Since October 7, 2023, at the latest, renowned critical intellectuals have been distancing themselves from Germany's long-uncontested, even exemplary, policy of remembrance. They argue that it has “gone mad” (Susan Neiman), hijacked by the right wing, and has recently taken on authoritarian and identitarian-exclusionary traits – a development that, according to Luca Di Blasi, is by no means surprising. According to him, a people's community that had been discredited and become untenable after 1945 was able to survive in the name of guilt as a “perpetrator's community.” For the discourse of “German guilt” not only set the course for a progressive identity politics that was attractive to collective victims of discrimination and persecution. It also offered an alternative for former accomplices and confidants on the perpetrator side: the preservation of a collective identity in the name of acknowledged guilt. This “negative identity politics” took effect in postwar Germany.
Building on Sigmund Freud's reconstruction of different ways of dealing with collective guilt in Judaism and Christianity, Di Blasi shows how the acknowledgment of guilt after 1945 became a new form of national identity politics – and how we can overcome its crisis.
Non-fiction
Luca Di Blasi, born in Lucerne in 1967, was a research assistant to Peter Koslowski and Vittorio Hösle at the Research Institute for Philosophy in Hanover, a postdoctoral researcher in the Mysticism and Modernity project at the University of Siegen, and a research assistant at the ICI Berlin, which he helped to establish. He currently teaches philosophy as a professor at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Bern. His research focuses on the philosophy of religion, contemporary continental philosophy, political theology, and cultural theory.
