Bernhard Schlink's Views on Collective German Guilt

© Silke Hesse, 2013

Bernhard Schlink’s Views on Collective German Guilt

Silke Beinssen-Hesse

Monash University

As a child I knew that our family had a connection with the German Lutheran Church in Sydney – at some stage my mother was even elected an elder and my less committed father was co-opted as church treasurer – but we attended mainly for christenings, confirmations, marriages, funerals and other rites of passage. Our instruction in doctrine was minimal; what I carried away with me was the primacy of the commandment of love and the advice that prayer was best used to ask for guidance when life matters became too complicated for common sense and kindliness. Sin was an unfamiliar concept; we tried to get things right and if we didn’t succeed, we approached them differently or tried harder the next time. I can’t remember religious instruction at school placing the emphasis very much differently; perhaps I was just not attuned to other messages. Original sin was not on the syllabus, nor was redemption. And yet my brothers and I grew up drowning in guilt.

At first things were simpler. There was a war in which one half of the world was fighting the other half; all the countries seemed to be either the friends or the enemies of other countries. Our problem was that we had somehow become detached from the country whose side we were supposed to be on, and had become lost right in the middle of the other side. The other side were people just like us, except that they didn’t speak German at home, and some of them were nice to us and some of them didn’t want anything to do with us. It was all a conundrum. At some stage we were then moved to a place where the people on our side had been collected and everyone spoke either German or another non-English language like Italian or Arabic, which we couldn’t understand at all. In some ways that made things simpler, though the place was crowded and dusty, the facilities basic, and the people felt like strangers; even their German sounded funny, probably because most of them had come from Palestine or Singapore or New Guinea or Iran or some other far-away place. But we all got used to each other and there wasn’t a problem. Then a year or so before the end of the war, our family was suddenly discharged and we had to get used to the other lot of people again; and again most of them were very nice to us and we could usually avoid those that didn’t like us. And then there was peace which we had all wanted, but which turned out to be not such a good thing.  My mother was very sad because nearly everyone in her family had been killed, and those that hadn’t were starving, and the houses and the countryside had been smashed up completely; but that had happened in other countries too. We tried what we could to help, which was all one could really do. But the peace wasn’t the real problem either. The real problem was that something had happened during that war in that far-away land from which my mother came and in which my Australian-German father had also lived for many years that made us all so despicable that people shunned us in horror. It had to do with a man called Hitler, who was, however, no longer alive, due to the heroism of the Australians and their friends, and with people called the Nazis who supported him. For those, like us, who spoke German at home the Nazi poison was part of their very nature; poison was the best way of describing it since it was invisible but apparently terribly harmful. People would shout at you in anger or perhaps fear if they saw you; if you were a girl they would often just turn their backs on you and walk quietly away. But what the Nazis had actually done was not really explained to us at home or at school. Perhaps nobody quite knew; it had something to do with Jews and nobody really knew what a Jew was, and probably people didn’t want to be nasty to you by talking about it too openly either, even though they clearly considered you responsible for the terrible things that had happened, though you had never even seen a Jew or knowingly hurt one. All the same, there were still quite a lot of people who were nice to you and not afraid of you either. It was difficult to work out how bad you really were. – I was eight when the European war ended. How does one describe a child’s confusion in an age where children were largely left to work things out for themselves? How does one cope with guilt without sin?

Recently – it is now sixty-six years since the end of that war – I came across Bernhard Schlink’s essay “Collective Guilt”, published two years ago in his collection Guilt about the Past. Schlink, a professor of Law at Berlin and also a novelist who has used the Holocaust as a theme, argues for the legal validity of the concept of collective guilt for crimes such as the Holocaust, guilt that would include the children of perpetrators, collaborators or accessories right down to the third or fourth generation, though he admits that collective guilt is today outlawed under international law. To support his case he goes back to ancient Germanic tribal law according to which any or all members of a perpetrator’s clan could be punished for his misdeed, whether it was intentional or accidental. Such clan law still exists in some places: remote Aboriginal groups often prefer to solve problems with pay-back; in New Guinea Christian missionaries fought hard against the socially crippling scourge of revenge killings; and just a few days ago my paper reported on the public gang-raping of a Pakistani woman, Mukhtaran Mai, by fourteen men, a punishment ordered by village elders in 2002 “because Ms Mai’s brother was accused of having illicit relations with a woman from a rival clan” (The Age, 22-23 April, 2011). The courageous Ms Mai took her case to the courts but even Pakistan’s Supreme Court refused to condemn all but one of the alleged rapists involved. Presumably, according to the logic of the elders, if the sexual relations of a clan member might serve to boost the numbers of a rival clan, his sister must be forced symbolically to bear the fourteen children that could eventually be the result of such an illicit union. While primal instincts of group revenge can be stirred up in many of us - George W. Bush’s reaction to the outrage of 9/11, inflicting massive punishment on a different set of Muslims, might serve as an example - it seems extraordinary that a modern European lawyer should want to sanction this, particularly when the Holocaust itself had elements of a very similar revenge action against a group perceived by many Germans to have had an unfair economic advantage over the avenging group. Hitler had also introduced Sippenhaftung, according to which family members were held responsible for the actions of one of their members.

Schlink goes on to explain that one way of avoiding the more extreme consequences of payback has always been to expel the offending member of the group, so that the group can no longer benefit from his economic contribution. He tells us that his generation of the Student Revolution had done their best to achieve such expulsions, outing their own parents and grandparents, even though, if collaborators and accessories were counted in, they knew that the numbers of the guilty were too vast to punish effectively. Many of the more extreme cases had, of course, by then been dealt with by the courts; but Schlink points out that the German administration had never rid itself completely of Nazi collaborators and consequently Germans could not expect leniency from their victims.

There seem to me to be several things wrong with Schlink’s argument. Advocating payback as a remedy for payback (even WWII can be seen as in part payback for the injustices of Versailles) seems absurd if our aim is world peace. It also seems strange to insist that justice must be aligned with primal psychology, which tends to need little encouragement to burst forth, rather than governed by reason and experience. Moreover, the vengeful justice of Schlink’s generation makes no distinction between the crime and its human perpetrator or facilitator. While a crime must be condemned unequivocally, a human being can learn from mistakes, particularly if encouraged to confront them, and such a person can then become a valuable member of society. He or she is often deeply disturbed by what they have done and needs help and eventually forgiveness. Nazism is not an incurable deformation or contagion. Even prison systems today have some commitment to rehabilitation. Moreover, any accused must also have access to the defence of mitigating circumstances. Where such vast numbers of people within a nation go wrong, as was the case in Germany, the likelihood is great, that coercion, blindness, ignorance, timidity, a perceived conflict of duties or similar universal human weaknesses would have played a significant part. The post-war de-nazification process along with the Nuremberg Trials recognized this and concentrated on the instigators and the major criminals, prescribing re-education for the wider population. The modern Germany thus produced seems to endorse this policy as having been generally successful, for the Federal Republic has become a reliable democracy and a responsible and helpful member of the European and global communities.

There is another point to be made in relation to Schlink’s essay. In their legal practice, societies have the choice between placing the emphasis on punishment or on rehabilitation; the two are often almost incompatible. Punishment may be satisfying for the wronged party from the point of view of gaining revenge; but it has been shown to be next to useless with regard to prevention. In the case of Germany, since it is virtually inconceivable that any German citizen today would want to repeat even elements of the Holocaust, punishment, even if it were an effective deterrent, would have no constructive role to play. A rehabilitated German nation intent on improving its image does, however, presage a better future and that is in everyone’s interest.

Due to Schlink’s use of archaic justice as a model, he also does not make the nowadays relevant distinction between the individual and the group. Individual Germans may know they are innocent; but they will still recognize that the nation to which they belong bears responsibility for crimes, even generations after they were committed. The nation must make restitution, but under a new government and a generation or two later, it is no longer guilty in the true sense of the word. In the sixty-six years since the end of the war the German government, the nation’s institutions, and many individuals acting on behalf of their country have done a great deal - I cannot argue here about whether or not it is enough - to make information about the Nazi years available, compensate victims, and manifest regret. Regret to the extent of mourning will inevitably still be felt by many among the current generation; but the term guilt in place of responsibility can only create confusion. It is also counter-productive for it is obvious that any person who is unjustly accused will be far less willing to compensate, warn and mourn than someone who does so voluntarily in an act of generosity. It is only if their personal innocence is acknowledged that young people will shoulder the national responsibility willingly. The term guilt must be reserved for actual perpetrators. Apart from being destructive to the individual and his sense of self, it encourages the perpetuation of nationalist clichés of the wicked German that lend themselves to all sorts of chauvinism, concealed racism and dishonesty.

It is perhaps inevitable that many Germans of the second and third generations that I have met have an over-sensitive reaction to all forms of coercion and disrespect, to demands for unquestioning obedience, to any remark that suggests intolerance of foreigners and to any other behaviours and attitudes that remind them of Nazi times. Worrying behaviours and attitudes can be found, to some extent, in all societies. In Germany, however, they will more often than not evoke memories of historical guilt. It is above all in this way that a perception of ongoing guilt is likely to remain alive, and that is a constructive use of memory. Schlink seems to suggest that individual Germans would do best to move out of the oppressive historical context into which they were born and define their identity as arising ”only from the here and now”. It seems to me that this wholesale rejection of one’s history could well lead to a shallow and impoverished life. Though it is not politically correct to say so, my conversations with German friends I trust have shown that for most, their lives throughout the Nazi years were as full of small but difficult acts of courage, kindness and honesty, as they were of disturbing moments of cowardice and coldness. Ordinary people do not suddenly become purely good or bad when a government changes. A gesture of protest or helpfulness in dangerous circumstances is worth a great deal, even if it can ultimately do little to change an oppressive situation. In Germany’s case, only the fall of the dictator could do that.               

So much for Schlink’s views on collective guilt. There is, however, another sense in which Germany has often been held to be guilty. Academics in particular have tried hard in the post-war years to prove that the nation’s culture had been going evil ways for many generations. I worked among such ideas during my professional life. But what came to the surface was often heavily determined by geographical specificities, good and bad relationships with neighbours that were mutual, and pervasive pan-European movements and fashions. Thus racism of one kind or another was a prevailing attitude in that newly scientific age, as was nationalism. I have not been persuaded that it is possible to apportion blame in a meaningful way here. A world-wide culture of mutual respect and cooperativeness between nations would presumably have produced better outcomes than the competitive nationalism of the first half of the twentieth century did. In the present global age we have learned to realize that the needs and peculiarities of others can quickly become our own problems and we must approach them proactively. Germany has been strongly discouraged from looking to blame any country other than itself for Hitler’s rise to power and its consequences; this restriction is clearly intended as part of its punishment, designed to prevent any attempt to shirk responsibility and deny guilt. But it is not an approach that can help us to understand how political and humanitarian catastrophes are best prevented.

      

When I began writing about my father’s life, it was impressed on me that his German background made it imperative that the question of participatory guilt for the Hitler debacle and the Holocaust be of primary importance. Before the facts became manifest through his letters, it had been widely assumed that his support of a right-wing anti-Hitler group was deeply suspect and this suspicion had a significant effect on my relationship with colleagues. I have become tired of the question of German guilt that has haunted my life. Like many other Germans too, my father tried to make considered and responsible decisions. Whether in hindsight they were always right, is a separate issue; but they were certainly never spectacularly wrong either. I would like to tell his story, which is interesting in its own right, without moralizing.

 © Silke Hesse, 2013

Bernhard Schlink’s Views on Collective German Guilt

Silke Beinssen-Hesse

Monash University

As a child I knew that our family had a connection with the German Lutheran Church in Sydney – at some stage my mother was even elected an elder and my less committed father was co-opted as church treasurer – but we attended mainly for christenings, confirmations, marriages, funerals and other rites of passage. Our instruction in doctrine was minimal; what I carried away with me was the primacy of the commandment of love and the advice that prayer was best used to ask for guidance when life matters became too complicated for common sense and kindliness. Sin was an unfamiliar concept; we tried to get things right and if we didn’t succeed, we approached them differently or tried harder the next time. I can’t remember religious instruction at school placing the emphasis very much differently; perhaps I was just not attuned to other messages. Original sin was not on the syllabus, nor was redemption. And yet my brothers and I grew up drowning in guilt.

At first things were simpler. There was a war in which one half of the world was fighting the other half; all the countries seemed to be either the friends or the enemies of other countries. Our problem was that we had somehow become detached from the country whose side we were supposed to be on, and had become lost right in the middle of the other side. The other side were people just like us, except that they didn’t speak German at home, and some of them were nice to us and some of them didn’t want anything to do with us. It was all a conundrum. At some stage we were then moved to a place where the people on our side had been collected and everyone spoke either German or another non-English language like Italian or Arabic, which we couldn’t understand at all. In some ways that made things simpler, though the place was crowded and dusty, the facilities basic, and the people felt like strangers; even their German sounded funny, probably because most of them had come from Palestine or Singapore or New Guinea or Iran or some other far-away place. But we all got used to each other and there wasn’t a problem. Then a year or so before the end of the war, our family was suddenly discharged and we had to get used to the other lot of people again; and again most of them were very nice to us and we could usually avoid those that didn’t like us. And then there was peace which we had all wanted, but which turned out to be not such a good thing.  My mother was very sad because nearly everyone in her family had been killed, and those that hadn’t were starving, and the houses and the countryside had been smashed up completely; but that had happened in other countries too. We tried what we could to help, which was all one could really do. But the peace wasn’t the real problem either. The real problem was that something had happened during that war in that far-away land from which my mother came and in which my Australian-German father had also lived for many years that made us all so despicable that people shunned us in horror. It had to do with a man called Hitler, who was, however, no longer alive, due to the heroism of the Australians and their friends, and with people called the Nazis who supported him. For those, like us, who spoke German at home the Nazi poison was part of their very nature; poison was the best way of describing it since it was invisible but apparently terribly harmful. People would shout at you in anger or perhaps fear if they saw you; if you were a girl they would often just turn their backs on you and walk quietly away. But what the Nazis had actually done was not really explained to us at home or at school. Perhaps nobody quite knew; it had something to do with Jews and nobody really knew what a Jew was, and probably people didn’t want to be nasty to you by talking about it too openly either, even though they clearly considered you responsible for the terrible things that had happened, though you had never even seen a Jew or knowingly hurt one. All the same, there were still quite a lot of people who were nice to you and not afraid of you either. It was difficult to work out how bad you really were. – I was eight when the European war ended. How does one describe a child’s confusion in an age where children were largely left to work things out for themselves? How does one cope with guilt without sin?

Recently – it is now sixty-six years since the end of that war – I came across Bernhard Schlink’s essay “Collective Guilt”, published two years ago in his collection Guilt about the Past. Schlink, a professor of Law at Berlin and also a novelist who has used the Holocaust as a theme, argues for the legal validity of the concept of collective guilt for crimes such as the Holocaust, guilt that would include the children of perpetrators, collaborators or accessories right down to the third or fourth generation, though he admits that collective guilt is today outlawed under international law. To support his case he goes back to ancient Germanic tribal law according to which any or all members of a perpetrator’s clan could be punished for his misdeed, whether it was intentional or accidental. Such clan law still exists in some places: remote Aboriginal groups often prefer to solve problems with pay-back; in New Guinea Christian missionaries fought hard against the socially crippling scourge of revenge killings; and just a few days ago my paper reported on the public gang-raping of a Pakistani woman, Mukhtaran Mai, by fourteen men, a punishment ordered by village elders in 2002 “because Ms Mai’s brother was accused of having illicit relations with a woman from a rival clan” (The Age, 22-23 April, 2011). The courageous Ms Mai took her case to the courts but even Pakistan’s Supreme Court refused to condemn all but one of the alleged rapists involved. Presumably, according to the logic of the elders, if the sexual relations of a clan member might serve to boost the numbers of a rival clan, his sister must be forced symbolically to bear the fourteen children that could eventually be the result of such an illicit union. While primal instincts of group revenge can be stirred up in many of us - George W. Bush’s reaction to the outrage of 9/11, inflicting massive punishment on a different set of Muslims, might serve as an example - it seems extraordinary that a modern European lawyer should want to sanction this, particularly when the Holocaust itself had elements of a very similar revenge action against a group perceived by many Germans to have had an unfair economic advantage over the avenging group. Hitler had also introduced Sippenhaftung, according to which family members were held responsible for the actions of one of their members.

Schlink goes on to explain that one way of avoiding the more extreme consequences of payback has always been to expel the offending member of the group, so that the group can no longer benefit from his economic contribution. He tells us that his generation of the Student Revolution had done their best to achieve such expulsions, outing their own parents and grandparents, even though, if collaborators and accessories were counted in, they knew that the numbers of the guilty were too vast to punish effectively. Many of the more extreme cases had, of course, by then been dealt with by the courts; but Schlink points out that the German administration had never rid itself completely of Nazi collaborators and consequently Germans could not expect leniency from their victims.

There seem to me to be several things wrong with Schlink’s argument. Advocating payback as a remedy for payback (even WWII can be seen as in part payback for the injustices of Versailles) seems absurd if our aim is world peace. It also seems strange to insist that justice must be aligned with primal psychology, which tends to need little encouragement to burst forth, rather than governed by reason and experience. Moreover, the vengeful justice of Schlink’s generation makes no distinction between the crime and its human perpetrator or facilitator. While a crime must be condemned unequivocally, a human being can learn from mistakes, particularly if encouraged to confront them, and such a person can then become a valuable member of society. He or she is often deeply disturbed by what they have done and needs help and eventually forgiveness. Nazism is not an incurable deformation or contagion. Even prison systems today have some commitment to rehabilitation. Moreover, any accused must also have access to the defence of mitigating circumstances. Where such vast numbers of people within a nation go wrong, as was the case in Germany, the likelihood is great, that coercion, blindness, ignorance, timidity, a perceived conflict of duties or similar universal human weaknesses would have played a significant part. The post-war de-nazification process along with the Nuremberg Trials recognized this and concentrated on the instigators and the major criminals, prescribing re-education for the wider population. The modern Germany thus produced seems to endorse this policy as having been generally successful, for the Federal Republic has become a reliable democracy and a responsible and helpful member of the European and global communities.

There is another point to be made in relation to Schlink’s essay. In their legal practice, societies have the choice between placing the emphasis on punishment or on rehabilitation; the two are often almost incompatible. Punishment may be satisfying for the wronged party from the point of view of gaining revenge; but it has been shown to be next to useless with regard to prevention. In the case of Germany, since it is virtually inconceivable that any German citizen today would want to repeat even elements of the Holocaust, punishment, even if it were an effective deterrent, would have no constructive role to play. A rehabilitated German nation intent on improving its image does, however, presage a better future and that is in everyone’s interest.

Due to Schlink’s use of archaic justice as a model, he also does not make the nowadays relevant distinction between the individual and the group. Individual Germans may know they are innocent; but they will still recognize that the nation to which they belong bears responsibility for crimes, even generations after they were committed. The nation must make restitution, but under a new government and a generation or two later, it is no longer guilty in the true sense of the word. In the sixty-six years since the end of the war the German government, the nation’s institutions, and many individuals acting on behalf of their country have done a great deal - I cannot argue here about whether or not it is  enough - to make information about the Nazi years available, compensate victims, and manifest regret. Regret to the extent of mourning will inevitably still be felt by many among the current generation; but the term guilt in place of responsibility can only create confusion. It is also counter-productive for it is obvious that any person who is unjustly accused will be far less willing to compensate, warn and mourn than someone who does so voluntarily in an act of generosity. It is only if their personal innocence is acknowledged that young people will shoulder the national responsibility willingly. The term guilt must be reserved for actual perpetrators. Apart from being destructive to the individual and his sense of self, it encourages the perpetuation of nationalist clichés of the wicked German that lend themselves to all sorts of chauvinism, concealed racism and dishonesty.

It is perhaps inevitable that many Germans of the second and third generations that I have met have an over-sensitive reaction to all forms of coercion and didrespect, to demands for unquestioning obedience, to any remark that suggests intolerance of foreigners and to any other behaviours and attitudes that remind them of Nazi times. Worrying behaviours and attitudes can be found, to some extent, in all societies. In Germany, however, they will more often than not evoke memories of historical guilt. It is above all in this way that a perception of ongoing guilt is likely to remain alive, and that is a constructive use of memory. Schlink seems to suggest that individual Germans would do best to move out of the oppressive historical context into which they were born and define their identity as arising ”only from the here and now”. It seems to me that this wholesale rejection of one’s history could well lead to a shallow and impoverished life. Though it is not politically correct to say so, my conversations with German friends I trust have shown that for most, their lives throughout the Nazi years were as full of small but difficult acts of courage, kindness and honesty, as they were of disturbing moments of cowardice and coldness. Ordinary people do not suddenly become purely good or bad when a government changes. A gesture of protest or helpfulness in dangerous circumstances is worth a great deal, even if it can ultimately do little to change an oppressive situation. In Germany’s case, only the fall of the dictator could do that.               

So much for Schlink’s views on collective guilt. There is, however, another sense in which Germany has often been held to be guilty. Academics in particular have tried hard in the post-war years to prove that the nation’s culture had been going evil ways for many generations. I worked among such ideas during my professional life. But what came to the surface was often heavily determined by geographical specificities, good and bad relationships with neighbours that were mutual, and pervasive pan-European movements and fashions. Thus racism of one kind or another was a prevailing attitude in that newly scientific age, as was nationalism. I have not been persuaded that it is possible to apportion blame in a meaningful way here. A world-wide culture of mutual respect and cooperativeness between nations would presumably have produced better outcomes than the competitive nationalism of the first half of the twentieth century did. In the present global age we have learned to realize that the needs and peculiarities of others can quickly become our own problems and we must approach them proactively. Germany has been strongly discouraged from looking to blame any country other than itself for Hitler’s rise to power and its consequences; this restriction is clearly intended as part of its punishment, designed to prevent any attempt to shirk responsibility and deny guilt. But it is not an approach that can help us to understand how political and humanitarian catastrophes are best prevented.

      

When I began writing about my father’s life, it was impressed on me that his German background made it imperative that the question of participatory guilt for the Hitler debacle and the Holocaust be of primary importance. Before the facts became manifest through his letters, it had been widely assumed that his support of a right-wing anti-Hitler group was deeply suspect and this suspicion had a significant effect on my relationship with colleagues. I have become tired of the question of German guilt that has haunted my life. Like many other Germans too, my father tried to make considered and responsible decisions. Whether in hindsight they were always right, is a separate issue; but they were certainly never spectacularly wrong either. I would like to tell his story, which is interesting in its own right, without moralizing.

  © Silke Hesse, 2013

Bernhard Schlink’s Views on Collective German Guilt

Silke Beinssen-Hesse

Monash University

As a child I knew that our family had a connection with the German Lutheran Church in Sydney – at some stage my mother was even elected an elder and my less committed father was co-opted as church treasurer – but we attended mainly for christenings, confirmations, marriages, funerals and other rites of passage. Our instruction in doctrine was minimal; what I carried away with me was the primacy of the commandment of love and the advice that prayer was best used to ask for guidance when life matters became too complicated for common sense and kindliness. Sin was an unfamiliar concept; we tried to get things right and if we didn’t succeed, we approached them differently or tried harder the next time. I can’t remember religious instruction at school placing the emphasis very much differently; perhaps I was just not attuned to other messages. Original sin was not on the syllabus, nor was redemption. And yet my brothers and I grew up drowning in guilt.

At first things were simpler. There was a war in which one half of the world was fighting the other half; all the countries seemed to be either the friends or the enemies of other countries. Our problem was that we had somehow become detached from the country whose side we were supposed to be on, and had become lost right in the middle of the other side. The other side were people just like us, except that they didn’t speak German at home, and some of them were nice to us and some of them didn’t want anything to do with us. It was all a conundrum. At some stage we were then moved to a place where the people on our side had been collected and everyone spoke either German or another non-English language like Italian or Arabic, which we couldn’t understand at all. In some ways that made things simpler, though the place was crowded and dusty, the facilities basic, and the people felt like strangers; even their German sounded funny, probably because most of them had come from Palestine or Singapore or New Guinea or Iran or some other far-away place. But we all got used to each other and there wasn’t a problem. Then a year or so before the end of the war, our family was suddenly discharged and we had to get used to the other lot of people again; and again most of them were very nice to us and we could usually avoid those that didn’t like us. And then there was peace which we had all wanted, but which turned out to be not such a good thing.  My mother was very sad because nearly everyone in her family had been killed, and those that hadn’t were starving, and the houses and the countryside had been smashed up completely; but that had happened in other countries too. We tried what we could to help, which was all one could really do. But the peace wasn’t the real problem either. The real problem was that something had happened during that war in that far-away land from which my mother came and in which my Australian-German father had also lived for many years that made us all so despicable that people shunned us in horror. It had to do with a man called Hitler, who was, however, no longer alive, due to the heroism of the Australians and their friends, and with people called the Nazis who supported him. For those, like us, who spoke German at home the Nazi poison was part of their very nature; poison was the best way of describing it since it was invisible but apparently terribly harmful. People would shout at you in anger or perhaps fear if they saw you; if you were a girl they would often just turn their backs on you and walk quietly away. But what the Nazis had actually done was not really explained to us at home or at school. Perhaps nobody quite knew; it had something to do with Jews and nobody really knew what a Jew was, and probably people didn’t want to be nasty to you by talking about it too openly either, even though they clearly considered you responsible for the terrible things that had happened, though you had never even seen a Jew or knowingly hurt one. All the same, there were still quite a lot of people who were nice to you and not afraid of you either. It was difficult to work out how bad you really were. – I was eight when the European war ended. How does one describe a child’s confusion in an age where children were largely left to work things out for themselves? How does one cope with guilt without sin?

Recently – it is now sixty-six years since the end of that war – I came across Bernhard Schlink’s essay “Collective Guilt”, published two years ago in his collection Guilt about the Past. Schlink, a professor of Law at Berlin and also a novelist who has used the Holocaust as a theme, argues for the legal validity of the concept of collective guilt for crimes such as the Holocaust, guilt that would include the children of perpetrators, collaborators or accessories right down to the third or fourth generation, though he admits that collective guilt is today outlawed under international law. To support his case he goes back to ancient Germanic tribal law according to which any or all members of a perpetrator’s clan could be punished for his misdeed, whether it was intentional or accidental. Such clan law still exists in some places: remote Aboriginal groups often prefer to solve problems with pay-back; in New Guinea Christian missionaries fought hard against the socially crippling scourge of revenge killings; and just a few days ago my paper reported on the public gang-raping of a Pakistani woman, Mukhtaran Mai, by fourteen men, a punishment ordered by village elders in 2002 “because Ms Mai’s brother was accused of having illicit relations with a woman from a rival clan” (The Age, 22-23 April, 2011). The courageous Ms Mai took her case to the courts but even Pakistan’s Supreme Court refused to condemn all but one of the alleged rapists involved. Presumably, according to the logic of the elders, if the sexual relations of a clan member might serve to boost the numbers of a rival clan, his sister must be forced symbolically to bear the fourteen children that could eventually be the result of such an illicit union. While primal instincts of group revenge can be stirred up in many of us - George W. Bush’s reaction to the outrage of 9/11, inflicting massive punishment on a different set of Muslims, might serve as an example - it seems extraordinary that a modern European lawyer should want to sanction this, particularly when the Holocaust itself had elements of a very similar revenge action against a group perceived by many Germans to have had an unfair economic advantage over the avenging group. Hitler had also introduced Sippenhaftung, according to which family members were held responsible for the actions of one of their members.

Schlink goes on to explain that one way of avoiding the more extreme consequences of payback has always been to expel the offending member of the group, so that the group can no longer benefit from his economic contribution. He tells us that his generation of the Student Revolution had done their best to achieve such expulsions, outing their own parents and grandparents, even though, if collaborators and accessories were counted in, they knew that the numbers of the guilty were too vast to punish effectively. Many of the more extreme cases had, of course, by then been dealt with by the courts; but Schlink points out that the German administration had never rid itself completely of Nazi collaborators and consequently Germans could not expect leniency from their victims.

There seem to me to be several things wrong with Schlink’s argument. Advocating payback as a remedy for payback (even WWII can be seen as in part payback for the injustices of Versailles) seems absurd if our aim is world peace. It also seems strange to insist that justice must be aligned with primal psychology, which tends to need little encouragement to burst forth, rather than governed by reason and experience. Moreover, the vengeful justice of Schlink’s generation makes no distinction between the crime and its human perpetrator or facilitator. While a crime must be condemned unequivocally, a human being can learn from mistakes, particularly if encouraged to confront them, and such a person can then become a valuable member of society. He or she is often deeply disturbed by what they have done and needs help and eventually forgiveness. Nazism is not an incurable deformation or contagion. Even prison systems today have some commitment to rehabilitation. Moreover, any accused must also have access to the defence of mitigating circumstances. Where such vast numbers of people within a nation go wrong, as was the case in Germany, the likelihood is great, that coercion, blindness, ignorance, timidity, a perceived conflict of duties or similar universal human weaknesses would have played a significant part. The post-war de-nazification process along with the Nuremberg Trials recognized this and concentrated on the instigators and the major criminals, prescribing re-education for the wider population. The modern Germany thus produced seems to endorse this policy as having been generally successful, for the Federal Republic has become a reliable democracy and a responsible and helpful member of the European and global communities.

There is another point to be made in relation to Schlink’s essay. In their legal practice, societies have the choice between placing the emphasis on punishment or on rehabilitation; the two are often almost incompatible. Punishment may be satisfying for the wronged party from the point of view of gaining revenge; but it has been shown to be next to useless with regard to prevention. In the case of Germany, since it is virtually inconceivable that any German citizen today would want to repeat even elements of the Holocaust, punishment, even if it were an effective deterrent, would have no constructive role to play. A rehabilitated German nation intent on improving its image does, however, presage a better future and that is in everyone’s interest.

Due to Schlink’s use of archaic justice as a model, he also does not make the nowadays relevant distinction between the individual and the group. Individual Germans may know they are innocent; but they will still recognize that the nation to which they belong bears responsibility for crimes, even generations after they were committed. The nation must make restitution, but under a new government and a generation or two later, it is no longer guilty in the true sense of the word. In the sixty-six years since the end of the war the German government, the nation’s institutions, and many individuals acting on behalf of their country have done a great deal - I cannot argue here about whether or not it is  enough - to make information about the Nazi years available, compensate victims, and manifest regret. Regret to the extent of mourning will inevitably still be felt by many among the current generation; but the term guilt in place of responsibility can only create confusion. It is also counter-productive for it is obvious that any person who is unjustly accused will be far less willing to compensate, warn and mourn than someone who does so voluntarily in an act of generosity. It is only if their personal innocence is acknowledged that young people will shoulder the national responsibility willingly. The term guilt must be reserved for actual perpetrators. Apart from being destructive to the individual and his sense of self, it encourages the perpetuation of nationalist clichés of the wicked German that lend themselves to all sorts of chauvinism, concealed racism and dishonesty.

It is perhaps inevitable that many Germans of the second and third generations that I have met have an over-sensitive reaction to all forms of coercion and didrespect, to demands for unquestioning obedience, to any remark that suggests intolerance of foreigners and to any other behaviours and attitudes that remind them of Nazi times. Worrying behaviours and attitudes can be found, to some extent, in all societies. In Germany, however, they will more often than not evoke memories of historical guilt. It is above all in this way that a perception of ongoing guilt is likely to remain alive, and that is a constructive use of memory. Schlink seems to suggest that individual Germans would do best to move out of the oppressive historical context into which they were born and define their identity as arising ”only from the here and now”. It seems to me that this wholesale rejection of one’s history could well lead to a shallow and impoverished life. Though it is not politically correct to say so, my conversations with German friends I trust have shown that for most, their lives throughout the Nazi years were as full of small but difficult acts of courage, kindness and honesty, as they were of disturbing moments of cowardice and coldness. Ordinary people do not suddenly become purely good or bad when a government changes. A gesture of protest or helpfulness in dangerous circumstances is worth a great deal, even if it can ultimately do little to change an oppressive situation. In Germany’s case, only the fall of the dictator could do that.               

So much for Schlink’s views on collective guilt. There is, however, another sense in which Germany has often been held to be guilty. Academics in particular have tried hard in the post-war years to prove that the nation’s culture had been going evil ways for many generations. I worked among such ideas during my professional life. But what came to the surface was often heavily determined by geographical specificities, good and bad relationships with neighbours that were mutual, and pervasive pan-European movements and fashions. Thus racism of one kind or another was a prevailing attitude in that newly scientific age, as was nationalism. I have not been persuaded that it is possible to apportion blame in a meaningful way here. A world-wide culture of mutual respect and cooperativeness between nations would presumably have produced better outcomes than the competitive nationalism of the first half of the twentieth century did. In the present global age we have learned to realize that the needs and peculiarities of others can quickly become our own problems and we must approach them proactively. Germany has been strongly discouraged from looking to blame any country other than itself for Hitler’s rise to power and its consequences; this restriction is clearly intended as part of its punishment, designed to prevent any attempt to shirk responsibility and deny guilt. But it is not an approach that can help us to understand how political and humanitarian catastrophes are best prevented.

      

When I began writing about my father’s life, it was impressed on me that his German background made it imperative that the question of participatory guilt for the Hitler debacle and the Holocaust be of primary importance. Before the facts became manifest through his letters, it had been widely assumed that his support of a right-wing anti-Hitler group was deeply suspect and this suspicion had a significant effect on my relationship with colleagues. I have become tired of the question of German guilt that has haunted my life. Like many other Germans too, my father tried to make considered and responsible decisions. Whether in hindsight they were always right, is a separate issue; but they were certainly never spectacularly wrong either. I would like to tell his story, which is interesting in its own right, without moralizing.