The news of last month's reopening of the Reichstag building, sixty-six years after its ruination by fire, sent a small chill up more than a few aging spines. The stable parliamentary democracy that is today's Germany can hardly be faulted for acceding to its own understandable yearning for symbolic continuity with eight centuries of a representative legislature—the imperial Diet goes back to 1100—or its nostalgia for an edifice erected during a period of unbridled cultural energy. Still, many of us cannot but be assailed by the obvious memories associated with that historic place and the events surrounding its near-destruction: the birth-pangs of fascism, the first reports of terror in the streets, and finally the incendiary pretext that ushered in the long night of the most destructive dictatorship the world has ever known.

And then there are the words. Germany is alone among nations in preserving the language of empire for the name of its legislative body. Chancellor Schroeder asserted in his opening address that there is no equation between the retained use of "Reich" and current or future reality, but some of us are not completely reassured by his facile certitude. The word reverberates. Perhaps our unease would be less were we not confronted with another verbal reminder of horror that his government has chosen to keep in place. Emblazoned on the facade over the tall pillars fronting the refurbished building is the old proclamation that in a bygone time stirred so many nationalistic hearts: Dem Deutschen Volke, "To the German People."

In restoring a building, anguished emotions have also been restored. To men and women of a certain age throughout the world, the sight or the sound of the word "Volk" brings back an entire panoply of painful recollections. Who, growing up in the 1930s or the early 1940s, can forget the horrifying uses to which the ancient Germanic concept of Volk was put, in the name of racial purity, ethnic hatred, persecution, and murder? To Hitler's votaries and their generations of like-minded predecessors, the German Volk was more than a people. It was an imperious familial community of tribal origin, held indissolubly together by ties of unblemished blood and an attachment to the sanctity of the Vaterland. Its basis was the myth of a lustrous history and the glorification of the imagined heroic sagas of the Mittelalter, the near-primitive and therefore noble early Middle Ages of Wagnerian confabulation.

The notion of Volk was, in Hitler's words, "a blood-conditioned entity" and "the sacred collective egoism which is the nation." Addressing the members of the displaced Reichstag on January 30, 1937, Hitler proclaimed his plan: "The main plank in the National Socialist program is to abolish the liberalistic concept of the individual and the Marxist concept of humanity and to substitute for them the Volk community, rooted in the soil and bound together by the bond of its common blood." The German Volk was the Master Race, disdainful of lesser tribes and murderously contemptuous of the impurities of surrounding cultures. Its assumed existence was the arrogant justification for some of the most repulsive crimes ever perpetrated in the name of ideology. Lofty oratory did not disguise its inherent rot.

One need not be a Freudian to intuit that an obsessional insistence on purity is a reaction to a deep sense of uncleanness. One need not even subscribe to the theory of unconscious motivation to perceive a national phenomenon in Nazism that figuratively reeked of the fear of contamination. To understand the details of Robert Proctor's illuminating analysis of the interaction between science and national neurosis, it is only necessary to recall that cancer, in the 1930s, was seen by the laity and by many doctors as a disease likened to degeneration and defilement, a disease that approached by stealth and killed by treachery, a disease tinged with shame, a disease not to be disclosed.