2. Michael Strawser, Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard—From Irony to Edification.

JOSEPH W. KOTERSKI, S.J.

p. cm.—(Perspectives in continental philosophy ; no. 16)

In the history of twentieth-century philosophy, Jaspers is counted among the existentialists.² His many books, large and small, did much to bring existentialist concerns and tendencies in philosophy to public attention, for his books offered interesting analyses of many current situations but were also well written in relatively simple language, free from the neologisms that rendered other existentialists more difficult to grasp. Not just the present volume on the question of war guilt but comparable essays that redefined the meaning of the university, examined prevalent conditions of political liberty, and promoted belief in the European spirit reflect his special brand of existentialism: one that did not just talk about engagement with social and cultural conditions but that tried to make specific and positive contributions to current problems.

A native of Oldenburg in northern Germany, Jaspers testified in his philosophical autobiography³ to the spirit of critical and independent thinking that his father cultivated in him from the start. His grandfather had been a Lutheran pastor, while his immediate family seems to have been theistic but anti-ecclesial. After some initial studies in law, he changed to medicine and trained under well-known pathologists and psychiatrists in the clinic at the University of Heidelberg before the First World War. His first large-scale work, General Psychopathology (1913), a ground-breaking text in that field, is the result of his reflections on that experience. His second major scientific work, Psychology of Worldviews (1919), shows his developing interest in philosophical problems and methods.

Jaspers’s formal transfer from teaching psychiatry to philosophy at Heidelberg permitted him to begin issuing a long stream of philosophical books and articles, most notably the three-volume general exposition of his viewpoint tided simply Philosophy (1932). The philosophy faculty proved to be a post that better suited his mind and his delicate health. From childhood he had suffered from bronchial and cardiac problems, but a stern discipline in matters of work and rest, and the constant support of his wife, Gertrude (whom his autobiography describes as his intellectual soulmate), made possible a career of teaching and writing until the Nazis severed his academic connections in 1937 because of displeasure with his acute criticism of racism and rabid nationalism. Gertrude’s Jewish heritage was also held against him, but they were spared the fate of deportation or worse, and in private retirement during the war Jaspers was able to continue to write.

Although much material remains in unpublished manuscripts to this day, he did publish a score of books, including several volumes of historical commentary called The Great Philosophers and a thoroughgoing restatement of his own system in his treatise On Truth. Two of his lecture series gave a more succinct expression to his ideas: Reason and Existence and Philosophy of Existence. In these studies one sees a trait that sets him apart from many of his fellow existentialists, whose suspicions about science and technology he critiques in the course of his own on-going appreciative engagement with both the fruits of modern science and the habits of thinking typical of a scientific mind. His post-Second World War books also enter the dialogue of existentialism with religion. They include a debate on the demythologizing of the Scriptures, which he conducted with Rudolph Bultmann (Myth and Christianity), as well as several volumes of discussions with Protestant theologians (Philosophical Faith and the subsequent Philosophical Faith and Revelation).

In 1948 Jaspers left Heidelberg for a post at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Before his death in 1969, he also published a popular introduction to his philosophy (Way to Wisdom), a sophisticated reflection on the atomic age (The Atomic Bomb and the Future of Mankind), and his long-nurtured views on the philosophy of history (The Origin and Goal of History). It is this book that contains his famous theory of the Axial Age of history, the period from about 600 B.C. to 400 B.C. in which Chinese, Indian, Persian, Hebrew, and Greek thinkers all independently generated many of the political and metaphysical ideas that have been most decisive in shaping the rest of human history.

In Jaspers’s own judgment, the figure that was most important for the shaping of his own thinking was Immanual Kant, but he also credits Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Max Weber with inspiring his work.⁴ His readers, however, cannot help noticing the strongly Neoplatonist cast to much of his thought, and the four figures whom he quotes again and again are Plotinus, Bruno, Spinoza, and Schelling. The metaphysical matrix that in some way undergirds the rest of his writings, including the present volume, is Kantian and Neoplatonic. By his lights, it is simply impossible for a thinker to evade the “problem of being,” and yet one may never assume that “being is something generally understood.” With Kant, he repeatedly asserts the validity of the thesis that everything “objective” is always conditioned by “consciousness,” and thus he regards any claim about purely objective being (in his vocabulary, Dasein) as invariably an illusion.

Yet we live in the reality of the life-world, and so we do well to accept the Neoplatonic heritage of diverse spheres of being that philosophical reflection can progressively distinguish. There is a triad of levels of existence to be noticed: (1) the simple givenness of “objects” whenever individuals encounter anything real in their normal experience; (2) the human constructions of the life-world of the subject (internally within an individual and externally, for instance, in the trust-relations that constitute communities large and small); and (3) transcendent being that is always in principle beyond what any subject-mind can ever mentally encompass but to which the symbols devised by religion and philosophy regularly venture to point. Again, with Kant, Jaspers articulates a doctrine of Ideas that places him squarely in the tradition of German Idealism, yet always in a way that is tempered by the basic realism of Jaspers’s own medical and political heritage.

The result is that he is the sort of philosopher who can help “realists” learn what they need to discover from “idealism” and vice versa.⁵ More specifically, Jaspers amplifies Kant’s basic doctrine of the three Ideas (the world, the soul, and God) that reason must postulate in order to compensate for the fact that we are never presented with the whole of reality and yet we constantly feel the hunger to think about such wholes. We human beings know anything that we do come to know only within the boundaries of some horizon or other. Here Jaspers’s point is much like both that of Aristotle, who long before insisted that we know an object only by grasping its form or structure, and that of the long tradition of realism, which has regularly identified an object’s form with transcendental truth, the fundamental intelligibility of every being as being.⁶ But thinking this problem through as a Kantian committed to the doctrine that there is “no object without a subject” and thus no access to objectivity that is not categorically conditioned by consciousness and its attendant subjectivity, Jaspers proposes that “the world” (cosmos) is the Idea that we project in order to encompass all possible objective viewpoints, even though such a whole is actually unknowable to us in principle. Likewise, the depths of consciousness that are the ground for the second level of existence are never able to be fully plumbed by anyone, and so they are equally unknowable as a whole, and yet we need some way of thinking about them. So, according to Jaspers, following Kant, reason offers the I, the soul, as a useful mode of encompassing consciousness. At the third level, God or Transcendence is the Idea by which to encompass all of being, but the reality of such being is as ineffable as the One envisioned by Plotinus.

In each of Jaspers’s descriptions of the system of his thought we find him flexibly alert to the classical philosophical problem of the one and the many that these encompassing Ideas are designed to accommodate. The compelling and cogent reasoning of the scientific and technical realm, for example, belong to “world orientation,”⁷ where Jaspers explores the mutual interdependence of fact and theory in all the empirical sciences. For him, these factors are interlocking but intrinsically incomplete, and science, therefore, can claim to offer cogent and compelling demonstrations and yet has to retain an endlessly open perspective, since the search for objective truth will always go on. One sees some of this attitude in his comments about the practical dimensions of the political context of university life in the present volume on the question of guilt. For Jaspers, there are four interconnected but irreducible spheres of reality in “the world”: matter, life, soul, and spirit. Each is real, but each demands that we recognize a different mode of objectivity. The physician, for example, needs to have appropriate regard for biochemistry, for medicine, for therapy, and for the spiritual and emotional life of a patient. The importance of each level in itself demands philosophical and practical distinctions.

Much of the discussion in the present book turns on questions of truth, freedom, and ethics. On the issue of guilt and responsibility there are necessarily going to be conflicts of freedom and authority, of religion and philosophy, and of politics and academia. For Jaspers, these are all areas in which the compelling certainties of scientific reason are unavailable and yet where choices must still be made, however large the risk of failure looms. In the face of such possible tragedy, he still insists that even failure (“shipwreck”) can be philosophically significant in the discovery of the meaning of being. In the tragic situations that are central to his meditations in this book, such failures may well prove particularly significant for coming to a proper acknowledgment of one’s level of responsibility. For Jaspers, the freedom of the I (the soul) is ultimately indefinable and unprovable,⁸ but is nevertheless a reality that constantly contradicts the reductive efforts of determinists to deny it on the faulty assumption that “objective material being” is “the whole of being.” Jaspers keeps his readers mindful that human beings are conscious of their freedom in various ways, including (1) through their existential choices, that is, the various decisions one makes in the course of one’s life by which one progressively becomes precisely who one is, and (2) through the personal unity of one’s own existence simultaneously at the levels of matter, life, soul, and spirit. By virtue of embodiment and self-consciousness, one’s freedom inescapably involves the reconciliation of necessity and free choice: although my choices are free, the world in which I make these choices is often quite recalcitrant, and yet I bind myself by them (sometimes in order to change that world), and I must accept the consequences of the choices I make. These choices are not simply determined by empirical reality, however much they are conditioned thereby.

In the present study we find Jaspers discussing the phenomenon of guilt. For him, guilt is not alien to freedom but comes precisely from being free. It comes as an intrinsic consequence of some of the choices we make and some of the situations in which we find ourselves and which we accept. Our existence requires actions of various sorts, actions that we must will, choose, and carry out. But the human condition is also such that even nonaction is really a kind of action, a result of choice. By each of my choices and my acts, I make myself more of just the sort of person who chooses that sort of action, for I have embraced one possibility and cast other possibilities aside. All this happens within groups and communities of various sorts (a part of the givenness of our “world”), and this can implicate us in guilt that would not otherwise be our own, just as it permits us to participate with profit and delight in the successes of communities to which we belong but for which we are not personally responsible. In Jaspers’s more biblical moments one even detects echoes of the “original guilt” that some religious traditions have recognized as “original sin,” but in his more philosophical moments one finds him focused more on the categories of political and metaphysical guilt that this book articulates in contrast to criminal and moral guilt.

What is perhaps especially valuable in a book like this is its integration of the speculative and the practical. Jaspers’s steady respect for staying open to truth and for acknowledging responsibility for action and choice has its roots in the quest for an adequate philosophy of being that is not paralyzed by the Cartesian split of human from nonhuman being. That split has often been invoked to justify ethical theories that attend to a person’s intention in isolation from the embodied nature of any action or from the wide-reaching consequences of personal choices. If not everything in Jaspers’s system is completely convincing (for example, his reticence about revealed truth and the ultimate inaccessibility of God as anything other than an Idea), his insights into the question at hand remain undeniable.

Joseph W. Koterski, S.J.

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

Force is what decides between men, unless they reach agreement. Any state order serves to control this force so as to preserve it—as law enforcement within, as war without. In quiet times this had been almost forgotten.

Where war establishes the situation of force, the right ends. We Europeans have tried even then to maintain some remnant of it in the rules of international law, which apply in war as in peace and were last expressed in the Hague and Geneva Conventions. The attempt seems to have been vain.

Where force is used, force is aroused. It is up to the victor to decide what shall be done with the vanquished, in line with the rule of vae victis. The vanquished can either die or do and suffer what the victor wants. As a rule he has always preferred to live (here are the roots of the fundamental master-servant relationship as profoundly illustrated by Hegel).

Right is the sublime idea of men who derive their existence from an origin which is secured by force alone, but not determined by force. Wherever men become aware of their humanity and recognize man as man, they grasp human rights and base themselves on a natural law to which both victor and vanquished may appeal.

As soon as the idea of right arises, men may negotiate to find the true right in discussion and methodical procedure.

True, what in case of a complete victory becomes right for the vanquished and between victor and vanquished, has thus far played only a very limited role in events which are decided by acts of political will. These events become the fundament of a positive, factual law which is not justified through right.

Right can only apply to guilt in the sense of crime and in the sense of political liability, not to moral and metaphysical guilt.

But even the punished or liable party can recognize the right. The criminal can feel his punishment as his honor and rehabilitation. The one who is politically liable can admit that the living conditions he must accept now are facts determined by fate.

Mercy is what tempers the effect of undiluted right and of destructive force. The humanity of man senses in it a higher truth than may be found in the unswerving consistency of either right or force.

(a) Notwithstanding the existence of right, mercy works to open a realm of justice freed from flaws. For all human norms are full of flaws and injustice in their consequences.

(b) Notwithstanding the possibility of force, the victor shows mercy. He may be motivated by expedience, because the vanquished can serve him, or by magnanimity, because his sense of power and stature is raised by letting the vanquished live; or he may in conscience submit to the demands of a universally human natural law, by which the vanquished is no more stripped of all rights than is the criminal.

WHO JUDGES, AND WHO OR WHAT Is JUDGED?

Every German asks himself: how am I guilty?

The question of the guilt of the individual analyzing himself is what we call the moral one. Here we Germans are divided by the greatest differences.

While the decision in self-judgment is up to the individual alone, we are free to talk with one another, insofar as we are in communication, and morally to help each other achieve clarity. The moral sentence on the other is suspended, however—neither the criminal nor the political one.

There is a line at which even the possibility of moral judgment ceases. It can be drawn where we feel the other not even trying for a moral self-analysis—where we perceive mere sophistry in his argument, where he seems not to hear at all. Hitler and his accomplices, that small minority of tens of thousands, are beyond moral guilt for as long as they do not feel it. They seem incapable of repentance and change. They are what they are. Force alone can deal with such men who live by force alone.

But the moral guilt exists for all those who give room to conscience and repentance. The morally guilty are those who are capable of penance, the ones who knew, or could know, and yet walked in ways which self-analysis reveals to them as culpable error—whether conveniently closing their eyes to events, or permitting themselves to be intoxicated, seduced or bought with personal advantages, or obeying from fear. Let us look at some of these possibilities.

(a) By living in disguise—unavoidable for anyone who wanted to survive—moral guilt was incurred. Mendacious avowals of loyalty to threatening bodies like the Gestapo, gestures like the Hitler salute, attendance at meetings, and many other things causing a semblance of participation—who among us in Germany was not guilty of that, at one time or another? Only the forgetful can deceive themselves about it, since they want to deceive themselves. Camouflage had become a basic trait of our existence. It weighs on our moral conscience.

(b) More deeply stirring at the instant of cognition is guilt incurred by a false conscience. Many a young man or woman nowadays awakens with a horrible feeling: my conscience has betrayed me. I thought I was living in idealism and self-sacrifice for the noblest goal, with the best intentions—what can I still rely on? Everyone awakening like this will ask himself how he became guilty, by haziness, by unwillingness to see, by conscious seclusion, isolation of his own life in a “decent” sphere.

Here we first have to distinguish between military honor and political sense. For whatever is said about guilt cannot affect the consciousness of military honor. If a soldier kept faith with his comrades, did not flinch in danger and proved himself calm and courageous, he may preserve something inviolate in his self-respect. These purely soldierly, and at the same time human, values are common to all peoples. No guilt is incurred by having stood this test; in fact, if probation here was real, unstained by evil acts or execution of patently evil commands, it is a foundation of the sense of life.

But a soldier’s probation must not be identified with the cause he fought for. To have been a good soldier does not absolve from all other guilt.

The unconditional identification of the actual state with the German nation and army constitutes guilt incurred through false conscience. A first-class soldier may have succumbed to the falsification of his conscience which enabled him to do and permit obviously evil things because of patriotism. Hence the good conscience in evil deeds.

Yet our duty to the fatherland goes far beneath blind obedience to its rulers of the day. The fatherland ceases to be a fatherland when its soul is destroyed. The power of the state is not an end in itself; rather, it is pernicious if this state destroys the German character. Therefore, duty to the fatherland did not by any means lead consistently to obedience to Hitler and to the assumption that even as a Hitler state Germany must, of course, win the war at all costs. Herein lies the false conscience. It is no simple guilt. It is at the same time a tragic confusion, notably of a large part of our unwitting youth. To do one’s duty to the fatherland means to commit one’s whole person to the highest demands made on us by the best of our ancestors, not by the idols of a false tradition.

It was amazing to see the complete self-identification with army and state, in spite of all evil. For this unconditionality of a blind nationalism—only conceivable as the last crumbling ground in a world about to lose all faith—was moral guilt.

It was made possible, furthermore, by a misinterpretation of the Biblical warning: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers”—a warning completely perverted by the curious sanctity appertaining to orders in military tradition. “This is an order”—in the ears of many these words had and still have a ring of pathos as if voicing the highest duty. But simultaneously, by shrugging off stupidity and evil as inevitable, they furnished an excuse. What finally turned this conduct into full-fledged moral guilt was the eagerness to obey—that compulsive conduct, feeling itself conscientious and, in fact, forsaking all conscience.

Many a youth nauseated by Nazi rule in the years after 1933 chose the military career because it seemed to offer the only decent atmosphere uninfluenced by the Party. The army, mentally against the Party, seemed to exist outside and without the Party as though it were a power of its own. It was another error of conscience; eventually, with all the independent generals in the old tradition eliminated, the consequences appeared as moral decay of the German officer in all positions of leadership—notwithstanding the many likable and even noble soldierly personalities who had sought salvation in vain, misled by a betraying conscience.

The very fact that honest consciousness and goodwill were our initial guides is bound to deepen our later disillusionment and disappointment in ourselves. It leads us to question even our best faith; for we are responsible for our delusions—for every delusion to which we succumb.

Awakening and self-analysis of this delusion are indispensable. They turn idealistic youths into upright, morally reliable, politically lucid German men acquiescing in their lot as now cast.

(c) By partial approval of National-Socialism, by straddling and occasional inner assimilation and accommodation, moral guilt was incurred without any of the tragic aspects of the previous types.

The argument that there was some good to it, after all—this readiness to a supposedly unbiased appraisal—was widespread among us. Yet the truth could be only a radical “either-or”: if I recognize the principle as evil, everything is evil and any seemingly good consequences are not what they seem to be. It was this erring objectiveness, ready to grant something good in National-Socialism, which estranged close friends so they could no longer talk frankly. The same man who had just lamented the failure of a martyr to appear and sacrifice himself for the old freedom and against injustice was apt to praise the abolition of unemployment (by means of armament and fraudulent financial policies), apt to hail the absorption of Austria in 1938 as the fulfillment of the old ideal of a united Reich, apt to cast doubts on Dutch neutrality in 1940 and to justify Hitler’s attack, and apt, above all, to rejoice in the victories.

(d) Many engaged in convenient self-deception. In due time they were going to change this evil government. The Party would disappear again—with the Fuehrer’s death at the latest. For the present one had to belong, to right things from within. The following conversations were typical:

An officer speaks: “After the war we’ll finish National-Socialism on the very basis of our victory; but now we must stick together and lead Germany to that victory—when the house burns down you pour water and don’t stop to ask what caused the fire.”—Answer: “After victory you’ll be discharged and glad to go home. The SS alone will stay armed, and the reign of terror will grow into a slave state. No individual human life will be possible; pyramids will rise; highways and towns will be built and changed at the Fuehrer’s whim. A giant arms machine will be developed for the final conquest of the world.”

A professor speaks: “We are the Fronde within the Party. We dare frank discussion. We achieve spiritual realizations. We shall slowly turn all of it back into the old German spirituality.”—Answer: “You are deceiving yourselves. Allowed a fool’s freedom, on condition of instant obedience, you shut up and give in. Your fight is a mirage, desired by the leaders. You only help to entomb the German spirit.”

Many intellectuals went along in 1933, sought leading positions and publicly upheld the ideology of the new power, only to become resentful later when they personally were shunted aside. These—although mostly continuing positive until about 1942, when the course of the war made an unfavorable outcome certain and sent them into the oppositionist ranks—now feel that they suffered under the Nazis and are therefore called for what follows. They regard themselves as anti-Nazis. In all these years, according to their self-proclaimed ideology, these intellectual Nazis were frankly speaking truth in spiritual matters, guarding the tradition of the German spirit, preventing destructions, doing good in individual cases.

Many of these may be guilty of persisting in a mentality which, while not identical with Party tenets and even disguised as metamorphosis and opposition, still clings in fact to the mental attitude of National-Socialism and fails to clear itself. Through this mentality they may be actually akin to National-Socialism’s inhuman, dictatorial, unexistentially nihilistic essence. If a mature person in 1933 had the certainty of inner conviction—due not merely to political error but to a sense of existence heightened by National-Socialism—he will be purified only by a transmutation which may have to be more thorough than any other. Whoever behaved like that in 1933 would remain inwardly brittle otherwise, and inclined to further fanaticism. Whoever took part in the race mania, whoever had delusions of a revival based on fraud, whoever winked at the crimes then already committed is not merely liable but must renew himself morally. Whether and how he can do it is up to him alone, and scarcely open to any outside scrutiny.

(e) There is a difference between activity and passivity. The political performers and executors, the leaders and the propagandists are guilty. If they did not become criminals, they still have, by their activity, incurred a positively determinable guilt.

But each one of us is guilty insofar as he remained inactive. The guilt of passivity is different. Impotence excuses; no moral law demands a spectacular death. Plato already deemed it a matter of course to go into hiding in desperate times of calamity, and to survive. But passivity knows itself morally guilty of every failure, every neglect to act whenever possible, to shield the imperiled, to relieve wrong, to countervail. Impotent submission always left a margin of activity which, though not without risk, could still be cautiously effective. Its anxious omission weighs upon the individual as moral guilt. Blindness for the misfortune of others, lack of imagination of the heart, inner indifference toward the witnessed evil—that is moral guilt.

(f) The moral guilt of outward compliance, of running with the pack, is shared to some extent by a great many of us. To maintain his existence, to keep his job, to protect his chances a man would join the Party and carry out other nominal acts of conformism.

Nobody will find an absolute excuse for doing so—notably in view of the many Germans who, in fact, did not conform, and bore the disadvantages.

Yet we must remember what the situation looked like in, say, 1936 or ’37. The Party was the state. Conditions seemed incalculably permanent. Nothing short of a war could upset the régime. All the powers were appeasing Hitler. All wanted peace. A German who did not want to be out of everything, lose his profession, injure his business, was obliged to go along—the younger ones in particular. Now, membership in the Party or its professional organizations was no longer a political act; rather, it was a favor granted by the state which allowed the individual to join. A “badge” was needed, an external token without inner assent. A man asked to join in those days could hardly refuse. It is decisive for the meaning of compliance in what connection and from what motives he acquired his membership in the Party; each year and every situation has its own mitigating and aggravating circumstances, to be distinguished only in each individual case.

METAPHYSICAL GUILT

We distinguish between cause and guilt. An exposition showing why things happened as they did, and why indeed they could not but so happen, is automatically considered an excuse. A cause is blind and involuntary. Guilt is seeing and free.

We usually deal in like fashion with political events. The causal connection of history seems to relieve a people of responsibility. Hence their satisfaction if, in adversity, effective causes seem to make inevitability plausible.

Many tend to accept and stress their responsibility when they talk of their present actions whose arbitrariness they would like to see released from restraints, conditions and obligations. In case of failure, on the other hand, they tend to decline responsibility and plead allegedly inescapable necessities. Responsibility had been a talking point, not an experience.

All through these years, accordingly, one could hear that if Germany won the war the victory and the credit would be the Party’s—while if Germany lost, the losers and the guilty would be the German people.

But actually, in the causal connections of history, cause and responsibility are indivisible wherever human activity is at work. As soon as decisions and actions play a part in events, every cause is at the same time either credit or guilt.

Even those happenings which are independent of will and decision still are human tasks. The effects of natural causes depend also on how man takes them, how he handles them, what he makes out of them. Cognition of history, therefore, is never such as to apprehend its course as flatly necessary. This cognition can never make certain predictions (as possible, for instance, in astronomy), nor can it retrospectively perceive an inevitability of general events and individual actions. In either case it sees the scope of possibilities, only more richly and concretely in the case of the past.

In turn, this cognition, historic-sociological insight and the resulting picture of history, affects events and is to this extent a matter of responsibility.

Chiefly named as premises independent of freedom—and thus of guilt and responsibility—are the conditions of geography and the world-historical situation.

GEOGRAPHICAL CONDITIONS

We Germans differ greatly in the kind and degree of our participation in, or resistance to, National-Socialism. Everyone must reflect on his own internal and external conduct, and seek his own peculiar rebirth in this German crisis.

Another great difference between individuals concerns the starting time of this inner metamorphosis—whether it began in 1933 or in 1934, after the murders of June 30; whether it happened from 1938 on, after the synagogue burnings, or not until the war, or not until the threatening defeat, or not until the collapse.

In these matters we Germans cannot be reduced to a common denominator. We must keep an open mind in approaching each other from essentially different starting points. The only common denominator may be our nationality which makes all jointly guilty and liable for having let 1933 come to pass without dying. This also unites the outer and the inner emigration.

Due to our great diversity, everybody can apparently blame everybody else. This lasts as long as the individual really envisions only his own situation and that of people similar to him, and judges the situation of the others only in relation to himself. It is amazing to observe how we get really excited only when we are personally concerned, and how we see everything in the perspective of our special position. It takes a constant, conscious effort to escape from this perspective.

A recital of the recriminations current among the Germans of today would lead to endless discussions. Only some incidental examples from the present and the recent past are to be mentioned here. We may well falter at times, when our patience threatens to give out in talking with each other and we run up against brusque and callous rejection.

In the past years there were Germans who demanded martyrdom of us other Germans. We should not silently suffer what was going on, they told us; even if our action remained unsuccessful, it still would be like an ethical prop for the entire population, a visible symbol of suppressed forces. Thus I could hear myself rebuked from 1933 on, by friends, men and women.

Such demands were so harrowing because there was profound truth in them, yet a truth insultingly perverted by the manner of its presentation. What man, by himself, can experience before the transcendent, was dragged down to a level of moralizing, if not of sensationalism. Quietude and reverence were lost.

At present, a bad example of dodging into mutual accusation is given in many discussions between emigrants and others who stayed here—between the two groups we have come to describe as outer and inner emigration. Each has its ordeal. The emigrant has the world of a strange language to contend with, and homesickness as in the symbolic story of the German Jew in New York who had Hitler’s picture on the wall of his room. Why? Because nothing short of this daily reminder of the horrors awaiting him here would let him master his longing for the homeland. The trials of the stay-at-home included being utterly forsaken, an outcast in his own country, in constant danger, alone in the hour of need, shunned by all save a few friends whom he endangered in turn, thus suffering anew. Yet if now one group accuses the other, we need but to ask ourselves how we feel about the inner condition and tone of voice of these accusers—whether we are happy that such people feel this way, whether they set an example, whether there is something of an uplift in them, of freedom, of love, which might encourage us. If not, then what they say is not true, either.

There is no growth of life in mutual accusation. Talking with each other actually ceases; it is a form of the severance of communication. And this in turn is always a symptom of untruth, and so an occasion for honest men to search unceasingly where untruth might be hiding. It hides wherever Germans presume to judge Germans morally and metaphysically; wherever the veiled will to compulsion reigns instead of the goodwill to communication; wherever there is zeal to have the other admit guilt; wherever arrogance—“I am not incriminated”—looks down on the other; wherever the feeling of guiltlessness holds itself entitled to hold others guilty.