| Abstract | The fact that the idea of moral guilt led to the most controversy is no coincidence. The notion of moral guilt shared by the Germans as Germans ends up in a twilight zone, located somewhere between a layer of an apparently judicial nature and a collective feeling beyond juridical control.(6) In relation to the subject of Jaspers' essay -- the impact of guilt discourse on the collective consciousness of the Germans -- this kind of guilt may well be the most relevant. It seems to correspond in its effect to the historical and cultural-anthropological category of remembrance -- what the Germans call Gedächtnis. This "moral guilt," which [Karl Jaspers] himself did not consider objectifiable, needs to be located in the context of what he characterized as überlieferung -- "transmission" or "tradition." He thus wrote that "it is not the liability of a national but the concern of one who shares the life of the German spirit and soul -- who is of one tongue, one stock, one fate with all the others -- which here comes to cause, not as tangible guilt, but somehow analogous to co-responsibility." Jaspers could thus "feel co-responsible for what Germans do and have done" -- "in a way which is rationally not conceivable, which is even rationally refutable."(7) He thereby revealed himself in the eyes of his opponents as an advocate of a legally inapplicable collective guilt: the very accusation, so to say, that the philosopher originally wanted to ward off in his essay.
It is therefore evident that each respective affiliation with a collective linked to the Holocaust -- perpetrators and victimsm -- leaves its mark on the choice of approach to its historical representation. The "German" Holocaust memory thus tends to foreground the circumstances leading to the crime; the "Jewish" memory is concerned with the motives that informed it. Likewise, researchers who lack any direct or indirect affiliation to the collectives involved with the crime tend to universalize its meaning.(15) In order to demonstrate what homo sapiens is capable of doing, these researchers will stress the "human" -- read: universal -- phenomena that can be observed in connection with the crime. Such an anthropologization of the Holocaust by forms of memory removed from the event results in focusing on the presumably omnipresent possibility of crimes against humanity rather than on the past reality that transpired. In this manner, the branch of scholarship that has gradually established itself as "genocide studies" has converged significantly with the epistemological tendency corresponding to "German" memory. Here as well, the universalist claims of the how are preferred as an object of study to the particularist claims of the who. In effect, the basic question of "why us?" posed by the group of victims seems primarily reserved for Jewish memory: for the memory of those directly affected by the crime.
The attempt to depict the Jewish Holocaust as a case of "ethnic cleansing" that ran out of control eradicates the Holocaust's specificity. What remains are general and generalizable universalist insights, which indeed have certain gratifying implications in that they relieve the oppressive weight of guilt. What is more, the phenomenon of "ethnic cleansing" allows the Germans to perceive themselves also as victims, since they indeed suffered expulsions that resulted in a huge number of deaths.(20) They too have their tale of suffering to tell -- the bombing victims, the abducted members of the Wehrmacht, the rapes at the end of the war.(21) But, they lament, this history cannot be expressed, for the constant reference to "Auschwitz" denies the Germans the "right to a hearing" that befits their suffering.(22) This allegedly suppressed history seems to be just awaiting its narrators.(23) Meanwhile, the different national narratives based on different memories are displaced to the discourse of the Holocaust, where questions of guilt, suffering and pain are endlessly negotiated.
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