ABSTRACT
As the most substantial public enunciation of Hitler’s “worldview” (Jäckel 1981), Mein Kampf provided the benchmark, so to speak, for uses of the body-nation metaphor in Nazi propaganda up until 1945.1 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 content of Mein Kampf; its main aim is to reconstruct the “ontology” underlying 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 impossible . . . any history of Holocaust perpetrators that sought to go beyond one-dimensional caricature.”2
