The persistence of collective guilt

Abstract

This paper asks why, despite the obvious difficulties entailed, the notion of ‘collective guilt’ continues to feature in discussions of the responsibilities of one group towards another. The aim is to clarify how it is that the partial success of repeated attempts to distinguish individual from collective guilt and to confine the latter to a pre-modern moment reveals something of our present. The key contributions to this discussion made by Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers in relation to Nazi Germany are examined for their ambivalences in this regard, as are some recent developments in international law and politics. The suspicion is that collective guilt is a notion that modern political reason cannot embrace and yet which it cannot entirely disavow: ‘collective guilt’ and the element of fate that it implies is central to our understanding of citizenship, nationhood and political commitment. The paper thus attempts an analysis of the durability of the concept of collective guilt; it is not an evaluation of its usefulness, but an exploration of its persistence.

Keywords:

• collective guilt
• Arendt
• Jaspers
• Kant
• moral luck
• genocide
• nation
• reparations
• community

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank James Brown, Tim Edwards, Andreas Hess, Philip Spencer and the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this text.

Notes

1 See, for example, Kutz (2000), May & Hoffman (1991) and Isaacs (2011).

2 See also Graeber (2011, p. 60) who notes that ‘to pay’ comes from to pacify or appease.

3 This is not an attempt to say that we are all Kantians, rather that Kant's way of construing the matter cuts deeply into our perceptions and is structuring of many of our social and political institutions.

4 According to Kant, juridical law-giving can be external, but ethical law-giving can only be internal; ethics ‘can have no external lawgiver’ (1996, pp. 21–2).

5 This section is indebted to Alan Norrie's (2008) insights concerning Arendt and Jaspers, but pushes the arguments in a different direction. Norrie develops a discussion of Arendt and Jaspers in terms of their ambivalences concerning justice in order to open up an understanding of the aporias in modern law's relation to justice. In this paper, I use the ambivalences in Arendt and Jaspers's work to open up the question of collective guilt, examining how and why it re-emerges despite their explicit statements of its inadmissibility.

6 This table is adapted from Olick (2005, p. 284).

7 Other problems of judgement include retroactivity, the defence of obeying orders and the question who is to judge. See Mettraux (2008).

8 Eichmann was tried and convicted in 1961–1962 in Israel under the Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law 1950 (Law 5710/1950, s. I(a)). He was charged with ‘crimes against the Jewish people’, ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘war crimes’. ‘Crimes against the Jewish people’ are modelled on the Genocide Convention. See Schabas (2000).

9 Bartov describes Nazi Germany as a ‘community of murder’ (2000, p. 29). On the effacement of the boundaries between the innocent and the guilty see Primo Levi's description of survivors' guilt: to survive Auschwitz implied complicity with the regime, gaining advantage over one's fellows by whatever means possible (Levi, [1947] 1979). On the other hand, one could ask whether Arendt's account of the effacement of boundaries is exaggerated. Many of those who lived through the Nazi period did not lose their moral compass. This throws into question Arendt's characterization of Eichmann in terms of his ‘thoughtlessness’; arguably there's a need for stronger reckoning with anti-Semitism in judging Eichmann than Arendt allows. As Lozowick observes, ‘Instead of trying to explain that we are all capable of doing what the SS did, it would be better to ask what made them into such aberrations’ (2002, p. 279). Arendt's text risks dissolving the positive evil of anti-Semitism into thoughtlessness – ironic given her frustration with Kant's conception of evil as rationalized into comprehensible motives (Arendt, 1966, p. 459).

10 Philip Spencer notes that Arendt pushes the idea of ‘absolute innocence’ too far, leaving a problem of how to account for cosmopolitan internationalists who do not recognize state loyalty or authority yet are intensely politically active and loyal to a different community, such as Rosa Luxemburg (see Spencer, 2006).

11 ‘There is no other way to realize truth for the German than purification out of the depth of consciousness of guilt’ (Jaspers, [1947] 2001, p. 112). Note how this links with the idea of Germany having a special role to play in respect of the rest of humanity because of its unique historical position. This is in some respects a peculiar, inverted version of earlier proto-nationalist arguments about Kultur. For further discussion of the significance of Jaspers's text see Rabinbach (2001).

12 For example, chapter 9 of Arendt's The origins of totalitarianism (1966) traces the ‘perplexities of the rights of man’ in contemporary political practice in terms of the displacement of what one has done in favour of what one is.

13 Erskine argues that moral agency can be thought of in terms of capacity for deliberation, not necessarily consciousness (Erskine, 2003).

14 Note that reparations can also be paid by individuals.

15 See Klemperer's acerbic comments on the word ‘denazification’ and the difficulties of achieving this (2000).

16 Joint enterprise was novel in international law; in the UK ‘joint enterprise’ enables anyone who agrees to commit a crime with others to be liable for the actions of others in the group. The Justice Committee of the House of Commons has recently considered reform to this law. See House of Commons Justice Committee (2012).

17 Ainley has commented perceptively on an inconsistency at the heart of the Rome Statute's conception of individual agency whereby the group membership of the victim, e.g. of genocide, is paramount, but the group membership of the perpetrator is deemed irrelevant (see Ainley, 2006).

18 Also see Israel Singer speaking in 2000, cited in Authers (2006): ‘you can't repair the dead’.

19 Compare Bruno Bettelheim's observation that ‘What cannot be talked about can also not be put to rest, and if it is not, the wounds continue to fester from generation to generation’ (Bettelheim, 1985, p. 162). In this regard the rewriting of the German language to forbid certain expressions is significant. See Klemperer (2000), Eitz & Stötzel (2007).

20 Further evidence for the traction of collective conceptions of identity can be gleaned from many accounts of the dynamics of nationalism, from Anderson's account of ‘imagined communities’ (1983), to Zizek's observations concerning nationalism and the ‘theft of enjoyment’ (1993).

21 Compare Arendt's comment: ‘if one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew’. (1994, p. 12).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Samantha Ashenden

Samantha Ashenden is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her current research focuses on guilt, violence and conditions of political legitimacy.