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By Root 5566 0

in his greatest gamble of all, the Soviet Union. This was to mark the onset, over the next two years, of the Frustration Stage. Every fantasy, because it cannot reach any satisfactory resolution, must consist of swings between anticipation and frustration; and the middle phase of the fantasy cycle marks that moment when frustration begins to outweigh anticipation. The initial euphoria of Hitler's advance into Russia (and the start of a new, more murderous phase in his drive to exterminate the Jews and other `below the line' untermenschen) was succeeded by the setback of the first Russian winter and the entry into the war of the United States. This was followed by the even more breathtaking advances of his armies in the summer of 1942, both in Russia and North Africa; succeeded in that autumn and winter by his first really crushing reverses at Stalingrad and El Alamein. Again, as we see in so many stories, external forces were at last constellating in serious opposition to the dark central figure, and by the summer of 1943, with the defeat of his last great Russian offensive at Kursk, coinciding with the allied invasion of Sicily, the mass-sinking of his U-boats in the Atlantic and the unleashing of day-and-night assault by allied bomber fleets on the cities of Germany itself, Hitler's dream was moving into its Nightmare Stage. By the summer and autumn of 1944, with enemies now closing in from three sides, he was in exactly that position in which we see the hero by the end of the fourth act in a Shakespearian tragedy such as Macbeth or Richard III: a cornered rat without hope of escape. In 1945 the final act of the drama wound to its archetypal conclusion when, amid the rubble of the one-time capital of his great European empire, he, like so many central figures of Tragedy before him, took his own life.

At this point, for all those hundreds of millions of people who had been drawn into the conflict against him, the archetypal response which now shaped their emotions more than anything else was that which we see enacted at the end of an Overcoming the Monster story. For six years Hitler had loomed up in their consciousness just like any monster in storytelling, vested with all the psychological characteristics of a mythical monster. He had seemed invincibly powerful, utterly heartless, devilishly ingenious: the complete personification of all that is twisted and dark in human nature. Yet now at last the monster was dead. By a titanic concentration of masculine values, strength, will and organisation, reinforced by the selflessness of the allied cause, this quintessence of evil had been overcome. And ultimately it could be seen how, like any monster in fiction, his central failing, his fundamental flaw, was that he was blind. Possessed by unconscious forces, he had, as he himself once put it, been a `sleepwalker', leading his people into a colossal act of collective make-believe. As the archetype dictates, this cosmic act of hubris had eventually aroused its inevitable nemesis. Cosmic balance had been restored. Yet, for all the mighty wave of relief and rejoicing which engulfed humanity, this was not of course the end of the story, even when, a few months later, the Nazis' collective alter-ego on the other side of the world met similar nemesis in those mushroom clouds rising over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

For millions of those who had suffered under Hitler's shadow, the slaying of the monster did not bring the unalloyed victory for light that we see at the end of a fictional version of the story. For half the peoples of Europe, the end of one tyranny meant only their falling under the advancing shadow of another, that of Stalin's Communism. Even for many in the West, the time after the war was still bleak, as they struggled out of the ruins to live through years of austerity. For the fact was that, although it had been natural to view the events of those wartime years as like living through a gigantic, real-life Overcoming the Monster story, this had only been a projection onto the outer world of an archetype