Nazi ideology measured human value by capacity for group bonding

Evidence

The diagnosis itself was imbued with Nazi ideology, under which every individual’s value was measured, as Sheffer outlines, by their Gemüt—a tricky, hard-to-translate concept that referred, in this era, to a person’s sense of group bonding within the broader Volk, the Aryan collective that was being engineered and militarized by the Nazi state. People with autism—because their gaze is inward rather than outward, and because many struggle to read social cues and tend to focus less on social approval than others do—had, according to Asperger, “poverty of Gemüt.” They would not make good group players in the Volk. Most, he wrote, had no social value whatsoever: they would grow up to “roam the streets as ‘originals,’ grotesque and dilapidated, talking loudly to themselves or unconcernedly to passers-by.” A small subset, however, who he called his “little professors,” could play exceptional roles. In 1941, with the Nazis still solidly in control, he wrote, “We know how many of our former children, including very difficult cases, entirely fulfill their duties in their professions, in the armed forces, and in the [Nazi] party, not a few among them in eminent positions. This is how we know that the success of our work is worth the effort.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 695

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Gemüt as the Nazi-era standard of worth — inward-facing neurodivergence read as social uselessness.
• QUESTION: Is the Gemüt concept part of Klein’s analytic toolkit for understanding today’s right’s valorization of outward-facing group conformity?