Schliemann: a merchant digs for trojan gold

Now comes a fairy tale, the story of the poor boy who at the age of seven dreamed of finding a city, and who thirty-nine years later went forth, sought, and found not only the city but also treasure such as the world had not seen since the loot of the conquistadors.

This fairy tale is the life of Heinrich Schliemann, one of the most astounding personalities not only among archæologists but among all men to whom any science has ever been indebted.

It began this way: A little boy stood at a grave in the cemetery of the little village where he was born, far up in the North German state of Mecklenburg. The grave was that of the monster Hennig. He was said to have roasted a shepherd alive, then to have kicked the victim for good measure after having broiled him. For this misdeed, it was said, each year Hennig’s left foot, covered with a silk stocking, grew out of the grave like some strange plant.

The boy waited by the grave, but nothing happened. He went home and begged his father to dig up the grave and find out where the foot was that year.

The father, a poor clergyman, told the boy fables, fairy tales, and legends about, among other things, the battles fought by Homer’s heroes, about Paris and Helen, Achilles and Hector, about mighty Troy, which was burned and leveled. For Christmas 1829 he gave his son Jerrer’s Illustrated History of the World, which contained a picture showing Æneas holding his son by the hand and carrying his old father on his back as he  fled the burning citadel of Troy. The boy looked at the massive walls and the great Scæan Gate. “Is that how Troy looked?” he asked. The father nodded. “And it is all gone, and nobody knows where it stood?” “That is true,” the father replied.

“But I don’t believe that,” said the boy, Heinrich Schliemann. “When I am big, I shall go myself and find Troy and the King’s treasure.”

The father laughed.

The prophecy of a seven-year-old became a reality. And at the age of sixty-one, by which time he had become a world-famous archæologist, he was still an enthusiast. During a chance visit to his native village he actually considered digging into the grave of the wicked Hennig. And in the preface to his book Ithaca he wrote:

“When my father gave me a book on the main events of the Trojan War and the adventures of Odysseus and Agamemnon—it was my Christmas present for the year 1832—little did I think that thirty-six years later I would offer the public a book on the same subject. And do this, moreover, after actually seeing with my own eyes the scene of the war and the fatherland of the heroes immortalized by Homer.”

A child’s first impressions stick with him throughout his life, but in Schliemann these impressions soon passed beyond those left by parental recitals of classic deeds. His schooling was finished at the age of fourteen, whereupon he was signed on as apprentice in a grocery business in the little city of Fürstenberg. For five and a half years he retailed herring, brandy, milk, and salt. He ground up potatoes for distillation, and swept up the shop at night. His work lasted from five in the morning until night.

He all but forgot his father’s stories. Then one day a drunken miller’s helper came into the store, hung about the counter, and in a resounding voice declaimed verses filled with the scornful pathos that the once-educated are wont to show toward intellectual inferiors. Schliemann was enchanted, though not a  word did he understand. When he found out that the man was reciting from Homer’s Iliad, he scraped a few pfennigs together and bought the drunkard a schnapps to get him to say the verses all over again.

Schliemann’s youth was filled with adventure. In 1841 he went to Hamburg and was signed as cabin boy on a vessel bound for Venezuela. After fourteen days at sea the ship ran into a wild storm and foundered off the Dutch island of Texel in the North Sea. He made shore, but landed in a hospital, exhausted and in rags. A recommendation from a family friend enabled him to get employment as an office boy in Amsterdam.

In a miserable, unheated garret room he began his study of languages. Within two years, by an unusual method of self-teaching, he had mastered English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. “These exacting and strenuous studies,” he says, “within a year had so strengthened my memory that the effort of learning Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese seemed very easy. Six weeks spent on any one of these languages, and I could speak and write it fluently.”

After being promoted to correspondent and bookkeeper with another Amsterdam firm doing business with Russia, in 1844, when only twenty-two years old, Schliemann began to learn Russian. But no one in the city, he found, could speak this most difficult of European languages. The only teaching aids he could pick up were an old grammar, a dictionary, and a poor translation of Telemachus.

He carried on imaginary conversations so loudly that he disturbed his neighbors. The walls shook when he declaimed pieces he had learned by heart from Telemachus. Other tenants complained, and twice he was forced to seek new lodgings. Finally he hit on the idea of providing himself with a critical audience and for this purpose hired a poor man, whom he paid four francs a week. This unfortunate fellow was required to sit on a chair and hear out long passages from Telemachus, not a word of which he understood. After six hectic weeks Schliemann was conversing fluently with  Russian merchants come to Amsterdam to attend the indigo auction.

He was as successful in business as in his language studies, though here luck undoubtedly played a part. Yet in fairness to Schliemann it must be said that he belonged to the few who know how to hold fast to the luck that comes everyone’s way sooner or later. The indigent minister’s son, the apprentice, the shipwrecked cabin boy, the office worker—and master of eight languages—became first a small wholesaler, then, with dizzying speed, a royal merchant. Invariably he picked the shortest road to commercial success. When only twenty-four years old he went to St. Petersburg as agent for his firm. This was in 1846. A year later he founded his own export-import business, all of which took time and a great deal of hard work.

“It was not until 1854 that I was able to learn Swedish and Polish,” he writes. He made extensive trips, one to North America in 1850. During that year, while he was there, the admission of California into the United States automatically gave him American citizenship. Like so many others, he was carried away by the gold-rush fever. He set up a bank for dealing in gold. Already he was a man of sufficient status to be received by the President of the United States. “About seven o’clock I was driven to visit the President of the U.S.A. I told him how my desire to see this splendid country and to make the acquaintance of its great leader had led me to travel here all the way from Russia. My first and most important duty was to pay my respects to him, I said. He received me warmly, introduced me to his wife and daughter and father, and I talked with him for an hour and a half.”

But soon thereafter Schliemann came down with a fever. In the end, uneasiness over the weird, lawless customers he had to deal with drove him back to St. Petersburg. In those years he was indeed a gold seeker, just as one of his biographers, Emil Ludwig, described him.

Yet his letters of that period and his two autobiographies  reveal him always and everywhere in the relentless grip of that childhood dream to find and explore the distant scenes where Homer’s heroes had performed their great deeds. This obsession even gave him, probably the most gifted student of languages in his century, a peculiar inhibition regarding the study of Greek. Fearing that he might fall under its spell and abandon his business before he had created a sound foundation for the free pursuit of his quest, he did not begin his study of modern Greek until 1856. He achieved it within his usual six weeks; in another three months, he had mastered the intricacies of Homeric hexameters. How did he do it? “I have thrown myself so wholly into the study of Plato that, if he were to receive a letter from me six weeks hence, he would be bound to understand it.”

Twice in the following years he was on the verge of actually treading on earth hallowed by Homeric song. On a trip to the second cataract of the Nile, by way of Palestine, Syria, and Greece, only a sudden illness prevented him from visiting the island of Ithaca. On this journey he learned Latin and Arabic. His diaries are written in the language of the country where he chanced to be. In 1864 he was again on the point of paying a visit to Trojan lands, but instead decided on a two-year trip around the world, the fruit of which was his first book, written in French.

By this time he was financially independent. The pastor’s son from Mecklenburg had developed an uncanny busines sense. “My enterprises had been wonderfully blessed by Heaven,” he says with unconcealed pride, “to such a degree that by the end of the year 1863 I was already in possession of means far beyond my most ambitious expectations.” And to this he added, in a casual tone that would sound overweening in anyone but Heinrich Schliemann: “I [now] retired from business so that I could devote myself entirely to the studies that so completely fascinated me.”

In 1868 he went to Ithaca, through the Peloponnesus and the Troad. The introduction to his Ithaca is  dated December 31, 1868. The subtitle reads: Archæological Investigations of Heinrich Schliemann.

A photograph of Schliemann taken during his St. Petersburg days shows him as a prosperous gentleman wearing a heavy fur cloak. On the back of this picture, which he sent to a forester’s wife whom he had known when she was a little girl, is an inscription that reads: “Photograph of Henry [sic] Schliemann, formerly apprentice with Herr Hückstaedt in Fürstenberg; now wholesale merchant in the Imperial Guild of St. Petersburg, hereditary honorary freeman, Judge of the St. Petersburg Commercial Court, and director of the Imperial State Bank of St. Petersburg.”

Is it not a fairy tale? That a highly successful businessman should burn all his bridges behind him in order to make a youthful dream come true? That, armed with little but his knowledge of Homer, he should dare challenge the science of his day? That he should pit his beliefs against the doubters and the philologists, preferring pick and shovel to the bookish approach?

In Schliemann’s day, Homer was thought of as the legendary bard of a prehistoric age. Scholars took no more stock in his facts than they did in his very existence. Until that much later time when someone boldly called Homer the first war correspondent, his reporting of the struggle for Priam’s citadel was rated, for historical accuracy, about on a par with the ancient sagas, if not relegated to the shadow realm of myth.

For does not the Iliad begin with the story of “far-darting Apollo,” who set a deadly sickness into the Achæan ranks? And did not Zeus himself intervene in the Trojan War, and likewise “lily-armed Hera”? And did not gods turn into mortals, susceptible to fleshly injury? Even Aphrodite was not immune from the cut of a bronze spearpoint. Myth, saga, legend—illuminated by the divine spark of one of the world’s greatest poets!

In the Iliad Greece is portrayed as a highly cultured land. Yet when the Greeks appeared in recorded  history they were a simple and numerically small people. Their kings were not powerful, they did not have great fleets of vessels. And so in Schliemann’s day it was much easier to believe that Homeric Greece was a poetic myth than to give credence to the idea that a Homeric epoch of high culture had preceded the youthful barbarism out of which, by historical record, the noble Hellenic culture unfolded.

Such considerations failed to shake Schliemann’s belief, dreamer as he was in Homeric mists. He read Homeric poetry as bare reality. He believed implicitly. This was as true when he was forty-six as it had been when, as a boy, he had been fascinated by the picture of the fleeing Æneas.

When Schliemann read Homer’s description of the Gorgon shield of Agamemnon and was told that the buckler strap had been decorated with a figure of a three-headed snake, he accepted all this as gospel truth. The chariots, weapons, and household articles portrayed in detail by Homer were for him part and parcel of ancient Greece. Were all these heroes—Achilles and Patroclus, Hector and Æneas—and this pageant of friendship, hate, love, and high adventure, nothing but mere invention? Schliemann did not think so; to his mind such people and such scenes had actually existed. He was conscious that all Greek antiquity, including the great historians Herodotus and Thucydides, had accepted the Trojan War as an actual event, and its famous names as historical personages.

Carrying his belief in Homer before him like a banner, in his forty-sixth year the millionaire Heinrich Schliemann set forth directly for the kingdom of the Achæans, not even bothering, en route, to explore modern Greece. It is of symbolic interest that almost the first native Greek he got to know was an Ithacan blacksmith whose wife was introduced to him as Penelope, his sons as Odysseus and Telemachus. We can only imagine how he must have been fired by this auspicious omen.

 Incredible as it may seem, this actually happened: the rich and eccentric foreigner one evening sat in the village square and read the Twenty-third Book of the Odyssey to the descendants of those who had been dead for three thousand years. Overcome by emotion, he wept, and the villagers wept with him.

The majority of contemporary scholars believed that the site of ancient Troy—if Troy had existed at all—was near a little village called Bunarbashi. This remote hamlet was distinguished, as it still is today, by the odd fact that each house had as many as twelve stork nests on its roof. At Bunarbashi were two springs, on which account some more daring archæologists were inclined to give credence to the idea that eventually ancient Troy might possibly be located thereabouts. For it is written in Homer, in the twenty-second song of the Iliad (verses 147–52):

“… And [they] came to the two fair-flowing springs, where two fountains rise that feed deep-eddying Skamandros. The one floweth with warm water, and smoke goeth up there from around us as it were from a blazing fire, while the other even in summer floweth forth like cold hail or snow or ice that water formeth.”

For a fee of forty-five piasters Schliemann hired a local guide and rode out bareback to have his first look at the land of his boyhood dreams. “I admit,” he says, “that I could scarcely control my emotion when I saw the tremendous plain of Troy spread out before me, a scene that had haunted my earliest childhood dreams.”

But this first impression was enough to convince him, believing literally in Homer as he did, that Bunarbashi was not the site of ancient Troy. For the locality was fully three hours away from the coast, and Homer describes his heroes as able to travel back and forth several times daily between their moored ships and the  beleaguered city. Nor did it seem likely to Schliemann that a great palace of sixty-two rooms would ever have been built on such a small knoll. The setting was not right for cyclopean walls, breached by a massive gate through which the crafty Greeks entered in a wooden horse.

Schliemann examined the springs of Bunarbashi, and was surprised to find that in a space of 1,650 feet he could count not merely two—the number mentioned by Homer—but thirty-four of them. Even so, his guide assured him that he had miscounted. Actually there were forty. For that very reason, the guide pointed out, the region was called “Kirk Giös”—that is, “Forty Eyes.”

Schliemann made a careful survey of the countryside in his Iliad and reread the verses telling how Achilles, the “brave runner,” chased Hector three times around the fortress of Priam, “with all the gods looking on.” Following Homeric directions as best he could, Schliemann traced out a likely course about the hill. At one point, however, he encountered a drop so steep that he had to crawl down it backwards on all fours. Since, in Schliemann’s view, Homer’s description of the landscape was as exact as a military map, surely the poet would have mentioned the incline had his heroes scrambled down it three times “in hasty flight.”

With watch in one hand and Homer in the other, he paced out the road between what were purported to be the two hills securing Troy, this road winding through the foothills to the shore off which the Achæan ships were supposed to have been anchored. He also re-enacted the movements of the first day of battle in the Trojan War, as portrayed in the second to the seventh songs of the Iliad. He found that if Troy had been located at Bunarbashi, the Achæans would have had to cover at least fifty-two miles during the first nine hours of battle.

The complete absence of ruins clinched his doubts about the site. He could not even turn up any potsherds.  Elsewhere, in Ithaca, potsherds had been found in such quantity that someone had remarked: “Judging by the archæologists’ findings in graves, the ancients must have spent most of their time patching up broken vases. Low creatures that they were, before going out of existence they smashed everything to smithereens, to be sure to leave their finest pieces behind in the form of jigsaw puzzles.”

“Mycenæ and Tiryns,” Schliemann wrote in 1868, “were destroyed 2,335 years ago, but their ruins are of such solid construction that they can last another 10,000 years.” And Troy was destroyed only 722 years earlier. It seemed highly unlikely that the cyclopean walls described by Homer would have disappeared without a trace. Yet in the environs of Bunarbashi there was not a sign of ancient masonry.

Ruins there were aplenty, however, in other not too distant places. Even the untrained eye could not miss them at New Ilium, now called Hissarlik—which means “Palace”—a town some two and a half hours northward from Bunarbashi and only one hour from the coast. Twice Schliemann examined the flat top of the mound at Hissarlik, a rectangular plateau about 769 feet long on each side. This preliminary survey pretty well satisfied his mind that he had located ancient Troy.

He began to cast about for proof and discovered that others shared his opinion, among which minority was Frank Calvert, American vice-consul, but English by birth. Calvert owned a part of the mound of Hissarlik and had a villa there. Having excavated on his own account, he was inclined to agree with Schliemann, but had never given much thought to the consequences of the idea. The Scottish scholar C. MacLaren, and Eckenbrecher, a German, were other voices that had called out unheard in the wilderness.

And how about the wells mentioned in Homer, which were the main prop of the Bunarbashi theory? For a short while Schliemann wavered when he found  no springs at all at Hissarlik, in striking contrast to his discovery of thirty-four at Bunarbashi. It was Calvert who helped him over this difficulty. Calvert pointed out that in this volcanic region he had heard of several hot springs suddenly drying up, only to reappear after a short period. And so Schliemann casually cast aside everything that hitherto had seemed so important to the scholars. Moreover, the running fight between Hector and Achilles was plausible enough in the Hissarlik setting, where the hill sloped gently. To circle the city three times at Hissarlik they would have had to run nine miles. This feat, Schliemann thought, was not beyond the powers of warriors caught up in the heat of a grudge fight.

Again Schliemann was more influenced in his thinking by the judgment of the ancients than by the scholarship of his day. He recalled how Herodotus had reported that Xerxes once visited New Ilium to look at the remains of “Priam’s Pergamos,” and there to sacrifice a thousand cattle to the Ilian Minerva. According to Xenophon, Mindares, the Lacedæmonian general, had done the same. Arrian had written that Alexander the Great, after making an offering at New Ilium, took weapons away with him and ordered his bodyguard to carry them in battle for luck. Beyond this, Cæsar had done much for New Ilium, partly because he admired Alexander, partly because he believed himself to be a descendant of the Ilians.

Had they all been misled by a dream? By the bad reporting of their day?

At the end of a chapter in which he has piled up evidence in support of his views, Schliemann abruptly abandons his scholarly argument to gaze, enchanted, at the ancient landscape. He writes, as he might have cried out when a boy: “… and this I should like to add, that no sooner has one set foot on Trojan soil than one is astonished to see that this noble mound of Hissarlik seems to have been intended by Nature herself to be the site of a great citadel. If well fortified, the location would command the whole plain of Troy.  In the whole region there is no point comparable with this one.

“Looking out from Hissarlik, one can see Ida, from whose summit Jupiter looked down on the city of Troy.”

And now a man possessed went to work. All the energy that had made him a millionaire, Schliemann concentrated on realizing his dream. Ruthlessly he squandered his material means and strength.

In 1869 he had married a Greek girl named Sophia Engastromenos, who was as beautiful as his image of Helen. Soon Sophia, too, was absorbed in the great task and was sharing his fatigues, hardships, and worries. He began to dig at Hissarlik in April 1870. In 1871 he dug for two months, and another four and a half months in the two succeeding years. He had a hundred workers at his disposal. All this time he was restlessly active. Nothing could hold him down, neither deadly mosquito-borne fevers and bad water nor the recalcitrance of the laborers. He prodded dilatory authorities, he ignored the incomprehension of narrow-minded experts who mocked him as a fool, and worse.

The Temple of Athena had stood on the highest ground in the city, and Poseidon and Apollo had built the walls of Pergamos—so it was recorded in Homer. Therefore the temple should be located in the middle of the mound, Schliemann reasoned, and somewhere round about, on the original level ground, would be the walls constructed by the gods. He struck into the mound, boldly ripping down walls that to him seemed unimportant. He found weapons and household furnishings, ornaments and vases, overwhelming evidence that a rich city had once occupied the spot. And he found something else as well, something that for the first time caused Heinrich Schliemann’s name to speed around the world. Under the ruins of New Ilium he disclosed other ruins, under these still others. The hill was like a tremendous onion, which he proceeded to dismember layer by layer. Each layer seemed to have  been inhabited at a different period. Populations had lived and died, cities had been built up only to fall into decay. Sword and fire had raged, one civilization cutting off another, and again and again a city of the living had been raised on a city of the dead.

Each day brought a new surprise. Schliemann had gone forth to find Homeric Troy, but as time went on he and his workers discovered no less than seven buried cities, then two more; nine glimpses, all told, of primitive ages that previously had not been known to exist.

The question now arose which of these nine cities was the Troy of Homer, of the heroes and the epic war. It was clear that the bottommost level had been a prehistoric city, much the oldest in the series, so old that the inhabitants had not known the use of metals. And the uppermost level had to be the most recent, and no doubt consisted of the remains of the New Ilium where Xerxes and Alexander had made sacrifice.

Schliemann dug and searched. In the second and third levels from the bottom he found traces of fire, the remains of massive walls, and the ruins of a gigantic gate. He was sure that these walls had once enclosed the palace of Priam, and that he had found the famous Scæan Gate.

He unearthed things that were treasures from the scientific point of view. Part of this material he shipped home, part he gave over to experts for examination, material that yielded a detailed picture of the Trojan epoch, the portrait of a people.

It was Heinrich Schliemann’s triumph, and the triumph, too, of Homer. He had succeeded, the enthusiastic amateur, in demonstrating the actual existence of what had always counted as mere saga and myth, a figment of the poetic fancy.

A wave of excitement coursed through the intellectual world. Schliemann, whose workers had moved more than 325,000 cubic yards of earth, had earned a breathing spell. Presently, his interests meanwhile having turned to other projects, he set June 15, 1873 as  the date for the termination of the diggings. On the day before the last shovelful of earth was to be turned, he found a treasure that crowned his labors with a golden splendor, to the delight of the watching world.

It happened dramatically. Even today, reading about this amazing discovery takes one’s breath away. The discovery was made during the early hours of a hot morning. Schliemann, accompanied by his wife, was supervising the excavation. Though no longer seriously expectant of finding anything, nevertheless out of habit he was still keeping close watch on the workmen’s every move. They were down twenty-eight feet, at the lower level of the masonry that Schliemann identified with Priam’s palace. Suddenly his gaze was held spellbound. He began to act as if under compulsion. No one can say what the thievish workers would have done if they had seen what met Schliemann’s astonished eyes. He seized his wife by the arm. “Gold!” he whispered. She looked at him in amazement. “Quick,” he said. “Send the men home at once.” The lovely Greek stammered a protest. “No buts,” he told her. “Tell them anything you want. Tell them today is my birthday, that I’ve just remembered, and that they can all have the rest of the day off. Hurry up, now, hurry!”

The workers left. “Get your red shawl!” Schliemann said to his wife as he jumped down into the hole. He went to work with his knife like a demon. Massive blocks of stone, the debris of millennia, hung perilously over his head, but he paid no attention to the danger. “With all possible speed I cut out the treasure with a large knife,” he writes. “I did this by dint of strenuous effort, and in the most frightful danger of losing my life; for the heavy citadel wall, which I had to dig under, might have crashed down on me at any moment. But the sight of so many immeasurably priceless objects made me foolhardy and I did not think of the hazards.”

There was the soft sheen of ivory, the jingle of gold. Schliemann’s wife held open the shawl to be filled  with Priam’s treasure. It was the golden treasure of one of the mightiest kings of prehistory, gathered together in blood and tears, the ornaments of a godlike people, buried for three thousand years until dug from under the ruined walls of seven vanished kingdoms. Not for one moment did Schliemann doubt that he had found Priam’s treasure-trove. And not until shortly before his death was it proved that Schliemann had been misled in the heat of enthusiasm. Troy lay neither in the second nor in the third layer (see this page). The treasure had belonged to a king who antedated Priam by a thousand years (see Plate III).

Like thieves the Schliemanns spirited their find into a wooden hut on the site, and there spread everything out on a rough wooden table. There were diadems and brooches, chains, plates, buttons, golden wire and thread, and bracelets. “Apparently someone in Priam’s family had hastily packed away the treasure in boxes and carried them out without even taking time to remove the keys from the locks. Then, on the walls, this person met his death either directly at enemy hands or when struck down by a flying missile. The treasure lay where it fell, and presently was buried under five or six feet of ashes and stones from the adjacent royal house.”

Schliemann, the fantast, took a pair of earrings and a pendant and put them on his young wife, ornaments three thousand years old for the twenty-year-old Greek. He stared at her. “Helen!” he breathed.

What to do now with this golden hoard? Schliemann allowed news of the find to get out, but by various adventurous means, aided by his wife’s relatives, was able to smuggle the treasure to Athens, thence out of the country. When Schliemann’s house was searched and sealed on orders from the Turkish Ambassador, not a trace of gold was found.

Was he a thief? The law regulating the disposal of antiquities found in Turkish territory was loosely framed, and highly subject to interpretation according to the caprice of local officials. Having sacrificed his whole career to the fulfillment of a dream, Schliemann could hardly be expected to be excessively scrupulous at this point in the game. He was determined to preserve his hoard of golden rarities for the delectation of European scholarship. Seventy years before, Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin and Kincardine, had set a precedent of sorts when he deliberately removed invaluable sculptures from the Parthenon. In Elgin’s day Athens was still Turkish, as was Hissarlik in Schliemann’s. Elgin had been given a Turkish firman, or license, that contained a clause stating that “nobody may hinder him from removing carved figures from the Acropolis, or inscribed blocks of stone.” On the strength of this clause Elgin acted boldly. Two hundred cases filled with material from the Parthenon were shipped to London. The legal battle over ownership of this incomparably beautiful collection dragged on for years. The marbles had cost Elgin £74,240, but the compensation voted him by Parliament amounted to only £35,000, not even half of his expenses.

When Schliemann retrieved the “treasure of Priam” from its hiding place, he felt that he had reached the pinnacle of his life. Could such brilliant success be improved on? 

Ceram, C. W.

   Gods, Graves, and Scholars.

A novel of cats and murder - Notes

 Of all mammals, cats are world champions at sleeping. They spend about sixteen hours a day in the arms of Morpheus, thus beating even the large and lazy panda, which spends just ten hours of the day asleep. Being switched off for two-thirds of its time, so to speak, a nine-year-old cat has in effect spent only three years awake. However, quantity is not the same thing as quality, so the comfortably laid-back cat cannot relax as thoroughly as its two-legged retainers. Cats do not take their sleep all at once, like humans, but in the short snatches sometimes known as cat-naps. During these naps, which consist of several sleep cycles, their brains are nowhere near as completely 'disconnected' as the human brain. So far as bio-signals are concerned, the cat's deep sleep is more like our own light sleep. And appropriately for a hunter, the cat's 'radar' remains alert even during a siesta. If even a distant mouse-like rustling is heard, the alarm system immediately comes on, and the tiger on stand-by is wide awake at once.

Cats, who often assume the most artistically ornate positions as they doze, can indulge in this lethargic life-style only because they are extremely efficient hunters with few natural enemies. Their natural prey, on the other hand, often consists of creatures who can never sleep for more than a few minutes at a time, such as hares. For obvious reasons, cats are popular 'guinea-pigs' for scientists researching into the nature of sleep, and in that capacity have made heroic contributions to various pioneering discoveries.

2. Some people regard neutering with revulsion, as barbaric butchery and the infringement of a cat's right to develop its personality freely. They believe that we mutilate our animal companions cruelly to make them easy-care soft toys, and then hypocritically argue that it was a harmless therapeutic measure and all for the pet's own good; sex, we point out, doesn't make you happy. The natural drives of the sanitised Barbie cat cease to be a nuisance to us, and it becomes a toy lion acceptable in polite company.

However, the author can see the arguments on the other side too. Tom cats with their family jewels still functional are genuinely uncontrollable, and in considerable danger of getting severely injured during their constant fights. They also give off a pungent erotic aroma which smells pestilential - to their tin-openers, anyway. Female cats (or queens) who still have all their equipment may easily be 'calling' for a mate the whole time, turning the home upside down with their rampageous behaviour. Too many pregnancies at frequent intervals will leave them suffering from stress, exhaustion, and very likely gynaecological complications too. There is also the constant danger of over-population, since cats breed like the proverbial rabbits. Finally, when you remember that neutered cats live two or three years longer without getting conspicuously overweight, neutering is probably the lesser of two evils in a standard urban household.

3. Cats have an irresistible impulse to sharpen and clean their claws, and will often do it on the sofa or some other treasured piece of furniture. Many cat owners regard this activity as they might the appearance of a nightmare figure from a horror film running amok with a set of knives. However, amputation of a cat's claws for inappropriate scratching is a barbaric mutilation and a peculiarly cruel kind of torture. For one thing, the cat uses its claws in the daily task of grooming, for combing and cleaning the fur, and cannot do without them. Anyone who has ever been unable to scratch in order to relieve an itch will understand the gravity of the situation. Moreover, de-clawed cats cannot get a proper grip when they try to climb in instinctive response to another animal need, and if they are in flight from a dog (or another and hostile cat) the consequences can be fatal. If an ill-disposed neighbour goes for it with malicious intent, a cat deprived of its sharp daggers cannot defend itself properly. And finally, cats whose claws have been amputated are unable to hunt and so cannot fend for themselves in an emergency.

Amputation of the claws, also euphemistically known by the ancient Greek term 'onyxectonomy', is illegal in many European countries. In the leading international cat breeding associations it is condemned even more strongly than doping in the Olympic Games. You should do everything possible in the way of conditioning to divert your cat's urges to an official scratching post. At the first sign that your pet vandal has his beady eye on the furniture, take him to the spot where scratching is allowed. If in doubt, it is really better not to keep a cat at all if you cannot live with its claws as well as its velvet paws.

4. With mysterious regularity, cats will often say goodbye to the four walls of home and go on their travels with some unknown end in view. It is as mysterious an exodus as the strange disappearance of a husband who pops out for cigarettes and vanishes into some twilight zone never to be seen again. Humans were puzzling over this behaviour pattern even in ancient times; superstition says that the departure of a cat means someone in a house is going to die. There is an old Flemish proverb, 'When the cat goes out, death comes in.' Today, however, more rational explanations are sought. Perhaps the sensitive runaway is simply responding 'allergically' to some subtle change in its familiar surroundings and urgently requires a change of scene. Or then again, perhaps the cat has received Zen enlightenment during its meditative trance beside the radiator and is following in the steps of Siddhartha to turn the wheel of Karma. Or of course there is the remote possibility that E.T. and the rest of the UFO brigade are regularly stealing cats for vivisection with a view to solving the cosmic mystery of self-satisfaction.

5. The Chartreux (sometimes called the Chartreuse), a French breed extremely similar to the British Blue, is a handsome, muscular animal with a broad head and well-proportioned short legs, about the closest a cat comes to being a teddy bear. With its yellow or golden eyes and its short, thick, velvety fur, grey to blue-grey in colour, this cuddly creature captures small children's hearts. The Chartreux may appear calm and lethargic, but it can be a tiger in sheep's clothing, and in emergency will show its pugnacious, battling nature.

There is a widespread idea that the monks of La Grande Chartreuse monastery in France bred these cats in the Middle Ages to rid themselves of mice. According to this story the good clerics, who also made a commercial hit with their famous green liqueur, raised their new breed from related cats imported from South Africa. Unfortunately closer examination shows that the legend is only an old wives' tale. According to the Prior of La Grande Chartreuse, no sister house ever existed in South Africa, nor did any Carthusian monks ever bring back African cats. The theory that the cat takes its name from the simple grey robes allegedly worn by Carthusian monks also belongs in the realm of fantasy, since the Carthusians have always worn pure white habits. More probably the name goes back to a kind of wool widely known in France in the past. Finally, the fact that no written records whatever about any kind of cat-breeding experiments exist at La Grande Chartreuse casts further doubt on the legend.

However, those culinary experts the French did add to the history of the Chartreux cat, if not very creditably. According to Linnaeus, these cats used to be fattened, killed and eaten, for instance stuffed and roasted; this gruesome dish even found its way into old German menus as 'Dachshund'. Furriers cured the coat and sold it as 'petit gris'; the finished product, trimmed and dyed, was sold to gullible consumers as otter skin.

The famous natural scientists Linnaeus and Buffon recognised the Chartreux cat as a separate breed, and in the 1930s a French veterinary surgeon gave it a scientific name of its own: Felis catus cartusianorum. Our oldest documented record of a blue-grey cat dates from 1558 and comes from Rome: a poet sadly laments the death of his little pet.

6. When the cat lies lazily in the sun licking itself it is not just cooling itself off (through evaporation) and getting clean. Using elements already present in the body, ultra-violet rays produce an essential elixir of life in the fur: this is vitamin D, the sunlight or anti-rickets vitamin. The cat supplements its normal diet with this extract, which enables it to store calcium and phosphate in its bones. Calcium, the silver-grey alkaline earth metal, gives the teeth their biting power and the bones their strength. Rickets, a severe form of bone softening in children, was known on the continent of Europe in the past as the English disease; the idea was that the prevalence of fog in the British Isles kept the invigorating rays of the sun away. Children affected by rickets were a pitiful sight, pigeon-breasted and with severely deformed skeletons.

Rickets in the strict sense seldom occurs in cats, but similar conditions have been found in kittens with inadequate calcium or vitamin D in their diet. The condition deprives the cat of vitality and causes fragile, deformed or fractured bones. Vitamin D is present in milk, fish products and tinned cat-food. It is particularly important to make sure that housebound cats who seldom or never see 'real' daylight out of doors get an adequate supply. Paradoxically, however, too much vitamin D can be harmful, causing symptoms similar to a lack of it.

7. It is one of the persistent and proverbial myths about the animal kingdom that hostility must inevitably exist between dogs and cats because 'language barriers' and their irreconcilably different characters preclude peaceful coexistence on the part of the two arch-enemies. In nature - and therefore in their genetic information - there is no provision for cats and dogs to meet, since they occupy different ecological niches and hunt different prey. Temperamentally, dog and cat are indeed opposites. At a first encounter the cat will remain cool and reserved, sounding out the situation as befits a loner. The dog, on the other hand, with its extrovert pack-animal nature, will immediately makes a boisterous attempt at rapprochement. The cat misinterprets this boisterous approach as a hostile infringement of its own personal space (or 'flight distance'). Many further misunderstandings can easily arise because non-verbal messages mean different things in dog and cat language. Cats, decorous creatures that they are, touch noses with each other as a greeting. The dog observes no such niceties, but puts his nose straight up to the cat's tail to sniff it -from the cat's point of view, a serious breach of good manners. The cat will raise a paw in warning, making the dog even more bumptious, since among dogs a raised paw is a friendly gesture. The dog gets the wrong message from the agitated twitching of a cat's tail, because his own kind wag their tails when they are feeling friendly and relaxed. If the cat eventually turns and runs because (as we all know) the cleverer gives way first, it is only giving the dog the fatal signal to act as a hound and start the chase. In a direct frontal attack from a cat, however, the dog will usually be the loser, because cats have faster reactions and because a prey animal which turns to attack simply does not fit into the canine scheme of things. Cats are just as surprised if an aggressive rat ventures to attack.

In spite of such handicaps, the two hostile powers can easily come to tolerate each other and even strike up firm friendships. Out of over five million dogs in German households, almost half live with other domestic pets, a great many of them with cats. Fraternisation works best, of course, if the two 'enemies' come into the house as young animals and grow up together. In those circumstances even cats and mice can become good friends.

An affectionate female gorilla called Koko recently attracted much attention by making a pet of a cat; when her pet died as a result of an accident Koko grieved until she was given another cat.

Murr the cat, the amusing protagonist in a novel by the Romantic author E.T.A. Hoffmann, makes friends with a poodle called Ponto in his youth. In the course of the novel Murr even writes a learned treatise of his own (entitled 'Thought and Instinct, or Cat and Dog'), proving among other things that 'words' used by the two species (e.g. the dog's 'bow-wow' and the cat's 'miaow') have the same etymological origin.

This is not really so fantastic a notion, for many million years ago dog and cat were indeed closely related, both belonging to a super-family of dog-like and cat-like carnivores. Recently a French clergyman and his family moved to a new parish some two hundred kilometres away. They took their German Shepherd dog with them but left their cat in their old home. Two weeks after the move the dog disappeared - and came back to his new home seven weeks later with the cat in tow.

8. There is probably no other beast of prey in the wild so misunderstood, as a result of ignorance and direct horror propaganda, as the European wildcat (Felis silvestris). The wild cousin of our domestic cat is noticeably larger and sturdier and can weigh up to thirteen kilograms. The wildcat has shorter legs, smaller ears and a more sloping forehead than the domestic cat, as well as a thick ringed tail. At first glance, its coat pattern suggests a grey tabby domestic cat, but the blurred black striped pattern of the wildcats' fur is in fact unique to them.Felis silvestris lives in thickly overgrown woodland areas, and will also make itself a nest in cracks in the rock or hollow trees. It is a timid loner, impossible to approach, and leads a largely solitary life, coming together with other members of its species only for a few weeks in spring in order to mate. After mating, the female wildcat has two to four kittens, which are blind at birth. These kittens cannot be kept as domestic pets; sooner or later, however sweet and playful they seem, they will change and become ferocious. Wildcats occupy an important ecological niche, keeping mice and other harmful vermin in check.

The wildcat lived in Central European forests for over three hundred thousand years, but it has been systematically decimated in the last few centuries. In the British Isles it now survives only in Scotland. In modern Germany, the setting of this novel, there are only about fourteen hundred wild cats. Continental hunters deliberately spread disinformation to the effect that wildcats attacked hares, fawns and other of their own favourite prey. The 'grey ghost' was even said to be in touch with the powers of darkness and able to kill a grown man. For superstitious reasons, most hunters would 'bless' their guns with holy water before going after wildcats. Many experts believe that the systematic reintroduction of Felis silvestris to various parts of Europe can at most only delay the extinction of the species.

9. Although our tame domestic cats were probably created by breeding from their African ancestors, they can interbreed successfully with the European wildcat. As things stand, the domestic cat can even produce offspring by the North American lynx. Finally, there is even a possibility that there are no limits at all to mating between small cats (of the genus Felis). According to the textbooks, the cross-breeding of wild and domestic cats ought to produce infertile hybrids, but some of these bastard cats have obviously retained the ability to reproduce. There are some strange hybrids in the depths of northern European forests, and it would be surprising if the domestic cat did not have a few drops of wild European blood in its veins. That transfusion very probably occurred in the ancient forests of European folklore; it cannot yet be proved for certain, but at some point new forensic techniques such as genetic fingerprinting will give us a definite answer. So far as today's domestic cat is concerned, a fling with a wildcat can take a nasty turn; foresters have seen such wildcats turn to scratching furies at the sight of a decadent domestic pet.

10. The belief that cats have an amazing and indeed paranormal ability to find their way home is so deeply rooted that it periodically surfaces in the media, embroidered with ever new episodes. Almost every week you can hear of some Puss in Boots who accidentally fetches up in a strange and distant place but finds his way home with dreamlike certainty. Americans, with their taste for the road movie, have versions in which the trip is country-wide, from coast to coast. Examined closely, the tale has two different variants which should be distinguished from each other. The conventional variety, whereby the cat finds its way home from some strange place, can be explained in principle without calling on any psi factor. The cat may have an acoustic picture of the sounds of home at the back of its head, and finds its way by that map. Or it may take a fix from the position of the sun, as travellers in former times used to. Perhaps cats, like whales, may even have a magnetic sense which allows them to navigate as if by a compass.

However, there are cases suggesting some paranormal force at work, stories in which a cat has been left behind but follows its master long distances to a new and hitherto entirely unknown home. This variant cannot be explained by even the most remarkable achievements of the senses, and is often called psi-trailing and regarded as an extra-sensory talent. Some decades ago the American parapsychologist J.B. Rhine collected and analysed all documented cases. The biggest sensation was a cat belonging to a New York veterinary surgeon who moved from New York to California. Several months later the cat, who had been left behind in New York, turned up energetically demanding entry to his new home and made straight for his favourite place in a comfortable armchair.

We can make what we like of such mysterious journeys. Desmond Morris, the British cat expert, thinks it is pointless and leads nowhere to look for parapsychological explanations of the marvels and mysteries of nature, thus stifling the curiosity of the inquiring mind. Ever since the times of the Ancient Egyptians, however, the cat has presented mankind with mysteries which are peculiar to itself and will put the abilities of any two-legged medium in the shade.

11. Although the eyes of the cat are among the greatest masterpieces created by the 'Blind Watchmaker' - evolution - those amazing organs are not much good at perceiving colour. As with primates (including humans), they face forward, and display their aesthetic beauty in some of mankind's oldest painted records. They are very large in relation to skull size and therefore absorb a great deal of light. In addition, the back of the eye is covered by the reflective tapetum, which throws back the 'used' rays of light. This amplifier of the residual light makes the cat's reflective eyes powerful tools for night vision, and military commanders have tried to make use of them in nocturnal warfare.

The light-sensitive layer of the eyes, the retina, consists of two kinds of photocells, rods and cones. The rods, which are far more numerous than the cones, react very sensitively to differences between light and dark, and are situated mainly in the outer area of the retina. The cones, responsible for colour perception and close-up vision, function only in daylight and are concentrated in the centre of the retina, in humans a circular pit or fovea. The feline fovea, containing only a few cones, is a horizontal line. Cats thus have very sharp eyes for spotting mice who happen to wander across their field of vision, but it would be hard for them to see the letters of newsprint properly, and they have difficulty in adjusting their lenses to the macro-area which shows close-up detail. Cats are therefore sometimes disorientated if the object of their interest is right in front of their faces.

Because of the small number of colour cones in cats' eyes, it was thought for a long time that they could see the world only in black and white. However, it was then shown that they can be trained, rather laboriously, to distinguish between certain primary colours. In time they can tell red, blue and white apart. On the whole, however, colour is not very important to them: all mice are grey at night anyway. But American zoologists have recently discovered that the domestic cat has a latent ability to see in colour at birth. The Spanish wildcat, which like many other archaic relations of our domestic cat hunts its prey in the bright midday sun, has about twice as many cones in its pupil and is thus fully able to perceive colour. When it is born the domestic cat, whose forebears at some point took to seeking food by night near human settlements, has just the same kind of colour-perceptive fovea. The ability to see colour, however, is soon eradicated by genetic programming. Probably this ghost of an ability in the cat's eye still exists only because it could be useful at some point if the cat were ever to revert to its old life-style.

FELIDAE ON THE ROAD(Felidae Part II)

Akif Pirinçci

A novel of cats and murder

 

The Holocaust Industry

 Holocaust Guilt

We are now all so familiar with Holocaust rhetoric from Jewish organizations that its characteristic audacity can easily pass unnoticed:

When Jews feel and say that Germany and those in Europe who supported, or at least did not oppose the Nazi regime, should never be allowed to forget, events back them up.—Anti-Defamation League’s Letter From Europe, July 2000.

The number of Germans and other Europeans who “supported . . . the Nazi regime” is by now very small; more than a half-century has passed since Adolf Hitler’s death. So the ADL do not mean, despite the literal sense of the sentence quoted above, that Jews will never allow eighty-year-old Germans to forget their support for National Socialism sixty years ago; nearly all will be dead within the decade. They really mean young Germans—and young Lithuanians, young Croats, young Italians, young Finns etc. The nations themselves, they are saying, should never be allowed to forget, and Jewish organizations like the ADL plan to make their collective guilt for Nazism a permanent feature of their national identities.

That much should be obvious. Perhaps it even makes sense. Nations often feel collective pride in their ancestors’ achievements; perhaps they should also feel collective shame for their ancestors’ crimes.

But there is an additional, very large group that finds itself included in the ADL’s program for punitive Holocaust remembering: “those in Europe who . . . did not oppose the Nazi regime.” The ADL are, again obviously, not concerned about eighty-year-old Spaniards or eighty-year-old Swedes or eighty-year-old Swiss “who . . . did not oppose the Nazi regime.” Nor do they mean a French housewife who, sixty years ago, neglected to rescue Jews from the clutches of the German occupiers. The ADL mean young Frenchmen and young Spaniards and young Swedes and young Swiss. They, too, must always remember.

So you are guilty and must never be allowed to forget, nor should your children be allowed to forget, if your grandfather “supported the Nazi regime”; you are also guilty and must never be allowed to forget, and your children should never be allowed to forget, if your grandfather merely failed to “oppose the Nazi regime.” Not opposing Hitler and supporting Hitler incur the same guilt and the same obligation to remember. That means that most Europeans and their children must never be allowed to forget the Holocaust, and the ADL assume not only their own ability to speak, but also their power to ensure that others listen. If Jews want twenty-year-old Swedes and their children never to forget, their remembering is certain.

What if your grandfather did, in fact, oppose the Nazi regime? You might at least think that twenty-year-old Americans or Englishmen would be under no obligation to remember perpetually the Holocaust. But if that idle thought briefly crossed your mind, you were mistaken. Mandatory Holocaust remembering is almost as pervasive in the United States and Great Britain, nations that fought to destroy National Socialism, as in the nation where it was born.

That European Jews were killed not only by Germans but also by “apathy” and “silence” in the United States and Great Britain, the apathy and silence being products of an ingrained “anti-Semitism” that the Anglo-American world shared with its German enemies, is now a standard teaching of Holocaust lore, which treats inaction and collaboration as crude synonyms. The failure of the Allies to bomb rail lines leading to Auschwitz, now the subject of a $40 billion lawsuit by Jewish “survivors” against American taxpayers, is the preferred example of this inaction/collaboration; the failure of the Western democracies to rescue Jews on the St. Louis—a failure also, though rarely mentioned, of the Jewish Agency in Palestine—is another popular complaint. The West, all Holocaust promoters agree, either killed Jews in, or failed to rescue Jews from, history’s most horrible crime, so the West as a whole stands condemned by both its acts and its inaction, with a mere handful of Righteous Gentiles, the vast majority being decidedly unrighteous, providing rare exceptions that only prove the rule.

“The free and ‘civilized’ world,” Elie Wiesel claims, handed “[the Jews] over to the executioner. There were the killers—the murderers—and there were those who remained silent.” Wiesel invokes here the newly minted crimes of “indifference” and “abandonment,” which Jewish Holocaust promoters have manufactured in order to add the former heroes of World War II to its cast of villains, almost as guilty as the Germans they fought. Nazis and anti-Nazis are conflated, by their shared guilt, into a single category, the former for their crimes against Jews, the latter for their sinful indifference to the crimes. “The Jews of Europe,” Jewish historian Irving Abella writes, “were not so much trapped in a whirlwind of systematic mass murder as they were abandoned to it.”

The simple truth, of course, is that Jewish organizations and Jewish historians and Jewish “survivors” want every White Gentile to feel guilt for the Holocaust, so they have invented a series of ad hoc excuses for broadening the class of the “guilty” to include all of us, whatever our grandfathers were doing sixty years ago.

The Holocaust Industry

One of the undeniable strengths of The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2000), Norman Finkelstein’s often furious denunciation of rapacious Holocaust profiteering, is its demystification, for a mainstream audience, of all this Holocaust lore as nothing more than an instrument of “Jewish aggrandizement” wielded for both political power and profit. The Holocaust industry of the title is a network of Jewish historians and Jewish institutions that exploits the Holocaust in order to acquire the diverse political benefits that a history of victimhood now offers, in addition to the very substantial pecuniary rewards that Jewish organizations have successfully squeezed from European governments and corporations in what Finkelstein calls “an outright extortion racket.”

Holocaust “scholarship” and Holocaust “memory,” themselves often funded from the racket’s proceeds, are seldom, Finkelstein argues, disinterested historical investigations or politically innocent recollections of Jewish suffering, as their practitioners would have us believe, but are instead expressions of an ideological structure that serves current political interests, principally the Jewish Heimat in Palestine and its Zionist supporters in the United States. German atrocities against Jews are the Holocaust industry’s raw material, ethnically self-serving propaganda its finished product.

Prof. Finkelstein identifies two central ideas underlying the Holocaust industry’s omnipresent propaganda: “(1) The Holocaust marks a categorically unique historical event; (2) The Holocaust marks the climax of an irrational, eternal Gentile hatred of Jews.” The former he dismisses as “intellectually barren and morally discreditable,” the latter as a simple fiction, popular among Jews but transparently false. Both dogmas are, however, mutually self-sustaining and jointly they construct a radically ethnocentric world-view, with the Holocaust at its center. Jews are distinguished from everyone else by virtue of their historical moment of unparalleled suffering, and Gentiles are distinguished from Jews by having nurtured the hatreds that culminated in this moment of unparalleled suffering. Jews were victims of history’s greatest crime, and they have been, over millennia, the objects of the perennial Gentile hatred that eventually caused history’s greatest crime. The entirety of non-Jewish history is therefore indicted. At any moment the unique evil of the Holocaust could have occurred, the hatreds that caused it being perennial, and since the hatreds are entirely irrational, with no relation to antecedent Jewish behavior, Jews bear no responsibility for having in any way provoked them. “For two thousand years,” Elie Wiesel believes, “. . . we were always threatened. . . . For what? For no reason.”

The political benefits of Holocaust dogmas are substantial. Cynthia Ozick can explain hostility to Israel by denying the need for an explanation: “The world wants to wipe out the Jews . . . the world has always wanted to wipe out the Jews.” The incommensurate evil of the Holocaust also offers an esthetically compelling symmetry. Thus Leni Yahil, in her unapologetically Zionist study of The Holocaust, on the establishment of the Jewish State: “Destruction unparalleled in history was contrasted with a creation unparalleled in history.” Anyone who has seen Schindler’s List should be familiar with the symmetry: From the black-and-white darkness of the Holocaust European Jewry emerges into the bright colors of its own Jewish State. And if, as Wiesel says, Auschwitz represents “the failure of two thousand years of Christian civilization,” then each escalation of the preeminent evil that Auschwitz now signifies is an additional indictment of Christian civilization and an additional justification for a Jewish State physically separate from it. Zionists therefore have an interest in maintaining Holocaust dogmas and in ensuring their dissemination, since the Holocaust helps immunize Jews against criticism in the Diaspora, where they form a vulnerable minority among potentially genocidal majorities, and inhibits criticism of Israel, which serves a permanent refuge for Jews should eliminationist anti-Semites once again attempt unparalleled destruction.

The monetary benefits of Holocaust dogmas are also substantial. Finkelstein’s case against Holocash extortion, the core of his book, is detailed and devastating. No one who has read The Holocaust Industry could fail to find unintended humor in Abraham Foxman’s recent claim that Jewish organizations regard the collection of Holocaust reparations as a “sacred mission.” Some highlights:

·Holocaust profiteers wildly exaggerated the value of dormant accounts in Swiss banks, the subject of a massive Jewish campaign of national vilification directed against Switzerland, including the fraudulent claim that the banks robbed Jews of as much as $20 billion. Of the $1.25 billion eventually paid by the Swiss to the World Jewish Congress (WJC), at most only $200 million were genuinely owing, and contradicting the repeated claims of Jewish organizations, the independent Volcker Committee found no evidence that Swiss banks mishandled dormant Jewish accounts.

·Holocaust profiteers, in this case the Simon Wiesenthal Center, falsely charged, in order to assist the extortion racket, that the Swiss interned Jewish refugees in “slave labor camps” during the war. The historical record is clear: They didn’t.

·Holocaust profiteers, the WJC and the World Jewish Restitution Organization, have formally agreed to exclude Israeli banks from their extortion campaign, even though they also hold dormant Holocaust-era accounts. Finkelstein comments: “The writ of these Jewish organizations thus runs to Switzerland but not to the Jewish state.” Further: “The most sensational charge leveled against the Swiss banks was that they required death certificates from the heirs of Nazi Holocaust victims. Israeli banks have also demanded such documentation. One searches in vain, however, for denunciations of the ‘perfidious Israelis.’”

·Holocaust profiteers launched their recent campaign for compensation in the name of “needy survivors,” but most of the money that they have thus far extorted is destined for the coffers of Jewish organizations and will be spent to fund more Holocaust education and Holocaust memorials and Holocaust studies, like much of the more than $61 billion in reparations already paid by Germany prior to the current round of extortion. Tellingly, “survivors” themselves, familiar with the institutional greed of their self-appointed spokesmen, prefer to be paid directly by the German government.

·Holocaust profiteer Edgar Bronfman, head of the WJC, “movingly testified before the House Banking Committee that the Swiss should not ‘be allowed to make a profit from the ashes of the Holocaust.’ On the other hand, Bronfman recently acknowledged that the WJC treasury has amassed no less than ‘roughly $7 billion’ in compensation monies.”

·Holocaust profiteers have regularly inflated the number of Jewish “slave laborers” in order to extort additional money from European corporations. And since each increase in the number of Jewish “slave laborers” alive today logically requires a corresponding decrease in the number of Jews who died in German concentration camps, the Holocaust industry is practicing its own mercenary version of “Holocaust denial.” If Jewish claims for compensation are correct, then the Holy Six Million figure must be false. Finkelstein quotes his mother, herself interned at Majdanek: “If everyone who claims to be a survivor actually is one, who did Hitler kill?” Or as David Irving once put it: “Another Holocaust victim is born every day.”

·Holocaust profiteers falsely claimed that former “slave laborers” never received compensation from Germany, although they were “covered under the original agreements with Germany compensating concentration-camp inmates” and have received payments amounting to the equivalent of $1 billion in contemporary currency. “Still, 50 years later the Holocaust industry was demanding money for ‘needy Holocaust victims’ who had been living in poverty because Germans allegedly never compensated them.”

·Holocaust profiteer Elie Wiesel demands a minimum lecture fee of $25,000, as well as a chauffeured limousine.

Finkelstein concludes: “The current campaign of the Holocaust industry to extort money from Europe in the name of ‘needy Holocaust victims’ has shrunk the moral stature of their martyrdom to that of a Monte Carlo casino.”

Although most prominent ideologies have, for good or ill, been subjected from the anti-Western Left to analyses of the political interests they serve, the Jewish Holocaust, which now looms over a host of what should be entirely unrelated subjects, has hitherto been exempt, largely as a result of the Holocaust industry’s successful campaign to theologize Jewish suffering, transforming it from concrete events at a particular time into an ahistorical object of religious reverence, replete with taboos that few outside the Racial Right dare violate. Finkelstein’s marked lack of deference to conventional Holocaust pieties and the rules of Holocaust correctness intentionally desacralizes the Holocaust in order to deprive its exploiters of the aura of sanctity that shields their schemes from scrutiny, and in this objective he shares something in common with the revisionist Robert Faurisson, who has debunked “the religion of the Holocaust” for more than two decades. Yet tactical taboo violation does not demonstrate disbelief in the religion of which the taboos form a part. Finkelstein, as we shall see, shares the faith and therefore objects to those who would abuse it. But many of his Holocaust convictions are indistinguishable from those of the Holocaust industry he attacks, and his “radical” critique of Holocaust orthodoxy ends up restating some of its most important dogmas in an only marginally less pernicious form.

There is an obvious lesson in this. If as a society we delegate to Jews, as in effect we have done, the job of explaining criticism of Jews, we should not be surprised that the answers they arrive at have little to do with themselves and much to do with us. The most popular of their answers—that the source of anti-Semitism is our irrational hate—was predictable before the investigation ever began, given the ethnic composition of the class of experts eligible to conduct it. Similarly, if in mainstream discourse the charge of anti-Semitism remains so devastating that only Jews can safely attack Holocash extortion, we can anticipate that Jewish biases may affect the character of the attack, given the practical impossibility of anyone other than a Jew launching it. There is much of value in The Holocaust Industry, but much also that reflects an internal ethnic squabble among Jews in which, predictably, crucial Holocaust premises remain uncontested.

Discovering the Holocaust

Once upon a time, not so long ago, the suffering of European Jewry during the Second World War lacked a name. It was just suffering. The suffering of an American soldier crippled on D-Day, the suffering of a Jew starved at Bergen-Belsen, and the suffering of a German woman crucified on a barn door all belonged to the same broad generic category of wartime deaths and wartime suffering. In the Western democracies historians and the public at large paid, naturally enough, more attention to first two than to the latter, more attention to our suffering than to theirs, but no one believed that ours deserved a special name.

Beginning in the 1960s, during the course of the Civil Rights Revolution, that changed. One group, until then numbered on our side, the Jews, began to distinguish their suffering from everyone else’s. Jews in Israel had, in fact, already defined their wartime suffering as distinctively un-Gentile by assigning it a special Hebrew name, and with remarkable forethought the Jewish National Fund in pre-Zionist Palestine had already started plans, in 1942, for a memorial to this “Shoah” (“Catastrophe”), later to become the Yad Vashem Museum, before most of the events it would memorialize had actually occurred. But in the Diaspora Jewish suffering, correctly or not, was still only suffering, and Jewish deaths, from among the more than fifty million who died during the war, were still only deaths.

“Holocaust,” the English version of “Shoah,” was first deployed to describe distinctively Jewish suffering during the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, a trial consciously conducted as an educational enterprise, and it was not until the late 1960s that “Holocaust” began its ascent into public consciousness in the English-speaking world, propelled by a steadily growing number of essays and books bearing the term, most authored by Jews. In 1968 the Library of Congress replaced “World War, 1939–1945—Jews” with “Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)”; in 1978 the influential television mini-series Holocaust appeared, watched by almost a hundred million Americans, its advertising financed by Jewish organizations; and in the same year President Carter established a commission, chaired by professional “survivor” Elie Wiesel, to create a national museum in Washington memorializing Jewish suffering in Europe.

Holocaust remembering accelerated rapidly in the decade that followed, and by 1991 Rabbi Michael Berenbaum, then project director of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, could boast, accurately, that World War II was merely a “background story” to the Holocaust. The contrary view, that the Holocaust was a footnote (“point de détail”) to the war, is now illegal in France and much of Europe, as the French nationalist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen discovered. The old view of World War II has not only been supplanted; in some countries it has literally been criminalized.

The Jewish Holocaust was a run-of-the-mill horror in a century that saw many horrors, no worse than the Armenian holocaust, or the Cambodian holocaust, or the Russian holocaust, or the Rwandan holocaust, or the Ukrainian holocaust, and arguably no worse, at the level of individual suffering, than the Palestinian Naqba; if any of us had a choice between spending eight months in Auschwitz, the duration of Elie Wiesel’s internment, or fifty years in a Palestinian refugee camp, only a fool would choose the latter. Whose suffering gets publicly commemorated is a political decision based not on the magnitude of the suffering but on the political lessons that the commemorators hope to privilege. Different suffering teaches different lessons. The Jewish Holocaust can plausibly teach the dangers of race-cultural self-assertion on the part of majorities and the attendant moral obligation to respect minority differences. The Ukrainian holocaust could plausibly teach much different lessons: the murderous results of internationalist attempts to eradicate national loyalties, as well as the hatred that a certain unassimilated minority often feels for its host populations. Everyone has heard of Adolf Eichmann and almost no one has heard of Lazar Kaganovich because as a society we judge the first set of lessons preferable to the second.

There should be no real mystery why this occurred. Holocaust education in the public schools, Holocaust Studies programs at most major universities, a Week of Holocaust Remembrance in mid-April, annual Holocaust commemorations in fifty states, a Holocaust Museum on the Washington Mall, Holocaust documentary after Holocaust documentary, Holocaust film after Holocaust film—all testify either to the absolutely unprecedented character of Jewish suffering during World War II, a suffering that dwarfs all pseudo-holocausts into pitiable insignificance, or else to the power of Jews to foist their racial agenda on White Gentiles. Since the first alternative should be unthinkable—the death-tolls of Soviet and Chinese Marxism were twenty million and sixty-five million respectively, according to the Black Book—no one can seriously discuss contemporary “Holocaust mania” without also discussing Jewish power.

Finkelstein has, however, no intention of discussing Jewish power, and he resolves the problem, in his own mind, by recourse to a fantasy common across the mainstream political spectrum, from Rush Limbaugh on the Right to Noam Chomsky on the Left—the fantasy of Israel as a valuable strategic resource, “a proxy for US power in the Middle East” necessary to ensure cheap oil and docile Muslims. Because the Holocaust deflects legitimate criticism of the Jewish State, Finkelstein argues, incessant remembering of the Holocaust also serves American foreign-policy objectives.

It is difficult even to conceive how this Israeli proxy is supposed to function, and there is no evidence that it does function, witness the price of oil, a devastating oil embargo in the 1970s, and the conspicuously undocile Muslim terrorists who now regularly attack Americans. But the proxy’s phantom existence enables Finkelstein and some others on the Left to identify their anti-Zionism as a species of anti-Americanism. Leftist criticism of Israel becomes de facto criticism of American geopolitical objectives. The latter are, Finkelstein imagines, really responsible for the billions shipped annually to Israel, and Zionist lobby groups in Washington, motivated not by distinctively Jewish group loyalty but by the raceless pursuit their own political agendas, are only the willing facilitators, “marching in lock-step with American power.” The unexamined assumption—that support for Israel benefits the United States—remains unexamined. No one need discuss Jewish power, Finkelstein has convinced himself, because Jewish power is only a useful tool in the hands of much more powerful non-Jewish “ruling elites.” America’s apparently Israel-first Middle East policy, far from indicating the ability of Jewish lobby groups to distort the democratic political process for their own ethnocentric purposes, as an unexpert could easily delude himself into believing, actually reflects the opposite, the absence of any significant, racially self-interested Jewish power. Zionist Jews still must remain beholden to their Gentile wire-pullers.

Finkelstein accordingly locates the beginning of frantic Holocaust remembering precisely in June of 1967, when American Jewry and the non-Jewish ruling elites who control U.S. foreign policy first recognized the geostrategic value of Israel, in the wake of the Jewish State’s unexpected victory over its Arab neighbors. Jewish elites became “the natural interlocutors for America’s newest strategic asset,” a role that offered them access to real political power, until then denied to Jews. They would abandon Israel and the Holocaust propaganda that helps sustain it the moment that Israel ceased to be, in the eyes of their Gentile benefactors, a valuable surrogate for Imperial America, since their Zionism and their awakened Holocaust memory are not the result of racial emotions, but only of unsentimental political calculation.

The argument cannot be taken seriously, but absent clairvoyant insights into the minds of the amorphous Jewish elites Finkelstein alludes to, it would be hard to disprove. We can only say that it does not adequately explain actual Jewish behavior. Why, for example, would Jewish elites, in this instance namable elites, repeatedly agitate for the release of Jonathan Pollard? They derive no political benefit from it, and they run the considerable political risk of irritating non-Jews, most of whom still regard treason as a serious offense. The simplest answer is the most convincing: Pollard is a Jew who spied on non-Jews for the benefit of the Jewish State, and Jewish elites feel racial loyalty toward him both as a fellow Jew and as an Israeli spy. They are therefore willing to take political risks, with no hope of political benefits, to secure his release.

Or consider the example of Neal Sher, former “nazi-hunter” for the Office of Special Investigations, later head of AIPAC, the chief Zionist lobby group in Washington. When Sher declares that “every Jew alive today is a Holocaust survivor,” the commonsense assumption that he is asserting, comically but nevertheless with complete sincerity, his emotional solidarity with the Holocaust’s Jewish victims plausibly accounts for both his former profession and the ruthlessness with which he and his fellow Jewish “nazi-hunters” have pursued it: deporting octogenarians to face Communist kangaroo courts during the Cold War, arranging tragi-comic trials in which senile alleged “war criminals” testify incoherently from their hospital beds, illegally suppressing exculpatory evidence in the Demjanjuk case, threatening impoverished East European countries with economic penalties, and so forth. Again the political risks are real, as Jews visibly exploit Gentile institutions to exact racial vengeance on their enemies from a half-century ago. Give the devil his due: The hatreds of Sher and his ilk are genuine, not tactical.

Most Diaspora Jews, as their actual behavior plainly demonstrates, do have a strong emotional attachment to their Jewish State, and most also have a strong emotional attachment to their politicized interpretation of the Holocaust. Finkelstein’s implausible thesis was necessary, from his perspective, only because the fact, if openly acknowledged, of strong Jewish racial loyalties will inevitably lead anyone who thinks seriously about the political abuse of the Holocaust to anti-Semitic conclusions. Incessant Holocaust promotion by Jews has some obvious ulterior motives, none of which has anything to do with American foreign-policy objectives: to delegitimize nationalism within majority-White nations; to legitimize Jewish nationalism in the Jewish State; to immunize Jews from criticism; to extract money from Germany, the United States, Switzerland, etc. Holocaust remembering is, in short, part of a racially self-interested agenda—it helps Jews and hurts us.

The Lessons of the Holocaust

The Jewish Holocaust, we are told endlessly, teaches universal “lessons,” and there are now taxpayer-funded Holocaust museums throughout the West, along with an extensive miseducational apparatus, designed to impart these supposedly crucial “lessons,” applicable (so we are instructed) to everyone everywhere. But the principal “lesson” that the Holocaust teaches is, undoubtedly, the lethal consequences of any racial or national consciousness among Whites. Because White racialism and intolerance and nationalism led to the Holocaust, White racialism and intolerance and nationalism must be eradicated, to avoid future holocausts. In terms of practical politics a politician who opposes Third World immigration on racial or even on cultural grounds has failed to learn the “lessons of the Holocaust”; the largely successful Jewish campaigns to tag Patrick Buchanan and Jörg Haider with the “Nazi” label/libel are recent cases in point.

The Holocaust Museum in Washington announced its anti-White objectives early on, even before its construction: “This museum belongs at the center of American life because America, as a democratic civilization, is the enemy of racism and its ultimate expression, genocide.” Genocide is, according to Jewish Holocaust lore, the natural outcome of any racial self-assertion by people of European descent, and American democracy is, by Jewish fiat, devoted to the extirpation of every vestige of our racial consciousness. That, not surprisingly, is what organized Jewry has wanted all along, as Kevin MacDonald has thoroughly documented.

In theory, the “lessons of the Holocaust” should teach Jews that Israel cannot ethically remain an explicitly Jewish state, committed to the preservation and advancement of a single Volk, rooted in land, tradition and blood, but must instead become a multiracial “state of its citizens,” bound together only by abstract political principles and an eagerness to celebrate diversity, like the nationless anti-nations most Diaspora Jews now demand that their host populations become. In practice, needless to say, few Jews and no major Jewish organizations allow logical consistency and the lessons of the Holocaust to interfere with their racial self-interest. On the contrary: “The heart of every authentic response to the Holocaust,” writes philosopher Emil Fackenheim, “. . . is a commitment to the autonomy and security of the State of Israel.” Whereas in Israel Jews have formed a Jewish State for themselves and permit no one but Jews to immigrate into it, not even the Palestinian Arabs they ejected in 1948, in the Diaspora they campaign for multiculturalism and Third World immigration. Jews hate all nationalisms save their own; they are nationalists within Israel, but anti-nationalists everywhere else.

Broad Jewish support for Zionism in Israel, coupled with strident opposition to any form of racialism or nationalism in the Diaspora, is the defining hypocrisy of contemporary Jewry. Finkelstein, like the late Israel Shahak, is not guilty of it. He is a principled man: He opposes racialism in the United States, so he also opposes it in Israel. Yet he is apparently unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge, his own anti-racialist debt to the “shelves upon shelves of [Holocaust] schlock” under whose weight American libraries are currently groaning. What has been, beyond any doubt, the most politically significant lesson of the Holocaust, the evil of White “racism,” is almost completely absent from his text, appearing only in two sentences in the final chapter:

Seen through the lens of Auschwitz, what previously was taken for granted—for example, bigotry—no longer can be. In fact, it was the Nazi Holocaust that discredited the scientific racism that was so pervasive a feature of American intellectual life before World War II.

Auschwitz did not, of course, scientifically discredit scientific racism, but it is certainly true that the academic study of racial differences has been discredited by its association with German National Socialism, although the facts themselves remain indifferent to the lessons of the Holocaust. It is also true that “bigotry is no longer taken for granted,” but this bland summary of the sea-change in post-war attitudes to race requires a translation. Finkelstein, like most multiracialists, believes that the majority-White nations of the West are still riddled, from top to bottom, with bigotry and systemic “racism.” The fight against White “racism” has scarcely begun; the lessons of the Holocaust have only taught us that bigotry should no longer be taken for granted.

An unwillingness to acknowledge their own impressive victories is a common characteristic of anti-White ideologues. The near absence of American borders does not inhibit Chicano activists from angrily denouncing the alleged “racism” of the small remnant that remains; the presence of a massive system of mandated racial discrimination directed against Whites does not inhibit “civil rights” activists from angrily denouncing (statistically nonexistent) “institutional racism” allegedly directed against Blacks. Anti-racialist campaigns need a perpetual state of emergency to eliminate the cultural toxin of “racism,” but the scarcity of the toxin only escalates demands for more emergency measures. Demands for further Euro-American capitulation are invariably presented as though no significant capitulation has yet occurred. Whites have foolishly divested themselves of their former racial consciousness, but they receive no credit for their new racelessness, only more vilification.

Thus in the midst of a culture soaked in White guilt, Finkelstein recommends more of the same, while presenting his proposals as part of a radical assault on a conservative Holocaust Establishment too timid to berate the goyim with the severity they deserve. “We could,” he says, “learn much about ourselves from the Nazi experience,” and he helpfully suggests additional atrocities that we might, if so inclined, also commemorate: European “genocide” in the Americas; American atrocities during the Vietnam War; American enslavement of Blacks; murderous Belgian exploitation of the Congo. All of these suggestions for atrocity commemoration have a feature in common that should not be too difficult to discern, and with the likely exception of the last, each could be dutifully recited by any well-indoctrinated schoolboy, thanks to multicultural miseducation.

Finkelstein has further suggestions. We could also contemplate, while learning much about ourselves from the Nazi experience, how “Manifest Destiny anticipated nearly all the ideological and programmatic elements of Hitler’s Lebensraum policy”; how German eugenics programs, commonly regarded as precursors of the Jewish Holocaust, merely followed American precedents; how the Nuremberg Laws were a milder variant of the Southern prohibition of miscegenation; how “the vaunted Western tradition is deeply implicated in Nazism as well,” Plato and Rousseau being the proto-Nazis Finkelstein has in mind. Clearly, learning from the Nazi experience means learning to see the Nazi in ourselves and in our history.

Here Finkelstein’s self-described radical critique of Holocaust orthodoxies has a parasitical relation to what it purports to debunk, tacitly relying on alleged Holocaust uniqueness in order construct a tenuous guilt-by-association which would be laughable in any other context. Hitler opposed “birth control on the ground that it preempts natural selection”; Rousseau said something similar. Most American states once had eugenics laws sanctioning the sterilization of mental defectives; the Nazis had similar laws. Leo Strauss called this form of non-reasoning the reductio ad Hitlerum. We are expected to see, and unfortunately most Whites will indeed see, not discrete ethical issues but a sinister pattern that establishes culpability. Yet the sinister pattern of culpability only exists if the Holocaust remains, on account of its unparalleled evil, the terminus toward which all of Western history was directed; the pattern ceases to exist if the Holocaust is dislodged from its position high atop a hierarchy of suffering. Substitute the Judeo-Bolshevik slaughter of Ukrainians for the Jewish Holocaust and you will also select a different set of signposts leading to a different unparalleled evil.

Since Finkelstein does not practice what he preaches, avoiding the implications of his own call to democratize suffering, his preferred Holocaust lessons turn out, as we have seen, to be not much different from the anti-racialist lessons that Holocaust promoters already teach. Elie Wiesel would have no objection to most of Finkelstein’s pedagogy of White guilt, though he would of course insist that Jews need not be among its pupils. White guilt is a given for both; they differ only on how we should best commemorate it and on whether Jews should be included among the group to whom the requisite lessons must be addressed. We are, Finkelstein and Wiesel agree, morally obliged to “confront” and “remember” Nazi crimes, even though the confronting and remembering will be “difficult” and “painful,” because we were somehow complicit in them, and in this both articulate what is now surely the core dogma of Holocaust propaganda. “[To] study . . . the Holocaust,” says Marcia Sachs Littell, director of the National Academy for Holocaust and Genocide Teacher Training, “is also to study the pathology of Western civilization and its flawed structures.” Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, Holocaust theologian, goes further: “The guilt of Germany is the guilt of the West. The fall of Germany is the fall of the West. Not only six million Jews perished in the Holocaust. In it Western civilization lost its claim to dignity and respect.”

Such expressions of anti-Western animus, routine in Jewish Holocaust writing, would be very difficult to reconcile with Finkelstein’s account of the genesis of Holocaust remembering, namely that organized Jewry “forgot” the Holocaust throughout the 1950s and then, in order to become valued participants in American statecraft, tactically “remembered” it in 1967, so that “Jews now stood on the front lines defending America—indeed, ‘Western civilization’—against the retrograde Arab hordes.” Anti-Western animus is, on the other hand, very easy to explain within the socio-political context of the decade when, by all accounts, the Holocaust received its English name and began its ascent into popular consciousness. American Jewry’s decision to remember the Holocaust was dependent on White America’s willingness to listen. A speaker normally presupposes an auditor, and vocal Holocaust remembering likewise presupposes receptive Holocaust listening. Jews had no intention in the 1960s, and they have no intention now, of remembering their Holocaust in the absence of a non-Jewish audience.

American Jews conveniently recovered their forgotten Holocaust memory at the very historical moment when racial victimization in the past began to confer political power in the present. Since Jews are more intelligent and much more politically powerful than other aggrieved minorities, they have elevated their wartime victimization above all other victimizations, while surrounding it with a deceptive, often eloquent language of humane universalism. The Jewish victims of the Holocaust, philosopher Paul Ricoeur writes, are “delegates to our memory of all the victims of history,” a formulation which in practice means that all of history’s other victims can be safely ignored or consigned to a small, dark corner in your local Holocaust museum, being somehow included in the representative suffering of the Jews. Thus this exceptional piece of Holocaust lore from Yad Vashem’s Avner Shalev: “We add our voice to those who believe that the Holocaust, because of its Jewish specificity, should serve as a model in the global fight against the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, ethnic hatred and genocide.” The sentence is logically incoherent but its meaning is clear: Jewish specificity ensures universality. And the political subtext is also clear: In the holy war against “racism,” one race of victims is far more equal than the rest.

Jewish Self-Segregation

In the famous film footage of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, a British soldier, a kind of Everyman Tommy, states the Allied consensus at the time: “When you actually see a place like this . . . you know what we are fighting for.” Surveying the same evidence, General Ira Eaker, of the United States Eighth Air Force, drew a similar conclusion: “Let any doubter, in all the generations to come, contemplate what it would be like to live in a world dominated by Hitler, the Japanese warlords, or any other cruel dictator or despot.”

Neither the British soldier nor General Eaker saw in the corpses of Belsen the pathology of our vaunted Western civilization, or the consequences of American eugenics laws and Lebensraum policies, or (in Wiesel’s words) the “shameful legacy” of pre-war immigration quotas, or the moral imperative to celebrate racial diversity. Neither would have accepted any of the preceding even if a helpful “Holocaust educator” had patiently explained them all; neither would have understood what the “Holocaust educator” was talking about. We, the civilized democracies, had just defeated them, the cruel dictatorships. Belsen and the other camps showed conclusively what we had just saved the world from. The average Mississippi Klansman would have concurred.

There were serious errors in this triumphalist vision of the war. A cruel despot, in fact history’s cruelest despot, Joseph Stalin, had been the main beneficiary, and the Red Army, even as the British soldier was speaking, were in the process of liberating Eastern Europe in the name of Soviet Marxism, raping and murdering as they liberated. A war that had nominally begun to prevent a historically German city, Danzig, from rejoining the German Reich, as most of its citizens wanted, had ended with not only Danzig but all of Eastern Europe in the hands of the Communists. And Belsen itself, which supplies our visual impressions of what the Holocaust “looked like,” happens to be among the German concentration camps that most clearly fit the revisionist thesis: that the bulk of deaths in the camps, and the emaciated bodies that form the Holocaust’s compelling iconography, were the result not of a program of deliberate extermination but of dislocations, caused by Allied bombing, in the final months of the war.

But the triumphalist consensus was culturally benign, at least for those nations that had fought on the winning side. It said something good about ourselves, and it dignified the many lives that the war had needlessly cost. The consensus should have served Jewish interests as well. Anti-Semitism was a distinctive vice of the cruel German dictatorship that the democratic Allies had just defeated, and it was therefore delegitimized, just as fascism and national socialism were delegitimized. Significantly, the first two Hollywood films attacking anti-Semitism, Crossfire and Gentleman’s Agreement, both appeared in 1947, the latter receiving an Academy Award for Best Picture. The war’s aftermath offered a didactic opportunity to define anti-Semitism as incompatible with the West’s highest ideals, which Allied soldiers had supposedly shed their blood defending. With Hitler’s defeat the enemies of the Jews were placed outside our Civilization, which should have encouraged Jews to curtail their frequent efforts to subvert it.

The Jewish group decision to shape their Holocaust memory into an indictment of Western “anti-Semitism” and “racism”—our “pathology”—was a calculated repudiation of post-war triumphalism. The Jewish Holocaust, as it emerged from the burgeoning identity politics of the 1960s, blurred and even effaced what had formerly been a clear distinction between them and us, cruel dictatorships and civilized democracies, and it set Jewry apart from both. There were now, in Wiesel’s analysis, “murderers” and “those who remained silent” on one side, and innocent Jews on the other, a much different binary opposition that allows no place for the exploits of the formerly heroic Allies. The corollary of this intense ethnocentrism is the doctrine of the world’s criminal “abandonment” of the Jews, a doctrine that distinguishes Jews from everyone else, to the detriment of the latter. “The world,” we recall, “has always wanted to wipe out the Jews,” which is another way of saying that Jews owe loyalty to nobody but themselves.

The alleged “pathology of Western civilization,” with the Holocaust as its foremost symptom, has been constructed incrementally by a series of choices in which Jews, Norman Finkelstein among them, have broadened what was previously the specific evil of the Nazis into the general evil of the West, so that, as German historian Ernst Nolte puts it, “Homo hitlerensis ultimately appears as merely a special case of Homo occidentalis.” Just as Jews are representative victims, so all Euro-folk, assuming the role once assigned to Germans alone, are representative perpetrators. We, including the descendants of World War II’s victors, are now potential Nazis who are capable, if not for anti-racialist training and regular visits to Holocaust museums, of repeating uniquely evil Nazi crimes. Unique Nazi evil has been expanded to include all of us, without suffering any diminution in the process.

Teaching the lessons of White guilt has been a long-standing mission of Jewish propagandists. The potential Nazi lurking behind the conventional American hero was the barely concealed subject of Crossfire, which introduced to the screen a radically new character who would be immediately recognized by a modern audience, the pathological White hate criminal, in this case a superficially normal veteran, a police officer before the war, who gratuitously murders a Jew; Dore Schary, producer of Crossfire, later became the national chairman of the ADL, thus making a seamless personal transition from cultural to explicitly political Jewish activism. Crossfire was an early attempt to “learn much about ourselves from the Nazi experience,” and contrary to Finkelstein, there is no shortage of such educational opportunities today. Recent Holocaust promoters, emboldened by our current affection for racial self-flagellation, have simply ascribed to Western man in general the pathology which their less ambitious forebears confined to lone madmen.

Insofar as we accept, as far too many of us do, the false moral burden to feel racial guilt over (“learn much about ourselves from”) German wartime atrocities, real and fictional, we have internalized Jewish ethnocentrism, learning to see ourselves through Jewish eyes. We should therefore learn our own “lesson of the Holocaust”—that the descendants of both the winners and the losers of the Second World War now have a common interest in repudiating the old mythology of unique Nazi evil, along with the anti-Western Holocaust industry which has fastened itself on it.

Some Thoughts on Hitler

And Other Essays

by

Irmin Vinson

Georg Walther Groddeck

 Studies in Genius VI

Groddeck

1948

IF THE WORK AND TEACHINGS of Georg Walther Groddeck [1] (1866–1934) are not as well known today as they deserve to be it is perhaps largely his own fault. His first job, he considered, was to heal; the writer and the teacher took second place. Over and above this Groddeck also knew how quickly the disciple can convert the living word into the dead canon. He knew that the first disciple is also very often the first perverter of the truth. And this knowledge informs his written work with that delightful self-deprecating irony which so many of his readers profess to find out of place; an irony which says very clearly “I am not inviting you to follow me, but to follow yourself. I am only here to help if you need me.” [2] The age does need its Groddecks, and will continue to need them until it can grasp the full majesty and terror of the “It” which he has talked so much about in his various books and particularly in that neglected masterpiece The Book of the It. [3]In considering Groddeck’s place in psychology, however, there are one or two current misunderstandings which deserve to be cleared up for the benefit of those who have mistaken, or continue to mistake, him for an orthodox disciple of Freud. Groddeck was the only analyst whose views had some effect on Freud; and Freud’s The Ego and the Id is a tribute to, though unfortunately a misinterpretation of, Groddeck’s It theory. Yet so great was his admiration for Freud that the reviewer might well be forgiven who once described him as “a populariser of Freudian theory.” No statement, however, could be farther from the truth, for Groddeck, while he accepts and employs much of the heavy equipment of the master, is separated forever from Freud by an entirely different conception of the constitution and functioning of the human psyche. His acknowledgements to Freud begin and end with those wonderful discoveries on the nature of the dream, on the meaning of resistance and transference. In his use of these great conceptual instruments, however, Groddeck was as different from Freud as Lao Tzu was from Confucius. He accepted and praised them as great discoveries of the age; he employed them as weapons in his own way upon organic disease; he revered Freud as the greatest genius of the age; but fundamentally he did not share Freud’s views upon the nature of the forces within the human organism which make for health or sickness. And this is the domain in which the doctrines of Groddeck and of Freud part company. In this domain, too, Groddeck emerges as a natural philosopher, as incapable of separating body and mind as he is incapable of separating health and disease.

To Freud the psyche of man was made up of two halves, the conscious and the unconscious parts; but for Groddeck the whole psyche with its inevitable dualisms seemed merely a function of something else—an unknown quantity—which he chose to discuss under the name of the “It.” “The sum total of an individual human being,” he says,

physical, mental and spiritual, the organism with all its forces, the microcosmos, the universe which is a man, I conceive of as a self unknown and forever unknowable, and I call this the “It” as the most indefinite term available without either emotional or intellectual associations. The It-hypothesis I regard not as a truth—for what do any of us know about absolute truth—but as a useful tool in work and in life; it has stood the test of years of medical work and experiment and so far nothing has happened which would lead me to abandon it or even to modify it in any essential degree. I assume that man is animated by the It which directs what he does and what he goes through, and that the assertion “I live” only expresses a small and superficial part of the total experience “I am lived by the It”… [4]This fundamental divergence of view concerning the nature of health and disease, the nature of the psyche’s role, is something which must be grasped at the outset if we are to interpret Groddeck to ourselves with any accuracy. For Freud, as indeed for the age and civilisation of which he was both representative and part, the ego is supreme. There it lies, like an iron-shod box whose compartments are waiting to be arranged and packed with the terminologies of psycho-analysis. But to Groddeck the ego appeared as a contemptible mask fathered on us by the intellect, which by imposing upon the human being, persuaded him that he was motivated by forces within the control of his conscious mind. “Yet,” asks Groddeck, “what decides how the food which passes into the stomach is subdivided? What is the nature of the force which decrees the rate of the heart-beat? What persuaded the original germ to divide and subdivide itself and to form objects as dissimilar as brain cortex, muscle or mucus?”

When we occupy ourselves in any way either with ourselves or with our fellow-man, we think of the ego as the essential thing. Perhaps, however, for a little time we can set aside the ego and work a little with this unknown It instead.…We know, for instance, that no man’s ego has had anything to do with the fact that he possesses a human form, that he is a human being. Yet as soon as we perceive in the distance a being who is walking on two legs we immediately assume that this being is an ego, that he can be made responsible for what he is and what he does and, indeed, if we did not do this everything that is human would disappear from the world. Still we know quite certainly that the humanity of this being was never willed by his ego; he is human through an act of will of the All or, if you go a little further, of the It. The ego has not the slightest thing to do with it.…What has breathing to do with the will? We have to begin as soon as we leave the womb, we cannot choose but breathe. “I love you so dearly, I could do anything for you.” Who has not felt that, heard it, or said it? But try to hold your breath for the sake of your love. In ten seconds or, at most, in a quarter of a minute, the proof of your love will disappear before the hunger for air. No one has command over the power to sleep. It will come or it will not. No one can regulate the beating of the heart…

Man, then, is himself a function of this mysterious force which expresses itself through him, through his illness no less than his health. To Groddeck the psychoanalytic equipment was merely a lens by which one might see a little more deeply than heretofore into the mystery of the human being—as an It-self. Over the theory of psychoanalysis, as he used it, therefore, stood the metaphysical principle which expressed itself through man’s behaviour, through his size, shape, beliefs, wants. And Groddeck set himself up as a watchman, and where possible, as an interpreter of this mysterious force. The causes of sickness or health he decided were unknown; he had already remarked in the course of his long clinical practice that quite often the same disease was overcome by different treatments, and had been finally led to believe that disease as an entity did not exist, except inasmuch as it was an expression of a man’s total personality, his It, expressing itself through him. Disease was a form of self-expression.

However unlikely it may seem, it is nevertheless a fact that any sort of treatment, scientific or old-wife’s poultice, may turn out to be right for the patient, since the outcome of medical or other treatment is not determined by the means prescribed but by what the patient’s It likes to make of the prescription. If this were not the case then every broken limb which had been properly set and bandaged would be bound to heal, whereas every surgeon knows of obstinate cases which despite all care and attention defy his efforts and refuse to heal. It is my opinion, backed by some experience with cases of this nature, that a beneficent influence may be directed upon the injured parts…by psycho-analysing the general Unconscious, indeed, I believe that every sickness of the organism, whether physical or mental, may be influenced by psychoanalysis.…Of itself psychoanalysis can prove its value in every department of medicine, although of course a man with pneumonia must be put immediately to bed and kept warm, a gangrened limb must be amputated, a broken bone set and immobilised. A badly built house may have to be pulled down and reconstructed with all possible speed when no alternative accommodation is available, and the architect who built it so badly must be made to see his mistakes…and an It which has damaged its own work, lung, or bone, or whatever it may be, must learn its lesson and avoid such mistakes in future…

Since everything has at least two sides, however, it can always be considered from two points of view, and so it is my custom to ask a patient who has slipped and broken his arm: “What was your idea in breaking your arm?” whereas if anyone is reported to have had recourse to morphia to get sleep the night before, I ask him: “How was it the idea of morphine became so important yesterday that you make yourself sleepless, in order to have an excuse for taking it?” So far I have never failed to get a useful reply to such questions, and there is nothing extraordinary about that, for if we take the trouble to make the search we can always find an inward and an outward cause for any event in life.The sciences of the day have devoted almost the whole of their interest to the outward cause; they have not, as yet, succeeded in escaping from the philosophic impasse created by the natural belief in causality, and side by side with this a belief in the ego as being endowed with free will. In all the marvellous pages of Freud we feel the analytical intellect pursing its chain of cause-and-effect; if only the last link can be reached, if only the first cause can be established, the whole pattern will be made clear. Yet for Groddeck such a proposition was false; the Whole was an unknown, a forever unknowable entity, whose shadows and functions we are. Only a very small corner of this territory was free to be explored by the watchful, only the fringes of this universe lay within the comprehension of the finite human mind which is a function of it. Thus while Freud speaks of cure, Groddeck is really talking of something else—liberation through self-knowledge; and his conception of disease is philosophical rather than rational. In the domain of theory and practice he is Freud’s grateful and deeply attentive pupil, but he is using Freud for ends far greater than Freud himself could ever perceive. Psychoanalysis has been in danger of devoting itself only to the tailoring of behaviour, too heavily weighted down by its superstructure of clinical terminology it has been in danger of thinking in terms of medical entities rather than patients. This is the secret of Groddeck’s aversion to technical phrases, his determination to express himself as simply as possible using only the homely weapons of analogy and comparison to make his points. In The Book of the It, which is cast in the form of letters to a friend, he discusses the whole problem of health and disease from a metaphysical point of view, and with an ironic refusal to dogmatise or tidy his views into a system. But the book itself, brimming over with gay irony and poetry, does succeed in circumscribing this territory of experience with remarkable fidelity; and from it Groddeck emerges not only as a great doctor but also as a philosopher whose It-concept is positively ancient Greek in its clarity and depth. “In vain,” says Freud somewhere, “does Groddeck protest that he has nothing to do with science.” [5] Yes, in vain, for Groddeck’s findings are being daily called upon to supplement the mechanical findings of the science which he respected, but of which he refused to consider himself a part. “Health and sickness,” he says,

are among the It’s forms of expression, always ready for use. Consideration of these two modes of expression reveals the remarkable fact that the It never uses either of them alone, but always both at once: that is to say, no one is altogether ill, there is always some part which remains sound even in the worst illnesses; and no one is altogether well, there is always something wrong, even in the perfectly healthy. Perhaps the best comparison we could give would be a pair of scales. The It toys with the scales, now putting a weight in the right pan, now in the left, but never leaving either pan empty; this game, which is often puzzling but always significant, never purposeless, is what we know as life. If once the It loses its interest in the game, it lets go of life and dies. Death is always voluntary; no one dies except he has desired death…The It is ambivalent, making mysterious but deep-meaning play with will and counter-will, with wish and counter-wish, driving the sick man into a dual relation with his doctor so that he loves him as his best friend and helper, yet sees in him a menace to that artistic effort, his illness.

The illness, then, bears the same relation to the patient as does his handwriting, his ability to write poetry, his ability to make money; creation, whether in a poem or a cancer, was still creation, for Groddeck, and the life of the patient betrayed for him the language of a mysterious force at work under the surface—behind the ideological scaffolding which the ego had run up around itself. Disease, then, had its own language no less than health, and when the question of the cure came up, Groddeck insisted on approaching his patient, not to meddle with his “disease” but to try and interpret what his It might be trying to express through the disease. The cure, as we have seen above, is for Groddeck always a result of having influenced the It, of having taught it a less painful mode of self-expression. The doctor’s role is that of a catalyst, and more often than not his successful intervention is an accident. Thus the art of healing for Groddeck was a sort of spiritual athletic for both doctor and patient, the one through self-knowledge learning to cure his It of its maladjustments, the other learning from the discipline of interpretation how to use what Graham Howe [6] has so magnificently called “The will-power of desireless”: in other words, how to free himself from the desire to cure. This will seem a paradox only to those—and today they are very many—who have no inkling of what it is like to become aware of states outside the comfortable and habitual drowsings of the ego. We are still the children of Descartes, and it is only here and there you will find a spirit who dares to replace that inexorable first proposition, with the words “I am, therefore I can love.” [7]It was this dissatisfaction with the current acceptance of disease as clinical entity that drove Groddeck finally to abandon, wherever possible, recourse to the pharmacopoeia or the knife; in his little clinic in Baden-Baden he preferred to work with a combination of diet, deep massage, and analysis as his surest allies. On these years of successful practice his reputation as a doctor was founded, while his writings, with their disturbing, disarming, mocking note, brought him as many pupils as patients, as many enemies as admirers. The majority of his theories and opinions, together with the It-concept on which his philosophy is based, were already worked out before he had read Freud. Yet he gladly and joyfully accepted the Freudian findings in many cases, and never ceased to revere Freud; but whereas the work of Jung, Adler, Rank, Stekel, might well be considered as modifications and riders to basic Freudian theory, Groddeck’s case is unique and exceptional. He stands beside Freud as a philosopher and healer in his own true right.

“With Groddeck,” wrote Keyserling [8] after his death,

has gone one of the most remarkable men I have ever met. He is indeed the only man I have known who continually reminded me of Lao-Tzu; his non-action had just the same magical effect. He took the view that the doctor really knows nothing, and of himself can do nothing, that he should therefore interfere as little as possible, for his very presence can invoke to action the patient’s own powers of healing. Naturally he could not run his sanatorium at Baden-Baden purely on this technique of non-intervention, so he healed his patients by a combination of psychotherapy and massage in which the pain he inflicted must have played some part in the cure, for in self-protection they developed the will-to-life, while the searching questions he put in analysis often touched them on the raw!…In this way Groddeck cured me in less than a week of a relapsing phlebitis which other doctors had warned me would keep me an invalid for years, if not for the rest of my life. [9]For the patient Groddeck sought to interpret, through the vagaries of outward symptom and clinical manifestation, the hidden language of the It; “I do maintain,” he writes,

that man creates his own illnesses for a definite purpose, using the outer world merely as an instrument, finding there an inexhaustible supply of material which he can use for this purpose, today a piece of orange peel, tomorrow the spirochete of syphilis, the day after a draught of cold air, or anything else that will help him pile up his woes. And always to gain pleasure, no matter how unlikely that may seem, for every human being experiences something of pleasure in suffering; every human being has the feeling of guilt and tries to get rid of it by self-punishment.

To Groddeck plainly the ego is only a reflexive instrument to be used as a help in interpreting the motive force which lies behind the actions and reactions of the whole man; it is perhaps this which gives his philosophy its bracing life-giving quality. It is a philosophy with a boundless horizon, whereas the current usages of psychoanalysis plainly show it to have been built upon a cosmogony as limited in scope as that which bounded the universe of Kelvin or of Huxley. [10] If Freud gives us a calculus for the examination of behaviour, the philosophy on which it rests is a philosophy of causes; to Groddeck, however, all causes derive from an unknowable principle which animates our lives and actions. So we are saved from the hubris of regarding ourselves as egos and of limiting our view of man to the geography of his reflexes; by regarding the ego as a function we can re-orientate ourselves more easily to the strains and stresses of a reality which too often the ego rejects, because it cannot comprehend, or because it fears it. So much, then, for the basic difference between the philosophies of Freud and Groddeck; it will be evident, if I have stated my case clearly, that they complement one another, that they are not antithetical, as some have believed them to be; for Freud supplies much of the actual heavy machinery of analysis, and Groddeck joyfully accepts it. In return Groddeck offers a philosophy of orientation and humility which justifies the technocratic contributions of Freud, and allows us to understand more clearly the problems and penalties not merely of disease, for that does not exist per se—but of suffering itself. With Freud we penetrate more deeply into the cognitive process; with Groddeck we learn the mystery of participation with the world of which we are part, and from which our ego has attempted to amputate us.

And what of the It? Groddeck does not claim that there is any such thing. He is most careful to insist that the It is not a thing-in-itself, but merely a way-of-seeing, a convenient rule-of-thumb method for attacking the real under its many and deceptive masks; indeed in this his philosophy bears a startling resemblance to the Tao-concept of the Chinese. The It is a way, not a thing, not a principle or a conceptual figment. Having accepted so much, Groddeck is prepared to attempt a half-length portrait of it.

Some moment of beginning must be supposed for this hypothetical It, and for my own purposes I quite arbitrarily suppose it to start with fertilisation…and I assume that the It comes to an end with the death of the individual—though the precise moment at which we can say an individual is dead is again not so simple a matter as it seems.…Now the hypothetical It-unit, whose origin we have placed at fertilisation, contains within itself two It-units, a male and a female.…It is perhaps necessary here to comment upon the extent of our ignorance concerning the further development of the fertilised ovule. For my purposes it is sufficient to say that after fertilisation the egg divides into two separate beings, two cells as science prefers to call them. The two then divide again into four, into eight, into sixteen and so on, until finally there comes to be what we commonly designate a human being.…Now in the fertilised ovule, minute as it is, there must be something or other—the It, we have assumed?—which is able to take charge of this multitudinous dividing into cells, to give them all distinctive forms and functions, to induce them to group themselves as skin, bones, eyes, ears, brain, etc. What becomes of the original It in the moment of division? It must obviously impart its powers to the cells into which it divides, since we know that each of them is able to exist and re-divide independently of the other.…It must not be forgotten that the brain, and therefore the intellect, is itself created by the It.…Long before the brain comes into existence the It of man is already active and “thinking” without the brain, since it must first construct the brain before it can use it to think with. This is a fundamental point and one we are inclined to ignore or forget. In the assumption that one thinks only with the brain is to be found the origin of a thousand and one absurdities, the origin also of many valuable discoveries and inventions, much that adorns life and much that makes it ugly.…Over and against the It there stands the ego, the I, which I take to be merely the tool of the It, but which we are forced by nature to regard as the It’s master; whatever we say in theory there remains always for us men the final verdict “I am I”.…We cannot get away from it, and even while I assert the proposition is false I am obliged to act as if it were true. Yet I am, by no means, I, but only a continuously changing form in which my “It” displays itself, and the “I” feeling is just one of its ways of deceiving the conscious mind and making it a pliant tool.…I go so far as to believe that every single separate cell has this consciousness of individuality, every tissue, every organic system. In other words every It-unit can deceive itself, if it likes, into thinking of itself as an individuality, a person, an I. This is all very confusing but there it is. I believe that the human hand has its I, that it knows what it does, and knows that it knows. And every kidney-cell and every nail-cell has its consciousness just the same…its “I” consciousness. I cannot prove this, of course, but as a doctor I believe it, for I have seen how the stomach can respond to certain amounts of nourishment, how it makes careful use of its secretion according to the nature and quantity of the material supplied to it, how it uses eye, nose and mouth in selecting what it will enjoy. This “I” which I postulate for cells, organs, etc, like the general-I (or the ego-awareness of the whole man) is by no means the same thing as the It, but is produced by the It, as a mode of expression on all fours with a man’s gestures, speech, voice, thinking, building, etc…About the It itself we can know nothing.

At this point the orthodox objections of the Rationalist deserve to be stated and considered. They are questions which Groddeck himself did not bother to answer, believing as he did that no hypothesis could be made to cover all the known facts of a case without special pleading or sophistry, and being unwilling to strain for interpretations which might appear to cover the whole of reality and yet in truth yield only barren formulae. Groddeck believed that whatever was posited as fact could sooner or later be disproved; hence his caution in presenting the It-hypothesis not as a truth, but as a method. Yet a critic of the proof-of-the-pudding school would have every right to ask questions along the following lines:

That a case of inoperable cancer, say, which defies every other form of treatment, can be made to yield before a Groddeckian attack by massage and analysis, is within the bounds of belief. Even the It-hypothesis might be conceded as a useful working tool in this case. Freud has so far altered the boundaries between the conscious and unconscious intention that we are inclined to respond to suggestions which fifty years ago would have seemed fantastic. But if a thousand people contract typhoid from a consignment of fruit are we to assume that the individual It of each and every one of them has chosen this form of self expression in a desire for self punishment?

It is the sort of question to which you will find no answer in Groddeck’s books; yet if he seems content to present the It as a partial hypothesis it is because his major interest is in its individual manifestation. Yet there is nothing in the hypothesis as such to preclude a wider application. Had he addressed himself to such a question he might very easily have asserted that just as the cell has its It-ego polarity, and the whole individual his, so also could any body or community develop its own. The conventions of the logic that we live by demand that while we credit the individual with his individuality, we deny such a thing to concepts such as “state,” “community,” “nation”—concepts which we daily use as thought-counters. Yet when our newspapers speak of a “community decimated by plague” or a “nation convulsed by hysteria” we accept the idea easily enough, though our consciousness rejects these formations as fictions. Yet in time of war a nation is treated as an individuality with certain specified characteristics; politicians “go to the nation”; The Times discusses the “Health of the Nation” with the help of relevant statistics. This unity which we consider a fiction—could it not reflect, in its component parts, the shadows of the individual unity, which is, according to Groddeck, no less a fiction? If a national ego why not a national It? But I am aware that in widening the sphere of application for the It-hypothesis I am perhaps trespassing: for if Groddeck himself remained silent on the score he no doubt had his reasons.

And what of the domain of pure accident or misadventure? A man hurt by a falling wall? The victim of a railway accident? Are we to assume that his It has made him a victim of circumstances? We know next to nothing about predisposition—yet it is a term much used by medical men to cover cases where the link of causality appears obvious, the effect related satisfactorily to the cause; thus the victim of hereditary syphilis satisfies the syntax of our logic, while the victim of a railway accident seems simply the passive object of fate. And yet we do unconsciously recognise predisposition in individuals, in our friends, for how often when the news of the accident reaches us do we exclaim “But it would happen to someone like X!”? The truth is that all relations between events and objects in this world partake of the mystery of the unknown, and we are no more justified in covering one set of events with words “disease” or “illness” than we are of dismissing another with words like “accident” or “coincidence.” Groddeck himself was too wily a metaphysician to put himself at the mercy of words. “I should tell you something,” he writes,

of the onset of diseases, but the truth is that on this subject I know nothing. And about their cure…of that, too, I know just nothing at all. I take both of them as given facts. At the utmost I can say something about the treatment, and that I will do now. The aim of the treatment, of all medical treatment, is to gain some influence over the It.…Generally speaking, people have been content with the method called “symptomatic treatment” because it deals with the phenomena of disease, the symptoms. And nobody will assert that they were wrong. But we physicians, because we are forced by our calling to play at being God Almighty, and consequently to entertain overwhelming ideas, long to invent a treatment which will do away not with the symptoms but with the cause of the disease. We want to develop causal therapy as we call it. In this attempt we look around for a cause, and first theoretically establish…that there are apparently two essentially different causes, an inner one, causa interna, which the man contributes of himself, and an outer one, causa externa, which springs from his environment. And accepting this clear distinction we have thrown ourselves with raging force upon the external causes, such as bacilli, chills, over-heating, over-drinking, work, and anything else.…Nevertheless in every age there have always been physicians who raised their voices to declare that man himself produced his diseases, that in him are to be found the causae internae.…There I have my jumping-off point. One cannot treat in any way but causally. For both ideas are the same; no difference exists between them.…In truth I am convinced that in analysing I do no differently than I did before when I ordered hot baths, gave massage, issued masterful commands, all of which I still do. The new thing is merely the point of attack in the treatment, the one symptom which appears to me to be there in all circumstances, the “I”.…My treatment…consists of the attempt to make conscious the unconscious complexes of the “I”.…That is certainly something new but it originated not with me, but with Freud; all that I have done in this matter is to apply the method to organic diseases, because I hold the view that the object of all medical treatment is the It: and I believe the It can be influenced as deeply by psychoanalysis as It can by a surgical operation.If we have spent much time and space in letting Groddeck, as far as possible in his own words, define and demarcate the territory of the It, the reason should by now be apparent. Not only is the ego-It polarity the foundation-stone upon which his philosophy is built, but without an understanding of it we cannot proceed to frame the portrait of this poet-philosopher-doctor with any adequacy; since his views concerning the function and place of the ego in the world are carried right through, not only in his study of health and disease, but also into the realms of art-criticism and cosmology, where his contributions are no less original and beautiful. Groddeck, like Rank, [11] began as a poet and writer, only to turn aside in middle life and embrace the role of healer; lack of first-hand acquaintance with Groddeck’s poetry, his one novel, and what his translator describes as “an epic,” prevents me from saying anything about this side of his activities; [12] but in his one incomplete volume of art-criticism, published here under the title of The World of Man, the reader will be able to follow Groddeck’s study of painting in terms of the It-process—for he believed that man creates the world in his own image, that all his inventions and activities, his science, art, behaviour, language, and so on, reflect very clearly the nature of his primitive experience, no less than the confusion between the ego and the It which rules his thoughts and actions. Unfortunately, his death in 1934 prevented him from carrying out more than the groundwork of his plan, which was to review every department of science and knowledge in terms of this hypothesis; but in the fragments he has left us on art, language, and poetry, the metaphysical basis of his philosophy is carefully illustrated and discussed. The humour, the disarming simplicity and poetry of his writing cannot be commented upon by one who has not read his books in the original German, but it is sufficient to say that enough of Groddeck’s personality comes through in translation to make the adventure of reading him well worthwhile, both for the doctor and for the contemporary artist—for the knowledge and practice of the one supplements the ardours and defeats of the other; and art and science are linked more closely than ever today by the very terms of the basic metaphysical dilemma which they both face. All paths end in the metaphysics.

Groddeck was often approached for permission to set up a society in England bearing his name, on the lines of the Freudian and Adlerian Societies; but he always laughed away the suggestion with the words “Pupils always want their teacher to stay put.” He was determined that his work should not settle and rigidify into a barren canon of law; that his writings should not become molehills for industrious systematisers, who might pay only lip-service to his theories, respecting the letter of his work at the expense of the spirit. In a way this has been a pity, for it has led to an undeserved neglect—not to mention the downright ignominy of being produced here in a dust-jacket bearing the fatal words, “Issued in sealed glacine wrapper to medical and psychological students only.” And this for The Book of the It, which should be on every bookshelf!

There has been no space in this study to quote the many clinical case-histories with which Groddeck illustrates his thesis as he goes along; I have been forced to extract, as it were, the hard capsules of theory, and offer them up without their riders and illustrations. But it is sufficient to say that no analyst can afford to disregard Groddeck’s views about such matters as resistance and transference any more than they can afford to disregard him on questions like the duration of analysis, the relation of analysis to organic disorders, and the uses of massage. If he wholeheartedly accepted many of Freud’s views there were many reservations, many amendments which he did not hesitate to express. For if Freud’s is a philosophy of knowledge, Groddeck’s is one of acceptance through understanding.

Another fundamental difference deserves to be underlined—a difference which illustrates the temperamental divergence between Freud and Groddeck as clearly as it does the divergence between the two attitudes to medicine which have persisted, often in opposition, from the time of Hippocrates until today. While Groddeck is campaigning wholeheartedly for the philosophy of non-attachment, he refuses to relinquish his heritage as a European in favour of what he considers an Asiatic philosophy. In his view the European is too heavily influenced by the Christian myth to be capable of really comprehending any other; so it is that his interpretation of the religious attitude to life refers us back to Christ, and if he accepts the Oedipus proposition of Freud, he does not hesitate to say that it seems to him a partial explanation. But Groddeck’s Christ differs, radically from the attenuated portraits which have been so much in favour with the dreary puritan theologians of our age and time.

Christ was not, neither will he be; He is. He is not real. He is true. It is not within my power to put all this into words; indeed I believe it is impossible for anyone to express truth of this sort in words, for it is imagery, symbol, and the symbol cannot be spoken. It lives and we are lived by it. One can only use words that are indeterminate and vague—that it why the term It, completely neutral, was so quickly caught up—for any definite description destroys the symbol.

And man, by the terms of Groddeck’s psychology, lives by the perpetual symbolisation of his It, through art, music, disease, language. The process of his growth—his gradual freeing of himself from disease, which is malorientation towards his true nature, can only come about by a prolonged and patient self-study; but the study not of the ego in him so much as of the Prime Mover, the It which manifests itself through a multiplicity of idiosyncrasies, preferences, attitudes, and occupations. It is this thorough-going philosophic surrender of Groddeck’s to the It which makes his philosophy relevant both to patient, to artist, and to the ordinary man. Thus the symbol of the mother on which he lays such stress in his marvellous essay on childhood fuses into the symbol of the crucifixion, which expresses in artistic terms this profound and tragic preoccupation.

The cross, too, is a symbol of unimaginable antiquity…and if you ask anyone to tell you what the Christian cross may seem to him to resemble, he will most invariably answer “A figure with outstretched arms.” Ask why the arms are outstretched and he will say they are ready to embrace. But the cross has no power to embrace, since it is made of wood, nor yet the man who hangs upon it, for he is kept rigid by the nails; moreover he has his back turned to the cross.…What may that cross be to which man is nailed, upon which he must die in order to redeem the world? The Romans use the terms os sacrum [13]for the bone which is over the spot where the birth-pangs start, and in German it is named the cross-bone, Kreuzbein. The mother-cross longs to embrace, but cannot, for the arms are inflexible, yet the longing is there and never ceases.…Christ hangs upon the cross, the Son of Man, the man as Son. The yearning arms which yet may not embrace are to me the mother’s arms. Mother and son are nailed together, but can never draw near to each other. For the mother there is no way of escape from her longing than to become dead wood…but the Son, whose words “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” gave utterance to the deepest mystery of our human world, dies of his own Will and in full consciousness upon that cross…It is in his writings on the nature of art and myths that we can see, most clearly revealed, the kernel of his thought concerning the nature of symbolism and the relation of man to the ideological web he has built about himself; it is here too that one will see how clearly and brilliantly Groddeck interpreted the role of art in society. He is the only psychoanalyst for whom the artist is not an interesting cripple but someone who has, by the surrender of his ego to the flux of the It, become the agent and translator of the extra-causal forces which rule us. That he fully appreciated the terrible, ambivalent forces to which the artist is so often a prey is clear; but he also sees that the artist’s dilemma is also that of everyman, and that this dilemma is being perpetually restated in art, just as it is being restated in terms of disease or language. We live (perhaps I should paraphrase the verb as Groddeck does), we are lived by a symbolic process, for which our lives provide merely a polished surface on which it may reflect itself. Just as linguistic relations appear as “effective beliefs” in the dreams of Groddeck’s patients, so the linguistic relations of symbolism, expressed in art, place before the world a perpetual picture of the penalties, the terror, and magnificence of living—or of being lived by this extra-causal reality whose identity we cannot guess. “However learned and critical we may be,” writes Groddeck, “something within us persists in seeing a window as an eye, a cave as a mother, a staff as the father.” Traced back along the web of affective relations these symbols yield, in art, a calculus of primitive preoccupation, and become part of the language of the It; and the nature of man, seen by the light of them, becomes something more than a barren ego with its dualistic conflicts between black and white. Indeed the story of the Gospels, as reinterpreted in the light of Groddeck’s non-attachment, yields a far more fruitful crop of meanings than is possible if we are to judge it by the dualistic terms of the ego, which is to say, of the will. “Only in the form of Irony can the deepest things of life be uttered, for they lie always outside morality; moreover truth itself is always ambivalent, both sides are true. Whoever wants to understand the Gospel teachings would do well to bear these things in mind.” And Groddeck’s Christ, interpreted as an Ironist, is perhaps the Christ we are striving to reinterpret to ourselves today. There is no room here for the long-visaged, long-suffering historical Christ of the contemporary interpretation, but a Christ capable of symbolising and fulfilling his artistic role, his artistic sacrifice, against the backcloth of a history which, while it can never be fully understood, yet carries for us a deliberate and inexorable meaning disguised in its symbolism.

If we have insisted, in the course of this essay, on the presentation of Groddeck as a philosopher it is because what he has to say has something more than a medical application. In medicine he might be considered simply another heretical Vitalist, for whom the whole is something more than the sum of its parts: certainly he has often been dismissed as a doctor “who applied psycho-analysis to organic disease with remarkable results.” While one cannot deny his contributions to psychoanalysis, it would not be fair to limit his researches to this particular domain, although the whole of his working life was spent in the clinic, and although he himself threw off his writings without much concern for their fate. Yet it would also be unjust to represent him as a philosopher with a foot-rule by which he measured every human activity. The common factor in all his work is the attitude and the It-precept which was sufficiently large as to include all manifestations of human life; it does not delimit, or demarcate, or rigidify the objects upon which it gazes. In other words he refused the temptations of an artificial morality in his dealings with life, and preferred to accord it full rights as an Unknown [14] from which it might be possible for the individual to extract an equation for ordinary living; in so doing he has a message not only for doctors but for artists as well, for the sick no less than for the sound. And one can interpret him best by accepting his It-concept (under the terms of the true-false ambivalence on which he insisted so much) both as truth and as poetic figment. And since Groddeck preferred to consider himself a European and a Christian it would be equally unjust to harp on the eastern religious systems from which the It may seem to derive, or to which it may seem related. (“The power of the eye to see depends entirely on the power of vision inherent in that Light which sees through the eye but which the eye does not see; which hears through the ear, but which the ear does not hear; which thinks through the mind but which the mind does not think. It is the unseen Seer, the unheard Hearer, the unthought Thinker. Other than It there is no seer, hearer, thinker.” Shri Krishna Prem. [15])

Groddeck would have smiled and agreed, for the principle of non-attachment is certainly the kernel of his philosophy; but the temper of his mind is far more Greek than Indian. And his method of exposition combines hard sane clinical fact with theory in exactly balanced quantities. One has the feeling in reading him that however fantastic a proposition may seem it has come out of the workshop and not out of an ideological hothouse.

Four books bearing his name have been published in England. Of these the only one which pretends to completeness is The Book of the It; [16] the three other titles are composed of essays and various papers, strung together by his translator. They are The World of Man, The Unknown Self, and Exploring the Unconscious. At the time of writing they are all unfortunately out of print. The first and third volumes contain a thorough exposition of his views on the nature of health and disease; The World of Man contains the unfinished groundwork of his projected study on the nature of pictorial art. The last volume also contains some general art-criticism, but is chiefly remarkable for an essay entitled Unconscious Factors in Organic Process which sets out his views on massage, and contains a sort of new anatomy of the body in terms of psychological processes. [17] Despite the fearfully muddled arrangement of these papers, not to mention a translation which confessedly misses half the poetry and style of the original, these books should all be read if we are to get any kind of full picture of Groddeck’s mind at work.

Even Groddeck’s greatest opponents in Germany could not but admit to his genius, and to the wealth of brilliant medical observations contained in his books; it is to be sincerely hoped that he will soon occupy his true place in England as a thinker of importance and a doctor with something important to say. It is fourteen years since Groddeck’s death and his complete work is still not available to the general public in England. Why?

For the purposes of this brief essay, however, I have struck as far as possible to the philosophy behind his practice, and have not entered into a detailed exposition of his medical beliefs and their clinical application; with a writer as lucid and brilliant as Groddeck one is always in danger of muddying the clear waters of his exposition with top heavy glozes and turbid commentaries. In his work, theory and fact are so skillfully woven up that one is always in danger of damaging the tissue of his thoughts in attempting to take it to pieces. I am content if I have managed to capture the ego-It polarity of his philosophy, and his conception of man as an organic whole. But as with everything in Groddeck one feels that manner and matter are so well-married in him that any attempt to explain him in different words must read as clumsily as a schoolboy’s paraphrase of Hamlet. This fear must excuse my ending here with a final quotation.

Every observation is necessarily one-sided, every opinion a falsification. The act of observing disintegrates a whole into different fields of observation, whilst in order to arrive at an opinion one must first dissect a whole and then disregard certain of its parts.…At the present time we are trying to recover the earlier conception of a unit, the body-mind, and make it the foundation of our theory and action. My own opinion is that this assumption is one we all naturally make and never entirely abandon and, furthermore, that by our heritage of thought, we Europeans are all led to trace a relationship between the individuum and the cosmos.…We understand man better when we see the whole in each of his parts, and we get nearer to a conception of the universe when we look upon him as part of the whole.

[1].   Durrell first encountered Groddeck’s Book of the It while in Alexandria and wrote to Miller about it in September 1944: “I’m absolutely bowled over by Groddeck’s Book of the It—it’s simply terrific. I have written England to send you a copy” (Durrell, Durrell–Miller 175). Groddeck was also greatly admired by W.H. Auden (Mengham 165) who would inscribe and send copies of The Book of the It to friends. Since Horizon originally published this essay and was co-edited by Auden’s close friend Stephen Spender, who was with Auden during the time he discovered Groddeck, it is likely this essay would have been known to him. This essay has also appeared as the introduction to Groddeck’s The Book of the It, and it refers to Groddeck’s other works, from which Durrell borrowed plots for The Alexandria Quartet, such as Semira’s nose from The Unknown Self (Gifford, “Noses” 2–4), and in it Clea discovers with her new hand, “IT can paint!” (Durrell, Alexandria 874). Groddeck is explicitly mentioned in The Avignon Quintet. Groddeck is out of favour in psychoanalytic communities and was discounted by Carl Jung (1875–1961) in his brief correspondence with Durrell. For more on Durrell’s use of Groddeck, see Christensen’s “An Overenthusiastic Response” (63–94) and Sobhy’s “Alexandria as Groddeck’s It” (26–39).[2].   Most quotations from Groddeck have not been identified. This anti-authoritarian theme in Groddeck may have been a significant part of his appeal to Durrell at this time, which coincides with his publishing several works through anarchist presses, most notably “Elegy on the Closing of the French Brothels” (30–32) in George Woodcock’s NOW in 1947, Zero and Asylum in the Snow through Circle Editions 1947, “Eight Aspects of Melissa” (1–8) in Circle in 1946, and many poems in the second and third issues of Robert Duncan’s Experimental Review in 1940–1941.[3].   First published as Das Buch vom Es in 1923. Durrell’s copy would have been the 1923 printing by Funk & Wagnalls. Durrell’s annotated copy of Groddeck’s The Unknown Self is held by the McPherson Library at the University of Victoria. A later copy, the 1951 Vision printing, is also held by the Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, as well as seven other volumes of Groddeck’s work. However, the Morris Library’s holdings are mainly in French, and only Exploring the Unconcsious predates this article in printing (1933). Durrell’s first copies appear lost during his travels after Egypt.

[4].   Groddeck, Book of the It 15–16. Durrell quotes this passage in a letter to Henry Miller, February 28, 1946 (Miller–Durrell 195).

[5].   “A writer who, from personal motives, vainly asserts that he has nothing to do with the rigours of pure science. I am speaking of George Groddeck….We need feel no hesitation in finding a place for Groddeck’s discovery in the structure of science” (Freud, The Ego 23).

[6].   E. Graham Howe (1896–1975) was a theosophist and psychoanalyst whose works Durrell had reviewed in the 1930s.

[7].   René Descartes (1596–1650) famously proposed “cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am).

[8].   Hermann Graf Keyserling (1880–1946) was a German philosopher who studied under and was treated by Groddeck.

[9].   Keyserling 12.

[10]. William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin (1824–1907) and Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), both scientists, are held up as examples of determinism and Victorian scientific rationalism.

[11]. Otto Rank (1884–1939) was a psychoanalyst close to Freud whom Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin knew well. Durrell first read Rank’s The Trauma of Birth in 1938 and wrote an essay on Rank that year—it was declined by Purpose, which later published his essay on Howe, “The Simple Art of Truth” (MacNiven 201). Purpose also published Groddeck’s essays in the 1920s.[12]. Groddeck’s novel Thomas Weltlein was published in 1919 and translated into English as The Seeker of Souls. Freud had significant praise for this novel.

[13]. The Latin term for the triangular bone at the base of the spine and back of the pelvis.

[14]. Freud derived the term for the Id from Groddeck (das Es, literally “the It” in English). Likewise, “Unknown” is Unbewusst in psychoanalytic terminology, typically rendered in English as “Unconscious.”[15]. Shri Krishna Prem in The Yoga of the Bhagavad Gita quoting Srimad Bhagavada (167). Shri Krishna Prem was born Ronald Henry Nixon and taught English at Lucknow University but changed his name when he studied under the university’s vice-chancellor, Yashoda Ma. The two founded an Ashram at the Radha-Krishna temple they built in Mirtola, India. He was the first Westerner to practice Vaishnavism.

[16]. The English version of The Book of the It has been cut; it is not the full text of the original German edition.

Lawrence Durrel From the Elephant's Back