PARTISAN REVIEW
istrators. Enforced indifference to politics produced the characteristically
German phenomenon of
Weltfremdheit
among its men of thought. This
Is no mere scholarly unworldliness or touching practical vagueness.
In fact, the alacrity with which the German intellectual world sub–
mitted to Hitler is proof that,
if
it knew nothing of politics, it at
least knew how to be politic.
W eltfremdheit
is an inner acceptance of
the intellect's exclusion from the public forum.
Today, without a national and political tradition to fall back on,
it is precisely intellectuals on whom Germany must rely. Yet
W eltfremd–
heit
and the moral cowardice which it begot disqualify most intellectuals
now in Germany. At this juncture Karl Jaspers, a professor and a
philosopher, has courageously undertaken the thankless duty of speaking
out to his fellow Germans on the question of their guilt.
Professor Jaspers makes no attempt in these lectures to "describe"
the crimes of Nazism, to evoke the evil in its fullness--intentionally so,
I have been told, lest the audience to which his words are directed be
tempted perversely to extract a grim kind of flattery from the very
enormity of the evil. His concern is to distinguish the various senses in
which Germans are guilty of the Nazi acts, in order that each shall by
self-examination come to understand his own responsibility.
By distinguishing among several categories of guilt-criminal,
political, moral, and metaphysical-Professor Jaspers breaks down the
notion of collective guilt. This is all to the good-where all are guilty,
none is. Thus, the "question" of German guilt, in the realm of post–
war international politics, has been settled-guilty or not, the German
collectivity is being punished as if it were-and its only consequence
has been to make the Germans even more sullen and indifferent to what
the world charges them with.
Nevertheless, faced with the frightful mess that is Germany today,
it is just this question of national guilt that is most apt to rouse us out
of our own apathy. How was it possible, we still wonder, for a handful
of debased and vulgar amateur politicians so intimately to involve a
whole nation in their victory and ultimate ruin that we are tempted to
look on mere membership in this nation as a kind of guilt? Professor
Jaspers' distinctions provide the only sane basis on which to consider
this question without resorting to superficial collective characterizations.
He himself hardly does so, though what he says is interesting: "We do
not drop the distinction [between political liability and moral guilt],
but we have to narrow it by saying that the conduct which made us
liable rests on a sum of political conditions whose nature is moral, as
it were, because they help to determine individual morality.... There
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