My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  I relapsed for weeks at a time, once even for months.

  The whole thing seemed to me so monstrous, the accusations so boundless, that, tormented by the fear of doing injustice, I again became anxious and uncertain.

  The crucial argument that according to Mein Kampf removed that uncertainty and turned him conclusively into an anti-Semite has to do with Zionism and the attitude to it of liberal Jews, who rather than disowning the Zionists as non-Jews, as they perhaps would have done had it been purely a matter of faith, instead made sure that all Jews “remained unalterably of one piece.”

  In a short time this apparent struggle between Zionistic and liberal Jews disgusted me; for it was false through and through, founded on lies and scarcely in keeping with the moral elevation and purity always claimed by this people.

  The cleanliness of this people, moral and otherwise, I must say, is a point in itself. By their very exterior you could tell that these were no lovers of water, and, to your distress, you often knew it with your eyes closed. Later I often grew sick to my stomach from the smell of these caftan-wearers. Added to this, there was their unclean dress and their generally unheroic appearance.

  All this could scarcely be called very attractive; but it became positively repulsive when, in addition to their physical uncleanliness, you discovered the moral stains on this “chosen people.”

  In a short time I was made more thoughtful than ever by my slowly rising insight into the type of activity carried on by the Jews in certain fields.

  Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it?

  If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light – a kike!

  What had to be reckoned heavily against the Jews in my eyes was when I became acquainted with their activity in the press, art, literature, and the theater. All the unctuous reassurances helped little or nothing. It sufficed to look at a billboard, to study the names of the men behind the horrible trash they advertised, to make you hard for a long time to come. This was pestilence, spiritual pestilence, worse than the Black Death of olden times, and the people were being infected with it! It goes without saying that the lower the intellectual level of one of these art manufacturers, the more unlimited his fertility will be, and the scoundrel ends up like a garbage separator, splashing his filth in the face of humanity. And bear in mind that there is no limit to their number; bear in mind that for one Goethe, Nature easily can foist on the world ten thousand of these scribblers who poison men’s souls like germ-carriers of the worst sort, on their fellow men.

  It was terrible, but not to be overlooked, that precisely the Jew, in tremendous numbers, seemed chosen by Nature for this shameful calling.

  Is this why the Jews are called the “chosen people”?

  He goes on to link the Jews with prostitution and the white slave traffic in Vienna, declaring that he no longer hesitated in bringing up the Jewish problem, but was determined to bring it to light, and that now that he knew what signs to look for he would constantly discover new connections and manifestations, until suddenly coming upon Jews in a position where he had least expected to find them:

  When I recognized the Jew as the leader of the Social Democracy, the scales dropped from my eyes. A long soul struggle had reached its conclusion …

  Gradually I began to hate them.

  All this had but one good side: that in proportion as the real leaders or at least the disseminators of Social Democracy came within my vision, my love for my people inevitably grew. For who, in view of the diabolical craftiness of these seducers, could damn the luckless victims? How hard it was, even for me, to get the better of this race of dialectical liars! And how futile was such success in dealing with people who twist the truth in your mouth, who without so much as a blush disavow the word they have just spoken, and in the very next minute take credit for it after all.

  No. The better acquainted I became with the Jew, the more forgiving I inevitably became toward the worker …

  Thus I began to make myself familiar with the founders of this doctrine, in order to study the foundations of the movement. If I reached my goal more quickly than at first I had perhaps ventured to believe, it was thanks to my newly acquired, though at that time not very profound, knowledge of the Jewish question. This alone enabled me to draw a practical comparison between the reality and the theoretical flimflam of the founding fathers of Social Democracy, since it taught me to understand the language of the Jewish people, who speak in order to conceal or at least to veil their thoughts; their real aim is not therefore to be found in the lines themselves, but slumbers well concealed between them.

  For me this was the time of the greatest spiritual upheaval I have ever had to go through. I had ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and become an anti-Semite.

  The first phenomena he attributes to the Jews are all concerned with cultural decay. The decay of the press, the decay of literature, the decay of art, in other words decay within the public domain. This decay, perceived by many, could be seen either as the expression of moral decay or as the cause of moral decay. Hitler believed the latter, and his implication of the Jews in this respect may similarly be understood in two ways, as the expression either of the base morals of the Jewish people or of an attempt to corrupt existing moral structures, in other words to destroy the people from within. Hitler seems to believe it to be a combination of the two and that it is through the policies of the Social Democrats that the categorization and calculation applied to send those areas into decay, absent in other areas, become visible. Opinions, beliefs, and morals, whether expressed publicly or by the individual in private, in a work of art or a political utterance, are by such reasoning relative notions, like degrees of good and bad on a scale of morals. Eventually he shifts this relative boundary in toward the absolute, by posing the question: “Have we an objective right to struggle for our self-preservation, or is this justified only subjectively within ourselves?” Or, put differently, are culture and morality relative, something we decide for ourselves, or is their basis objective? Is there something external that lends credence to our moral beliefs, something external that defines our culture, something fundamental and given? He believes the answer to be yes, setting the boundary between nationalism and Marxism, which is basically an expression of the boundary between the German and the Jewish, in a notional space he calls the handiwork of the Lord. He writes the following:

  The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight. Thus it denies the value of personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, and thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and its culture. As a foundation of the universe, this doctrine would bring about the end of any order intellectually conceivable to man. And as, in this greatest of all recognizable organisms, the result of an application of such a law could only be chaos, on earth it could only be destruction for the inhabitants of this planet.

  If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.

  Eternal Nature inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands.

  Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.

  The most significant rhetorical turn in this line of reasoning, forming the kernel of Hitler’s political ideology as it is formulated in Mein Kampf, and thereby the point from which all subsequent actions performed by the Nazis issue, including those which in sum comprised the most comprehensive disaster in our human history, the Holocaust, is its arguments to the effect that anti-Semitism is not emotionally founded but t
he very opposite, a rational standpoint at which he has arrived by way of common-sense reasoning. This is a crucial distinction. Crucial for Hitler himself, in that if the hatred he felt toward the Jews had no rational foundation, which is to say if it were not accountable for by reference to something inherently Jewish, then it would necessarily come from him and be the expression of his inner feelings, whose existence he barely acknowledged, and crucial for those he was addressing, since by stating that his first, intuitive emotion in respect to the Jews was that anti-Semitism was a terrible thing, he thereby preempted an important and very human objection, that the Jews were people like them, with joys and sorrows, children and parents, friends and colleagues, and so one could not possibly hate them, could not turn against them, it being unreasonable and wrong. This is what you feel, Hitler says, and there is nothing wrong in feeling it, I did too. Anti-Semitism is outrageous. The pogroms are a terrible thing. But these feelings, which are deeply human, cloak the true state of affairs. And it is thus, concealed as if in disguise, that the activity of the Jew, which is directed toward destroying precisely what is good, precisely that which gives rise to the feeling that anti-Semitism is wrong, is taking place. It must be exposed, and this can only occur by way of rational arguments such as those he provides in his book. This is the rhetorical crux: I say things as they are. Germanness is associated with differences: the individual has value as a person, in that they belong to a race and are a part of that race’s political expression, which is the nation-state. The value of what is German resides in its spiritual ideals.

  Jewishness, equated with Marxism, is associated with sameness: for the Jew and the Marxist alike there are no individual differences between people, the individual is expendable, of value only in belonging to the mass, and there are no differences of race, which is to say no Volk and no nation-states. Jewish-Marxist value is material and monetary. Everything is the same in the Marxist world, and that lack of differentiation, that reality of no distinctions, is akin to chaos. Germanness is founded on values that form the basis of moral distinctions, good and bad, which is to say the qualitative, whereas the Jewish-Marxist domain is based on numbers and masses, which is to say the quantitative. Germanness finds its legitimacy in nature, which is to say the living world, the biological, which natural science has divided into classes, families, and species, and whose principle, the very principle of life itself, is the survival instinct, the right of the strongest. The Jewish-Marxist domain too finds its legitimacy in nature, but in that part of nature that is lifeless, which is to say in the material, that which is dead. The consequence of the Jewish-Marxist view is chaos, sameness, eventually death and the absolute void, which is the final and most undifferentiated state of all.

  A biological mind-set comes out on several levels of the text; when Hitler writes about areas of cultural life in which Jews feature strongly, they are likened to an abscess into which “you cut,” a dissection that reveals, like a maggot in a rotting corpse, a Jew. The activities of the Jews are likened to a pestilence, worse even than the Black Death, a poison. All this, filth, plague, poison, decay, comes from outside the human sphere to spread within it, eventually to destroy it. To Hitler’s mind, the body is at the outset pure, morally and physically, and may remain so by maintaining its remoteness from other bodies in a meticulous system of constraints regulated by morals. Syphilis, he later states, diseased sexuality, comes of prostituting love, which in turn is the fault of the Jews. “This Jewification of our spiritual life and mammonizing of our mating instinct will sooner or later destroy our entire offspring,” he writes. Money converts all values into pecuniary values, even the most hallowed of all, love, and the consequence is not just decay of the spirit, but also decay of the flesh, which becomes sick and riddled with disease. The image of the Jew as a kind of sprinkler spraying filth into the face of humanity would seem to adequately sum up Hitler’s mind-set, the threat of transgression, diffusion, disease, and chaos, the worst imaginable scenario, finding simple, striking, yet absolutely ambivalent expression.

  But thus far in his reasoning the distinction between the Jewish and the German is yet to be conceived as absolute, Marxist-Jewish understanding of the human domain as being amenable to quantification, capable of being weighed and measured, expressed in numbers, is yet to be construed as an expression of Jewish nature, that is as a part of the racial makeup of the Jews, but as belonging to their culture. The right to fight for one’s moral beliefs and culture is something Hitler finds in nature, where the strongest prevails, which makes the struggle absolute, though as yet it is not the object of his endeavor. This changes, however, as he proceeds to racial anthropology toward the end of the first volume of Mein Kampf, following his account of the capitulation and the resentment and hateful darkening of his soul it precipitated.

  What racial anthropology does is to transpose elements of nature onto culture. Nature is the biological world of animals and plants, of all things living, and it expresses nothing other than itself, refers to nothing other than itself; it is a godless universe Hitler writes about, though by no means valueless, for the principles that govern nature, its biological laws, are in themselves generative of value, and among those values the survival and development of the species is primary. That value is regulated by two principles, delimitation and selection.

  There are some truths which are so obvious that for this very reason they are not seen or at least not recognized by ordinary people. They sometimes pass by such truisms as though blind and are most astonished when someone suddenly discovers what everyone really ought to know …

  Thus men without exception wander about in the garden of Nature; they imagine that they know practically everything and yet with few exceptions pass blindly by one of the most patent principles of Nature’s rule: the inner segregation of the species of all living beings on this earth.

  Even the most superficial observation shows that Nature’s restricted form of propagation and increase is an almost rigid basic law of all the innumerable forms of expression of her vital urge. Every animal mates only with a member of the same species. The titmouse seeks the titmouse, the finch the finch, the stork the stork, the field mouse the field mouse, the dormouse the dormouse, the wolf the she-wolf, etc.

  Only unusual circumstances can change this, primarily the compulsion of captivity or any other cause that makes it impossible to mate within the same species. But then Nature begins to resist this with all possible means, and her most visible protest consists either in refusing further capacity for propagation to bastards or in limiting the fertility of later offspring; in most cases, however, she takes away the power of resistance to disease or hostile attacks …

  The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a tiger, etc., and the difference can lie at most in the varying measure of force, strength, intelligence, dexterity, endurance, etc., of the individual specimens. But you will never find a fox who in his inner attitude might, for example, show humanitarian tendencies toward geese, as similarly there is no cat with a friendly inclination toward mice.

  Therefore, here, too, the struggle among themselves arises less from inner aversion than from hunger and love. In both cases, Nature looks on calmly, with satisfaction, in fact. In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is always a means for improving a species’ health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development.

  This is a duplication of Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest, laden with values. Delimitation, purity, development, these are Hitler’s key concepts, first establishing them in nature, then transposing them onto the culture on the premise that man is first and foremost a biological being, but al
so that man’s ideas and conceptions are keyed to the biological in such a way that superior ideals may be developed only by superior races, and that the survival of these ideals is a function of the survival of the race. Such an ideal is unselfishness. All living organisms possess the instinct of self-preservation, which in the case of the most primitive species operates entirely on the I. What makes the Aryan race superior, according to Hitler, is not that the instinct of self-preservation is stronger than in other races, but that it expresses itself in a more advanced manner, rising above simple egotism, allowing its own needs to recede into the background so that it may work for others, make sacrifice for others, working for the good of a community greater than itself.

  The Aryan is not greatest in his mental qualities as such, but in the extent of his willingness to put all his abilities in the service of the community …

  This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture. From it alone can arise all the great works of mankind, which bring the founder little reward, but the richest blessings to posterity. Yes, from it alone can we understand how so many are able to bear up faithfully under a scanty life which imposes on them nothing but poverty and frugality, but gives the community the foundations of its existence. Every worker, every peasant, every inventor, official, etc., who works without ever being able to achieve any happiness or prosperity for himself, is a representative of this lofty idea, even if the deeper meaning of his activity remains hidden in him.