Jung The Villain: Nazism, Zionism, And The Evil Doctrine of "Collective Guilt"

Wikipedia:

Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote an influential essay in 1945 about this concept as a psychological phenomenon, in which he asserted that the German people felt a collective guilt (Kollektivschuld) for the atrocities committed by their fellow countrymen, and so introduced the term into German intellectual discourse. Jung said collective guilt was “for psychologists a fact, and it will be one of the most important tasks of therapy to bring the Germans to recognize this guilt.”

After the war, the Allied occupation forces in Allied-occupied Germany promoted shame and guilt with a publicity campaign, which included posters depicting Nazi concentration camps with slogans such as “These Atrocities: Your Fault!” (Diese Schandtaten: Eure Schuld!).

An excerpt from, “After the Catastrophe” by Carl Jung (1945):

Living as we do in the middle of Europe, we Swiss feel comfortably far removed from the foul vapours that arise from the morass of German guilt. But all this changes the moment we set foot, as Europeans, on another continent or come into contact with an Oriental people. What are we to say to an Indian who asks us: ‘You are anxious to bring us your Christian culture, are you not? May I ask if Auschwitz and Buchenwald are examples of European civilization?’ [...] The world sees Europe as the continent on whose soil the shameful concentration camps grew… .

If the German intends to live on good terms with Europe, he must be conscious that in the eyes of Europeans he is a guilty man. As a German, he has betrayed European civilization and all its values; he has brought shame and disgrace on his European family, so that one must blush to hear oneself called a European… .

If a German is prepared to acknowledge his moral inferiority… before the whole world, without attempting to minimize it or explain it away with flimsy arguments, then he will stand a reasonable chance, after a time, of being taken for a more or less decent man, and will thus be absolved of his collective guilt… .

Long before 1933 there was a smell of burning in the air, and people were passionately interested in discovering the locus of the fire and in tracking down the incendiary. And when denser clouds of smoke were seen to gather over Germany, and the burning of the Reichstag gave the signal, then at last there was no mistake where the incendiary, evil in person, dwelt.

The sight of evil kindles evil in the soul… . Something of the abysmal darkness of the world has broken in on us, poisoning the very air we breathe and befouling the pure water with the stale, nauseating taste of blood… .

When evil breaks at any point into the order of things, our whole circle of psychic protection is disrupted.

The terrible things that have happened in Germany, … are a blow aimed at all Europeans. (We used to be able to relegate such things to ‘Asia!’) The fact that one member of the European family could sink to the level of the concentration camp throws a dubious light on all the others. Who are we to imagine that ‘it couldn’t happen here’? [...] …a terrible doubt about humanity, and about ourselves gnaws at our heart.

Nevertheless, it should be clear to everyone that such a state of degradation can come about only under certain conditions. The most important of these is the accumulation of Urban, industrialized masses- of people torn from the soil, engaged in one-sided employment, and lacking every healthy instinct, even that of self-preservation. Loss of the instinct of self-preservation can be measured in terms of dependence on the state… . Dependence on the State means that everybody relies on everybody else (=State) instead of on himself. Every man hangs on to the next and enjoys a false feeling of security, for one is still hanging in the air even when hanging in the company of ten thousand other people. The only difference is that one is no longer aware of one’s own insecurity. The increasing dependence on the State is anything but a healthy symptom; it means that the whole nation is in a fair way to becoming a herd of sheep, constantly relying on a shepherd to drive them into good pastures. [...] The steady growth of the Welfare State is no doubt a very fine thing from one point of view, but from another it is a doubtful blessing, as it robs people of their individual responsibility and turns them into infants and sheep. [...] …once a man is cut off from the nourishing roots of instinct, he becomes the shuttle-cock of every wind that blows. He is then no better than a sick animal, demoralized and degenerate, and nothing short of a catastrophe can bring him back to health.

I own that in saying all this I feel rather like the prophet who, according to Josephus, lifted up his voice in lamentation over the city as the Romans laid siege to Jerusalem. It proved not the slightest use to the city, and a stone missile from a Roman ballista put an end to the prophet.

An excerpt from, “Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century” by Hans Thomas Hakl, translated by Christopher McIntosh, Routledge, 2014, Pg. 73 – 76:

After the war Jung appears to have clearly re-oriented himself and adapted to the new power structure. At the same time I do not wish to deny that he was genuinely shaken by the extent of the Nazi extermination operations, which were coming increasingly to light. As proof of Jung’s “re-orientation” I quote the well-known German esoteric writer and poet Herbert Fritsche, whose admirers included Hermann Hesse and Else Laske-Schüler. Fritsche had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 and placed in protective custody.35 In a letter of December 1948 to the poet and alchemist Alexander von Bernus, Fritsche wrote, in his famously caustic style:

What pleased me particularly in your alchemy book was your contretemps with C.G. Jung … Frankly, even though you cut him down to size, you deal too politely with him when you treat him as the great, unique psychologist. We saw what kind of a psychologist he is when, in 1945, he proclaimed to the world that all Germans are fascists, even when they are anti-fascists-and that any German who came to him with psychological problems would have to collapse with remorse and deliver a confession of collective guilt, otherwise he would be untreatable.

This very emotional statement is supported in a letter of 12 September 1945 to Erwin Rousselle from Baroness Hertha Jay von Seldeneck, a friend of Olga Fröbe who lived at that time at the Villa Sogno in Ascona: 

The [Eranos] meeting took place without me. The theme was the spirit. You will understand what kind of spirit reigned when I tell you that I did not go. The utter-ances of the wise old man [Jung] on the psychological inferiority of the Germans have naturally been a great success and have done incalculable damage. He made them in an interview, but this went through the entire press. Such things make one sick. Up to now I have not been able to bring myself to visit him.

And she goes on, “It is high time that members of the intelligentsia gather together once more so that they can discover that in the [German] Reich there are still many free minds-martyrs for their convictions.” In a letter to her friend Lilly von Schnitzler, of 30 September 1945, Hertha von Seldeneck gives a clearer explanation as to why she did not take part in that year’s Eranos meeting.

I do not know whether I will have the opportunity to speak with Jung. His various judgments have done endless damage and have become a slogan among people who were already stirred up. He, who has the ear of the world, should have had more sense of responsibility. I could not take part in the meeting, as Olga F. had it conveyed to me that there would be a certain antipathy towards everything coming from the Reich. This shows you the situation clearly. Anyone who has not at least suffered in a concentration camp does not count here.

Erwin Rousselle, who knew Jung well and had himself lost his teaching post dur-ing the Nazi period, also wrote to Jung in this connection on 15 March 1947, sending him a twenty-page letter.” On the subject of Jung’s much-touted statements, Rousselle concedes that he knows “only the interview printed in the Weltwoche headed ‘Will the Souls Find Peace?, which you have rejected as being inauthentic.” In this interview Jung expressed the view that it was naïve to distinguish between respectable and unrespectable Germans.

All of them, consciously or unconsciously, actively or passively, are involved in the brutalities; one knew nothing of these things and yet one did know, as it were in a sort of contrat génial. The question of collective guilt… is for the psychologists a plain fact, and it will be one of the most important therapeutic tasks to bring the Germans to an acknowledgement of this guilt.

On this subject, it may be worth quoting a sentence from Jung’s 1945 article “Nach der Katastrophe” (After the catastrophe) in the newspaper Neue Schweizer Rundschau, although it should be said that the article as a whole takes a more balanced view of the question of collective guilt:

If a German recognizes his moral inferiority as being a collective guilt before the world and does not attempt to explain away this guilt or to mitigate it through inadequate arguments, then he has a reasonable chance, after a certain time, to be accepted as a possibly decent human being and thus be exculpated, at least by a few, from the collective guilt. “

Brigitte Spillmann and Robert Strubel offer an interesting explanation for this abrupt U-turn after the war:

His cold, indeed brutal, change of course after the catastrophe [of Germany] indi-cates an inner counter-reaction, intended to avoid the loss of self-identity and self-regard entailed by an abandonment of those values that he had previously upheld with such personal conviction. Here he was in the same boat as all those Germans on to whom after the war he so vociferously projected his own failure, speaking of their collective guilt and psychopathic condition. And his experience was similar to theirs when he hastily dropped his former ideals in order to avoid a partial loss of self.

If these authors are right, then Jung’s change of direction was for narcissistic rather than objective reasons. Altogether, they bring out Jung’s fundamentally divided nature, as revealed in his behavior, his writings, and even in his own retrospective self-evaluation. They argue that this tension between the fragmented parts of his personality had its effect on those with whom he came into contact and who could not tell with whom they were really dealing. This would also explain why judgments about him were usually expressed “not with calm, scientific objectivity, but frequently with one-sided vehemence.” 

During the war Jung had still behaved in a more nuanced way towards the Germans, as is proved by a short exchange of letters between him and Olga Fröbe, which also throws a different light on other things. On 22 June 1942 she wrote to him with the fol-lowing question:

Mrs. Dr. Supan in Munich has written to me saying that she and Mrs. Lucy Heyer would like to come to the meeting and that she needs a statement from me, for the Propaganda Ministry, that her presence at the meeting is desired. I have the feeling that it is not advisable for Eranos to have direct contact with Germany at this time, and I am unwilling to send an invitation of an official nature as she requests. What would you advise me to do?

She adds that she is asking the question out of anxiety that after the war it might be held against Eranos that there had been a collaboration with Germans. Jung immediately answered on 24 June 1942:

I would advise you to go along with the request of Mrs. Supan and Mrs. Lucy Heyer. Mrs. Heyer is a person of very respectable attitude, and I would not like to make life more difficult for these people. Ultimately we in Switzerland are neu-tral, and moreover in such official matters we cannot afford to pursue a one-sided policy. If two German ladies take part in our meetings, no one can make that into a reason for accusing Eranos of having, so to speak, collaborated with the Germans. We represent no political or social interests, only spiritual ones.

Regarding Jung’s views on the Germans-as with his attitude towards the Jews a few years earlier-it is not my intention to make any moral accusations. We know from the Bible who has the right to cast the first stone-or indeed subsequent ones. Furthermore, we must always be as well informed as possible about the precise circumstances, for only through a discriminating analysis is it possible to come close to the truth. And only from the truth is it possible (sometimes) to draw moral conclusions. As already indicated, I personally would rather incline to the view that, where these statements of Jung are concerned, it was not a matter of the Germans or Jews per se, but primarily a matter of himself and his teaching. He was so fully convinced of the importance of his researches that he was prepared to bring them to the broad public under (almost) any circumstances. We should not forget that for decades he had felt ignored by the scientific world. When one wants to “sell” something, and this something moreover is one’s own teaching, there is unfortunately a great temptation to sing the tune of anyone who can help. Then it can also happen that one throws off moral “ballast” that is threatening to hinder one’s upward flight. Even the most eminent members of our species are not immune to human weakness.

His former friend Gustav Heyer commented very trenchantly on this matter in a letter of 13 September 1956 to a recipient identified only as Michaelis:

In our personal relations I came into uncomfortable contact with Jung’s “shadow”. for example the way in which he, the former passionate fellow traveler of National Socialism, carefully distanced himself from us when the regime went wrong, and after 45 not only propagated the horrible doctrine of collective guilt but, without a qualm, threw his old German friends and pupils as fodder to the denazification authorities according to the well-tried motto “stop thief,” a strategy that brought him complete success. This and other things gave me cause to speak of a miserable character: and in fact I am convinced that Jung would not contradict this. “

In the many discussions about Jung’s negative traits—-including his love affairs with female patients—-there is always the great danger of thereby overlooking his enormous achievements as a pioneer of psychology. The Jungian Verena Kast even suspects that there is “a tendency to point to his ‘Nazi past’ in order to avoid having to come to grips with his ideas.” One finds it hard to avoid the impression that often enough this is indeed the case, whether it happens consciously or unconsciously. Of course one should not turn a blind eye to the negative aspects of eminent people, but by the same token one should not forget the positive ones. Can we not accept that no human being is either good or evil but a mixture of both? Every person is the sum total of many contradictions that can never be logically resolved in a fully satisfactory way. Oddly enough we tend to accept this more readily in the case of artists, but we also need to accept it in the case of scientists, politicians, and, indeed, every individual. “Only the paradoxical can come any-where near capturing the fullness of life; that which is uncontradictory and uniform in meaning is inevitably one-sided and therefore not capable of expressing the ineffable.”