post holocaust post zionism

guilt and collective responsibility. A comprehensive, systematic — and courageous — theo retical treatment of this question was undertaken right after the war by Karl Jaspers, one of the few German philosophers who did not collaborate more or less enthusiastically with the Nazi regime.

In a book he published at that time, The Question of German Guilt, he draws several interesting distinctions, on the basis of which he maintains that all Germans, even those who personally did nothing wrong, bear political responsibility for the crimes committed by the German state during the war. Thus, in his view, they have no choice, as German citizens and members of the .German people, but to pay the price of those crimes Perhaps because the book was written immediately after the war, it does not take up the question of historic responsibility; for example, the question of whether the Israeli claim to "special treatment" (such as giving Israel German submarines) is justified, as is the tendency of many Germans to accept and respond to that claim. Some of the latter have rather instrumental, even cynical motives in doing so. Others — the German foreign minister at the time of this writing, Joschka Fischer, seems to be one of them — think Germany has a special responsibility to Israel and the Jews. Guilt and collective responsibility, especially when they are passed on from one generation to the next, arc not only hard to live with but also theoretically subtle and complex.

It is not at all clear how blaming the children or grandchildren of murderers for what their forebears did can be justified or how any claim can be made on this basis. However, a claim could be made on the basis of what Jasper, for one, writes, a confirmation of the moral validity of the bibli cal ".saying, "The fathers eat sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge Without pretending to exhaust this complicated subject, one or two com ments are in order.

Germans who were too young to take part in the war or who were born afterward bear no guilt or responsibility for what their parents or grandparents did. But one cannot overlook the fact that for more than a generation thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people who were party, directly or indirectly, to those crimes went on living, peacefully and contentedly, in Germany.

Many held prominent positions in government, the academy, cultural institutions, the press, and other spheres. It has also become clearer and clearer that, in fact, all Germans knew, more or less, what was being done to the Jews, and the vast majority not only failed to oppose these actions but accepted them and perhaps even supported them. Many profited from them as well, particularly from the despoiling of Jewish property. Quite a few of that generation are still alive, and it is in their name that the German government has tried to atone for Nazi crimes, among other things by giving Israel "special treatment." Furthermore, economic and financial institutions, organizations, industrial concerns, and public and political bodies generally maintain some continuity of identity, over and above the identities of the individuals of which they are composed. In Germany, it is known that during the war big, rich manufacturers employed many thousands of slave laborers — often Jews — and that they continued to operate and prosper without interruption after the war was over. That is but one example. To the extent that such institutions form an important part of German society, they perpetuate the institutional, cultural, and political responsibility of Germany as a whole. But that responsibility remains abstract and takes on concrete meaning only in the actions, feelings, and lives of individual people living in Germany today. Here, it would be well to refer again to a citation of Jurgen Habermas that appears in Zuckerman's book. The lives of contemporary Germans, Habermas says, are "connected with the form of existence of our parents and grandparents by a mesh of family, local, political and intellectual traditions which is difficult to untangle — by an historical milieu, .(therefore, which in the first instance has made us what we are and who we are today" (p. 46 Zuckerman quotes these words when describing the "debate of the his torians." This famous controversy stirred up not only historians but also intellectuals and public opinion in general in Germany in the late 198os. It was provoked by a statement of the well-known historian Ernst Nolte to the effect that the character of Nazism should be investigated historically, in the context of the wider European phenomenon of fascism, and that the murderousness of the Nazi regime should be seen as a reaction to Stalinism. Even the Third Reich's war against the Jews should,