The Question of German Guilt

The decisive point is an eternal basic phenomenon, returned today in new form: he who in total defeat prefers life to death can only live in truthfulness—the only dignity left to him—if he decides upon this life in full realization of its meaning. What Hegel showed in his “Phenomenology,” in the grandiose chapter on master and servant, is the necessity which human consciousness would like to obscure in order to evade it.

The decision to stay alive in impotence and servitude is an act of life-building sincerity. It results in a metamorphosis that modifies all values. Here—if the decision is made, if the consequences are accepted and toil and suffering embraced—lies the sublime potential of the human soul. In Hegel’s exposition it is the servant rather than the master who bears the spiritual future—but not unless he honestly follows his hard road. Nothing is given. Nothing comes by itself. The errors of self-abasement and proud defiance can be avoided only if this prime decision is clear; purification serves to clarify both the decision and its consequences.

The presence of guilt, together with defeat, adds a psychological complication. Not only impotence but guilt must be accepted, and the transmutation which man would like to avoid must grow from both.

Proud defiance finds a multitude of points of view, of grandiloquences and edifying sentimentalities, to help itself to the delusion by which it can be maintained. For instance:

The meaning of the necessity to accept past events is changed. A wild inclination to “own up to our history” permits the concealed affirmation of evil, the discovery of good in evil, and its preservation in the soul as a proud fortress held against the victors. This perversion admits of sentences such as the following: “We must know that within us we still bear the primordial strength of will which created the past, and we must also stand by it and accept it into our existence.… We have been both and shall remain both… and we ourselves are never anything but our entire history whose strength we bear within us.” “Reverence” will force the new German generation to become like the previous one.

A defiance disguised as reverence is here confusing the historic soil—in which we are lovingly rooted—with the entirety of the realities of our common past. Far from loving all of those, we reject a good many as alien to our being.

In this affirming recognition of the evil as evil, queer emotional obscurities may admit of sentences such as the following: “We must become so brave and so great and so gentle that we can say, yes, even this horror was and will remain our reality, but we are strong enough to make it over within ourselves, for creative tasks. We know within us a fearful potentiality which once appeared in miserably erring forms. We love and esteem our whole historic past with a reverent affection transcending any single historic guilt. We bear this volcano within us, daring to know that it may blow us up, but convinced that only our ability to tame it will open the last expanse of our freedom and we realize, in the dangerous strength of such possibility, what in common with all others will be the human achievement of our spirit.”

This is a tempting appeal—born of a bad, irrationalist philosophy—to avoid a decision and intrust ourselves to a process of existential levelling. “Taming” is not half enough. The “choice” is what matters. Failure to make the choice immediately revives the possibility of an evil defiance, bound to end up by saying, “Go and sin.” The misapprehension in this appeal to reverence toward evil, even though it is negated, is that it could only lead to an illusive community.

A third manner of proud defiance may affirm all National- Socialism as a matter of “philosophy of history”—in an esthetic view compounding obvious evil and disaster, which should be soberly considered, into an emotional fog of false magnificence:

“In the spring of 1932 a German philosopher prophesied that within ten years the world would be governed politically from two poles only, Moscow and Washington; that Germany, in between, would become irrelevant as a political-geographical conception, existing only as a spiritual power.

“German history—to which the defeat of 1918 had actually opened vistas of greater consolidation and even Great-German achievement—revolted against this prophesied and indeed impending tendency to simplify the world around two poles. Against this world tendency, German history contracted for an isolated, self-willed, titanic effort still to reach its own national goal.