Guilt about the Past Read Free Page A

vertical, so that guilt emanates from perpetrators and other implicated parties to their contemporaries and to their own progeny, but not to the offspring of their contemporaries.
    I would like to offer an explanation for this. The guilt of non-repudiation presumes a community of solidarity, which has to be actually experienced as a community inhabited by real people with whom one communicates and interacts. A community of solidarity is not something unintelligible or extrasensory, rather it is the tangible intertwining of relationships by real people as they communicate and interact. Seen in this light, belonging to a people in common is not wholly sufficient to establish a community of solidarity. It has to be concretely experienced, and it is experienced in an especially fundamental way: by belonging to one generation or one family, by living with one’s parents and even grandparents. Living with one’s teachers, pastors, professors and other respected and admired members of the parent generation can yield a similar experience of belonging. These experiences of belonging make the fact of belonging to a people in a community of solidarity personal. One’s own identification with a people, its structures and history and the corresponding perceptions and expectations of others can likewise achieve this arrangement. But they do so only in decreased clarity and strength. What is more, one can avoid such identification and withdraw from it; one can live consciously in the here and now, not mired in history, and avoid contact with non-Germans, who confine one within one’s German identity. The experience of belonging to one’s own family or generation is inescapable, and for that reason the norm of dissociating oneself spreads at least as far as to one’s contemporaries, to the next generation and even to the generation of grandchildren. But the dead grandparents who have been perpetrators are not family that is concretely experienced. To keep them within one’s solidarity or to distance oneself from them is not an actual alternative for the grandchildren.
    No judge can exempt, no verdict can free the
children from their share of guilt formed as part of their parents’
bequeathal to them. Maybe a psychotherapist or psychoanalyst could offer a
sort of release. Obviously, repression can substitute for release aggravated
by occasional feelings of dismay and self-consciousness, embarrassment and
shame. In any event, over the generations, collectively experienced
historical events become individually varied memories. The task of
dissociation from specific historical guilt leads to the creation of one’s
own identity, an undertaking that every generation has to master.
    Legal standards and the other norms considered in the course of my deliberations release the generations to come from guilt resulting from the crimes committed by the national socialists. To a great extent, they are released into the future with the freedom to decide for themselves whether to define their identity as arising from history or as defined only by the here and now. Insofar as they choose an identity saturated by history or one that other people assign to them, they stand in a certain sort of solidarity with past generations and will have come to terms with their guilty past, either by acceptance or dissociation. Only in this weak sense is guilt preserved in history and kept alive into the future.

The Presence of the Past
    These years the people of my generation are turning sixty. We were born in the last years of the war and the first years thereafter and grew up with the German Federal Republic. We enjoyed the seemingly intact world of the fifties, grew tired of it and rebelled against it. In the sixties we became political, in the seventies we entered into our professional and working lives, in the eighties we grew successful in our careers, and in the nineties we secured influential positions in politics and government, the economy, education and