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Touching evil brings with it the grave peril of succumbing to it. (Jung 1963, pp. 360-1)
With the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 all the Nazis vanished. Nobody had done anything, nobody had seen anything, nobody had known anything. And anyone who could not quite manage to avoid confrontation with the horrors of the Holocaust had some best friends who were Jews. Everybody had just been an innocent bystander and a wall of silence was built around ‘all that’ which was hardly mentioned by name. It took nearly twenty-five years and the coming of age of the first postwar generation to break through that wall of silence in the students' uprisings of the late 1960s. (Only then, for example, did the Nazi era start to become a subject taught at schools.)
Jung distanced himself from the catastrophe in his own way: a one-sided misinterpretation of Germanic mythology (Jung 1936; cf. Burri 1978) was followed by other papers written with hindsight (Jung 1946). In those Jung displayed the attitude of an observer from a distant planet - as if what had happened had nothing whatsoever to do with himself, as if he was not part of that very culture that had created the traumatic events. This had not always been the case. In his address to the ‘Allgemeiner ärztlicher Kongress für Psychotherapie’ (General Medical Congress for Psychotherapy) in Bad Neuheim, Germany, in 1934, Jung had acknowledged the strong influence of Germany on the Swiss intellectual climate and he had expressed his wish to preserve this coherence (Jung 1934). Already in June of the previous year - only weeks after Freud's books had been publicly burned by the Nazis with the words, ‘Against the soul-shredding overvaluation of the instinctual life - for the nobility of the human soul!’ (quoted in Brecht et al. 1985, p. 92) - Jung's language in his notorious interview on Radio Berlin (Jung 1933) is seamlessly identical with that of the Nazis, a fact that unfortunately gets completely lost in translation.
The quest for hop