Karl Jaspers on War Guilt

I haven’t quite decided whether I like what I read being relevant to understanding the world around me, or whether that relevance is ultimately more disturbing than positive. At university, I read Theodor Adorno’s essay “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” and then later on various things of Hannah Arendt’s, such as “Organised Guilt and Universal Responsibility” – both works that aimed to analyse the state of the German body politic in the aftermath of the Second World War. These were interesting enough and helped me write essays, but they were not ultimately texts that I thought would have much use in my day-to-day life. Nietzsche might turn me into a superman, but Adorno and Arendt would at best only teach me to look at history with care and scepticism. Now, however, it seems that I was completely mistaken.

Since the events of February 24th, I have returned to these pieces in an attempt to understand some of the questions that the present conflict will raise within Russia if it is ever to return to the Western international community as anything other than a pariah. After the Second World War Germany lay in ruins and the Allies had to work out what to do with the Germans themselves. Some of them, of course, had perpetrated perhaps the greatest mass evil the world had yet witnessed; others, however, had merely stood by; and still, others had actively or passively resisted the Nazi regime. But as Arendt points out, the only way to be sure that someone actually was an anti-Nazi was after they had hanged them. The Allies ultimately decided not to blame the German people as a whole; instead, they organised the Nuremberg Trials for Germans who were most obviously guilty of terrible crimes.

The situation in Russia will not be similar to that of Germany after 1945 and hopefully Ukraine will also escape a similar fate. But there is much that needs unpacking, challenging, and working through if we ourselves are to be able to engage constructively with Russia and the Russians. Because in adopting an attitude of blanket condemnation of the Russian people, we not only copy the Russian state’s own idiotic stance that suggests Ukraine is composed entirely of banderovtsi (supporters of the Ukrainian Nazi-collaborator Stepan Bandera), we also lose the sense of nuance and humanity that is necessary for living successfully on this shared planet.

Anyway, in preparation for a much longer piece I have read Karl Jaspers’ lecture series The Question of German Guilt (Die Schuldfrage). Like Arendt’s “Organised Guilt”, Jaspers’ lectures were given as the smoke was still rising off a ruined Germany. Jaspers, not a Jew himself but married to one, was concerned with identifying what his people were guilty of and who should be their judges. In this post I will summarise his work. Translations are my own.

Among the ashes

Germany’s manufacturing capacity had been burnt to the ground, but there was still greater damage inside men and women’s hearts. People had lost common ground, there was no way to communicate anymore. More than that, people had lost the ability to reflect. The Question of German Guilt takes us back to the Enlightenment and in particular Kant’s view of intellectual maturity as stated in his essay “What is Enlightenment?”. Germans, Jaspers thought, needed to regain their maturity – here defined as the ability to think for themselves (what Kant used the Latin phrase “sapere aude” – “dare to think” – to mean).  No longer should Germans hide behind “pride, doubt, anger, defiance, revenge, scorn” – instead they should listen and think, having set their emotions “on ice”.

It is only through rebuilding the ability for Germans to talk to one another that they will be able to connect to one another again. And then, once that has been achieved, “we create the essential foundations for us to talk to other peoples once more.” The only way out of pariahdom is to return to communication within one’s own broken state. But twelve years of propaganda and ideological pressure had done much to destroy internal unity among the Germans and deprive them of their solid ground.

Four Types of Guilts

The world (eventually) condemned the Nazi state, and rightly so. People wanted things to be made right and the Germans to be punished. But Jaspers is keen to demarcate the areas where the rest of the world was right to attack Germany, and where it ought better to keep silent. To this end, he defines four separate types of guilt.

Criminal Guilt

The first of these is criminal guilt. This one is familiar to us all. A crime has been committed when a law has been broken, and punishment is exacted through the court. One punished in this way has the opportunity to defend themselves using defined measures, like a defence lawyer.

Political Guilt

The second type of guilt is political guilt or political accountability. The things a state does, whether good or bad, concern political guilt. Every citizen is politically guilty because every citizen is responsible for their state. The Germans did not, strictly speaking, vote as a majority for Hitler, but they were still guilty for his actions because they did not act to remove him from power. The actions undertaken by Nazi Germany are, therefore, in this limited way, the fault of the German people. Instead of a court, here the arena for judgement is determined by power, or “the will of the victors”. The Allies and Soviets had won and gained control over Germany, so it was entirely fair for them to determine a punishment that would work out this political guilt. Whether they wanted to restrain themselves or murder as many Germans as possible, this was up to them.

Political guilt grows out of minor failures, especially to resist harmful political tendencies. Eventually, it became next to impossible to resist the Nazis. But there were many opportunities, especially early on in Hitler’s tenure, when the Germans could have prevented him from consolidating his control. Even if we feel useless and unfree, that is the eventual result of situations where we could have acted to prevent ourselves from becoming so.  

Moral Guilt

Next, we have moral guilt. The actions taken by individual people, whether or not they break laws, are still things the individuals are responsible for. With moral guilt, there is no way to pass the responsibility on to others. Being ordered to do something is no excuse, nor is being scared. If we pull the trigger in a war, we are not always guilty of a crime, but we must make peace with our own soul about our actions. Likewise, if we do not act to prevent something bad, such as the removal of a Jewish friend to the camps, we are not guilty in a criminal sense, but we are guilty in a moral sense. Within our own conscience – the only valid courtroom [MP1] – we must determine how to live with ourselves. Nobody can tell us we are morally guilty, and nobody can punish us for moral guilt. All these mechanisms lie within the individual soul or heart and are nobody else’s business.

A group cannot be morally guilty as a collective. Only individuals can be morally guilty, as their consciences are their own. To generalise a group as guilty for anything other than their political failures is the beginning of hate: “it would be as though there are no more people, only collectives.” When we refer to the people so much it destroys individual dignity and lays the ground for ideologies that destroy the individual within us. 

Metaphysical Guilt

Finally, we have metaphysical guilt. This is where Jaspers’ philosophical leaning becomes most apparent. This kind of guilt is connected to our existence as members of a common humanity. “There is a solidarity between human beings as human beings, which makes every individual responsible for every injustice and harm that takes place in the world, especially for those crimes which are committed in our presence or with our knowledge. When I do not do what I can to stop them, so am I guilty.” This is guilt over human badness, a kind of shame at what we are capable of, and though it is spread over all of us alive, it is worse for those who are close, physically, and temporally, to horrors. It is a kind of survivor’s guilt mixed with shame at what we humans are – “that I still live, that is my guilt”. The only potential judge for such guilt is god.

Consequences, Defences.

Each of these guilts has its consequences. Criminal guilt has punishment, while political guilt has accountability and making amends, whether this be through reparations or being destroyed by the victors. Moral guilt leads to a painful process of renewal, first by insight and then later by atonement. Finally, an awareness of metaphysical guilt leads to “a changed consciousness of humanity’s own self before God.” We learn something about who we are and are left humbled by it.

We must be able to defend ourselves, especially against the accusations of others. In The Question of German Guilt Jaspers’ describes some of the ways in which we might do this. Firstly, we can distinguish between ourselves as an individual and the group our accusers may wish to forcibly merge us into. We can state the facts of the case, and we can appeal to rights (providing, however, that we have not broken those of others – hypocrisy is rarely an effective defence!). We can reject the judge as biased, or the accusations themselves as not being used to establish truth or justice but as instead serving some other, less worthy purpose – as punishment themselves, or to discredit us. Ultimately, the main thing to note about the process of public accountability is that we can demand “accountability and punishment,” but we can never demand “regret and rebirth”. The latter can only come from within.

The Germans’ Guilt

After WW2 Germany was covered with foreign soldiers, many of whom were forbidden even from exchanging a friendly word with their former enemy’s people. Meanwhile, placards were going up with the phrase “Das ist eure Schuld!” (this is your fault) next to scenes from the camps. It was not an easy time to be a German, even without the refugee crisis that the dislocation of the Germans from their homelands in Silesia, East Prussia, the Sudetenland, and others had caused. But the phrase “this is your fault” is not as clear as it appears. It can mean “You tolerated the regime”, “You supported it”, “you stood by before evil,” “you committed criminal acts”, and “as a people you are lesser, criminal, and bad.” In short, it can mean an awful lot. So, what should it mean? What guilt was there, according to Jaspers, and were there any mitigating factors?

The Nuremberg Trials determined criminal guilt, trying Germans who had committed clear crimes against humanity and war crimes. By determining criminal guilt, the other forms of guilt were brought into sharper focus. All the Germans were politically guilty because they had failed to make their government accountable. “But making someone accountable is not the same thing as recognising them as morally guilty.” So, it is in matters of moral guilt that there are distinctions to be drawn among the Germans. Some people of course do not have a conscience, but for the majority, there would be varying degrees of moral guilt and a consequence need for reflection, atonement, and renewal.

Jaspers notes the different ways that moral guilt can manifest itself, ranging from false consciousness, partial approval of the state (weren’t the autobahns great?), to delusions including self-deception (thinking you can change it from within). The only way of lessening one’s moral guilt as a German would be to have acted to prevent injustices and doing things like sabotage.  

Mitigating Factors

The problem with political guilt in particular is that we can never completely nail it down. We all know how the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War left Germany in a position where fascism could develop effectively – here the victors of that war must bear some guilt for the eventual “round two”. But there was also inaction after Hitler had risen to power. Jaspers notes as examples the Vatican’s concordat with Hitler in 1933, international recognition of Nazi Germany, and the decision to let the Olympic Games go ahead there. We Europeans were also guilty of inaction, preferring an uneasy peace to a war that could have saved us all from still greater horrors. These factors do not change the fact that Germany needed to be held accountable in 1945, but they do make it clearer that Germany’s guilt was not absolute.

Purification – Living With Guilt

The last parts of The Question of German Guilt are concerned with living with our moral guilt. Unlike criminal guilt, which ends when a sentence is served or a fine paid, or political guilt which is bounded by a peace treaty and thereby ended, moral guilt lasts forever. “It never ends. Whoever bears [such guilt] within themselves begins a trial that lasts a lifetime.” Someone who is morally guilty wishes to make amends, but they cannot be demanded of such a person, and they must again rely on their conscience to determine what is necessary to set things right. But things must be set right, because moral purification “is the way human beings are human beings”. Once we are conscious of our guilt, we can feel again a human solidarity and common responsibility, without which freedom is impossible.

Conclusion

Jaspers was not the only person trying to work out what to do about the fact that his people had committed crimes of a hitherto unprecedented evil, and his thoughts in The Question of German Guilt are not necessarily the best approach. Yet I can’t help but feel that they will prove a good starting point for considering Russian guilt, when that time comes. Russian citizens have had ample time to vote their president out of office, and then to remove him from power by other means – that they have failed is their common political guilt. Meanwhile on the battlefield, in Mariupol and Bucha and countless other cities and towns, crimes have been committed which must be tried in a court of law. Some of them, indeed, already have been.

But I am more interested in matters of moral guilt. It seems to me correct that the Russians have very different levels of moral guilt, ranging from inaction to active opposition to grudging support for their state. Thinking about the Russian people as collectively morally guilty is idiotic and counterproductive – indeed, more than one of the (recent, academic) essays I have read on this kind of guilt says that the only way for an awareness of moral guilt to grow within a group is from within that group. If an outsider like me or you tries to tell the Russians they are guilty it will almost always have the opposite effect. Therefore, we should be silent on the accusations if we care about the state of others’ souls, however much we might desire retribution for crimes committed in their name. The only exception Jaspers makes is that of friends – others who are close to us and who we acknowledge to have a genuine interest in our souls.

I have not written this piece to defend Russians. Certain of my friends sharing memes about how their conscience is killing them does nothing to diminish their obvious and, often, continued failure to act. But we must realise that guilt is a complex thing, and once the last gun goes silent there will be things that we can demand from the losing side of this conflict, and things that we cannot. And unfortunately, matters of conscience will always be beyond our reach.

Ultimately I am not quite sure how far I agree with Jaspers. I hope anyone who, like me, has been thinking about guilt these past few months will appreciate just how much of a quagmire the whole topic is. If you have an interesting take on how to work out guilt and responsibility in this or any other conflict, consider leaving a comment.

Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

How do we write biography? Well, depending on whether the subject has shuffled off this mortal coil or not, we could talk to them or else their relatives, friends, and enemies. Most likely we will spend a lot of time in archives, scattered around the country or world, reading journals and diaries, letters, and memoirs. To recreate the past we may need to read some history books, or better yet newspapers. If we are writing about a creative person we ought to read their books or watch their films, over and over. And yet if we do only this, we may still end up with something rather soulless.

Richard Holmes employed the “footsteps method”. He would literally retrace the steps of his quarries throughout their lives, allowing himself to imagine his way into their lives in a way that merely memorising poetry could not do. I myself have been to a Dostoevsky house museum in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, two Tolstoy ones in the former city, and there is a Dickens museum not far from me where I am now staying in London. Sometimes seeing these old places can really bring the writers back to life, but more often it seems to be the objects inside them that do that. The Akhmatova museum in Petersburg stands out as doing a great job of reminding me how awful that period of the Soviet Union was for many of its people.

Julian Barnes’ novel and non-fiction work, Flaubert’s Parrot, is an attempt at writing a biography of Flaubert. I say attempt only because its failure is deliberate, and the fault of the narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, rather than his creator. We learn a great deal about Flaubert, but far more about the nature of biography. Each chapter seems to employ a different approach to dealing with Flaubert as if Braithwaite is trying to work out which approach will stick. Here are a few examples of what I mean:

We have a chronology chapter, which contains three different chronologies of Flaubert’s life with a little bit of editorial commentary. In the first, Flaubert emerges as a successful, cheery, and social being; in the second his life is one of misery, disappointment, and financial problems; the third is made of extracts from his letters. Each chronology, in fact, quotes from Flaubert, but each ends up leading to an entirely different impression of the man. The authority that we expect to come from the primary source – his letters – only serves to make us look silly for trusting any of the chronologies at all. One message we might take away is just how easy biography, even a simple chronology, can be used to manipulate or mislead.

Another chapter imagines Louise Colet, Flaubert’s legendary mistress (who saved an awful lot of his most fascinating letters for us lucky readers in posterity), and the story she would tell of him. This is imaginative biography, giving us another perspective. One chapter looks at Flaubert through the various animals he used to compare himself to (bears, dogs, sheep, camels etc); another looks at him through the books he hadn’t written, the decisions he hadn’t made in life – a sort of “what if” biography; still another explores his attitude to that most awful of modern inventions, the choo-choo train. What is so brilliant about Flaubert’s Parrot is that each of these angles manages, even while occasionally (deliberately) sharing choice extracts from the letters and novels, to tell us something new about Flaubert, and cast him in a completely different light. Nothing alone, certainly not traditional biography, can fully capture the soul.

A murky patch in Flaubert’s biography concerns an English governess, so Barnes creates some letters that have fallen into the hands of a rival academic (Braithwaite is actually a doctor) which would blow open the academic consensus and bring our narrator fame and glory. The academic relates the story of how he came upon these letters, tells what they contained, but finally informs Braithwaite that he burned them out of respect for Flaubert’s wishes on the matter. Our narrator is outraged – his chances at fame and glory have gone down drastically.

But here there is also something else at play. Biography is often about solving mysteries, eliminating those last few blank spots in the chronology with a fantastic discovery. One of the most memorable pieces of Holmes’ Footsteps concerns his travels around Italy, attempting to work out the truth of Percy Shelley’s relationship with Claire Clairmont, a woman who accompanied him and his wife during their own time there. Biography is about taking control over the past and bringing it into order, and Braithwaite has just had the past rebuff him. There were several times as I was reading Flaubert’s Parrot where I thought of W.G. Sebald’s novels – Austerlitz or The Emigrants. In both we have a narrator attempting to recover the past, by all possible means, only to be disappointed. It is not so easy to recapture the world.

Just as literature is not the real world, so too is a biography of a literary figure not the same as that of a friend. Initially, our impression of Braithwaite places him as one of those stock characters we see in 20th-century fiction – the cynical old man spitting on the world and obsessed with his work. For example, Braithwaite gets more upset by moments in Flaubert’s life than he does revisiting memories of his participation in the Second World War. During the chapter involving the letters, he seems positively monomaniacal. But as the book progresses, we get hints of a troubled relationship with his wife, and finally her suicide. For example, we linger longer on the topic of adultery than perhaps even a book on Flaubert warrants.

All this puts the experiments at writing Flaubert’s life in a new light. We might say that Braithwaite is trying to work out what kind of biography might allow him to make sense of his own life, his own loss. Is it a little dictionary of important people, or is it a fictionalised telling of his wife’s side of things? His cynicism finally seems more tragic than tedious, because we see immediately what it takes him a whole book to realise – that life and literature, research, and intimate biography, are separated by a chasm:

“Ellen. My wife: someone I feel I understand less well than a foreign writer dead for a hundred years. Is this an aberration, or is it normal? Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.”

Fiction is a way of building a world where things make sense. And biography is just fiction that sticks close to its source material. But life does not make sense. Letters are burned, lives are ended, in ways that are incomprehensible, and no moral waits for us at the end of the tunnel. Flaubert’s Parrot tells us about Flaubert, and it tells us about Braithwaite’s wife. But it is only Flaubert who seems comprehensible by the book’s end, only Flaubert whose actions can be explained by whichever explanation offered by the book seems to make the most sense to us.

We come away from the novel with a sense of a world that is limited. After the humour (which Flaubert’s Parrot is full of) and the literary games, there comes unease. Biography is so much less comprehensive than we had previously imagined, so much less respective of the truth – because we see that the truth is impossible to determine. Literature appears a refuge, as always, but a cowardly one. And so, we return to the real world, uncertain, because that’s the only thing for it.

I really enjoyed the novel, in case that does not come through. It’s really good fun, and its experimentation serves an obvious purpose. At the same time, it is informative on Flaubert in a way that feels far more useful than a full biography. For example, there’s a chapter on common complaints about Flaubert (his politics, his pessimism, his women) and their rebuttals. This kind of approach is far more exciting and dynamic than just a footnote in a stodgy tome. The novel achieves what the best experimental fiction of our age does – it reveals that there are more ways to read and write than we had hitherto realised and that what is familiar may not even be the best. In this Flaubert’s Parrot is not just inspiring, it’s vital too.

Richard Holmes – The Age of Wonder

Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder takes us into the period between about 1760 and 1830, a time of rapid change in the sciences – and indeed everywhere else. In literary and philosophical matters, we saw the rise of Romanticism, a counterforce to the stodgy orderliness of the Enlightenment with its emphasis on reason and humanity’s perfectibility. Romanticism, against that backdrop, emphasized a rather more complex view of human nature and the world, one full of the interplay between light and dark, reason and unreason, and chaos and order, where nothing was ever quite completed and put away neatly. It also, in poetry, in particular, brought attention to the importance of personal, subjective experience in a way that had never really been the case before. It is hard for us now to appreciate just how revolutionary Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads were when it was first published in 1798.

In others of his books that I have read on this blog, Holmes has dealt with the heroes and heroines of British Romanticism – the likes of Keats, Shelley, and Byron. In the Age of Wonder, he puts forward a Romantic science, to go alongside literary Romanticism. Both science and art, he argues, are linked by a feeling of wonder. Romantic science and its popularizes took Romantic ideas of genius and work, that “ideal of intense, even reckless, personal commitment to discovery”, and used it to shape the myths it told about its famous figures – astronomers, explorers of continents and the contents of test tubes.

One of Holmes’ many achievements in the book is to draw together science and arts once more, to demonstrate to a new set of readers that the two cultures set out in C. P. Snow’s famous lecture of the same name need not be divided but ought instead to be harmonious. Coleridge and Humphry Davy inhaled laughing gas together, after all. But beyond simply making use of the material facts, it is Holmes’ particular artistic talent which serves this end. Holmes makes science exciting – to a non-scientist such as myself – by infusing it with flesh and blood. The Age of Wonder is the fruit of countless years of research. It takes figures from the past and brings them into immediacy so that their discoveries seem to matter, not just for us, whose world is based upon the past, but for their contemporaries. We see just how revolutionary, for example, Davy’s safety lamp for mining was, because Holmes recreates the world of the miner – ugly, dirty, brutish, and short.

We meet a cast of characters ranging from Joseph Banks, who in his youth was an explorer and botanist and who later came to lead the Royal Society (Britain’s great academy for the sciences) for over forty years, to William Herschel and his sister Caroline, Germans from Hanover who after emigrating to England came to revolutionize our understanding of the stars. Although the focus is on British science, Holmes gives us a sense of how European science was at the time, highlighting the connections between figures like Lichtenberg and Humboldt in the German lands, Linnaeus further North, and various French scientists, with their British counterparts.

At the same time, Holmes shows an increasing politicisation of science that is now somewhat familiar. Much of the book takes place during the Napoleonic Wars, and although these wars were punctuated by years of peace, relations between France and Britain were not always cordial. British scientists were often awarded prizes in France which they were kindly advised not to collect. The technology of hot air balloons, which to us now seems so innocent, once was a source of great anxiety, as it was feared that the French could use it to send an entire army across the Channel to catch the British by surprise. 

Perhaps this is most obvious in the case of Mungo Park. He was an explorer from Scotland who took two journeys in West Africa around the turn of the century. The first time he travelled almost on his own, a kind of proto-backpacker, relying on the kindness of the locals he met to see him safely home. The result of this was kidnap and torture, and his papers only survived because they were stored safely in his hat. Still, rather surprisingly, Park made it out of Africa and told his tale. He returned to country life in Scotland but grew restless. He declared he “would rather brave Africa and all its horrors” than stay in these “lonely heaths and gloomy hills”. He organized another expedition, but this time his financial backing came from the Colonial Office. Instead of a one-man jaunt, he led nearly a hundred soldiers. As happened all too often, a few cheery letters arrived from the coast and then rumour ended up being all was left of Park. Captain Cook, whose arrival at Tahiti begins The Age of Wonder, also died after peaceful methods of engaging with natives were replaced by a more aggressive, violent, and indeed imperial approach.

Holmes’ telling of Park’s story is gripping. It wouldn’t look out of place next to Lytton Strachey’s tale of General Gordon in Eminent Victorians. Of course, that is why Holmes’ book is so effective. This is less a work of history than a group biography, “a relay race of scientific stories,” that “link together to explore a larger historical narrative”. Through these stories – of balloonists and astronomers, physicians, and inventors – we have a sense of history passing.

Though there are dates, this is not history as a cascade of facts. We see time passing through the ageing and decline of a cast of characters. Joseph Banks goes from a spry young man to a gout-ridden old one, Davy suffers a stroke and a rapid decline. Almost without noticing it, we realise that one cast of characters has, by the book’s end, been shifted out for another. William and Caroline Herschel have been replaced by their son John, Charles Babbage has come onto the scene, and Michael Faraday has begun to eclipse his mentor Davy. With them, Holmes stops.

Though we wish he could continue forever, his endpoint is not an arbitrary one. Science and artistic Romanticism could coexist for a good reason. Wonder was the natural feeling of these scientists because they could more or less maintain Christian belief as they worked. Their discoveries seemed to reveal God’s greatness – the watchmaker analogy suggested by William Paley in his 1802 book Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity – more than they did His absence. There was not as yet a pronounced sense that science was undermining God.

But by the end of The Age of Wonder, this is much less true. Materialism, founded on a sense of deep time and deep space, begins chipping away at the old certainties. And when the book finally ends with Charles Darwin setting off in 1831 towards the discoveries that would make his name, we have a sense almost of apprehension. Gone are the days when a man like Davy could write bad poetry and play with gases, or Novalis could journey into the depths of the earth to look at rocks before writing poetry that actually works. The armies have been drawn up – the artists, retaining their romantic ethos; and the scientists, retaining their commitment to truth. To this day, there are too few connections between them.

Holmes’ work is itself a source of wonder. And for that, it already serves to begin building bridges between science and the arts. To restore the sense of wonder at science is essential to rekindling our present interest in it. The facts are never as important as we may claim they are, at least when we ourselves are not donning lab coats. An artistic approach, that teaches us to see in a new way by recreating the past and the excitement of its questions and problems, is what is truly necessary to make us more rounded readers and beings in the world. And that is exactly what The Age of Wonder provides.

More Holmes can be found here and here.