FORMER WEST GERMANS AND THEIR PAST
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and to find out why these upstanding people became the cruelest, the
most pathological beings we have seen. We have to tell them to tolerate
and accept guilt, that we have the most horrible history but not to
evade looking at this history. To find out why. That would mean to
find out how to get along with guilt feelings, finding out what kind of
guilt feelings are appropriate and what kind are absolutely inappropriate.
The prognosis would be to be in contact with Germans, to make them
as international as possible; to find out what one can do to make it pos–
sible for these superego-perverted people to tolerate their guilt feelings.
Because if they can't, they are only looking at themselves. As it is, they
have to fight these guilt feelings and consequently have no feelings for
others. These feelings take all their energy. They can't really be humane
to people who are different from them. Individual psychology can help
us to find out something about national psychology.
Diane MacMullan:
I'm in the Department of Music, and I just wanted
to offer a tip for those of you interested in what one author referred to
as the soft revolution of 1989. There's a little-known museum in Leipzig.
It's been set up in the old
Stasi
building, by the former opponents of the
Stasi.
There I think you would get an idea of what was happening in
Leipzig in 1989.
Igor Webb:
I
think we have time for three more questions, but please
be brief.
Victor Brightberg:
I'm a former survivor of the concentration camps,
Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and finally liberated in Terezin. My question is
about guilt. I know while I'm alive nobody can face me and say it did–
n't happen. But I have a feeling that within the next twenty-five years
Germany will start releasing papers in order to demonstrate that they
were only obeying the will of the people whose countries they occu–
pied, in a sense, with the help of the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Russians.
That the French Vichy government helped them. And truly, Anne Frank
was not turned in by a German but by a Dane. So the easiest way to get
rid of guilt is to blame someone else. I encountered this after I was liber–
ated, when I was hunting for Germans and hoping I would find some
SS. When I did confront one, he said, "I am not a Nazi." History will
be rewritten, and the blame for what they committed will be put on
other people.
John Carney:
I
am Adelphi's oldest freshman . Let me personalize my
