The Question of German Guilt

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Those of you who sat in these rooms as students in recent years are now thinking, perhaps, Everything suddenly sounds altogether different; the cast has changed; the course of political events presents the figures—now these, now those—as puppets; as organs of power they recite their little verses; whichever way they talk, none can be trusted, for professors do not bite the hand that feeds them, either.

I can understand this distrust in all young people awakened to full consciousness during the past twelve years, in this environment. But I beg you in the course of your studies to keep an open mind for the possibility that now it may be different—that now there really may be truth at stake. You are the ones who are called upon, each to help in his place so that truth may be revealed. For the time being, listen to my conception of the situation of the sciences at the university, and examine it. It is as follows:

In some sciences you will hear scarcely anything different from the past years. There, scholars who remained true to themselves have always taught truth. You will have met many a teacher again who in tone of voice as well as in the contents and fundamental views of his lectures faced you the same as he was all through these years.

On the other hand, notably in the philosophical and political fields, you may receive a strange impression. There everything does indeed sound altogether different. True, if those who studied here before 1933 or even in the first years afterwards were to come back, they probably would note a coinciding basic attitude in many of us. But there, too, it may be possible to feel a change wrought by the upheavals of this decade. And the change of cast is a fact. Teachers who would expound the National-Socialist phraseology to you have vanished. Others have reappeared as old men out of the past, or joined as young ones in a metamorphosis to freedom and candor, while’til now they had to wear masks.

Again I ask you: beware the premature conclusion that only the opposite of recent values is taught, that we are talking just as before though in reverse, fighting what used to be glorified and glorifying what used to be fought—that in either case, today as yesterday, the doctrine was a result of political compulsion and thus no real truth. No; at least it is not so in all places. Where it is, there would indeed be no essential difference. The way of thought would not have changed, only the direction of aggressiveness or mendacious glorification.

By our manner of teaching we professors will have to show that the radical difference—though also marked in certain contents—decisively lies in the very way of thinking. If what was taught before was propaganda, neither science nor philosophy, we are now not to adopt another point of view but to return to the way of thinking as a critical movement, to research which is true cognition. This can be suppressed. Given room, it grows out of the essence of human existence.

To be sure, all thought and research depend on the political situation. But the difference is whether thought and research are forced and used for their own purposes by the political power, or whether they are left free because the political power wants free research, a region free from its immediate influence.

Before 1933 we had permission to think and talk freely, and now we have it again. The present political situation is a military government, and a German government which, being set up by authority of the other, is itself not yet a democratic government but an authoritarian one. But neither by the military government nor by the German one is a line of thought and research imposed upon us. Both leave us free for truth.

Today this does not yet mean that we are free to pass discretionary judgments.

The situation as a whole does not permit entirely free public discussion of every decisive world-political question which now plays a part in the political struggle of the powers. This is a matter of course. Though it may be painful and not an ideal situation, political tact may at times exact silence on certain questions and facts everywhere in the world, in the interest of the most propitious solution. Truthfulness demands that we admit this, but no one has the right to lodge a complaint. Talking about all things as we like and please is license, anyhow.

Only what we say ought to be unconditionally true.

The political events of the day are not a topic for lectures at the university in the sense of our being engaged in politics. Criticism or praise of the actions of government is never the business of lectures—but the scientific clarification of its factual structure is.

The fact that we have a military government now means, without my having to say so in so many words, that we have no right to criticize the military government.

But all that denotes no repression of our research, only a firm compulsion to refrain from doing what is never our business: dabbling in political actions and decisions of the day. To me it seems that only malice would consider that a restraint of our research into the truth.

It means, rather, that we are free to try by all means, and in all directions, to discover the methodically explorable. We have the chances of discussion and of our manifold views, but we also run the risks of distraction and rootlessness.

This again does not mean that we have freedom to engage in propaganda. Propaganda might perhaps be tolerated if in line with the political aims valid today. At the university it would even then be a calamity. We do not have to capture truth by quick statements. We have to test, to weigh, to reflect, to debate to and fro and pro and con, to question our own assertions. Truth does not exist as merchandise ready-made for delivery; it exists only in methodical movement, in the thoughtfulness of reason.

What I have said so far applies to our university as such, to its doctrine and research. For our present course the suggested problems of tension are especially acute.

I want to speak to you about our situation, and so I shall constantly skirt the immediate actuality of concrete politics, which is not and should not be our theme. Yet what we want to ponder is a condition precedent for our judgment in politics as well.

I want to speak from philosophical motives, for our own enlightenment and encouragement. Truth shall help us find our way.

For these considerations we shall first visualize two necessities, the consciousness of which I deem particularly indispensable to Germans in our present situation. We must learn to talk with each other, and we mutually must understand and accept one another in our extraordinary differences. These differences are so great that in borderline cases we appear to each other like people of different nations.

TALKING WITH EACH OTHER

We have to get our spiritual bearings in Germany, with one another. We have no common ground yet. We are seeking to get together.

Talk from the platform is necessarily one-sided. We do not converse here. Yet what I expound to you has grown out of the “talking with each other” which all of us do, each in his own circle. The manner in which this takes place everywhere is the ethos of the atmosphere we live in.

Everyone must deal in his own way with the thoughts I expound. He is not simply to accept as valid but to weigh, nor simply to oppose but to test, visualize and examine.

We want to learn to talk with each other. That is to say, we do not just want to reiterate our opinions but to hear what the other thinks. We do not just want to assert but to reflect connectedly, listen to reasons, remain prepared for a new insight. We want to accept the other, to try to see things from the other’s point of view; in fact, we virtually want to seek out opposing views. To get at the truth, an opponent is more important than one who agrees with us. Finding the common in the contradictory is more important than hastily seizing on mutually exclusive points of view and breaking off the conversation as hopeless.

It is so easy to stand with emotional emphasis on decisive judgments; it is difficult calmly to visualize and to see truth in full knowledge of all objects. It is easy to break off communication with defiant assertions; it is difficult ceaselessly, beyond assertions, to enter on the ground of truth. It is easy to seize an opinion and hold on to it, dispensing with further cogitation; it is difficult to advance step by step and never to bar further questioning.

We must restore the readiness to think, against the tendency to have everything prepared in advance and, as it were, placarded in slogans. One requirement is that we do not intoxicate ourselves with feelings of pride, of despair, of indignation, of defiance, of revenge, of scorn, but that we put these feelings on ice and perceive reality. We must suspend such sentiments to see the truth, to be of good will in the world.

Yet this, too, applies to talking with each other: it is easy to think everything tentatively and never to come to a decision; it is difficult to make the true resolve in the lucidity of universally open thought. It is easy to shirk responsibility by talking; it is difficult absolutely, but without obstinacy, to maintain a resolution. It is easy always in a situation to take the line of least resistance; it is difficult, led by the absolute resolution through all mobility and pliability of thought, to stay on the determined path.

These difficulties let us go astray in opposite directions. We make no headway if we play off the aberrations on one side against those on the other. Nor is there a middle way. Rather, man’s way to truth lies in the realm of the causes to which those aberrations are due. There we go when we can really talk with each other. To that end something must constantly remain in us that trusts the other and deserves his trust. Then, amidst discussion, that silence is possible in which men listen together and hear the truth.

Therefore we do not want to rage at one another but to try to find the way together. Emotion argues against the truth of the speaker. We want to affect no fanatic will, nor to outshout each other. We do not want to engage in melodramatic breast-beating, to offend the other, nor to engage in self-satisfied praise of things intended merely to hurt the other. We do not want to force opinions on one another. But in the common search for truth there must be no barriers of charitable reserve, no gentle reticence, no comforting deception. There can be no question that might not be raised, nothing to be fondly taken for granted, no sentimental and no practical lie that would have to be guarded or that would be untouchable. But even less can it be permitted brazenly to hit each other in the face with challenging, unfounded, frivolous judgments. We belong together; we must feel our common cause when we talk with each other.

When we talk aloud to each other, we merely continue what and how each individual inwardly talks to himself. In this kind of talking none is the other’s judge; everyone is both defendant and judge at the same time. All our talks are darkened by such accusations, by the moralizing which has for ages mingled with so many conversations and keeps dripping into our wounds like poison, whatever it may be aimed against. We cannot remove this shadow but we can make it constantly lighter. We can have the right impulse: we do not want to accuse, except in the case of definite crimes capable of objective determination and of punishment. All through these years we have heard other people scorned. We do not want to continue that.

But we always succeed only in part. We all tend to justify ourselves, and to attack what we feel are hostile forces with depreciating judgments or moral accusations. Today we must examine ourselves more severely than ever. Let us make this plain: in the course of events the survivor seems always right. Success apparently justifies. The man on top believes that he has the truth of a good cause on his side. This implies the profound injustice of blindness for the failures, for the powerless, for those who are crushed by events.

It is ever thus. Thus was the Prussian-German noise after 1866 and 1870, which frightened Nietzsche. Thus was the even wilder noise of National-Socialism since 1933.

So now we must ask ourselves whether we are not lapsing into another noise, becoming self-righteous, deriving a legitimacy from the mere facts of our having survived and suffered.

Let us be clear about this in our minds: that we live and survive is not due to ourselves. If we have a new situation, with new opportunities amidst fearful destruction, it has not been created by our own strength. Let us not claim a legitimacy which is not due us.

As today every German government is an authoritarian government set up by the Allies, so every German, every one of us, owes the scope of his activities today to the Allies’ will or permission. This is a cruel fact. Truthfulness prevents us from forgetting it even for a day. It preserves us from arrogance and teaches us humility.

Among the survivors, among those on top, there are today, as ever, the outraged, impassioned ones, all thinking they are right and claiming credit for what has happened through others. The man who is well off, who finds an audience, thinks that this alone makes him right.

No one can avoid this situation altogether. Time and again, when we get on this path for an instant, we must make a real effort to find our way back to self-education. We are outraged ourselves. May outrage cleanse itself, may it stay with us as outrage against outrage, as morals against moralizing. We fight for purity of soul in struggling against the invincible in us.

That is true of the work which we now want to do together in this lecture course. What we have thought as individuals, or heard in conversations here and there, may partly be objectivized in a reflective connection. You want to participate in such connected reflections, in questions and attempted answers in which you will recognize what lies ready within yourselves or is already clear. We want to reflect together while, in fact, I expound unilaterally. But the point is not dogmatic communication, but investigation and tender for examination on your part.

Brainwork is not all that this requires. The intellect must put the heart to work, arouse it to an inner activity which in turn carries the brainwork. You will vibrate with me or against me, and I myself will not move without a stirring at the bottom of my thoughts. Although in the course of this unilateral exposition we do not actually talk with each other, I cannot help it if one or the other of you feels almost personally touched. I ask you in advance: forgive me, should I offend. I do not want to. But I am determined to dare the most radical thoughts as deliberately as possible.

In learning to talk with each other we win more than a connecting link between us. We lay the indispensable foundation for the ability to talk with other peoples.

If I anticipate that which is to become the theme of these lectures only at their very end: for us the way of force is hopeless, the way of cunning undignified and futile. Full frankness and honesty harbors not only our dignity—possible even in impotence—but our own chance. The question for every German is whether to go this way at the risk of all disappointments, at the risk of additional losses and of convenient abuse by the powerful. The answer is that this is the only way that can save our souls from a pariah existence. What will result from it we shall have to see. It is a spiritual-political venture along the edge of the precipice. If success is possible, then it will be only at long range. We are going to be distrusted for a long time to come.

Lastly, I characterize ways of remaining silent to which we incline and which constitute our great danger (I myself cannot refrain from accusing—at least not from a mental attack on the aggressive mentality).

A proudly silent bearing may for a short time be a justified mask, to catch one’s breath and clear one’s head behind it. But it becomes self-deception, and a trap for the other, if it permits us to hide defiantly within ourselves, to bar enlightenment, to elude the grasp of reality. We must guard against evasion. From such a bearing there arises a mood which is discharged in private, safe abuse, a mood of heartless frigidity, rabid indignation and facial distortions, leading to barren self-corrosion. A pride that falsely deems itself masculine, while in fact evading the issue, takes even silence as an act of combat, a final one that remains impotent.

Talking with each other is canceled too by speech which no longer speaks in private—speech which means to insult but not to hear an answer, waiting rather for the moment of face-slapping and secretly anticipates what in reality is fist and manslaughter, machine gun and bombing plane. Rage can distinguish only friend and foe for a life-and-death struggle, talks frankly with neither and does not see men as men, to get along with by being ready for self-corrections. We cannot be conscientious enough in illuminating this sort of conflict and rupture in our intercourse.

THE GREAT DIFFERENCES BETWEEN Us

Talking with each other is difficult in Germany today, but the more important for that reason. For we differ extraordinarily in what we have experienced, felt, wished, cherished and done. An enforced superficial community hid that which is full of possibilities and is now able to unfold.

We cannot sensibly talk with each other unless we regard the extraordinary differences as starting points rather than finalities. We have to learn to see and feel the difficulties in situations and attitudes entirely divergent from our own. We must see the different origins—in education, special fates and experiences—of any present attitude.

Today we Germans may have only negative basic features in common: membership in a nation utterly beaten and at the victors’ mercy; lack of a common ground linking us all; dispersal—each one is essentially on his own, and yet each one is individually helpless. Common is the non-community.

In the silence underneath the leveling public propaganda talk of the twelve years, we struck very different inner attitudes and passed through very different inner developments. We have no uniformly constituted souls and desires and sets of values in Germany. Because of the great diversity in what we believed all these years, what we took to be true, what to us was the meaning of life, the way of the transformation must also be different now for every individual. We are all being transformed. But we do not all follow the same path to the new ground of common truth, which we seek and which reunites us. In such a disaster everyone may let himself be made over for rebirth, without fear of dishonor. What we must painfully renounce is not alike for a1l—so little alike that one man’s renunciation may impress another as a gain. We are divided along different lines of disappointment.

That the differences come into the open now is due to the fact that no public discussion was possible for twelve years, and that even in private life all opposition was confined to the most intimate conversations and was often furtive among the closest friends. Public and general, and thus suggestive and almost a matter of course for a youth that had grown up in it, was only the National-Socialist way of thinking and talking.

Now that we can talk freely again, we seem to each other as if we had come from different worlds. And yet all of us speak the German language, and we were all born in this country and are at home in it.

We must not let the divergence faze us, the sense of being worlds apart. We want to find the way to each other, to talk with each other, to try to convince each other. Let us visualize a few typical differences.

There were our conceptions of events, differing to the point of irreconciliability: some went through the whole disrupting experience of national indignity as early as 1933, others after June 1934, still others in 1938 during the Jewish pogroms, many in the years since 1942, when defeat became probable, or since 1943 when it became certain, and some not until it actually happened in 1945. For the first group, 1945 was the year of delivery and new chances; for others these days were the hardest, since they brought the end of the supposedly national Reich.

Some radically sought the evil’s source and took the consequences. They desired intervention and invasion by the Western powers as early as 1933; for they saw that now, with the gates slammed on the German prison, delivery could only come from outside. The future of the German soul depended on this liberation. If its destruction was not to be completed, it had to be freed as soon as possible by sister nations of Western bent, acting on a common European interest. This delivery did not take place. The way led on to 1945, to the most fearful destruction of all our physical and moral realities.

But this view is by no means general among us. Aside from those who saw or are still seeing the Golden Age in National-Socialism, there were opponents of National-Socialism who were convinced nonetheless that a victory of Hitler’s Germany would not result in the destruction of Germanism. Instead, they foresaw a great future based on such a triumph, on the theory that a triumphant Germany—whether immediately or after Hitler’s death—would rid itself of the party. They did not believe the old saying that the power of a state can only be maintained by the forces which established it; they did not believe that terrorism would, in the nature of things, be unbreakable precisely after a victory—that after a victory, with the army discharged, Germany would have become a slave nation held in check by the SS for the exercise of a desolate, destructive, freedomless world rule in which all things German would have suffocated.

Another difference lies in the way of the ordeal which, although common to all of us, is extraordinarily varied in the kind and degree of its particular appearance. Close relatives and friends are dead or missing. Homes lie in ruins. Property has been destroyed. With everybody experiencing trouble, severe privations and physical suffering, it is still something altogether different whether one retains a home and household goods or has been ruined by bombs; whether he sustained his suffering and losses in combat at the front, at home, or in a concentration camp; whether he was a hunted Gestapo victim or one of those who, even though in fear, profited by the régime. Virtually everyone has lost close relatives and friends, but how he lost them—in front-line combat, in bombings, in concentration camps or in the mass murders of the régime—results in greatly divergent inner attitudes. Millions of disabled are seeking a way of life. Hundreds of thousands have been rescued from the concentration camps. Millions are being evacuated and forced to roam. The greater part of the male population has passed through the prisoner-of-war camps and gathered very dissimilar experiences. Men have come to the limits of humanity and returned home, unable to forget what really was. Denazification throws countless numbers out of their past course. The suffering differs in kind, and most people have sense only for their kind. Everyone tends to interpret great losses and trials as a sacrifice. But the possible interpretations of this sacrifice are so abysmally different that, at first, they divide people.

The loss of a faith makes a tremendous difference. All of us have somehow lost the ground under our feet; only a transcendently founded religious or philosophical faith can maintain itself through all these disasters. What used to count in the world has become brittle. The believing National-Socialist, his thoughts even more absurd now than they were during the days of his rule, can only snatch at feeble dreams, while the nationalist helplessly stands between the immorality of National-Socialism, through which he sees, and the reality of the German situation.

Equally vast is the difference in kind and degree of our guilt. No one is guiltless. We shall take up this question later.

But no one is beyond the pale of human existence, provided he pays for his guilt.

True, it is sensible for the individual, depending on his past, to curb and resign himself—it applies to individuals, not to the many, that they should perhaps be silent now, for the time being.

In Germany we have not only the differences between the peculiar attitudes based on the German fate. We also have here the party divisions which are common to all the West: the socialist and bourgeois-capitalist tendencies, the politicized creeds, the democratic will to freedom and the dictatorial inclination. And not only that; it may yet happen that these contrasts will be affected by the Allied powers, and work on us as on a now politically impotent, pliant, testing material.

All these differences lead to constant disruption among us Germans, to the dispersal and division of individuals and groups—the more so as our existence lacks the common ethical-political base. We only have shadows of a truly common political ground on which we might stand and retain our solidarity through the most violent controversies. We are sorely deficient in talking with each other and listening to each other. We lack mobility, criticism and self-criticism. We incline to doctrinism.

What makes it worse is that so many people do not really want to think. They want only slogans and obedience. They ask no questions and they give no answers, except by repeating drilled-in phrases. They can only assert and obey, neither probe nor apprehend. Thus they cannot be convinced, either. How shall we talk with people who will not go where others probe and think, where men seek independence in insight and conviction?

Often the outstanding difference is simply one of character. Some people always tend to be in opposition, others to run with the pack.

Germany cannot come to unless we Germans find the way to communicate with each other. The general situation seems to link us only negatively. If we really learn to talk with each other it can be only in the consciousness of our great diversity.

Unity by force does not avail; in adversity it fades as an illusion. Unanimity by talking with and understanding each other, by mutual toleration and concession leads to a community that lasts.

What we have mentioned and shall develop in subsequent discussions are typical traits. No one needs to classify himself. Anyone who feels himself referred to does so on his own responsibility.

OUTLINE OF SUBSEQUENT DISCUSSIONS

We want to know where we stand. We seek to answer the question, what has led to our situation, then to see what we are and should be—what is really German—and finally to ask what we can still want.

It is only now that history has finally become world history—the global history of mankind. So our own situation can be grasped only together with the world-historical one. What has happened today has its causes in general human events and conditions, and only secondarily in special intranational relations and the decisions of single groups of men.

What is taking place is a crisis of mankind. The contributions, fatal or salutary, of single peoples and states can only be seen in the framework of the whole, as can the connections which brought on this war, and its phenomena which manifested in new, horrible fashion what man can be. It is only within such a total framework that the guilt question, too, can be discussed justly and unmercifully at the same time. At the beginning, therefore, we place a theme which does not even mention Germany as yet: the generality of the age—how it reveals itself as technical age and in world politics and in the loss or transformation of all faith.

Only by visualizing this generality can we distinguish what is all men’s due and what is private to a special group—or, furthermore, what lies in the nature of things, in the course of events, and what is to be ascribed to free human decision.

Against the background of this generality we seek, second, the way to the German question. We visualize our real situation as the source of our spiritual situation, characterize National-Socialism, inquire how it could and did happen, and finally discuss the guilt question.*

After the visualization of the disaster we inquire, third: what is German? We want to see German history, the German spirit, the changes in our German national consciousness, and great German personalities.

Such a historical self-analysis of our German being is at the same time an ethical self-examination. In the mirror of our history we see our aims and our tasks. We hear them in the call of our great ancestors and apprehend them at the same time by illuminating the historic idols which led us astray.

What we think of as German is never mere cognition but an ethical resolve, a factor in German growth. The character of one’s own people is not finally determined until it is historically finished, all past and no future any more (like ancient Hellenism).

The fact that we are still alive, still part of history and not yet at the absolute end, leads, fourth, to the question of our remaining possibilities. Is there any strength left to the German in political collapse, in both political and economic impotence? Or has the end come in fact?

The answer lies in the draft of the ethos which is left to us—and if it were the ethos of a people deemed a pariah people in the world today.