Thus, to give you another example from a contemporary controversy, the argument of Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy, in which Pope Pius XII stands accused of his singular silence at the time of the great massacres of Jews in the East, was immediately countered, and not only by outcries from the Catholic hierarchy, which after all is understandable. It was also countered by the falsifications of the born image makers: Hochhuth, it has been said, accused the pope as the chief culprit in order to exculpate Hitler and the German people, which is a simple untruth. More significant in our context has been the reproach that it is "of course" superficial to accuse the pope, all of Christianity stands accused; or even more to the point: "No doubt, there is ground for serious accusation, but the defendant is the whole human race". The point I wish to raise here goes beyond the well-known fallacy of the concept of collective guilt as first applied to the German people and its collective past-all of Germany stands accused and the whole of German history from Luther to Hitler-which in practice turned into a highly effective whitewash of all those who had actually done something, for where all are guilty, no one is.

You have only to put Christianity or the whole human race into the place originally reserved for Germany to see, or so it would seem, the absurdity of the concept, for now not even the Germans are guilty any longer: no one at all is for whom we have so much as a name instead of the concept of collective guilt. What I wish to point out, in addition to these considerations, is how deep-seated the fear of passing judgment, of naming names, and of fixing blame-especially, alas, upon people in power and high position, dead or alive-must be if such desperate intellectual maneuvers are being called upon for help. For is it not obvious that Christianity has survived rather handsomely many popes who were worse than Pius XII, precisely because it was never all of Christianity that stood accused? And what shall one say of those who would rather throw all mankind out of the window, as it were, in order to save one man in high position, and to save him from the accusation not even of having committed a crime, but merely of an admittedly grave sin of omission?

It is fortunate and wise that no law exists for sins of omis- sion and no human court is called upon to sit in judgment over them. But it is equally fortunate that there exists still one institution in society in which it is well-nigh impossible to evade issues of personal responsibility, where all justifications of a nonspe- cific, abstract nature-from the Zeitgeist down to the Oedipus complex-break down, where not systems or trends or original sin are judged, but men of flesh and blood like you and me, whose deeds are of course still human deeds but who appear before a tribunal because they have broken some law whose maintenance we regard as essential for the integrity of our common humanity. Legal and moral issues are by no means the same, but they have a certain affinity with each other because they both presuppose the power of judgment. No courtroom reporter, if he knows what he is doing, can avoid becoming involved in these questions. How can we tell right from wrong, independent of knowledge of the law? And how can we judge without having been in the same situation?

It is at this point that I think it would be proper to make my second personal remark. If the heat caused by my "sitting in judgment" has proved, as I think it has, how uncomfortable most of us are when confronted with moral issues, I better admit that not the least uncomfortable one is myself. My early intellectual formation occurred in an atmosphere where nobody paid much attention to moral questions; we were brought up under the assumption: Das Moralische versteht sich von selbst, moral conduct is a matter of course. I still remember quite well my own youthful opinion of the moral rectitude we usually call character; all insistence on such virtue would have appeared to me as Philistine, because this, too, we thought was a matter of course and hence of no great importance-not a decisive quality, for instance, in the evaluation of a given person. To be sure, every once in a while we were confronted with moral weakness, with lack of steadfastness or loyalty, with this curious, almost automatic yielding under pressure, especially of public opinion, which is so symptomatic of the educated strata of certain societies, but we had no idea how serious such things were and least of all where they could lead.

We did not know much about the nature of these phenomena, and I am afraid we cared even less. Well, it turned out that we would be given ample opportunity to learn. For my generation and people of my origin, the lesson began in 1933 and it ended not when just German Jews but the whole world had been given notice of monstrosities no one believed possible at the beginning. What we have learned since, and it is by no means unimportant, can be counted as additions and ramifications of the knowledge acquired during those first twelve years, from 1933 to 1945. Many of us have needed the last twenty years in order to come to terms with what happened, not in 1933, but in 1941 and 1942 and 1943, up to the bitter end.

And by this, I do not mean personal grief and sorrow, but the horror itself to which, as we can see now, none of the concerned parties has as yet been able to reconcile itself. The Germans have coined for this whole complex the highly questionable term of their "unmastered past." Well, it looks as though today, after so many years, this German past has turned out to remain somehow unmanageable for a good part of the civilized world. At the time the horror itself, in its naked monstrosity, seemed not only to me but to many others to transcend all moral categories and to explode all standards of jurisdiction; it was something men could neither punish adequately nor forgive. And in this speechless horror, I fear, we all tended to forget the strictly moral and manageable lessons we had been taught before, and would be taught again, in innumerable discussions, both inside and outside of courtrooms.

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Copyright © 2003 by Hannah Arendt.

Tags: Philosophy

About the Author

Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906, fled to Paris in 1933, and came to the United States after the outbreak of World War II. She was editorial director of Schocken Books from 1946 to 1948. She taught at Berkeley, Princeton, the University of Chicago, and The New School for Social Research. Arendt died in 1975. More