Review of Nations Have the Right to Kill
By Juha Siltala, Professor of History, University of Helsinki
Dr. Richard Koenigsberg belonged to the first post-Frankfurt-School generation of scholars who—during the 1960’s and 1970’s—tried to amalgamate psychoanalysis with social analysis. They joined to the Frankfurtians in asking why people act against their own best interests. These scholars saw in the sacrifice of life for alien purposes arrested individuation: authoritarian bending of personal will and revenge upon minorities (Adorno); unresolved symbiosis with the bad maternal object (Theweleit); or re-enactment of ruptures in the continuity of the self onto society (Koenigsberg).
They also challenged the traditional “self-evident” view of warfare as a struggle for scarce resources waged by calculating profit-maximizers. Instead, these scholars considered restoration of psychic equilibrium to be the main impetus in history, which was seen as a nightmare of violent projections and intrusions of disowned mental contents. Psychic homeostasis and group membership were seen as more decisive factors than economic self-interest.
In his most recent book, Nations Have the Right to Kill, Richard Koenigsberg explores the psychic and social construction of the nation-state. His work is more interesting than ever. Koenigsberg claims that nations kill—not so much to destroy enemies—but to increase cohesion by killing their young. He presents evidence showing how volunteer and subscript armies during the First World War demonstrated a readiness to die for the sake of their beloved nations.
The huge waste of infantrymen during World War I was the result—not only of strategic stalemate and lack of breakthrough technologies—but of peoples’ desire to demonstrate that their nations were more than social constructions. That for which flesh-and-blood human beings were willing to die and be mutilated could not be pure fiction or merely imagined communities. The idea of the nation materialized in the heaps of corpses on the battlefields of Somme and Verdun.
Hitler is presented as a leader who sought to fulfill the dream of nationalism by persuading Germans to merge with the whole and surrender their interests to the community. Citing Franco Fornari’s theory that people seek to destroy because they love, Koenigsberg argues that the abuses of nationalism reflected a perverted form of attachment. What’s more, the noble emotion “love of country” made Hitler feel he was entitled to punish those who shrank from total commitment.
To show his love and devotion, Hitler was ready to exterminate “shirkers” – the Jews – who in his imagination had escaped national sacrifice during the First World War. Where the best men (German soldiers) had willingly surrendered their lives, Jews—Hitler believed—had not. During the First World War, German soldiers were transported to the front in cattle-cars and slaughtered in massive numbers. Koenigsberg shows how Hitler brought about the re-enactment of this trauma by compelling Jews be transported in cattle-cars and slaughtered by the millions.
Koenigsberg does not drown his readers in scholastic footnotes like younger scholars trying to convince their audience and themselves of their vast knowledge. Rather, he demonstrates his erudition through incisive arguments. This book is highly recommended as a text or supplementary reading for courses on nationalism, Nazism and the First World War.