The Question of German Guilt

I can understand this distrust in all young people awakened to full consciousness during the past twelve years, in this environment. But I beg you in the course of your studies to keep an open mind for the possibility that now it may be different—that now there really may be truth at stake. You are the ones who are called upon, each to help in his place so that truth may be revealed. For the time being, listen to my conception of the situation of the sciences at the university, and examine it. It is as follows:

In some sciences you will hear scarcely anything different from the past years. There, scholars who remained true to themselves have always taught truth. You will have met many a teacher again who in tone of voice as well as in the contents and fundamental views of his lectures faced you the same as he was all through these years.

On the other hand, notably in the philosophical and political fields, you may receive a strange impression. There everything does indeed sound altogether different. True, if those who studied here before 1933 or even in the first years afterwards were to come back, they probably would note a coinciding basic attitude in many of us. But there, too, it may be possible to feel a change wrought by the upheavals of this decade. And the change of cast is a fact. Teachers who would expound the National-Socialist phraseology to you have vanished. Others have reappeared as old men out of the past, or joined as young ones in a metamorphosis to freedom and candor, while’til now they had to wear masks.

Again I ask you: beware the premature conclusion that only the opposite of recent values is taught, that we are talking just as before though in reverse, fighting what used to be glorified and glorifying what used to be fought—that in either case, today as yesterday, the doctrine was a result of political compulsion and thus no real truth. No; at least it is not so in all places. Where it is, there would indeed be no essential difference. The way of thought would not have changed, only the direction of aggressiveness or mendacious glorification.

By our manner of teaching we professors will have to show that the radical difference—though also marked in certain contents—decisively lies in the very way of thinking. If what was taught before was propaganda, neither science nor philosophy, we are now not to adopt another point of view but to return to the way of thinking as a critical movement, to research which is true cognition. This can be suppressed. Given room, it grows out of the essence of human existence.

To be sure, all thought and research depend on the political situation. But the difference is whether thought and research are forced and used for their own purposes by the political power, or whether they are left free because the political power wants free research, a region free from its immediate influence.

Before 1933 we had permission to think and talk freely, and now we have it again. The present political situation is a military government, and a German government which, being set up by authority of the other, is itself not yet a democratic government but an authoritarian one. But neither by the military government nor by the German one is a line of thought and research imposed upon us. Both leave us free for truth.

Today this does not yet mean that we are free to pass discretionary judgments.

The situation as a whole does not permit entirely free public discussion of every decisive world-political question which now plays a part in the political struggle of the powers. This is a matter of course. Though it may be painful and not an ideal situation, political tact may at times exact silence on certain questions and facts everywhere in the world, in the interest of the most propitious solution. Truthfulness demands that we admit this, but no one has the right to lodge a complaint. Talking about all things as we like and please is license, anyhow.

Only what we say ought to be unconditionally true.

The political events of the day are not a topic for lectures at the university in the sense of our being engaged in politics. Criticism or praise of the actions of government is never the business of lectures—but the scientific clarification of its factual structure is.

The fact that we have a military government now means, without my having to say so in so many words, that we have no right to criticize the military government.

But all that denotes no repression of our research, only a firm compulsion to refrain from doing what is never our business: dabbling in political actions and decisions of the day. To me it seems that only malice would consider that a restraint of our research into the truth.

It means, rather, that we are free to try by all means, and in all directions, to discover the methodically explorable. We have the chances of discussion and of our manifold views, but we also run the risks of distraction and rootlessness.