Responsibility for the past

I have been talking in class about the relationship we have with our past. I am often accused by students of not being objective enough, of being too judgemental or too negative about particularly U.S. history. I accept this criticism, to some extent. Sometimes I overlook the beauty and glory and awfulness of the past as past, as separate and unbridgeable. My emphasis is on using the present to understand the past AND using the past to understand the present. Neither process is simple or easy. I have intellectual and epistemological reasons for looking at history this way, but I also have a moral, or even emotional reasons. To me the past is not dead. It is something we carry with us whether we know it or not. And as we put together our imagined communities -- particularly the nation, in our identities as "Americans" -- we assume some stories of the past as our own, again, without necessarily even knowing or acknowledging them. So, in part, my "negativity" about the American past is an attempt to counter our master narratives and myths which I believe to be not merely too positive, but evasive of central parts of our history, particularly slavery and the conquering of the west. This does not mean that we all should go around feeling bad all the time, or that our history is uniquely evil, but that our story is, at the least, very complex and morally ambiguous. For example, the more I read about the SCFF (So-Called Founding Fathers), the more I appreciate them. And the more I see of the world and its history, the more I appreciate the genius of the SCFF's ideas and implementation of those ideas. But we can't simply shift off to the side, as incidental or destined-to-be-overcome-by-progress, their slaveholding and any other parts of their stories we find to be less than admirable. Sometimes those stories are central; hence I like to think of Sally Hemings as a Founding Mother.

So I was interested to see German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, declare, "The overwhelming majority of Germans living today do not bear guilt for the Holocaust. But they do bear a special responsibility." What exactly that responsibility is needs to be continually discussed.

Brad DeLong quotes Amitai Etzioni on Germans' "communal responsibility" for the Holocaust:

Communal responsibility is based on the fact that we are born into a community and share its history, memories, identity, achievements, and failures. We are not simply individual human beings, who can retreat behind a Rawlsian "veil of ignorance," secure in our universal rights and historical innocence. We are also members of specific families and communities. We cannot help but share their burdens, just as we share in their treasures; their responsibilities as well as their privileges. Thus, an American inherits both the proud memory of the Boston Tea Party and the agony of slavery; both the marvelous work of the Framers of the Constitution and the slaughter of Native Americans; the vigilant protection of freedom--from Greece to Korea--and the killing of innocent children, women, and other civilians in My Lai. The memory of slavery is particularly telling. Abolished some 134 years ago, before the ancestors of most contemporary Americans had even immigrated, slavery is still part of the American past; we cannot erase or ignore it. Most important, our aggrieved past commands us all to act, not merely the sons and daughters of plantation owners. We are all co-responsible for that which our community has perpetrated and condoned, for both past sins of commission and omission.

In the same sense, just being a German means being part of both a great culture that gave the world Goethe, Kant, Bach, Schiller, Heine--and the Nazis. I am not saying that the brighter moments in all our histories shine to the same extent, nor that the darker ones are equally troubling. But I am pointing out that we are all members of a community, and as such, bearers of its burdens. Like others, I prefer the notion of responsibility over that of guilt, particularly when it concerns people who personally could not have been involved in the crimes committed. I do not hold that guilt is always harmful or inappropriate or a poor source of motivation for positive social and moral deeds. But it can generate negative feelings, and sometimes debilitating consequences. I know a fair number of younger Germans who are obsessed with Germany's past, who rather than drawing lessons from it, wallow in its wrongs. They turn morose and depressed, and are forever defensive and apologetic about their country. Unfortunately, like digging into an old wound, their pain does not lead them to make affirmative commitments. In contrast, the concept of communal responsibility calls attention to the fact that whether or not one is guilty in the personal sense, one has a responsibility to build on the particular past of one's community, drawing on its assets and learning from its liabilities...