Conclusion: Towards a Politics of Feelings of Guilt

This chapter discusses the ways in which over-identification with the collective was the deciding moment when individual perpetrators fully committed to Nazi crimes, and has been a critical factor in fending off feelings of guilt today. It shows how dehumanizing classifications, scientific rationality, as well as the psychological cycle of denial, attack, and the reversal of roles of perpetrator and victim connects the ways in which individual guilt was fended of in past court cases with the ways in which political guilt is fended off in current debates around Austria’s involvement in Nazi atrocities. Finally, it explains that Austrians need psychoanalytic theory, the idea of the subject-in-outline, and “embodied reflective spaces” to work through their past and make sure that what happened does not happen again.

“Ich fühle mich nicht schuldig (I do not feel guilty)”: From Doubts to Murder

This chapter analyzes the post-war trial case of the physician Dr. Franz Niedermoser, who murdered patients in the psychiatric hospital in Klagenfurt, Austria during the NS regime. It traces the ways in which Dr. Niedermoser, who was initially hesitant to carry out the murders in the hospital, gradually became morally disengaged, in the course of which he lost the capacity to feel guilty and critically reflect upon his actions, which arrested his capacity for embodied reflective judgment. It explains those mechanisms that made him move from initial hesitation at committing crimes, to later feeling no guilt for having committed them. It shows that to get a person to judge that he or she ought to help carry out crimes, it is first necessary to eliminate any feeling that this is wrong.

The Defense of Repressed Guilt: The Staging of Thomas Bernhard’s Heldenplatz

This chapter analyzes the heated and often violent debates around Thomas Bernhard’s staging of the play Heldenplatz, before it was first staged in Vienna, the capital of Austria. The play exposes the continuing and sharpened fascism of Austrian democracy in the 1980s. The chapter challenges the recent argument of Mihai Mihaela that the staging of the play turned Austrians into people with the ability for self-reflective judgment. Rather, the chapter draws on Anna Freud to expose the ways in which Austrians in these public debates used the defense mechanism of identification, impersonating the aggressor, projections, as well as displacement of anger to keep their guilt feelings around their Nazi past repressed. As a result we are confronted with flawed and often paranoid judgments.

Roma and Sinti as Homo Sacer

This chapter analyzes the case of the Austrian University Professor Beiglböck who led lethal medical experiments on Roma and Sinti in the Dachau concentration camp during the NS regime. It traces the emergence of the “gypsy” as the paradigmatic figure of what Giorgio Agamben termed homo sacer—from being declared as vogelfrei in the fifteenth century to being exposed to death in the concentration camps of the Nazis. It also explains the ways in which Beiglböck and his defense counsel reiterated the racist NS branding of Roma and Sinti as “gypsies” as a means to exonerate Beiglböck from guilt and responsibility, which underlines how NS ideology continued to be present in the post-war trials. It lets surviving witnesses of the experiments speak about the horrors of the deadly experiments.

Rethinking Reflective Judgment as Embodied

This chapter challenges the separation between thinking and feeling in judgment, which we find in Arendt’s idea of judgment. It brings Arendt in conversation with Adorno to theorize an embodied form of reflective judgment that acknowledges that thinking and feeling are deeply enmeshed in making critical judgments, and exposes that the suppression of feelings of guilt leads to poor judgment. It shows that individuals and nations must confront guilt feelings that pertain to the nation’s past (and current) crimes to foster an embodied form of judgment. Embodied reflective judgment is necessary to take responsibility for the crimes of our forefathers and mothers, to show solidarity with the victims of crimes and their descendants, and to make sure that such crimes are not repeated.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the reader to the idea of embodied reflective judgment, and draws on Karl Jasper’s work (1947) to clarify the distinction between individual guilt, which is at the center of chapters two and three and collective (or political) guilt, which is at the center of chapter four and five. It also introduces the reader to the theories and methods employed in the analysis of court cases of Austrian NS perpetrators and public debates around Austria’s involvement in Nazi atrocities, and the research process. It furthermore provides the reader with a socio-political background of Austria before, during and after World War II, which is necessary to understand the analysis of the court cases and current debates. Finally, it provides an overview of the other chapters.

An Austrian Haus der Geschichte?: The Drama Continues

This chapter exposes the defense mechanisms in the heated public debates about establishing a house of history in Vienna, from the time period from 2015 until the present, because such a museum would also display Austria’s Nazi past. The defense mechanisms underline the continuing inability of contemporary Austrians to live up to guilt, and that they advance any reason, no matter how ridiculous, to keep unconscious guilt feelings repressed. As a result, we are confronted with flawed judgments and the continuing failure of Austrians to work through their past. The debate around establishing a house of history in which scientists, university professors and politicians participate exposes that we find the lack of embodied reflective judgment particularly in the educated class.