Guilt about the Past Read Online Free PDF Page A

as well as for the perception of the world. It makes sense even though it goes beyond what is required in a strictly legal sense. It pays tribute to the fact that the past is still traumatic to others. It does not mean that it has to be traumatic for us to the same extent. Detraumatisation takes place concomitantly within the dialogue and on each side independently, and one side does not have to wait until the other side successfully completes the process. Waiting for each other can also keep both mutually mired in trauma.
    There is no mastering the past. But there is living consciously with present-day questions and emotions that the past releases. Questions and emotions – of course the past does not just trigger questions, but also makes us lose our composure, be at a loss for words, and become sad, fearful, and enraged, despair of cosmic and human justice, and suffer under the guilt that ensnares not only those who were then perpetrators, but those who later tolerated the perpetrators living among them.
    In the instances in which the past does not currently evoke questions or emotions nothing is gained by referring to it again and again. This only devalues and squanders the past’s moral legacy. Where the Third Reich and the Holocaust do not bring up the questions and emotions that our generation has experienced, the next generation will have to experience its own questions and emotions and in its own way. In any case, they will not have to confront some of the issues that the first generation and my generation faced; the third generation is only slightly caught up in the guilt of the past, and the following generation will not be at all.
    Under no circumstances does the past allow itself to be dismissed. Not only because its horrors were so terrible that they can never be forgotten. Not only because it makes us perceive the threats to our cultural and civilised existence. It touches on all themes and problems of morality. Responsibility and conviction, resistance and accommodation, loyalty and betrayal, hesitation and taking action, power, greed, justice and conscience – there is not a single drama that cannot be exemplified by an occurrence out of this particular past with ample proximity to our present world and with adequate aesthetic quality.
    Unlike Stalin’s gulag and Pol Pot’s killing fields, the Holocaust and the Third Reich are perversions of bourgeois culture and offer, moreover, this culture’s universal content and structure in a perverted form. So the flood of books, films, plays, and performances dedicated to the Holocaust and the Third Reich will not cease for a long time to come, not in Germany and not throughout the rest of the world. And the past they encompass is global: the Holocaust and Second World War were the last historical occurrences that seized all the world at once, Germans and Jews, Eastern and Western Europe, America and even Asia and Africa. That past is our common history.
    And so, the past is not lost, even without special efforts and events, even without the endless reproduction of what my generation started in the sixties and seventies, even without the next generation being confronted with the past to the dangerous point of becoming bored and cynical. Precisely because the Third Reich and Holocaust have become a universal experience and teach universal lessons they will not fade into obscurity. The past can become history for the generations to follow without losing any of its importance and impact.
    When a collective occurrence, just as an individual one, is deemed as history, it no longer dominates the collective or individual narrative, but is integrated into it. With regard to the Third Reich and the Holocaust that means that German history does not have to be viewed as if everything in the past were building up to this particular outcome and would be fulfilled by it. It means that German history should not be evaluated in the present day only in light of those years,