Guilt About the Past Read online

  And the children? It is self-evident that the perpetrators, inciters, and accessories to the crimes are guilty. We understand also that those who did not offer any resistance or opposition in spite of being in a position to do so are guilty. We even understand that guilt also reaches those who do not actively separate themselves from the perpetrators and participants through dissociation, repudiation, or judgment. Finally, we understand that renunciation, if it had happened in a radical fashion, would still have produced guilt again and again. Still, is it necessary for children to find themselves entangled in this web of guilt as well?

  After the considerations up to this point the answer appears obvious: if members of a community of solidarity bring guilt upon themselves by not renouncing those guilty members of their community, and if a nation of people is such a community of solidarity, then yes, children too become entwined in the guilt of non-renunciation. This guilt sits in wait for them until they become able to recognise the guilt of others, dissociate or not dissociate themselves from it, and therewith become capable of acquiring their own guilt. But I think that the conclusion is more complicated than that.

  It has been observed that children whose parents experience guilt solely on the basis of not dissociating themselves after 1945, who were neither perpetrators nor involved in some other way, are usually free from feelings of guilt. The relationship with guilt that causes the norm of dissociating oneself does not appear to reach far enough. However, it is not the case that guilt has an effect only in horizontal relationships, i.e. among contemporaries, and not in vertical ones, i.e. between parents and children, since the children of perpetrators, inciters, and accessories to the crimes and, to a lesser extent, children of parents who, despite being able to, failed to offer any resistance or opposition, often experience feelings of guilt. Moreover, they experience the challenge of confronting their parents about their guilt and either coming to terms with it or withdrawing. Perhaps it could be said that the norm of self-dissociation extends to one further level of relationship only, horizontal or vertical, so that guilt emanates from perpetrators and other implicated parties to their contemporaries and to their own progeny, but not to the offspring of their contemporaries.

  I would like to offer an explanation for this. The guilt of non-repudiation presumes a community of solidarity, which has to be actually experienced as a community inhabited by real people with whom one communicates and interacts. A community of solidarity is not something unintelligible or extrasensory, rather it is the tangible intertwining of relationships by real people as they communicate and interact. Seen in this light, belonging to a people in common is not wholly sufficient to establish a community of solidarity. It has to be concretely experienced, and it is experienced in an especially fundamental way: by belonging to one generation or one family, by living with one’s parents and even grandparents. Living with one’s teachers, pastors, professors and other respected and admired members of the parent generation can yield a similar experience of belonging. These experiences of belonging make the fact of belonging to a people in a community of solidarity personal. One’s own identification with a people, its structures and history and the corresponding perceptions and expectations of others can likewise achieve this arrangement. But they do so only in decreased clarity and strength. What is more, one can avoid such identification and withdraw from it; one can live consciously in the here and now, not mired in history, and avoid contact with non-Germans, who confine one within one’s German identity. The experience of belonging to one’s own family or generation is inescapable, and for that reason the norm of dissociating oneself spreads at least as far as to one’s contemporaries, to the next generation and even to the generation of grandchildren. But the dead grandparents who have been perpetrators are not family that is concretely experienced. To keep them within one’s solidarity or to distance oneself from them is not an actual alternative for the grandchildren.

  No judge can exempt, no verdict can free the children from their share of guilt formed as part of their parents’ bequeathal to them. Maybe a psychotherapist or psychoanalyst could offer a sort of release. Obviously, repression can substitute for release aggravated by occasional feelings of dismay and self-consciousness, embarrassment and shame. In any event, over the generations, collectively experienced historical events become individually varied memories. The task of dissociation from specific historical guilt leads to the creation of one’s own identity, an undertaking that every generation has to master.

  Legal standards and the other norms considered in the course of my deliberations release the generations to come from guilt resulting from the crimes committed by the national socialists. To a great extent, they are released into the future with the freedom to decide for themselves whether to define their identity as arising from history or as defined only by the here and now. Insofar as they choose an identity saturated by history or one that other people assign to them, they stand in a certain sort of solidarity with past generations and will have come to terms with their guilty past, either by acceptance or dissociation. Only in this weak sense is guilt preserved in history and kept alive into the future.

  The Presence of the Past

  These years the people of my generation are turning sixty. We were born in the last years of the war and the first years thereafter and grew up with the German Federal Republic. We enjoyed the seemingly intact world of the fifties, grew tired of it and rebelled against it. In the sixties we became political, in the seventies we entered into our professional and working lives, in the eighties we grew successful in our careers, and in the nineties we secured influential positions in politics and government, the economy, education and the media. In a few years our star will begin its descent.

  On our birthdays we give speeches about what we wanted to accomplish and what we achieved. Most of these speeches broach the subjects of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. For those of us employed in the humanities – in universities, culture and the media – the past, at one time or another, was or still is our topic; I don’t know of any colleague of mine who hasn’t, as I also have, given lectures and seminars on legal doctrine and practice in the Third Reich. For those of us working in politics, the administration, and the law, the past sharpened our understanding of freedom, equality, and a just system of government; the lessons to be learned from the Third Reich are an integral part of the advanced training programs for administrators and judges. When those of us in business or who offer professional services contemplate the ethics and responsibilities of their chosen fields they also contemplate the former involvement of these fields in the Third Reich and the Holocaust; they have organised exhibitions and publications on the role of doctors in the Third Reich, pharmacists in the Third Reich, chemists in the Third Reich and so forth.

  For most of us our formative years were deeply influenced by the past of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Its memory stood at the centre of our arguments with our parents and our rebellion against them. During the sixties, when those actually involved were reluctant to speak of the past, we developed a strong need to confront them, provoke them, ask them what they had done. Some of you may have seen the film, The Nasty Girl, in which a schoolgirl assigned to write a paper about her town decides to explore its wartime history, and encounters massive hostility from her older neighbours – this was a common experience among my friends. We regarded it as self-evident that the past had to be talked about, researched, taught, learned. Our image of German history acquired its contours from its shadow. When travelling abroad we were confronted as heirs of this past, and such confrontations came to define our experience of ourselves as Germans. Dealing with the past became a part of our self-perception and self-expression, even if it only played a minor role in our work.

  Hence, for my generation the past is still very present – and not just for the intellectuals. Two summers ago, during the soccer World Cup, I
was watching a match in a beer garden in Berlin. When the German team scored its first goal, a worker my age threw his arms into the air and shouted, ‘Wir sind wieder wer!’ (‘We are somebody again!’). So even this worker saw himself under the long shadow of the past and experienced this moment as a liberation, as a chance to get back into the light. Since the expectations and ideas of our generation now define the cultural mainstream, the past that has moulded us and still occupies our thoughts has found its way into every corner of public life.

  That was not without risk. During the sixties, the public discussion about the Third Reich and the Holocaust had to be insisted upon against great resistance. To break down the resistance of those who would rather have repressed and forgotten the past, the topic had to be raised again and again. But even after there was no longer anyone who needed to be convinced that the past may never be repressed or forgotten, my generation still prided itself on its moral fortitude. And it kept discussing the past as if doing so still demanded courage, still justified pride, still could not happen often enough.

  The result has been a sort of banality. The Holocaust has become small change that is easily handed out. Yet another memorial event, conference, article or book against forgetting the past, another comparison between Auschwitz and some awful contemporary event. The analogies stretch far; I have seen Kosovo and Darfur compared to Auschwitz, Saddam Hussein to Hitler, East German border guards who patrolled the Berlin Wall to concentration camp murderers, and current prejudices against foreigners to those against Jews back then.

  The legacy for the next generation is dangerous. The ennui sometimes exhibited by schoolchildren concerning the Third Reich and the Holocaust has its roots in the deadening frequency with which they are confronted with the past by their teachers and the media. Likewise, the careless to cynical tone they sometimes adopt in speaking about the past is partly a result of being steeped in comparisons whose heavy tone of moral pathos does not always carry a corresponding moral weightiness.

  That is not to say that comparisons may never be drawn. The idea of the Holocaust as incomparably unique is as fatally belittling as inappropriate comparisons. In hindsight, the so called Historikerstreit (Historian’s Fight) of the eighties, in which German historians and philosophers debated whether the Holocaust was unique, or could be compared to other events, looks almost absurd. Historical situations are always unique and can still be compared; comparing situations doesn’t cancel their uniqueness. The historians and philosophers who insisted on the incomparable uniqueness of the Holocaust, because they feared that otherwise the Holocaust would lose its power as a warning signal to future generations, defeated their own purpose. Future generations can be warned by the Holocaust not to do something they are about to do only if what they are about to do is somehow comparable to the Holocaust. One can learn from history and from the Holocaust only if one compares.

  If a situation is so unique that it can’t be compared to anything, increasing historical distance will mean that it can no longer concern or engage us. It has lost its actuality. If the situation is discussed with moral pathos, that moral pathos amounts to almost nothing. Moral pathos not undergirded by moral engagement, and moral engagement not carried by contemporary concern, are not genuine. And the next generation keenly senses that hollowness.

  What is both historically unique and persistently disturbing about the Holocaust is that Germany, with its cultural heritage and place among civilised nations, was capable of those kinds of atrocities. It elicits troubling questions: if the ice of a culturally-advanced civilisation upon which one fancied oneself safely standing was in fact so thin at that time, then how safe is the ice we live upon today? What protects us from falling through it? Individual morality? Societal and state institutions? Has the ice grown thicker with time or has the passage of time only allowed us to forget how thin it really is?

  These questions concern the very foundations of our individual moral existence and our ability to live together in our society and its institutions. They are questions that are unsettling and challenging even after decades of relative safety within the political, economic and cultural realms of a civil society. At the same time, we are not confronted with, nor do we have to find answers for, these questions on a daily basis. Perhaps there are no answers for them other than living our lives with accountability for what we have been given: our relationships with other human beings, our work and our institutions.

  This brings me to the next danger resulting from my generation’s preoccupation with the Third Reich and the Holocaust. The lesson we drew from the past was a moral one rather than an institutional one. We accused our parents, teachers, professors and politicians of blindness, cowardice, opportunism, the ambitious and ruthless pursuit of their careers, and a lack of moral courage. The accusations levelled placed the blame on individual moral failings, and within those indictments lay an implicit duty to embrace a higher standard of moral behaviour.

  Therefore, those among my generation who became teachers attempted to instruct their students how to show civil and moral courage. Some of you may have seen the film Rosenstrasse about the wives who demonstrated against the deportation of their Jewish husbands until the deportation was cancelled. It is a movie that teachers love to see with their students. It illustrates what they took to be the lesson from the past: it is righteous to show moral courage and resist. It is righteous to fight the beginnings of evil because courage has a better chance then than later. It is righteous to prepare oneself for possible future situations by looking at past situations and pondering what one would have done in them.

  Certainly, moral courage is one of the lessons gleaned from the past. But I have doubts about the extent to which it can be taught in this didactic way. I think it is learned mostly from living example, experience and repeated practice. Fighting and winning yesterday’s moral battles with bravery in one’s mind doesn’t necessarily prepare one for today’s moral conflicts. After the wall had come down and the question came up which East German judges could be accepted as judges in the unified Germany, the president of the Federal Administrative Court advocated a generous acceptance policy. He received a petition from West German judges who objected to this generosity: since East German judges had not shown the courage of insisting on their judicial independence but rather followed party orders, they were unsuited to be independent judges under the rule of law. So far so good. But since the West German judges didn’t want to upset the president whose opinion was important for their careers, they decided not to sign the petition with their names but rather turn it in as an anonymous collective petition. They had learned something and they had done something but obviously they had also missed something.

  Even if learned properly, moral courage is not the only and maybe not even the first lesson to be gleaned from the past. What the past likewise so glaringly shows is the helplessness of individual morality in the absence of institutions in which citizens are recognised and matter, institutions that they can impact by their appeals and which they can depend on to respond and support. Once parties, unions and associations, churches and clubs, universities, schools and courts have been forced into line, there comes a point when the ethics of opposition survive only in quixotic heroic gestures.

  In as far as there was any resistance during the Third Reich and the Holocaust that had an effect beyond being symbolic gestures, its basis was found less in individual morality than in communist or socialist solidarity, Christian faith and ecclesiastic responsibility, and the honour code of officers or of the aristocracy. The lessons of the past pertain not just to individual morality, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to societal and state institutions in which individual morality must be preserved if it is to have the power to resist in the crucial moment. This applies to citizens’ engagement within and on behalf of institutions to ensure their proper functioning. That does not mean, however, that well-functioning institutions are built on consta
nt evocations of morality. Moralising appeals in politics, moralising arguments in court decisions, moralising sermons in churches on all aspects of life, and moralising lectures about the responsibilities of schools and universities are again wrong-minded remnants of the past. Properly functioning institutions embody morality without constantly preaching it.

  Again, the engagement within and on behalf of institutions is something not taught and learned easily. Among my students I have many who strive for excellence because they want to go into corporate law and become rich. I have students who care about justice and human rights and want to work for non-government organisations, the United Nations (UN) and affiliated international organisations. I have students who want to enjoy the quietness and reliability of life as a civil servant or a judge, because today this life allows best for combining professional life and family life. But a judgeship at home needs and deserves as much engagement with justice as a job with the UN in Africa, and being an excellent lawyer in government, the administration, a union, or the church may not make you as rich, but is certainly as much fun as excelling in a corporate law firm. And the lesson from the past is that the maintenance of these and other institutions is as crucial a vaccine as assertions of individual morality.