War Guilt

I really hope some of you EALAC students speak German. This is a really interesting article comparing the development of the German and Japanese nation states up until WWII and then how they've dealt with similar issues of guilt as well as modernization and dealing with their imperial legacies since WWII. I'd be really interested to know what some of you think.

http://www.zeit.de/2010/46/Kriegsschuld-Deutschland-Japan?page=1

Here's the first part of this translated (by me, which means it's not a great trans.):

Following the big delusion

Japan and Germany are both burdened with difficult war guilt. [This article is about] how they tried to come to terms with their own histories and with their neighbors.

I. Japan, Germany, and their neighbors: what is similar or the same in our two countries?

We are both nation states. Both were, compared to other nations in the world, misled by imperialism relatively late—beginning in the end of the 19^th century and then brutally and recklessly [sick auswirkend] in the first half of the 20^th century.  This was a tragic factor in the history of our two countries.

I want to give two examples of what I mean with historically late imerialism. If German military imperialism under Hitler took place a hundred years earlier, then comparisons with Napoleon or Caesar or Alexander the Great would have been at hand [nahegelegen, lit. lying nearby].

Of course, all wars, everywhere in the world, and especially wars of conquest, go hand in hand with an increase in brutalities. Comparison is of course impossible, in the case of Germany, with the industrial extermination of millions of European Jews. Germany is, with regards to this point, dissimilarly more heavily burdened than Japan—or the Soviet Union or England, France, or the USA. If the Japanese aggressions, against Korea, Manchuria—and later all of China—and many southeast Asian countries, had taken place 100 or 130 years earlier, the rest of the world would have compared them to the imperialism of the big European nations, with Napoleons conquest of almost all Europe or with the colonial conquests of most European nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. If the slavery of Korean workers and comfort women had taken place 100 years earlier, then it might have been compared with slavery in the USA, which could only be suppressed through the bloody civil war of the 1860s. And the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, if it had taken place 130 years earlier, might have been compared to the bombardment of the Danish capital of Copenhagen by the British navy.

Obviously, the aforementioned significant historical comparisons can never erase the underlying fact: each crime remains a crime. In the process, however, one should put forth an import observation: there is no collective guilt of an entire nation for the crimes of its political and military leaders. Guilt only affects [betrifft] the criminals, not the entire nation. It does not affect [betrifft] therefore the entirety of all Japanese or all German soldiers. There is no collective guilt, but no doubt many personal guilts—especially in the political and military leadership.

Contemporary Japanese and Germans are in no way complicit to the crimes that took place in the Second World War. They are, however, no doubt on both sides responsible for insuring that similar crimes cannot occur again in the future. And it remains our task, in this sense, to appeal to the next generations.

With regard to the economic development of our two countries, we can put forth with satisfaction that both have, since the 1860s achieved enormous technological, industrial, and civilizational development, which at the same time imply opening [morally and politically] and modernization. The catalysts were the so-called Meiji Restoration (which is by the way a misleading word: 1868 was not so much a restoration as a modernization, really a revolution), and on the German side the Fin de siècle particularity of Bismark’s founding of the empire.

We can say today with great satisfaction: Japan and Germany belong to the technological, economic, and intellectual world elite [Weltspitze—apex of the world]. We have both globalized our economies far and wide. In the process, we have become strikingly dependent on imports of oil and other raw material and on maritime traffic [Verkehrswegen]. We are as a result affected in similar ways by the current world recession. Despite that, both nations continuously and structurally achieve trade surpluses, which the nations with trade deficits are not exactly ecstatic about.

To the similarities between the two nations also belongs the important hint of the fact that the populations of both Japan and Germany have been declining for several years as a result of low birthrates. This presents significant consequences. The current debate in Germany over Hartz IV or over Rente mit 67 is only a forerunner of future developments, which are going to play out fully in both nations.