Political scientist Thomas U. Berger declares at the outset of this exceptionally thoughtful and useful book on war and guilt in postwar Europe that "We live in an age of apology and recrimination." He could not be more right. Guilt is everywhere around us, and its potential sources have only just begun to be plumbed, as our understanding of the buried past widens and deepens. Questions of guilt and innocence and absolution and expiation and atonement may have been largely banished from our intramural discussions of private morality, on grounds of their being "too judgmental," but they proliferate everywhere else, even as the public authority of traditional religious institutions has declined. Nowhere else is one more likely to find such concerns expressed than in matters relating to foreign affairs and international relations, particularly in the settlement of wars.

The assignment of responsibility for causing a war, the designation of war guilt, the assessing of punishments and reparations, the identification and prosecution of war crimes, the compensation of victims, and so on—all of these are thought to be an essential part of settling a war's effects justly, and are part and parcel of the moral economy of guilt as it now operates on the national and international level. But the standards have been steadily raised, and the demands of justice are at once very demanding, even insistent, and ever more difficult to satisfy.

Berger's book engages precisely these issues by examining how governments in post-1945 Austria, Germany, and Japan have dealt with the aftermath of World War II. How can such states come to terms in an honest way with their pasts, and achieve some appropriate measure of postwar justice without crippling themselves and remaining mired either in the past or in utter denial? Or, by the same token, how can such states achieve internal and external reconciliation without choosing to forgive the unforgivable, and thereby betray the call of justice for those who suffered from historical wrongs? How does one strike the proper balance between justice and reconciliation, not only as a moral question, but also as a political question? Berger finds that the empirical record of these three countries suggests that this is, in fact, a very difficult balance to achieve, justice not always being attainable without incurring costs that most societies are, as a practical matter, unable to pay.

As Berger's opening chapter suggests, the heightened moral awareness that we now bring to international affairs is something new in human history, stemming from the growing social and political pluralism of Western democracies and from the unprecedented influence of universalized norms of human rights and justice, supported and buttressed by a robust array of international institutions and nongovernmental organizations, ranging from the International Criminal Courts to Amnesty International.

In addition, as Berger argues, the larger narratives through which nations organize and relate their history, and through which they constitute their collective memory, are increasingly subject to monitoring and careful scrutiny by their constituent ethnic, linguistic, cultural and other subgroups, and are responsive to demands that those histories reflect the nation's past misdeeds and express contrition for them. Here too he seems spot on. Never has there been a keener and more widespread sense of particularized grievances at work throughout the world, and never have such grievances been able to count on receiving such a thorough and generally sympathetic public hearing.

There is no disputing the fact, then, that history itself, particularly in the form of "coming to terms with" the wrongs of the past, and the search for historical justice, is becoming an ever more salient element in national and international politics. We see it in the concern for past abuses of indigenous peoples, colonized peoples, subordinated races and classes, and the like, and we see it in the ways that nations relate their stories of war. Far from being buried, the past is alive with moral contestation.

All of this might seem to represent a form of moral progress, just as certain in its trajectory as the scientific and technological progress of modernity. Perhaps the most impressive example of sustained collective penitence in human history has come from the government and people of Germany, who have done so much to atone for the sins of Nazism. But how much penitence is enough? How long? When can we say that the German people—who are, after all, an almost entirely different cast of characters from those who lived under the Nazis—are free and clear, and have "paid their debt" to the world and to the past? Who could possibly make that judgment? And will there come a day—indeed, has it already arrived?—when the Germans will have had enough of the Sisyphean guilt which, it seems to many of them, they have been forced to bear, and will begin to seek their redemption by other means?

This points to another problem for postwar settlement, analogous to the ironic way that scientific and technological progress may be bringing us rising levels of guilt along with rising levels of human empowerment. And that problem is that our age's heightened universal moral standards apply universally, which is to say that they are like weapons on a pivot, which tomorrow may be whirled around and trained to devastating effect upon the very ones who are wielding them today. Those who stand in judgment can, and should, be held to the same standards they impose. The mirror of guilt points back at them too.

Who, after all, is pure and wise enough to administer such postwar justice with impartiality and detachment, and impeccable moral credibility? What nation or entity is sufficiently without sin to cast the decisive stone? The Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials were landmarks in the establishment of institutional entities administering and enforcing international law. But as Berger points out, they also were of questionable legality, reflecting the imposition of ad hoc, ex post facto laws, administered by victors whose own hands were far from being entirely clean (consider the irony of Soviet judges sitting in judgment of crimes their own regime committed with impunity), indeed, who might well have been made to stand trial themselves, had the tables been turned, for the firebombing of Dresden, or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or dozens of other acts.

Or consider an example from an earlier time, a moment that Berger does not discuss, but that might be the locus classicus of the problem. One can reasonably consider whether the infamous Article 231 in the Treaty of Versailles, assigning "guilt" to Germany for World War I, was not, in the very attempt to impose the victor's just punishment on a defeated foe, itself committing an act of grave injustice, the indignity of which surely helped to bring on the catastrophes that would follow it. Certainly the unintended consequences of that treaty are illustrative, like none other, of the high stakes involved in the work of postwar settlement, and the need to bring to it a special kind of prudential wisdom. And perhaps one of the lessons it teaches, which is one of the lessons of Berger's book, is that the assignment of guilt, especially exclusive guilt, to one party or another may satisfy the most urgent claims of justice, or the desire for retribution, but may fail utterly the needs of reconciliation and reconstruction. As Elazar Barkan bluntly argued in his book The Guilt of Nations, "In forcing an admission of war guilt at Versailles, rather than healing, the victors instigated resentment that contributed to the rise of Fascism." The work of healing has a claim all its own, one that is not always compatible with the utmost pursuit of justice (although it probably cannot succeed in the complete absence of such a pursuit). Nor does such an effort to isolate and assign exclusive guilt meet the needs of a more capacious historical understanding, one that understands, as Herbert Butterfield wrote, that history is "a clash of wills out of which there emerges something that no man ever willed."

The deeply inscribed algebra of sin demands some kind of atonement, but for some aspects of the past, there is no imaginable way of making that transaction without creating sins of equivalent dimension. What possible atonement can there be for, say, the institution of slavery? It is no wonder that the issue of reparations for slavery surfaces periodically, and probably always will, and yet it is simply beyond the power of the present or the future to atone for the past in any effective way. Those of us who teach history, and take seriously the moral formation of our students, have to consider what the takeaway from this is likely to be. Do we really want to rest easy with the idea that a proper moral education demands an acute awareness of our extensive individual and collective guilt—a guilt for which there is no imaginable atonement? That this is not a satisfactory state of affairs would seem obvious; what to do about it, particularly in a strictly secular context, is another matter.

As Berger's account suggests, therefore, there may be an intrinsic conflict in postwar settlements between the quest for justice and the path to reconciliation and healing. Sometimes the latter course may result in opportunistic decisions that come to seem genuinely shameful in retrospect. David W. Blight's magisterial book Race and Reunion dealt with just such a conflict, in the wake of the American Civil War, arguing that the sectional reconciliation of North and South, though miraculous after such a bloody conflict, was achieved at the expense of the freed slaves, whose rightful demands for simple justice and dignity would have to wait a century before being fulfilled.

Berger sees repeated examples of what he calls "the tragedy of transitional justice," a pattern of accommodation and half-measures that he finds to have been acted out to a greater or lesser extent in the Austrian, German, and Japanese responses to their respective postwar rehabilitations. It would be wrong to say that Berger looks upon such responses approvingly; he calls them "tragic." But he insists upon realism in appraising the facts, and finds that in all such instances, the requirements of large-scale social change simply proved too daunting. The purging from power of old élites, for example, proved impractical in situations where their expertise and experience was indispensable for the rebuilding of shattered economies. And national narratives might be allowed to fudge the truth for the sake of national self-respect, as in postwar Austria, which long described itself as Hitler's first victim, a half-truth at best, rather than his ardent accomplice. (This state of affairs changed dramatically with the revelations about former UN Secretary-General and Austrian President Kurt Waldheim's possible involvement in Nazi war crimes.) It seems that the passage of a certain amount of time is required for societies to have the ability to engage fully with the moral implications of their own past, without being overwhelmed by guilt or succumbing to the grip of a "fight or flight" mechanism of self-protection. In the meantime, "transitional justice" is the best that can be reasonably expected, however morally unsatisfactory it may seem by universalistic standards.

But it is never reasonable to expect reasonableness. One should expect instead that the act of repressing our awareness of those universalistic standards, and of our moral accountability to them, for the sake of a fragile "transitional justice" will not be easy to sustain. "Sooner or later," says Berger, who has a kind of dry gallows humor, "we are all going to be sorry." He is right about that too.

The interesting question one is left with by this fascinating book is whether and how much all of this has to do with our living in a world that has increasingly been run according to secular premises, using a secular vocabulary operating within an "immanent frame," a mode of operation that requires us to repress the very religious frameworks and vocabularies within which the dynamics of sin and guilt and atonement have hitherto been rendered intelligible. I use the term "repression" here for a reason. In his Civilization and Its Discontents, the grand master of repression, Sigmund Freud, identified the tenacious sense of guilt as "the most important problem in the development of civilization." In fact, he argued that it seems that "the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt." This process does not depend, even for the irreligious Freud, on the "liberation" of the human race from its religious illusions. Indeed, it could well be the case, and paradoxically so, that just at the moment when we have become more keenly aware than ever of the wages of sin in the world, and more keenly anxious to address those sins, we find ourselves least able to describe them in their proper terms, let alone find moral release from their weight.

Wilfred M. McClay is the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma. This essay draws upon his work in a larger project funded by the Religion and Innovation in Human Affairs Program of the Historical Society.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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