While promoting her latest film at Cannes, Fatherland, based on Thomas Mann’s and his daughter’s return to their devastated homeland after the Second World War, German actress Sandra Hüller was asked by journalists whether she feels guilt over her country’s past. “Yes, I feel the guilt every day,” she responded. “And also, I never get bored of it, to feel the guilt, because it’s necessary to act right.”

This attitude seems odd, even pathological. Why should someone feel a crippling inherited guilt over atrocities that were committed decades before she was born, that she was neither responsible for nor had any influence over? There are echoes here of the bien-pensant, self-flagellating attitude in Britain and America towards the Atlantic slave trade. The difference is that in the German case, this stance is tied up with the rebuilding of the country’s postwar legitimacy.

It would be easy to scoff at Hüller’s comments as simple “virtue signaling”, but there is a more complex psychological dynamic at play here. The deeper question at stake concerns national memory and how a society relates to the grisly chapters of its history.

Indeed, Germany’s memory culture has been touted as a model — albeit a necessarily imperfect one — for how countries like America and Britain should work through their own historical crimes of slavery, racism and empire. Susan Neiman, in her 2019 book Learning from the Germans, contrasted Germany’s numerous public memorials to the victims of Nazism with the Confederate monuments which still populate the American South.

What’s more, when memory culture is institutionalized, it becomes a kind of ritualized performance that people feel they must parrot because it’s expected of them, rather than an authentic case of ethical reflection and engagement with historical legacy. This creates an “official” version of history to which all must adhere, while any challenge is treated as blasphemous. Even when dealing with events as traumatic as the Atlantic slave trade and the Second World War, dogma is not conducive to good history.

In 1959, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno gave a lecture titled “The Meaning of Working Through the Past”. In it, he provocatively argued that the latent structural and psychological causes of fascism linger into the present, so we cannot entirely consign it to the past. That an atrocity like Auschwitz came about in the first place means something else on the same scale can arise again in the future.

One element from Adorno’s lecture which is increasingly vital for modern readers is his idea that one must strive for an enlightened and mature approach to the past. Critically mature people don’t shy away from the responsibility of comprehending the past, but nor do they moralize about history. Adorno resisted the idea of a collective guilt passed down through the generations, one which cannot be cleansed and can only be wallowed in.

We are all products of the accumulated actions of our ancestors. We can’t abolish the past, nor would it be desirable to try. But we should not be enslaved by it, either. There is a sweet spot in being able to reflect on the past clearly and honestly without whitewashing or denying the truth. This involves embracing what George Orwell once called “the power of facing unpleasant facts”, avoiding the trap of ceaseless moral self-condemnation. We are not guilty for the iniquities of the past, but we do have a responsibility to think critically about them. Unfortunately, guilt complexes take us further away from that task.

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Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

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