Changes

|title=Guilt About the Past

|author=Bernhard Schlink

|date=February 2010

|isbn=978-1905636778

}}

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.