It probably does matter whether Germany is a she, seeing as you mention it, grant. She certainly used to be, NYT 10/23/1915 - Germany Says She Cannot Stop Turks, and, given that we call Bayern Bavaria and München Munich, but a well known Munich football team Bayern Munich, it would surprise me that we bow to the dictates of the German language in this particular case. Has anyone (else obviously) referred to Germany in the feminine since the war?
Germany's contrition and rehabilitation was long and complicated, as one might expect. There was the initial disarmament, the rounding up and trial of major war criminals, followed by denazification, thoroughly, and savagely, completed in the Soviet zone, but rather curtailed in the West, leaving many former Nazis in influential jobs, or even leading US space programs. This toughness in the East was used to justify a sense of innocence of the crimes of World War II that I don't think was justified, by the way. In the West denazification led to a new constitution that's well worth looking at, especially the Grundgesetz.
West Germany really started to face up to it's past, specifically the Holocaust, in the 1960s. The second Auschwitz trials tried the lower-level officials of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The first Auschwitz trials were carried out in Poland after the Nürnberg trials and dealt with people such as Rudolf Höss and Richard Baer. Very few people were charged in these new trials, but they were nevertheless very important because they deliberately sought to bring the facts of Auschwitz to light and public consciousness. Facing up to this past was the central theme of the '60s in Germany, as reconstruction had been in the '50s, and where "das Wunder von Bern" (victory in the 1954 World Cup Final) was perhaps the great symbolic event of the 50's, the equivalent event in the '60s, though it actually came in 1970, may well have been the Warschauer Kniefall.
The ‚60s and ‚70s: Grass, Böll, Celan, Beuys, Fassbinder, Herzog ...
Concerning guilt in the abstract: yes, I think that's about right, it's effects change with time. An effect would be feeling guilty or responsible, for instance, or later, perhaps, being unusually strongly opposed to other people performing similar acts. We can of course argue whether guilt really is, as Pyewacket suggested, just part of a coping strategy used by westernised humans, and the its extension beyond those directly responsible quite meaningless. |
