530
QUESTIONS OF GUILT
FARBER: I think that they could feel a great deal of responsibility
about what action is being taken, they can
be
outraged about the action
that is being taken, without feeling any authentic gu ilt about it.
NORMAN BIRNBAUM: I have a ver y imprecise question to put to
Leslie Farber. It seems to me tha t your discourse entails a fairly radio
cal and profound separation between descriptions of psychological states
and processes and descriptions of the moral unive rse. It's not a clear
separation, but it implies a profound one. But we ought to consider the
fascinated horror with which people look a t the case of modern Ger·
many, and post-war developments in Germany, which seems to run
roughly as follows . This was a society which objectively, through its
political mechanisms, committed crimes. The populace was implicated
in the crimes because it was believed tha t most of them knew about it.
From 1942 onward, the existence of the death camps in the occupied
eastern territories was known because the soldiers on leave from the
Eastern front told everybody abou t it. From 1943 onwa rd, the official
propaga nda policy of the regime was to implica te the population in
what was being done (Goebbels's line was we're all in it together ) . And
after the war, the Nuremberg trials and the very brief period of re–
education which was followed by something else apparently only had
the effect of reinforcing feelings of na tional solida rity, of being per–
secuted, of being misunderstood. So tha t this guilt, if there was any,
was collectivized in an extraordinarily defensive and tribal way and
has never yet been fully, except possibly through genera tional conflict,
worked out in a moral way. Now, is the nega tive fa scina tion exercised
by the German nation in this way the feeling that we're witnessing a kind
of pure psychological phenomenon without a moral dimension for the his–
torical experience, with the exception of a small elite group which in–
cludes the present president and prime ministe r of the West German
government? Or is it something else ? I s Germany an historica l aber–
ration, tha t is, a nation with a purely tribal, or predominantly tribal,
morality?
FARBER : A mutual friend of ours asked me, as I was thinking about
this question, how come Germany stays the bad guy and how come
Japan very quickly became a good guy? Pa rt of the reason has to
be
the Nuremberg trials, which have been extended forever, it would seem.
They never stop. There's always a new Nazi to be found somewhere or
other in South America. Japan didn' t have to suffer these trials. They
were got over very quickly. I suspect, without having any justification
for this, that the Nuremberg trials have something to do with this
phenomenon that you' re desc ribing very correc tly. There's something
about the world imposition through the Nuremberg trials of collective
guilt which has aroused something that could be called solidarity here.
As to whether this is a tribal thing' on the pa rt of the Germans, or
whether they are by heritage, by history, morall y deficient, I wouldn't
know.
