Collective Responsibility

Jodie Hemerda
February 25, 2003

When unthinkable acts against humanity are perpetrated by your government, are you responsible? Andrew Schaap’s brilliantly written article “Guilty Subjects and Political Responsibility: Arendt, Jaspers and the Resonance of the ‘German Question’ in Politics of Reconciliation” examines the responses of Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers to this complex question. Jaspers, a German philosopher whose work influenced modern theology and psychiatry as well as philosophy, wrote The German Question.  A German-born American political scientist most noted for her writings on totalitarianism, Arendt critiqued Jaspers’ influential text’s philosophy. The significance of Schaap’s writing as the United States readies for a war against Iraq resonates loudly. As an American trying to grasp my country’s resoluteness in such an unnecessary war, this article’s discussion of collective responsibility deeply troubles me.

 The majority of residents of Germany during the late 1930s and 1940s resoundingly cry foul at the notion of collective responsibility. They claim ignorance of Hitler’s atrocities even in the midst of: numerous concentration camps scattered throughout their country, “the slave labor used extensivel

in the German Industry and Farming,” and “German Propaganda and mass media” bragging about the burning of synagogues (Kimel, 1997, 2). According to Alexander Kimel, a holocaust survivor, “they chose to deny the knowledge and remain silent” (1997, 2). That choice sealed their responsibility to their society.

 Schaap’s paper compares Arendt and Jaspers’ ideas of how best to reconcile the burden of a people after an atrocity like the Holocaust. Both philosophers believe that the people are responsible.

They agree that, by virtue of their membership in a political community, all citizens are indeed collectively responsible for reparations to those wronged by the state. This liability, however, does not imply moral blame since such political responsibility is imputable on the bases of association rather than the actions and intentions of each person. (Schaap, 2001, 750)

 Arendt and Jaspers make an important distinction between blame and responsibility. Blame implies intent, whereas responsibility refers to the liability of your position in society. As a citizen your duty involves taking action against leaders, like Hitler, who commit crimes against humanity.

 A Jasperian account of collective responsibility based on sympathetic identification is closely associated with a restorative conception of political reconciliation in which private and public moralities tend to be conflated. The politics of authentic self-expression that such a conflation leads to threatens an abandonment of political responsibility by guilty subjects. (Schaap, 2000, 750)

 To remedy the wrongs of the state, “Jaspers’ principal concern is to facilitate the ‘moral and political self-clarification’ of his co-nationals” (Schaap, 2000, 751). Jaspers advocates prosecution of war criminals, but feels that the people must also be held accountable to their role as citizens of the offending state. “But the deeper process of purification that Jaspers advocates depends of the realization of moral and metaphysical guilt by ordinary Germans in communication with one another” (Schaap, 2000, 751). Jaspers believes that this recognition of guilt by the masses will lead “to a transformation of human self-consciousness before God’” (Schaap, 2001, 751). Schaap appropriately questions the lack of political responsibility in Jaspers’ process which may lead to self-realization, but fails to bring about any other real consequence.

 Arendt argues that “acknowledgement of collective guilt … actually amounts to a plea of personal and political irresponsibility” (Schaap, 2000, 752). Everyone pleading guilty has the unfortunate effect of making no one responsible. Arendt feels strongly that “it was precisely a widespread abdication of moral and political responsibility that made the death camps possible” (Schaap, 2000, 752). Arendt identifies bureaucracy and ideology as obstacles of political responsibility. Where bureaucracies encourage efficient job function, ideologies attribute outcomes to phenomena of history or nature. Both lead to an “abdication of political responsibility [which] enabled ‘normal’ individuals like Adolf Eichmann to become functionaries in the Nazi regime” (Schaap, 2000, 753). By claiming that they were just doing their job or that they were only one person in a movement of millions, allows the German people to separate the personal from their political involvement.  

Arendt’s ideal citizen publicly engages with diverse others to disclose a common reality from a plurality of perspectives, to disclose her unique identity through public speech and action and to accord dignity to other citizens through mutual recognition of each other as members of a common world. (Schaap, 2000, 753)

 This belief lives in today’s deep democracy movement which encourages open and honest debate, embraces the voice of dissention, and truly celebrates the diverse opinions of the people.

Deeply understood, the democratic ideal is a normative guide for the development of diversity-respecting unity in habits of the heart that are shaped and corrected by reflective inquiry. Such ideal-guided democratic deepening in habits of the heart is a necessary concomitant to democratic institutional evolution within our increasingly globalized, highly vulnerable, shared social life. (Green, 1999, ix)

 Applying Jaspers and Arendt’s philosophy to the reconciliation efforts in Germany brings theory into practice. Many critics of Jaspers fault his The German Question “to the apparent failure in post-war Germany to openly and genuinely reckon with the past” (Schaap, 2000, 755). For him, the solution to healing the country relied on purification of the soul which would lead to a transformation of the people. Arendt found “the sentiment of guilt detrimental to the realization of political freedom” (Schaap, 2000, 756).

Arendt (1950, p.342) was appalled by what she describes as ‘a deep-rooted, stubborn, and at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened’ among the populace… ‘Those young men and women who every once in a while … treat us to hysterical outbreaks of guilt feelings are not staggering under the burden of the past, their fathers’ guilt; rather they are trying to escape from the pressure of very present and actual problems into a cheap sentimentality (EJ, p.251). (Schaap, 2001, 756)

 Arendt felt that authentic political action and judgement would move the people to act and judge with openness for the sake of their world and love of it. Indignation and a movement toward change would have been better responses to healing post-war Germany than Jaspers’ guilt and incurring public lamentation.

 The defining difference between Arendt and Jaspers theories of reconciliation comes down to saving the soul or the world. Though Schaap further details the distinction between these theorists on this particular subject, his support for Arendt holds steady as he concludes:

While the outcome of an agonistic reconciliation [Arendt’s theory] can not be predetermined nor foreseen, a common sense of a shared reality ought to emerge out of a diverse polity. For the sake of the world in which wrongs were perpetrated, political responsibility enjoins us, in this sense, to ‘know precisely what was, and to endure this knowledge, and then to wait and see what comes of knowing and enduring’ (MDT, p. 20). (Schaap, 2000, 763)

Today, decades after the passing of Jaspers and Arendt, Rwandans face their actions during the 1994 genocide and work towards reconciliation amongst themselves. In addition to prosecutions in a war court, Rwanda’s reconciliation process involves the Gacacas Court.

An indepth review of the situation revealed that a judicial system that ensures active participation of the community in the process of investigation of accusations and sentencing of culprits could be a viable option to the classical judicial system. Thus, the gacaca judicial system evolved, and the Gacaca law became one of the ways to help Rwandans gain justice. Gacaca jurisdictions will be set up at the different administrative levels, starting from the cellule to the secteur, the commune and the préfecture. The Gacaca law regulates the functioning of the gacaca jurisdictions. It defines how people register, nominate and vote for gacaca tribunal judges and explains the role and responsibility of the gacaca tribunal at each administrative level. The important aspect of the Gacaca law is that it removes most of the genocide trials from the classical judicial system. (Gabisirege and Babalola, 2001, 1) 

Rwandan President Paul Kagame announced that “Gacaca was established to put an end to the culture of impunity, to find out the truth about what happened during the genocide and to bring about reconciliation on the basis of justice” (Kampala, 2003). In this forum, victims stand before a group of people, including the perpetrator, and vent their grievances. The group then discusses how best to remedy the misdeeds of the past. In Rwanda, this often involves neighbors accusing neighbors, teachers accusing students, and so forth. Though only time will judge the success of this process, this community’s effort to openly come to terms with its past to address and rectify the crimes of the genocide offers a real chance for a peaceful tomorrow. As Arendt would surely agree, if left to simmer below the surface, the grievances of Rwanda would eventually boil over and the victims would violently rise up against their perpetrators and begin the cycle of violence once more.

 Rwandans should be commended for their valiant effort toward reconciliation. Ignoring, denying, or justifying their crimes against humanity like those in Germany where justice included public trials of political leaders, but not the people who ran the camps, turned in Jews, drove the trains, or used slave labor has led most Germans to appear arrogant in their impunity. Similar consequences are evident in the United States in relations with the Native Americans and Blacks. Rather than continuing with the tradition of addressing the wrongs of the government, discrimination has been run underground with the emergence of a “politically correct” society. The penalties of such remain to be seen, though the rioting after the Rodney King trials indicates continued strained racial tensions.

 As the United States stands poised to attack Iraq, Arendt’s ideas of openness mixed with today’s deep democracy offer diplomatic solutions before the necessity of reconciliation with a post-war nation. As 160,000 U.S. soldiers arrive in the Middle East, responsibility lies with every American citizen. If war comes, if thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians die, if the United States falls under a retaliatory attack, the blame falls on the people, not just those in Washington who we elected. I refuse to ignore, deny or justify. I do know and voice out against the injustices my country plans to commit, but I fear war will come regardless. When my country bombs Iraq and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis perish, I am responsible.

Full Quotation from Kimel

Eugene Kogon, a former Buchenwald prisoner, later Professor of Political Science at the University of Munich commented on the German participation in his book “Der S.S. Staat (The Theory and Practice of Hell):

…and yet, there wasn’t even one German who did not know of the camps’ existence or who believed they were sanatoriums. There were very few Germans who did not have a relative or an acquaintance in camp, or who did not know, at least, that such one or another had been sent to a camp. All the Germans had been witnesses to the multiform anti-Semitic barbarity. Millions of them been had been present – with indifference or with curiosity, with contempt or down right malign joy – at the burning of synagogues or humiliation of Jews and Jewesses forced to kneel in the street mud.

 Not a single German could have been unaware of the fact that the prisons were full to overflowing, and that executions were taking place continually all over the country. Thousands of magistrates and police functionaries, lawyers, priests and social workers knew generically that the situation is grave. Many businessman who dealt with the camp L.L. men as suppliers, the industrialists who asked the administrative and economic offices of the S.S. for slave-laborers, the clerks in those offices, all knew perfectly well that many of the big firms were exploiting slave labor. Quite a few workers performed their tasks near concentration camps or actually inside them. Various university professors collaborated with the medical research centers instituted by Himmler, and various State doctors and doctors connected with private institutes collaborated with professional murderers. A good many members of military aviation had been transferred to S.S. jurisdiction and must have known what went on there. Many high-ranking army officers knew about the mass murders of the Russian prisoners of war in the camps, and even more soldiers and members of

the Military Police must have known exactly what terrifying horrors were being perpetrated in the camps, the ghettos, the cities, and the countryside of the occupied eastern territories. Can you say that even one of these statements is false?

 In my opinion, none of these statements is false, but one other must be added to complete the picture: in spite of the varied possibilities for information, most Germans did not know because they didn’t want to know. Because, indeed, they wanted not to know. It is certainly true that State terrorism is a very strong weapon, very difficult to resist. But it is also true that the German people, as a whole, did not even try to resist. In Hitler’s Germany a particular code was widespread: those who did not talk; those who did not know did not asked questions; those who did not asked questions received no answered. In this way the typical German citizen won and defended his ignorance, which seemed to him sufficient justification of his adherence to Nazism. Shutting his mouth, his eyes and ears, and accomplice to the things taking place in front of his very door.

 

Knowing and making things known was one way (basically then not all that dangerous) of keeping one’s distance from Nazism. I think the German people, on the whole, did not seek this recourse, and I hold them fully culpable of this deliberated omission.