Title: What role do metaphors play in racial prejudice? The function of antisemitic imagery in Hitler's<i>Mein Kampf</i>
Abstract: ABSTRACT Musolff's study applies methods of cognitive metaphor analysis to Hitler's antisemitic imagery in Mein Kampf, especially to the conceptualization of the German nation as a (human) body that had to be cured from a deadly disease caused by Jewish parasites. The relevant expressions from the conceptual domains of biological and medical categories form a partly narrative, partly inferential-argumentative source ‘scenario’, which centred on a notion of blood poisoning that was understood in three ways: a) as a supposedly real act of blood defilement, i.e. rape; b) as a part of the source scenario of illness-cure; and c) as an allegorical element of an apocalyptic narrative of a devilish conspiracy against the ‘grand design of the creator’. The conceptual differences of source and target levels were thus short-circuited to form a belief-system that was no longer open to criticism. The results cast new light on central topics of Holocaust research, such as the debates between more ‘intentionalist’ and more ‘functionalist’ explanations of the origins of the Holocaust, and the question of how the Nazi metaphor system helped gradually to ‘initiate’ wider parts of the German populace into the implications of the illness-cure scenario as a blueprint for genocide. The Nazi antisemitic metaphor system thus provides a unique example of the cognitive forces that can be unleashed in the service of racist stigmatization and dehumanization. Keywords: antisemitismbody politiccognitive theoryHolocaust Mein Kampf metaphorNational Socialismrace Notes 1See postings to the Figurative Language Network (FLN), 3 July 2001, available at www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/fln.html (viewed 2 November 2006). 2Posting to FLN, 3 July 2001. 3Postings to FLN, 3–13 July 2001. 4See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1980); Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002); Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think. Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books 2002). 5See e.g. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 vols (Chicago: Quadrangle 1961), i.2–19; Joachim C. Fest, Hitler. Eine Biographie (Frankfurt on Main, Berlin and Vienna: Propyläen 1974), 292–304; Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler's World View. A Blueprint for Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1981), 57–9, 89–91; Philippe Burrin, Hitler and the Jews. The Genesis of the Holocaust, trans. from the French by Patsy Southgate (London: Edward Arnold 1994), 27–8, 31–6; Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews. Vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1998), 87–8; Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (London: Penguin 1999), 244; and Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London: Allen Lane 2003), 197–8. 6See e.g. Rudolf Olden, Hitler (Amsterdam: Querido 1936); Kenneth Burke, ‘The rhetoric of Hitler's “battle”, Southern Review, vol. 5, Summer 1939, 1–21; Victor Klemperer, LTI. Notizbuch eines Philologen (Leipzig: Reclam 1946); Dolf Sternberger, Gerhard Storz and Wilhelm E. Süskind, Aus dem Wörterbuch des Unmenschen [1946–8] (Frankfurt on Main and Berlin: Ullstein Taschenbuch 1986); George Steiner, ‘The hollow miracle’, in George Steiner, Language and Silence. Essays 1958–1966 (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1979), 136–51; Eugen Seidel and Ingeborg Seidel-Slotty, Sprachwandel im Dritten Reich (Halle: Verlag Sprache und Literatur 1961); Konrad Ehlich (ed.), Sprache im Faschismus (Frankfurt on Main: Suhrkamp 1989); Cornelia Schmitz-Berning, Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 1998); and Peter von Polenz, Deutsche Sprachgeschichte vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. III: 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 1999), 541–54. 7For critical views of the classic tradition of metaphor theory, see Max Black, ‘Metaphor’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 55, 1954, 273–94, and James E. Mahon, ‘Getting your sources right. What Aristotle didn't say’, in Lynne Cameron and Graham Low (eds), Researching and Applying Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999), 69–80. 8This politico-ethical criticism of metaphor itself has a long tradition in political philosophy, reaching back at least to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. See Stephen K. Land, The Philosophy of Language in England (New York: AMS Press 1986); Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996); and Andreas Musolff, Metaphor and Political Discourse (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2004), 159–72. 9Recently, Felicity Rash has published a comprehensive inventory of figurative passages in Mein Kampf, which is ordered under the two general headings cultural v. nature metaphors and similes into more than 170 subcategories. By providing references for all examples in German and English, the inventory provides an invaluable basis for further research. Felicity Rash, ‘A Database of Metaphors in Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf’, 2005, available at www.qmul.ac.uk/%7Emlw032/Metaphors_Mein_Kampf.pdf (viewed 2 November 2006). 10Jäckel, Hitler's World View, 58. For a critique of this strong ‘intentionalist’ position because of its teleological, and thus ultimately circular, structure, see Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (London: Edward Arnold 2000), 104. 11Neil Gregor, How to Read Hitler (London: Granta 2005), 67. 12See Paul Chilton, ‘Manipulation, memes and metaphors: the case of Mein Kampf’, in Louis de Saussure and Peter Schulz (eds), Manipulation and Ideologies in the Twentieth Century. Discourse, Language, Mind (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins 2005); Bruce Hawkins, ‘Ideology, metaphor and iconographic reference’, in René Dirven, Roslyn Frank and Cornelia Ilie (eds), Language and Ideology. Vol. II: Descriptive Cognitive Approaches (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins 2001), 27–50; and Felicity Rash, ‘Metaphor in Hitler's Mein Kampf’, metaphorik.de (online journal), no. 9, 2005, 74–111, available at www.metaphorik.de/09/rash.pdf (viewed 13 November 2006). 13For the specific ‘logic’ of analogical reasoning as the basis for the use of metaphor in argumentation, see Stella Vosniadou and Andrew Ortony (eds), Similarity and Analogical Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989); Dedre Gentner, Keith Holyoak and Boicho N. Kokinov (eds), The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2001); and Musolff, Metaphor and Political Discourse, 30–9. 14See Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being. A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1936); F. W. Maitland, ‘The body politic’, in F. W. Maitland, Selected Essays, ed. H. D. Hazeltine, G. Lapsley and P. H. Winfield (Cambridge 1936), 240–56; E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture [1943] (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1982); Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology [1957] (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1997); and David G. Hale, The Body Politic. A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (The Hague and Paris: Mouton 1971). 15See, for example, Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Vintage Books 1978); George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason. A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1989), 166–72; and Andreas Musolff, ‘Ideological functions of metaphor: the conceptual metaphors of health and illness in public discourse’, in René Dirven, Roslyn Frank and Martin Pütz (eds), Cognitive Models in Language and Thought: Ideologies, Metaphors and Meaning (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter 2003), 327–52. 16The editions used were Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Franz Eher 1933) for the German text, and Mein Kampf, trans. from the German by Ralph Manheim [1943] (London: Pimlico 1992) for the English text. In the following discussion, all English translations are by the author, with key terms supplied in German, and page references both to the German text of 1933 and the reprint of the Manheim translation in the footnotes. 17Hitler, Mein Kampf, 252 (1933); 210 (1992). 18Hitler, Mein Kampf, 268 (1933); 224 (1992). 19Hitler, Mein Kampf, 253–4 (1933); 211–12 (1992). 20Hitler, Mein Kampf, 334 (1933); 277 (1992). 22Hitler, Mein Kampf, 70 (1933); 60 (1992). 21Hitler, Mein Kampf, 360 (1933); 298 (1992). 23For discussion of the cognitive structure of ‘scenario’, see Charles J. Fillmore, ‘An alternative to checklist theories of meaning’, Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, vol. 1, 1975, 123–31, esp. 124–9, and George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1987), 285–6; Musolff, Metaphor and Political Discourse, 17–29. 24See Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2001); Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men. Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins 1992); Christopher Browning, The Path to Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992); Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews; and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1996). 25Hitler, Mein Kampf, 311 (1933); 258 (1992). 26Hitler, Mein Kampf, 313 (1933); 260 (1992). 27Jäckel, Hitler's World View, 89. 28Alan Bullock, Hitler. A Study in Tyranny (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1962), 40. 29Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936, 244. 30Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 198. 31See Hans-Günter Zmarzlik, ‘Der Sozialdarwinismus in Deutschland als geschichtliches Problem’, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschicht, vol. 11, 1963, 246–73; Gerhard Baader and Ulrich Schultz (eds), Medizin und Nationalsozialismus: Tabuisierte Vergangenheit—Ungebrochene Tradition? (Berlin: Verlagsgesellschaft Gesundheit 1980); Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin. The Popularisation of Darwinism in Germany 1860–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1981); Peter Weingart, Jürgen Kroll and Kurt Bayertz, Rasse, Blut und Gene. Geschichte der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland (Frankfurt on Main: Suhrkamp 1988); Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989); Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler. Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2004); and, critically, Richard J. Evans, ‘In search of German Social Darwinism’, in Richard J. Evans, Rereading German History, 1800–1996. From Unification to Reunification (London: Routledge 1997), 119–44. 32Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life [1859] (London: John Murray 1901), 644. 33Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex [1879] (London: Penguin 2004), 210. 35Hitler, Mein Kampf, 444–5 (1933); 365–6 (1992). Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch has pointed out the allusion to Genesis 1: 26 in Hitler's reference to ‘men in the image of the Lord’: ‘And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’ (Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch, Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Munich: W. Fink 2002), 312–17). 34Darwin, The Origin of Species, 646. 37Hitler, Mein Kampf, 70 (1933); 60 (1992). 36Hitler, Mein Kampf, 313 (1933); 260 (1992). 38Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 87; Bärsch, Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismvs, 380. 39See Bärsch, Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismvs, 277–318. For relevant passages in Mein Kampf, see, for example, 317, 340, 351, 752 (1933); 59, 63, 282, 294, 605 (1992). 40For the debate concerning the (pseudo)-religious character of Hitler's ideology, see, in addition to Bärsch, Manfred Ach and Clemens Pentrop, Hitlers ‘Religion’: Pseudoreligiöse Elemente im nationalsozialistischen Sprachgebrauch (Munich: Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Religions- und Weltanschauungsfragen 1991); Michael Ley and Julius H. Schoeps (eds), Der Nationalsozialismus als politische Religion (Bodenheim: Philo Verlagsgesellschaft 1997); Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich. A New History (London: Macmillan 2000), 97–101; Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003); and Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939 (London: Allen Lane 2005), 257–60. 41Fest, Hitler, 202, 732. 42See, for example, Hitler's admiration of the ‘propagandistic’ successes of the Catholic Church, as stated repeatedly in Mein Kampf, 481, 512–13 (1933); 393, 417–18 (1992). 43According to Susan Sontag (Illness as Metaphor, 71–6), traditional disease metaphors in political theory at least up to the Enlightenment served mainly the purpose of ‘encourag[ing] rulers to pursue a more rational policy’ and were not normally used to suggest the complete destruction of social groups, nations or races. 44Hitler, Mein Kampf, 337 (1933); 279 (1992). 45See, for example, Hitler, Mein Kampf, 268, 316, 346, 751 (1933); 223–4, 262, 268–9, 288, 605 (1992). 46See, for example, Hitler, Mein Kampf, 334, 335, 339, 340 (1933); 276, 281, 282, 296 (1992). 47Hawkins, ‘Ideology, metaphor and iconographic reference’, 46. 48This doubly stigmatizing force of the bloodsucker metaphor probably accounts for its long tradition of use as a pejorative term. See Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable, ed. Adrian Room (London: Cassell 2000), 142, and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 2 [1860] (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 1984), 190. 49See, for example, Hitler, Mein Kampf, 62, 334, 360 (1933); 54, 277, 298 (1992). 50See, for example, Hitler, Mein Kampf, 135, 186, 331, 361 (1933); 113, 155, 274, 298 (1992). 51See, for example, Hitler, Mein Kampf, 63, 269, 272 (1933); 54, 224, 226 (1992). Tuberculosis, which figured in Hitler's antisemitic metaphors in earlier writings, is mentioned only in literally medical contexts in Mein Kampf, see 253, 269 (1933); 211, 224 (1992). 52Hitler, Mein Kampf, 358 (1933); 296 (1992). 53See Steve Jones, The Language of the Genes. Biology, History and the Evolutionary Future (London: Flamingo 2000), 38–40. 54Hitler, Mein Kampf, chapters 2, 7, 11 and passim. 56Hitler, Mein Kampf, 357 (1933); 295 (1992). 55See Henry Picker (ed.), Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier 1941–1942 (Stuttgart: Seewald 1965); and Werner Jochmann (ed.), Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941–1944. Die Aufzeichnungen Heinrich Heims (Munich: Heyne 1982). 57Originally, the term Blutschande appears to have meant mainly incest but was then extended metonymically. See Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 190–1. 58Hitler, Mein Kampf, 22, 361 (1933); 21, 299 (1992). 59Hitler, Mein Kampf, 253, 335 (1933); 277, 289 (1992). 60See Christopher Browning, ‘Beyond “intentionalism” and “functionalism”: the decision for the Final Solution reconsidered’, in Browning, The Path to Genocide, 86–121; David Cesarani (ed.), The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation (London: Routledge 1996), 1–29 (Introduction); Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, 93–133; Saul Friedländer, ‘The extermination of the European Jews in historiography: fifty years later’, in Omer Bartov, The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath (London and New York: Routledge 2000), 79–91; and Peter Longerich, Der ungeschriebene Befehl: Hitler und der Weg zur ‘Endlösung’ (Munich: Piper 2001). 61See David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism (Oxford: Blackwell 1992); David Bankier, ‘German public awareness of the Final Solution’, in Cesarani (ed.), The Final Solution, 215–27; Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jew, passim; and Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 586–610. 62For the crucial role of propaganda in the preparation and actual planning of the Soviet campaign as a war of racial annihilation, see Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army. Soldiers, Nazis and War in the Third Reich (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1991); Burrin, Hitler and the Jews, 115–31, 140–7; and Christopher Browning, ‘Hitler and the euphoria of victory’, in Cesarani (ed.), The Final Solution, 137–74.
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-02-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 97
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot