Giving an account of myself: Trans-Generational Holocaust guilt in the company of Bernhard Schlink and Judith Butler

Abstract

This paper is a theoretical exploration of the limits of guilt and responsibility in relation to the Holocaust, using the author’s own family history as an example. Popular writer and lawyer Bernhard Schlnk has argued that German collective guilt for the Holocaust can be geometrically mapped, and that it dissolves by the third generation. However his argument slips from historical guilt to guilt as a ‘feeling’ felt by an individualised, liberal subject, and in doing so renders the victims irrelevant to the process and the outcome. This paper argues that a more ethical approach is offered by Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself. Butler’s theorisation of the act of attempting to ‘give an account’ for wrong-doing shows that such a process ultimately lays bare the intrinsically social nature of self-narration, an understanding which requires different understandings of intent, and hence of guilt and responsibility, from those usually assumed in legal meditations. Such an exposure to the sociality at the heart of the self can, contingently and at best, turn the inevitable failure of the attempt to narrate responsibility into an opening towards ethical relationship with the other. (Author supplied abstract)