The Question of German Guilt

In my enumeration of complainants I put the manifold groups side by side with the intention of making the incongruity felt at once. The distress may as such, as destruction of life, be all of one kind; but it differs essentially in its general connection as well as in its particular place therein. It is unjust to call all equally innocent.

On the whole, the fact remains that we Germans—however much we may now have come into the greatest distress among the nations—also bear the greatest responsibility for the course of events until 1945.

Therefore we, as individuals, should not be so quick to feel innocent, should not pity ourselves as victims of an evil fate, should not expect to be praised for suffering. We should question ourselves, should pitilessly analyze ourselves: where did I feel wrongly, think wrongly, act wrongly—we should, as far as possible, look for guilt within ourselves, not in things, nor in the others; we should not dodge into distress. This follows from the decision to turn about, to improve daily. In doing so we face God as individuals, no longer as Germans and not collectively.

Dodging into a Generality

I feel relieved when I myself become individually unimportant because the whole is something that happens to me without my cooperation and thus without personal guilt. I live in the view of the whole, then, a mere impotent sufferer or impotent participant. I no longer live out of myself. A few examples:

(1) The moral interpretation of history as a whole lets us expect a justice on the whole—for “all guilt is on earth requited,” as the poet says.

I know myself a prey to a total guilt. My own doing scarcely matters any longer. If I am on the losing side, the overall metaphysical inescapability is shattering. If I am on the winning side, my success is flavored with the good conscience of superior virtue. This tendency not to take ourselves seriously as individuals paralyzes our moral impulses. Both the pride of a self-abasing guilt confession in the one instance and the pride of moral victory in the other become evasions of the really human task which always lies in the individual.

Yet experience contradicts this total view. The course of events is not unequivocal at all. The sun shines alike upon the just and the unjust. The distribution of fortune and the morality of actions do not seem to be interconnected.

However, it would be an equally false total judgment to say, on the contrary, that there is no justice.

True, in some situations the conditions and acts of a state fill us with the ineradicable feeling that “that can’t end well” and “there is bound to be a reckoning.)’ But this feeling no sooner puts its trust in justice, beyond comprehensible human reactions to evil, than errors appear. There is no certainty. Truth and probity fail to come by themselves. In most cases amends are dispensed with. Ruin and vengeance strike the innocent along with the guilty. The purest will, complete veracity, the greatest courage may remain unsuccessful if the situation is inopportune. And many passive ones come by the favorable situation undeservedly, due to the acts of others.

In the end, such things as atonement and guilt lie only in the personality of the individuals. Despite metaphysical truth which it may contain, the idea of total guilt and being ensnared in an overall guilt-atonement relationship comes to tempt the individual to evade what is wholly and solely his business.

(2) Another total view holds that finally everything in the world comes to an end, that nothing is ever started without failing in the end, that everything contains the ruinous germ. This view puts non-success with every other non-success on the one common level of failure, and thus, in an abstraction, robs it of its weight.

(3) Interpreting our own disaster as due to the guilt of all, we give it a metaphysical weight by the construction of a new singularity. Germany is the sacrificial substitute in the catastrophe of the age. It suffers for all. It erupts in the universal guilt, and atones for all.

There is a false pathos in this application of ideas from Isaiah and Christianity, serving in turn to divert men from the sober task of doing what is really in their power—from improvement within the sphere of the comprehensible and from the inner transformation. It is the digression into “estheticism” which by its irresponsibility diverts from realization out of the core of individual self-existence. It is a new way of acquiring a false collective feeling of our own value.

(4) We seem as though delivered from guilt if in view of the vast suffering among us Germans we cry out, “It has been atoned for.”