The Justification of the Godless: Heinrich Vogel and German Guilt

Abstract

Guilt has proved an irresistible category for making and interpreting the twentieth-century history of which Germany has been the focus. In that history individuals, organizations, and nations have become guilty. The history of guilt is not made by the wrongdoers alone, but also by those who judge them. Doing wrong and being moralistic often have an evil symbiosis in individuals and communities. Guilt has not always been accurately allocated, and accusations of guilt have been manipulated for political purposes so producing more complex evil. There was guilt for the First World War, but it was untruthfully imposed on Germany alone by Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty. Within Germany, assigning guilt to political opponents, while refusing to accept any responsibility for what had happened, intensified the divisions within the nation and ensured that its policies were inspired by inward as well as outward enmity and unreality. The theologian H. J. Iwand argued in 1954 that the Nazis had taken the Freund-Feind conception of politics to absurdity, blaming (versündigt) the Left for all that happened after 1918. Consequently, Iwand judged the nationalist front in the Weimar Republic to have represented die organisierte Unbussfertigkeit of the German people. Too late, after 1945, it had become politically clear to many, but not to all, that complex historical guilt must be met by a complex response lest its power escalate yet again beyond the control of truth, understanding, and humanity.