In-der-Blog-sein

Harvard University Press Publicity resurrects an interview with German historian H. R. Jauss.

M. Olender. There is an enormous bibliography on World War II, in Germany and elsewhere, many, many studies by historians, sociologists, and psychologists, on the crimes committed by the Nazis. But how are we to explain the fact that the major German academics who were compromised by Nazism have said nothing about their past, have been able to say nothing, or very little, to the succeeding generations of students of the last half a century?

H. R. Jauss. It’s difficult for me to talk about the silence of my teachers, of Heidegger or Gadamer. The exceptions were indeed quite rare. Apart from Jaspers and the articles in Die Wandlung, you have to turn to authors such as the great Marxist philologist Werner Krauss to hear a few isolated voices. Karl Löwith does talk about Heidegger’s silence. In his statements, Löwith indicates how far Heidegger’s seminars in the early 1930s had pushed the destruction of metaphysics, to the point of being within arm’s length of what Nazi ideology was about to become. Although our teachers were silent, our generation did draw a lesson from them, which was also our motto: “Never again Auschwitz, never again Hiroshima.”

M. Olender. Can you say more about that silence of a generation?

H. R. Jauss. The silence in this case is undoubtedly linked to a refusal to understand what is inhuman. Leo Spitzer shed light on that phenomenon for us in an article called “The Familiar and the Strange,” also published in Die Wandlung. Spitzer wondered why German academics, who played such a major role in legitimating Nazism, had so much trouble after the war talking about what had happened, as if the incomprehensible inhumanity of the crimes committed by that regime confined everyone who had participated in it — in what ever capacity, as actors or as witnesses— to total mutism. The radical strangeness of Nazi barbarism has paralyzed a generation of intellectuals, confining them to passivity, a mental inertia, literally to stupidity — if stupor indeed renders one mute.

  ¶ 1:26 PM