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Jewish Activities in the Metropolitan Area

March 18, 1934
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Germany is suffering from a nervous breakdown, declared W. Beran Wolfe, director of the Community Church menta, hygiene clinic, writing in the current issue of the Modern Psychologist.

Outlining the background of recent German history, and demonstrating the reasons for this breakdown, Dr. Wolfe explained, “The technique of a nervous breakdown is simple: You fail in a critical situation because your ‘private logic’ has been knocked out by the superior force of common sense, the force of reality. You go through a brief terror, and as you recover from the immediate sting of defeat, you unconsciously build up an alibi. If you can, you save your face by hanging the blame on the convenient shoulders of a scapegoat.”

Dr. Wolfe maintains that this is what has happened in Germany. “In the case of Germany,” he writes, “this is Hitlerism. Just as a nervous stomach or a palpitating heart may become the loudspeaker of a personality in the throes of a nervous breakdown, so Hitler has become the mouthpiece of a distraught Germany. Once the technique is crystallized, nothing else matters. Reason is thrown to the winds, reality is excluded from consideration.” The scapegoat, he explains, lay close at hand, in the person of the Jew.

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