Claudia Leeb offers a psychoanalytical study of Austrian involvement in Nazi atrocities and recent efforts to avoid confronting this past. The basic claim of the book is that repression of the feeling of guilt undermines the capacity of individuals and collectives to exercise critical judgment, thereby enabling moral failure, violence, and even mass murder.
Leeb’s theoretical intervention is the concept of “embodied reflective judgment.” Drawing from Kant’s aesthetic theory, Hannah Arendt suggests that the political faculty par excellence is reflective judgment, in which thinking proceeds from particulars without mediation by pregiven determinate concepts. Leeb argues that Arendt is too one-sidedly cognitive, that thinking and feeling are entangled, and that critical judgment requires embodied emotion. As a sort of corrective to Arendt’s denigration of “cheap sentimentality,” Leeb turns to Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics. Inhering in the “remainder” that escapes “identity thinking” is a material element to morality, located in the physical feeling that something is wrong. Leeb contends that the separation of thought and feeling is “perfected” by totalitarianism—a massive breakdown in feeling as well as thinking.
Leeb focuses almost exclusively on guilt as a precondition for embodied reflective judgment. Psychological defense mechanisms to avoid confronting unconscious guilt about injustice cripple judgment. Stock phrases, dehumanizing “scientific” language, overidentifications with the collective, false projections, “balance accounts of guilt,” impersonations of the aggressor, displacements of anger, and careerism all pave the way for distorted judgment and potential violence.
Leeb’s introduction documents Austrian complicity with National Socialism and subsequent nonconfrontation with that past. Chapter 1 criticizes Arendt and unfolds the idea of embodied reflective judgment. The next two chapters are studies of trials of individual perpetrators and the guilt repression behind their failures of judgment. Chapter 2 examines Dr. Franz Niedermoser, who murdered patients at an Austrian psychiatric hospital during the Nazi regime. Although he was initially reluctant to carry out murders he felt were wrong, mechanisms of moral disengagement soon dissolved his capacity to feel guilt and to engage in reflective judgment, allowing him to kill without anxiety. Chapter 3 draws from the work of Giorgio Agamben to describe the figuration of Roma and Sinti as homo sacer, abandoned by law but subjected to the political and thereby exposed to death with impunity. At Dachau, Roma and Sinti were forced to undergo scientific experiments known to be lethal. When the man who ran the experiments, Professor Wilhelm Beiglböck, was later tried, his defense exhibited startling continuity with Nazi-era thinking in attempting to exonerate him by dehumanizing his victims as “gypsies” and “asocial.”
The last two substantive chapters turn from the criminal guilt of perpetrators to the intergenerational political guilt of the Austrian community. Chapter 4 centers on the 1988 staging of Thomas Bernhard’s play Heldenplatz in Vienna and the furious condemnation it elicited even before opening. Leeb documents the defense mechanisms at play as vitriol bubbled up to fend off confrontation with unconscious guilt. Chapter 5 picks up an even more recent controversy over the proposed Haus der Geschichte history museum in Vienna. Innumerable objections, each more captious and absurd than the last, were summoned to resist a centrally located museum that would candidly foreground Austrian collaboration with National Socialism. Once again, Leeb comprehensively documents each psychological defense mechanism. The conclusion emphasizes the similarities in guilt repression between past individual perpetrators and collectivities avoiding that past.
Leeb should be commended for asserting the relevance of psychoanalysis to political theory. Liberal rationalism and postmodern depictions of a subject produced by discourse and power have together crowded out political theory sensitive to the repressed unconscious. Arendt’s ideas about judgment, particularity, and exemplary validity have been one basis for the endeavor to cut a sort of middle course that breaks with political theory explicitly grounded in Kant’s universalistic political philosophy of right without forsaking normativity altogether. By challenging Arendt for being insufficiently attuned to feelings and their unconscious management, the book stakes out its own compelling, alternate Freudian mezzo position. I myself cannot begin to fathom our moment of hostile ethnic nationalism and authoritarian populism without recourse to psychoanalysis and Adorno. For instance, one mechanism described by Leeb that might be ripped from the headlines is “DARVO”: Deny claims that prompt feelings of guilt, Attack those making the claims, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender.
Leeb also convincingly demonstrates psychological continuities between perpetration and retrospective denial. One particularly stark example involves an Austrian academic denigrating any Austrian museum that would evoke feelings of guilt by juxtaposing Austria with the United States. In the United States, home to its own famous Holocaust Museum, one “works with emotionalism and offers fast identifications” because Americans are forced to deal with a “very heterogeneous audience in terms of ethnic background and educational background.” By contrast, the more homogeneous Austrians “should strengthen the idea of scientific rationality” (p. 196). The symmetries are only too clear: ethnic diversity remains the problem, and the rationalized bureaucratic mass production of death should not be memorialized with emotion.
This exhaustive cataloging of the array of psychological fortifications erected by Austrians can feel question-begging in the chapters on memorialization. Any viewpoint other than an unblinking stare into the abyss of the past is classified as repression of unconscious guilt; alternative possibilities are never considered. Although Leeb contrasts salubriously “tackling” feelings of guilt with neurotically “suppressing” them, the book never articulates how a politics where the past no longer weighs like a nightmare on the living might appear (p. 2). Communities must strive to “take responsibility for crimes,” “resolve” their guilt, and “repair” the past, but what it might mean to overcome the past without denying it is never specified.
Leeb tenders a connection between repressed guilt for “unrepaired” past violence and the “potential of present-day violence”; embodied reflective judgment is imperative “to avoid the disasters that plagued the past from being continued in the present and the future” (pp. 223–24). Leeb quotes Adorno himself, who wrote, “The past will have been worked through only when the causes of what happened then have been eliminated” (p. 55). Though breakdowns in embodied reflective judgment were a necessary condition of mass murder, they were not the root cause. If we follow Adorno’s collaborator Max Horkheimer—”whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism”—then we might think that the potential for “new cycles of aggression and hatred” is generated foremost not by enduring repression of guilt, but by enduring social forms like capitalism (Max Horkheimer, “The Jews and Europe,” in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, eds. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner, 1989). The book does make the trenchant point that the division of labor facilitates the division of bureaucratized thought from privatized feeling. But this is as far as Leeb goes in linking the psychological to the sociological.
I worry that efforts to reground normativity on Adorno’s “new categorical imperative”—Auschwitz, never again—drift toward the very identity thinking that the book is assiduously avoiding: subsumption of a particular under the universal that “brutally” identifies the object with a stereotype (p. 141). The risk is that the Holocaust becomes the singular crime, both incomparable and that against which everything is compared. What is this if not stereotyped rule-based thinking inhibiting us from sensitivity to new particulars? Might “never again” itself be a defense mechanism to reconcile our consciences with cataclysms that do not fit this pre-formed category (the depredations of neoliberal freedom and environmental doom come to mind)? Or take another, more immediate example of exceptionalism-cum-defense mechanism: the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, recently asserted the total incommensurability of the Holocaust and condemned applying the term “concentration camp” to US mass detention of migrants.
My hunch is that the book relies so heavily on the exemplary summum malum of Nazi mass murder because this retrieves a crypto-foundationalism compensating for the moral uncertainty that follows Arendt’s “unfreezing concepts” and “thinking without a bannister.” But the anxiety that comes with living as what Leeb calls a “subject-in-outline”—breaking with total identification with the collective without completely abandoning it—must not be repressed by retreating into surreptitious identity thinking, even unconsciously. Nor can we permit such retreat to let us evade our own collective guilt and responsibility for today’s world on the brink.
