The Question of German Guilt
Language: English
Pages: 0
ISBN: B00L3NWN2G
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Routledge Handbook of German Politics & Culture (Routledge Handbooks)
The Post-Office Girl (New York Review Books Classics)
The Big Yellow Book of German Verbs: 555 Fully Conjuated Verbs
Of a country are presumed to bear for the deeds of their governments. In this sphere, even declining to vote in elections is taken to make a person co-responsible for the way in which one is governed, for one had the chance to participate. Regardless of whether the individual citizen likes or dislikes a given regime, all citizens have to suffer the consequences that the victorious powers impose upon the whole country for the misdeeds of its regime. (3) Moral guilt names the personal.
World situation—this is the enormity. (2) The trial is said to be a national disgrace for all Germans; if there were Germans on the tribunal, at least, then Germans would be judged by Germans. Rejoinder: The national disgrace lies not in the tribunal but in what brought it on—in the fact of this régime and its acts. The consciousness of national disgrace is inescapable for every German. It aims in the wrong direction if turning against the trial rather than its cause. Moreover: Had the victors.
Who feel likewise—without becoming melodramatic about it—and farther from the ones whose soul seems to deny this link. And this proximity means, above all, a common inspiring task—of not being German as we happen to be, but becoming German as we are not yet but ought to be, and as we hear it in the call of our ancestors rather than in the history of national idols. By our feeling of collective guilt we feel the entire task of renewing human existence from its origin—the task which is given to.
Camps and engaged in types of warfare previously started by Germany is secondary. Here we are not discussing events since the armistice, nor what Germany suffered and keeps on suffering after the surrender. (2) The purpose of our discussion, even when we talk of a guilt of the others, is to penetrate the meaning of our own. (3) In general, it may be correct that “the others are not better than we.” But at this moment it is misapplied. For in these past twelve years the others, taken for all in.
Chooses that sort of action, for I have embraced one possibility and cast other possibilities aside. All this happens within groups and communities of various sorts (a part of the givenness of our “world”), and this can implicate us in guilt that would not otherwise be our own, just as it permits us to participate with profit and delight in the successes of communities to which we belong but for which we are not personally responsible. In Jaspers’s more biblical moments one even detects echoes of.