Fulbrook, Mary. “Guilt and Shame among Communities of Experience, Connection and Identification”

In this book chapter, historian Mary Fulbrook provides a “historical phenomenology of guilt and shame” in post-war Germany by looking at the “empirical manifestations” of these two emotions in different historical contexts and among two groups of people: the communities of experience and the communities of connection and identification. The two groups are divided alongside their relation and attitude to the Holocaust: the former involves victims and perpetrators, who have a direct experience of the Holocaust, while the communities of connection and identification refer to the second or third generation who hold a “close identification to the Nazi past,” notably the children of the perpetrator generation (16). Her study relies largely on survivor and perpetrator testimonies, and oral history interviews with survivors and perpetrator descendants.

Fulbrook pays particular attention to victims to elaborate how they were plagued by the long-term effect of guilt and shame combined, arising primarily from the dehumanization they experienced during the war and the following “survival syndrome”. Significantly, her historical approach to the guilt and shame of Holocaust victims contests the theoretical paradigm proposed by Ruth Leys in her From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After, suggesting an opposite trajectory from shame to guilt.  

Though focusing more on the victim, Fulbrook also conducts a close investigation into the perpetrators, perpetrator generation and their children in terms of their affective reactions to the Nazi past. She points out that while the perpetrators (and the perpetrator generation) were widely characterized by the lack of guilt and shame and seeked ways to deflect their guilt, the later generation’s affective response to the Nazi past was more divided. Some of them continued to deny their parents’ guilt, while others responded to their parents’ misdeeds with “vicarious shame” and developed a strong identification with the victims, which facilitated the memorialization of Holocaust victims from the 1970s onwards, but ironically “left the guilt of the guilty” unexplored and unexposed (28-29). For perpetrator studies, Fulbrook’s study is valuable in providing a historical account of how of shame and guilt are expressed among perpetrators, the perpetrator generation and their descendants in post-war Germany.

Author of this entry: Chihhen Chang

Fulbrook, Mary. “Guilt and Shame among Communities of Experience, Connection and Identification.” Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond: Disturbing Pasts (London: Bloomsbury, 2016): 15-31.