The Question of German Guilt

In 1945 the Nazi government had scarcely fallen when Karl Jaspers, a professor of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg who had been forced to resign from his post in 1937, broached the question of national guilt in a series of lectures that immediately attracted broad interest. (For more on his life, see the second part of this introduction.) With simple directness he voiced the question many were whispering: “Are the German people guilty?” From his own conflicted feelings at being a German with an unblemished record as an anti-Nazi who had nevertheless remained within Germany throughout the war, Jaspers began to articulate a matrix of distinctions among types of guilt and their corresponding degrees of responsibility. His immediate purpose in these lectures was to warn against evasive apologies and wholesale condemnations, but his philosophical approach to the problem generated a book that has stood the test of time and offers compelling insight for situations far removed from the specific historical setting that occasioned these reflections.

Were it not for the media coverage of some of today’s refugees—in Kosovo, for instance, or East Timor—prosperity would make it almost impossible to imagine the trauma that gripped Europe after the Second World War. The raw suffering on all sides—in the lands that Hitler’s armies invaded and within Germany itself—seemed only to confirm the blanket verdict that had been of necessity very simple and without nuance in order to sustain the energies needed for the war effort: in the judgment of the victors, Germany was guilty of bringing all this suffering upon itself for having brought so much suffering upon others. The times were impatient of distinctions.

But impatient or no, the times required distinctions. Although the term “guilt-trip” had not yet been devised, the phenomenon is perennial. To separate the genuine responsibility that warrants true guilt from any guilt-trip (whether self-imposed by the vanquished in their despair or unfairly laid upon them by the victors), Jaspers brings to bear a sacred principle of ethics: one bears responsibility only to the degree that one has taken part and acted. Where one did not voluntarily consent or approve, there can be no culpability assigned. The purpose of Jaspers’s distinctions is to sort out the guilt that those responsible really should feel from the ill-defined and inappropriate feelings of guilt weighing down postwar Germans like a demon needing to be exorcised.

But even when the principle is clear, assessing responsibility will never be simple. If individuals or groups are ever to deal with the feelings of guilt that tend to surge forth, the pangs of conscience that emerge, and the reparation that is owed to those who have been wronged, it is crucial for a careful assessment of one’s responsibility to take place. To enable the process to begin for Germany and for Germans, Jaspers proposed a powerful but controversial fourfold schema:

(1) Criminal guilt belongs only to those who violated the law (taken broadly to include the natural law and international law, if not the positive law in force at the time in one’s own country) and who have been convicted by a court with appropriate jurisdiction (hence the elaborate justification being offered at the time for the trials conducted at Nuremberg).

(2) Political guilt, by contrast, comes about for the entire citizenry of a modern state, for modern states allow no one to be apolitical. Unfair as it seems, this sort of guilt is what all citizens of a country are presumed to bear for the deeds of their governments. In this sphere, even declining to vote in elections is taken to make a person co-responsible for the way in which one is governed, for one had the chance to participate. Regardless of whether the individual citizen likes or dislikes a given regime, all citizens have to suffer the consequences that the victorious powers impose upon the whole country for the misdeeds of its regime.

(3) Moral guilt names the personal responsibility one bears before the tribunal of one’s own conscience for one’s own deeds—even for deciding to follow the orders one receives from one’s superiors. Here especially Jaspers counsels complete and utter honesty, for no one can ever know another person’s heart, and thus no one may ever judge another’s moral guilt. But neither may anyone simply pass over assessing one’s own genuine moral responsibility, even if some grand reversal of fortunes has suddenly afflicted the individual or the community with great sufferings in turn. If there really is moral guilt in one’s past, the demands of conscience require the responsibility to be faced.