THE QUESTION OF GERMAN GUILT
PERSPECTIVES IN CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY
John D. Caputo, series editor
1. John D. Caputo, ed., Deconstruction in a Nutshelclass="underline" A Conversation with Jacques Derrida.
2. Michael Strawser, Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard—From Irony to Edification.
3. Michael Barber, Ethical Hermeneutics: Rationality in Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation.
4. James H. Olthuis, ed., Knowing Other-wise: Philosophy at the Threshold of Spirituality.
5. James Swindal, Reflection Revisited Jürgem Habermas’s Discursive Theory of Truth.
6. Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Postmodern Second edition.
7. Thomas W. Busch, Circulating Being: From Embodiment to Incorporation—Essays on Late Existentialism.
8. Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics. Second edition.
9. Francis J. Ambrosio, ed., The Question of Christian Philosophy Today.
10. Jeffrey Bloechl, ed., The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.
11. Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate, eds, Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology.
12. Trish Glazebrook, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science.
13. Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign. Second edition.
14. Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. Second edition.
15. Dominique Janicaud, Jean-François Courtine, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Paul Ricoeur, Phenemenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate.
The QUESTION of GERMAN GUILT
By KARL JASPERS
TRANSLATED BY E. B. ASHTON
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY
JOSEPH W. KOTERSKI, S.J.
Originally published as Die Schuldfrage in 1947. © 1965 Piper Verlag GmbH, München, Germany.
Translation © 1948 by The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a Division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction © 2001 by Fordham University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, No. 16
ISSN 1089-3938
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jaspers, Karl, 1883-1969.
[Schuldfrage. English]
The question of German guilt / Karl Jaspers ; translated by E.B. Ashton, with a new introduction by Joseph W. Koterski.
p. cm.—(Perspectives in continental philosophy ; no. 16)
Originally published: New York: Dial Press, 1947.
ISBN 0-8232-2068-0—ISBN 0-8232-2069-9 (pbk.)
1. National socialism. 2. World War, 1939-1945—Germany. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Atrocities. 4. Germany—History—Philosophy. 5. Antisemitism—Germany—History—20th century. I. Ashton, E. B., 1909-II. Tide. III. Series.
DD256.48 J3713 2000
943.086—dc21
00-029375
Printed in the United States of America
00 01 02 03 04 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction to the 2000 Edition
“Ladies and Gentlemen”
Introduction
Scheme of Distinctions
The German Questions
Differentiation of German Guilt
Possible Excuses
Our Purification
Introduction to the 2000 Edition
More than half a century has gone by since the fall of the Nazi government, but neither the simple passage of time nor the crossing of a threshold as symbolic as the new millennium has yet extinguished the question of responsibility for the carnage of the Second World War.1 Certain Swiss banks are only now disclosing the records of looted gold, and we still hear of attempts to extradite and prosecute some war criminals. In all likelihood, even when the last of those then alive have passed away, the echoes of the tragedy will linger, in much the way that the effects of the Civil War are still felt long after those who were but children then have perished. History is like that.
THE QUESTION OF GUILT
In 1945 the Nazi government had scarcely fallen when Karl Jaspers, a professor of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg who had been forced to resign from his post in 1937, broached the question of national guilt in a series of lectures that immediately attracted broad interest. (For more on his life, see the second part of this introduction.) With simple directness he voiced the question many were whispering: “Are the German people guilty?” From his own conflicted feelings at being a German with an unblemished record as an anti-Nazi who had nevertheless remained within Germany throughout the war, Jaspers began to articulate a matrix of distinctions among types of guilt and their corresponding degrees of responsibility. His immediate purpose in these lectures was to warn against evasive apologies and wholesale condemnations, but his philosophical approach to the problem generated a book that has stood the test of time and offers compelling insight for situations far removed from the specific historical setting that occasioned these reflections.
Were it not for the media coverage of some of today’s refugees—in Kosovo, for instance, or East Timor—prosperity would make it almost impossible to imagine the trauma that gripped Europe after the Second World War. The raw suffering on all sides—in the lands that Hitler’s armies invaded and within Germany itself—seemed only to confirm the blanket verdict that had been of necessity very simple and without nuance in order to sustain the energies needed for the war effort: in the judgment of the victors, Germany was guilty of bringing all this suffering upon itself for having brought so much suffering upon others. The times were impatient of distinctions.
But impatient or no, the times required distinctions. Although the term “guilt-trip” had not yet been devised, the phenomenon is perennial. To separate the genuine responsibility that warrants true guilt from any guilt-trip (whether self-imposed by the vanquished in their despair or unfairly laid upon them by the victors), Jaspers brings to bear a sacred principle of ethics: one bears responsibility only to the degree that one has taken part and acted. Where one did not voluntarily consent or approve, there can be no culpability assigned. The purpose of Jaspers’s distinctions is to sort out the guilt that those responsible really should feel from the ill-defined and inappropriate feelings of guilt weighing down postwar Germans like a demon needing to be exorcised.
But even when the principle is clear, assessing responsibility will never be simple. If individuals or groups are ever to deal with the feelings of guilt that tend to surge forth, the pangs of conscience that emerge, and the reparation that is owed to those who have been wronged, it is crucial for a careful assessment of one’s responsibility to take place. To enable the process to begin for Germany and for Germans, Jaspers proposed a powerful but controversial fourfold schema: