Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities

by Mahmood Mamdani

He distinguished four kinds of guilt, none of which could be imposed by the allies and collectively experienced in Germany. Criminal guilt was imposed on individuals in courts, and so could not be collective; political guilt belonged in theory to every citizen of the regime at fault, yet obviously could not be embraced by those who knew they were not in fact guilty of the regime’s offenses; moral guilt was a private affair, which could only be assessed by the individual; and metaphysical guilt, incurred by those who caused a “rupture of a fabric of basic solidarity between all human beings,” was judged by God alone. The kulturnation could not but reject such notions, but it could take collective responsibility and thereby maintain and achieve “social integration,” even as the political nation was a thing of the past.34 Andreas Huyssen considers Jaspers “the first to articulate German responsibility for Auschwitz in 1946 when the Holocaust was still very marginal in political debates.”35 Responsibility—not guilt.