L’‘incapacità’ di riconoscere la responsabilità: Riflessioni a partire da Ritorno in Germania di Hannah Arendt

Abstract

After her visit to Germany in 1949/50 Hannah Arendt wrote the essay The Aftermath of Nazi-Rule. Report of Germany (1950) in which she collects her reflections on post-war German society. Starting from this analysis, the present article aims to investigate the causes of the inexplicable indifference to Nazi crimes that Arendt observes in the German people. While Arendt emphasizes the inability to think (and feel) provoked by the regime, A. and M. Mitscherlich focus on the failure to process the traumatic ‘loss of the Führer’. In both cases, a mechanism of reality distortion gets triggered, resulting in the repression of the past and the denial of one’s own guilt and responsibility. The studies by Bar-On, Pohl and Welzer (et al.) show how these repression processes are also active in later generations, even today, representing a threat to a successful reworking of the past, to the preservation of collective memory and to the recognition of one’s own responsibility not only for the past, but also for the present and future.

Keywords

• hannah arendt
• indifference
• responsibility
• memory
• transgenerational trauma