On Bernhard Schlink's Lectures "Guilt About the Past".

© Silke Hesse 2013

Bernhard Schlink’s Lectures  Guilt about the Past. UQP: St Lucia, 2009.

Silke Hesse

In his six Weidenfeld lectures given at Oxford, the writer and law professor Bernhard Schlink addresses the topic of “Guilt about the Past” with regard to the Holocaust of six million Jews perpetrated by Germans and their Nazi government. He is aware “that the long shadow of past guilt is universal, and not just a German experience […]. But I’m not going to talk about the Americans and the Native Americans, the Belgians and the Congo, the British in India, or the French Foreign Legion. It’s not up to me to judge other people’s histories.” (2) Of course it tends to be the Germans, more than any other nation, who talk about their guilt and others do pass judgment.

While conceding that “current international law prohibits collective punishments”(7), Schlink points out that Teutonic clan law did recognize collective guilt and at times even included the perpetrator’s children in the retribution. But our attitudes have changed. “Once guilt is defined as individual and subjective, based on fault, knowledge and the intent to commit an offence, strict liability, based only on causation or the result of the harm, becomes more difficult to understand and defend… “(8) He tells us that “the developments that gave rise to our current concept of individual guilt were not only the adoption of Christian theology on sin, the reception of Roman law, and the growth and flowering of Enlightenment rationality over superstition and irrationality. The disappearance of tribal liability or liability based on clan affiliation coincided with the dissolution of the tribe “. (9) This would suggest that collective guilt is no longer a viable concept. But Schlink refuses to relinquish it without examining it for useful leads. He points out that the “perpetrator’s clan would be released from liability if they broke with, if they expelled, or if they handed the perpetrator over to the victim’s clan” (10). In doing so, they did not see themselves as accepting “responsibility for someone else’s crime, but […] responsibility for one’s own solidarity with the criminal.” (12) He sees even children caught up in this process: “This guilt sits in wait for them until they become able to recognize the guilt of others, dissociate or not dissociate themselves from it, and therewith become capable of acquiring their own guilt.” (18) “The norm of dissociating oneself spreads at least as far as to one’s contemporaries and to the next generation” (20) he tells us. In his view, this aspect of collective guilt still holds good for Germans today, and his generation, the generation of the Student Revolution, did try to tackle the unpleasant task of dissociating themselves from the generation of their parents, the perpetrators of the Holocaust. But “dissociation, judgment and repudiation could not and cannot be fully successful after 1945 […] because the numbers were huge[…] renunciation would not have included all those who were guilty […] innocent people would have been implicated as well” (17) and because there was no effective punishment. Neither a killing spree nor legal retribution could have effectively solved the problem. This is the tragedy of German guilt “that dissociation, judgment and repudiation could not and cannot be fully successful after 1945.” (16) What Schlink suggests is that, in spite of renunciation, a nation can only gradually grow out of its burden of guilt, usually over three or more generations. He does not make it clear whether repudiating one’s parents also means rejecting everything they did for you, whether it is permissible to take their circumstances (e.g. the Depression, the war) into consideration, and whether a rehabilitation of the relationship should be possible once guilt has been admitted. He also suggests that the role of the younger generation is to reject what they see as the perpetrators rather than to help them understand where they went wrong. Perhaps because he has forbidden himself to criticise other nations, he tells us that the weight of guilt experienced by different nations for similar crimes can vary, (e.g. he can see no problem with Austria shrugging off her guilt for the Holocaust) and that your actual guilt is the guilt your nation is conscious of. By this measure, Germany’s guilt far outweighs the guilt of all other nations.

I have problems with Schlink’s argument, perhaps because I have always been an Australian national, did not grow up in Germany and lived there only for reasonably brief periods of time as a visitor, though I do have a German background and identify with German culture to a certain extent. I also find it hard to accuse my parents, who were forced to leave Germany and Hitler in 1933, of anything more than a relatively normal lack of prescience. Viewed from abroad, Schlink’s legalistic definition of collective guilt seems esoteric. People here who bring up questions of German guilt tend to have in mind the crowds that enthusiastically welcomed Hitler, in Austria as much as in Germany. They see the Germans as a nationalist collective and see their crime as racism. But the condemnation of German nationalism will often be in favour of Australian or British nationalism, and the people who accuse all Germans of anti-Semitic racism, may happily include all those of German descent in their equally racist condemnation, attitudes left over from the two World Wars when they were widespread. Seen from here, it would seem prudent not to make too much of collective guilt so as not to resurrect the chauvism of the first half of the twentieth century.

That no sane person nowadays would not condemn Nazi practices seems a truth too obvious to be argued. But whether this condemnation would extend to the treatment of indigenous peoples by Australians of earlier and even more recent generations is another question. There is something like a prohibition on comparing the Holocaust with any other persecutions and genocides which makes it easy for the average Australian to feel self-righteous. Inspired by fear of “Holocaust denial”, the conversation about the Holocaust is so dogmatically constricted much of the time that it tends to become boring and is consequently avoided.  Schlink writes: “Historical situations are always unique and can still be compared.[…] If a situation is so unique that it can’t be compared to anything, increasing historical distance will mean that it can no longer concern or engage us.” The unwillingness to compare has meant that the sensitive conscience painstakingly developed by Germans with respect to themselves is not necessarily recognized by other nations as of relevance to them.

Schlink points out that in the current context more useful collectives than race or nation are the institutions of a country. “We accused our parents, teachers, professors and politicians of blindness, cowardice, opportunism, the ambitious and ruthless pursuit of their careers, and a lack of moral courage. […]What the past […] shows is the helplessness of individual morality in the absence of institutions in which citizens are recognized and matter, institutions they can impact by their appeals and which they can depend on to respond and support. Once parties, unions and associations, churches and clubs, universities, schools and courts have been forced into line, there comes a point when the ethics of opposition survive only in quixotic heroic gestures.” (32/3) This is certainly a suggestion Australians should take up; it was government bureaucracies and the police that separated Aboriginal children from their families.

Schlink is a lawyer who thinks in terms of guilt and punishment. I have some reservations here, not with the fact that the law exists and must be respected but with the centrality he gives to it.  From my non-lawyer’s perspective, the law exists for the welfare of society and not in its own right. It is designed to preserve and enhance order, which should ideally be based on justice and thus lead, indirectly, to a better world. This better world includes, ultimately, the rehabilitation of the criminal, about which Schlink has very little to say. The crime of the Nazis was a disregard for the sanctity of the human being: his/her dignity, welfare and life. The response to these crimes must not be repayment in kind, but a demonstration of this regard. Perpetrators are human beings and should be treated as such unless they have shown they are mere beasts or automatons (if that can ever be the case).

Punishments actually rarely lead to rehabilitation; this would include Schlink’s exclusion, rejection and shaming of culprits. The punishments imposed by the law have to be accepted but they are based on legal and not moral verdicts. Even the laws of democratic countries are not reliably moral. People can do illegal things for morally right reasons and should be encouraged to make this distinction for the sake of their own and their society’s dignity and honesty.  There are also degrees of guilt and the law recognizes them. The ‘guilty’, whether formally or informally accused or convicted, must learn to see the nature and extent of their guilt and innocence clearly. To carry unwarranted guilt is a form of hypocrisy which diminishes a person and the community he/she is a part of and I think that many Germans have been bullied into considering themselves far more guilty than they are. What is, in my view, appropriate for all Germans who have not committed specific crimes, and few of these are now alive, appropriate also for people world-wide, is to acquire knowledge of what happened, to deeply mourn the victims and deplore the activities of their persecutors, and to learn and apply every lesson that can be learned from the past..

According to Schlink, guilt exists till it is forgiven. Here too, from my non-German perspective, I feel the need to point out that the refusal to forgive can have genuine psychological reasons (in which case the person asking forgiveness can/should help to resolve the issues) but it can also be vindictive, punitive or calculating, particularly seventy years after the event. Moreover, the imputation of guilt must be done in the name of the real victims and not to nourish hatreds and self-righteousness. One of the problems for Germans coping with the Holocaust is that there is so little actual interaction between German and Jewish individuals and the exchange therefore tends to be abstract and formally ceremonious with no true understanding and forgiveness being created. Conversations between human beings are always far more useful in such a situation because they involve actually getting to know the other and hearing new opinions and experiences. Here some Australian cities with Holocaust survivors can offer opportunities for dialogue; the Aborigines are, of course, officially part of our society and it should be possible to talk to them.

I have one final reservation regarding Schlink’s lectures. Although the Holocaust and World War II were inextricably intertwined, Schlink does not mention the war even once, probably because he wants to avoid anything that could sound like an attempt to excuse the Germans. The Holocaust discussion is, unfortunately, spiked with taboos and fears that often get in the way of honesty. Other points Schlink makes, like the need to be alert to corruption, even “corruption through good intentions” (110) and the need to insist on authenticity and on “the whole truth” in literary presentations, I wholeheartedly endorse.

In conclusion, I should like to draw attention to some instances of what I suggest might be ‘corruption with good intentions’. There have been two filmic treatments of Aboriginal issues in recent years that were made with Aboriginal cooperation. One is the excellent six part television series The First Australians, the other the popular musical film Bran Nu Dae;  Rachel Perkins was centrally involved in both. In two episodes of the first, the ‘baddies’ are Germans; in the Victorian episode an obscure, inept and authoritarian missionary was discovered who could direct blame away from the appalling handling of  the Healesville community by the Victorian government; in the fourth episode Carl Strehlow, whose approach was, in my view, more in line with what we consider proper today than that of most of his fellow missionaries and certainly most secular colonists, is presented in a bad light, with Marcia Langton asking twice why he was there in the first place, a question that could equally be asked of all white settlers. In the musical Bran Nu Dae, it is German Catholic missionaries that are made the laughing stock. In each case, deflecting blame from British-Australians can perhaps be seen as a step in the reconciliation process for Aboriginal people. But it is also a reversion to old stereotypes that distort history and are more often than not hard to kill. I recently looked at a book on colonization in New Guinea, a friendly, unpretentious account from mid-war in 1942, which acknowledges the progressive and benign approach of the last German Governor Hahl (an act of brave and independent thinking at such a time), but hastens to attribute it to the fact that he was copying the British. The same book marvels that Major Detzner, commander of the German colonial militia, who had once apparently marched through native villages waving the German flag, should have written as his journal an extraordinary encyclopaedia of the natural beauties of New Guinea and, like Saint Francis, gathered the birds about him and talked to them when he rested. (Detzner had spent the four years of WWI in the jungle, with only his native carriers for companions, an extraordinary feat of endurance.) If we looked more closely, we would discover that German Romantic philosophy, which revered nature in all its manifestations, including the native as ‘child of nature’, and which crucially influenced many German explorers and missionaries (though not always government policy), was usually more respectful towards indigenous peoples than British Darwinism, which tended to see indigenous peoples as ‘savages’ to be exploited by the white master. Even today, many of our most dedicated ecological tourists are young Germans, yearning to experience ‘unspoilt nature’. Cultures are complex and much that is valuable is lost if they are simplified and corrupted for political ends.