Collective Guilt. How Germans Lived After the War

Many scholars left Germany with the arrival of the "brown plague." They cursed and forgot the country that literally cast them into the garbage of history, but not Karl Jaspers, who decided to go through this trial with his people. He cursed Germany in 1945. In 1937, he was disgracefully stripped of his professorship for sympathizing with the Jews, and then his former colleagues began to harass him. The scholar did not want to leave the country even then. For a long eight years, he wrote "in a drawer" and lived under the daily threat of arrest. In 1945, everything changed; the shackles of fascism fell. Jaspers thought that now all those who collaborated with the regime would be sent to the garbage heap of history, where he had spent a long eight years, but when he came to the university, he met the same people who had organized the harassment against him. It seemed that everyone had forgotten the past. The scholar could not bear this shame; he cursed Germany and left the country. He never set foot on German soil again, and the result of his disappointment was the philosopher's main work: "The Question of Guilt," in which he first formulated and substantiated the concept of "collective guilt." This work marked the beginning of a significant process of understanding the phenomenon of fascism; it, along with a series of essays and interviews by Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, who attempted to analyze the question of guilt from the standpoint of analytical psychology, made up this book.