That the guilt was not exclusively German but would have to belong to the world—more specifically, the Western world—was a common point of view among German intellectuals of many political persuasions, no matter their thoughts on the distinction between culture and state power. These thinkers rejected both reeducation and collective guilt because they saw the German crisis—and National Socialism in particular—as the outcome of larger forces like nihilism, secularization, mass society, and the telos of history. In the words of Carl Jung, the psychologist, “The moment we so-called innocent
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