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PARTISAN REVIEW
back to sober and serious reflection. Such reflection cannot be dispas–
sionate. But the passion we bring to it and find in it provides a different,
clearer, and cleaner atmosphere for thought than the foggy moralism of
imputed or insisted-upon feelings.
If you have gathered that I am no great fan of "overcoming the
past" as it was usually displayed in West German public discourse from
the mid 1960s to the late 1980s, you would be right. Its purpose, to an–
ticip"ate my conclusion, had not to do with history or with memory, but
with current politics; and its effect, as far as understanding the past was
concerned, was largely one of obfuscation, not clarity. If you were to
jump from that conclusion to another, namely that I blame any part of
this spectacle on my distinguished predecessor of this panel, you would
be wrong. In fact, it is Dr. Mitscherlich who furnishes us with what I
think is the best starting point for explaining what
Vergangenheitsbewiilti–
gung
was really about.
In their classic study of the inability to mourn, she and her husband
argued, starting in the late 1950s, that postwar Germans' collective in–
ability to purge Adolf Hitler and 'fue Fuhrer-image of Hitler from their
unconscious kept them in a permanent state of immaturity and of politi–
cal and emotional incompetence. The dictator in the mind was, in some
ways, as effective a tyrant as the real-life dictator in the Reich Chan–
cellery had been. Now, as a Freudo-skeptic I might argue with that,
pointing out, for example, that at least the emotionally crippled Ger–
mans of the 1950s were not building or even planning to build death
camps, but I won't. Instead I will accept the basic notion of a col–
lective, social-psychological and partly self-inflicted immaturity. Only in
my version, the self-inflicted immaturity
IS
that of
Vergangenheitsbewiiltigung
itself
My view, to be blunt, is that the Germans have the history they
have; there is no point in obsessing about its imaginary after-effects to
such an extent that you wind up obscuring the real past. Remembering
history, after all, should be existential, not pedagogic; memory, even of
other people's lives, is individual before it is civic. To quote a recent
German comment, there is no point in turning the memory of historical
tragedy into "permanent rhetoric" which neither enlightens nor purifies.
And I would make a further point, one highly relevant to the other im–
pending
Vergangenheitsbewiiltigung,
that of Communist Germany, one
which must be remembered if German public debate, educational policy,
and political etiquette is to avoid another thirty years of
angst.
I observed
that
Vergangenheitsbewiiltigung
was an example of self-inflicted immaturity.
Given that it was, to some extent at least, a conscious practice, unlike
