Karl Jaspers - The Question of German Guilt (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

THE QUESTION OF GERMAN GUILT

PERSPECTIVES IN CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY
John D. Caputo, series editor

1. John D. Caputo, ed., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida.

2. Michael Strawser, Both/And: Reading KierkegaardFrom Irony to Edification.

3. Michael Barber, Ethical Hermeneutics: Rationality in Enrique Dussels Philosophy of Liberation.

4. James H. Olthuis, ed., Knowing Other-wise: Philosophy at the Threshold of Spirituality.

5. James Swindal, Reflection Revisited Jrgem Habermass Discursive Theory of Truth.

6. Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Postmodern Second edition.

7. Thomas W. Busch, Circulating Being: From Embodiment to IncorporationEssays 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, Heideggers 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-Franois Courtine, Jean-Louis Chrtien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Paul Ricoeur, Phenemenology and the Theological Turn: The French Debate.

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, Mnchen, 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 meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept 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 0-8232-2068-0ISBN 0-8232-2069-9 (pbk.)
1. National socialism. 2. World War, 1939-1945Germany. 3. World War, 19391945Atrocities. 4. GermanyHistoryPhilosophy. 5. AntisemitismGermanyHistory20th century. I. Ashton, E. B., 1909-II. Tide. III. Series.

DD256.48 J3713 2000
943.086dc21
00-029375

Printed in the United States of America

00 01 02 03 04 5 4 3 2 1

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. 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.

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 todays refugeesin Kosovo, for instance, or East Timorprosperity would make it almost impossible to imagine the trauma that gripped Europe after the Second World War. The raw suffering on all sidesin the lands that Hitlers armies invaded and within Germany itselfseemed 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 Jasperss 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 ones responsibility to take place. To enable the process to begin for Germany and for Germans, Jaspers proposed a powerful but controversial fourfold schema:

(1) Criminal guilt belongs only to those who violated the law (taken broadly to include the natural law and international law, if not the positive law in force at the time in ones own country) and who have been convicted by a court with appropriate jurisdiction (hence the elaborate justification being offered at the time for the trials conducted at Nuremberg).

(2) Political guilt, by contrast, comes about for the entire citizenry of a modern state, for modern states allow no one to be apolitical. Unfair as it seems, this sort of guilt is what all citizens 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.