Bernhard Schlink
Last month ABC broadcaster Phillip Adams interviewed Bernhard Schlink, retired German law professor and author of a number of books including the novel The Reader, now a celebrated and controversial film of the same title (still showing at the Nova five times a day).
Born in 1944, Schlink has dealt a great deal with the question of guilt, especially guilt ‘inherited’ by his generation of Germans born during or after the terror of the Third Reich. A brief extract of the interview:
Adams: “You identify another danger resulting from your generation’s preoccupation with the Third Reich and Holocaust, and that is that the lesson you drew from the past was a moral one rather than an institutional one. What’s that mean?”
Schlink:
“What we thought we had to learn was, we need more individual moral courage to resist, to say the truth, to not waver in the face of pressure, all of that.
“And in retrospect, I think one has to realise that resistance against the Third Reich was only possible, or mostly possible, in those circles where there was an institutional background like the church for Bonhoeffer, like traditions of the military and nobility for those who resisted in the army, like the communist or socialist movement for workers.
“So I think that individual morality needs an institutional background, needs an institutional support and once this has been destroyed it’s almost impossible to resist, at least in a successful way, just by using one’s individual morality.
“And so that’s what I mean: the lesson that we should have learned as much as the moral lesson, is the lesson that we have to take care of our institutions.”
Schlink’s latest book is Guilt about the Past, a collection of six essays exploring the phenomenon of collective guilt and how it attaches to a whole society, not just to individual perpetrators.
