ABSTRACT
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 legitimization in the subsequent chapters.
