Guilt About the Past by Bernhard Schlink

Guilt About the Past by Bernhard Schlink
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Category: Politics and Society
Reviewer: John Lloyd
Summary: An academic text, but quite warm, even though it considers collective guilt, such as the German experience post-Holocaust.
Buy? Maybe	Borrow? Maybe
Pages: 256	Date: February 2010
Publisher: Beautiful Books
ISBN: 978-1905636778
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Consider, if you will, guilt. You might have it tainting you, as beyond the perpetrators, every person who stands in solidarity with them and maintains solidarity after the fact becomes entangled. The link might not strictly be a legal one, but concern norms of religion and morals, etiquette and custom as well as day-to-day communications and interactions. Hence a collective guilt like no other - that witnessed in Germany. The assumption that membership to a people engenders solidarity is something Germans of my generation do not easily like to accept, we read. However difficult it might have been back then in its day, Germany had to physically renounce anything to do with Nazism, to actively 'opt-out' of connections to avoid the solidarity seen connecting the whole nation like a toxic spider web. And since then it's linked in all the children, in a bequeathal of guilt.

But generations on, do the after-effects of the Holocaust and the 3rd Reich still include forming a collective guilt? Does it still worry the nation? It certainly affects Bernhard Schlink, the professor of law, and writer (of thrillers and more), to the extent that he can publish six mini-lectures (basically, twenty-page essays) in this extended pamphlet. The Holocaust will certainly long be casting a long and dark shadow as a precedent, inflicting on current debates about courage, morals - and whether a whole nation of people can or should have something like a pride once more.

Germany definitely made an Other to have in their national affairs - or certainly showed that Otherness up like nobody else before or since. And that Other has a power and cause to seek restitution. Hence chapter three here, which concerns a more legal aspect to Schlink's arguments. These pages might be a little too specialist, and perhaps a little woolly, as for me at least, in a strange way, talking about notions of legality, and such debatable, changeable things as retroactive laws, does not fit with something as utterly definite as the Holocaust.

However essay number four, on moral consequences, is better, pointing out the ridiculousness of politicians who say sorry for things done in days of old, when it's not them who should bear any guilt for anything, and perhaps those being apologised to are not there to offer forgiveness. Given racial slaughters, of course, some reconciliation is always beneficial.

Finally, chapter six looks at Holocaust fiction, and how a writer or movie-maker might wish to style a story and populate his dramas with real people, and with such an overbearing legacy. It adds a personal touch and consideration to this book, which is always readable yet understandably academic, discusses the general and specific, has the bearing of convincing truth while allows for discussion, and is both very amenable yet perhaps too specialised for a general recommendation.

I must thank the beautiful people of Beautiful Books for my review copy.

For a flawless look at how some German people actively questioned their generation’s Nazi past, we recommend The Baader-Meinhof Complex by Stefan Aust.

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