Introduction

Throughout this book I have challenged the prevailing idea that judgment is merely connected to thinking and rationality and has nothing to do with feelings. I have shown that people must engage with individual and collective feelings of guilt, to arrive at critical judgments, which I term embodied reflective judgment. Insofar as feeling and thinking are deeply entangled with each other, people's and nations’ attempts via defense mechanisms to fend off feelings of guilt lead to flawed and even paranoid judgments. In the Introduction and Chapter 1, I set up the theoretical framework. I developed my idea of embodied reflective judgment by bringing Arendt's works, in particular her interpretation of the case of Eichmann, an Austrian perpetrator who was tried in Jerusalem, into conversation with Adorno's engagement with psychoanalysis to elaborate defense mechanisms.

In Chapters 2 and 3, I analyzed the court cases of actual Nazi perpetrators: in particular the case of Dr. Niedermoser, who was responsible for the mass murder of psychiatric patients in the Klagenfurter hospital in Austria, in Chapter 2; and the case of the Austrian university professor Beiglböck from the University of Vienna, who was responsible for the torture and murder of Roma and Sinti in the Dachau concentration camp, in Chapter 3. Here my analysis focused on exposing those mechanisms that led to a breakdown of individual feelings of guilt and critical thinking, where as a result embodied reflective judgment was arrested and these people committed crimes.

In Chapters 4 and 5, I exposed the defense mechanisms that present-day Austrians use to keep unconscious collective feelings of guilt that pertain to Austria's Nazi past repressed. In Chapter 4, I analyzed the defense mechanisms in the violent debates around the staging of Thomas Bernhard's Heldenplatz play, which exposed the continuing proto-fascist elements in contemporary Austria.