Germany Possessed

H.G. Baynes

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138699380
• eBook ISBN: 9781315516950
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1941, the blurb read: "The aim of this work is to state and understand the psychological dynamics of the present conflict. The author is a medical psychologist who has had unusual opportunities for studying German mentality. He characterizes the condition of Germany as one of dæmonic possession and Hitler as the primitive medicine-man who gained a magical ascendency by playing the role of medium to the German unconscious. He analyses the fundamental instability of the collective German psychology and relates this to the dæmonic outbreak. The ambiguous personality of the Führer is seen as the indispensable symbol of a deeply divided nation striving for unity. Whereas the pagan-Christian conflict in the soul of Christendom is urging individual consciousness to a new statement of human values, it has produced in the soul of Germany a state of collective intoxication which is the negation of individuality.

This book is the first serious attempt to depict the invisible underground causes of the European catastrophe and to state the issue in terms of epochal transition. It was German violence which started the conflagration, but the fires of anti-Christian revolt have long been smouldering in the general unconscious. Material of a varied kind, gathered from German myth and legend and from a number of contemporary witnesses has been pieced together into a comprehensive psychological survey, embracing both the personal and the impersonal aspects of the German scene. Hitler is discussed as personality, as symbol, and as a disease. The influence of the Wagnerian German myth upon Hitler's inflammable imagination is discussed and the basic ideas of Hitlerism are traced to their source.

This is the attempt of psychology to elucidate the irrational and unintelligible elements in the present chaos."

Chapter I
ADOLF HITLER PERSONAL AND DÆMONIC

1

WITH the individual problem, psychology is needed when a man comes to the end of his tether. In other fields psychology comes into its own when other means prove inadequate. Political science, economics, diplomacy, and that cynical state-opportunism known as Realpolitik, have all made an attempt to explain the grim confusion of the present state of affairs. But certain questions in the minds of calm, sensible people remain unanswered, and it is these insistent, residual questions which psychology must be called upon to answer:

1. How, for instance, did Adolf Hitler, a fundamentally illegitimate personality, unsupported by dynastic tradition, adequate education, or political inheritance, come to be dictator of modern Germany?

2. How is it possible for the German to be, on the one hand, obedient, domesticated, law-abiding and reasonable and, on the other, capable of wholesale and even sadistic cruelty?

3. Can we regard the Hitler phenomenon as purely German, or could a similar catastrophe overtake the British people?

Questions such as these, which are only too liable to be answered with prejudiced heat, demand just that detached consideration of the mind proper to psychological thinking. Because it is fitted to ask questions which were hitherto unanswerable, psychology has already expanded the scope of the human mind. Psychological medicine, including psycho-analysis, has grown in response to the question: 'Why is this person sick?' In like manner, medical science began with the question: 'What manner of sickness is this?' and reaped an abundant harvest by observing the various pathological processes which its question eventually disclosed.

The average mind is soon discouraged from asking questions to which no intelligible answer is available. The mind of the true philosopher or scientific investigator, however, reveals itself in the tenacity with which it points a rapier-like question at the heart of nature, holding the mind steadfast to its quest, until an answer has been given. But since the answers to our questions lie in the darkest regions of the soul, our scientific quest must attune itself to Kant's humane definition of understanding: 'the realization of a thing to the measure which is sufficient for our purpose'.

When Freud observed how his hysterical patients persisted in telling him their dreams, and how talking about them seemed to improve matters, he asked the question: 'What do dreams actually signify?' This led him to inquire into the kind of mental process which produced the dream, and from this followed the discovery of the so-called unconscious mind. Thus a whole aspect of nature was revealed, which had previously been carefully camouflaged by such face-saving conceptions as accident, coincidence, fate, Providence, acts of God, and so forth. Darwin's conceptions and the growth of natural science had enormously extended the possibility of insight, so that the scientific mind of the West was beginning to be ripe for this discovery towards the end of last century.

At about the same time, and independently of Freud, Jung was observing certain irregularities in word-association tests carried out with patients as a routine procedure at the state mental hospital in Zürich. At the places indicated by these irregular reactions he looked, as it were, through the crack and asked himself the question: 'Why does this person have difficulty at this particular word?' In this way he came upon the buried complex, when he immediately recognized that same factor of repression which Freud had already described in his work with hysterical patients.

Since those days a great deal has been discovered about the unconscious. We now know that it is not unconscious in the sense that it lacks consciousness, but that its contents exist in a state of relative dissociation from ordinary waking consciousness. What we call consciousness is simply the habitual standpoint of our waking mind, just as the land, as opposed to the sea, is the normal base to which we feel we belong.

We cannot attempt to understand Hitler as a phenomenon without some understanding of the nature of the unconscious, inasmuch as his psychology, being that of a medium, is related more to potential conditions in the unconscious than to the actual world of reality. It is as though he were equipped not only to perceive the hidden forces or tendencies of the unconscious, but also to be conditioned by them, as the wire is conditioned by the electric current which it conducts. But we must be careful what we say about mediums in general, because the portrait varies a great deal according to the degree of consciousness of the individual concerned. There are many intuitive people who can become mediumistic in regard to the unconscious situation, yet who never fall into the hysterical, possessed state which is generally characteristic of the primitive type of medium. This primitive type is, of course, that of the shaman or medicine man, whose prodigious prestige among his savage tribesmen rests upon his capacity for surrendering himself to, and becoming possessed by, the unconscious. The shamanistic frenzy, the wild state attained by the dervish in the dervish dance, the hysterical transports of religious revivalists and similarly induced conditions of fanatical excitement, the oratorical intoxication of the demagogue, the orgiastic frenzy of the Dionysian worshipper of antiquity — all these are forms in which the state of being possessed by the unconscious is deliberately cultivated on magico-religious grounds. Throughout antiquity and amongst practically all primitive races, this capacity for being possessed and transported by the unconscious endows the individual in question with mana or magical prestige. Such prestige has always rested upon exactly the same grounds as that of Hitler's in modern Germany; the individual possessed is believed to voice the will of heaven. Among savage peoples this usually means the voice of the ancestor spirits. The state of possession, therefore, is the means by which the spirit of the great, all-wise ancestor is enabled to break through from the spirit world and control events in the real.¹

A mind accustomed to think of the unconscious in the orthodox Freudian sense, as a depository of personal refuse which accumulates from infancy onwards, may be confused, at first, by this conception of the unconscious as an ancestral heirloom. A conservative fish that has spent its whole existence within the confines of a small pool in a mountain stream will naturally conceive the universe in terms of the contents of its pool, unless or until it ventures down the stream and experiences the depths and terrors of the world beyond. In a word, the personal unconscious is the first and immediate psychic envelope in which we are contained. But the impersonal, or racial unconscious is the timeless psychical matrix which contains everyone, and by virtue of which the whole historical past is present as the living background of each individual psychology. The savage mind ignores the small fish, the little personal dreams that flit about the dimly lit channels of his subconscious world. But the impressive commanding dream, the 'doctor dream', immediately seizes hold of his mind. He takes it to the headman, who at once calls a palaver to discuss what it is saying.

Since earliest time the immense importance given to dreams and dream interpretation, to divination and augury, has been related to the absolute significance universally attached to revelation. This is due to the world-wide primitive belief that dreams and visions are directly communicated by wise ancestral spirits. In primitive life culture is a stream flowing from the ancestors to posterity; not through universities, museums, and libraries, but through tradition and custom and that ancestral voice which sometimes pierces the thin veil of sleep. I have known cases in which a shaman has been commanded to take up his cultural vocation by an ancestral spirit which appeared to him in a dream or vision. This image teaches him the things he has to know, and even speaks through his mouth during the shaman trance.

To sum up, when mediumship is defined as a function of the unconscious, we refer not merely to the superficial levels of the personal unconscious, but more especially to that generalized tribal, racial, or ancestral background of the mind which Jung has called the collective unconscious.

2

Upon this general psychological background it is now possible to indicate the main source of Hitler's power and to sketch in some relevant personal features.

It is not easy to get at the truth of Hitler's origins and early life. The official account is meagre and obviously arranged. Moreover, as in every totalitarian regime where only an expedient rendering of facts is forthcoming, a whole swarm of unofficial 'inside' sources of information press their own especial claim for credence. On the whole, Konrad Heiden's biography of Hitler is accepted as being the most reliable.

According to this account, Hitler was born on April 20th, 1889, at Braunau in Austria.¹ His father, who was the illegitimate son of a miller called Hiedler, was known for the greater part of his life by the name of Alois Schicklgruber; Schicklgruber being the name of his unmarried mother. Hitler's father was large and was said to resemble Marshal Hindenburg; a factor which may have had important consequences in the Führer's subsequent attitude to the aged president. Schicklgruber was first a shoemaker's apprentice and later a customs official.

Adolf Hitler was born of Schicklgruber's third marriage with a young woman, Klara Poelzl, and it was about this time that Schicklgruber changed his interesting and curious name to Hitler. Possibly he disliked his name. But it is psychologically significant that, in making the change, he reverted to the matrilineal pattern of kinship. For Hitler was the name of Klara Poelzl's mother. Thus Hitler's father performed an unconscious act of submission to the matrilineal principle. According to this principle, the main channel from the ancestors to posterity flows through the mother and, therefore, all familial responsibility, all possessions, and the general cultural heritage, including the name, are passed on through-her. The father is little more than a permanent guest in the mother's house. Hitler's father may also have been attracted to this name because of its similarity with that of his own putative father, Johann Hiedler the miller.

Another account which has wide currency, especially in Austria, is that Hitler's father was a wealthy Viennese Jew and that Schicklgruber, a mean and ungentle petty official, was attracted to Klara Poelzl more by the handsome 'consideration' which she brought with her as a dowry than by any kindling of the heart. This account also has it that Schicklgruber treated his wife very badly and that Adolf came to hate him, not only for the mean way in which he would bring up the circumstances of his birth but also for his physically brutal treatment of his mother. Terrible quarrels between the parents resulted. It is easy to see how the idea of rescuing his young mother from the tyranny of this aged alien who masqueraded as his father could have developed in the son's mind.

In submitting this account of Hitler's personal myth by the side of the orthodox version I make no special claim for its factual truth. I give it because it supplies psychological verisimilitude for the main outline of Hitler's psychology. The other account does not. Even if the facts are proved to be different, this account will still retain its psychological validity as a myth, inasmuch as it certainly corresponds with the essential psychological situation. The spirit of resentment and venomous hatred which shows so plainly in Mein Kampf, and is the dynamic mainspring of his whole career, must surely have had its root in Hitler's personal history. We also know on his own testimony that, at a very early age, he decided to become an artist, in direct opposition to Schicklgruber's intention to make him pass his state examinations and enter the Austrian customs service. This desire to be an artist appeared at too early an age to have originated from his independent experience of himself and his powers. It has much more the character of a mother's secret wish for her son and, in so far as it led to a direct revolt against Schicklgruber's plan for him, it would seem to confirm the idea that the mother exploited the boy in the secret struggle of wills between the parents. Hitler could easily have acquired his feminine taste for intrigue in this early atmosphere of manœuvring for position.

More illuminating still is the insight, furnished by this myth, into Hitler's insane anti-Semitism and his passionate hatred of Austria. On this latter score Dr. Rauschning's¹ personal testimony reveals that Hitler's attitude towards Austria was regarded as insane even by his own generals. He records how in 1934 he approached General Blomberg with the idea of persuading the Fuhrer to accept mediation 'on the lines of securing Austrian consent to a common foreign policy with Germany ... General Blomberg gave me this unforgettable reply ... "I have a sort of Jester's freedom to say anything I like to the Führer. But I shall never dream of saying anything to him about Austria, and I strongly advise you to steer clear of the matter. It is being decided by the Fuhrer alone. It is a point on which he is not quite sane." '¹

Now, according...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• PREFACE
• I ADOLF HITLER, PERSONAL AND DÆMONIC
• II WOTAN, GOD AND DEVIL
• III THE GOD CRIMINAL
• IV HITLER AS SYMBOL
• V THE MESSIANIC POSSIBILITY
• VI ACCELERATION AND DESTRUCTION
• VII THE SOURCE OF HIS IDEAS
• VIII THE HITLER DISEASE
• IX FACTORS GOVERNING MORALE
• INDEX