In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

ACTION = IMPOTENCE (TRAGEDY) 353
robbery. In five of these cases, however, the police have been unable to
produce any substantiating evidence. (Berliner Tageblatt, August 8)
According to conventional ethical and even legal standards, this case
makes the attribution of responsibility and guilt particularly easy because
the delinquent has grown up under circumstances that should have
prepared him to lead an orderly life. Calling his existence "tragic,"
therefore, seems to express nothing but an elementary unwillingness to
discuss guilt or responsibility at all. In a grotesquely similar sense, the
philosopher Theodor Lessing describes as "tragic" the efforts of an
ostrich to fly, since its failure can certainly not be interpreted as an
individual shortcoming (Lessing, 233). When the murder of a young
American scientist by two Eskimos during a polar expedition is discovered
seventeen years after the fact, the New York Times (September 25)
presents the case as a Tragedy because forgoing the attribution of guilt
gives the story a more enigmatic flavor [see Polarities] and helps discourage
legally problematic prejudgments. When Greta Garbo calls the discontinuation
of John Gilbert's contract with MGM studios a Tragedy,
the word frees her from having to ask the uncomfortable question
whether she could have used her own rapidly growing influence to help
her former lover (Gronowicz, 201). Among those who are addicted to
the concept of Tragedy, Adolf Hitler goes particularly far in underscoring
the extent to which he denies any attribution of guilt or responsibility.
Describing the miserable conditions in which the proletarians of Vienna
lived around the turn of the century, he couples the word "tragic" to his
interpretation of their status as victims: "I witnessed this personally in
hundreds of scenes, initially with disgust and indignation; but later I
began to grasp the tragic side and to understand the deeper reasons for
their misery. Unfortunate victims of poor social conditions" (Hitler, 28).
Hitler fears that if people see themselves as guilty, this will paralyze their
capacity to act politically in their own interest: "This uncertainty is only
too deeply rooted in one's own feeling of being guilty of such tragedies
of demoralization. It paralyzes every sincere and firm decision, thus
adding to the wavering and half-heartedness with which even the most
urgent measures of self-preservation are taken. Only when a race is no
longer burdened by the consciousness of its own guilt will it find the
internal peace and external strength to cut down purposefully and brutally
the wild shoots and pull up the weeds" (30).