The Question of German Guilt
ISBN: 9780823238552
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Fordham University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter



Shortly after the Nazi government fell, a philosophy professor at Heidelberg University lectured on a subject that burned the consciousness and conscience of thinking Germans. "Are the German people guilty?" These lectures by Karl Jaspers, an outstanding European philosopher, attracted wide attention among German intellectuals and students; they seemed to offer a path to sanity and morality in a disordered world.

Jaspers, a life-long liberal, attempted in this book to discuss rationally a problem that had thus far evoked only heat and fury. Neither an evasive apology nor a wholesome condemnation, his book distinguished between types of guilt and degrees of responsibility. He listed four categories of guilt: criminal guilt (the commitment of overt acts), political guilt (the degree of political acquiescence in the Nazi regime), moral guilt (a matter of private judgment among one's friends), and metaphysical guilt (a universally shared responsibility of those who chose to remain alive rather than die in protest against Nazi atrocities).
Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) took his degree in medicine but soon became interested in psychiatry. He is the author of a standard work of psychopathology, as well as special studies on Strindberg, Van Gogh and Nietsche. After World War I he became Professor of Philosophy at Heidelberg, where he achieved fame as a brilliant teacher and an early exponent of existentialism. He was among the first to acquaint German readers with the works of Kierkegaard.

Jaspers had to resign from his post in 1935. From the total isolation into which the Hitler regime forced him, Jaspers returned in 1945 to a position of central intellectual leadership of the younger liberal elements of Germany. In his first lecture in 1945, he forcefully reminded his audience of the fate of the German Jews. Jaspers's unblemished record as an anti-Nazi, as well as his sentient mind, have made him a rallying point center for those of his compatriots who wish to reconstruct a free and democratic Germany.

Karl Jaspers was one of the originators of German existentialism. He began his career as a psychiatrist but was increasingly concerned about philosophical and moral issues. His was "a lucid and flexible intelligence in the service of a genuine and passionate concern for mankind." Removed from his professorship at the University of Heidelberg by the Nazis in 1937, he was reinstated in 1945 on the approval of the American occupation forces. In 1949 he went to the University of Basel. The New York Times wrote of him in his lifetime: "Jaspers shows himself . . . to be one of the most diligent and sensitive students of contemporary history. He has a good eye for the present because he knows what to fear in it---particularly the loss of individual freedom."

Jaspers was deeply concerned about the human condition, and in his book The Future of Mankind (1957), entitled in its updated edition The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man (1961), he attempted to arouse conscience in the face of the deadly danger of atomic warfare "at the same time . . . attempt[ing] to apply the principles of his philosophy to a new field, and to lay the foundations of a political philosophy" (Times Literary Supplement). After the German publication of this book, Jaspers was awarded the German Peace Prize at the 1958 Frankfurt Book Fair. Hannah Arendt, who had been his student and a translator of some of his works, made the presentation.

Jaspers's multivolume work, The Great Philosophers---edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Ralph Manheim, and published in English from 1962 to 1966---was hailed by the Library Journal as "a major work, a brilliant book . . . Jaspers defends the unity of philosophy and his aim is to make philosophy available to all, to provide the serous reader with a guide "to the thinking of the great philosophers and to a personal encounter with them."

The obituary of Jaspers in the New York Times said in assessing him: "With Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Jaspers was one of the makers and shapers of existentialist philosophy. For almost 50 years, in books, essays and lectures, he strove to give a personalist answer to modern man's questions about his own nature and the nature of existence."

(Bowker Author Biography)


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