ABSTRACT
It is interesting to note that Hitler did not regard Germany as being composed purely of ‘Aryans’. Rather, he hoped to increase the Aryan proportion of the population through genetic selection, deportation and extermination. As I mentioned earlier, throughout Hitler’s writings it is clear that there is a pronounced nationalistic as well as a racial component in his thinking. (This is also true of nineteenth-and twentieth-century anti-semitism in general, as the Dreyfus affair showed.1)
Re-reading Hitler confronts us with a coldly paranoid logic. Hitler regarded all history as consisting of struggles between competing nations for living space and, ultimately, for world domination. The Jews, according to Hitler (who got it from Lueger), are a nation and participate in these struggles with the principal goal of world domination. Hitler thought that this was because the Jews did not possess living space, an identifiable, geographical locality. Therefore, it is the world or nothing for them. In fact, for Hitler, the nationalism of the Jews is ‘denationalization, the inter-bastardization of other nations’.2 The Jewish nation achieves its goal of world domination by denationalizing existing states from within and imposing a homogeneous ‘Jewish’ character on them-for instance, by its international capitalism and by its equally international communism. So, in Hitler’s thinking, there is a tussle between wholesome nationhood and its corrupting enemy, the Jews. (The question of the nationhood of the Jews is still a pressing problem, especially in the context of Middle Eastern politics, as my Israeli colleague Gustav Dreifuss has reminded me.)3
Thus, a crucial aspect of Hitler’s thinking is that the Jews represent a threat to the inevitable and healthy struggle of different nations for world domination. There is an uncomfortable echo to Hitler in Jung’s
view that each nation has a different and identifiable national psychology of its own that is, in some mysterious manner, an innate factor. Merely to juxtapose these two points of view would be distasteful and it is certainly not my intention to make a straightforward comparison of Hitler and Jung, nor to suggest that Hitler influenced Jung. But if we go on to explore the place of the Jews in Jung’s mental ecology, to try to find out where they are situated in his perspective on the world, then we have to ask whether there is a similarity in the underlying structure of the assumptions about nations, history and culture in these two views. Readers will recall that my intention has been to see whether there is anything in Jung’s thinking about the Jews that must lead him to anti-semitism, perhaps forcing honest women and men to give up their interest in analytical psychology.
