The Question of German Guilt

What he counsels is a cultivation of truth—the teachers will have to show their students that they are returning to their classrooms with a difference—that there would be no more propaganda, but only a genuine truthfulness that is always the authentic goal of human intelligence by its very nature. Called upon by the Allies to be Heidelberg’s first postwar rector, Jaspers recognized that the freedom a university needs from political control demands in turn that professors not use their podiums for politically committed (we might now say “politically correct”) speech. In short, he counsels that academic freedom requires mature self-restraint and a personal dedication to keeping one’s professional remarks within the canons and methods of one’s discipline. Now as then professors have a difficult time remembering to temper their own opinions on subjects beyond their professional expertise and to revere truth above all when feelings and passions become inflamed.

But here or in any walk of life, habits of truthfulness cultivated in times of peace and prosperity will be rewarded by a clear conscience, even in the harshest scenarios. By the practice of honesty and truthfulness even in the smallest matters and most mundane affairs, one will be all the more ready to act authentically in moments of crisis, personal or social, and perhaps even to take the risks that Edmund Burke envisioned when he wrote that all that is needed for evil to triumph is for the good to do nothing.

JASPERS: HIS LIFE AND BASIC CONVICTIONS

In the history of twentieth-century philosophy, Jaspers is counted among the existentialists.² His many books, large and small, did much to bring existentialist concerns and tendencies in philosophy to public attention, for his books offered interesting analyses of many current situations but were also well written in relatively simple language, free from the neologisms that rendered other existentialists more difficult to grasp. Not just the present volume on the question of war guilt but comparable essays that redefined the meaning of the university, examined prevalent conditions of political liberty, and promoted belief in the European spirit reflect his special brand of existentialism: one that did not just talk about engagement with social and cultural conditions but that tried to make specific and positive contributions to current problems.

A native of Oldenburg in northern Germany, Jaspers testified in his philosophical autobiography³ to the spirit of critical and independent thinking that his father cultivated in him from the start. His grandfather had been a Lutheran pastor, while his immediate family seems to have been theistic but anti-ecclesial. After some initial studies in law, he changed to medicine and trained under well-known pathologists and psychiatrists in the clinic at the University of Heidelberg before the First World War. His first large-scale work, General Psychopathology (1913), a ground-breaking text in that field, is the result of his reflections on that experience. His second major scientific work, Psychology of Worldviews (1919), shows his developing interest in philosophical problems and methods.

Jaspers’s formal transfer from teaching psychiatry to philosophy at Heidelberg permitted him to begin issuing a long stream of philosophical books and articles, most notably the three-volume general exposition of his viewpoint tided simply Philosophy (1932). The philosophy faculty proved to be a post that better suited his mind and his delicate health. From childhood he had suffered from bronchial and cardiac problems, but a stern discipline in matters of work and rest, and the constant support of his wife, Gertrude (whom his autobiography describes as his intellectual soulmate), made possible a career of teaching and writing until the Nazis severed his academic connections in 1937 because of displeasure with his acute criticism of racism and rabid nationalism. Gertrude’s Jewish heritage was also held against him, but they were spared the fate of deportation or worse, and in private retirement during the war Jaspers was able to continue to write.