The Question of German Guilt

“If that philosopher’s prophecy was right in placing a time limit of only ten years on the beginning of Russo-American world rule, the precipitate pace, the haste and violence of the German countereffort was understandable. It was the pace of an inwardly meaningful and fascinating but historically belated revolt. In the past months we have seen this pace eventually outrun itself in pure, isolated raving. A philosopher lightly pronounces sentence: German history is past; the Moscow-Washington era is beginning. So greatly, longingly devised a history as the German one does not simply say, amen, to such academic resolutions. It flares up; in deeply excited resistance and attack, in a savage tumult of faith and hatred it plunges to its doom.”

Thus, in the summer of 1945, a young man who has my highest personal esteem wrote in a confusion of dismal feelings.

All this is indeed not purification but further entanglement. Thoughts like these—whether self-abasing or defiant—may for an instant evoke feelings as of delivery. You think you are back on your way, and actually you have only come closer to a dead end. It is the impurity of feelings which is here increased and simultaneously consolidated against the chance of a genuine metamorphosis.

All types of defiance feature an aggressive silence. I withdraw when reasons become irrefutable. I found my self-respect on silence as the last power left the powerless. I show my silence so as to hurt the powerful. I hide my silence so as to plan for a restoration, politically by seizing implements of power—laughable though these would be in the hands of men without access to the world’s giant industries that produce the tools of destruction—and psychologically by a self-vindication admitting of no guilt. Fate decided against me; there was a senseless material superiority; my defeat was honorable; within myself I tend my loyalty and my heroism. But the way of such conduct merely augments the inner poison, in illusive thought and anticipating self-intoxication.

Dodging into Specialties Intrinsically Correct

but Unessential to the Guilt Question

We are evading the guilt question if we deviate from essentials into intrinsically correct details—as if these were the whole—or if we persistently seek, and indeed find, fault with others.

In appropriate circumstances, a patient striving for common sense permits the submission of facts and connections to the victor. Now that we Germans are no longer active in the whole of history, we look upon what is and is not done as deciding our fate as well. Yet however correct this line of thought may be, it must not serve to replace or extinguish the guilt question.

The form of evasion most easily understood is the glance at our own woes. Help us, many think, but don’t talk of atonement. Tremendous suffering excuses. We hear, for example:

“Is the bomb terror forgotten, which cost millions of innocent people their lives or health and all their cherished possessions? Should that not make up for what was sinned in German lands? Should the misery of the refugees which cries to Heaven not act disarmingly? ”

“I came to Germany from the South Tyrol as a bride, thirty years ago. I have shared the German ordeal from the the first day to the last, taking blow after blow, making sacrifice after sacrifice, drained the bitter cup to the end—and now I feel accused, too, of things I never did.”

“The misery which has now overtaken the whole nation is so gigantic, growing to such unimaginable size, that one should not rub salt into the wounds. The population, in its surely innocent parts, has already suffered more than just atonement may perhaps require.”

Indeed the disaster is apocalyptical. Everyone complains, and rightly so: those who were rescued from concentration camps or persecution and still remember the frightful suffering; those who lost their dear ones in the most cruel manner; the millions of evacuees and refugees roaming the road without hope; the many hangers-on of the Party now being weeded out and suddenly in want; the Americans and other Allies who gave up years of their lives and had millions killed; the European nations tormented under the terrorist rule of the National-Socialist Germans; the German emigrants forced to live in a foreign-language environment, under the most difficult conditions. Everyone, everyone.

Everywhere the complaints turn into accusations. Against whom? In the end: all against all.

In this horrible world situation, in which at present our distress in Germany is comparatively the greatest, we must not forget the interrelation of the whole. The guilt question keeps leading back to it.