Repentance for the Holocaust

Front matter

signale modern german letters, cultures, and thought

Series editor: Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Cornell University

Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought publishes new English-language books in literary studies, criticism, cultural studies, and intellectual history pertaining to the German-speaking world, as well as translations of important German-language works. Signale construes “modern” in the broadest terms: the series covers topics ranging from the early modern period to the present. Signale books are published under a joint imprint of Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library in electronic and print formats. Please see http://signale.cornell.edu/.

Part I The Jewish Device of Repentance: From Individual

Divine-Human to Interhuman, Collective “Turning” 21 1. “Turning” in the God-Human Relationship (R1-R9) 25 2. Interhuman and Collective Repentance (R10-R14) 52.

Part II Mutual-Turning in German Vergangenheitsbewaltigung: Responses and Correspondence 81

3. “People, Not Devils” (P1) 83 4. “Fascism Was the Great Apostasy” (P2) 92 x Contents 5. “The French Must Love the German Spirit Now Entrusted to Them” (P3) 6. “One Cannot Speak of Injustice without Raising the Question of Guilt” (P4) 7. “You Won’t Believe How Thankful I Am for What You Have Said” (P5) 8. “Courage to Say No and Still More Courage to Say Yes” (P6) 9. “Raise Our Voice, Both Jews and Germans” (P7) 10. “The Appropriateness of Each Proposition Depends upon Who Utters It” (P8) 11. “Hitler Is in Ourselves, Too” (P9) 12. “I Am Germany” (P10) 13. “Know before Whom You Will Have to Give an Account” (P11) 14. “We Take Over the Guilt of the Fathers” (P12) 15. “Remember the Evil, but Do Not Forget the Good” (P13) 16. “We Are Not Authorized to Forgive” (P14) Conclusion Bibliography Index

140 157

168 184 200

217 235

262 290 318

329 349

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have come into being without the support of many. First and foremost, I would like to thank Wayne Cristaudo and C. Roland Vogt, for their enduring mentorship and friendship— even after my graduation from the University of Hong Kong. At Hong Kong Baptist University, I am indebted to Jean-Pierre Cabestan and H. Werner Hess, who gave me the opportunity to work at the European Union Academic Programme Hong Kong, where I finished the revision of the manuscript of this book.

The improvement of this work has benefited tremendously from the recommendations of the editorial board of Signale, Peter Uwe Hohendahl, the series editor, and the two anonymous readers. I am grateful for their thoughtful suggestions, and also for the encouragement of Kizer Walker, the managing editor of the series. To Marian Rogers, my copyeditor, I want to say a special word of thanks and admiration: her professionalism and dedication were humbling and heartening at the same time. I felt truly privileged to have worked with her on this project.

xii Acknowledgments

Previously, I profited greatly from the critiques of Christopher Hutton, Stefan Auer, and Dan Diner, former director of the Simon Dubnow Institute (SDI) at Leipzig University. I am particularly pleased that an article version of this book is included in the SDI Yearbook for 2015. Without the perseverance of Petra Klara Gamke-Breitschopf, the manuscript editor, I don’t think I would have come this far.

Above all, I thank my wife, Queenie, for her unfailing love and support. It has not been easy to have a husband who is regularly away “doing research” year after year, especially when with two daughters at home to take care of in addition to a full-time job. Had her yes been less unswerving at any point in the last ten years or so, I might have stopped somewhere midway. For this reason, my final thank-you goes to my mother-in-law, Vanessa, for stepping in when we most needed an extra pair of hands at home.

ASF BRD CDU DDR EKD GEI JNF

PRIME SPD

ABBREVIATIONS

Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (Action Reconciliation Service for Peace)

Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany)

Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (Christian Democratic Union of Germany) Deutsche Demokratische Republik (German Democratic Republic)

Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (Evangelical Church in Germany)

Georg-Eckert-Institut

Jewish National Fund

Peace Research Institute in the Middle East Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany)

xiv

TRC VgB

ZdJ

Abbreviations

South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

A convenient shorthand for Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past); not generally used in the literature

Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland (Central Council of Jews in Germany)

Introduction

The German Problem of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung

A national catastrophe, a physical and psychic collapse without parallel.

THomas Mann, 1945 Here then is a whole people in a state of spiritual ruin such as has never been known, perhaps, in the history of the world.?

VicTOR GOLLANCZ, 1946

This book develops the biblical idea of “turning” (tshuvah in Hebrew) into a conceptual framework to analyze a particular area of contemporary German history, often loosely referred to as “coming to terms with the past” (Vergangenheitsbewältigung in German, or VgB for short). It examines a selection of German responses to the

1. Thomas Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” in Thomas Mann’s Addresses Delivered at the Library of Congress, 1942-1949 (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2008), 64. See the use of this speech by Jean Améry to encourage the German youth in P14.

2. Victor Gollancz, Our Threatened Values (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946), 84.

Nazi past, their interaction with the victims’ responses, such as those of Jewish individuals,’ and their correspondence with biblical “repentance.” In demonstrating the victims’ influence on German responses, I argue that the latter can be better analyzed and understood as a “model for coping with the past” in a relational rather than national paradigm. By establishing the conformity between such responses and the idea of Umkehr/Buße tun, as tshuvah is invariably translated into German,* the book asserts that the religious texts from the “Old Testament” encapsulating this idea are viable intellectual resources for dialogues among victims, perpetrators, bystanders, and their later generations in the discussion of guilt and responsibility, justice and reparation, remembrance and reconciliation. It thus is perhaps one of the greatest ironies of the twentieth century, in which Nazi Germany had sought to eliminate each and every single Jew within its reach, that postwar Germans have relied on the Jewish device of repentance as a feasible way out of their unparalleled “national catastrophe” (Mann), their unprecedented “spiritual ruin” (Gollancz).

The controversial nature of the research materials in question necessitates a further clarification of the aims and limits of this study before we venture into the relevant literature, methodology, and structure of the book. First and foremost, this is neither

3. It does not belong to the scope of this study to delve into what constitutes “Jewishness.” When a certain idea is labeled or a certain personality is referred to as “Jewish” in this book, it is meant only to convey the fact that it is or can be perceived as Jewish (or to have perceived Jewish familial roots)—whether the basis of such perception is valid or not belongs to another inquiry. I would like to thank Sander Gilman for pointing me to this qualification. Nevertheless, given the overlapping meanings (i.e., ethnic, religious, cultural, etc.) of the term, and the Nazi perversion of it, a less-than-precise use of the word “Jewish” is bound to be problematic. My starting point for using it is the identity-legitimacy of the victim’s claim arising from Nazi German crimes, and my intention is to give credit (when extraordinary expressions of “turning” are recorded, for instance) where credit is due, rather than arriving at the bizarre situation where somebody was persecuted as a “Jew,” and then subsequently honored as a “Christian.”

4. In general, the Einheitsübersetzung (1980) tends to use Umkehr (umkehren) throughout the Bible, whereas the Lutherbibel (1984) shifts between it and Buße (tun) in the New Testament and Bekehrung (bekehren) in the “Old Testament.” Compare Jeremiah 31:19, 2 Kings 17:13, and Matthew 3:2.

affirmation nor negation of moral realities in postwar Germany; whether the responses analyzed bespeak real repentance or not exceeds the analytical purview of the researcher. Rather, this book recognizes its judgmental limits and bases its conclusions solely and consciously on what is “on the surface”: forms of expression and ways of argumentation that are—themselves belonging to observable realities nonetheless—open to interpretation by all.° Likewise, in documenting Jewish efforts of “turning” in correspondence with the biblical idea of “assisted” repentance (i.e., God helping the sinner repent, who is unable to transform himself if left alone), there is no intention—explicit or implicit—to suggest that Jewish victims were themselves guilty, hence “in need” of repentance vis-a-vis the Germans; “co-repentance” in this sense is categorically rejected by the author. Rather, when “mutual-turning” is spoken of in this study, it is meant to describe the process in which the victims, who did not need “turning,” turned nonetheless in aid of the turning of the wrongdoers, who needed it. It is to the explication of the multiple senses of turning (both biblical and historical) that this research dedicates itself. Neither a German nor a Jew, I do not see it as my “duty” to defend one or the other in their responses to the Shoah, or to “idealize” particular individuals, significant as their turning contributions might be. If there is something to defend in this book, it is the biblical notion of repentance, which is its core and organizing principle, as a viable blueprint for international reconciliation.

5. In this sense, my approach differs from that of Klaus Briegleb, who looks at the postwar German literary scene (Gruppe 47 in particular) and finds “contempt and taboo” when it comes to the encounter with Jews and Judaism after the Shoah. Making judgment on whether or how much a particular individual, group, or epoch has come to terms with the past is far from what this book is about. The existence of observable expression—rather than the lack of expected expression—is also important for my investigation, without which there is no correspondence to prove. See Klaus Briegleb, Mißachtung und Tabu: Eine Streitschrift zur Frage: ‘Wie antisemitisch war die Gruppe 47?’ (Berlin/Vienna: Philo, 2003).

4 Repentance for the Holocaust Il

While there is no lack of in-depth studies on German VgB, most of which were published in the last two decades or so,‘ relatively little has been done to explore the religious roots of this phenomenon, and nothing, so far as I could gather in the English and German languages, on the direct link between it and biblical repentance.’ Among the most prolific scholars on the phenomenon are Norbert Frei, Peter Reichel, and Constantin Goschler, whose works lay the basis for subsequent research on VgB in its political, juridical, and institutional dimensions, as well as with respect to reparation and artistic representation.’ There are also specific studies on key “episodes” or policy areas of coming to terms with the past, such as the Historikerstreit, in which the question and meaning of the singularity of the Holocaust were at stake.? The phenomenon

6. There are also VgB-dedicated monographs published before the 1990s, for example, Armin Mohler’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Von der Läuterung zur Manipulation (Stuttgart-Degerloch: Seewald, 1968); and Der Nasenring: Im Dickicht der Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Essen: Heitz & Höffkes, 1989). These, however, are in fact polemics against rather than factual analyses of VgB.

7. Though Konrad Jarausch ostensibly uses “repentance/turning” as the title for his narrative of German “transformations,” an idea he borrowed from Gustav Radbruch’s “Umkehr zur Humanität,” the religious contents of the concept are not explored, and hence no attempt is made to connect these to postwar “transformations.” See Konrad Jarausch, Die Umkehr: Deutsche Wandlungen 1945-1995 (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2004); Gustav Radbruch, “Die Erneuerung des Rechts,” in Rechtsphilosophie, ed. Arthur Kaufmann (Heidelberg: C. F. Müller Juristischer Verlag, 1990), 112. Likewise, Umkehr also appears throughout Werner Wertgen’s monograph on VgB, but it is not employed as the overarching analytical and organizational concept. See Werner Wertgen, Vergangenbheitsbewältigung: Interpretation und Verantwortung (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2001).

8. Norbert Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS- Vergangenheit (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 2003); Constantin Goschler, Schuld und Schulden: Die Politik der Wiedergutmachung fiir NS-Verfolgte seit 1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005); Peter Reichel, Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Deutschland: Die Auseinandersetzung mit der NS-Diktatur von 1945 bis heute (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001); Reichel, Erfundene Erinnerung: Weltkrieg und Judenmord in Film und Theater (Munich: Hanser, 2004).

9. Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Lily Gardner has attracted so much scholarly attention that it can already boast of having its own “dictionaries” and “lexicons.”'® Added to these are numerous comparative studies addressing the issues of disparity and transference in the intra-German, European, and interregional contexts.!!

In the existing works where religion takes center stage, focus tends to be restricted to how the German churches have or have not dealt with the Nazi legacy—or more precisely, the question of Christian guilt in the Nazi era—while at times offering “theological reflection” as a means of coming to terms with this past.'* In other words, these works present VgB in the domain of theology and religion as an institution, rather than analyzing the wider history of VgB through theological concepts. Aleida Assmann’s earlier intervention in tracing certain catchwords in VgB discourse to their biblical roots proves a rarity in the literature." Yet even she would later agree with Ulrike Jureit—who criticizes the religious intrusion into the “secular system” of coming to terms with the past'*—that

Feldman, Germany’s Foreign Policy of Reconciliation: From Enmity to Amity (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).

10. Torben Fischer and Matthias N. Lorenz, eds., Lexikon der ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ in Deutschland: Debatten- und Diskursgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus nach 1945 (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007); Thorsten Eitz and Georg Stötzel, Wörterbuch der ‘Vergangenheitsbewaltigung’: Die NS- Vergangenheit im öffentlichen Sprachgebrauch, vols. 1-2 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2007 and 2009).

11. See, among others, Annette Weinke, Die Verfolgung von NS-Tätern im geteilten Deutschland: Vergangenheitsbewaltigungen 1949-1969 oder: Eine deutsch-deutsche Beziehungsgeschichte im Kalten Krieg (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2002); Christoph Cornelißen, Lutz Klinkhammer, and Wolfgang Schwentker, eds., Erinnerungskulturen: Deutschland, Italien und Japan seit 1945 (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2004); and Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: Norton, 2000).

12. Lucia Scherzberg, ed., Theologie und Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme im interdisziplinären Vergleich (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2005); and Matthew Hockenos, A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).

13. Aleida Assmann and Ute Frevert, Geschichtsvergessenheit, Geschichtsversessenheit: Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach 1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1999), 54, 59-60, 80-81.

14. Ulrike Jureit and Christian Schneider, Gefühlte Opfer: Illusionen der Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2010), 42.

religious concepts, having no reference in the “secular-speaking area,” have no place in the vocabulary of remembrance culture (Erinnerungskultur).

Yet, as we shall see later and throughout the historical chapters in part 2 of this book, the religious vocabulary of sin and guilt, of atonement and repentance, has accompanied VgB as a historical process! from the very beginning. It is therefore questionable as a research practice and historiographical principle that certain materials and expressions are excluded at the outset from the subject matter simply because they don’t conform to a certain view of secularity and its relationship with the phenomenon.!” As Assmann herself concluded early on, “The entire concept of reconciliation (Versöhnung) through repentance (Buße) is only thinkable on the ground of a guilt culture (Schuldkultur).”'® It is argued here that the concept of repentance from the Hebrew Bible has indeed had a significant influence on the German process of facing the Nazi past. The historical records show that the notions of “turning” are

15. Aleida Assmann, Das neue Unbehagen an der Erinnerungskultur (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2013), 116. The point on which she disagrees with Jureit, though, is the latter’s conflation of victim-identification and victim-orientation, an objection also raised by Werner Konitzer, “Opferorientierung und Opferidentifizierung: Überlegungen zu einer begrifflichen Unterscheidung,” in Das Unbehagen an der Erinnerung: Wandlungsprozesse im Gedenken an den Holocaust, ed. Ulrike Jureit, Christian Schneider, and Margrit Fröhlich (Frankfurt a. M.: Brandes & Apsel, 2012).

16. As it is a heavily contested coinage, there have been no doubt various attempts at defining and periodizing Vergangenheitsbewaltigung by its proponents and opponents alike. On the conceptual history of the term, see Helmut König, Michael Kohlstruck, and Andreas Wöll, “Einleitung,” in Vergangenheitsbewältigung am Ende des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, ed. Helmut König, Michael Kohlstruck, and Andreas Wöll (Opladen/Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1998). On the different periodization models, see note 60 below.

17. One could only imagine the loss in research findings if, for example, the South African experience of coming to terms with the past were to be studied within exclusively secular frameworks, and theological inputs in the process itself were to be left out of consideration. On the comparability and utility of such experiences, see the conclusion in this book. On the theologically informed approach to the study of coming to terms with the past, see John Paul Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace Press, 1997).

18. Assmann and Frevert, Geschichtsvergessenheit, 91.

spiritual resources at the disposal of the victims and their descendants, who used them to help the perpetrators and their later generations arrive at insights that were otherwise inaccessible to them. This book seeks to acknowledge this extraordinary and indispensable assistance in understanding what it means “to turn,” and the corresponding willingness and openness to receive that assistance.

An early German volunteer at Aktion Sühnezeichen, an initiative based on the idea of “atonement” (Sühne),'” has documented how she came to know the Jewish meaning of “mercy” from her Hebrew teacher: “Jehuda explained to us that the word ‘mercy’ does not fully render the meaning of ‘chessed.’ Mercy is something that comes from God to us while we remain passive receivers. ‘Chessed’ means much more; it means ‘God’s solidarity’ with us. God stands by us. ‘One must not only receive chessed, but also do it,’ said Jehuda. ‘Only then will we know what it means.’ ”?° Another time she was “taught” in Israel by a “Chaverim” from America about what “repentance” means: ““You know what,’ Mats said, ‘you can’t run around in chains forever, just because your fathers are guilty. ... When a person realizes his guilt, the obvious thing for him to do is to learn and to repent (umkehren) and to better himself (sich bessern). . . . The first thing we wish from you Germans is not that you come here and speak about ‘atonement’ or ‘sign of atonement,’ but that Germany becomes another Germany because it has learned from the past. Then, what was hurtful to us will also become less hurtful.”?!

Needless to say, such views do not “represent” Jewish thinking in any quantitative sense. Yet they do touch upon, as I shall argue in this book, some of the fundamental tenets of biblical repentance: namely, the role of mercy in repentance, the sin of the fathers, and the possibility of renewal. Without the intellectual infrastructure, the “cultural ground” (Assmann) furnished by these ancient

19. See PS.

20. Christel Eckern, Die Straße nach Jerusalem: Ein Mitglied der ‘Aktion Sühnezeichen’ berichtet über Leben und Arbeit in Israel (Essen: Ludgerus-Verlag Hubert Wingen, 1962), 18 (emphasis added).

notions from the Bible, which at times of grave moral crises can be the only remaining recourse to argumentative legitimacy, the key questions of how a nation can come to terms with its past risk become intractable, or merely matters of personal taste. Can the past be “mastered” (bewältigt werden)? Can something be “made good again” (wiedergutgemacht) through reparation? If the names are logically false, can one still affirm their referents, or must these be rejected as based on “illusions”? With what “promise” or hope can those Germans engaging in VgB substantiate their claim that their words and deeds would contribute to their renewal as a people and to their reconciliation with their victims? Is it possible at all “after Auschwitz”? Without some form of preexisting “frames of meaning,”” shared by both the victims and the perpetrators (at least historical-culturally, not necessarily religious-ideologically, as was manifest in Nazi “Christian” theology), how can one answer these questions with a reasonable degree of satisfaction—that is, in a way that is acceptable to those who live within these frames?

II

In the immediate period around the time of military defeat in 1945, some German intellectuals both inside and outside the country were engaged in reflection on what was in store for their nation after Nazism. Ubiquitous in this reflection was the assessment that the existential crisis (the “German question/problem”) begotten by the twelve preceding years was of such a catastrophic proportion that only through a fundamental “returning”— whether it be to Germany’s religious roots, humanistic tradition, or Western democratic civilization—could postwar Germany have any hope of survival.

22. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 28.

23. See Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008).

Alfred Weber, in his Abschied von der bisherigen Geschichte (Farewell to Previous History),”* written before the war ended and published in Hamburg in 1946, called what was then still unfolding a “catastrophic historical collapse,” which in effect would seal the end of the history that had been led by European states up until then.” “The first great and fundamental sin (Sünde), which the West (Abendland) has committed against itself,” for which it had “to pay a high price,” was having erected a state system in which state behavior is placed “outside general morals,” “outside any effective idealistic supervision of actions,” as in the so-called moral-free state actions.*° Weber then proceeded to explore the “dogmatizing” tendencies in European history, culminating in the “nihilism” predominant in the epoch, which was allegedly the “deep cause” of the catastrophe. For him—the younger brother of Max Weber—the way forward was “to organize Europe and especially its German center on a free democratic basis that represents human dignity and humanity.”?’ The German people must engage in self-education for self-renewal and self-transformation, by returning to the “undogmatic European prototypes (Vorgestalten).””° “That is what we need. Here lies our future.””?

Carl-Hermann Mueller-Graaf (a.k.a. Constantin Silens) concurred with Weber that the age in which “Europe was the head and the lord of the world” was coming to end. But in his 1946 book, Irrweg und Umkehr (Misguided Path and Repentance), Silens focused on what he called the “German problem” instead of “Europeanizing” it.’”' For him, who professed to belong to “that Christian and conservative Germany,” “the great German guilt (deutsche Schuld), the guilt of many decades, is the turning away

24. Alfred Weber, Abschied von der bisherigen Geschichte: Uberwindung des Nihilismus? (Hamburg: Claaßen und Goverts Verlag, 1946).

30. Constantin Silens, Irrweg und Umkehr (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1946), 245.

(Abwendung) from the Christianness of the West (Christlichkeit des Abendlandes),” turning instead to Darwin, Nietzsche, and Spengler, the “true misleaders.”*? As such, the Germans, who “are guilty of our fate,” must do repentance, “not repentance (Buße) in the sense of worldly revenge. . . [but] repentance in the great sense of Christianity, which means realization (Erkenntnis) and confession (Bekenntnis) of the wrong done,” “repentance as regretful (reuig) realization of one’s own evil.” “They must understand that they need a truthful response before God and for their own sake, so that they break a better path to their children’s future, better than the one that has led them to today’s misery.”** Without the spiritual outlook derived from the “spirit of Christian regard for the neighbor,” the author—an official in trade and economic affairs both during and after the Nazi years**—was convinced that “there can be no German future.” 36

Silens, a Lutheran, could easily find a cohort in other German Christians of his time, such as Johannes Hessen, a Catholic theologian. Hessen held a series of public lectures in the winter semester of 1945-46 at the University of Cologne, where he taught philosophy, musing about “reconstruction” (Wiederaufbau) of postwar Germany in different spheres, from science to law to religion. He found no more fitting description of the destruction he witnessed in the Germany of 1945 than the first verse from the book of Lamentations, traditionally attributed to the prophet Jeremiah: “Wandering through the ruins of our great cities, one wants to join in the lament of the prophet: ‘How forlorn the city lies, once full of folks.’ ”3” Yet, Hessen immediately added, “worse than the material is the intellectual devastation (geistige Verwiistung) of Germany. ... National Socialism has proved to be... an assassination

34. Ibid.

35. See Matthias Pape, “Mueller-Graaf, Carl-Hermann,” Neue Deutsche Biographie 18 (1997): 497-98.

36. Silens, Irrweg und Umkehr, 10.

37. Johannes Hessen, Der geistige Wiederaufbau Deutschlands: Reden tiber die Erneuerung des deutschen Geisteslebens (Stuttgart: August Schröder Verlag, 1946), 10.

of all intellectual culture.”’® Like Silens, he advocated the avowal of German guilt, of a “common guilt” (Gemeinschuld), in order to work together toward the “intellectual-ethical rebirth of our people”: “In the final analysis, we have all become guilty. . . . There is not only guilt of the individual, there is also guilt of the community (Schuld der Gemeinschaft). Since we belong to the people, whose leadership has unleashed this war and with it brought unspeakable suffering and misery to humanity, each of us has after all become guilty before humanity and before God.”*? He presented Nazism (especially Alfred Rosenberg’s racial theory) as an antithesis to Christianity and proposed “reconstruction in the religious sphere” following the prophetic path of individual Christians like Martin Niemöller and Clemens August Graf von Galen.*°

Beyond the intellectual-ethical “reconstruction,” a distinguished economist of his time, Wilhelm Röpke, proposed “revolutions” in the political and socioeconomic spheres. Though also for him, these revolutions were dependent on the “moral revolution, just as the German question is always in essence an intellectual-moral one.”*! The threefold revolution was deemed a necessary undertaking after the “physical, political, and moral suicide (Selbstmord)” of the Germans, “a tragedy without parallel in history, a real tragedy, in which guilt and fate are enchained to one another.” * Now that the Germans had become a pariah Volk, “odium generis humani,” “one of the most problematic, most complicated, and most hated peoples,” “one of the worst wellsprings of infection (Ansteckungsherd),”* “it is the hour of ‘regret (Reue) and rebirth

(Wiedergeburt), of which the German philosopher Max Scheler had spoken after the First World War.”*' The German people as a

38. Ibid.

41. Wilhelm Röpke, Die deutsche Frage (Erlenbach-Zurich: Eugen Rentsch, 1945), 222.

44. Ibid., 222. See Max Scheler’s essay, “Reue und Wiedergeburt,” in Vom Ewigen im Menschen, vol. 1, Religidse Erneuerung (Leipzig: Der Neue Geist, 1921), 5-58.

whole, said Röpke, “will not commit suicide, but repent (umkehren), if he is shown the way back.”® The professor of economics, who had been “retired” in 1933 for being a Nazi opponent, pleaded with his Swiss readers to “nurture the delightful first signs of repentance (Umkehr) of German intellectuals,” so that one might eventually really speak of “Germany’s rebirth.” 46

Without going any further into the early primary German responses to the “catastrophe” of the long decade of Nazi Germany, one can already see from the brief survey above the prolific use of the theologically charged terms “sin,” “guilt,” and “repentance” to perceive, analyze, and to propose solutions to the “German problem.”*” Though one might disagree with their diagnoses—for instance, would an unqualified returning to Christianity be a sufficient “German repentance” when the German churches themselves were by and large compromised?** Would a mere returning to the democratic West be a satisfactory answer to the millions of victims of Nazism, many of whom were from or still in the then undemocratic East?*? On the other hand, European Jewish intellectuals were also engaging in reflection on whether and how “Jewish remnants” should help Germans attain the “moral renewal” they desperately needed, from remaining in postwar Germany to exercise justice (Eugen Kogon) to leaving for Palestine to establish a model civilized state (Hans Klee).°° Irrespective of the actual validity of these, their act of employing biblical concepts to communicate with one another is a historical fact and, insofar as it is continual, a social phenomenon that is itself a legitimate object

45. Ropke, Deutsche Frage, 224.

47. There is certainly much to explore between biblical notions and German thought, above and beyond the contemporary problem of coming to terms with the past. See, for example, Daniel Purdy, On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought, Signale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library, 2011).

48. See more on this problem in P2.

of phenomenological investigation.” The results will show, inter alia, that the broader discourses went actually much further than just (re)turning to Christianity and democracy: whereas an aspect of Nazism was to cut Christianity from its Jewish roots, postwar Christian reflection in Germany was characterized by its returning to this foundation through using scriptures from the “Old Testament” in VgB sermons, and opening itself to Talmudic sources and Jewish voices in general.** Postwar political reform also went way beyond building democratic structure and culture to cultivating individual concern for the suffering of the others, based on the biblical idea of the “new heart” of vulnerability.”

IV

Without some substantial basis for evaluating the discourse on “(re)turning,” it would seem that all proposals have equal validity, which certainly is not the case.’ Yet, “turning” in the Bible is not an empty concept: not all turnings or returnings are repentant turnings.” This book begins therefore with an exploration of the idea

51. Husserl points us to the phenomena of subjects and intersubjectivity—not as merely psychological-natural objects, but in relation to the Lebenswelt, that pregiven, preexisting “ground” on which potentialities and possibilities in theory and praxis stand—as a new field of science toward which philosophy should strive, as phenomenology. My work can be considered as phenomenological investigation insofar as it looks at and seeks to describe that “pregiven, preexisting ground,” that source of “selbstverstandliche Evidenz” (what I call intellectual infrastructure), on which Germans and Jews could think, talk, act, and judge about how to deal with the aftermath of the Shoah. In this sense, this book presupposes that the biblical concept of repentance is a constituent part of that Lebenswelt in which both perpetrators and victims find themselves.