Sunday, June 6, 2010

The Otto Weininger syndrome


Sarah Honig
Another Tack
Sarah Honig's Blog
06 June '10

Suicide can be individual or collective. In either manifestation it can share similar attributes and arise from parallel psychological anomalies. It can be perversely popular.

In early 20th-century Vienna, for example, a spate of high-profile suicides triggered a pseudo-romantic fad. There seemed to be something dashing in taking one’s own life in a grand gesture that apparently made a statement. Pivotal in sensationalizing the fashion was 23-year-old philosopher Otto Weininger who shot himself in 1903 in the same hotel room where Beethoven died (presumably to enhance the dramatic effect).

Weininger’s intense auto-anti-Semitism loomed large among his motivations. Born Jewish, he converted to Christianity in his last year but obviously found no salvation. His book Geschlecht und Charakter (Gender and Character) testifies to boundless self-loathing. Weininger lambastes modernity as “Jewish” and asserts that ”women and Jews are pimps; their goal is to make man guilty. Our era is not only the most Jewish, but also the most feminine of eras” which “no longer has a single great artist, a single great philosopher. It has the least originality and the biggest hunt for originality.”

Moreover, Weininger makes hair-raising “anthropological observations,” even embracing notions that “Jewish hair… points to the Negro, and the completely Chinese or Malaysian skull shapes, which one so often finds among the Jews – who frequently have a yellow complexion – point to partly Mongolian blood.” Harrowing stuff.

Unsurprisingly Weininger’s most ardent posthumous fans were the Nazis, foremost Hitler himself who reportedly said he “had only encountered one decent Jew, Otto Weininger, who killed himself when he realized that the Jew thrives on contaminating the authentic folk bloodlines of others.”

Weininger’s suicide was regarded by Third Reich ideologues as the only “honorable” way for a Jew to cleanse the world of his existence.

Repulsive as this undeniably is, it’s hardly irrelevant. The noxious Weininger syndrome still afflicts certain Jews. The mental aberration Weininger took to extremes is still being taken to extremes by his torchbearers. But there’s one very significant difference. Latter-day Weiningers look out quite nicely for their own well-being. Their self-abhorrence is channeled onto the Jewish collective. They promote national Jewish suicide, not their own personal demise.

(Read full article)

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