The German Patient: Crisis and Recovery in Postwar Culture

Chapter 1. Sick of Guilt

chapter 1 Sick of Guilt Is the destruction, the bloodshed at an end? Alas, we do not know. But for the moment there is peace. No, it is something else. It is the end of the illness, that inner illness, the end of the unnatural, of that forced way of life, a life that was no longer a life, of the pressure of an inner regime, that mysterious world of violence and false appearances that kept us in suspense, against which we fought futilely, but that ensnared us and whose simple disappearance we so desired, often without hope, although we knew nothing of what would follow. —Wilhelm Hoffmann, Nach der Katastrophe I think I share all your views on the subject of the “nation” and on the freedom to choose political responsibility and therefore a state. There is, however, something that one cannot choose but has to “accept.” . . . If someone says: You are a German Jew—I am a German—those are of course just words, and everything depends on their interpretation. I think constantly now, with my heart, about what my being a German means. Until 1933 that was never problematic for me. But now one at least has to contend with a fact I perceive more strongly in Switzerland than I do at home in Heidelberg: The whole world shrieks at one, so to speak: You are a German. —Karl Jaspers, in a letter to Hannah Arendt In the tumultuous years that followed the end of World War II, postwar discourses associated Germanness with two things: guilt and pathology. As the epigraphs suggest, these designations emerged virtually side by side. If the “inner illness” af›icting the nation had subsided, its aftereffects were still to be felt—not least, in the accusatory stance of other nations, which made the designation of “German” a damning diagnosis in and of itself. Consumed by a collective crisis, Germany appeared, in the view of many 26 contemporary intellectuals, to be quite literally “sick of guilt”—ailing not just as a result of twelve years of Hitler’s rule but also the steady confrontation with the mass scale of the regime’s ghastly crimes, and the growing sense that German culture at large would have to account for its responsibility for those offenses. Just how Germany should confront the question of culpability was hotly contested. If postwar German thinkers shared a belief that the nation must be restored, they were divided about how to understand the issue of German responsibility for the actions of the collapsed regime. In the realm of politics, as Norbert Frei has demonstrated, a ›edgling West German government endorsed a politics of “discretion” regarding participation in the Nazi regime, leading to a “triumph of silence” that tolerated and even embraced perpetrators and contributed, among other things, to the West German government’s poor record for prosecuting Nazi crimes.1 In the more immediate years that followed the end of war, however, before this selective silence emerged as of‹cial state policy, diverse intellectual schools sought to answer the “German question.” As a result, competing discourses of guilt vied for prominence. While both factions shared important commonalities—most notably a certain biomedical language when discussing the German relationship to fascism—their differences were pronounced . With his 1946 volume Die Schuldfrage (The Question of German Guilt), Karl Jaspers undoubtedly exerted the greatest in›uence on this intellectual debate. Jaspers argued for a juridical and theological conceptualization of guilt, stressing the importance of legal as well as psychological remedies for the nation’s condition. Rejecting collective categories, he advocated a nuanced understanding of culpability and emphasized the role of the individual in the process of coming to terms with the crimes of Nazi Germany. Jaspers imagined a new model of German citizenship founded on personal responsibility and proposed that the nation would ‹nd regeneration through the redemption of its individual members. Ultimately, the model espoused by Jaspers would prevail, setting the course for of‹cial West German attitudes toward national guilt for decades to come.2 But in the mid-1940s, as debates about German responsibility were still taking shape, a different, parallel discourse emerged. In contrast to the school that followed Jaspers’s legal model, which envisioned the nation as a kind of German Defendant on trial for the crimes of the Nazi regime, this second group of writers approached guilt as a largely medical problem. They constructed the nation as a German Patient and treated Sick of Guilt 27 [18...