The Question of German Guilt

Because in my innermost soul I cannot help feeling collectively, being German is to me—is to everyone—not a condition but a task. This is altogether different from making the nation absolute. I am a human being first of all; in particular I am a Frisian, a professor, a German, linked closely enough for a fusion of souls with other collective groups, and more or less closely with all groups I have come in touch with. For moments this proximity enables me to feel almost like a Jew or Dutchman or Englishman. Throughout it, however, the fact of my being German—that is, essentially, of life in the mother tongue—is so emphatic that in a way which is rationally not conceivable, which is even rationally refutable, I feel co-responsible for what Germans do and have done.

I feel closer to those Germans who feel likewise—without becoming melodramatic about it—and farther from the ones whose soul seems to deny this link. And this proximity means, above all, a common inspiring task—of not being German as we happen to be, but becoming German as we are not yet but ought to be, and as we hear it in the call of our ancestors rather than in the history of national idols.

By our feeling of collective guilt we feel the entire task of renewing human existence from its origin—the task which is given to all men on earth but which appears more urgently, more perceptibly, as decisively as all existence, when its own guilt brings a people face to face with nothingness.

As a philosopher I now seem to have strayed completely into the realm of feeling and to have abandoned conception. Indeed language fails at this point, and only negatively we may recall that all our distinctions—notwithstanding the fact that we hold them to be true and are by no means rescinding them—must not become resting places. We must not use them to let matters drop and free ourselves from the pressure under which we continue on our path, and which is to ripen what we hold most precious, the eternal essence of our soul.

Possible Excuses

Both we ourselves and those who wish us well are ready with ideas to alleviate our guilt. There can be no question of nullifying such guilt as we, distinguishing and reassembling, have developed here; but there are points of view which, by suggesting a more lenient judgment, simultaneously sharpen and characterize the type of guilt referred to at each time.

TERRORISM

Germany under the Nazi régime was a prison. The guilt of getting into it is political guilt. Once the gates were shut, however, a prison break from within was no longer possible. Any discussion of what responsibility and guilt of the imprisoned remained and arose thereafter must consider the question what they could do at all.

To hold the inmates of a prison collectively responsible for outrages committed by the prison staff is clearly unjust.

It has been said that the millions—the millions of workers and the millions of soldiers—should have resisted. Since they did not, since they worked and fought for the war, they are considered guilty.

We may say in rebuttal that the 15,000,000 foreign workers worked just as well for the war as did the German workers. There is no evidence that more sabotage acts were committed by them. Only in the final weeks, with the collapse already under way, the foreign workers seem to have become active on a larger scale.

Large-scale actions are impossible without organization and leadership. To ask a people to rise even against a terrorist state is to ask the impossible. Such rebellion can only be a scattered, disconnected occurrence, generally anonymous, subsequently unknown—a quiet submersion in death. Only a few exceptions were publicized by special circumstances, and these only orally and in narrow limits (as the heroism of the two students, Scholls, and of Professor Huber in Munich).

This being so, we marvel at some accusations. Franz Werfel, in an unmerciful indictment of the whole German people written shortly after the collapse of Hitler Germany, says that “only the one Niemoeller resisted.” In the same article he mentions the hundreds of thousands who were killed in the concentration camps—why? Surely because they resisted, although for the most part only by word. The ineffective disappearance of these anonymous martyrs underlines the impossibility. After all, concentration camps were a purely domestic affair until 1939, and even after that they were filled largely with Germans. In every month of 1944 the number of political arrests exceeded 4,000. The fact that there were concentration camps until the very end proves that there was opposition in the country.