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The Writing of AnxietyThe Writing of Post-War Guilt: Rose Macaulay and Rebecca West

The Writing of Anxiety: The Writing of Post-War Guilt: Rose Macaulay and Rebecca West [Writing in the wake of the Eichmann trial, and of the furore that had followed the publication of her controversial reports on the trial, Hannah Arendt perhaps had good reason to worry about the extent to which a cultural psychology of guilty feelings was interfering with the moral imperative to establish actual guilt. Despite the best efforts of justice, guilt never was going to remain within the walls of the ‘Beth Hamishpath’ in Jerusalem in 1961. As Arendt points out, Eichmann’s odd willingness to stand trial after his capture in Argentina by the Israeli Secret Service, one of the many peculiarities of this hugely complicated event, was bound with his sense of a culture of guilt working beyond the demands of the law. Eichmann claimed that he actually wanted to stand trial (not that he had any choice in the matter) because of the ‘guilt complex’ emerging in Germany: by hanging himself ‘in public’, he said, he could do his part in ‘lifting the burden of guilt from German youth’.4 It was this kind of exploitation of a dangerously ‘sentimental’ guilt that concerned Arendt. For Arendt, this and the fact that BenGurion’s Mapai party tried to use the trial to demonstrate the rightful necessity of the Israeli state to a world — including most pointedly the world of the Jewish Diaspora — deemed guilty of passive collusion had threatened, but not succeeded, to turn this most necessary of historical acts into a show trial.5 There is no moral or political use, Arendt cautions again and again, in crying over spilt guilt in this way. ‘Only in a metaphorical sense can one say he feels guilty for what not he but his father or his people have done’, she concludes.6] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

The Writing of AnxietyThe Writing of Post-War Guilt: Rose Macaulay and Rebecca West

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References (2)

Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2007
ISBN
978-1-349-28456-6
Pages
92 –114
DOI
10.1057/9780230592025_6
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[Writing in the wake of the Eichmann trial, and of the furore that had followed the publication of her controversial reports on the trial, Hannah Arendt perhaps had good reason to worry about the extent to which a cultural psychology of guilty feelings was interfering with the moral imperative to establish actual guilt. Despite the best efforts of justice, guilt never was going to remain within the walls of the ‘Beth Hamishpath’ in Jerusalem in 1961. As Arendt points out, Eichmann’s odd willingness to stand trial after his capture in Argentina by the Israeli Secret Service, one of the many peculiarities of this hugely complicated event, was bound with his sense of a culture of guilt working beyond the demands of the law. Eichmann claimed that he actually wanted to stand trial (not that he had any choice in the matter) because of the ‘guilt complex’ emerging in Germany: by hanging himself ‘in public’, he said, he could do his part in ‘lifting the burden of guilt from German youth’.4 It was this kind of exploitation of a dangerously ‘sentimental’ guilt that concerned Arendt. For Arendt, this and the fact that BenGurion’s Mapai party tried to use the trial to demonstrate the rightful necessity of the Israeli state to a world — including most pointedly the world of the Jewish Diaspora — deemed guilty of passive collusion had threatened, but not succeeded, to turn this most necessary of historical acts into a show trial.5 There is no moral or political use, Arendt cautions again and again, in crying over spilt guilt in this way. ‘Only in a metaphorical sense can one say he feels guilty for what not he but his father or his people have done’, she concludes.6]

Published: Oct 6, 2015

Keywords: Moral Agency; Pleasure Principle; Metaphorical Sense; Nuremberg Trial; Guilty Feeling

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