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I would like to thank Sally Cove, Susie Protschky, Catherine Kevin, Peter Monteath, Dirk Moses, Bradley Naranch, the staff and students at the Flinders History Seminar Series, and the two anonymous reviewers from Central European History for their insightful comments and suggestions on this paper.
In chapter eleven of Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler, having constructed aneal type "culture-bearing" Aryan race,1 came to elucidate his views on the history of Jews within Germany. Until the time of Frederick the Great, he argued, "it still entered no one's head to regard the Jews as anything else but a 'foreign' people."2 Thereafter, he asserted, came a period of transition wherein Jews had "the effrontery to turn Germanic."3 The rest of the chapter, for Hitler, was an attempt to reverse this putative historical mistake, and presents the reader with a vitriolic casting out of Jews, described as "parasites" and a "noxious bacillus," from the German body politic.4 The aim of this textual expulsion, Hitler explained, was to ensure that the Germans would not be destroyed from within, as had "all great cultures of the past."5 To Hitler, Jews were what Julia Kristeva has called "the abject"6--that which is simultaneously part of the self but radically rejected by the self. In seeking to expel the "Germanic Jews" from the Volkskörper, Hitler sought to expel that part of the German self that, in his view, was a source of weakness and taint.7
Kristeva's concept of the abject as that which is neither self nor other is in essence a modification of Lacan's earlier binary understanding of the relation of the self to the other in the process ofentity formation during the "mirror stage." In 1949, Lacan described the mirror stage as a pivotal moment in the construction of the self. The infant gazed upon itself in the mirror and assumed for itself anentification with an image that was at once external to itself and a projection of the self. Thisentification with a translocated, external reflection, an exterior image of the self (the imago) established an irrevocable change in the way in which the self was delineated,8 creating a nexus between what Lacan...