recognizing collective guilt for success in personal psychotherapy: "All of them,
consciously or unknowingly, actively or passively, are involved in horrors; they did not
know anything about what was happening, and at the same time they knew. Today, the
Germans are like a drunken man who wakes up in the morning with a hangover. They
do not know what they did and do not want to know. There is only one sense of unlimited
misfortune. They will make spasmodic efforts to justify themselves in the face of
accusations and hatred of the outside world, but this will be the wrong way. Atonement,
as I have already noted, lies only in the full recognition of own misconduct" [6].
In particular, Carl Jung defined the main problem of military European nations -
the lack of conscience. What happened to the Germans - is a disease, and sick Germans
are all and immediately equally independent of political passions, attitude towards
Hitler and membership in the NSDAP. If a nation wants to be cured - it must admit its
misconduct. The psychiatrist emphasized: "Any nation that believes in its infallibility
will become a prey, and others will become victims of obsession if in their disgust for
German misconduct they forget about their own imperfections".
The psychologist personally passed the evolution from fascination with Nazism
to critical thinking. After the war, he explained his loyalty to Hitler with the demands
of time. This conformistic position of the argument "There was such time!"
characterizes the following words by K. Jaspers: "A person endures political reality as
something alien, it seeks to outwit it for the sake of its personal benefits or lives in a
blind capture of self-sacrifice".
The existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger (Jaspers’ opponent), all 12 years
of Hitler's control, was a member of the NSDAP and had other approaches to
misconducts of German people in general and, in particular. As M. Heidegger has
reasonably noticed, one can be guilty without doing anything bad: "... a person can be
guilty to others, without being guilty to himself. Someone else can "make a debt" for
another "for me". The winners led the Germans to self-destruction, and the Germans
willingly followed them. Self-destruction refers to the voluntary (under the leadership
of the winners) movement of the Germans against its own, primordial essence.
Considering "... that the Germans' betrayal of their essence, the rejection of their
destiny is an immeasurably more terrible "collective fault" than that which the
Germans bear for the "horrors of gas chambers" and others publicly called "crimes"
and that now the German people and the country is one single concentration camp" [2,
327]. These views reveal an understanding by the philosopher of not recognizing social
reality as a philosopher and repenting for his conscious or unconscious deeds.
Denial of the Nazi past, according to Jaspers, gave rise to a neurotic fault that has
no direct relation to the fault of the real or metaphysical. Neurotic fault does not only
contribute to ethical purification and transformation, but, on the contrary, can lead to
destructive acts, those who at the unconscious level tend to overcome it. It is possible
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