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Article: Nazis, mythology, and totalitarian minds in Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night.
- Article from:
- Mythlore
- Article date:
- September 22, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 Mythopoeic Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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THERE WERE MANY Darwinian eugenicists in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century and one, Fritz Lenz, justified his race eugenics by calling on Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, and his science, to formulate Nazi race policy. This same policy is explored by Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night (1961) in the context of totalitarianism, and his notion of the "totalitarian mind," a mind, as we discover, manufactured by a Nazi mythology based on the ideology of social Darwinism. In Racial Hygiene, Robert Proctor argues that Lenz's ideas were influenced by Galton's science, quoting Lenz thusly:
To those in Germany who find any mention of the word "race"
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