Liberation in the Luther Year, Anno Domini 1996?

The exact opposite could be claimed here, starting from America and overzealously seconded by the German media. In the land of the free, the home of the brave, as the American national anthem says, a clear line of development from Luther to Hitler was seen, as so often before. Although such a line has often been proven untenable, it has resurfaced in an anti-German manner.

With little regard for the fact that the Reformation was a predominantly libertarian movement, paving the way for liberal revolutions in England, America and France, and pioneering the currents known as liberalism, Luther’s support of authoritarian princes to promote the Reformation was presented as the beginning of German authoritarian thought, which then reached its consistent climax in Hitler’s totalitarianism, when it should not be assumed that someone who courageously defied the emperor and pope in Worms would lower himself to the status of a “princely servant” of petty German rulers!

This view, shared by President Franklin Roosevelt, among others, was also rampant in 1996. Accusations against the behavior of Germans under Hitler have accumulated in growing proportions. The terrible things that happened under him were no longer blamed on a small number of his supporters. The regular Wehrmacht was also blamed for many things, and finally the entire German people. This is obviously seen as the final solution to the shifting of blame for Hitler’s final solution. People have even gone so far as to claim that the desire to murder is in the blood of the Germans in order to slowly bleed them dry because they are no longer satisfied with continuous blackmail.

It seems to be of little concern that such attributions are vulgar moves. The lust for revenge pursuant to the thesis “From Luther to Hitler” seems to know no bounds. It can be countered by the forgiveness thesis “From Luther to Schiller to Nietzsche”, which is based on Christian charity.

The reformer, named by Thomas Carlyle in liberal England in the liberal century among the highly revered heroes of history, and counted by Thomas Mann in the year of the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany on the occasion of the 200th birthday of Goethe alongside the latter and Bismarck among the “three mighty men” of Germany, was shown on a German stamp as an Augustinian monk on the 450th anniversary of his death. This was a good choice, which testified to something important.

It was the Augustinian monk Luther who chastised, scourged and bloodied himself out of a sense of guilt, and took all this pain upon himself to prevent his soul from bleeding out. And it was the Augustinian monk who, after dark, painful, agonizing doubts about divine grace, stormed out into the world with his tower experience and, as the Wittenberg Nightingale, extended the Augustinian doctrine, which provided for a gradual, piecemeal forgiveness of sins through Christian faith, in a magnificently liberal manner to the point where he accepted a one-off, all-inclusive forgiveness of all sins through faith in Jesus Christ, so that it might be day for mankind.

Luther’s redeeming act apparently appealed to Schiller, who, according to Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty, “probably contributed more than almost anyone else to spreading liberal ideas in Germany”. In his Jena academic inaugural address, he praised the “intrepid Augustinian monk” and, at the beginning of the 19th century, came out with lines in the “Bride of Messina”, which immediately preceded his great Swiss freedom play, that encourage us to say of feelings of guilt over the Hitler regime: “Let them go, they have no profit!” Right at the beginning it says: “Obeying necessity, not one’s own instinct.” This has often been repeated. Like so much of Schiller, it is a winged word with a value of its own, so that it can also be evaluated and utilized outside of its context.

Most of the Germans who feel guilty about the Third Reich do so, I believe, out of necessity, not their own instinct. For I cannot imagine that many would allow themselves to be captivated by such feelings in a nation in which the idea of liberty played an important role for centuries and has not yet died out even in today’s federalism, and of which Hegel said that its love of freedom had long prevented its unity.

In its distress after the lost war, the German people felt compelled to indulge in such feelings, whether in an honest or hypocritical way, whether it compelled itself in its distress or was compelled by others. So it is to be hoped that the growing desire for freedom predicted by Hegel and the actual growth of human freedoms throughout the world will lead to a time when, mindful of Christian grace, people will obey their own liberal instincts rather than imposed, intrusive need.

The last lines of “The Bride of Messina” should make this easier: “Life is not the greatest good / But the greatest evil is guilt.” As the play does not seem to have been intended solely for theatrical effect, it was probably these words that caused young people at the Weimar premiere to shout a cheer for the poet, something quite unseemly in the Duke’s house at the time, which Schiller tried to curb and for which their leader was reprimanded by the police.

In relation to the evil deeds of the Third Reich, these words say that the lives of many victims were not taken at the cost of the greatest good, but that (and this word is to be noted!) the guilt based on the murders is the greatest evil. The guilt of an evil deed is worse than the deed itself:

So, at any rate, Schiller, who had already written in the “Maid of Orleans”: “Life is the only good of the wicked.” Moreover, if you only read the last, clearly emphasized words of both lines, you come to the clear statement “not guilt”. In view of Schiller’s condemnation of all evils, this means that there should be no guilt because of them, and no one should be found guilty.

This coincides, at least legally, with the statute of limitations for crimes committed under Hitler according to the German penal code adopted in the 19th century, which also remained valid in the Third Reich. But even if one sees the law as merely an ethical minimum and affirms guilt for misdeeds in the Third Reich on moral or ethical grounds, the concluding lines can be seen as an encouragement to dispose of this guilt as well and to bring about a conclusion to the discussions of what happened under Hitler. In France too, as François Mitterand emphasized, unpleasant events in French history were no longer discussed after twenty years.

This coincides with Nietzsche, who, writing at the fin de siècle, framed the liberal century with Schiller. In his essay “On the Boon and Bane of History for Life”, he states right at the beginning: “It is possible to live almost without memory, as the animal shows; but it is quite impossible to live at all without forgetting. Or, to explain myself even more simply about my subject: there is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of historical sense, in which the living is damaged and ultimately perishes, be it a person or a people or a culture.”

Germans could finally take these words to heart so that they as individuals, their people and their culture do not finally perish.

The thesis “From Luther to Schiller to Nitzsche” calls on them to reject the view that redemption lies in remembrance, which has become fashionable in order to prolong German feelings of guilt. For not only is this view un-Christian, and Christian thinking should be given more consideration again in a predominantly Christian nation. It is also logically untenable, because the memory of evil is more likely to generate feelings of guilt than redemption.

In view of the comments made here by Luther, Schiller and Nietzsche, one really has to ask oneself what would have seemed worse to these great Germans: the evil deeds under Hitler’s dictatorship, where they shied away from applying the principle of inter arma silent leges; or constant recriminations against Germans, which for many observers have already increased in quality and quantity ad nauseam for fifty years, and which, if they continue, are likely to lead to the hemorrhaging of the German people and its culture over the coming decades – a people of 80 million!

Luther’s translation in Jeremiah 22.10 reads: “Weep not for the dead, neither mourn for them: but weep for him that goeth away; for he shall never return to see his fatherland.” Lamenting over the dead would probably have seemed particularly reprehensible to Luther, Schiller and Nietzsche if it was aimed at any advantage, any hoped-for and calculated gain. And they would probably have mourned the Germans who had to go on being accused, to remain prisoners of guilt and not to return to their free fatherland. But defiantly, all three would certainly have wanted to prevent their compatriots from being burdened with guilt in good conscience with the words:

“Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel wär’,
und wollt’ uns gar verschlingen:
So fürchten wir uns nicht so sehr
Es soll ihr nicht gelingen!”

“Even if the world were full of devils
and wanted to devour us:
We shall not fear so much.
It shall not succeed!”