BLACK HOLES

This is one way to get famous; just destroy. Today, some comparatively petty criminals seek public attention by murdering innocent people such as small children. But they cannot equal the above man. Social forces have been brought into the explanation. But if this were so, everybody would be equally affected. And history teaches us something different: Hitler came to power after an appointment by a senile President--and then proceeded by eradicating all opposition by secret executions and assassinations in 1934, especially of his former comrade Roehm and his henchmen. A lot of negotiations had been going on before, such as with the military and the industrialists, who felt threatened by Roehm and his three million strong stormtroopers (SA). After obtaining absolute power and exposing Germans to Goebbels' propaganda machinery, a lot of Germans fell for Hitler, but not all. The idea that some form of mass craziness all of a sudden turned "the people of poets and thinkers" into a rabid mass of Nazis is wrong. There are definite groups of actors who caused the above events.

So, the part of the explanation must lie within these actors. Let us look at the situation from an uncanny distance: Is it not as if there were a small bunch of black holes (the central group of Nazis), who sucked a lot of others in, destroying them, and finally collapsing into themselves? What if the Nazis were a set of walking deads themselves--psychologically speaking? What if the necessary precondition for the mass murders and the war was that the people, who set it in motion, had to be dead in a psychological sense?

Let me describe my personal experiences with these people and then compare what some historians have to say about some of the Nazis. Have you ever dealt with a dog ? The dog sits in front of you and looks at you. You talk to him and he tries to understand. Even though it is not a human you are talking to, you have the definite impression that you are talking to someone--another alive being. I have to tell you that I met some people in my sessions, whom I could not reach in the same sense. I try to reach someone or something inside of them, and after some time I recognize that there is nobody. There is an empty nothing inside. The exterior may be impressive, the people may be rich, well educated. But there is certain coldness, a sense of incoherence and of uncertainty in the interaction. Their reasoning is pretty formal and linear. It is not at all of the flexible and warm type. They are closed and guarded. And there is a lot of power--of the pushy, sometimes even mean or violent, kind in the air. People around them do not flourish, they wilt. And most of the dark holes have a very bad temper, which they might have learnt to control, because appearences are very important to them. Their favorite game is to make people of the full, lively, and spontaneous kind feel stupid in their presence. The black holes can talk in very well-formed sentences, give you a very clean overview of complex situations. However, if you are not a sucker, the account somehow feels wrong. Because there is nothing inside, an empty person does not accept responsibility. It is always circumstances and others, who are responsible.

Hitler was very reluctant to meet people, whom he considered as superior because they might look through him. Goering used another strategy to cover up the black hole inside: "He gave the appearance of a genial, bonhomie-type individual who radiated conviviality and good fellowhip. He was, in fact something quite different--a cold, calculating opportunist who trampled anything or anyone who stood in his past." (Maracin, p. 39). "Goering loved titles, medals, gaudy uniforms, extravagant living, and attention." Yeah, if the interior is crappy, the exterior has to make up for it!

But let me talk about another form of mass murder, which received much less attention, namely psychological mass murder. Since the above people have no soul, there is nothing which will suffer when they kill. To make their followers kill designated targets, the followers have to be psychologically killed before. This is done by the instillation of a violent ideology. Everybody becomes the same predator. "Communication" becomes easy because everybody thinks and feels the same way. The "person" I am is multiplied many many times, which makes me feel very powerful. And even when I die, I still live on because there are a lot of I's--clones of myself--out there, which makes me feel immortal.

   Walter Rathenau

Kern, the 1922 assassin of politician Rathenau, expresses the above directly: "... I blew out my brains. I am dead...Were it otherwise, I could not bear it. I follow my star. I die daily. While my actions are are the sole motive force within me, everything I do is the expression of this force. This force is destructive--hence I destroy. I know that I shall perish in the moment when this force no longer has any use for me."

Kern "had to" destroy him because Rathenau was such a fine human being: "He indeed is the finest and ripest fruit of his age. I couldn't bear it if again something great were to arise out of the chaotic, insane age in which we live...We fight for other things. We are not fighting to make the nation happy--but to force it tread in the path of its destiny. I will not tolerate that this man should once more raise it up to purposefulness and give to it a national consciousness. For these things belong to an age that was destroyed in the war..."

Here, it is indicated when the souls of the above people died, which were already attacked by ardent nationalism, namely in the trenches and battles of World War 1. Ernst Juenger, in his book The Storm of Steel, vividly and distantly describes the events. It took Juenger most of his life--and he became 102 years old-- to warm his blood just a little. A brilliant and very successful author, he remained a distant and analytical observer and visionary.

The above situation of a destructive blind impulse is mirrored in the Lord of the Rings movies. In it, the Morgul Lords, are filled with nothingness--and just a blind drive to annihilate.

Let us make another check now whether the above "theory" makes sense: Individuals are wiped out if they are good copies of a group ideology. A most vivid example are the people at the center of the popular kids in high schools. Don't they look and behave all in the same way? But if people at the center of groups are not alive psychologically any more, people at their fringes or even outside should be. How can we check this? A very good check are actions and not just words. People, who are around the fringes, should be warmer and more willing to help others in need.

  Professor Nechama Tec

This is exactly what Nechama Tec found out in her book When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland. The common denominator of those helpers--there were even Nazis amongst them--were that they belonged to the fringes of their groups.

One might argue now that the rescue of a couple of Jews done by independent individuals did nothing to change the big currents of history. This was the kind of argument Planck (founder of quantum physics) made against Heisenberg's (Hitler's later director of the atom bomb project) alleged intention to leave Germany. But is this argument really true?

Let me give you a counterexample:

  Georg Elser

This guy tried to assassinate Hitler in 1939. Hitler left too early--about several minutes before the bomb went off. True, Elser was unsuccessful. But there is another very important inference: This was the year 1939, and the Gestapo (Secret Sate Police) and the SD (Security Service) were all-pervasive in Germany. And they had no idea that this was coming--and no inkling, who had done it after the fact--until he was caught trying to leave the country.

To camouflage their impotence against a lone wolf, they came up with the conspiracy theory of the British Secret Service being involved. There will be a page on Elser on my website because nothing is available on him in English.

Let me talk a little more about the reach of Heydrich's SD and Mueller's Gestapo: Homes were spied upon by block warders, who knew each of the households assigned to them. Telephones were tapped. Children spied on their parents, friends on friends, students on teachers and professors and on each other. Heydrich even established a first-class brothel in Berlin, which was bugged with electronic listening devices. And if you were marked by the SD, the Gestapo picked and roughed you up--and often made you disappear forever.

It is very unlikely that modern agencies can ever approach this kind of penetration. This means that they are even less prepared to deal with lone wolves, who are driven by a different set of beliefs. Even if big terrorist organizations are destroyed, smaller groups come into being. If these groups are destroyed, individuals remain. If careless individuals are locked or shot up, the well-camouflaged and clever kind will be left over.

This whole development leads full circle to what made Western Civilization, namely rationality and reasoning. The technology, which grew out of it is necessary--but not sufficient for winning.

 The following is part of  page 225 of Ernst Juenger's book Storm of Steel (Penguin Classics, 2003). The incident happened in March of 1918. Juenger had entered the Western Front as a nineteen-year-old December of 1914. Most of his comrades had not survived so long. So, the above experience is just one of many Juenger had.

Pay special attention to the last sentence:

Moments like that are not easily shaken off.

Sometimes, the victims themselves, who are wounded but unconscious, are less affected emotionally than their buddies, who have to watch the effects of an IED. I had some exposure to soldiers with so-called PTSD, when working at the Heidelberg US Army Hospital, the place, at which General Patton died after World War II--and I do not believe that the effects are really seen in their proper perspective.

Events like the above change one's world forever. Things, which have been important so far, become irrelevant. One grows very close to one's comrades and one becomes aliented from civilians--sometimes even wife and kids--and certainly most reporters and politicians. One tries to stay friendly and respectful on the surface, which makes the invisible barrier only stronger. Sometimes there is a short temper and outbursts of rage: "You don't understand. My buddies do." The result is alienation from civil society. And not many people can bear this kind of psychological loneliness. Psychologists, psychiatrists, and counselors do not really listen, and the consequences of the events (alienation, flashbacks, attack on value-system, etc.) are so scary that the soldier tries to push these things away. Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier of all times, used medication to push things away and got addicted. In free societies the "cure" is essentially a solution involving a small group of people. In an authoritarian society, in which individuals are empty and individual help is not available because there are no individuals, an artificial closeness is achieved by cloning a mass of comrades.

Now I have to become personal to prepare for the final discussion. I have to warn you; the pictures will have to be quite graphic to make my point: I grew up in a country butcher-shop. I tell you, this was really hard for me because I liked animals, especially the calves. I even had sympathies for the ugly pigs, who screamed their lungs out because they knew what was coming: Shot in the head with a special apparatus, throat cut, blood drained, skinned, opened up, intestines removed, head cut off, hanged on hooks, and cleft in two parts. The intestines came into an open dump, which festered with maggots. Big carrion flies were buzzing all over the place--and the stink of death was everywhere. Well, when about seven, I started dreaming that I was subject to the above procedure. I was so scared that I tried not to fall asleep, but could not help it. I woke up from the nightmare, only to fall asleep again. This went on for a long time--until I had enough. I sat down and started thinking:

"Gerhard, what is the problem?"--"It is that you are having these terrible dreams."--"Well, you said it: They are dreams."--"But I believe it's really happening when I dream."--"Well, so you should be able to tell that you're dreaming when you're dreaming."--"Yes, but how?"--"You know that is really simple: If you're butchered, it means that you're dreaming. In reality, people are not butchered."--"So, if I am butchered again, I can tell myself that it is only a dream and force my eyes open."

It worked beautifully: Next time, when I was butchered again, I knew that I was dreaming, went along safely with the experience for some time until it got on my nerves and then opened my eyes and was awake. I repeated the procedures a few times--and then the dreams stopped.

I am only all too happy that I did not have to listen to my late philosopher friend Paul Feyerabend, who told me several decades later: "Well, this criterion is not exact. People have actually butchered, that is, processed other people like animals." I hate these wisecrack remarks. You have to be pretty careful what you tell other people. And I think that the principle was fairly exact for the time I lived in."

Then I forgot the whole thing. Years passed by until, at age 15, I got to know that a great many people had no chance to open their eyes. The nightmare had been reality just a few years before my birth, and my country had enacted it. I became quite critical of my surroundings, alienated from it. I did not trust the air I was breathing in. The results were that I studied at American instead of German universities and that I rejected Anna Freud's offer to train me as a psychoanalyst. Both things made me lose a lot of money--but losing my soul would have cost me much more. I am still suffering from the above societal shyness, however, which makes it hard for me to do present myself publicly. I do not have any problems with individuals though. Another reason is that I am excessively cautious in contaminating others with mental nonsense. Hitler and Freud had much more "self-confidence" in this respect.

Now let me address the issue of emptiness again. I said that people who are empty have no soul. However, I should rather say that these people work hard to have no soul, that they buried it. I could also say that their actions are intended to make the development of their soul impossible, much as someone who pours poison into a garden to make growth impossible. As much as our souls need good gardeners to grow, its absence needs a conscious effort to prevent it from doing so. Rathenau's murderer Kern says exactly this: He is dying each day.

Skeptics may say that I use a very fuzzy--not well-defined notion--here. Firstly, I would object that it is much better to use an important--although fuzzy--notion than not using it at all. It is much better than a famous surgeon's saying "I have cut open so many bodies and never found a soul." This is as stupid as saying "I have taken so many computers apart and never found a program." Today psychiatrists make a similar mistake when they blame people's problems on "chemical imbalance." Secondly, mathematics, the most exact of all sciences, uses "fuzzy" notions in axioms of geometry. Some of these axioms allow for more than one interpretation, which means that the notions are fuzzy.

But this does not mean that I cannot try and make my notion of soul a little clearer. I would tentatively say that it is the place within us that can suffer and think clearly and freely. I will not say more at this point, but rather check whether this description fits what I said before and whether it allows some deductions, which can be checked.

How can a person kill his soul? One way to do it is through mass murder. Each murder hurts so much that you have to close the place that hurts down. Then you have to twist your logic to make it justifiable. Consequently, awakening a mass murderer's soul again should have disastrous consequences for the person whose soul is exposed to the full impact of his actions.

 Gitta Sereny

I know of one person, another hero of mine, who ventured to do exactly this kind of thing. Her name is Gitta Sereny. In her book Into that Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder, she relates her long interaction with Franz Stangl, a notorious Nazi Commandant of German Extermination Camps. Stangl's final insight that he was guilty killed the man: It literally broke his heart.

The above discussion is a suggestion how realistic psychological concepts might be gleaned from reality. Such a psychology has the potential of improving the lives of real people.

 Audie Murphy (http://audiemurphy.com)

I spoke about this man before in the context of PTSD (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder). Audie was plagued by insomnia and depression. He became dependent on sleeping pills, which a doctor had prescribed to him. When he wanted to get rid of his dependency, he locked himself in a motel room, stopped taking the pills, and went through withdrawal for a week. As we can see, it is all about motivation to stop the dependency.

Assume the following scenario: A drug is designed, which will give you the best high and euphoria that you can imagine--let us say, for a week or two. However, after that experience you will die. Do you think that some people will take the drug? I think that quite a few will. These people are not dependent, they are addicts. An addict does not care about his own life; Audie did. The scenario of the deadly euphoric drug is approximated today by methamphetamines. The dying is just a little more drawn out.

Psychologists and psychiatrist do not make a distinction, however, between drug dependency and drug addiction, which is a serious shortcoming.