You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
That any Jewish resistance occurred during the Holocaust was extraordinary, given the power of the German assault on Jewish bodies and minds and the devastation produced by ghettoization. Yet, essential to the existence of resistance was the capacity of resistors to transcend the radical inversion of meaning and value imposed by the German occupation and German racist policies. Resistance occurred against a backdrop of group psychosis. I would like to address the power of psychosis on the group level and its relationship to psychosis in the individual. Group madness and individual madness are quite different, but there is one very frightening similarity: the power of perception (delusion) to literally transform reality to conform with the projections of the subject.
For the psychotic subject, reality is what delusion defines as reality; for the group, reality is what the group ideological consensus defines as truth and necessity. And in the case of the Germans, what reality defined as necessity was the Jewish menace in radically distorting biological and genetic reality to make life untenable. The Jew as an absolute and mortal danger had to be physically eliminated before the German cultural group could be assured of safety. These allusions appear continually in German policy and propaganda statements. It is this kind of psychological universe that the resistor was forced to confront, fight, and overcome: the Jew as evil threatening the very foundations of the Aryan future.
The resistor, then, comes to represent and affirm an historical sanity, a value embedded in history and the history of ethics: the refusal of the premises of mass murder and the murder of an identified and marked group simply because this group exists. That assumption that the Other must die because the Other exists has no standing in an ethical history that grants dignity to human life. And when the resistor refused either physically or spiritually the Germans' view of reality, that refusal embrac