The Question of German Guilt

In Germany we have not only the differences between the peculiar attitudes based on the German fate. We also have here the party divisions which are common to all the West: the socialist and bourgeois-capitalist tendencies, the politicized creeds, the democratic will to freedom and the dictatorial inclination. And not only that; it may yet happen that these contrasts will be affected by the Allied powers, and work on us as on a now politically impotent, pliant, testing material.

All these differences lead to constant disruption among us Germans, to the dispersal and division of individuals and groups—the more so as our existence lacks the common ethical-political base. We only have shadows of a truly common political ground on which we might stand and retain our solidarity through the most violent controversies. We are sorely deficient in talking with each other and listening to each other. We lack mobility, criticism and self-criticism. We incline to doctrinism.

What makes it worse is that so many people do not really want to think. They want only slogans and obedience. They ask no questions and they give no answers, except by repeating drilled-in phrases. They can only assert and obey, neither probe nor apprehend. Thus they cannot be convinced, either. How shall we talk with people who will not go where others probe and think, where men seek independence in insight and conviction?

Often the outstanding difference is simply one of character. Some people always tend to be in opposition, others to run with the pack.

Germany cannot come to unless we Germans find the way to communicate with each other. The general situation seems to link us only negatively. If we really learn to talk with each other it can be only in the consciousness of our great diversity.

Unity by force does not avail; in adversity it fades as an illusion. Unanimity by talking with and understanding each other, by mutual toleration and concession leads to a community that lasts.

What we have mentioned and shall develop in subsequent discussions are typical traits. No one needs to classify himself. Anyone who feels himself referred to does so on his own responsibility.

OUTLINE OF SUBSEQUENT DISCUSSIONS

We want to know where we stand. We seek to answer the question, what has led to our situation, then to see what we are and should be—what is really German—and finally to ask what we can still want.

It is only now that history has finally become world history—the global history of mankind. So our own situation can be grasped only together with the world-historical one. What has happened today has its causes in general human events and conditions, and only secondarily in special intranational relations and the decisions of single groups of men.

What is taking place is a crisis of mankind. The contributions, fatal or salutary, of single peoples and states can only be seen in the framework of the whole, as can the connections which brought on this war, and its phenomena which manifested in new, horrible fashion what man can be. It is only within such a total framework that the guilt question, too, can be discussed justly and unmercifully at the same time. At the beginning, therefore, we place a theme which does not even mention Germany as yet: the generality of the age—how it reveals itself as technical age and in world politics and in the loss or transformation of all faith.

Only by visualizing this generality can we distinguish what is all men’s due and what is private to a special group—or, furthermore, what lies in the nature of things, in the course of events, and what is to be ascribed to free human decision.

Against the background of this generality we seek, second, the way to the German question. We visualize our real situation as the source of our spiritual situation, characterize National-Socialism, inquire how it could and did happen, and finally discuss the guilt question.*

After the visualization of the disaster we inquire, third: what is German? We want to see German history, the German spirit, the changes in our German national consciousness, and great German personalities.

Such a historical self-analysis of our German being is at the same time an ethical self-examination. In the mirror of our history we see our aims and our tasks. We hear them in the call of our great ancestors and apprehend them at the same time by illuminating the historic idols which led us astray.

What we think of as German is never mere cognition but an ethical resolve, a factor in German growth. The character of one’s own people is not finally determined until it is historically finished, all past and no future any more (like ancient Hellenism).

The fact that we are still alive, still part of history and not yet at the absolute end, leads, fourth, to the question of our remaining possibilities. Is there any strength left to the German in political collapse, in both political and economic impotence? Or has the end come in fact?