The Delusion of Perfection

THE FUTURE OF GERMANY by Karl Jaspers. 173 pages. University of Chicago Press. $4.95.

Philosopher Karl Jaspers, 85, is a ghost at the German banquet who knows just how to haunt complacent fellow countrymen. Ever since the end of World War II, he has been relentlessly reminding his people that guilt belongs not only to Hitler but to the Germans who supported and obeyed him. Six years ago, he brought down Wagnerian thunder on his head by advising Germans to give up their favorite dream, reunification. Now in this slim, blunt: volume--a bestseller in Germany--he has put all the unpleasant reminders together. The result is a remarkable attempt at national selfcriticism. Only Guenter Grass--described by Jaspers as "our one political writer who cannot be praised highly enough"--has stabbed harder at the German conscience.

Jaspers sees Germany today as morally adrift in prosperity, pretty much as it was morally adrift in poverty in 1931, when he warned of the approaching collapse of the Weimar Republic in Man in the Modern Age. Does he now foresee a neo-Nazi takeover? Hardly. But he does assert that the Germans are still making the same kind of peculiarly German mistake: looking for a system so perfect that the individual citizen will be spared the effort of trying to be good.

Passion for Order. In their "immoderate desire for security," Jaspers finds Germans as overresponsive as ever to instant recipes for political salvation. They continue to put too much trust in the wrong things: the rationalism of know-how, the promise of perfection through the conquest of technology. Above all, "with built-in subject mentality," he says, the Germans trust their government just because it is their government. They uncritically share its passion for order while it gives low priority to civil rights and tirelessly promotes laws to cover every possible emergency. They cannot bring themselves to the heresy of doubting the self-sufficiency of method and apparatus.

The consequence, as Jaspers sees it, is that West Germany has become a kind of robot state without a heart. He writes despairingly: "We still have neither roots nor an ideal in politics, no sense of where we come from or where we are going . . . Neither in the operations of our business nor in our passing, swiftly forgotten excitements is there a faith or an ethos." But Jaspers does not leave matters with this harsh judgment. He is more than a gadfly.

Big-Bomb Ambitions. Teaching and living in Switzerland since 1948, he has made practically a full-time career out of worrying about Germany's alternatives. As an existentialist committed to specific choices within specific situations, he makes point-by-point proposals. West Germany should turn away from De Gaulle, toward the U.S.: "The global interests of the United States are our own." It should give up its pre-World War II boundary claims ("a world of fantasies"). As for big-bomb ambitions, forget them. "We may be given a voice in nuclear questions, but we can never have the right to make independent decisions and choices of our own." Instead of dreaming about reunification, West Germany should get down to the practical task of economic aid to East Germany; this would help develop East German prosperity, he suggests, which in turn might lead to political liberalization. The burden of his analysis is that illusions are the German form of corruption. Let Germans stop proudly deceiving themselves: "We can never regain the status of a great power."

The terrible and perhaps impossible demand Jaspers is making of his countrymen is that they choose to be good rather than try to be great. In his 1961 book, The Future of Mankind, he presented the same irritatingly simple ultimatum to the world. "To achieve a life that is worthy of him," he wrote, "man must survive--but he will survive only if he achieves that life."

In his anxiety to avoid what he regards as the German sins of dogmatism and obsessive blueprinting, Jaspers is even more vexingly silent than most philosophers about the ultimate question: Just how do men make them selves better? The book offers no answer, only a corrective statement of the problem. To Germany--and to a world he sees turning Germanic in its illusion that responsibility can be programmed --Jaspers merely utters an unpopular no. Implacably he points to the individual and says: "The whole world will not change if I change. But the change in myself is the premise."

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