Luca Di Blasi: The politics of guilt. On German identity politics

Whatever shape your heart is in

The terrorist attack by Hamas and the subsequent retaliatory war by the Israeli army have shaken up the moral coordinates of German remembrance policy. The German-Italian philosopher Luca Di Blasi subjects the German culture of remembrance, long regarded as exemplary, to a fundamental critique. According to him, a national community that had become discredited and untenable after 1945 was able to survive in the name of guilt as a "community of perpetrators". After all, the talk of "German guilt" not only set the course for a progressive identity policy that was attractive to collective victims of discrimination and persecution. An alternative for former accomplices and accomplices on the perpetrator side also appeared: the preservation of a collective identity in the name of recognized guilt. This "negative identity politics" became effective in post-war Germany.

Drawing on different ways of dealing with collective guilt in Judaism and Christianity, Di Blasi shows how the recognition of guilt became a new form of national identity politics after 1945 - and how we can overcome its crisis.

Luca Di Blasi is Professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Bern.

An event in cooperation with the Verein der Freunde des Rohkunstbau e.V.

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/ ZAK Center for Contemporary Art/ Free of chargeTranslated with DeepL

Meeting point: ZAK - Center for Contemporary Art, 1 OG

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Next date:

• Date Thursday, 30/April/2026 18:00
• Venue Zitadelle Spandau
• Address Am Juliusturm 64, 13599 Berlin-Spandau