{"id":16402,"date":"2026-05-18T09:09:57","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T09:09:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/16402\/"},"modified":"2026-05-18T09:09:57","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T09:09:57","slug":"should-germans-still-feel-guilty-about-the-nazis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/16402\/","title":{"rendered":"Should Germans still feel guilty about the Nazis?"},"content":{"rendered":"

While promoting her latest film at Cannes, Fatherland, based on Thomas Mann\u2019s and his daughter\u2019s return to their devastated homeland after the Second World War, German actress Sandra H\u00fcller was asked by journalists whether she feels guilt over her country\u2019s past. \u201cYes, I feel the guilt every day,\u201d she responded<\/a>. \u201cAnd also, I never get bored of it, to feel the guilt, because it\u2019s necessary to act right.\u201d<\/p>\n

This attitude seems odd, even pathological. Why should someone feel a crippling inherited guilt over atrocities that were committed decades before she was born, that she was neither responsible for nor had any influence over? There are echoes here of the bien-pensant, self-flagellating<\/a> attitude in Britain and America towards the Atlantic slave trade. The difference is that in the German case, this stance is tied up with the rebuilding of the country\u2019s postwar legitimacy.<\/p>\n

It would be easy to scoff at H\u00fcller\u2019s comments as simple \u201cvirtue signaling\u201d, but there is a more complex psychological dynamic at play here. The deeper question at stake concerns national memory and how a society relates to the grisly chapters of its history.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Germany\u2019s memory culture has been touted as a model \u2014 albeit a necessarily imperfect one \u2014 for how countries like America and Britain should work through their own historical crimes of slavery, racism and empire. Susan Neiman, in her 2019 book Learning from the Germans, contrasted Germany\u2019s numerous public memorials to the victims of Nazism with the Confederate monuments which still populate the American South.<\/p>\n

The problem with H\u00fcller\u2019s approach is that repeatedly making a show of \u201cguilt\u201d engenders moral fatigue and, eventually, diminishing returns. At that point, people either disengage or become resentful. Excessive moralization can end up weakening the gravity of the very historical awareness it seeks to preserve.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, when memory culture is institutionalized, it becomes a kind of ritualized performance that people feel they must parrot because it\u2019s expected of them, rather than an authentic case of ethical reflection and engagement with historical legacy. This creates an \u201cofficial\u201d version of history to which all must adhere, while any challenge is treated as blasphemous. Even when dealing with events as traumatic as the Atlantic slave trade and the Second World War, dogma is not conducive to good history.<\/p>\n

In 1959, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno gave a lecture<\/a> titled \u201cThe Meaning of Working Through the Past\u201d. In it, he provocatively argued that the latent structural and psychological causes of fascism linger into the present, so we cannot entirely consign it to the past. That an atrocity like Auschwitz came about in the first place means something else on the same scale can arise again in the future.<\/p>\n

One element from Adorno\u2019s lecture which is increasingly vital for modern readers is his idea that one must strive for an enlightened and mature approach to the past. Critically mature people don\u2019t shy away from the responsibility of comprehending the past, but nor do they moralize about history. Adorno resisted the idea of a collective guilt passed down through the generations, one which cannot be cleansed and can only be wallowed in.<\/p>\n

We are all products of the accumulated actions of our ancestors. We can\u2019t abolish the past, nor would it be desirable to try. But we should not be enslaved by it, either. There is a sweet spot in being able to reflect on the past clearly and honestly without whitewashing or denying the truth. This involves embracing what George Orwell once called \u201cthe power of facing unpleasant facts\u201d, avoiding the trap of ceaseless moral self-condemnation. We are not guilty for the iniquities of the past, but we do have a responsibility to think critically about them. Unfortunately, guilt complexes take us further away from that task.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While promoting her latest film at Cannes, Fatherland, based on Thomas Mann\u2019s and his daughter\u2019s return to their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16403,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1238,5,939,4807,8642,8562,282,2152,7393],"class_list":["post-16402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-film","tag-germany","tag-history","tag-holocaust","tag-nazis","tag-nazism","tag-sandra-huller","tag-second-world-war","tag-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}