6 ideas
Germans did not merely obey Hitler; they installed him in place of their own ego ideal, so that loving him was a form of loving an inflated version of themselves. His fall was therefore not the loss of an external ruler but a narcissistic injury, a collapse of the self's own grandiosity. That is why the loss could not be mourned in the ordinary way.
Mourning Hitler honestly would have risked a massive collective melancholia: self-devaluation, guilt and depression at having loved a criminal ideal. To escape this, postwar Germans derealized the Nazi period, treating it as a dream or an alien occupation that had happened to them rather than something they had done. The defense protected self-esteem but cut the past off from feeling.
A striking absence of feeling after catastrophe is not neutrality or recovery; it shows how strongly affect is being held down. A population that speaks of mass murder with flat indifference, or talks mostly of its own suffering, is spending psychic energy to keep guilt and grief out of awareness. Read the missing emotion as the symptom.
The frantic energy of the postwar economic miracle worked in part as a manic defense: busy productivity and material success filled the space where grief and self-examination should have been. Rebuilding became a way to undo the damage symbolically without ever facing what it meant. Tireless activity can be a flight from inner work.
A society that has not worked through its losses cannot form new, freely chosen attachments to ideals, so its politics stays conservative, apathetic and focused on the status quo. The energy that mourning would release stays tied up in defending against the past. Real democratic engagement requires grief work first, because only mourning frees libido for new commitments.
Collective mourning has an order: first break through denial and admit identification with the lost ideal, then grieve the ideal's loss, and only then feel empathy and guilt toward its victims. Grief for the victims is impossible while people still unconsciously defend the idealized leader, since feeling the victims' suffering would indict the self. Skipping steps yields ritualized, affectless remembrance.