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Describing Freud in one of his finest moments, an incident rather unattended by biographers, Eissler narrates a brief episode in 1920 wherein Freud, called to be an expert witness on the electrical treatment of war neuroses, gave testimony that, for the most part, favored a veteran of the Austro-Hungarian Army. Afflicted by a war neurosis as well as having probably sustained cranial damage from an explosion of an artillery shell at the Russian front, the veteran, W. Kauders, tried to prove that the eminent psychiatrist, Wagner-Jauregg, incorrectly diagnosed him as a malingerer as well as having treated him maliciously.
The fascination of the trial is augmented by the emblematic quality of Freud's testimony. For Freud was supporting, albeit in modulated fashion, those veterans who, having just encountered the grinding, horrifying reality of war, were trying in effect to refute the militarist articles of faith of a Germanic state.1 In a sense, veterans were bidding for a national dialogue on the state's values and ideology in which they could participate as discussants in contrast to being, as they had been, passive recruits for sick national designs.
Anal sadism, providing the psychodynamic fundament of Germanic culture, had led to a sepia world view. Edged by the allure of annihilation (Fromm, 1973; Hitler, 1943) in which everything would uniformly be turned into excrement (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1985), this view colored Germanic society's ideation of bellicosity and linked it with imaginings about race, space, manliness, and maturity (Binion, 1976; Dundes, 1984; Grunberger, 1979).
Reaching an apotheosis under the Nazis, violence and combat were exalted by Germanic culture. Though sometimes flirtatiously veiling its message, omnipresent Germanic kitsch adorned strife, war, and destruction (Friedländer, 1982). Governance by force, supposedly the first law of nature, insured the victory of the strong over the weak. The law of Darwinism, it was held, saw to