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|  | | Lee Harvey Oswald was plainly obsessed with John F. Kennedy and stylized him into a kind of super-ego. He couldn’t help but see parallels between his own life and that of the President: Both had reading disabilities but devoured one book after the other. Both were stationed in the Pacific during the war. Both had brothers named Robert. Oswald was convinced that he too would one day become President of the United States. His personal obsession would become the American trauma of the twentieth century when he fatally shot Kennedy in Dallas on 22 November 1963.
For sixty years now, that assassination has been reexamined repeatedly. Scientists, journalists, and Hollywood directors have vied with one another to find the secret group that masterminded it. The FBI, the CIA, the Soviet KGB, the Ku Klux Klan, Fidel Castro, and the Nazis have all been alleged to have been behind it. Entire libraries and archives are filled with the evidence for these ideas, which in the meantime are also nurtured in Internet forums. Even today, eighty percent of Americans believe that Kennedy was the victim not of one person’s delusions but of a large-scale conspiracy.
The Bochum-based Germanist Manfred Schneider does not doubt that Oswald was instructed to commit his bloody deed. Contrary to suspicions, he was not compelled to kill Kennedy on the orders of the intelligence services or by opponents of the Cold War. Rather, his directives were fathomable, emerging out of the "paranoid” mindset of a Presidential murderer. In this monumental work, Schneider uncovers the fatal effects of paranoia on many others who in the intervening two millennia have tried to kill heads of state, pop stars, and revolutionary leaders, or who have bombed symbols of power. He documents how Mark David Chapman, the assassin of John Lennon, shared this state of mind along with the suicide pilots of 9/11 and with Friedrich Stapss, the minister’s son who attempted to kill Napoleon in 1809. As was the case with Oswald and his cult surrounding Kennedy, assassins before and after him have pieced together a ludicrous but coherent worldview, perceiving behind every shrub (as it were) a malevolent intent or conspiracy. Each and every fact is loaded with meaning for them; they find in every text and image a confirmation of their fundamental suspicion that nothing is quite as it seems. For Schneider, these paranoiacs have not succumbed to “madness” but conform to a "special mode of reason", a type of hyper-rationality. It is in turn the basis for their exegesis of the world, and it follows a shrewd and perfect logic. At the same time, these individuals hardly care whether their basic assumptions concur with reality.
In the 750 pages of The Assassination, Schneider presents perceptive and thought-provoking analyses in the history of this high-profile act of violence. His impressive narrative talents are in evidence at the beginning of the book in his description of Julius Caesar’s murder in 44 B.C. by Brutus et al. For Schneider, that assassination represents the "primal scene of political murder.” It is an event with paradigmatic character, evoked time and again in the centuries to come, both by great writers as well as their most enthusiastic readers -- the assassins. Hence, Charlotte Corday, who stabbed the Jacobin Marat in his bathtub in 1793, was able to recite by heart most of Voltaire’s play about Caesar. And John Wilkes Booth, who entered the rogues’ gallery of the U.S. presidential assassins almost a hundred years before Oswald, had even acted in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. He is also said to have declaimed Brutus’s line "Sic semper tyrannis" (“Thus always to tyrants”) as he held the gun to Abraham Lincoln’s head.
The universal schematic for assassination was already established in ancient Rome, according to Schneider. However, he encounters it in its actual form much later. For the modern era, with its streamlining of work and personal life and with its belief in the universal laws of reason, is the perfect breeding ground for the paranoiac’s hyper-rationality. And yet, as Schneider demonstrates so vividly in the case of the Kennedy assassination, paranoia is in no sense the privilege of a set of obsession-driven assassins. Rather, it is the ubiquitous symptom of an age that seeks to banish what is contingent and irrational from the world. At the same time, when a powerful man believes that he alone has access to certain truths, he is not so different from those assassins out to thwart his plans. Against his will, as it were, it is shown just how much contingency is at times directing the course of events.
If (as Schneider argues) there is a paranoid conspiracy theorist within every assassin, we still cannot jump to the opposite conclusion, that behind every conspiracy theorist -- themselves well-represented in the ranks of modern historians, statesmen and philosophers -- there is a potential assassin. In his “critique of paranoid reason,” Schneider scrutinizes the excesses of our current explanatory models while also warning us not to blur the boundaries between our faith in rationality, "artificial interpretations," and acts of fanaticism. As a result, we should not find too much fault in this well-written and unconventional study when it itself applies slightly paranoid methods designed to help us find our way through the thickets of intellectual and contemporary history. Although it may not have been intentional, such an approach adds force to the significance of his project.
Marianna Lieder
May 2011
[Translated by David Brenner]
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