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recriminations, accusations, and self-abasement. He urged a German as
well as a global framework for a full public consideration of the Nazi
past, one which wou ld transcend the categories of victors and van–
quished. Jaspers' protege, the late Hannah Arendt, when she accepted
the Lessing Prize in Hamburg in 1958, came back to Jaspers' plea when
she called on her audience to acknowledge and comprehend, with
immutable coldness, the historical past; to live with it and transcend it
with remembrance for the sake of the future, not to hide or denature it
of its stark reality. She thought that such candor with the past was a key
to realizing democracy, the humanity and friendship within the
human community. As Jaspers had put it, "our human dignity obliges
us" to realize the democracy of the German present out of the national
and personal past of German citizenry.
The phenomenon of German terrorism should be viewed as a
pathological version of this wider German national problem. Terror–
ism shou ld inspire Germany to take up once more a serious encounter
with its past, in schools and in the home. Precisely for the sake of
German democracy, no group of young Germans, no matter how small
in number, shou ld be permitted to re-enact the past and yet delude
themselves by their ostensibly different idealism and self-righteous,
antifascist principles; for they regress into the inhuman habits of the
German past which obli terate the innocent and treat human life as
superfluous. However, it is easy for those of us who are Jews and
Americans merely to reflect and recommend. The difficulty and pain of
addressing the German past for Germans in the name of future
democracy cannot really be appreciated by those of us who are outside,
whose identity in society is allied with the victims and the liberators
of the German past.
