There is no such thing as 'inherited guilt'

The column below was sent by Francis Hunt as a comment on today’s blogpost. It is a powerful reply to the extreme right and AfD saying: "It's time for Germany to stop feeling guilty”.  Thank you Francis for the clarity, insight and accuracy.

It's a popular argument from the extreme right in Germany. The concept of inherited guilt is a good straw horse argument; It puts forward a false premise, demolishes it, and then claims that the demolition proves its case.

The Christian concept of Original Sin notwithstanding, there is no such thing as "inherited guilt". What there is, is a collective responsibility for Germans - and for the Federal Republic of Germany, as the legal successor state of the Nazi one - to remember the lessons of that appalling period of German history, and to bear witness to it so that those lessons will not be forgotten.

One way of looking at the history of Germany since the war is to see it as the long and difficult journey to understand and express the consequences of this responsibility. Part of this process involved a decided refutation of any concept of "blood guilt", given the presence of such ideas in the foul mess of the origins of antisemitism.

The ideas of "inherited" or "blood" guilt are illogical and absolutely toxic. Are my children (half-German and half-Irish) only half as guilty as their contemporaries? Or is one "drop" of German blood enough to damn them completely to guilt?

It is horribly fascinating to see how the AfD is able to paradoxically use the racist concept of "blood" to relativise the whole question of remembering the lessons of the Holocaust. Combining the idea of German "Volk" and German Nation, and commingling it with a simplistic view of history extending over millenia, the AfD politician, Alexander Gauland, described the history of the Nazi period as a "bird dropping" [Vogelschiss] in the whole sweep of history. Commingled with this relativism is the usual right wing argument that Germany has more than adequately accepted its guilt and done sufficient atonement for it. And so, absolution is self-declared.

Except that present-day Germany is not "guilty" of the Nazi abomination. It needs no absolution. But the responsibility to remember, to bear witness, remains. Is that an ongoing cultural "burden"? Some may see it that way. But I see the ongoing challenge to bear witness to the terrible lessons of the past as a marvelously creative opportunity for German culture. Often imperfect, frequently with a large serving of hypocrisy as a side dish. But over the decades, always moving forward. When you visit the Holocaust Memorial in front of the Bundestag in Berlin, you get a real sense of what this German responsibility means. Yes, the burden can sometimes feel heavy, but there is also profound honour to be found in taking it up.