Thus, in the summer of 1945, a young man who has my highest personal esteem wrote in a confusion of dismal feelings.
All this is indeed not purification but further entanglement. Thoughts like these—whether self-abasing or defiant—may for an instant evoke feelings as of delivery. You think you are back on your way, and actually you have only come closer to a dead end. It is the impurity of feelings which is here increased and simultaneously consolidated against the chance of a genuine metamorphosis.
All types of defiance feature an aggressive silence. I withdraw when reasons become irrefutable. I found my self-respect on silence as the last power left the powerless. I show my silence so as to hurt the powerful. I hide my silence so as to plan for a restoration, politically by seizing implements of power—laughable though these would be in the hands of men without access to the world’s giant industries that produce the tools of destruction—and psychologically by a self-vindication admitting of no guilt. Fate decided against me; there was a senseless material superiority; my defeat was honorable; within myself I tend my loyalty and my heroism. But the way of such conduct merely augments the inner poison, in illusive thought and anticipating self-intoxication.
Dodging into Specialties Intrinsically Correct
but Unessential to the Guilt Question
We are evading the guilt question if we deviate from essentials into intrinsically correct details—as if these were the whole—or if we persistently seek, and indeed find, fault with others.
In appropriate circumstances, a patient striving for common sense permits the submission of facts and connections to the victor. Now that we Germans are no longer active in the whole of history, we look upon what is and is not done as deciding our fate as well. Yet however correct this line of thought may be, it must not serve to replace or extinguish the guilt question.
The form of evasion most easily understood is the glance at our own woes. Help us, many think, but don’t talk of atonement. Tremendous suffering excuses. We hear, for example:
“Is the bomb terror forgotten, which cost millions of innocent people their lives or health and all their cherished possessions? Should that not make up for what was sinned in German lands? Should the misery of the refugees which cries to Heaven not act disarmingly? ”
“I came to Germany from the South Tyrol as a bride, thirty years ago. I have shared the German ordeal from the the first day to the last, taking blow after blow, making sacrifice after sacrifice, drained the bitter cup to the end—and now I feel accused, too, of things I never did.”
“The misery which has now overtaken the whole nation is so gigantic, growing to such unimaginable size, that one should not rub salt into the wounds. The population, in its surely innocent parts, has already suffered more than just atonement may perhaps require.”
Indeed the disaster is apocalyptical. Everyone complains, and rightly so: those who were rescued from concentration camps or persecution and still remember the frightful suffering; those who lost their dear ones in the most cruel manner; the millions of evacuees and refugees roaming the road without hope; the many hangers-on of the Party now being weeded out and suddenly in want; the Americans and other Allies who gave up years of their lives and had millions killed; the European nations tormented under the terrorist rule of the National-Socialist Germans; the German emigrants forced to live in a foreign-language environment, under the most difficult conditions. Everyone, everyone.
Everywhere the complaints turn into accusations. Against whom? In the end: all against all.
In this horrible world situation, in which at present our distress in Germany is comparatively the greatest, we must not forget the interrelation of the whole. The guilt question keeps leading back to it.
In my enumeration of complainants I put the manifold groups side by side with the intention of making the incongruity felt at once. The distress may as such, as destruction of life, be all of one kind; but it differs essentially in its general connection as well as in its particular place therein. It is unjust to call all equally innocent.
On the whole, the fact remains that we Germans—however much we may now have come into the greatest distress among the nations—also bear the greatest responsibility for the course of events until 1945.
Therefore we, as individuals, should not be so quick to feel innocent, should not pity ourselves as victims of an evil fate, should not expect to be praised for suffering. We should question ourselves, should pitilessly analyze ourselves: where did I feel wrongly, think wrongly, act wrongly—we should, as far as possible, look for guilt within ourselves, not in things, nor in the others; we should not dodge into distress. This follows from the decision to turn about, to improve daily. In doing so we face God as individuals, no longer as Germans and not collectively.
Dodging into a Generality
I feel relieved when I myself become individually unimportant because the whole is something that happens to me without my cooperation and thus without personal guilt. I live in the view of the whole, then, a mere impotent sufferer or impotent participant. I no longer live out of myself. A few examples:
(1) The moral interpretation of history as a whole lets us expect a justice on the whole—for “all guilt is on earth requited,” as the poet says.
I know myself a prey to a total guilt. My own doing scarcely matters any longer. If I am on the losing side, the overall metaphysical inescapability is shattering. If I am on the winning side, my success is flavored with the good conscience of superior virtue. This tendency not to take ourselves seriously as individuals paralyzes our moral impulses. Both the pride of a self-abasing guilt confession in the one instance and the pride of moral victory in the other become evasions of the really human task which always lies in the individual.
Yet experience contradicts this total view. The course of events is not unequivocal at all. The sun shines alike upon the just and the unjust. The distribution of fortune and the morality of actions do not seem to be interconnected.
However, it would be an equally false total judgment to say, on the contrary, that there is no justice.
True, in some situations the conditions and acts of a state fill us with the ineradicable feeling that “that can’t end well” and “there is bound to be a reckoning.)’ But this feeling no sooner puts its trust in justice, beyond comprehensible human reactions to evil, than errors appear. There is no certainty. Truth and probity fail to come by themselves. In most cases amends are dispensed with. Ruin and vengeance strike the innocent along with the guilty. The purest will, complete veracity, the greatest courage may remain unsuccessful if the situation is inopportune. And many passive ones come by the favorable situation undeservedly, due to the acts of others.
In the end, such things as atonement and guilt lie only in the personality of the individuals. Despite metaphysical truth which it may contain, the idea of total guilt and being ensnared in an overall guilt-atonement relationship comes to tempt the individual to evade what is wholly and solely his business.
(2) Another total view holds that finally everything in the world comes to an end, that nothing is ever started without failing in the end, that everything contains the ruinous germ. This view puts non-success with every other non-success on the one common level of failure, and thus, in an abstraction, robs it of its weight.
(3) Interpreting our own disaster as due to the guilt of all, we give it a metaphysical weight by the construction of a new singularity. Germany is the sacrificial substitute in the catastrophe of the age. It suffers for all. It erupts in the universal guilt, and atones for all.