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Love,
Holocaust and Humiliation
The German
Holocaust and the Genocides in Rwanda and
Somalia
By Evelin
Gerda Lindner
TFF associate
(1999). Love, Holocaust and Humiliation. The German
Holocaust and the Genocides in Rwanda and Somalia. In
Medlemsbladet for Norske Leger Mot Atomkrig, Med Bidrag
Fra Psykologer for Fred, 3 (November), pp. 28-29.
(Dr. med. Evelin Gerda Lindner, University of Oslo,
Institute of Psychology, P.O.Box 1094 Blindern, N-0317
Oslo, Norway, Tel. +47 91789296,
e.g.lindner@psykologi.uio.no, www.uio.no/~evelinl)
Abstract
Historians usually describe the Treaty of Versailles
after the First World War (28th June 1919) as
'humiliating' for Germany ('Schmach,' 'Schande') and
argue that this humiliation 'pre-programmed' Germans for
the Second World War (see for example Norbert Elias
1989).
The 'humiliation' imposed by the Treaty of Versailles
was the starting point for my current research project at
the Institute of Psychology at the University of Oslo. In
this project in the field of social psychology I am
studying the genocide in Rwanda (1994) and Somalia (1988)
against the background of the German Holocaust.
Could humiliation lead to Holocaust, genocide and
ethnic cleansing? This is the central question posed in
my research. This is a short text where I present the
follow-up questions that have to be posed in order to
approach this subject.
To understand more about Holocaust, genocide and
ethnic cleansing seems especially urgent at present since
it is an issue that continues to haunt us, not least in
view of what is happening in Kosovo, Chechnya,
East-Timor, Afghanistan, Tibet, etc., or with respect to
international terrorism.
Introduction
Historians usually describe the Treaty of Versailles
after the First World War (28th June 1919) as
'humiliating' for Germany ('Schmach,' 'Schande') and
argue that this humiliation 'pre-programmed' Germans for
the Second World War (see for example Norbert Elias
1989).
The 'humiliation' imposed by the Treaty of Versailles
was the starting point for my current research project at
the Institute of Psychology at the University of Oslo. In
this project in the field of social psychology I am
studying the genocide in Rwanda (1994) and Somalia (1988)
against the background of the German Holocaust. I am a
German national, coming from what is known in Germany as
a 'refugee family,' I grew up with the debate about the
atrocities of the two World Wars. I am also drawing upon
my experience as a clinical psychologist (1977-1991, the
last 7 years in Cairo, Egypt) and my fieldwork in Somalia
and Rwanda/Burundi (1998-1999).
Could humiliation lead to Holocaust, genocide and
ethnic cleansing? This is one of the questions posed in
my research.
Anatol Rapoport wrote in 1997 that '... the most
intense feelings experienced by human beings are probably
those engendered by conflict and by love.'
Humiliated love is, perhaps, the most painful
phenomenon in human psychology. Does it not lead to
killings when it occurs in the relationship between man
and woman? From almost any detective story we learn that
'The murderer is most probably a member of the family.'
Could humiliated love lead to Holocaust?
Everybody knows how it feels to love somebody, admire
somebody greatly, and badly want to be respected and
recognised by that person. And everybody, I believe, also
knows how deeply painful it is if that person laughs at
you and makes fun of you or, even worse, ridicules your
love, especially if he or she does this in front of
others, mocking your admiration and your desire to be
acknowledged. Nothing could be more humiliating than
that.
Humiliation
The word humiliation stems from the Latin word humus,
earth, suggesting that to be humiliated means to be made
small, reduced to ground level, perhaps even to have your
face forced into the earth. I believe that it is a
universal human experience to feel terrible if put down
and humiliated, especially if your love is being rejected
in the very act of humiliation; even worse, if the wish
to be loved back is being denied at the same time. The
last is especially painful: namely, denial of the desire
to have your love returned. Imagine (and I had a client
who experienced this) that you are sitting in your
mother-in-law's sitting room and she says in front of the
whole family with disgust in her voice: 'And you want to
be part of our family? Who do you think you are???'
Hearing this, my client was deeply shocked and petrified,
felt cold, could hardly breathe, and was unable to
answer. For years afterwards, she could not remember this
incident without deep pain.
People react in different ways to humiliation: some
just become depressed, others get openly angry, and
others hide their anger and plan revenge. The person who
plans for revenge may become the leader of a movement.
Hitler, for example, began his adult life as a humiliated
underdog who badly wanted recognition and acknowledgement
but failed to achieve these things. One of his many deep
disappointments arose from his desire to become a
respected member of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. In
October 1907 Hitler took the Academy's entrance exam but
was rejected. In 1908 he applied for the second time and
was not even admitted to the test. An incident such as
this could have an impact.
Hitler
Eberhard Jäckel writes (1991) that 'Hitler's Mein
Kampf seems to provide us ... with four new aspects of
Hitlerian antisemitism, namely its increased significance
to Hitler himself; a new universalist-missionary element
its link-up with the outline of foreign policy and,
finally and above all else, an enormous radicalization of
the intended measures. As far as the first of these
aspects is concerned, Hitler now made his antisemitism
the center of both his personal and his political career.
He calls his time in Vienna, during which he had changed
'from a weakly cosmopolitan to a fanatical antisemite,
'the time of 'the greatest transformation' which he had
ever had to live through or, as he calls it elsewhere,
his 'most difficult change ever.'' (the quotations come
from pages 69 and 59 in the German edition of Mein Kampf;
pages 83 and 72 in the English edition). Jäckel
continues: 'And one of the best-known passages of his
book, a passage which is rarely quoted in its entirety
and probably often misunderstood, reads: 'With the Jews
there can be no bargaining, but only die hard either-or.
I, however, resolved now to become a politician.'
(quotation from page 225 in the German, page 269 in the
English edition).
At this point readers may object and say: 'One man can
hardly incite a whole population, even if he is very
angry and a gifted demagogue, if the population is not
ready to follow him!' On this point, Michael Bond,
Professor at the Department of Psychology at the Chinese
University of Hong Kong writes to me (1999): 'I believe
that you must draw a fundamental distinction between
individual humiliation [you humiliated me] versus
group [or national] humiliation [you or your
group humiliated my group]. This personal/group
distinction is important since people may act to avenge
different sorts of affront [and create different
sorts of affront for others!'
The issue is complicated. When you start studying the
notion of humiliation, it is very easy to become very
confused because there are so many different aspects and
kinds of humiliation. You might, for example, find a
'humiliator' who deliberately sets out to humiliate
somebody, but the targeted person simply does not feel
humiliated, and just laughs; or, at the other extreme,
imagine you want to be helpful, and unexpectedly, your
help is interpreted as being humiliating; or, to take a
third case, you might observe a couple and see that the
husband continually treats his submissive wife in such a
way that you think that she must surely feel humiliated
and protest, and yet she does not; not to forget cases
where people in fact enjoy being humiliated in so-called
'sado-maso' sex-practices or religious self-humiliation.
These examples suggest that a perpetrator might want to
commit humiliation but not succeed, that a 'good-doer'
might humiliate while trying to do good, that a third
party might observe 'victims' who do not see themselves
as such (or fail to see victims in cases where they do
exist), or that humiliation is sought instead of
despised.
Two types of
humiliation
My research became even more complicated when I
discovered that two deeply different definitions of
humiliation seem to exist in today's world: 'Humiliation
II' is connected with equality, while 'Humiliation I' is
connected with the negation of equality. 'Humiliation II'
is the more recent version of humiliation: namely, the
deeply wounding violation of my dignity as a human being,
where my dignity draws its justification from the Human
Rights notion that 'all men are created equal, that they
are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable
rights, that among these are life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness.' (U.S. Declaration of
Independence). By contrast, 'Humiliation I' is an older
version illustrated by the case of two aristocrats who
shoot at each other in a duel. They do this because they
consider it their duty to 'settle scores' or 'put right'
acts of humiliation even if they do not feel any deep
psychological wounds. Humiliation II has the potential to
be very 'hot,' meaning that humiliated dignity can cause
deep emotional wounds which might lead to passionate
retaliation, while Humiliation I can be answered by a
coldly planned chess game of honourable stances.
A further complication is introduced by the fact that
the humiliation which an individual feels might not be
the same which a group or nation feels (see Michael
Bond's comments). Can a country, a clan or an ethnic
group 'feel humiliated'? What about the case of
humiliated leaders who incite their followers to believe
in some more or less fabricated version of history that
contains supposed humiliations which must be avenged with
the leader's help?
I would like to let these questions make the readers
think. In my own future work I intend to build upon these
questions in order to try and shed light on the
relationship between leaders and followers in Germany,
Rwanda and Somalia. The aim is to understand more about
Holocaust, genocide and ethnic cleansing. This seems
especially urgent at present since it is an issue that
continues to haunt us, not least in view of what is
happening in Kosovo.
References
Elias, Norbert (1989, 1997). The Germans. Cambridge:
Polity
Jäckel, Eberhard (1991). Hitler's World View. A
Blueprint for Power.
Translated from German by Herbert Arnold, foreword by
Franklin L. Ford.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press
Rapoport, Anatol (1997). The Origins of Violence.
Approaches to the Study of
Conflict. With a new introduction by the author.
London: Transaction
Publishers
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