Patrick Lawrence: Guilt and Responsibility

The Case of Germany and Israel

Many years ago, another time and place, I had a German friend who hailed from Hamburg. Christophe was a cultivated sort—well-read, impressive art on the walls of his apartment. I remember how inordinately fond he was of his collection of those elegant, sought-after pipes made by Peterson of Dublin. 

It was a year or so into our friendship when Christophe began talking about the war, the Reich, the camps, and the albatross of guilt that was part of what it meant to be German in the world as it was after 1945. 

You occasionally hear this kind of thing from Germans, or at least I have over the years. I always cringe inwardly when a German friend or acquaintance talks in this manner about the burden of… what shall I call it? … Germanness. It is as if they overlook politics and history in favor of the insidious fallacy of what is called the national character argument: Germans did what they did in the 1930s and 1940s because that is who Germans are and that is what Germans do. Christophe was in his mid–40s—born, then, in the 1960s—and there he was bearing the anguishing psychological weight of an inescapable guilt.

I was fond enough of Christophe eventually to confront him about this, whatever the risk of embarrassment. In time, and after I had thought through the sadness I felt as I listened to my friend’s self-flagellations, our conversation led to a distinction I have not since forgotten. 

“Christophe,” I said as he puffed on one of his Petersons one evening, “there is guilt and there is responsibility. Those who served the Reich, even those who didn’t but turned away their faces—they were guilty, and if they are still alive they are still guilty. You aren’t. How could you be? You’re ‘guilty’ of nothing. The past confers responsibilities of one or another kind on all of us. It leaves you with a certain responsibility, yes, and you must know it and honor it. But to be guilty and to be responsible are very different things.”

I have thought many times about those long-ago exchanges with Christophe—a man of conscience but, we must say, misguided conscience—since the chain of events that began last Oct. 7. How have we in the West reacted to Israel’s daily atrocities in Gaza? And what has defined these reactions? All of us in the Atlantic world—Americans, French, Britons, Italians, Belgians, the others—should consider these questions. To do so it is necessary to take up the matter of guilt and responsibility. Not so strangely, it is Germany’s response to Israel’s barbarities that urges this self-examination upon us while giving it the cutting edge of a blade. 

The Federal Republic’s support of “the Jewish state” has long been unequivocal, ranking it with Washington’s “unconditional support,” the phrase Hillary Clinton favored during her years as secretary of state. This goes back to Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s first chancellor, who authorized war reparations and greatly needed economic aid four years after Israel’s founding in 1948. Germany has never looked back. Rudolf Dreßler, a long-serving member of the Bundestag, described Germany’s dedication to the Israeli cause as a Staatsräson, a reason of state, a fundamental obligation, while serving as Berlin’s ambassador to Tel Aviv from 2000 to 2005. It does not get any further beyond negotiable. 

Germany’s position on the Gaza crisis is entirely of a piece with this history. You would not think it would be possible for Berlin to side with Israel more radically, but Chancellor Olaf Scholz has managed it. Immediately after the events of Oct. 7, Berlin lit the Brandenburg Gate with the blue and white of the Israeli flag. Remember the procession of Western leaders who traveled to Tel Aviv post–Oct. 7 to render their stamps of approval as the savagery in Gaza got under way? Scholz was among the first. “At this moment, there is only one place for Germany: alongside Israel,” the chancellor stated at the time. 

Al Jazeera ran an excellently reported piece on German policy and the political climate in the Federal Republic two months after the events of Oct. 7. Among much else, it noted that Saxony–Anhalt, a socially and politically conservative state due south of Hamburg, now requires arriving immigrants to pledge allegiance to “Israel’s right to exist” on their applications for citizenship. No pledge, no citizenship. 

There appears to be as little room for nuance among the policy cliques in Berlin as there is for newcomers to Saxony–Anhalt. Annalena Baerbock, the least qualified foreign minister now gainfully employed in Europe, gingerly hinted in December that Israel might consider inflicting less suffering on the Palestinians of Gaza. Ten days later Scholz reaffirmed Germany’s diplomatic support for the Zionist state in terms that by this time had grown monotonous. “Germany stands firmly alongside Israel,” a government statement read. There were 17,000 Gazans dead at the time. 

Amid these incessant professions of fidelity, something interesting. An opinion poll conducted in November, when the death toll in Gaza was slightly more than one-third of the 29,000 recorded as I write, fewer than a third of those surveyed approved of the Scholz government’s unwavering support for the Zionist state. In my read, this may reflect a generational change in consciousness among Germans: Very few remain who remember the Reich and the Shoah, and the power of secondhand memories is naturally declining.    

How are we to read full, no-discussion-needed support for Israel even as it  commits genocide on a population of 2.3 million alongside apparently collapsing support for this posture among German citizens? I do not think we can understand this without engaging the questions of guilt and responsibility. 

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True enough and perfectly well-known, repairing Germany’s image—as a nation, as a society—has been a national project from the earliest years of its postwar rehabilitation. Germans have tried to do the same as a people. There is design in Berlin’s policy toward Israel, then, but there remains a consciousness of guilt abroad among Germans and a natural if subliminal desire to expiate it. This is often unmistakable when you are among Germans. It is what I heard in my conversations with Christophe and over the years with others. 

That Al Jazeera piece noted above quotes a scholar named Daniel Marwecki, whose book, Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and State Building (Hurst, 2020), sorts this out subtly and carefully. Marwecki’s term as he addresses the collective German psyche is morality. “When German politicians today talk about Israel,” he said when Al Jazeera interviewed him, “it is from a moral standpoint.” Referring to official German support for Israel, Marwecki adds, “All the leading German politicians think it is morally the right thing to do because of the German past.”

Think about this. Germany’s leadership—and some proportion of Germans, even if their enthusiasm for the apartheid state weakens—now have it that uncritical support for a regime whose genocidal, ethnic-cleansing project resembles the Reich’s more with every passing day is “morally the right thing to do,” in Marwecki’s useful summation. Approving with material, political, and diplomatic support a racist, frenetically violent nation that deploys an exterminating force against another people—this is Germany’s obligation 79 years after the Nazis’ collapse. Tell me in the comment thread you can think of something closer to collective insanity.  

There are two things to say about this preposterous state of affairs. One, this is where acting out of guilt so easily leads when the assumption of guilt is irrational—when it is wrong, in a word. Two, and related to this first point, to accept guilt as one’s burden in this way can be flatly, destructively irresponsible as it leads one, or an entire nation, down a mistaken path. 

I counted incorrectly: There is a third thing to say about a nation that erroneously understands guilt as an inherited condition from which it cannot escape and on which it must act more or less indefinitely. Such a nation is trapped in the past—or has been so trapped, or let itself be trapped, or intentionally trapped itself. This opens us to a recognition we must not miss. The Israelis have cultivated guilt among those from whom it seeks support for so long and so assiduously we can count it fundamental to its foreign policies. The project, which intensifies as the collective memory fades, is to confine Israel’s supporters to the past so as to cordon off the present—the present of Israel’s criminality and pathological cruelty. There is another way to put this: The Israeli objective is to prevent others from acting responsibly in the face of its conduct. 

Guilt, guilt, guilt, haunted memories, constant reminders of the past in books, films, museums, memorials: There is no need to deny the horrors of the last century and every need to escape this warped complex. The barbarities that unfold daily in Gaza make this matter urgent. And when we at last understand guilt and its proper place in our lives and as we think things through, two things are instantly possible. We are able to live in the present, not in the past, not as history’s prisoners, and we are able to react responsibly to events as they occur in this suddenly available present. 

In Germany’s case, Berlin’s policy toward Israel would turn upside down as neatly as an hourglass. There would be no supporting or condoning Israel’s criminal conduct, weakly proposing the Israelis tone it down, or acquiescing silently to it. Germany’s leaders would stand and say, “Those who came before us did what you are doing once—to those who came before you. We condemn your crimes. We must, this is our responsibility, just as we have condemned the crimes that disfigure our past.” 

There are all manner of geopolitical considerations that make this reversal unlikely if not, for the time being, impossible. It is perfectly plausible that Berlin’s political leadership is complicit as Israel manipulates the vulnerable sensibilities of Germans so as to sustain popular support for the apartheid regime. But in a better world what I just imagined would be Germany’s rethought response to Israel and the grotesque monster it has made of itself. And Germany, in a world even better than this better world, would lead the way. In this we would find an exquisite poetic justice: What Germany should do is what the rest of the West should do.

This would be to act out of responsibility as against the error or the con of guilt. The world’s most disgraceful nation would be disarmed, and humanity might begin to restore itself.

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