Book, Question of guilt, A: Germany and Nazism[LS]

The reflection of one of the most important German philosophers on the dehumanization of others during Nazism remains painfully current in the face of the latest political events in Brazil and around the world. Conceived in 1945, and coming to light the following year – when the crimes perpetrated by the Nazi regime were revealed in the Nuremberg trials –, this essay by Karl Jaspers soon established itself as the first, and indispensable, reflection on the guilt of an entire people. Jaspers – who was removed from his university post in 1937 because he was married to a Jew – returned from isolation forced by Hitler's regime and played, from the post-war period onwards, with his texts and radio broadcasts, the role of the moral conscience of a country that needed to rebuild itself in every field. This fundamental book is the greatest proof of his emblematic intellectual honesty.