So many accusations that we Germans make against each other. So much guilt again. She lurks everywhere. In every gesture. In every oath. With the war in Ukraine, the past has risen again. The misery of the displaced. The refugee treks. The poverty. The hunger. the cold. Basically, she was probably never gone, even if we now accuse ourselves of not having taken her seriously enough.
And there it crawls out of the cellars where our corpses lie: guilt. As if she had never been away, she now directs our perception of the war in Ukraine. As if she hadn’t allowed herself to be wrapped up in the cloak of history for decades as a manageable “responsibility”, well stowed away and gladly brought out by the Federal President when the German past was at stake.
The war in Ukraine beamed us back to 1945, when we Germans realized (but hardly realized) the immeasurable suffering we had brought to Europe. We redoubled our German failure in dealing with this debt. We fought them off. We put it into perspective. We distracted ourselves. We don’t want that to happen again!
New complicity threatens
Now, while Putin is the criminal – his first name is left out, “Putin” has become a metaphor for evil – we certainly don’t want to blame him. We would rather starve and freeze, we would rather impose the Morgenthau Plan of 1944 on ourselves and turn off the gas supply to our industry, we would rather continue to burn coal and postpone the energy revolution, including follow-the-science, until sometime after the war than continue to fund Putin’s war. Priority 1: do not become guilty again!
The battle cry is loud. It comes from mouths that like to wash their hands of innocence, who thought they could finally be sure that the Nazi is on the other side if they ostracized them loudly enough. Happy too soon! New complicity threatens, yes it has long since begun, because we do not want to see negligence again, so it is said, which is now obvious: Putin is the absolute evil, resistance is necessary on all fronts. We should have known, they say, but we haven’t heard. Because we wimps spoiled by wealth would rather lie in the bathtub than defend our democracy, which we didn’t even fight for ourselves. Give us the scourge, give!
The front of the self-conscientious has long since formed on social media. Any doubts about the unambiguity of good and evil, about the lack of alternatives to arms deliveries, about the saint Volodymyr Zelenskyj will be punished immediately. Solidarity with Ukraine! is the slogan. The smallest request is considered sabotage. You don’t mend a hero’s stuff! Especially not as a German softened by peace! Because we’re not at the front, we’re just watching, that’s bad enough, that alone creates new guilt. We’re failing the fighters! They are fighting for our freedom, they say. They fight for all of Europe! For democracy par excellence! Isn’t it asking too much not to buy more gas from Putin? Слава України! Glory to Ukraine!
Battle for honor, morale and values
Wait a minute… What are we actually shouting about? Why fame? Isn’t that the fucking fame that makes wars possible? And isn’t he the brother-in-arms of goddamn honor acting like it’s more important than life? Heroes don’t die, claims Ukraine’s president in his military camouflage sweater. This is how war propaganda works, even when it comes from the good guys. This is how power struggles for battles over honour, morality and “values” are made palatable to the “people” in the first place. And all of this is supposed to be completely different now because it is a war of aggression against a sovereign country? Strangely enough, people like to emphasize that Putin is a sovereign attacked the country as if this would only add to the reprehensibility of his act. Would it be less reprehensible to invade a not-so-sovereign country? Would the dead then have died less innocently?
Be that as it may, we Germans are not interested in such detailed questions. We have an obligation! We don’t have to ask whether all this solidarity is based not only on the beautiful blue and yellow liberal-democratic empathy, but also on the ugly old National Socialist self-hatred, the eternal burden of the Holocaust, which we hope to get rid of in exchange for the historical yoke the “turning point”. This time we want to do it right! Be on the right side for once! Finally join the good guys.
But the guilty conscience, this eternal toothache in the Federal Republic, simply cannot be stunned. Unfortunately. Because a bad conscience is never good advice. Anyone who first and foremost does not want to feel guilty makes mistakes that ultimately do more harm to Ukraine than the sober pragmatism of those who know that when there is war, everyone is guilty. There are only bad and not so bad decisions. How is more new suffering prevented? This consideration alone should guide action – not the basically self-centered, half-conscious uneasiness about the old German guilt.