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QUESTIONS OF GUILT
joke: the Jews felt guilty over survivin,g, the Dutch felt guilty over
not doing more for the Jews, the French felt guilty over this and that,
the only ones who didn 't feel guilty were the Germans. Obviously that
isn't litera lly true, but there's more than folk wisdom in this kind of
accusation. Hiroshima sUf\'ivors, too, had enormous guilt which had to
do with what I called SUf\'!\'al priority - to put it simply, with who
died and who stayed a live ; a nd with what I called a sense of organic
social balance, in which one felt that by living one denied another person
life, That one's own life is bought at the cost of a nother's is in many
situations the survivor's image, a nd it often leads to the further image
that one has actually killed the other person, no matter how inap–
propriate that feeling is.
That kind of image ry, of course, has also been very widespread
among concentration camp survivors, v,'here the a troci ty-producing
situation was such that one often had to litera ll y sacrifice another's life
to stay alive, and even if not, one sti ll had that kind of inner imagery.
You have here the situation in \\'hich those \\'ho are victimized are of
limited or negligible cu lpability in a moral or a criminal sense. One
could, after all, fau lt the J apanese for being part of the Japanese war
machine, although they were often little people who had little to do
with the whole process, but one ca n ha rdly fa ult the J ews for their
part in the war or in the process of murder in which they were vic–
timized.
Very little of the Germa n response to guilt, on the other hand,
has been a rti culated, The only German lea der to arti culate guilt in any
systematic way was Speer, and frankly my sense of Speer's guilt is that
it is a kind of kitsch guilt. It's there, and he's mouthing it rather well
and saying some important thin,gs, but it's reminiscent of that phrase
of Camus - one confesses in order to avoid telling what one knows.
There is, in effect, in the German people, a potentia l for guilt which
isn't realized. Alexander Mitscherlich, a gi fted German psychoanalyst,
has emphasized a process that he sees in many of his patients, which
he now generalizes for the German experience, of grief over loss of the
Fiihrer, whom many Germans did love: that grief unresolved, the
mourning work not properly ca rried through, the people are left with
a sort of desensitization, or what I would call numbin,g, and an in–
ability to have access to guilt over \\'hat they have actually done.
The processes I've been describing are similar, in the sense that
the victims feel more subjective psychologica l guilt than the victimizers,
Nor is there much redemptive force in personal transforma tion or real–
ization for Hiroshima and concentration camp survivors. There is mean–
ing sought a nd in some deg ree very much rea lized in the creation of
the state of Israel, but the place movement affords less rea liza tion for
the Hiroshima survivors' struggle for meaning a nd formul a tion.
In
studying Hiroshima survivors I felt one had to look at the other
side of the experience too, at those who made the bomb and dropped
it.
In
reading things said by and about the scientists, politicians and
military leaders who made those decisions, or non-decisions, that led
to the use of the bomb, one senses people like Stimpson, who was large–
ly responsible for the bomb, felt what can only be called awe. It's hard
