What responsibility do ordinarypeople bear for atrocities com-mitted in their names? According

to modern democratic sensibilities, respon-sibility is an individual affair. The idea, as inExodus (20:5), that the sins of the fatherscould be delivered unto the third and fourthgenerations goes against the grain. It seemsto be part of the collectivistic thinking thatcharacterizes modernity off its rails, a pre-modern remain that produces outbursts ofracism, nationalism, and genocide. That isnot to say that we are not interested inaccountability for political crimes. Interna-tional human rights entrepreneurs havepressed for holding dictators accountableand have supported efforts to obtain repara-tions and other forms of redress. But we arevery careful to avoid charges of “collectiveguilt,” which often sound more like theproblem than the solution. We don’t want tostart a culture war or clash of civilizations!

The fount of most contemporary think-ing about collective guilt, of course, is thecase of Germany in World War II. Indeed, avibrant discourse about collective guilt—consisting mostly of defenses against it—has been a significant feature of postwar

German identity, and has provided con-temporary discussions with a central pointof reference as well as a body of terms andconcepts. During the war, the anti-Nazicoalition demanded nothing less than“unconditional surrender,” and U.S. presi-dent Franklin Roosevelt represented acommon sentiment when he denied thatone could draw a sharp distinction betweenthe German people and the Nazi regime. Atthe beginning of the occupation, local mil-itary authorities created poster displays outof pictures from concentration camps, andcaptioned them with statements like“These Atrocities: Your Fault!” (DieseSchandtaten: Eure Schuld!). On the onehand, “collective guilt” was not the officialpolicy of the conquerors, and indeed ChiefProsecutor Robert Jackson rejected suchnotions in his opening statement at theNuremberg Tribunal:

We would also make clear that we have nopurpose to incriminate the whole Germanpeople. . . . If the German populace had will-ingly accepted the Nazi program, no stormtroopers would have been needed in the earlydays of the Party and there would have beenno need for concentration camps or theGestapo. . . . The German, no less than the non-

109

The Guilt of Nations?Jeffrey K. Olick

On the Natural History of Destruction, W. G. Sebald, trans. Anthea Bell(New York: Random House, 2003), 224 pp., $23.95 cloth.

Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration, Norbert Frei, trans. Joel Golb (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 2002), 365 pp., $35 cloth.

Romantics at War: Glory and Guilt in the Age of Terrorism, George P. Fletcher(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 272 pp., $24.95 cloth.

Reprinted from Ethics & International Affairs 17, no. 2.© 2003 Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs.

German world, has accounts to settle withthese defendants.1

On the other hand, Nazi propaganda duringthe war had made the most out of the demandfor unconditional surrender, out of Ger-manophobic public discourse in the UnitedStates and Britain, and especially out of the so-called Morgenthau Plan, which called fordestruction of all industry in the Ruhr andSaar regions, among other drastic measures, asthe only way to prevent a resurgence of Ger-man aggression. After the war, Germans thusreacted to any hint of collective guilt imputa-tions—sometimes even imagining them whenthey did not exist—with vigorous denials.

Illustrative here is the debate over theargument of the Swiss psychoanalyst CarlJung, who is usually credited with introduc-ing the term “collective guilt” (Kollek-tivschuld) into the German discourse. InFebruary of 1945 Jung gave an interview to aZurich newspaper in which he stated that“the popular sentimental distinctionbetween Nazis and opponents of the regime”was psychologically illegitimate. In an essaypublished shortly thereafter meant to clarifyhis inflammatory statements, Jung arguedthat all Germans were either actively or pas-sively, consciously or unconsciously, partici-pants in the atrocities, that the “collectiveguilt” of the Germans was “for psychologistsa fact, and it will be one of the most impor-tant tasks of therapy to bring the Germans torecognize this guilt.”2 As a psychiatrist, Jungbelieved that “without guilt, unfortunately,there can be no psychic maturation and nowidening of the spiritual horizon.”3

Central to Jung’s argument was his dis-tinction between psychological guilt andmoral or criminal guilt: “The psychologicaluse of the word ‘guilt’ should not be con-fused with guilt in the legal or moral sense.”There was a difference, he argued, between

objective and subjective guilt: “Guilt,” heinsisted, “can be restricted to the lawbreakeronly from the legal, moral, and intellectualpoint of view, but as a psychic phenomenonit spreads itself over the whole neighbor-hood. A house, a family, even a village wherea murder has been committed,” Jung argued,“feels the psychological guilt and is made tofeel it by the outside world.”4 His point is tounderstand the ways in which one can feelbadly for an act that one has not in fact com-mitted, both because no one can honestlyclaim never to have had a bad motive andbecause one is always stained by the veryproximity to its realization. Collective guilt,Jung thus argued, is “a state of magicaluncleanliness,”but it is also “a very real fact.”5

For Jung’s German interlocutors, how-ever, such subtle distinctions were not rele-vant. What they heard was “You are guilty.”This was a particular affront to those whocalled themselves “inner emigrants”—thoseliterary and political figures who hadremained in Germany but not supportedthe regime—for whom collective guiltappeared a much more serious charge thanindividual guilt, since they could not beaccused of the latter. The most significantresponse to Jung was by Erich Kaestner, arenowned children’s book author who wasworking for the U.S. Army’s German news-paper, Die Neue Zeitung. For Kaestner,Jung’s attack was yet one more blow to theinner emigrants, who had “for twelve longyears resisted the greatest malice,” and had

110 Jeffrey K. Olick

1 Quoted in Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nurem-berg Trials: A Personal Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1992),p. 168.2 Carl G. Jung,“After the Catastrophe,” in Essays on Con-temporary Events: The Psychology of Nazism, trans.R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1989), p. 72.3 Ibid., p. 72.4 Ibid., p. 51.5 Ibid., p. 53

now dared “to count on a bit of consolationand help, encouragement and sympathy.”6

For Kaestner, any imputation of guiltbeyond the criminal risked placing him incommunity with the Nazis when he andothers had already paid a tremendous priceto maintain that distinction; thus both anaccusation that he shares in this objectivelyor a diagnosis that he must feel guilty forhaving been present at the scene of thecrime is unacceptable to him. For Kaestner,it sounded as if Jung “had swallowed thetrumpet of final judgment.”7

IF THERE IS SOMETHING to Jung’s claims thatcollective guilt is a very real state of magicaluncleanliness, however, one should expectcollective guilt to have had profound effectson German culture, and can interpret Kaest-ner as manifesting the symptoms of repres-sion. Indeed, exactly such a claim is centralto a 1997 lecture by the novelist and critic W.G. Sebald, “Air War and Literature,” whichSebald delivered in Zurich shortly before hisdeath in an auto accident. The lectureappears as the anchor piece along withessays on the writers Alfred Andersch, JeanAmery, and Peter Weiss in English in a booktitled On the Natural History of Destruction.Sebald’s topic is the putative German repres-sion of the past in the 1950s, and in manyways his account is redolent not only of Jungbut of Margarete and Alexander Mitscher-lich’s landmark 1967 book, The Inability toMourn. The Mitscherlichs had argued thatGermans suffered from what they termed a“successful defense against melancholia.”Melancholia would have resulted from nor-mal mourning of their lost leader, whoembodied, according to the Mitscherlichs, a“collective ego-ideal” and “narcissisticobject.” But acknowledging that Hitler was alost source of positive feelings, the Mitscher-lichs argued, would have compromised Ger-

mans’ “intense defense against guilt, shame,and anxiety, a defense which was achievedby the withdrawal of previously powerfullibidinal cathexes.” Instead of confrontingtheir past, Germans thus “de-realized” it andthrew themselves into reconstruction, as iferasing the physical remains of the destruc-tion that they brought on themselves couldalleviate their guilt for having done so.According to the Mitscherlichs, moreover,this led to “a striking emotional rigidity”when Germans were confronted with thesuffering they had caused for others. Allthese are aftereffects of unacknowledgedcollective guilt.8

Where the Mitscherlichs began withrepressed love for the führer, Sebald beginswith what he claims is the repressed mem-ory of the air war against German cities.“[T]he sense of unparalleled nationalhumiliation arising from the destruction ofthe German cities and the horrors of thebombing nights,” Sebald claims, “neverreally found verbal expression . . . thosedirectly affected by the experience neithershared it with each other nor passed it on tothe next generation.”9 Sebald grew up, hewrites, with the sense that something wasbeing kept from him. Responsibility for thissilence Sebald lays at the feet of Germany’swriters, who, he argues, are duty-bound “tokeep the nation’s collective memory alive.”Instead, he charges, “if those born after thewar were to rely solely on the testimony ofwriters, they would scarcely be able to form

the guilt of nations? 111

6 Erich Kaestner, “Splitter und Balken,” in Splitter undBalken: Publizistik (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1998),p. 520.7 Ibid., p. 521.8 Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability toMourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, trans. Beverley R.Placzek (New York: Grove Press, 1975 [1967]),pp.23–24,28.9 W.G.Sebald,On the Natural History of Destruction, trans.Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2003), p. viii.

any idea of the extent, nature, and conse-quences of the catastrophe inflicted on Ger-many by the air raids.”10

Sebald is particularly concerned with thewriters of the “inner emigration,” for whomhe has little sympathy, though more becauseof their failings after 1945 than before. Oneof the central claims made on behalf of theinner emigrants was that they had stayed inGermany out of a felt duty to bear witness tothe suffering under the Nazi regime. Butwhere was the evidence of that witnessing?“What little has been recorded in literature,in terms of both quantity and quality,”Sebald writes, “stands in no relation to theextreme experiences of the time.”11 The rea-son for this is that these writers, in Sebald’sview, were more concerned with reworkingtheir own self-images and legacies than withconfronting difficult reality: “The worksproduced by German authors after the warare often marked by a half-consciousness orfalse consciousness designed to consolidatethe extremely precarious position of thosewriters in a society that was morally almostentirely discredited.” As a result, he laments,“No one has written the great German epicof the wartime and postwar periods.”12

This argument, Sebald claims, wasdesigned to invite critics to provide literarycounterexamples he had overlooked. But noone, Sebald claims in his afterword, suc-ceeded in doing so. However, this defenseplays down the wider range of his indict-ment, for Sebald does not limit his charge tothe writers, though their failure to meetwhat he sees as a special responsibility irkshim particularly much. Indeed, quite alongthe lines of Jung and the Mitscherlichs,Sebald diagnoses a more general syndromeof which the writers are only an especiallylamentable example. He describes a peculiarobliviousness of ordinary people to thedestruction around them as they went about

rebuilding their lives. “The destruction,” hewrites, “on a scale without historical prece-dent, [thus] entered the annals of the nation,as it set about rebuilding itself, only in theform of vague generalizations. It seems tohave left scarcely a trace of pain behind inthe collective consciousness, it has beenlargely obliterated from the retrospectiveunderstanding of those affected, and it neverplayed any appreciable part in the discussionof the internal constitution of our coun-try.”13 His claims are thus much wider in ref-erence than to literature. And here hesounds very much like the Mitscherlichs:“The new Federal German society,” heargues, “relegated the experiences of its ownprehistory to the back of its mind and devel-oped an almost perfectly functioning mech-anism of repression, one which allowed it torecognize the fact of its own rise from totaldegradation while disengaging from itsstock of emotions.”14

There are, however, some important dif-ferences between Sebald’s account and thatof The Inability to Mourn. Indeed, Sebaldchallenges important myths of the ’68ergeneration, for whom the Mitscherlichs’charges against the Federal Republic’sfounders were so important. In his essay onAlfred Andersch, for instance, Sebald dis-covers a continuity not between Nazis andthe older generation, but between Nazis andthe younger generation. Andersch’s occupa-tion-era journal, Der Ruf, heralded itself asthe voice of the younger generation, denyingfor them complicity in the crimes for whichthey had paid the price on the front. Never-theless, Sebald charges, “The articles writtenby [co-editor Hans Werner] Richter and

112 Jeffrey K. Olick

10Ibid., pp. 97, 69.11 Ibid., p. 69.12 Ibid., pp. ix, viii.13 Ibid., p. 4.14 Ibid., p. 11.

Andersch derive their inspiration almostwithout exception from the period before1945 . . . Der Ruf is a positive glossary andindex of fascist language.”15 This is a signif-icant challenge, since so much of the writ-ing inspiring the New Left in the 1960s wasa product of the literary salon known asGruppe 47 that formed in the wake of DerRuf’s prohibition by the American MilitaryGovernment. In his essay on the survivorJean Amery, moreover, Sebald secondsAmery’s disdain for “the alacrity withwhich the literature [of the sixties] was nowreclaiming ‘Auschwitz’ as its own territory.”Amery rightly saw, according to Sebald,that this “was no less repellent than its pre-vious refusal to broach that monstroussubject at all.”16

In contrast to the Mitscherlichs, Sebald isthus very much a man of his times, free ofthe older orthodoxies of the West Germanmemory wars. For decades, the politics ofmemory in West Germany was dividedbetween those who feared “too much”mem-ory and those, like Jung and the Mitscher-lichs, who believed Germans needed to workthrough their (collective) guilt if they wereto overcome the symptoms of repression.Sebald does indeed pose a strong ethical andpolitical-cultural imperative to remember,but his lecture was controversial becausethe lost memory it laments is that of Ger-man suffering, which heretofore has beenthe rallying cry of the extreme right. In thisregard, Sebald is only one example of a sur-prising recent interest in the memory ofGerman suffering from the left (including anew novel by Günter Grass and a best-selling book on the firebombing of Dres-den by a scholar—Jörg Friedrich—knownlargely for his indictment of what he calleda “cold amnesty” for Nazi war criminals inthe 1950s17).

How legitimate is this new interest inGerman suffering, previously associatedwith nationalist revanchism and discred-itable positions? The answer depends on thepurpose. The Mitscherlichs too believed itwas necessary for Germans to acknowledgetheir sense of loss that went with Hitler’sdeath; without this acknowledgment, un-worked-through guilt would continue toproduce resistance and narcissism. At times,this is Sebald’s point as well, and it seemsright to recognize the very real traumasmany ordinary Germans suffered. Did girlsin Berlin get what they deserved when theywere repeatedly raped by Soviet “shock”troops? Do the fears and injuries of Germanchildren under aerial bombardment notcount because their parents liked Hitler?Insofar as Sebald’s argument reminds usthat human suffering is never, in the lastinstance, entirely political and that there isa difference between the necessity and thejustice of war, the ethical imperative is clearand sobering.

But there are also passages in Sebald notentirely reconcilable with the overwhelminginsistence in the U.S. critical response to hisessay that he does not succumb to historicalrelativism, denying important distinctionsbetween how we evaluate the suffering ofthe Germans and the suffering theyinflicted. Sebald refers to the bombing of theGerman cities as “destruction . . . on a scalewithout historical precedent.”18 He equatesthe “right to silence” claimed by Germans inregard to their own traumas and “that of the

the guilt of nations? 113

15 Ibid., p. 125.16 Ibid., p. 145.17 Günter Grass, Crabwalk, trans. Krishna Winston(New York: Harcourt, 2002); and Jörg Friedrich,Die kalte Amnestie: NS-Täeter in der Bundesrepublik(Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1984).18 Ibid., p. 4.

survivors of Hiroshima.”19 On the one hand,he states clearly that “The majority of Ger-mans today know, or so at least it is to behoped, that we actually provoked the anni-hilation of the cities in which we once lived”and that “scarcely anyone can now doubtthat Air Marshall Goering would have wipedout London if his technical resources hadallowed him to do so” (though this seem-ingly contradicts his diagnosis of repres-sions and taboos that prevent people fromrealistically appreciating this).20On theother hand, he refers to “the devastationwrought by Germany’s wartime enemies,”and, writing of his adopted homeland inEngland, he refers to “the more than seventyairfields from which the war of annihilationwas waged against Germany” (emphasisadded).21 He characterizes the mania forreconstruction as “tantamount to a secondliquidation in successive phases of thenation’s own past history” (emphasis addedto indicate the use of the term “liquidation,”often associated with the extermination ofthe Jews).22 He also somehow seems tolament that “the question of whether andhow . . . [the firebombing of Dresden andother such acts] could be strategically ormorally justified was never the subject ofopen debate in Germany after 1945,” thoughhe understands why this would have beeninappropriate.23 He also argues that the lackof portrayals of the air war was “the tacitimposition of a taboo.”24

Finally, I was unsettled by the followingformulation: “Our vague feelings of sharedguilt prevented anyone . . . from being per-mitted to remind us of such humiliatingimages as the incident in the Altmarkt inDresden, where 6,865 corpses were burnedon pyres in February 1945 by an SS detach-ment which had gained its experience at Tre-blinka,”25 which does not quite equate theGerman victims in Dresden with the Jewish

victims of the Holocaust, but does juxtaposethem. How well does such a formulationstand up to the charge of historical rela-tivism? Given Sebald’s massive talents as awriter, I could not help but feel he was beingat least somewhat disingenuous when heclaimed he was surprised by the controversysurrounding his lecture; in such sentences asthat just quoted he is indeed playing withfire. Nevertheless, at his best, Sebald poses apowerful antidote to the self-righteousnessof the ’68ers, but in such a way that we areleft with alternatives other than a positivereassessment of the 1950s, as has been thestrategy of neoconservatives. This is thesense in which Sebald’s book is post-historical: there is nothing neo about it.

IN ANOTHER SENSE, however, Sebald’s lectureis very much within the orthodoxy of what Icall the “memory of memory” in Germany,the recursive commentary not only on thepast but on the way the past has beenremembered: Sebald’s argument, like mostGerman “memory of memory,” is anecdotaland polemical. Another way of breaking outof this tradition has been to require more ofsuch arguments, or at least to provide amore rigorous empirical foundation forthem. This kind of approach is often calledthe “history of memory,” and it has been agrowth industry of late, particularly in Ger-many. One of the most important examples

114 Jeffrey K. Olick

19 Ibid., p. 89.20Ibid., p. 103.21 Ibid., pp. 7, 69.22 Ibid., p. 7.23 Ibid., p. 13.24 Ibid., p. 34. How “tacit” the imposition was, however,is not entirely clear. Alexander Mitscherlich himself is agood example. In 1947, when Mitscherlich published astudy of Nazi doctors, he was condemned by col-leagues—not themselves tainted with Nazi pasts—asone who was sullying his own nest (Nestbeschmutzer).25 Ibid., p. 97.

is Norbert Frei’s recently translated book onthe Federal Republic’s Vergangenheitspolitikin the 1950s (the term—untranslatable—isrendered in English as “policy for thepast”).26 Frei’s apparent spur to write was anearlier book by the neoconservative histo-rian Manfred Kittel called The Legend of theSecond Guilt.27 This reference was, in turn,to a bestseller by the journalist Ralph Gior-dano, who argued that Germany’s failure toconfront adequately the memory of theHolocaust constituted a “second guilt”—theTalmudic notion that failure to expiate acrime is the equivalent of committing a sec-ond crime.28 Kittel claims that the “secondguilt” is a myth, supporting his argument byadducing every example of discourse aboutthe Nazi past in the 1950s he could find inorder to refute the claim that there had beena “silence” about the past in that period.Technically, Kittel is correct, there was nosilence. The discourse about the Nazi pastwas positively enormous in the first decadeof the Federal Republic. Frei’s frustrationwith Kittel, however, is that merely adducingexamples of discourse about the Nazi past isnot enough to refute the critical impulsebehind the charge of silence. Just as silencecan speak volumes, speaking volumes canalso be a silence of sorts.

In many ways, Frei puts an end to thepolemical debate over the putative silencesin the official political rhetoric of the 1950sby examining in exceptional detail exactlywho said what, when, where, and why. Freidivides his analysis into three sections. First,he examines West German legislative meas-ures aimed at reversing Allied occupationpolicies concerning the residues of NationalSocialism. These included amnesty laws in1949 and 1954, ending (indeed reversing)denazification programs, and, perhaps mostimportant, rehabilitating Nazi-era civil ser-vants. Second, Frei documents West Ger-

man efforts to alleviate the challenges posedby war criminals. And third, Frei presents aseries of case studies to show how the Ade-nauer government accomplished these pro-found reversals of punitive occupation-erapolicies without stepping over an ill-definedline into a right-wing revanchism thatwould have been unacceptable to the vigi-lant occupation authorities; indeed, Freichooses his case studies well to demonstratethe effort that went into defining and nego-tiating that line.

Perhaps Frei’s most interesting claim inthe present context is that the reason WestGermany’s new leaders were so concentrat-ed on overcoming punitive policies was notthat Germany was not collectively guilty, butprecisely that it was: “It would not appearfar-fetched here to discern . . . an indirectadmission—confirmed, as it were, throughcontradiction—of the entire society’sentanglement in the Nazi enterprise. Muchspeaks for understanding that virtuallyunfettered will to amnesty,” Frei concludes,“as an unconscious acknowledgement of theoften-cited charge of ‘collective guilt.’”29 Inother words, Frei seems to be implying thatearly leaders of the Federal Republic

the guilt of nations? 115

26 Other examples of this new empirical history of Ger-man memory include excellent books such as: RobertG. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past inthe Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 2001); Harold Marcuse, Legacies ofDachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp,1933–2001 (New York: Cambridge University Press,2001); and Helmut Dubiel, Niemand ist frei von derGeschichte: Die Nationalsozialistische Herrschaft in denDebatten des Deutschen Bundestages (Munich: CarlHanser Verlag, 1999).27 Manfred Kittel, Die Legende von der “ZweitenSchuld”: Vergangenheitsbewältigung in der Ära Ade-nauer (Berlin: Ullstein, 1993).28 Ralph Giordano, Die zweite Schuld oder von der Lastein Deutscher zu sein (Hamburg: Knaur, 1987).29 Norbert Frei,Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: ThePolitics of Amnesty and Integration, trans. Joel Golb (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 305–306.

believed—if they couldn’t quite admit it tothemselves—that everyone was guilty andthus that no one should be held account-able. The problem, however, is that thisclaim was always hidden behind vehementrejection of the very principle of collectiveguilt, which, following Frei, might haveserved a positive function: “Already in 1945,the thesis had encountered a high degree ofpsychic reception, and a correspondinglyvehement rejection; it had never been for-mulated by the Allies in the manner it wasbeing complained about. But from thebeginning, it served the Germans as wel-come reason for feeling unjustly treated.”30

Yet another example of “de-realization.”Because Germans could not accept the col-lective guilt argument with all it entailed fortheir national identity, they substituted aneven less plausible collective innocence. Theconsequences, Frei implies, resonatedthroughout the history of the FederalRepublic, and continue to do so today.

IN SOME CONTRAST to Sebald and Frei, GeorgeFletcher takes the German case as merely aparticularly powerful example of the dilem-mas of collective guilt, a problem that hepoints out is ancient indeed. Fletcher beginshis philosophical essay by challenging thestandard argument that “collective guilt” isan illiberal concept, one that takes part in thesame kind of logic the Nazis used against theJews. (In fact, a common trope in the post-war German discourse was that Germanswere the new “pariah people” and were thussuffering the same kind of fate as the Jews.The repugnant character of this defense isobvious.) Nevertheless, Fletcher seems toagree with the argument that “collectiveguilt” is an illiberal concept, except that hedraws a different implication than postwarGermans: there must be something wrongnot with collective guilt, but with liberalism.

Fletcher’s first principle is that liberalismis mistaken when it asserts the primal inde-pendence of individual action. In contrast,Fletcher argues, Romanticism “challengesthe degree to which individuals act in waysthat are totally independent of the collec-tives and nations in which their personalitiesare rooted.”31 After all, only collectivities, notindividuals, make war or perpetrate geno-cide. Fletcher’s syllogism is thus as follows:“Romantics bridge the self and the nation,the nation acts in history, achieving great-ness and committing crimes, and for itsglory as well as its crimes, the nation mustreceive a share of both the credit and theblame.”32 He does, however, respect the lib-eral fear that collective guilt can be associ-ated with collective punishment or guilt byassociation, as when an occupying armymight punish civilians for the acts of parti-san fighters. Fletcher is no less horrified thanliberals by such possibilities. But, in thebook’s most innovative move, he claims thatcollective guilt “carries a humanistic mes-sage.”33 This is because Fletcher sees collec-tive guilt not primarily as a way of justifyingincreased punishment for populations, butas a way of reducing the scapegoating hecharges is at the heart of war crimes trials.He argues persuasively that when we tryleaders or other individuals for what are atleast in part collective crimes, we misrecog-nize the nature of the crimes and our owncollective complicity in them.

Fletcher recognizes the dangers ofRomanticism here. Indeed, he identifies twotemptations, what he calls “too little guilt”and “too much guilt.” The first derives from

116 Jeffrey K. Olick

30Ibid., p. 306.31 George P. Fletcher, Romantics at War: Glory and Guiltin the Age of Terrorism (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 2002), p. 39.32 Ibid., p. 139.33 Ibid., p. 178.

the Romantics’ admiration of authenticity:If motive is important to a crime, then howcan we hold fanatics criminally responsible?After all, the September 11, 2001, hijackersbelieved that what they were doing was inGod’s name and that they were performinga sublime act of self-sacrifice. Why does thisnot excuse them, as a Romantic theory ofauthenticity might imply? The second dan-ger derives from the Romantic notion thatcommunities are organic entities in time. Ifso, why does the acknowledgment of collec-tive guilt not become hereditary guilt, inwhich the sins of the fathers are visited uponthe children? Each of these temptations,Fletcher acknowledges, can produce bar-barous results.

Fletcher’s solution is what he calls “distrib-uted guilt,” based on the model of tort law, inwhich liability can be allocated on the basis ofrelative fault. It also has roots in the theory ofhomicide, in which contributory or mitigat-ing factors determine the specific extent of thecharge. In the context of crimes like genocide,which cannot sensibly be described as themere sum of individual actions, a theory ofdistributed guilt makes the actual perpetra-tors less guilty than they are currently held ininternational law, and bystanders more so. AsFletcher argues, “This is an appealing,humanistic way to think about collective guilt,and it would have the virtue of broadening theinquiry in a criminal trial to include some ofthe tasks now filled by the truth commissionsthat have sprung up in transitional societiesfrom South Africa to El Salvador. If thishumanistic way of thinking about guilt could

carry the day,” he concludes, “we might seesome grounds for vindicating a Romanticattitude toward nations as actors in history.”34

WE HAVE, IT SEEMS, come full circle to Jung’ssense that collective guilt spreads itself outover a whole neighborhood. There is some-thing intuitively appealing about this posi-tion, which prevents us from venting ourprimal desire for someone to blame for oursins by reminding us of the ways in whicheveryone in a society—regime and people—is to some extent responsible for what is donein its name. And surely if there is an argu-ment for collective guilt in an authoritariansociety, it is even stronger in a democraticone, in which we require, at least in principle,that the political leadership express the “willof the people.” The bottom line is that polit-ical life has become so complex that it is evenharder than ever before to draw the linesbetween right and wrong, innocence andguilt. We are all guilty. The challenge is tomaintain the productive impulse in thisacknowledgment rather than to let ourselvesslip into the conclusion that because we areall guilty, we need not worry about it toomuch. This is the advantage of a psychologi-cal rather than legal understanding of collec-tive guilt: it encourages us to confront ratherthan avoid it, but provides a way to do so thatdoes not damn the guilty party forever. Pre-cisely this is what many Germans did notunderstand about Jung’s charge.

the guilt of nations? 117

34 Ibid., pp. 158–59.