The Question of German Guilt

In learning to talk with each other we win more than a connecting link between us. We lay the indispensable foundation for the ability to talk with other peoples.

If I anticipate that which is to become the theme of these lectures only at their very end: for us the way of force is hopeless, the way of cunning undignified and futile. Full frankness and honesty harbors not only our dignity—possible even in impotence—but our own chance. The question for every German is whether to go this way at the risk of all disappointments, at the risk of additional losses and of convenient abuse by the powerful. The answer is that this is the only way that can save our souls from a pariah existence. What will result from it we shall have to see. It is a spiritual-political venture along the edge of the precipice. If success is possible, then it will be only at long range. We are going to be distrusted for a long time to come.

Lastly, I characterize ways of remaining silent to which we incline and which constitute our great danger (I myself cannot refrain from accusing—at least not from a mental attack on the aggressive mentality).

A proudly silent bearing may for a short time be a justified mask, to catch one’s breath and clear one’s head behind it. But it becomes self-deception, and a trap for the other, if it permits us to hide defiantly within ourselves, to bar enlightenment, to elude the grasp of reality. We must guard against evasion. From such a bearing there arises a mood which is discharged in private, safe abuse, a mood of heartless frigidity, rabid indignation and facial distortions, leading to barren self-corrosion. A pride that falsely deems itself masculine, while in fact evading the issue, takes even silence as an act of combat, a final one that remains impotent.

Talking with each other is canceled too by speech which no longer speaks in private—speech which means to insult but not to hear an answer, waiting rather for the moment of face-slapping and secretly anticipates what in reality is fist and manslaughter, machine gun and bombing plane. Rage can distinguish only friend and foe for a life-and-death struggle, talks frankly with neither and does not see men as men, to get along with by being ready for self-corrections. We cannot be conscientious enough in illuminating this sort of conflict and rupture in our intercourse.

THE GREAT DIFFERENCES BETWEEN Us

Talking with each other is difficult in Germany today, but the more important for that reason. For we differ extraordinarily in what we have experienced, felt, wished, cherished and done. An enforced superficial community hid that which is full of possibilities and is now able to unfold.

We cannot sensibly talk with each other unless we regard the extraordinary differences as starting points rather than finalities. We have to learn to see and feel the difficulties in situations and attitudes entirely divergent from our own. We must see the different origins—in education, special fates and experiences—of any present attitude.

Today we Germans may have only negative basic features in common: membership in a nation utterly beaten and at the victors’ mercy; lack of a common ground linking us all; dispersal—each one is essentially on his own, and yet each one is individually helpless. Common is the non-community.

In the silence underneath the leveling public propaganda talk of the twelve years, we struck very different inner attitudes and passed through very different inner developments. We have no uniformly constituted souls and desires and sets of values in Germany. Because of the great diversity in what we believed all these years, what we took to be true, what to us was the meaning of life, the way of the transformation must also be different now for every individual. We are all being transformed. But we do not all follow the same path to the new ground of common truth, which we seek and which reunites us. In such a disaster everyone may let himself be made over for rebirth, without fear of dishonor. What we must painfully renounce is not alike for a1l—so little alike that one man’s renunciation may impress another as a gain. We are divided along different lines of disappointment.

That the differences come into the open now is due to the fact that no public discussion was possible for twelve years, and that even in private life all opposition was confined to the most intimate conversations and was often furtive among the closest friends. Public and general, and thus suggestive and almost a matter of course for a youth that had grown up in it, was only the National-Socialist way of thinking and talking.

Now that we can talk freely again, we seem to each other as if we had come from different worlds. And yet all of us speak the German language, and we were all born in this country and are at home in it.