28, The Eternal Jew (Der ewige Jude),
120,124,135,137,171n45. See 35-36, 38-41 {see also blood 53-56, 58,159n76
also biology/biological meta­ mix) The Rothschilds (Die Rothschilds),
phors, body metaphors, medical contamination, 14 53-56
metaphors cyanide, 1 Jew Siiss (Jud Suss), 53-54, 56-57
agent of disease, 2, 5,19, 24-26, venom, 112,114 Fischer, Eugen, 22
28, 34, 36,38,41,45,134, sclerosis, 1, 24 Fischer, Heinrich, 149n2
143-144 symptom, 25-26, 65,104,112,135 Fisher, John, 102
ague, 113-115,171n42 syphilis, 24,136 folk-theory, 75,143
biles, 112,114 ulcer, 46,121,169n60 Foolen, Ad, 162nl6
blood mix/defilement, 29, 34, 39^1, wens, 112-114 Forhan, Kate Langdon, 164nn52-54,
153n48 {see also poison: blood wound, 44, 86,103,112-113, 164n56,165n62,165n65,
poisoning) 169n60 165n73,165n78,165n80
bulimia, 113-115 Dodd, Bill, 149n6 Forster, Georg, 119,172n70
Doerr, Karin, 149n2,151n73 Fortescue, Sir John, 94, 96-98,
metastasizing, 1 Domarus, Max, 151, 156,158-161 165-166
tumour, 1, 2 4 ,177nl Donoso Cortes, Juan, 175n64 Francis II, last Emperor of the Holy
conjoined twins, 114-115,171n47 Diihring, Eugen Karl, 127,174n39 Roman Empire, 125
consumption, 103,113-114 Frank, Roslyn M., 163n25
contagion, 114 E Frank, Hans, 131,139
crisis, 25, 27-28, 51-52, 65, 85-86, Eckart, Dietrich, 32-33, 71 Frederick II, King of Prussia, 125
' 118-119,128,142-144 Edward IV, King of England, 94 Friedtlieb, Christian Werner, 123-124,
death, 24, 37-38,108,110,118, Einstein, Albert, 15 173nnl3-14
126, 133, 166nl04 Eitz, Thorsten, 148n25 Friihsorge, Gotthardt, 173nnl3-17
deformity, 102 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 101-102 Frei, Norbert, 155n4
dropsy, 102 Enlightenment, 36, 72-73, 77,107, Friedlander, Saul, 28, 32, 57, 61,
epilepsy, 113-114,171n45 117,126,130,138-139,144 153-162
frenzy, 102 Ensink, Titus, 148n25
germ, 24, 36,121 Enzensberger, Hans-Magnus, 137, G
gout, 102 177n5 Galton, Francis, 37
hydrophobia, 112 Eschwege, Helmut, 157n40 Ganz, Peter R, 126-127,148n23,
hygiene, 22, 30 eugenics, 22, 30, 37 172n4
hysteria, 1 Evans, Richard J., 29,153nn5D-51, Geeraerts, Dirk, 162nl3
impotence, 24,119 155n2,156nl6,156n25, Gellately, Robert, 155-158,160-161
infection, 2, 21, 35-37, 40, 60, 63, 156n30,157n35,157n37, genetics, 20-21, 37, 77
84, 88, 100 157n39,157n41,157n43, Gentner, Dedre, 151n3
lethargy, 113-114 157n48, 158nn57-58, 158n65, Gevaert, Caroline, 162nl3
malady, 102-105 159n72,159n84,162n3 Gibbs, Raymond W, 148nl4,162nl2
meagreness, 102 Gilbert, Martin, 157n46
monster, 24,107,128,134-135, F Giles of Rome, 92,165n78
173n24 Fabiszak, Malgorzata, 162nl5 Gilman, Sander L., lAgnll ----- -----
muscles, 109 fable of the belly {see body metaphor, Gitelman, Zji 172n74
palsy, 102 belly) Goatly, Andrew, 15,150n29,162nl5,
paralysis, 2, 24,132 Falk, Richard, 178nl0 169n7,170nl9
pathology, 24, 37,107,115,119, Fauconnier, Gilles, 19,148nl4, Godfrey of Fontaine, 92
127,132,138,171n45 149n23,151nn53-54 Goebbels, Joseph, 1-2, 32-33, 43-44,
pestilence/plague, 12, 24, 36, 54-55, Feldman, Karen S., 169n9 46, 48-50, 52-54, 57-58, 60,
60, 65, 67,92,101-102,123 Fenske, Wolfgang, 153n65,154n74 62-64, 66, 70, 73,141,147n9,
physiology, 2,15, 74, 83, 111, 116, Fest, Joachim C., 153n52, 154n78 156-157,159-161
^126-127,135,140 Fetscher, Iring, 161nl20 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (von), 126
pleurisy, 113-115,171n42 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 175n64 Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, 13, 28, 71,
poison/poisoning, 24-28, 35-41, film 149nnl6-18,149n20,150n49,
45-48, 65, 67, 73,112-114, Campaign in Poland (Feldzug in 153n46,162nnl-2
119,127,168n40 Poleri), 159n70 Goring, Hermann, 131
 204 Index
Gould, Stephen Jay, 153n54
Grady, Joseph, 151n53,162nl2
Great Chain of Being, 15-19, 72 74
81, 83, 85, 90, 99,101,140,’
150n52 '
macrocosm, 16, 72, 85, 89, 101
microcosm, 16, 72, 85
principle of continuity, 16,18-19, 83
_ prjnciple of gradation, 16,18, 83,’
150n52
principle of plenitude, 16,18-19 83
Gregor, Neil, 3 ,147nll,154n76, ’
155nlll
Greive, Hermann, 13,149nl4,154n76
Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 155nl01
155nll6,174n36,178nl4 ’ history, 2-8,11-13,15,17-18, 20-23
Grondelaers, Stefan, 162nl3
Gross, Raphael, 174-176
Grynspan, Herschel, 50
Guilhaumou, Jacques, 172n67
Guillaume de Conches, 84
Guldin, Rainer, 148nnl6-17,162-164
170nl9
Gunther, Hans F. K., 22
Gurian, Waldemar, 131, 174n43
175n76
Gustloff, Wilhelm, 49
H Hitler, Adolf, 1, 3, 6-7,11-76, 88-89
Habermas, Jiirgen, 176n92
Hachmeister, Lutz, 149n21, 156n4
161nl20
Hale, David George, 110,112,115
148nnl6-17,163-164, 167,’
169-171,176-177
Hamann, Brigitte, 148nn21-22,
151n67, 151n70, 153n51,
153n53,153n65,155nll5,
Hamann, Johann Georg, 176n95
Hampsher-Monk, Iain, 162n9
Harris, Jonathan Gil, 115,148nl6,
166nl, 167nl8,167n23,
169n61,169nl, 171nn44^5,
171n60
Harvey, William, 111, 170nl9
Harwood, John T., 170nll
Hawkins, Bruce, 14-16, 38,
149nn25-28,150nn40-43,
162n8
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 77
175n64
Heine, Heinrich, 132, 176n86
Henry of Ghent, 92
Henry U, King of England, 84
Henry IV, King of England, 100
Henry VI, King of England, 94
Henry VIII, King of England, 101-103
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 73,127 140
142,145,174n32,174n34’
Herf, Jeffrey, 149n21, 156n4,
158nn56-57
Heydrich, Reinhard, 131
Heritage, Sidney J., 167n22,168n37
Hilberg, Raul, 57,147nl0,155n2
159n87, 173nl0
Himmler, Heinrich, 63,141 144
Hippier, Fritz, 56,159n70,159n76
159n80
Hirsch, Emil G., 147n47
27, 29-30, 36, 38-39, 42,49-50,
52, 54, 60, 63, 69-77,81-84
89. 97,101,104,107,112,120,
122,124,126-127,130-134,
136-140,142-145,150,151,
153-156, 163,170,173-176
discourse history (see discourse)
conceptual history, 6, 76, 81,
136-138,150n30,150n52
history of ideas, 4, 72-73,101,
history of science, 76
120,128, 130-131, 133-134,
140, 142-144,147-156,
158-161,178
Mein Kampf 2-3, 7,12-15,17-19
21-29, 31-43, 52, 60, 65-66,
69, 71, 87,128,132,134,
141-142
Hobbes, Thomas, 72-73, 106-120
128-136, 142-145,169-171
174-177
Hodson,Jane, 162n24
Hofmann, Hanns Hubert, 125,173n22
173n26-27
Hollstein, Dorothea, 159n71
holocaust, 1, 2, 4, 6-8,11-14,16-18
23,28, 42^3, 56, 61, 63, 67,
70-71, 136, 141,148nl3,
155nl21,158n53, 159n92,
160n98,161nl41,162nl41
annihilation/elimination/extermi-
nation, 2, 13,17, 27-28, 35,
38, 41-42, 46, 51-53, 55-57,
59-65, 67-68,- 70-71, 75, 87,
120, 133,137,141-142,144,
147nl2,160nl00, 160nl04
162nl41
Crystal Night pogrom, 48, 66,
157n48
(final) solution, 3, 41-42, 52, 55,
57-58, 62, 70,144,147nl2
’ holocaust "prophecy”. 51-53,
55-62, 67, 69-70, 144,159n92,
160nl00,160nl04
Wannsee conference, 47,156n30,
160nl04
Holyoak, Keith, 151n3
Holy Roman Empire, 94,123,125-
127,173n28
homo saceii 133
Hughes, Geoffrey, 167nl7
Huizinga, Johan, 99,164n24
Hull, David L., 76
Humanism, 84, 90,104,108,129,135,
144,174n50. See also Middle
Ages, Renaissance
Hunt, Lynn, 172n69
Hunt, Maurice, 167nll
hyperbole, 17
I
ideology, 3-4, 6-7,11, 13-17,19,
21-23, 30, 32-33, 42, 52-54,
58, 62, 66, 71, 74-75, 81, 83,
99,113, 120,122,134,136-
138, 141,148-151,177
Indsley, John, 149n5
IMT (International Military Tribunal),
161nl24
J Koschorke, Albrecht, 148nnl6-17,
Jackel, Eberhard, 13, 23, 29, 148nl3,
151n71,151nl, 153n49,
153n52,155nl, 155n3,157n35,
159nn73-74,159nn88-91,
160nl01, 160nlll, 161nll6,
161nl22,161nnl25-127
Jager, Hans-Wolf, 172n67
James of Viterbo, 92
James I, King of England, 167nl8
Jenninger, Philipp, 148n25
Jessen, Hans, 173n25
John of Paris, 92,165n62
John of Salisbury, 73, 83-90, 92-98,
102,107, 142,163nnl8-22,
164-166
Johnson, Boris, 1, 5
Johnson, Mark, 17,148nl4,149n22,
151n53,162nl2, 169n7
Johnston, David, 108,169n4,169n9,
170nl9
Index 205
Johnston, Paul, 178n8
Jones, Steve, 150n30,155nnl08-110
Jonson, Ben, 178nl3
K
Kamper, Heidrun, 156n5
Kallis, Aristotle A., 149n21,156n4,
157n44,159n70,161nl20
Kant, Immanuel, 37, 126,142,173n30,
174n30,
Kantorowicz, Ernst H., 100,148nl6,
163-164,167,170,173-174
Kaplan, Marion A., 50,158n52
Karwowsky, Michael, 178n8
Kelly, Alfred, 153n51
Kelly, George Armstrong, 172n67
Kempshall, M.S., 163-165,
Kershaw, Ian, 29, 50,148n22,151-
153,155-158,161
Kertzer, David L, 162n4
Kettenacker, Lothar, 173n28
Kevles, Daniel J., 155nll0
Kienpointner, Manfred, 148n24
Klemperer, Victor, 12, 44, 46, 52, 61,
63-64, 66-67, 70,149,156,
157-161
Kloft, Michael, 149n21,156n4,
161nl20
Koenen, Andreas, 174n43,175-176
Koenigsberg, Richard, 150n44
Kohler, Kaufmann, 174n47
Kokinov, Boicho N., 151n3
Kokoschka, Oskar, 5 ,148n21
163n9,163n21,165n72,166nl,
173nl6, 177n3
Koselleck, Reinhart, 172n67
Kovecses, Zoltan, 75,148nl4,162nl3,
162nnl6-17
Krauss, Werner, 56
Krebs, Birgit-Nicole, 148n25‘
Kroll, Jurgen, 153n51
Kuhn, Axel, 151n71, 153n52
Kulka, Otto Dov, 155nl, 155n3,
157n40,159-161
Kwiet, Konrad, 157n40
L
Lakoff, George, 16-17, 74,148-151,
162,169
Laqueur, Walter 155n2,158n53
Leezenberg, Michiel, 169n7
Lehmann, Julius E, 22
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyitsch, 119,172n73
206 Index
Lenz, Fritz, 22
Leviathan, 73,106-112,114-117,
128-136,143,145,169,170,
174,176
Levkas, Ruth, 148n24
Liberalism, 130,135
Liebeschiitz, Hans 163n21,163n24
Lincoln,_Bruce, 163n3
Lindemann, Albert S., 162n4
Linke, Uli, 148nl5,148n24
Livy, 82, 103
Lockwood, Shelley, 165n74
Lohenstein, Daniel Casper von, 124,
173nl6
Lohneyss, Georg Engelhard, 124,173nl5
Longerich, Peter, 147-148,155-159,
161
Lorenz, Gottfried, 173nl2
Lovejoy, Arthur Oncken, 18, 72-73,
81, 83,150, 163
Lucken, Steven, 156n4
Ludemann, Susanne, 174n30
Lueger, Karl, 12
Luther, Manin, 122-123,172-173
M 166n99
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 73,103-105,
142,166nl,168-169
Mcllwain, Charles H., 167nl8
Mairgunther, Wilfred, 157n46
Maitland, Frederic William, 148nl6,
163nl7,167nl7,167nl9
Malcolm, Noel, 170nl4
Manheim, Ralph, 24,147n7,149n27,
155nll2
Manipulation, 11-12,14
Mannes, Stefan, 159n71
Marian, Ferdinand, 56
Marie Be France, 164n31
Marsilius of Padua, 92,101,123,
165nn64-65
Martinich, A[loysius] P., 169n3,
170nl3
Marx, Karl, 119,132,172n72
Matthaus, Jurgen, 159n86,159n95
Mayer, T.F., 167n22,168n37
medical metaphors , 20-24, 27-28,
30, 37, 39,41,45, 69, 71-72,
81, 83, 88, 97, 105, 110-113,
115-116,118-119,137-140,
155,162,169,170. See also
disease/illness metaphors
amputation, 86-89, 93, 96,100,105,
119,142,166n99
antidote, 112,114
care, 82-83, 88-89, 95,97
cure, 1-2, 6, 20, 24, 26-28, 35-36,
38,40^1, 54,61,72, 76,
85-87, 90, 93,100,103-105,
107,120,129,142,142-144,
168
diagnosis, 25, 27-28, 35,103,105,
128, 143,168
healing, 4, 24-28, 34, 44, 47, 63,
72,81,83, 85, 87-88, 92, 95,
97-106,108, no, 113,116-
119,128,135,140,142,148,
154,165-166,174
humours, 37,103,105,112,
114-116,169n60
physician, 103,105, 112,118
prescription, 24
regeneration, 24
remedy, 86,103-104
therapy, 7, 21, 24, 26, 28,
35-36, 53, 60, 62-64, 66-67,
71, 74-75, 86-87, 89, 96,
103-105,107,119,123,133,
136-137,142-144,162nl41,
Meier, Heinrich, 175nn56-58,
175nn69-70
memetics, 20-21, 76-77
Mendel, Gregor, 37
Mendelssohn, Moses, 132,176n95
Mensch, James R., 178nl0
metaphor. See also animal m., biologi­
cal m., body-state m., disease m.,
medical m., cognitive theory
analogy/analogical argument, 20-21,
23-24, 27-28, 30-31, 35, 38,
41, 55, 58-59, 71, 76, 81,
83-87, 89-97, 100, 103, 105,
107,109,111-112,115,119,
129,138,141-143, 151n3,
159n92,165nn84-85,169n61,
177n3
conceptual m., 15, 65, 74-75,121,
136,151n53
definition of, 2-3
discourse m., 76
domain (source, target d.), 2, 4,12,
14,19,21-22, 24,26-28, 30,
32, 34-36, 39-Jl, 43, 72, 83, •
86. 116,127,135,139-140,
144,170nll
event structure, 27, 35, 40, 93
iconographic reference, 14-16,18
import of (see cognitive theory, cogni­
tive import)
literal interpretation of, 3,11-13,17,
20, 23,38,41,52, 59, 69-72,
77, 83,90,137,141-142,
148nl5
m. tradition, 6-7, 74, 82,101, 111,
128
m. scenario, 24, 26-28, 32-44, 48,
52, 56-70, 73, 75-77,86-89,
100,105,107,116,120,127-
128,133,136-145,152n44,
153n45,157n40,161nl41,
174n39
personification, 17,134-135
simile/similitude, 14, 64,108-109,
115,124-125,142,144,
169nll, 170nll
tertium comparationis, 90-91,129,
177nl07
metonymy, 14, 74,105,155nll6,
170n22
Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 132
Michael, Robert, 149n2,151n73
Middle Ages, 4, 7,18, 55, 72, 77,
81-85, 89-91,93, 95-99, 101,
119,122,125,127,131,136,
138-140,143-144,150,156,
173-174. See also humanism-
scholasticism, 90-93, 98
Mieder, Wolfgang, 156n5
Milfull, John, 162n4
Miller, Mary, 163n3
Mintz, Samuel I., 169n3,170nl4
Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete,
161nl41
Moltmann, Gunther, 161nl20
Molotov, Vyacheslaw, 54
monster/monstrous, see disease, monster
Montaigne, Michel de, 166nl, 171n47
More, Sir Thomas, 102
Motohashi, Tesuya, 166n2
Mouton, Nicolaas T.O., 148nl6,
162nl6,177n3
Muller, Jan-Wernei^ 175n56,176n86
Muller-Richter, Klaus, 169n8
Musolff, Andreas, 147-148,151-152,
159,162,169
N Pechau, Manfred, 149n2
Nationalism, 126-127
National Socialism/Nazism, 3-8,
11-78, 81,120-121,128-131,
133-138,141-144,148-150,
Index 207
153,157-161,173,176-177.
See also Hitlei^ Goebbels,
Goring, Himmler
Das Reich (magazine), 160nl04
Das schwarze Korps (magazine), 15,
131,150n35
Der Sturmer (magazine), 47,157n33
GESTAPO, 43, 50, 65-66,141,
157n35
Neo-Nazis, 7, 74,149n26
NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische
Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), 44, 63,
130,160nl00
Nuremberg party conference/Nurem-
berg race laws, 45,47-49, 55,
131,153n64,157n37
Rohm putsch, 46,131
SD (SicherheitsdienstySD-itports,
43,49-50, 52-53, 56-59, 63,
67, 70,131,141,155,159,
160-161,172
SA (Sturmabteilung), 46, 50
SS (Schutzstaffel), 15, 49-50, 52, 59,
63, 65-66,131,160nl04
Volkischer Beobachter (newspaper),
50,158n50
Nederman, Cary J., 148nl6,163nl9,
163n21,163n23,164n52,
164nn54-56,165n62,165n80
Negelein, Paul, 124
Neoplatonism, 4,18, 72, 81, 83, 90
Nestle, Wilhelm, 148nl7
Neumann, Franz Leopold, 128,134-
135,138,174n48,177nnl07-
113
Nicolas of Cusa, 122,165n72
Niemeier, Susanne, 162n8
Niven, William, 148n25,149n2,
161nl41
North, Thomas, 166n2
Norton, Anne, 175^6 _________
O ^
Oakley, Todd, 151n53
Obama, Barack, 139,147n2,178n9
Obst, Dieter, 157n46
Olden, Rudolf, 149n2
P
Paechter, Heinz,, 149n2
Paine, Thomas, 119,172n70
Patterson, Annabel M., 148nl7
Patzold, Kurt, 156n30

208 Index
Pauwels, Paul, 147nl, 162n8
Peil, Dietmar, 148nnl6-17,163n9
Peltonen, Markku, 166n2,167n3
Pentrop, Clemens, 154n74
Peries, Gabriel, 162n8
Philip rV, King of France, 29,101
Pickex, Henry, 154n78
Plato, 4,18, 72, 81,102,m 163n4
Pococ^, John G.A., 166nn95-96,169n56
Pole, Reginald, 102-103
Poliakov, Leon, 162n4
Plutarch, 82-87, 89-90, 93-94,107,
166n2
Proctor, Robert N., 151n69,153n51
Prokhovnik, Raia, 108,169n3,169n8
propaganda, 1, 3, 7,12,14, 20-23,
33, 43-44, 47-50, 52, 54,
56-57, 59, 61-64, 66-67, 71,
74-77,125,137,141,144,148,
159-161,177. See also camou­
flage terminology
Przyrembel, Alexandra, 157n34
Ptolemy of Lucca, 91
Pufendorf, Samuel von, 124-125,
173nnl9-20
Q Schiller, Friedrich (von), 121
Quintus Serenus Sammonicus, 85
R Schmitz-Berning, Cornelia, 149nl2,
racism, 2, 6-8,11-13,15-19, 21-23,
25, 29-32, 34-35, 37-39, 42,
44, 47, 49, 53-54, 58, 62, 67,
71, 74,101,120-121,136,138-
140,143,149-150,153,155,
173,177. See also anti-Semitism,
holocaust, National Socialism
xenophobia, 12,17, 21,177nl
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 101
Rash, Felicity, 17-18, 22, 44,
150nn45-49,151n72,151nl,
154n76,159n77
religion, 11, 32-34, 87,132,166n88.
See also Christ
creator/Lord, 28-29, 31-32, 35,
40-41, 66
devil, 32, 35, 40^1, 62, 64, 87-89,
143
reformation, 44, 84, 99,122,156nl2
Remigio di Girolami, 92,156n66
Renaissance, 7,18, 72-73, 77, 99,101,
103,105,119,122,138-139,
143,150n52,166nl, 168n51.
See also Humanism
rhetoric, 7,11-12,14,17, 25, 42,
48,56, 59, 62,-66-67, 70,
72, 89-90, 95, 99,100,108,
112,120,124,141-142,145,
169-170,178
Roberts, Penny, 166nl
Robertus Pullus, 84
Rodrigue, Aron, 157n40
Rohrich, Lutz, 156nl2
Rooryck, Johan E., 172n69
Rose, Michael R., 153n54
Roseman, Mark, 156n30,160nl04
Rosenberg, Alfred, 32-33 ' Shakespeare, William, 5-6, 82, 99-101, Stieler, Kaspar, 124,173nl8
Rothschild, 53-56,132-133
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 73,117-120,
126,129,139,142,145,
171nn50-63,172nn64-66,
172n67
Ryle, Gilbert, 149nl5
S 167nnl2-13
Sarkozy, Nicolas, 139
Sawday, Jonathan, 148nl6
Schama, Simon, 172n67,172n69
Schank, Roger C., 153n45
Schechter, Salomon, 174n47
Schilling, Heinz, 125,173n21,173n23
Schleicher, Kurt von, 46
151n73,156nl3,174n32,
174n34,174nn37-39
Schmitt, Carl, 73,128-136,143,145,
174-177
Schmitz, Johannes, 155n4
Schnettger, Matthias, 173n24
Schoenberner, Gerhard, 157n37‘
Schoenfeldt Michael, 163n9
Schonbohm, Jorg, 1
Schonerer, Georg von, 12
Schoeps, Julius H., 149nl9
Schulze, Winfried, 173nl4
Schultz, Ulrich, 153n51
Schwarz, Erika, 156n30
Seidel, Eugen and Ingeborg Seidel-
. Slotty, 149nl2
Seidler, Michael, 173n21
semantics, 3-4, 6,12-13, 74-77,101,
122,137,139-141,148-149,
151-152,156,160,178. See
also cognitive theory, metaphor
euphemism, 3
categorization, 3-4,11,13-14,17,
19,23-24,28, 30,46, 54, 71,
88,115,119,129-130,140,
147,149,174
category mistake, 4 ,1 3 ,149nl5
encyclopaedic knowledge, 6
ontology, 18, 23, 27, 89
presupposition, 28
semantic development/drift,/6 //,
137,139
semantic transfer, 3,11-12, 22, 41,
140,170nl9 {see also cognitive
theory: mapping, metaphor)
Semino, Elena, 152n44,162nl6
139,148, 166-167
Coriolanus, 5, 82, 99-100, 148,166
Hamlet, 100,167
Julius Caesar, 167nl3
Richard II, 100,167n9
Richard III, 100,167n\Q
Troilus and Cressida, 100,
Shields, David, 178n9
Shirei^ William, 52, 158nn65-66
Shogimen, Takashi, 162nl6,177n7
Shorter Oxford Dictionary, 155nlUU,
155nl07,178nl2
Sieyes, Emmanuel, 172n68,174n35
Siever, Holger, 148n25
Simon, Gerd, 150n35,
Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie,
162n8
Sington, Derrick, 155n4
Skinner, Quentin, 73,101, 105, 108,
162-165,167-170,173-174
social Darwinism, 30, 33, 71,140,
153n51
sociolinguistics, 14,16
variation, 19, 75, 83, 85, 90, 98, Thomas Aquinas, 73, 91,164n52,
101,122,138-139,141
Soderbaum, Kristina, 56
Sontag, Susan, 36, 72-73 8^, ^9, 97,
102-105,112,116,119,135,
137,142,148,154,162,164,
166,168-170,177
Sopade-Ttpotts, 43, 47,155n3,157n45 Tilmans, Torquemada,
Southern, Richard W, 163n24
Sovereignty, 115-117,129,132,134
Spenser, Edmund, 101
Speer, Albert, 154n78
Sperber, Dan, 20-21,151n59,
151nn61-62
Spied, Mauro, I67nll
Spinoza, Baruch de, 132
Spitzer, Leo, 150n52
Index 209
Spurgeon, Caroline F.E., 166n2
Stahl, Friedrich Julius, 132-133
Stalingrad, German defeat at 61, 67
Stark, Gray D., 151n68
Starkey, Thomas, 102-103,105,115,
142,168
Starobinski, Jean, 171n60
Steen, Gerard, 151n3
Steiner, George, 148n25
Steinert, Marlis G., 161nl23
Stern, Josef, 148nl4 ‘
Sternberger, Dolf, 12, 66,149,161
Stirk, Peter M. R., 174n43
Stocker, Adolf, 127,174n38
stoicism, 4, 81
Stolleis, Michael, 173n24
Storz, Gerhard, 12, 66,149,161
Stotzel, Georg, 148n25 •
Strauss, Leo, 128-130,135-136,
169-170,174-175
Streicher, Julius, 47, 65,157n33
. Struve, Tilman, 163nl5,164n24
Suskind, Wilhelm E., 12, 66,149,161
Siiss-Oppenheimer, Joseph, 54
Swiggers, Pierre, 172n69
T
Taboo, 48, 50, 52, 67,141
Taine, Hippolyte, 175n64
Taube, Karl, I63n3
Taylor, John R., 153n45
Tegel, Susan, 159n71,159n76,159n78,
159nn82-83
Tendahl, Markus, 148nl4
Theweleit, Klaus, 47,148nl5
Thirty Years War, 123-124
164n55
Thomas Becket (Archbishop of Canter-
bury),^r-16in2Q.--------- -
Tillyard, E^M.W., 72-73, 83, 85,
89-91,100-101,150,162,164,
167
Karin, 162n9
Juan de, 165n72
Townsend, Rebecca, 148n24
Tucholsky, Kurt, 149n2
Turner, Mark, 16,19
V
Vande Winkel, Roel, 159n71,159n75
van Vree, Frank, 162n9 .
Verhandlungen des Reichstags, 156n/

210 Index
Vogel, Christian, 153n51
Volmert, Johannes, 149nl2
vom Rath, Ernst, 50
W Wilson, Peter H., 173n24
Wagner, Richard, 17, 54, 71
■V^lzer, Michael, 172n69
Weidenfeld, Arthur, 155n4
Weikart, Richard, 151nn68-69,153n51
Weinberg, Gerhard L., 151n71,151nl
Weindling, Paul, 151n69,153n51
Weingart, Peter, 153n51
Weise, Christian, 124,173nl7
Welch, David, 159n71,159nn75-76,
159nn79-80,159nn83-84
Wiegrefe, Klaus, 173n29
Wieland, Christoph Martin, 126,174n31
I
Wildmann, Daniel, 148nl5
Wilks, Michael, 163nl9
William of Ockham, 93,123,
165nn68-69
Winock, Michel, 162n4
Wulf, Joseph, 159n71,159n82
Y
Yu, Ning, 162nl4
Z
Zavadil, Jeffery, 163n8,163nl2
Zinken, Jorg, 76,148nl4,162nl6
Zmarzlik, Hans-Giinte^ 153n51
Zuckert, Catherine and Michael,
175n56