Inke Arns on Sun, 20 Jun 1999 01:23:50 +0200 |
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Re: Syndicate: moral responsibility |
*Tilt*, *tilt* ... Could we please get back to the guilt vs. responsibility question? Thanks to Jennifer for posting this initial quote, and thanks to everybody who jumped in on the "moral responsibility". Very, very enlightening indeed. I've been hesitating to join in... On Sat, 19 Jun 1999 14:09:57 McKenzie Wark wrote: "When we say 'responsibility', this need not mean the same thing as guilt. I certainly am not guilty of killing any blackfellas. But i do think i am responsible for the fact that sombody did." I definitely agree with this, McKenzie. Over the last few years there have been discussions going on here in Germany on the question of "collective guilt vs. collective responsibility". Are today's Germans "collectively guilty" for the Third Reich, and, subsequently, for the holocaust? No, this is not about collective guilt. And it can't be, since guilt is a personal/individual category. And I could appropriate McKenzie's text by saying "I certainly am not guilty of killing any Jews .... but I do think I am responsible for the fact that somebody did." And more: There is even no such thing as "Die Gnade der spaeten Geburt" (a muttering of the former German chancellor Kohl if I am not mistaken: "The grace of the late birth", meaning approximately that those who were born after WWII are not directly connected anymore to the burden of German history). It is not collective guilt, but collective responsibility we're talking about. For my generation, accepting responsibility for what has happened in the past means that you accept responsibility for the future... Personal, individual responsibility is about alertness ... about being aware that this should happen "never again." Very often I have thought about my family, my relatives, and what they possibly did or didn't do during the time of the "Third Reich". All of them were "normal", very "normal" people. Some of them secretaries, workers, salesmen, wives, mothers... one distant uncle was a soldier ....but let's leave him out at the moment. What interests me is the question of individual responsibilities of "normal" people. It is said very often that the Germans didn't *know* about the holocaust. I think that if people only had wanted to know, they could have known -- there were enough signs and hints only waiting to be read and deciphered. But -- and that's how I read it -- there was an emotional coldness, an emotional inability to relate to the "other" -- the "neighbour". When I read the books by George L. Mosse ("Die Voelkische Revolution") and Fritz Stern ("Kulturpessimismus") some years ago, which both describe, amongst other things, the late 19th and 20th century history of antisemitism in Germany, it became clear to me how deeply rooted it must have been within German society. For most of the people it was certainly not an "open" or violent antisemitism, but it was some kind of broad general "subcurrent". It secretly and successfully had entered the (sub-)conscious(ness) of several generations before 1933. And this is what makes me feel uneasy when I think about these "normal" people. But enough. What I want to say is that every single person is individually responsible for his/her decisions or non-decisions. There are certainly times when it is impossible to protest publicly against actions taken / crimes committed by a government. But this does not exempt anybody -- "individuals, each capable of making autonomous decisions" -- from taking "responsibility for those actions, and to exhibit a collective wave of revulsion and a collective demand to know who is responsible for this kind of reign of terror." To be precise: I have spoken exclusively and very briefly about the situation in Germany, even if I quoted the last citation from Michael Benson's mail. In the end of March 1999 there was an article in "Die Zeit", entitled "Living in the Target Area" (by Ulrich Ladurner and Norbert Mappes-Niediek, Die Zeit, 31 March 1999, p. 15). I am *translating* the passage on responsibility, and want to leave it open for further discussion: "There was also a deeper reason for the Belgrade citizens' utter astonishment [about the NATO intervention]: They were living a life lie [Lebensluege in German; i.e. something you don't (want to) realize in order to protect yourself)]. Even if Yugoslavia was involved in all of the Balkan wars since 1991, the Serbs in the motherland sticked to the idea that the war had nothing to do with them. The Croatian city of Vukovar was destroyed in artillery fire of the Yugoslav People's Army, corpses in the mass graves in Bosnia were stuck in plastic sacks of that same army, volunteers from Belgrade went looting through the villages in Bosnia and Croatia. And still, the Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic managed to convince his compatriotes that they were never at war. For years, his state television was raging against 'murderers, butchers, and mercenaries' on the other side of the border. Over the years, Milosevic has had many enemies -- but in one point almost all of his enemies agreed: We, the Serbs, are not responsible! That's one of the secrets of a man who, in spite of having initiated all the desasters, remains the most popular politician in Serbia. And the West has helped him. With the Dayton agreement in 1995, Milosevic became a Knight of Peace. Why shouldn't the Serbs in Belgrade take this as an acquittal? Here [in Belgrade], war was always the war of the others." Greetings. i n k e . a r n s __________________________ b e r l i n ___ 49.(0)30.3136678 | inke@berlin.snafu.de | http://www.v2.nl/~arns/ mikro: http://www.mikro.org | Syndicate: http://www.v2.nl/syndicate ------Syndicate mailinglist-------------------- Syndicate network for media culture and media art information and archive: http://www.v2.nl/syndicate to unsubscribe, write to <syndicate-request@aec.at> in the body of the msg: unsubscribe your@email.adress