Joachim Köhler and Hitler's Missing Testicle

A while back I promised a thorough critique of Joachim Köhler’s book [which now can be found here]. You might remember that I said I am waiting for the complete prose and literary works by Wagner to arrive from Germany, so I can check some references so I can do a thoroughly researched hatchet job. I am still waiting for these to arrive. I just hope I have room in my study to fit them all. I really wish you could get these things in decent eBook format. One day it may happen, but I have waited for years and nothing has come of it. For a while you could get a lot of Wagner’s writings and letters on CD-ROM. I thought that would be the start of something great but that has come and gone.

You may be interested to know that I have been doing plenty of research for future posts, while waiting for the complete works of Wagner to arrive. In particular, I have been reading up on my history. This has always been a weak spot for me, as I have never formally read history. I have been concentrating on the history of Germany and Europe before, during and after Wagner’s lifetime. The interesting thing about Wagner is that his lifetime covers the period of the Napoleonic wars, the 1848 Revolution, the Franco-Prussian war, the fall of Louis-Napoleon, the Paris Commune, and German unification. Once you include the use of his music for nationalistic propaganda purposes during the Third Empire, then he becomes intertwined with German history well after his death. You then have to look at the First World War, the German 1918-19 Revolution, the foundation of the Weimar Republic, and the National Socialist counter-revolutionary backlash against it. You could almost include German unification after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Only on the founding of the modern Federal Republic was Wagner’s call for a peacefully united German republic and parliamentary democracy fully realised. The history of Wagner, the man and his music, is virtually the history of Germany. My head is so full of ideas, I would need to write a book to discuss them all.

It just makes me realise how hard it is to grasp Wagner in his entirety. Not only do you need to grasp him musically, but also understand his relation to Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Schelling, Fichte, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and the later Frankfurt school. Next you need to understand where he stands in relation to early socialists such as Feuerbach and Proudhon, as well as to Marx and Engels. You also need to appreciate the tensions between Bakunin's anarchism and Marxism, then be able to related this back to Wagner again. Little wonder nobody has manage to fully embrace and grasp all of these aspects of Wagner with any overarching coherency.

Reading a lot around the events after the rise of National Socialism has been interesting in one way. I have read a fair bit of Sir Ian Kershaw, possibly the most respected living authority on this period of German history today. I highly recommend his two-volume biography of Hitler. However, today I would like to discuss his book Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution:

Particularly interesting is just how little Wagner rates a mention in any of his books on this era. This is not just true of Kershaw either, but few, if any books by respected historians of this era mention Wagner, other than in passing. It is in stark contrast to Köhler’s bizarre writings, from which you could be forgiven for thinking that the whole of the ideological foundations, as well as the political and bureaucratic apparatus of National Socialism functioned solely and entirely around the writings of a nineteenth century opera composer!

Kershaw writes in Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution:

The ‘Hitlerism’ argument will not go away. In fact, there are some signs, amid the current preoccupation with sexuality in history (as in everything else), that the old psycho-historical interpretations are making a comeback, and in equally reductionist fashion. Hence, we have recent attempts to reduce the disaster of nazism to Hitler’s alleged homosexuality, or supposed syphilis. In each case, one or two bits of dubious hearsay evidence are surrounded by much inference, speculation and guesswork to come up with a case for world history shaped fatefully and decisively by Hitler’s ‘dark secret’. Reduced to absurdity, a rent-boy in Munich or a prostitute in Vienna thereby carries ultimate responsibility for the evils of nazism.

How about reducing the whole of National Socialism, the Second World War and the Holocaust all down to Hitler’s bizarre Wagner fascination? It is, after all, just as absurdly reductionistic to reduce the immensely complex tragedy of this period of history down to the singular influence of one nineteenth century opera composer. In fact, it is an insult to all of the terrible pain and suffering of all the victims of this immensely complex chapter of history to reduce it all down to grand opera.


Kershaw generally treats Köhler’s writings on Wagner with the same contemptuous dismissiveness that he treats books that reduce the whole of National Socialism down to Hitler allegedly being gay, having syphilis, or missing one testicle*. It is just as reductionistic to reduce it all down to Hitler’s listening to Wagner. Kershaw agrees with the German historian,  Hans-Ulrich Wehler, who wrote:

Does our understanding of National Socialist policies really depend on whether Hitler had only one testicle? . . . Perhaps the Führer had three, which made things difficult for him, who knows? . . . Even if Hitler could be regarded irrefutably as a sado-masochist, which scientific interest does that further? . . . Does the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” thus become more easily understandable or the “twisted road to Auschwitz” become the one-way street of a psychopath in power?

From Michael Marrus: The Holocaust in History. Toronto: KeyPorter, 2000 pages 90–91

Rosenbaum also gives us a good explanation for why this sort of grand reductionism to just a singular variable is so seductive:

There is an almost comic disproportion to the amount of attention, the amount of weight, the amount of potency that has been projected upon Hitler’s genitalia in general and on his purportedly absent testicle in particular. Like the lost safe-deposit box, the lost testicle has become a repository for the hope that some singular solution—an explicatory single-bullet theory—exists somewhere to explain everything. The lost-testicle myth serves as a metaphor for the urge to find some freakish, idiosyncratic abnormality in the person of Hitler—to explain the magnitude of his crimes as a freak of nature rather than something that arose from the “normal” human nature we would otherwise share with Hitler. 

Ron Rosenbaum: Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (my bold emphasis)

The attempt to explain everything about Hitler by reducing everything down to his alleged pathological Wagner-obsession is just another one in a long line of these "single-bullet" theories. Brian Magee has previously documented that there is a longstanding tradition associating Wagnerism with madness, so it was probably inevitable that somebody should come up with a "single-bullet" theory that tried to explain Hitler's alleged insanity as having being caused by Wagnerism.

Neither Ian Kershaw, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Saul Friedlädner nor any other major historian of this era, even once cites Köhler. Joachim Fest is equally dismissive of Köhler, calling his writings a “polemic”. Kershaw does mention Köhler in a footnote to his Hitler biography where his theories are dismissed as being "a gross oversimplifications and distortion". Kershaw seems to have completely relegated Köhler to the level of just another “missing testicle” type of book. After all, if you are going to reduce Hitler and National Socialism down to a missing testicle, or Wagner’s music, why not reduce it down to Hitler's equally bizarre fascination for the Disney cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?

Köhler is probably writing that book right now. He just loves reducing everything down to these comically reductionistic interpretations. If someone hadn't already beaten him to it, Köhler would be explaining National Socialism in terms of Hitler’s alleged homosexuality. Köhler has already written a book about how everything in Nietzsche is a result of his alleged closet homosexuality. Or maybe, Köhler’s next book is going to be about Wagner's alleged homosexuality causing Hitler to lose a testicle? Or perhaps Köhler will argue that Wagner too had only one testicle?

Whatever. Who cares what bizarre book Köhler brain is about to hatch? However, pathologically obsessive-compulsively researched his books are, Köhler is probably the weirdest author I have ever come across in my whole life. His non-fiction writings and his fictional narratives are hard to distinguish. When you really see his sensationalist nonsense in perspective, you realise that it belongs in the same basket as other Nazi conspiracy stories. Some of these involve lurid stories of Satanism, or even aliens and UFOs. The trouble is that the popular market loves these types of conspiracies. The truth is always the biggest casualty.





Notes:


* Thomas Weber gives us the full story of how the missing testicle myth arose:

According to a Polish priest, who claims to have had conversations in the 1960s with the medic who treated Hitler after his injury, Hitler lost one of his testicles in the battle. The medic, Johan Jambor, had allegedly told him of Hitler: ‘His abdomen and his legs were covered in blood. Hitler was injured in the abdomen and had lost his testicle. His first question for the doctor was: “Will I still be able to have children?" A friend of Jambor claimed that Jambor had given him a similar account: ‘Jambor and his friend searched for injured soldiers for hours. They called Hitler “the screamer”. He was very loud and shouted “Help, Help!” Maybe Jambor really believed in this version of events, however self-serving the telling of the story was. Yet his testimony should certainly be treated as fiction. 

Even if we ignore the fact that none of Hitler’s military and medical records mention an injury to the abdomen and that Hitler did not have to be ‘found' as he was not injured on the battlefield but in the dugout of the support staff of regiment headquarters, Jambor’s account is less than convincing. Even if Hitler really had lost one of his testicles and was saved by Jambor, why would he have remembered the fate as well as the name of this particular still totally unknown, insignificant soldier, when he must have encountered hundreds, maybe thousands, of injured soldiers during the war?

I should also add that testicular rupture or loss due to a penetrating abdominal injury to the genitourinary area during military service would be considered a major abdominal injury. In the modern military setting it would mandate exploratory surgery. During the first world war, the lack of antibiotics and the more primitive state of surgery-anaesthesia would have made it an even more lethal injury.