The Question of German Guilt

¹ Among the many recent volumes that have been reconsidering the question, an especially interesting one is Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust: A Study in the Ethics of Character by David H. Jones (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999) and Ervin Staub, The Root of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). See also the essay by Amitai Etzioni, “Kris-tallnacht Remembered” in Commonweal (February 12, 1999): 12-15.

² Two classics studies of his place among the existentialists are those by James Collins, The Existentialists: A Critical Study (Chicago: Regnery, 1952) and by I. M. Bochenski, Contemporary European Philosophy, as translated by Donald Nicholl and Karl Aschenbrenner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956).

⁷ See volume one of his 1932 trilogy Philosophy, translated by E. B. Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

³ Karl Jaspers, “Philosophical Autobiography” in The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (The Library of Living Philosophers), edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp (LaSalle, 111.: Open Court, 1974):5-94 at p. 6.

⁴ A convenient source for a well-balanced survey of Jaspers’s thought is the volume Karl Jaspers: Basic Philosophical Writings, edited, translated, with introductions by Edith Ehrlich, Leonard H. Ehrlich, and George B. Pepper (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1986).

⁵ See my article “Jaspers on Realism and Idealism” in Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Kart Jaspers Gesellschaft 11 (1998):58-69.

⁶ On this theme see Josef Pieper, Living the Truth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), which contains a thoroughgoing historical essay on the difference between the classical metaphysical doctrine of the transcendentals of being and the corresponding doctrines in Kantian (and generally in Idealist) philosophy.

⁸ See volume two of Philosophy, translated by E. B. Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), especially 154-74.

* Only this last section on the guilt question is published in the following pages, with the contents elaborated on and freed from the form of academic lectures.

* “Theses on Political Liberty” were published by me in Wandlung, No. 6, p. 460ff.

* Reprinted in Wandlung, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1945.

* Hannah Arendt’s moving, soberly factual article, “Organized Guilt,” Jewish Frontier, January, 1945.