The Question of German Guilt

At times we seem to hear a pharisaical note in the charges, from those who perilously made their escape but finally—measured by suffering and death in concentration camps, and by the fear in Germany—lived abroad without terrorist compulsion, though with the sorrows of exile, and now claim credit for their emigration as such. This note we deem ourselves entitled to reject, without anger.

Some righteous voices have indeed been raised precisely in discernment of the terror apparatus and its consequences. Thus Dwight Macdonald wrote in the magazine Politics in March 1945: “The peak of terror and of guilt enforced by terror was achieved with the alternative, Kill or be killed,” and he added that many commanders assigned to executions and murders refused to take part in the cruelties and were shot.

Thus Hannah Arendt wrote about the participation and the complicity of the German people in the crimes of the Fuehrer as the result of organized terror. Family men, simple jobholders, whom nobody would ever have suspected of being capable of murder and who always had done their duty, now obeyed the orders to kill people and to commit other atrocities in the concentration camps with the same sense of duty.*

GUILT WITHIN HISTORY

We distinguish between cause and guilt. An exposition showing why things happened as they did, and why indeed they could not but so happen, is automatically considered an excuse. A cause is blind and involuntary. Guilt is seeing and free.

We usually deal in like fashion with political events. The causal connection of history seems to relieve a people of responsibility. Hence their satisfaction if, in adversity, effective causes seem to make inevitability plausible.

Many tend to accept and stress their responsibility when they talk of their present actions whose arbitrariness they would like to see released from restraints, conditions and obligations. In case of failure, on the other hand, they tend to decline responsibility and plead allegedly inescapable necessities. Responsibility had been a talking point, not an experience.

All through these years, accordingly, one could hear that if Germany won the war the victory and the credit would be the Party’s—while if Germany lost, the losers and the guilty would be the German people.

But actually, in the causal connections of history, cause and responsibility are indivisible wherever human activity is at work. As soon as decisions and actions play a part in events, every cause is at the same time either credit or guilt.

Even those happenings which are independent of will and decision still are human tasks. The effects of natural causes depend also on how man takes them, how he handles them, what he makes out of them. Cognition of history, therefore, is never such as to apprehend its course as flatly necessary. This cognition can never make certain predictions (as possible, for instance, in astronomy), nor can it retrospectively perceive an inevitability of general events and individual actions. In either case it sees the scope of possibilities, only more richly and concretely in the case of the past.

In turn, this cognition, historic-sociological insight and the resulting picture of history, affects events and is to this extent a matter of responsibility.

Chiefly named as premises independent of freedom—and thus of guilt and responsibility—are the conditions of geography and the world-historical situation.

GEOGRAPHICAL CONDITIONS

Germany has open borders all around. To maintain itself as a nation, it must be militarily strong at all times. Periods of weakness have made it a prey to aggression from the West, East and North, finally even from the South (Turks). Because of its geographical situation Germany never knew the peace of an unmenaced existence, as England knew it and, even more so, America. England could afford to pay for its magnificent domestic evolution in decades of impotence in foreign politics and military weakness. It was by no means conquered for that reason; its last invasion took place in 1066. A country such as Germany, uncemented by natural frontiers, was forced to develop military states to keep its nationhood alive at all. This function was long performed by Austria, later by Prussia.

The peculiarity and military style of each state would mark the rest of Germany and yet would always be felt also as alien. It took an effort to gloss over the fact that Germany either had to be ruled by something which, though German, was alien to the rest, or would in the impotence of a scattered whole be left at the mercy of foreign nations.

Thus Germany had no lasting center, only transient centers of gravity, with the result that none could be felt and recognized as its own by more than a part of Germany.