The Question of German Guilt

The moral issue also involves a confusion about the importance of power in human communities. The obfuscation of this fundamental fact is guilt, no less than is the false deification of power as the sole deciding factor in events. Every human being is fated to be enmeshed in the power relations he lives by. This is the inevitable guilt of all, the guilt of human existence. It is counteracted by supporting the power that achieves what is right, the rights of man. Failure to collaborate in organizing power relations, in the struggle for power for the sake of serving the right, creates basic political guilt and moral guilt at the same time. Political guilt turns into moral guilt where power serves to destroy the meaning of power—the achievement of what is right, the ethos and purity of one’s own nation. For wherever power does not limit itself, there exists violence and terror, and in the end the destruction of life and soul.

Out of the moral everyday life of most individuals, of the broad masses of people, develops the characteristic political behavior of each age, and with it the political situation. But the individual’s life in turn presupposes a political situation already arisen out of history, made real by the ethos and politics of his ancestors, and made possible by the world situation. There are two schematically opposed possibilities here:

Either the ethos of politics is the principle of a state in which all participate with their consciousness, their knowledge, their opinions, and their wills. This is the life of political liberty as a continuous flow of decay and improvement. It is made possible by the task and the opportunity provided by a responsibility shared by all.

Or else there prevails a situation in which the majority are alienated from politics. State power is not felt to be the individual’s business. He does not feel that he shares a responsibility; he looks on, is politically inactive, works and acts in blind obedience. He has an easy conscience in obeying and an easy conscience about his nonparticipation in the decisions and acts of those in power. He tolerates the political reality as an alien fact; he seeks to turn it cunningly to his personal advantage or lives with it in the blind ardor of self-sacrifice.

This is the difference between political liberty* and political dictatorship, conceived from Herodotus on as the difference between West and East (Greek liberty and Persian despotism). In most cases, it has not been up to the individual to say which will prevail. For good or ill, the individual is born into a situation; he has to take what is tradition and reality. No individual and no group can at one stroke, or even in a single generation, change the conditions by which all of us live.

CONSEQUENCES OF GUILT

The consequences of guilt affect real life, whether or not the person affected realizes it, and they affect my self-esteem if I perceive my guilt.

(a) Crime meets with punishment. It requires that the judge acknowledge the guilty man’s free determination of his will—not that the punished acknowledge the justice of his punishment.

(b) There is liability for political guilt, consequently reparation is necessary and further loss or restriction of political power and political rights (on the part of the guilty). If the guilt is part of events decided by war, the consequences for the vanquished may include destruction, deportation, extermination. Or the victor can, if he will, bring the consequences into a form of right, and thus of moderation.

(c) The outgrowth of the moral guilt is insight, which involves penance and renewal. It is an inner development, then also taking effect in the world of reality.

(d) The metaphysical guilt results in a transformation of human self-consciousness before God. Pride is broken. This self-transformation by inner activity may lead to a new source of active life, but one linked with an indelible sense of guilt in that humility which grows modest before God and submerges all its doings in an atmosphere where arrogance becomes impossible.

FORCE—RIGTH—MERCY

Force is what decides between men, unless they reach agreement. Any state order serves to control this force so as to preserve it—as law enforcement within, as war without. In quiet times this had been almost forgotten.

Where war establishes the situation of force, the right ends. We Europeans have tried even then to maintain some remnant of it in the rules of international law, which apply in war as in peace and were last expressed in the Hague and Geneva Conventions. The attempt seems to have been vain.