Stigma and Sacrifice in the Federal Republic of Germany

Abstract

Historians are dumb witnesses to a culture wrangling with itself about its criminal past if they only narrate the sequence of historical controversies such as those that have dotted the German public landscape since the Holocaust. They need to be alive to the subterranean biblical themes flowing beneath the surface froth of events, linking past and present through the continuity of German political emotions that are necessarily collective and therefore sensitive to anxieties about accusations of collective, inherited sin. This article argues that the guilt/shame couplet so common both in public German and academic discourses about post war Germany cannot account for the intergenerational transmission of moral pollution signified by Holocaust memory. In order to understand the dynamics of German political emotions, it is more useful to employ an alternative couplet: stigma and sacrifice. Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is too great to bear! Since you have banished me this day from the soil, and I must avoid Your presence and become a restless wanderer on earth—anyone who meets me may kill me!” The Lord said to him, “I promise, if anyone kills Cain, sevenfold vengeance shall be taken on him.” And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest anyone who met him should kill him. Cain left the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. 1