The Politics of Repressed Guilt The

Für Östereich: Mein geliebtes Geburtsland For Austria, my beloved country of birth 55617_Leeb.indd617_Leeb.indd iiii 009/01/189/01/18 110:290:29 AAMM The Politics of Repressed Guilt The Tragedy of Austrian Silence Claudia Leeb 55617_Leeb.indd617_Leeb.indd iiiiii 009/01/189/01/18 110:290:29 AAMM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Claudia Leeb, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun—Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/1 3 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 1324 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 1325 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1326 8 (epub) The right of Claudia Leeb to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 55617_Leeb.indd617_Leeb.indd iivv 009/01/189/01/18 110:290:29 AAMM Contents Acknowledgments vi Introduction 1 1. Rethinking Refl ective Judgment as Embodied 33 2. “Ich fühle mich nicht schuldig (I do not feel guilty)”: From Doubts to Murder 68 3. Roma and Sinti as Homo Sacer 97 4. The Defense of Repressed Guilt: The Staging of Thomas Bernhard’s Heldenplatz 130 5. An Austrian Haus der Geschichte?: The Drama Continues 167 Conclusion: Towards a Politics of Feelings of Guilt 203 References 235 Index 240 55617_Leeb.indd617_Leeb.indd v 009/01/189/01/18 110:290:29 AAMM Acknowledgments I would like to thank all those who have helped make this book a possibility. To begin with I would like to thank Matt Stichter, who has read each chapter and provided me with important feedback, which helped strengthen them. He also helped me with getting the manuscript in shape prior to submitting the fi nal version to the publisher. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of Edinburgh University Press on both the book proposal and the fi rst draft of the manuscript, which were all on target and helpful to provide a strong fi nal version of the book. I also would like to thank Jen Daly, the politics editor from Edinburgh University Press, and her team, for guidance and feedback throughout fi nalizing the book project. Also, many thanks to the team at the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance, in particular Winfried Garscha, for guiding me through the immense material on Austrian post-war trials. Many thanks also to Anatol Steck from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. Furthermore, many thanks to the anonymous reviewers of the Washington State University humanities fellowship for accepting me into the program, which provided me with the resources to pursue archival research in Austria and the United States, and gave me a space to present my work in public. In particular I would like to thank Chris Lupke, the former head of the fellowship program, for his feedback on the manuscript and for his encouragement to get it done. I would also like to thank Sun Raymond for his feedback on chapters of the book and his guidance, which was also cen- tral to strengthening the fi nal version of the book. I would like to thank Amy Allen, Lars Rensmann, Shalini Pradeepa Setkunandan, Thomas Dunn, and James Josefson for their important and detailed vi 55617_Leeb.indd617_Leeb.indd vvii 009/01/189/01/18 110:290:29 AAMM Acknowledgments feedback at various conferences on chapter drafts, which all helped to strengthen the fi nal versions of the chapters. Last but not least, I would like to thank all those who attended my talks at various venues, which all assisted greatly to direct my thinking (and feeling) about the topic. All translations from the source materials are mine. vii 55617_Leeb.indd617_Leeb.indd vviiii 009/01/189/01/18 110:290:29 AAMM Introduction One wants to break free of the past: rightly, because nothing at all can live in its shadow, and because there will be no end to the terror as long as guilt and violence are repaid with guilt and violence; wrongly, because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive. National Socialism lives on. (Adorno 2010: 213) Theoretical Background In this book I draw on early Frankfurt School critical theory, in particular Theodor W. Adorno, in combination with psychoana- lytic theory, in particular Anna Freud, to show that individuals and nations must deal with individual and collective feelings of guilt to arrive at what I term embodied reflective judgments, which means that both thinking and feeling are important for making critical judgments. In this I challenge the prevailing idea that judgment is merely connected to thinking and rationality and has nothing to do with feelings. When I say that both thinking and feeling are important for critical judgments, though, I do not mean to imply that they are separate and distinct entities. Rather, the idea of embodied refl ective judgment is based on the insight that thinking and feeling are not only connected, but deeply entangled with each other. The way in which we think about something can prompt an emotional response, and that response can prompt further refl ection necessary for critical judgment. The main aim of this book is to foreground feelings of guilt as a specifi c issue that individuals and political collectives must deal with to make embodied refl ective judgment a possibility. I show that 1 55617_Leeb.indd617_Leeb.indd 1 009/01/189/01/18 110:290:29 AAMM The Politics of Repressed Guilt if peoples and nations use defense mechanisms to evade their individual and collective feelings of guilt, then their capacity to think critically is diminished and as a result embodied refl ective judgment remains diminished or altogether absent. I do not argue, however, that feelings trump judgment in my understanding of embodied refl ective judgment. Rather, if feelings of guilt are evaded via defense mechanisms, then they cloud our ability to make embodied refl ective judgments. Moreover, if individual and collective feelings of guilt remain undealt with, they can be reactivated to continue the cycle of violence. Feelings of guilt that are fended off often resurface as hatred, aggressiveness and envy that can be exploited by political forces for their own purposes, which is why individuals and nations must tackle feelings of guilt instead of suppressing them. The goal of this book is to expose the connection between feelings of guilt and critical judgment, and to show what happens to critical judgment if individuals and collectives fail to deal with feelings of guilt that pertain to atrocities in the past. I develop my idea of embodied refl ective judgment in part as a corrective to Hannah Arendt’s notion of judgment, which has become dominant in the contemporary political theory literature on judgment, and implies a one-sided focus on thinking and rationality at the expense of feeling and emotion. In particular I show that crimes perpetrated during the National Socialist (NS) regime were not merely the result of a massive breakdown in thinking, as Arendt claims (Arendt 1963, 1973). Rather, they were also a result of a massive breakdown in feelings, in particular the feeling of guilt, which inhibited critical thinking, and as a result embodied refl ective judgment was arrested and people committed crimes. Furthermore, unlike Arendt, who reduces guilt to individual per- petrators, and considers a concern with collective feelings of guilt of post-crime generations as nothing other than a spurious and self-gratifying endeavor, a “hysterical outbreak” and an attempt to “escape from the pressure of very present and actual problems into a cheap sentimentality” (Arendt 1963: 251), I agree with Nyla Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje that “collective guilt has an important role to play in the creation of improved social conditions fol- lowing a violent past” (Branscombe and Doosje 2004: 7). 2 55617_Leeb.indd617_Leeb.indd 2 009/01/189/01/18 110:290:29 AAMM Introduction A failure to live up to collective feelings of guilt corrupts people’s judgments in two ways. First, people make all sorts of fl awed and even paranoid judgments to ward off having to deal with feelings of guilt, and so thinking and rationality is used merely to fend off feelings of guilt. Second, since it is feelings of guilt that would prompt refl ection, steps that ought to be taken to make reparations for the past and to prevent future injustices are less likely to be taken, because people are not judging that there is any need to do so. Although this book engages with a particular case, Austria, its main insights about feeling, thinking and judgment, as well as defense mechanisms, must be understood in a more general sense—everyone is vulnerable to mechanisms that lead to moral disengagement, and every nation has a few (or many) atrocities in its past, and with that must grapple with collective feelings of guilt to secure the possibility of embodied refl ective judgment, which is necessary to make reparations for past harms and make sure that such harms are not repeated in the present or future.

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