Introducing Nazi Germany to Undergraduates

In teaching Nazi Germany, I have made use of psychohistorical approaches in both lecture and seminar courses, with my explorations in an undergraduate seminar taught since 1991 being the most fruitful. Most of the students in this class, taught in a residence hall, are freshmen and sophomores. This is their introduction to Nazi Germany. For this reason, I think it necessary to provide them with basic facts, developmental patterns, and hypotheses generic to more “traditional” historiographical approaches. In due course, psychological explanations and hypothesizing enter the picture in ways which have proved to be utterly unintrusive — indeed, quite “natural.”

This is due to the fact that it soon becomes plain that there are two extremely important issues, examination of which is crucial to gaining an understanding of the National Socialist phenomenon: 1) Why and how Adolf Hitler came to have the ferociously-held beliefs that he did. 2) Why and how those beliefs found resonance enough in a people which allowed him to come to power and hold onto it, with, at least until the Stalingrad disaster, the approval of the vast majority of Germans. Here, quite obviously, we are dealing with the problem of the relationship between the individual and general historical developments, one of the oldest of historical conundrums. And, in due course, it becomes plain that with regard to Nazi Germany, more traditional approaches can respond only by resorting to explanations grounded in demonology, historical contingency (or accident), or in quasi-teleological discourses (e.g., Marxist), which, over time, increasingly ring hollow.

On occasion, I’ve felt constrained to provide hints or suggestions regarding the gnawing question of the relationship between Hitler and general German and, in some cases, European, developments. However, many if not most students (last spring there were 27 students in the seminar), quite on their own, came to the conclusion that only explanations informed by psychology could bridge the gap between Hitler and the forces which had shaped him into a person who was so extraordinarily influential.         A few of the students were either greatly interested in psychology, or declared psychology majors, and these often led the way in class discussions. By mid-term, though, just about all the students had established connections between the circumstances of Hitler’s family background (as laid out by Joachim Fest [in Hitler (1975)]) and leading characteristics of his ideology, his political ventures and political successes, and why the man’s propagandistic appeals were so effective. In a word, through confronting the individual-general question, students had come not only to accept psychological explanations as offering at least regulative hypotheses with regard to Nazi Germany, but had come to see that there was nothing particularly exotic or bizarre about them. At the same time, these students, who by now were as much teaching themselves as being “taught,” saw that aspects of “depth psychology” were themselves inherently

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historical, that an individual’s history always must be seen as being informed by general societal and cultural concerns. And that it is in fact the degree to which an individual product of a given society can make his own singular wishes, fantasies, and life-experiences congruent with those of society as a whole that will determine political success or failure.

The frustrated and angry child as father to the repressed but oh-so-successful political man, the Lebensweg of Adolf Hitler, became seen as both metaphor and guidepost for post-Great War [World War I] German society as a whole. At the same time, students became aware of how patterns of behavior which, under most social circumstances, would be seen as “dysfunctional,” could (and can) be of immense value in societies which, battered by history, were (and are) themselves “dysfunctional.” It was in this context that terms such as “displacement,” “projection,” and “trans-ference” were introduced: “projection” was used by one of the psychology majors, and by this point in the term, nobody seemed to view these terms as abstractions. This was particularly the case, since some of the students were reflecting on personal traumatic experiences, and how these had influenced their respective social and political attitudes. Again, the issue which allowed for the acceptance of the role of psychohistorical explanations in gaining a partial understanding of the Nazi phenomenon was that of the relationship between the individual and general forces.

By the time the class confronted the Holocaust, and saw the movie Night and Fog, the young people understood that the horrors to which they were exposed were the ultimate purpose of Nazism and that these had resulted from a terrible synergy between a dysfunctional personal history and a traumatized society which was in the same state. One student, in commenting upon her reaction to Night and Fog, summed up her experiences with psychohistorical approaches very well. “To understand,” she said, “is not to forgive; but to understand for the future. I guess that is all that we can do.” She was crying, and she was not alone.

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