"There is no safety for honest men but by believing all possible evil

of evil men." - Edmund Burke

The "Fascist" Fascination

I do not know if Jewish Holocaust films and books are preponderant over works about other abominations in the last two centuries, but the topic is certainly more familiar to most folks.  Despite Communists' superior mass murder, Nazi crimes seem much more fascinating and unfathomable.  Why?  Why is Hitler more popularly despised than Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot or other elitist thugs in relatively recent history?  (Charlemagne had 4,000 people decapitated in a single day.)  Why is the perverted swastika as commonly recognized as the yellow smiley face?

Sheer body count should not determine positive or negative greatness.  Method, style, efficiency, indifference, and motive determine the weight of outrage, revulsion, and residual fascination.  In fact, mass killings (by human design or nature) tend to cancel lasting outrage out, as if the magnitude is too immediate and unimaginable to retain.  (Consider how quickly 2005's Asian tsunami grief faded despite continued aid programs that go on behind the scenes.  150,000+ people being wiped out in mere minutes is too swift and big to hold.)  Premeditated, systematic abuse and slaughter wins prolonged attention.  And though the Soviets excelled at premeditated, systematic abuse and slaughter, the Nazis just shined brighter and with more gusto.  Mathias Freese, author of The i Tetralogy, considers the Jewish Holocaust to be "the single most important human event in world history."  Could he be right? 

I don’t mean to diminish or absolve any non-Nazi atrocities.  However, in this piece I address a contemporary novel about the National Socialist Workers Party scourge that happened to be one of the few genuinely totalitarian systems in history (the others being under what I call Big Communism umbrella).  When one hears the words "Nazi" or "Hitler," one thinks of "Holocaust," "death camps," "gas chambers," "ovens," "human skin lampshades," "piles of corpses," and so on.  Sadly, the "forced-labor camp" euphemism pops up when Communism is mentioned, downplaying the sadistic death machine of the relatively guilty and the innocent alike.  I blame this on sociological/political kid gloves that handle Communist atrocities - the same gloves that polish the reputation of pop-culture T-shirt hero Che Guevera even though he was a murder-relishing snake.  

The term "holocaust" (from the Middle English for "burnt offering" and Greek for "burnt whole"), used widely about the Nazi nightmare only by the late 1950s, has become inexorable from the Nazi stomping of Jews.  I prefer to specify Shoah or Jewish Holocaust when addressing the Nazi nightmare.  "Holocaust" is a word loosely used to describe countless acts of inhumanity.  The term belongs to a select few murder crimes.  The most recent event I can call holocaust is the 1994 mass slaughter of Tutsis by crazed Hutus in Rwanda.  That event, the gleeful murder of a half-million to a million men, women, and children, provides a key example of holocaust as I define it: An indifferent liquidation of a people or peoples for the sake of liquidation.  

Until relatively recently, slavery has been a historical (albeit horrible) norm, an open and usually acceptable aspect of society and even civilization.  Totalitarian power is unique in its mastery over perception, its secret barbarism, and its complete dehumanization of inmate human beings.  The inmate is isolated from time and space, damned to limbo.  A slave at the very least has market value and labor purposes.  A death camp victim has zero value and no purpose.  He/she only breathes or labors in order to be controlled and denied both life and death until a whim or schedule flicks him from mortality.    Why were there no notable revolt attempts in the death camps?  Why did docile crowds often go knowingly to their grisly demise?  Because identity and purpose were eradicated.  Opposition needs will, but only a self can flex will - and, as Kierkegaard wrote, "a person who has no will is not a self."  Unlike slaves or oppressed kinds or subjects of discrimination, death camp victims' very existence is effectively nullified.  They are, to use a popular metaphor, living dead - or, perhaps more poetically, twice killed.  Life itself is choked and erased; menstruation symbolically ceases.

Another misunderstanding about Nazis and Communists is focus on dissimilarities rather than commonalities.  Somehow the "fascist" tag has become more prevalent and insulting among so-called activists and "socially aware" folks, and the fascist/"right-wing" nature of the Nazis seems to be blamed more than their basic engine of life-hatred and soul-murder.  Nazism is a special phenomenon that eludes specific classification and is best described as erratic totalitarianism.  Heeding the fascist tag (that applies differently to Mussolini's Italian regime), let us not forget that the National Socialist Workers Party was collectivist (the very term "fascist" stems from words referring to groups bound to central power), rebelled against the "old" republic and envied aristocracy, raised the group over the individual, and (like all Communist regimes) approved of an elitist Party and "transcendent" leader who embodied "the people's" will.  I avoid referring to Nazis as fascists and rightists because I never want to diminish their kinship to Communist collectivism - and vice versa.  These Statist monsters are from the same litter.

But, still, the Nazis win the day when it comes to contemplating or memorializing modern State cruelty.  And though various regimes continue to persecute Christians, antisemitism (non-hyphenated thanks to Dennis Prager, who makes the important point that "anti-Semitism" applies to Jews being hated and not Semite Arabs) is resurfacing yet again.  

Europe has a special affinity for periodic Jew abuse, for one.  G.K. Chesterton called the Jews "the most famous scapegoat in European history."  Hitler's rhetoric against Jewry didn't pop from a vacuum and suddenly seem sensible to the masses.  It stemmed from and capitalized on the ancient cycle of antisemitism, the Pharoahs, the Visigoths, the collective grudges and fears of post-barbarian Europe, the military and conversion glory of Charlemagne (one of Hitler's models), the pogroms and exiles and fluctuating tolerance and clampdowns, the antisemitism of the Enlightenment (Volatire, etc.), the Dreyfus Affair, etc.  Though Muslim Spain was a richly cultured and cooperative time for Jews, it was relatively short-lived.  When the first Crusades started in 1096, there was repercussive  action against Jewish "infidels," particularly in Germany.  An army terrorized the Jewish areas of the Rhine district; Jews were slaughtered in Worms, Cologne, and many other cities until Henry IV tempered the bloodthirst and took measures to protect Jews.  Of course, atrocities flared up again, despite Bernard of Clairvaux's imploration against such mistreatment and madness.  Toledo Jews were mobbed in 1212; the Fourth Lateran Council included the canon that prohibited Jews from gaining office, hiring Christian servants, and from public appearance during Easter.  Murders were conveniently blamed on Jews (as blood collection for Passover observance), vengeance was generally dealt (like the sheriff saying "Get me a nigger" to pay for an unsolved murder in Faulkner's Light In August) by mobs and raids.  Despite his celebrated points, Martin Luther's invectives against "vermin" Jews enflamed later, religious rationalizations against the people.  And let's not forget Hitler's musical and racial mentor: Richard Wagner, the talented Jew hater complete with belief in a conquering Aryan Jesus.

The Nazis didn't originate the armband and star idea.  As far back 809 A.D. (the year Baghdad Caliph Haroun Al Raschid died), Muslim tolerance of Jews turned sour, and special badges distinguished Jew from Muslim.  By circa 1215, Innocent III endorsed the yellow identification badges for Jews.  This mark lasted for 600 years.  Frederick II relocated Jews to ghettos and bashed Austria's Duke Frederick for passing laws protective and respectful of Jews.  The Duke's measures ultimately failed, however.  After Frederick II died, war broke out, and the notorious Judenbrenner (Jew burners) lashed out.  About 1,000 Jews died after taking refuge from an angry mob in York Castle in England.  Rather than be killed as "Christ killers," most opted for suicide, as their ancestors chose at Masada.  Those who appealed to the mob's mercy were slaughtered.  John of Capistrano waged great abuse against Jews, arriving in Cracow in 1454 and installing the infamous badge-identification.  Spain ended up exploiting and abusing Jews, and Torquemada became Grand Inquisitor in 1483.  Of course, there are the recurring pogroms and antisemitic movements in Germany throughout the 19th Century and the Russian-originated, forged Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion to fan the flames all the way to the Final Solution. We needn't belabor the evidence.

Heed the words in the old Passover Haggadah: "In every generation there are those who rise against us to annihilate us."

Even without land disputes between Israelis and so-called Palestinians, there is much unchecked rage against Jews on the rise.  And the current kowtowing to fanatic and violent Muslims is a sign of ready-made indifference (and even approval) to Jewish victims.  This fact is another reason the Nazi nightmare is more fascinating.  Historic wheels are turning in favor of the same recurrent evil that helped a resentful imp rocket to divine status.

I must repeat the words of Dostoyevsky - who racial occultist Alfred Rosenberg called "the incarnation of sickness" - on his trepidation over Germany's brewing consolidation and possible war-making in 1877 as pertinent to today's tension:

But God grant that I'm mistaken; God grant that the new storm cloud that is approaching simply disperses and that all my premonitions prove to be only my "fervid" fantasies - the fantasies of a man who understands nothing of politics.*

* (I must admit that I have problems with Dostoyevsky's ambivalent opinions on Jews.  On one hand he wrote about brotherhood, rejected the "Christ-killer" accusation, equality, etc.; but he claimed that they controlled international politics and Europe through money, and associated them with "blind, carnivorous lust for personal material security" - what he considered anathema to Christian values.  He never advocated persecution or eradication, however.  In fact, he emphasized that he stood "for complete and conclusive equality of rights - because this is Christ's law, because this is a Christian principle."  At least to that he was bound, unlike the Nazis.

All Is Lawful/My Diagnosis

Perhaps the most common question that comes to mind when contemplating the Third Reich is: How could this happen?  And that question contains subquestions: How could normal people go along with this?  How could the German citizenry not have known about the camps?  How could they have not revolted if they did know?  What makes a doctor sworn to foster life become a practitioner of death?  Did the majority of Germans knowingly surrender their identification for the guttersnipe Austrian?  Sure, the National Socialists employed the usual appeals to the Common Good, challenge to envied financial interests, revived employment and profit sharing, government aid to the poor, blood pride, etc., but what worked to go those extra, insane steps into fanatical Thanatos worship?  "Has the whole world, then, fallen under the spell of the evil eye of Leviathan?" asked Nazi-opponent Karl Barth.  Psychoanalyst Franco Fornari wrote (as translated by Alenka Pfeifer): "Every one of us carries within himself silent, secret murders."  Novelist Joseph Conrad said, "The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."

From "The Psychology of Propaganda" by R. Money-Kyrle (1941):

"The people [at a Hitler/Goebbels rally] seemed gradually to lose their individuality and to become fused into a not very intelligent but intensely powerful monster, which was not quite sane and therefore capable of anything...The monster seemed to indulge in an orgy of self-pity...Self-pity gave place to hate; and the monster seemed on the point of becoming homicidal."

By the rally's climax, Thanatos, collective death wish, took over:

"'Germany must live; even if we must die for her...'  The monster was ready, indeed anxious to immolate itself."

In Meno Meyjes' historical "what if" film about obscure starving artist Adolf Hitler, Max (starring John Cusack and Noah Taylor), an anecdote is shared during a family meal. Max Rothman mentions a woman who deliberately swallowed a tapeworm in order to lose weight. This, of course, repulses his father-in-law, but it struck me as analogous.  Might people knowingly (however slightly) swallow a dangerous thing because that thing seems worth the risk to change a current affliction or depressing state?  Erik Erikson wrote: "How deeply worried self-made man is in his need to feel safe in his self-made world can be seen from the deep inroad which an unconscious identification with the machine...has made on the Western concept of human nature in general."  The Germans saw this new, promising, sleek and strong machine rise from Depression, insecurity, and dissolution - and accepted it as their savior.  And technology, improvements of literal machines, came at the right time for the devils.  Tetralogy's Gunther remembers the symbolic marriage of "twentieth century industrial machinery with the ancient hunt for the Jew."

Richard Rubenstein said Hitler "elicited from [the German people] something demonic, atavistic, and insane."  The Nazis tapped into the volk's unresolved infantile desires, stimulated the "polymorphous perversity" (as Freud put it) of bygone infancy, and through this regressive liberation managed to surpass all rational (Überich, superego) limits.  Hannah Arendt said totalitarianism bases itself on the concept "that everything is possible" (emphasis added), as Camus' play Caligula implies.  (I'm reminded of a boasting Party song in Maoist China: “If our leaders hold the ladder/then we can scale the sky.”)  I think that this notion goes haywire if it is divorced from the idea of possibility through God and instead placed in the hands of whatever mighty men rule the moment.  Perhaps Kierkegaardian despair* that pleads, "Get possibility, get possibility, possibility is the only salvation" is hyperextended by totalitarians seeking to replace God.  Since despair is a result of apparent determinism, being locked in a closed machine, perhaps the God-replacer or anti-God makes a monumental and desperate grab at willful manipulation of existence.  

This attitude exceeds any utopian faith in human perfection or dialectical materialists' belief in eventual economic concord.  It literally erases ethics and morality and makes anything fair game.  In his books, Dostoyevsky repeated his contention that if God doesn't exist (in humanity's hearts or actually) "nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful."  So the Nazis launched from the "all is permissible" idea to the "everything is possible" idea.  But possibility belonged to Hitler, no one else.  The death camp inmates especially had no stake in possibility: For them all was determined, down to their choice to escape by deliberate death.  O'Brien tells Winston in Orwell's 1984, "The rule of the Party is forever."

The Nazis exercised the spirit of indifference in their agents and minions.  "It is human indifference that I am after," said Freese in an interview.  This indifference to horrors is what alarmed Albert Camus so much about the Shoah.  It roused him – an existentialist who avoided embroilment by temporality and historical violence – to become a righteously indignant resistant to the Nazis (exposing his own susceptibility to moral gravitation)**. Hitler wrote about liberating the volk from the "chimera called conscience and morality," purging them "of their softness and sentimental Philistinism."  Destroying morality destroys any palpable worth in human beings.  Once cut off from any worthiness, a human is a zombie, raw material for the whims of the mighty.  Arendt again: "The next decisive step in the preparation of living corpses is the murder of the moral person in man."  She identified the vast disbelief in an ultimate Judgment as modern man's radical difference from antiquated man.  "[T]he worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope."  What's left is haphazardness and the conditional order of whoever has the power to dominate.  The ruling State becomes meaning, becomes purpose, kills God, replaces god.  Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer wrote: "No totalitarian authority nor authoritarian state can tolerate those who have an absolute by which to judge that state and its actions."

"There are only two conceptions of human ethics...One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct...The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community - which may dispose of it as an experimental rabbit or a sacrificial lamb."

                  - Ivanov to Rubashov in Arthur Koestler's Darkness At Noon

Mere atheism is not enough to explain unrestrained evil.  Monarchs', thugs', and clergies' professed theism didn't bar them from barbarism.  (Darkness At Noon's Ivanov asks Rubashov, "Do you know that since the establishment of Christianity as a state religion, a single example of a state which really followed a Christian example?  You can't point out one.") Nazis and Communists were not necessarily deniers of God - many seemed to act against God (the idea or the actuality): enraged Olympians rebelling against the Titans, so to speak.  Not a denial, but a contest.  As Gene Veith wrote, "Fascism is the modern world's nostalgia for Paganism.  It is a sophisticated culture's revolt against God."

Kirillov in Dostoyevsky's Devils (a satire and indictment of the logical consequences of socialism that foresaw the Bolshevik terror) decides to shoot himself.  He glorifies his suicide solution as the greatest assertion of self-will a man can make.  He begins by renouncing God: "He doesn't exist and can't exist."  His conclusion?  "If there's no God, then I am God...If there's no God, then everything is my will, and I'm bound to express my self-will."  This idea supports the no God/no real free will notion that anarchist philosopher Bakunin addressed.  But when Kirillov is confronted with the question of Christ, he insists, "The whole planet with everyone on it is sheer madness without that one man" (emphasis added).  Despite his apparent or sincere rejection of Christ, Kirillov understands the message wrapped up in the Christ idea: ultimate hope, human worth, and union of eternity with time.  To identify with the idea of Christ is to consider each human as an important synthesis of eternity and time.***  Being locked in the closed physical machine leaves us without rescue from apparent isness.  Darkness At Noon's Ivanov tells Rubashov, "Nature is generous in her senseless experiments on mankind.  Why should mankind not have the right to experiment on itself?"  Likewise, Hitler said, "Nature is cruel; therefore we are also entitled to be cruel."  The strong win the day.  The fittest survive.  Himmler, a frail worm of a man, firmly believed this.  The death camps were the toilets, waste receptacles, for the “fittest.”

Berdyaev had a peculiar perception of bourgeoisness.  He said that it killed "the thirst for another world," that it preferred "the world over God" and destroyed "the eternal in the name of the temporal," was "a slave to time and matter."  (The pantheistic German Faith Movement claimed that the German people were linked to the soil, "the earth is holy," and they were participants in "the sacraments of the earth.")  Interestingly, the despairing Jewish inmate narrator of The i Tetralogy's first volume defines himself as not more than "a situation in a location" (emphasis added).  Fleeting matter: a thing here and gone.  The death camps produced virtual non-existence, inside and outside the body.  No inmate action could achieve significance; even martyrdom was completely disarmed.  Once physical death happened, the unperson had never existed at all.  Complete erasure was achieved.  The narrator of Volume I in The i Tetralogy flattens the dirt where his former friend, Nathan, danced shortly before being slain by Nazi guards: "I give the impression to the guards that Nathan's space was never occupied."

"Does Big Brother exist?"

"Of course he exists.  The Party exists.  Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party."

"Does he exist in the same way as I exist?"

"You do not exist," said O'Brien.

                   - 1984, book 3, chapter 2

Strict materialist despots and God-usurpers know that the inner man must be rendered as vulnerable and useless as the abused outer man, so the manufacturing of living dead begins.  I agree with Arendt that the Nazi military aggression was a pretext and distraction for the demonic experimentation and slaughter of the camps.  The Nazis existed in order to realize their infantile tantrums and sadistic impulses and to kill, running on a mixture of collectivism, virulent violentization (a Lonnie Athens term), and continuance of the pagan norm of blood feud and human sacrifice.  As Arendt says, if they would have run out of Jews, they would have moved on to another group.  (This goes for the purging Communists as well.)  Death is an insatiable god, and justification of fodder is limitless.  Purges are usually for purges' sake.  Behind all the explanations for power grabs is the bare fact of power for power's sake.  O'Brien talking to Winston in 1984 again: "The object of persecution is persecution.  The object of torture is torture.  The object of power is power."

I diverge from a fundamental conclusion in Freese's The i Tetralogy concerning the significance of God-belief and the basic rationalization of the Nazi nightmare and central Jewish Holocaust, as we shall see later in the review.  I consider the Nazi nightmare to be an attempt to establish an existence completely without God, an especially perverse version of the mass soul-selling in Dostoyevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor.”****  Eric Hoffer wisely noted in The True Believer: “Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God.  For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay.”  Why should mercy be shown to clay?  And mere clay trying to at least die with meaning is laughable to such scum.  As realized by Koestler's Rabashov (about ruling Communism), "there was nothing exalted about [death]: it was the logical solution to political divergences."

As a layman, I personally diagnose Hitler and the Nazis as Infantile, Sado-Anal, Necrophilic, Deicidal Maniacs.  Their "fascist" qualities and mistakenly perceived obsession with order (control) often eclipse their disarray and lack of maturity.  They defied rationality and killed victims' faith, hurdled the reality principle and unplugged the superego (if you prefer colorful Freudian terms), shrugged off Angst (in the responsibility to a higher power sense), founded a blood-mystic death cult, and murdered the idea of a loving God in humankind with fervor and demonic insobriety.  But they can’t be written off as demons though they acted demonically.  "Nazis are human beings, not aliens," Freese reminds us.  This was a problem of human nature and the capacity for cruelty, despair, and life negation in regular human minds.  Dr. Attilio Capponi addresses the infamous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo: a mock prison experiment that made thugs of fake guards and victims of fake prisoners in less than a week.   In i Tetralogy aging ex-Auschwitz guard Gunther (going by the alias Klaus Ewald) says, “The Fuhrer understands the doppelganger in all of us.”  Otto Strasser wrote that Hitler was able "to act as a loudspeaker proclaiming the most secret desires, the least permissible instincts, the sufferings and personal revolts of a whole nation."   

Again, could Freese be correct in his assessment of the Shoah “as the single most important human event in world history?”  Though savagery and sadistic Statism came before and after, could the Nazis have been a peculiar revelation and warning to humankind?  Perhaps they, along with the complicit German citizenry, were special (witting and unwitting) agents of evil, as the demon-possessed swine were in the New Testament.  This idea was raised in by the character Stepan Trofimovich in Dostoyevsky’s Devils.  He figured that the unscrupulous socialist saboteurs were meant to carry evil and thus purge the salvaged Russian people.  This brings a new dimension to the term “Nazi pig,” and it makes one wonder if anyone at any time may be susceptible to similar “possession” in service of death.

* (Though I appreciate much of Kierkegaard's conceptualization of despair and Christianity, I have problems with his - and Kant's - "leap of faith" separation of rationality and Grace.)

** (Sartre figured that Camus didn't seek to make history - as Marx encouraged - but he sought to prevent it "from making itself."  In Camus' resistance to the Nazis, Sartre said he "revolted against death.")

*** (To kill for non-acceptance of Jesus as the Christ is to kill the idea.  We may look at the crucifixion, regardless of our takes on divinity or non-divinity, as an execution not proposed by Jews and authorized by Rome but as calendar-altering evidence of humanity's propensity for cruelty and snuffing of light in the darkness.)

**** (See the bloody orgy and ushered dictatorship after the "enlightened" French Revolution.)

Little Man

"What's his name?"
"Hitler."
"Never heard of him."
"You will."

- from Max

In Alan Moore’s controversial graphic-novel masterpiece, From Hell (not the disgraceful film adaptation), a chapter opens on a copulating couple in 1888 Braunau-am-Inn, Austria.  As the woman grunts under her husband, she experiences a horrible vision of blood gushing from Christchurch Spitalfields as Orthodox Jews walk by outside.  She is terrified, and the husband consoles her.  We are left to conclude that the couple is Hitler’s parents and this is the very moment of the future Fuhrer’s conception.  Moore shows this fateful event as coinciding with the bloody advent of Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel murders.  One of the book's central themes is the sun/moon, Apollonian/Dionysian, male/female dichotomy, which can be speculated in the significance of the Nazis' adoption of the swastika.  The Ripper, speculated by Moore to be Sir William Gull, is a 15th-degree Mason appointed as Queen Victoria's Royal Physician in Extraordinary.  The crown's reputation is threatened by blackmailing whores who've damaging information on Prince Albert.  Gull is secretly commissioned to fix the situation by any means necessary: "We would simply it were done, and done well," the Queen euphemistically says.  While carrying out the brutal and symbolic slaughter of each whore, Gull's delusions of historic importance increase.  When he finishes, his "heroic" mission accomplished, he says to his coachman, "It is beginning, Netley...the twentieth century.  I have delivered it...I'm finished.  I have been climbing, Netley, all my life, toward a single peak...Now there is only descent."  Gull's madness eventually convinces him that he has become God.  Though Moore never expounds on the Hitler parallel, I consider it a useful analogy.

Since the mostly apparent National Socialist antagonism toward Marxism is so prevalent, the curious commonalities with Marx's philosophy and the consequential socialist/communist States are unsung.  If anything, expressed hatred for Marx and communism was partly based on Jewishness - but primarily it was based on Statist rivalry.  (We mustn't forget that early socialist favorability in Germany had a hand in Hitler's rise.)  The fundamental difference was this: Nazis preached racial determinism and Marxists preached economic determinism.  Both supported the subordination of the individual to the collective "good," and both blamed the Jews for being a ruinous scourge on mankind.  Keep in mind that Marx wrote A World Without Jews (more familiarly called On The Jewish Question).  He bashed Judaism as a money-centered religion and accused Jews of worsening capitalism via usury and marketing:

What is the object of the Jew's worship in this world?  Usury...Money is the one zealous god of Israel...emancipation from...practical, real Judaism, would constitute the emancipation of our time.

Observe the following poetry passage from Marx's pre-capitalism-hating early days (thanks to Thomas Sowell):

Then I will wander godlike and victorious

Through the ruins of the world

And, giving my words an active force,

I will feel equal to the creator.

Or:

But who advances here full of impetuosity?

It is a dark form from Trier, an unleashed monster,

With self-assured step he hammers the ground with his heels...

In rage he continually deals with his redoubtable fist,

As if a thousand devils were gripping his hair.

(Insert Twilight Zone theme music here.)

One can never marvel enough at the Austrian gutternsipe’s rise from bitter mediocrity to master of the Third Reich.  A failed painter and architect, Hitler designed an order of disorder, painted his dreams with human blood, created a system of destruction, salvaged a crushed ego through a composite dominant Male he could never be.  Young, down-and-out Hitler was a father's ultimate nightmare about his daughter: an unclean bum, a loser, a hack with bad teeth.  But he ended up seducing and soiling Germany.  The German people, "so feminine in their nature," according to Hitler, saw what they wanted to see in this bum at the front door - even without the propaganda posters and rumors that elevated the dumpy, twitchy, reportedly feminine imp to apparent divinity.  A relative few, mostly outsiders, saw him for what he really was.  Dorothy Thompson (early 20th-Century American radio spokeswoman, outspoken commentator, feminist, and second wife of Sinclair Lewis) summed up Hitler thus, after meeting him in the 1930s: "He is the very prototype of the Little Man" and "He is the apotheosis of the little man."  And national castration fear or resentment undeniably overtook the German masses: shame from the Versailles Treaty spanking and domination, envied cultural soundness among the Jews.

Dr. Henry Murray's Harvard personality analysis of Hitler, for one, cited a "feminine component" in Hitler - as well as possible masochism.  Rene Mueller claimed that Hitler begged to be kicked repeatedly by her and that he grew quite excited when she finally obliged.  Mueller later committed suicide, as Hitler's niece Geli allegedly did and Eva Braun might have tried twice.  Was Hitler projecting his passivity and masochism on to the Jews, dealing out the abuse that he felt he needed or deserved?  Was he outraged by impotence and therefore ejaculated via blitzkrieg and oven chimneys?  He was, as Dorothy Thompson put it, a Little Man, a disgruntled failure who seemed fated to soak Europe with his tantrum tears and sick wet dreams that taunted his actual flaccidity, who needed propaganda and goons as surrogate potency.  And perhaps his and his minions' treachery was simply a turn-on, as wrongdoing excited Stavrogin in Dostoyevsky's Devils, a condition best summed up in Dostoyevsky's Notes From the Underground:

This pleasure comes precisely from the sharpest awareness of your own degradation; from the knowledge that you have gone to the utmost limit; that it is despicable, yet cannot be otherwise; that you no longer have any way out...  

One may not subscribe to Freudianism or psychoanalysis in general, but such imagery can be helpful.  We are irredeemably metaphorical creatures; we juggle metaphors even in our sleep.  There does seem to be an alternating link between Eros and Thanatos; and sexual hang-ups, motivations, and explanations for oddities and behavior mustn't always be dismissed as fantastic.  It is difficult not to interpret and describe much of the Nazi phenomenon with sexual metaphors.  Certainly we are dealing with deep-set gender and aggressive/submissive conflicts in this mass psychodrama of frustrated losers and imps gaining the Darwinian upper hand in 1930s Germany and beyond.  

Interestingly, Freud considered dreams themselves to be brief psychoses (delusional, illusory, and absurd) that could be rendered practical, given the subject's cooperation with therapy.  Perhaps we can think of the collective Nazi sin to be a brief (relative to human history) dream-psychosis skipped into actuality - as if a manifest alert to the need for redemption of us all.  And the symbology and analogies to and from Hitler's actualized dreams are countless.  His contempt for the Jews may be seen as an activated penis envy by a formerly ineffectual, reportedly "feminine" man or an Oedipal conflict with resented Jewish prowess as if it were the work of a single rival/superior father (which could include compelling evidence of his Jewish ancestry).  Notice the awe/disgust conflict in Nazi attitude toward Jewry.  They admitted their cultural might and consolidation (though by that time theological and breeding integrity had been diminished by secularism and assimilation), but depicted them as worthless, deadly vermin.  In the 19th Century, Nietzsche saw antisemites as resentful, fearful weaklings: "The Jews...are beyond any doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe."  Or, Hitler's mad love of "Fatherland" could be a self-loathing homosexual obsession.

Of course, the Oedipus complex is an easy abstraction of Hitler's projective behavior.  Psychoanalytically, one might notice the paradoxical result of unconscious desperation to return to mother safety, to deindividuation: in the  reparation mission, the love becomes the very killer of the love object: not only do masses fight to the death as if to return to "mother earth," but the very love becomes the killing force of the "mother," of the earth through technological devastation.  

Hitler reportedly witnessed his parents having sex when he was a boy, and this traumatic experience (due to an alleged attachment to his mother, Clara) prompted him to avenge his mother's seduction and defilement by becoming the only, sexless defense for Germany – which he likened to a vulnerable, molested woman.  Young man Hitler is said to have carried a picture of  Clara with him wherever he went.  If I had a dime for every Oedipal diagnosis for Adolf Hitler, I'd be rich.  Robert Bloch's Psycho, popularized by the Hitchcock film adaptation (that placed the term "psycho" into pop culture forever), comes to mind.  Norman Bates' isolation with the corpse of his mother in that ominous house (based on a Hopper painting, by the way) is a momma's boy's tortuous return to the womb - or at least the guiltless anal stage.  The house is a separate citadel against penetration and invasion.  Compare this to Hitler's exploitation of the blood poisoning/Jewish rape paranoia in order to protect the floundering German people from invasive forces.  Or consider the Berchtesgaten Eagle’s Nest, Hitler's lofty womb accessible only by a 9-mile long road, an underground passage through a mountain, through bronze doors, and up a 330-feet lift.  The following excerpt from Pink Floyd's song, "Mother" (from The Wall album/film), are quite relevant:

Mother, do you think they'll try to break my balls? 

Hush now baby, baby, don't you cry
Momma's gonna make all of your nightmares come true
Momma's gonna put all of her fears into you
Momma's gonna keep you right here under her wing
She won't let you fly, but she might let you sing 

Oh, Hitler made nightmares come true - and he sang a song of doom.  Like mother-driven Bates, violence was the inevitable solution to his repressions.  Hitler didn't hide his esteem for death-dealing.  "We must be ruthless," he insisted.  He called for "hate, hate and once again hate."  (Che Guevera didn't mince words either: "A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.")  This willful attitude shows the fundamental anti-Judeo/Christian nature of the Nazi/Communist worldviews of the last century, which I'll address later. Alternating signs of Oedipal and anal manifestations in Hitler and the Nazis abound.  

Hitler seemed destined to bathe Europe in blood and ashes.  (Then again, hindsight always makes destiny apparent.)  He claimed a “dependence on involuntary processes” and waited for a prompting voice before action: “I will wait, no matter what happens.  But if the voice speaks then I know the time has come to act.”  I cannot help but recall the recently caught BTK serial murderer who claimed a “monster” or “Factor X” determined his and other human monsters’ behavior.

Ayn Rand noted that "a hater regards his emotions as irreducible and irresistible, as a power he cannot question or disobey."  She shows that this mentality sparks in his formative years when he finds that lying and tantrums can manipulate adults, who represent unsatisfying reality and impeded whims:

Reality does not obey him, it frustrates his wishes, it is impervious to his feelings...but, he feels, it is a negligible enemy, since he has the power to defeat it by means of nothing but his own imagination, which commands the mysteriously omnipotent adults who can do what he is unable to do: circumvent reality somehow and satisfy his whims.

Little, bratty, tantrum-throwing man and men.  Despite common relation of Nietzschean notions to Nazi ideology (primarily the "superman" and inequality assertions), one can note Nazi aspects (aside from his scorn for nationalism and socialism) that might have disgusted Nietzsche.  For one, he diverged from German superiority, preferring to consider himself a Pole (certainly not favorable to Nazis).  He also decried the sickness of ressentiment, the vengeful spirit of the envious weakling or the valueless herd that seeks to obliterate or alter superior value systems.  (His scathing commentary on "decadent" Christianity needn't be explored here.)  Who can deny that ressentiment was a Nazi trait, as well as the appropriate "button" pushed in the disgruntled German people.  Where does ressentiment flourish, according to Nietzsche?  

...among anarchists and anti-Semites, where it has always bloomed, in hidden places, like the violet, though with a different odor. 

Surprisingly, The i Tetralogy slightly addresses Adolf Hitler himself.  Instead, we see the results of his death art, his spoiled-rotten realizations.

Pink Floyd's The Wall

Imagery and symbolism leftover from World War II and the Nazi nightmare have become as ingrained and widespread as some so-called Jungian archetypes - and much of the images and symbols are archetypes.  Oddly, imagining horrors like the Shoah and mass brutality in general is both easy and difficult.  We're frightened how vividly we can dramatize such monstrous behavior because we know we're not just recreating past events - we also know that it (monstrous behavior, mass brutality, inhumanity, torture, holocaust) is a fact before, now, and beyond.  It rides along with us, leers when we watch wriggling infants, pants in our ears when anger flares, waves from regretful mirrors and visits like succubi and incubi or in broad daylight.

The World Wars quickened psychic and spiritual fragmentation.  The childish, "Roaring," short-lived period of glitter and decadence between the World Wars and the Bolshevik Revolution in the East show how pitiable apparent achievement of goodwill, justice, and novelty really is.  "War to end all wars" indeed.  Folks ate, drank, and were merry - and tomorrow they died.  The next War obliterated most of whatever vestiges of general integrity remained.  Humanity improved terror and warfare, perfected desecration and creatively destroyed.  Artists shattered sensible perception and presented compositions arranged as if seen through the eyes of brainless or insane beings.  The modified legacy of "original sin" passed down as nameless confusion, anxiety about annihilation, and desperate longing to trade worried isolation for an irrational, featureless sanctuary, a regained womb of ignorance or singular ego.  After all, "we all die alone," the end is the end, only darkness and nothingness wait ahead.  The only resort is back.  But back isn't possible.  And disappointment, rage, and - most often - despair set in.  What we need is either delusion, tantrum, resignation, or help and hope.

I've always found great worth and food for discussion in Pink Floyd's album and film, The Wall.  The Wall film (written by Pink Floyd bassist/vocalist Roger Waters and directed by Alan Parker) contains all of the typical, ingrained images and symbols of the crucial World War II/Nazi nightmare stain on modern history, as well as useful (albeit simple) psychoanalytical motifs, modern fragmentation and isolation, the self-destructive process of "building walls" around oneself, and a closing message of hope despite the weight of the Wars, despair-philosophies, anti-philosophies, stomping of the better parts of religion, and the curse of the "loss of God."  A key, recurrent question in The Wall is "Is there anybody out there?"  If there isn't, then the wall is the only reality.  A statement recurs in the score: "All in all it's just another brick in the wall."   Only isness and madness reign.  If there is somebody "out there", there's potential salvation.

I focus on The Wall because of its familiar elements and relevance to this essay and Freese's novel.  Simply put, it is the painful story of a burned-out rock star named Pink (played by Bob Geldof) and his psychic breakdown from trying to make sense of a father killed in WWII and the indelible knowledge of Nazism, an overprotective mother, repressive elementary school, the downside of being a touring rock star, a cheating wife, and his loss of effective communication that leaves him impotent and lonely inside a wall of his own construction - until he lashes out in blind rebellion.

In appropriately fragmented chronology, the film shows us bits of Pink's past and recent life juxtaposed to WWII and psychedelic and Freudian animation sequences.  We see the wall gradually build around him.  As a child he is fatherless and often sleeps in bed with mother when he's scared; he tries on his father's military uniform in front of his mother's mirror; he gets spanked for insubordination (for being a poet) in school; he ruins his adult relationship with wife Vera by shutting her out; he gets into drugs and a hectic rock-n-roll lifestyle; he overdoses and completely retreats into an inner fantasy world where he is judged for his emotional crimes.  Pink's suffering is secondary, set off by the war-caused loss of his father.  The generation that follows a great horror usually suffers differently and more problematically than the generation that lived through it.  The damage becomes an heirloom rather than an invading upheaval, a communicable disease rather than a terminal illness that dies with the original victim.  and the heir suffers the extra guilt of having been spared the ordeal, to be able to distantly observe from a relatively safe and comfortable position.

Locked in a hotel room, staring at a television, Pink plumbs back into his past.  A lit but neglected cigarette sticks out of his hand that rests on the arm of the chair: the long, untapped ash tauntingly whole.  The ash, though erect and impressive, can be blown or shaken apart in a blink (a failed phallus) - much like Pink's psyche.  Pink ends up freaking out and trashing the hotel room, smashing guitars, hammering the television screen, eventually cutting himself on a broken sliding glass door.  Later, when his manager breaks into the room and finds Pink comatose on drugs and despair, Pink sinks into his fantasy identity as he's dragged to hospital.  He imagines his flesh melting and tears at it until he emerges from his self-cocoon as a steel-eyed, slick-haired, black-uniformed Hitlerian leader named Hammer.  The insignia of two crosses hammers (reminiscent of the swastika and, for me, the Soviet hammer and sickle) adorn him, and he arrives at a mass rally where the insignia blasts from huge flags and the crowd makes the sign with crossed wrists and raised arms.  Pink's weakness and failure are washed clean by this new, strong and ruthless ego; his passivity and repressions are purged by an unleashed, military terror on the streets:

Ooooh you cannot reach me now
Ooooh no matter how you try
Goodbye cruel world it's over...

In perfect isolation here behind my wall
Waiting for the worms to come

But the fantasy fizzles, and Pink ends up in complete surrender near a toilet, weakly singing, "I want to go home.  Take off this uniform and leave the show."  It is time for his trial.  Pink is now a limp and almost featureless doll (a vulnerable, little man) propped against the surrounding wall.  Accusing witnesses come forward one by one: his schoolmaster (a puppet), his wife (shown as a demonic, mantis-like thing), his overbearing mother (who just wants to take him back in her arms - arms that become the wall).  Finally the judge himself (itself), named Worm, makes an immediate ruling.  He appears as a towering buttocks on a pair of legs, his mouth an anus and his chin suggestively scrotal.  The wall closes as a circle around Pink, becoming a possible toilet for Worm.  (This deep-set anal motif will be discussed later.)  The judge looks down at Pink, his mouth/anus raging:

The way you made them suffer
Your exquisite wife and mother
Fills me with an urge to defecate
Since my friend you have revealed your deepest fear
I sentence you to be exposed before your peers

Tear down the wall!

The last defenses, the unsubstantial bulwark, the faked order and illusory containment breaks: We see a real stone wall, at once impenetrable and fatal, explode into pieces as Pink's impossibly long and painful scream of release is heard in the noise.  But The Wall's message is not fatality and cosmic ruin.  The smoke clears and we see children rooting through and cleaning up the rubble and bricks.  One child finds an unused Molotov cocktail bomb, sniffs at the rag, and pours out the liquid.  The frame freezes and the credits roll to a light and calm closing song:

All alone or in twos
The ones who really love you
Walk up and down outside the wall
Some hand in hand
Some gathering together in bands
The bleeding hearts and the artists
Make their stand
And when they've given you their all
Some stagger and fall after all it's not easy
banging your heart against some mad bugger's wall

(Remember these elements when reading the rest of this essay.)

Yet Another Book On the Holocaust

Mathias Freese notes that yet "another book on the Holocaust...evokes a sigh of 'enough.'"  He doesn't apologize for adding to the multitude, and he claims the right to discuss it despite the fact that he was not a first-hand witness/victim himself.  "Why would a survivor necessarily have a grasp on what happened?" he asks.  Since this horror is about humanity and savagery, restraint and mayhem, it's fair game for analysis and comment.

Art Spiegelman's award-winning comic series, Maus, depicted Jews as mice, Poles as pigs, and Germans as cats.  Spiegelman, like Freese, addresses the Shoah from a later generation.  The character Artie (Spiegelman's cartoon-ego who is also a cartoonist) listens to his father Vladek's testimony about the Nazi ordeal and relates the present discourse along with the painful past with readers.  The main problem of Maus is Artie's/Art's own resolution with his Jewish legacy in regard to the nightmare.  Artie's overbearing (and "anal") father moves into his house, and though Artie feels sorry for him he admits, "...he drives me crazy!"  So does the Shoah.  Artie says to his girlfriend Francoise:

"Sigh.  I feel so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams.  And trying to do it as a comic strip...There's so much I'll never be able to understand or visualize.  I mean, reality is too complex for comics..."

Francoise replies, "Just keep it honest, honey."  Perhaps honesty involves admitting you cannot fully understand.  The Auschwitz-inmate narrator in Tetralogy says, "I will never master what I see or what I know."

There have been excellent films dealing with insiders' and outsiders' Nazi/World War II experience: The Pianist,  Schindler's List, Invincible, Saving Private Ryan, and Life Is Beautiful, to name a few.  Freese finds Life Is Beautiful to be "insulting" because of its apparent sweetening attempt.  While I understand his aversion, I think it stems from a basic assumption that I will address and disagree with later.  

Though The i Tetralogy shares some similarities with the The Boys From Brazil (1978), it particularly reminds me of Music Box (1989), starring Jessica Lange and Armin Mueller-Stahl.  Ann Talbot (Lange) is a lawyer whose Hungarian father, Mike (Mueller-Stahl), has been accused of being a WWII war criminal via Russian documents.  Ann decides to defend her father against these accusations in court, but she gradually learns that his criminal past is quite true.  Freese's Tetralogy seems to be primarily about Gunther, the off-the-sanity-rails Auschwitz guard: his boiling psychopathology during his guard career, followed by his incognito elderly life in the United States.  But the book is about the entire nightmare's legacy, filtered through the reaction of Gunther's son, Conrad, who learns of his father's concealed crimes in discovered letters.  Conrad represents, in a sense, the Jewish descendents and everyone else trying to make sense of, absorb, and come to terms with the grand implications of the Shoah and the demonic fact of Hitler and future Hitlers.

After the war, Gunther changes his identity, marries, and has children.  When Volume III opens, he is living undetected in Nassau County, New York.  His obsessive narrative constantly complains about "Spielbergian homes," "assimilated Jews," "kikes," that the "Jews in America are very powerful."  "Guilt is for Jews," he states, implying that he hasn't a shred of guilt for the crimes he committed as a Nazi guard.  Young and old Gunther, let's say, is prone to overstate political matters (often in a more contemporary attitude) or verbalize relatively incidental ingredients in the Nazi nightmare as definitive motives for the Third Reich.  Gunther is adept at self-analysis (something discouraged by totalitarian belonging kind), dream/fantasy interpretation, social symbolism and political context, and metaphysical questions.  He even assesses the Nazi excess as irredeemable treatment of the Jews: "No Jew has ever gotten real justice.  Reparations - nonsense!  In the camps we went beyond any possible compensation."  He goes on to admit that the Jew will never find solace from the nightmare: "[W]e damaged him for all time."  Statements like these seem to be authorial injections rather than what a brute like Gunther might really be cognizant of - or, at least, think about.

Of course, I understand and normally approve of such a literary device.  (I employ it myself.)  The injections, however, sometimes ring too observant and rational for a ruined mind such as Gunther's.  He claims that "Shakespeare's Jew hatred is prettied up," identifies with "what Jesus experienced transfigured upon the cross," attributes the Nazi cause as the completion of "Christianity's final crusade," wishes "Jew Joseph" was there to interpret a dream of his.  He castigates Americans for being "unwilling to look inward" and that their "only contribution is marketing."  (Ironically, Karl Marx himself, decried the Jews' reduction of services and arts to monetary value - marketing.  This is a key assertion in Alfred Rosenberg's "The Earth-Centered Jew Lacks A Soul.")  Gunther goes so far as to propose the familiar "Would you kill Hitler in the crib" moral question.

Early in the novel, Gunther imagines explaining why the Nazis do what they do to a Jew - belting out extensive, accurate interpretation of Nazi psychopathology - and says, "You cannot imagine our ecstasy in all this."  His letter to his parents is more too-acute self-explanation.  (His fanaticism is almost too perfect.)  I tend to think that most participants in mass slaughter and evil do not or cannot identify exactly why they are doing what they do, let alone present a fully aware dossier on their own actual motives and justification.  The healthy are much more apt to properly diagnose sickness; a sober man is much more trustworthy about a drunkard's actions than the drunkard himself.  Gunther says, "We are in charge of doing the unimaginable, and we are imaginative about it."  He addresses his dutiful and civilian duality: "When I am on leave, I am a tender, soft person,  a good son, an engaging friend..."  Are these observations too aware?  Don't the successful violent socialization and eventual violentization usually happen without conscious reflection on the process?  These are just questions, not refutations.

Freese excels at imbedding characters into the reader so they are not soon forgotten.  One may take the heavy-handed, sometimes implausible, psychological ramblings as philosophical/political communication from the author or from the author's peculiar explanation or guess about what makes characters "tick."

Tautological, saturated with grisly and sexually perverse imagery, preachy and didactic, The i Tetralogy is an important, well written, intense and compelling addition to the collection of Shoah-centric works.  Grisliness and perversity are not meant to shock or offend (though they will), but to present - even to the point of surreality - speculative and possible psychological consequences of and explanations for the nightmare the world can't shake.  If the book can be blamed for hyper-sensual, surreal passages, it must be blamed for using the surreal to make the real seem more real.  As metaphorical creatures, we absorb the abstract and exciting more than the factual and the historic.  We cannot long dwell on real disasters and tragedy we learn about in classes or see on the evening news.  But fictional recreations and explorations based on real events tend to "smuggle" better understanding or, at least, imagination of very important matters of human nature and behavior.

Asshole of the World

"Some of our comrades, when it began in Poland, actually messed their pants."

- German soldier, Hans Lehmann, on increasing Nazi brutality

Famous books are often remembered for their famous opening lines.  Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."  C.S. Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: "There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb and he almost deserved it."  Barbara Hodgson's The Sensualist: "Helen woke up in the middle of the night wearing someone else's breasts."  Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: "It was a pleasure to burn."

The first line of Freese's The i Tetralogy is certainly memorable:  "I am rectum."  Say it out loud: "I am rectum."  It's creepy, isn't it?  It rings like Moby Dick's introductory "Call me Ishmael," but with a sad surrender - a powerful surrender in its blunt finality.  Instantly the reader is presented with utter despair.  Pascal asks in his notes on Order in Pensees, "Shall I believe I am nothing?"  Tetralogy doesn't even ask the question.  It begins with a conclusion: "I am rectum."  Not "a" rectum or "I am treated like a rectum."  "A" implies one among others; "treated like" is simile.  "I am rectum" is a direct admission of dehumanization.  And it's an appropriate introduction to an intense and obsessive psychological novel filled with anal imagery, analingus, feces, and sadistic sodomy.

Anality in literature is quite common, seriously and humorously.  Often the anus is associated with perversity and sin.  The Summoner in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales insults the Friar by claiming that friars, who are usually corrupt, have a special place to stay in Hell.  He relates a story about a friar given a tour of Satan's home.  The friar asks his guide why no other friars can be seen and a dirty explanation follows:

"'Show forth thine arse and let the friar see
Where is the nest of friars in this place...'
Out of the Devil's arse-hole there did drive
Full twenty thousand friars in a rout,
And through all Hell they swarmed and ran about.
And came again, as fast as they could run,
And in his arse they crept back, every one."

Sexuality is almost always associated with anality.  And the danger of being soiled or tasting solid or liquid waste can ruin sexual willingness.  Chaucer, no stranger to scatology, barred no holds with the following passage from "The Miller's Tale."  Naive courtly lover, Absalom (an effeminate and "anal" dandy), thinks his object of unrequited affection, Alison, offers her face to be kissed in the dark of night:

And through the window she put out her hole.
And Absalom no better felt nor worse,
But with his mouth he kissed her naked arse
Right greedily, before he knew of this.
Aback he leapt- it seemed somehow amiss,
For well he knew a woman has no beard;
He'd felt a thing all rough and longish haired,
And said, "Oh fie, alas! What did I do?" 

Jonathan Swift is well known for his apparent fixation on cleanliness and excrement.  Gulliver's key observation of the Yahoos' "strange Disposition of Nastiness and Dirt."  Few Swift fans are ignorant of Swift's poem about loss of wits because of the discovery that beautiful "Caelia, Caelia, Caelia shits."  Freud later expounded on this attraction/repulsion aspect of the sex organs' proximity to the evacuation orifices, particularly the anus: "We are born between urine and feces."  (I needn't reiterate the pop-friendly "anal stage" details for psychoanalytic speculation.)  Dr. Henry Murray guessed an "association in [Hitler's] mind of sexuality and excretion."*  Others have pointed to Hitler's vegetarianism and abstinence from alcohol, pointing to associations of meat with feces and beer with urine.  Tetralogy's Gunther says,  "The Jew is meat."

There are theories that the Nazis sought to literally turn Jews into feces.  Terrence Des Pres called the death camps' totality of filth "excremental assault".  The unavoidable reek of human filth and death (from odor to ashes) pervaded those who managed the camps and lingered about them as one's personal stink lingers after defecation.  The Jews were the waste of the Nazis' and Germans' own projected frustrations and moral failings pushed through manmade intestines and rectums into toilets and then combusted.  Zyklon-B was more than eradication of the "deadly closet moth" Jew.  It served the bonus purpose of causing involuntary defecation to soil the panicked piles of corpses after each session.

At one important moment in my personal studies, I found that a key nickname for the death camp was anus mundi, "asshole of the world."  How telling.  From there the anality of the nightmare fell into place, and when I came to Freese's novel and its preponderance of, for lack of a better term, shit, I was convinced of its validity.  (Though I missed mention of anus mundi in my initial reading of Tetralogy, I was pleased to notice Freese's inclusion of the nickname in a later recap.)  The unavoidable consequence of such mass production of human shit is the transformation into shit of the very practitioners.  They had to live in the epicenter; they were imbued with the deed, part of the refuse themselves.

Freese is not shy about shit.  He uses it - some might say "goes overboard" with it - in order to blast readers rather than lighten the nightmare in any way.  After the "I am rectum" clue to the waste imagery, i is forced to kiss Gunther's piss in the dirt.  I use this scene as a microcosm of the mass scapegoating for projected sins.  Hitler was a degenerate but accused the Jews as degenerates.  Hitler was the grubby seducer but blamed the Jews for being so.  He called the Jews parasites, but he was the parasite.  In a sense, the Nazis pissed their collective faults and made the Jews lap them up, made them part of the Jew in order to flush them from their systems.  After learning of his father's (Gunther's) past, son Conrad appropriately goes to Gunther's grave and urinates on it.

The i Tetralogy is inundated with waste imagery.  I can understand why some readers might tire of this.  It hardly abates, especially the instances of anal sex and excretion.  Early in i's narrative, he speaks for ultra-deprived prisoners' glorification of once mundane givens: "In my dreams...I find myself shitting without rushing, having time to wipe twice - even three times,  expending clouds of toilet tissue."  i cherishes the latrine as a reliable womb of sorts, "a placenta I cling to," a restorative haven.  Later, i says:

"When I am shitting my innards out, I fantasize Jehovah tacked to a cross, uttering in Hebrew an infinitely meaningful idea that caroms down the ages to modern times.  I inscribe "Thou hast been weighed and found wanting" over his head, and am done with the SOB."  

Gunther:

The Polish soil is alive and slimy again.  The mud is all about, a shifting, shitty sea.  I feel I walk atop a wallowing monster that exudes offal.  It is shit soil.  What it is good for is holding Jewish blood...the soil is a symbol of Poland, shit inhabited by shit...

Excretions turn to mist and coat my interior walls.  I smell the shit odor of tens of thousands...

Gunther describes a sex dream:

Anuses squint at me, some sere, some decomposing, showering gallons of feces on me...I am on my knees, my ass raised high, desirous of incoming pleasure to be, anus exposed...At once, I am penetrated, stoutly filled...I come several times, womanly...

Gunther realizes that his doppleganger is the one penetrating him.  During a second orgasm, he becomes ill, "a river of shit flows forth" from his mouth, and he becomes the shit.  As an old man, he describes his own buttocks as "buttocks that women have licked out of real desire and lust."  He has maintained a preference for women to "eat him" down there, much to his wife Mildred's disgust.

We needn't reiterate the obvious tendency for anal sadism in prolonged, unchecked prison situations.  Sure, Midnight Express showed a more benign instance of homosexuality through confinement and affection deprivation among inmates, but I'm referring to the predictable mockery/domination factor in prison/confinement hierarchy.  Like primates, anal mounting and submission are power and territory rituals.  One need only to consider fraternity anal/homoerotic hazing or inmate humiliation exposed at today's Abu-Graib and "Gitmo" detention centers to see the tendency in humans.  Stories of police or civilian "raping" of male victims with toilet plungers, etc., are not few.  A mixture of anality, humiliation, domination, deviant masculinity, and phallus worship cannot be dismissed from the Nazis.

Female Auschwitz guard (and later lover of Gunther) keeps a Jew's penis and scrotum with her as macabre trinkets.  Gunther wonders if she uses it for masturbation.  i watches Gunther urinate and thinks, "His prick is healthy looking, unlike mine which is a piece of wood, weathered and beaten thin."  Gunther, in turn, describes i's genitalia: "His scrotum is a walnut, his prick like his navel, recessed against his pelvic girdle."  From one of Gunther's fantasies: 

...clitorises speak to me in a thousand tongues...scrotums split their pouches and reveal tens of thousands of testicles, creased, withered "walnuts."  Penises, like demented gnomes, collapse in mushroom-capped heaps before my self - pink-erect pyramids.

After learning the sick truth about his father, Conrad looks back at all the signs of Gunther's depravity and concludes that he "was as primitive as the anus itself."  Conrad recounts a time when his father bit into and chewed on his pinky finger as punishment.  What that episode represents is self-explanatory.  He later has a dream of being a massive woman with "a vagina that could swallow all the cocks of the world."  His father, Gunther, penetrates him with a "cock as long and wide as a keel of a boat" that is relatively small compared to Conrad's mass.  "I am his master," Conrad says.  Woman-Conrad pulls his father so far into his body that Gunther goes into the intestine and expels from the anus: "At last he is evacuated, not as Gunther, but as shit, a huge monumental bowel movement..."  Woman-Conrad then realizes that he is his own mother, Milly.  This disgusting process is a call to Conrad to deal with and expel his father and the Shoah "for all time": "Can Gunther be reduced and rendered down so that he becomes disposal?"  

Here is a reversal of the Jews-turned-into-fe