The Vanity of Guilt

The Vanity of Guilt by Andreas Lombard

"In the decades after 1945, the imperative of forgetting was succeeded by the imperative of remembering. Victims replaced heroes, and remorse and self-accusation superseded pride. A man is no longer allowed to stand up for himself. When I define my homeland in terms of Christianity, it is taken for granted that I insult agnostics and Muslims. It is as if when I say I have a beautiful house, I insult all the other homeowners in my street. The tragedy of twentieth-century Germany arises from this dynamic. It has become axiomatic that if I do not wish to harm anyone, I must harm myself. Everything is inverted as a result—not only the architecture of memorials, which have become scrupulously anti-memorial, but culture and politics. Germans, it is thought, can be humane only insofar as they repudiate their heritage, as opposed to its distortion, and deny their cultural achievements along with their failings. In the most radical expression of this impulse, Germans assign to themselves the world-historical duty of self-denial, even to the point of extinction. This dynamic is pathological, viewed sociologically. But worse, it reflects a vanity of guilt that is dangerous and destructive in its theological arrogance. To a striking degree, the German political and cultural establishment has taken possession of the Holocaust. This terrible crime has become a precious asset to be deployed against anyone who dares to criticize the status quo.

In most societies, collective memory centers on affirmations that sustain communal belonging and self-worth. Germany’s postwar paradigm shift reversed this approach... our constant self-laceration has encouraged a hubristic self-righteousness. Germany is once again conceived as the exceptional nation, called to a singular destiny not of destructive self-assertion, but of self-abnegation... our constant self-laceration has encouraged a hubristic self-righteousness. Germany is once again conceived as the exceptional nation, called to a singular destiny not of destructive self-assertion, but of self-abnegation. Angela Merkel’s declaration to her fellow Germans that “we can do this”—as if Germany had to risk its very identity—shows that the wrong lessons have been learned from the horrors of the twentieth century...

Seeking to invent a new society, East Germany did not cultivate self-accusing guilt. The conflict divides Europe as well. Most of Germany’s neighbors—especially Central and Eastern European countries, as well as Denmark—do not cooperate with German policies and have begun to protect their borders. Since there are calls to join the “Compact for Migration” in international politics, this division has become visible...

Today, there are nearly 1.3 billion people in Africa, and it is projected that by 2050 there will be 2.5 or 2.7 billion. A recent poll in Ghana and Nigeria suggests that three-fourths of the population wants to move to Europe or the U.S. This means that, theoretically, 165 million people could soon be knocking on Europe’s doors from these two countries alone. Hospitality and integration are not sufficient approaches to immigration on this scale...

For many proponents of mass immigration, there are never enough ships crossing the Mediterranean. They finance rescue operations that encourage still more migrants to cross. They believe the multitudes of migrants are more worthy than the “bigots” who object to their arrival (often unpolished members of the working class). When in 2018 an eighty-five-year-old man was killed in his own house in Pomerania by a young man from Afghanistan, the secretary of the interior’s main concern was that this crime not be misused politically by the wrong side. (The daughter of the victim was then active in refugee aid and had given the Afghan a job as a nurse for her father.) In these cases and others like them (they occur again and again), the line between “victim” and “sacrifice” becomes fuzzy—as if the old man had died for the good cause of providing an occasion to fight racism.

Analysts of mass immigration frequently cite ­Milton Friedman, who said that open borders are incompatible with the welfare state...

A discussion paper for the German federal government’s migration summit in 2016 referred to “those who were always already there and those who have recently joined them.” The formulation is telling. The paper does not speak of German citizens. Instead, it relies on a circumlocution...

Ataman and others speak as if Germans and Europeans are sitting on resources to which non-Germans have an equal right—which means nothing less than the opening of a global war over anything and everything...

In 2013, a well-known judge and professor in Frankfurt wrote in the journal Merkur that the German state could no longer create positive family policies and that demographic decline should not be stopped. Because of the crimes of National Socialism, she went on to say, it would only be fair if the territory “on which Germany is located currently” were to be “colonized by other ethnic groups or given back to nature.” This is no isolated opinion. For many years, the German Federal presidents have been referring to “people in Germany” rather than “the German people.”...

The leading voices in Germany have long disputed the existence of a German people, since the concept of Volk is implicated in Nazi crimes. Yet the same voices say that no German can escape his shared responsibility for the historical offenses of the very same Volk whose existence is denied...

German leaders assume that negative nationalism should be obligatory for all of Europe and the world of tomorrow...

It is usually non-Jewish Germans who vigorously press the thesis of the metaphysical singularity of the Holocaust. There is something suspicious about this. Germans claim singularity not as victims, but as perpetrators. The “perpetrator people” now exalt their own crime as the greatest in human history—a monstrous kind of negative pride...

Kierkegaard offers a useful insight: It is a sin—a sin of pride—to despair of God’s forgiveness...

As early as 1946, Hannah Arendt wrote to Karl Jaspers: “This guilt [of the Nazis] in contrast to all criminal guilt, oversteps and shatters any and all legal systems. . . . We are simply not equipped to deal on a human political level, with a guilt that is beyond crime and an innocence that is beyond goodness and virtue.” Today, Germany seems as if it wants to cultivate the human-political impotence Arendt warned against. Is it an accident that those in Germany who are most ardent in maintaining the spirit of self-condemnation are also very hostile toward the State of Israel?

The same spirit of relentless antagonism toward healthy national self-affirmation prevents German politics from achieving normalcy. If Auschwitz is unique, then it cannot be repeated, in which case it should not loom over us as a danger. Yet the threat of its return is supposed to be constant. The honest fear of repetition continues to motivate campaigns by self-appointed guardians of virtue to combat real or imagined “Holocaust deniers,” “revisionists,” or simply “fascists.” Whoever dares to question the myth of German guilt (not the doubtless historic facts, but their civil-religious interpretation) risks severe personal and professional retribution.

The best defense against the accusation of downplaying the Holocaust is to accuse someone else of downplaying the Holocaust. The same could be said about fighting racism or fascism in general: You must malign others in order not to be maligned yourself. This creates a civil war–like situation in which Germans paint one another with the most abysmal accusations. So far, no German president has had the courage to check this fatal dynamic—which could be a German president’s most distinguished task... We need to put an end to poking around in the convictions of others, a compulsive policing misleadingly called “civil courage.” The accusers do not, in fact, need any courage at all; they are always guaranteed to be on the right side.

A long time ago, the rule of law was invented to interrupt the cycle of revenge. And modern European nations signed peace treaties to interrupt the cycle of war, transposing strife to the war of memories. To this day, the Catholic Dictionary of Civic Principles (Katholisches Staatslexikon) points out “the ethical meaning of forgiveness and forgetting.” You cannot decide not to remember, but you can make an effort to forget. Humans cannot live together without forgetting and forgiving. The institution of non-remembrance, of amnesia, is called “amnesty.” An amnesty prevented a civil war after the murder of Julius Caesar. Other instances of amnesty include the Edict of Nantes, the Peace of Westphalia, and the law of Louis the XVIII, which prohibited the commemoration of the Revolution’s terror and even ordered his brother’s murder forgotten, to “repair the chain of time.” In Germany, even in the West more widely, it seems that we are entering an era in which the aim is to remove all statutes of limitation and adjudicate all injustices anew.

Europe’s art of peace was succeeded by the terrible wars of the twentieth century, neither of which ended in peace. World War I concluded formally with the Treaty of Versailles, which was hardly a peace treaty. World War II ended without even that pretense. It ended with Germany smashed to exhaustion. I fear that this development, which is said to constitute progress, in fact represents a return to archaic justice. If a singular crime cannot be atoned for or punished; if it cannot be rectified as a matter of principle; if there is no forgetting and forgiving, also as a matter of principle; then the only answer is to obliterate...

Despite claiming a “negative identity,” Germans today live in the normal tension between past and future. We, too, eat and drink, hope and wait, sleep and love. Our problem is that we refuse to acknowledge our normality. We are morally tainted only in the usual ways, but we speak of our “total,” “unique,” or “radical” guilt. The German example has set a precedent for the West, another feature of our vanity of guilt. The thesis of white guilt for colonialism, for example, ignores progress and good deeds: education, mission, infrastructure, state institutions, health care, and much more. Schuld, the German word for guilt, is related to the word for debt, Schulden, and debt has to be accounted for precisely. Good is mixed with the bad, and if we are morally serious we must think about it with an accountant’s precision—even when it comes to the German people between 1933 and 1945...

Why don’t we let Hitler die? Why don’t we bury him? Can’t we do it? Do we not want to? Are we not allowed? Who would the Germans be if they dared to remove Auschwitz from the center of contemporary German self-definition? This would not entail denying it. But try to imagine a Germany without the mortal stain of Auschwitz. It is difficult—which is the problem in a nutshell...

In 1945, Hermann Broch wrote something illuminating in his correspondence with his fellow émigré, Volkmar von Zühlsdorff. Broch described the German people as exceptional: “the most extreme in good as in evil in the Western World.” Because of their exceptional nature, they would lead the world in overcoming evil. “Germany will play a leading role in the regeneration of the world.” All of a sudden, Germany becomes the nation through which all other nations are blessed—precisely by dwelling on its singular crime. ­Zühlsdorff rejected Broch’s thesis. He worried that a great injustice would arise from insisting on Germany’s crime. He warned, “Another wave will wash over us, that will repeat the crimes of National Socialism in the name of antifascism.”...

In the name of a humanitarian mission derived from its guilt over the destruction of European Jewry, Germany would allow the direst enemy of the Jewish people into the country by means of an overwhelmingly Muslim mass migration. Is what Adorján Kovács recently wrote in the journal Tumult true? That the Germans recognized something in the young Muslim men, “something of themselves as they largely are, but cannot openly be”? Is the willingness to tolerate mass immigration a “subconscious form of resistance of a completely defeated people”?...

The historian Rolf Peter Sieferle has asked: Is the last mission of Germany and Europe to give the world the lesson of their own disappearing? It seems as if some people want this. Too many of them are functionary types and militant agitators. The propagandists of the new world order see themselves as serving History and its mandates, and, like all ideologues, they believe that they must and may suspend traditional moral norms in the pursuit of their goals.

The danger of a violent hubris arises from the idea of a unique guilt. If the worst possible crime is behind us, then nothing that lies before us can ever compare. Everything that comes after Auschwitz (or colonialism, or whatever other “unique” debt may be found) has the character of a mere post-history, a posthistoire. This is the secret maximal permission hidden in the maxima culpa of a history without God. Nothing that we can do will ever be as terrible as the Holocaust. This relaxes our moral vigilance and introduces the idea that everything is allowed—as if there were no God."