The Nazi Übermensch vs. the Jewish Superhero

Hitler’s racial utopia collided with two Jewish teenagers’ creation of the most enduring superhero of our time.

photo: Daniel Álvasd/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Elana Gomel, an academic and writer.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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The official birthday of superheroes is supposed to be April 1938, when the first issue of Action Comics featured a new character: a guy in red trunks and a red cape with a big letter S on his chest.

Superman was the creation of two young Jews, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. But of course, no fictional character pops out of their creators’ head fully formed like Athena out of the head of Zeus. Each trails a long umbilical cord of history and culture.

Complete originality is impossible; just as we are born into a language, we are also born into the ocean of stories, ideas, and concepts that we revise and reinterpret in order to create something new.

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Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany in January 1933. By 1938, the racial state was fully established. The Nuremberg Race Laws, passed in 1935, created the legal framework in which German citizens were divided into several biological species, forbidden not simply to interact but to interbreed.

The Third Reich was the most extreme expression of what Robert Jay Lifton and other scholars called “biocracy”: a totalitarian state based on biomedical science.¹ Nowadays when the label of “racism” is applied to anything, from meritocracy to jeans, it is important to remember that racism means a complete ideology based on the supposed biological distinctions among different human races.

Nazis were not “white supremacists”; in fact, the idea of whiteness played almost no role in their thinking. Nazism was based on the unbridgeable biological divide between the Aryans and the Jews, with other races arranged in the hierarchy based on an elaborate system of measurements and hereditary indicators.

Blacks and Roma were inferior to the Nordics, but so were white-skinned, blue-eyed Slavs. As for Jews, skin color played no role whatsoever in their fate. The Jews were an “anti-race”: malevolent aliens disguised as human beings. The aim of the Nazi regime was to create a superior humanity freed of the Jewish taint, a collective of the Aryan New Men. The Nazis were not German nationalists; they were racial utopians.

The Übermensch, which is Superman in German, was the final fulfilment of this utopia, a dream of the biologically superior human, harking back to the earlier eugenicists. Though neither Francis Galton nor other prominent eugenicists, such as H. G. Wells, were racists, they did accept the basic premise, later elevated by Nazism, that humanity should control its own evolution by taking over “the function of nature (natural selection).” The selection in concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, where doctors would play the role of evolution by sending some to live and some to die with a wave of hand, was the gruesome literalization of this premise.

But how did the Nazis visualize the Übermensch?

Nazi art provided images of steely-eyed, square-jawed males and slender athletic women, but these were hardly enough to justify the elaborate apparatus of biocracy. And the Nazi elite were certainly not up to the task of inspiring the masses with their own evolutionary perfection. A common (and illegal) joke in the Third Reach claimed that the Übermensch was as blond as Hitler, as tall as Joseph Goebbels, and as slender as Hermann Göring.

However, there was a giant body of literature which predated the political rise of Nazism and portrayed the future racial utopia, published between 1895 and 1945, fleshing out the Aryan superhero. Forgotten and often deliberately purged from the libraries, these novels are described in Jost Hermand’s valuable book “Old Dreams of a New Reich.”

Partially inspired by Richard Wagner’s cult of Germanic mysticism, they depicted superheroes “whose strength and courage surpassed that of all other heroes of human history combined.”² Situated in the mythical past or in the utopian future, these images of biological transcendence helped to shape Nazi ideology, much like socialist utopias of the same period helped to shape communism.

Hitler, during his formative years in Vienna, was a fan, eagerly consuming the novels of Jules Verne, Karl May, and Kurd Lasswitz. But he also read widely in natural sciences, including the works of Thomas Malthus, Charles Darwin, and Ernst Haeckel, and in history, philosophy and social sciences, especially Arthur Gobineau and, of course, Friedrich Nietzsche. Hitler was not the crude barbarian of the wartime caricatures, but a well-read autodidact. Of course, so were Pol Pot and Joseph Stalin.

And this brings us back to Superman. It is often assumed that Superman, with his upbringing in rural America and his dedication to truth, justice, and the American way, was intended as a counterpart to the Übermensch. But interestingly, when after the war comics became the subject of a moral panic that centered on their supposed corruption of the youth, Superman was accused of being a covert Nazi. Dr. Fredric Wertham, who spearheaded the campaign against violence and sex in comics, wrote about him:

“Superman (with the big S on his uniform — we should, I suppose, be thankful that it is not an S.S.) needs an endless stream of ever new sub-men, criminals and foreign-looking people not only to justify his existence but even to make it possible. It is this feature that engenders in children either one or the other of two attitudes: either they fantasize themselves as supermen, with the attendant prejudices against the sub-men, or it makes them submissive and receptive to the blandishments of strong me who will solve all their social problems for them — by force.”³

Today, Dr. Wertham is remembered as a prude (his campaign led to the adoption of the Comics Code) and a fraud (much of his research about the supposed psychological damage of violence comics was unsound). But doesn’t he have a point? Not that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster intended their creation to be an SS-man in disguise. But the meaning of a cultural icon is not reducible to the intention of its creator.

In fact, many literary scholars (including Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault) argued against the very notion of authorial intention as being relevant to understanding of the text. And when you consider the cultural atmosphere of 1938, it is hard to overlook the fact that the notion of the biological Übermensch was in the air.

Indeed, subsequent iterations of the superhero trope obsessively return to that original historical moment, trying (and failing) to disengage it from the legacy of biocracy. Consider the 2000 beginning of the X-Men cinematic franchise that opens in Auschwitz. Why? No matter how you read it, it is highly problematic. Magneto, who becomes the leader of the “bad” superheroes is, of course, Jewish and a Holocaust survivor. So, is it a covert antisemitic allegory? Or, as much more likely, it is simply an attempt to make sense of the historical trauma of the Nazi regime that drowned the world in blood in order to create “real” superheroes?

The same return of the historically repressed is evident in Norman Spinrad’s stunning novel “The Iron Dream” (1973), which makes the connection between Nazism and superheroes into the backbone of its plot. But even more so, it is evident in the entire superhero genre’s obsessive attempts to differentiate between “good” and “bad” Übermensch, only to have it collapse into the Red Superman or the Dark Knight.

And here we come to the most provocative take on the very idea of Superman: Friedrich Nietzsche’s. The great German philosopher is often accused of being an inspiration of Nazism. This is unjust. Hitler was only 11 years old when Nietzsche died. And Nietzsche despised Wagner’s antisemitism and Volkish mythologizing, and was very vocal about it. But his most subtle and devastating retort to the dreams of biocracy lies in his description of what Superman actually is:

“Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”⁴

Superman is not an entity but a process; not being but becoming. He is a moving goalpost, a perpetually receding image of impossible transcendence. Not a muscle-bound Teutonic knight, not a flying do-gooder in red pants, not a Batmobile-driving rich dilettante. He is evolution itself: a perpetual change that never stops, never pauses, never reaches utopian perfection — but always beckons humanity to try to overcome our own limitations.

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1. Lifton, Robert Jay. “The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.” (Basic Books, 1986).

2. Hermand, Jost. “Old Dreams of a New Reich: Volkish Utopias and National Socialism.” (Indiana University Press, 1992).

3. Robb, Brian J. “A Brief History of Superheroes.” (Robinson, 2014).

4. “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” 1885.