German Guilt Diffusion Discussed Kundnani

Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust, by Hans Kundnani. 2009

German Guilt Diffusion for the Jews’ Holocaust: Germans Now Rewrite History By Making Themselves Out to Be Victims of Nazism

This book is mainly about German political movements, notably the Baader-Meinhof Gang and its successors. I focus instead on Holocaust supremacy and its implications.

LEFTIST CONSTRUCTS AND THE DIFFUSION OF RESPONSIBILITY AWAY FROM THE GERMANS

Kudnani writes, “Firstly, by seeing the explanation for fascism principally in the dynamics and development of capitalism, it tended to downplay the collective responsibility of the German people for Nazism…Secondly, the reduction of Nazism to fascism tended to sideline the specific character of National Socialism as it had developed in Germany as opposed to other countries where fascism had taken hold such as Italy. In particular, it marginalized the anti-Semitic nature of Nazism and with it the Holocaust.” (p. 18).

The author could have taken this further. Nowadays, there is a tendency to muddy the waters by the customary focus on anti-Semitism, wherein the anti-Semitism found in many pre-WWII non-German European nations (e. g, Poland) is tacitly accepted as almost the same as the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany. In addition, the ultimate blaming of Christian anti-Judaism, for the Holocaust, also has the effect, if not the purpose, of reducing German guilt.

HOLOCAUST SUPREMACY TAKES OVER GERMAN, AS WELL AS AMERICAN, THINKING

At one time, Germans, and westerners in general, thought of repentance for Nazism in terms of German crimes against Poles, and others, as well as German crimes against Jews. This all came to a screeching halt, as described by Kundnani, “The New Left’s renewed focus on the Holocaust was in fact part of a wider transformation in Germany’s attitude to the Nazi past that had taken place since the 1970s. The transformation paralleled the emergence of the Holocaust as a concept in the West in general. In the United States, for example, the Holocaust had become an increasingly important collective memory since the Six-Day War in 1967 and in particular since the Yom Kippur War in 1973.”

DOUBLETHINK IN ACTION: TRYING TO MAKE THE JEWS’ HOLOCAUST JEWISH-SPECIFIC AND UNIVERSAL AT THE SAME TIME

Kundnani comments, “The Holocaust seemed to impose on mankind a moral responsibility to do everything in its power to prevent something similar ever occurring again anywhere in the world. But, how was it possible to do so without comparing Auschwitz with other terrible events taking place at other times and in other places around the world and thereby implicitly relativizing it? To put it in a different way, was it possible to ‘historicize’ the Nazi past? As the children of those responsible for the Final Solution, Germany’s generation of 1968 faced these questions in such an intensified form that they became, for many of them, an existential dilemma.” (p. 4).

This dilemma, of course, presupposes the validity of the Jewish monopolization of the Holocaust. Had Genocide Equality reigned, no such dilemma or question would have arisen in the first place.

21ST CENTURY: GERMANS NOW MAKE THEMSELVES OUT TO BE VICTIMS OF NAZISM

While focusing on German thinking after 911, Kundnani quips, “In terms of the two currents of the thinking of the post-war generation that had emerged out of the student movement in the sixties, Germans had come to think of themselves much less as perpetrators and much more as victims.” (p. 296).

No kidding.