While traveling through Bosnia, on the road from Mostar to Sarajevo, I stopped in the town of Konjic. Nestled between steep, enclosing mountains and cut through by the fast-running river Neretva, the town presented itself with fitting drama. The surging water, the jagged dark ridges and the tiny buildings along the narrow, winding road made me feel small and temporary. It is a landscape that insists on history, not through monuments but through atmosphere. Everything seemed to remember the war of thirty years ago: the somber faces, the uneasy calm of the streets, and the mountains themselves, which appeared to hold the past like a low, persistent echo. I had stopped in Konjic because only a few kilometers outside town lies the bunker built by the infamous former leader of Yugoslavia: Tito.
“WAS A RUSSIAN INVASION IMMINENT?“
Winter was obviously not high season, because Leila told us we had to wait for only two more people to join us on the tour, a far cry from the hundreds of tourists who visit the bunker in summertime. After a short delay two Russian women arrived. Almost immediately, their presence unsettled me more than the bunker itself. I noticed my own reactions with a kind of embarrassed clarity. I felt antagonistic. Resentful. Even suspicious. Was a Russian invasion imminent? Questions surfaced that I did not ask aloud but could not silence internally. Why were they here? What were they thinking? How could they calmly participate in a historical tour while their own country was, at that very moment, violently rewriting borders and lives? Why were they not protesting their government, their degenerate fascist party leader, instead of leisurely listening to a tour guide in Bosnia?
These questions came easily, propelled by a sense of moral urgency that felt justified and, disturbingly, pleasurable. The moral clarity felt intoxicating. It smoothed the edges of a chaotic world. It offered alignment: I am on the right side of history; therefore, my discomfort is not only understandable but legitimate. And yet, it took considerable mental effort to remind myself that these women had exactly the same right to be part of a group being shown around Tito’s bunker as I did.
Of all people, I should be wary of judging others solely on their nationality. I grew up with family histories that argue forcefully against such reflexes: my father kept grilling me as a teenager about the precarious position the ethnic Chinese held in Indonesia: economically visible, culturally distinct, and periodically treated as convenient scapegoats in moments of national crisis; and the story of my mother, of German descent, during the morally ambiguous reckoning known as “axe day”, at the end of the Second World War, when she was told she could not participate in the festivities simply because she was the offspring of a German woman. These histories demonstrate how easily moral certainty slips into indiscriminate judgment.
And yet none of this historical knowledge weakened the feeling of righteousness that rose in me. That is the more perplexing question. We inhabit a world that feels increasingly chaotic and morally overwhelming. Faced with this overload, my mind seeks shortcuts. Nationality becomes a stand-in for agency. Individuals are reduced to symbols. This is not merely intellectual laziness; it is a psychological coping mechanism. Simplification restores a sense of order when accountability seems unreachable. The real question is therefore not why my mind simplifies, but why it seeks the comfort of judgment even when that judgment risks becoming unjust. To confront that urge demands more than autobiographical questions; it requires sustained, outward-looking curiosity about what we can legitimately expect from individuals who happen to share a passport with perpetrators.
It was after this realization that my attention shifted to Leila. She had called herself a war baby, someone born into the chaos unleashed by ethnic cleansing. She was, in the most literal sense, a witness to what collective identities can do to a people. During the tour, I found myself watching her closely, almost willing her to intervene. To say something. To confirm, however subtly, that my discomfort was justified. I almost begged her to take a position, to be on my side. Instead, she made no remarks whatsoever. Her narration remained precise, restrained, and neutral. To Leila our nationalities were entirely inconsequential. Her silence unsettled me more than any comment might have. It deprived me of the validation I was seeking.
The moment I allowed myself to see these women primarily as Russians rather than as individuals, I participated, however quietly, in the same logic that underlies collective punishment. I did not confront them. I did not accuse them. But internally, I placed them under suspicion, as if citizenship itself were a moral act. What troubled me most afterward was how easy this posture felt. How swiftly empathy gave way to moral superiority. Once adopted, it required remarkably little effort to maintain. It flattered the self while narrowing the world.
Recently, I met an American photographer who worked for Time Magazine in the early eighties in El Salvador. He witnessed how the Salvadorean junta killed and rampaged the country for years, all the while with the brazen support of the American government. I dared not ask him whether he felt ashamed of his nationality, whether he felt responsible and thus out of place. I was taken aback by the ease and autonomy with which he told me he was convinced of the nefarious nature of his government but felt no responsibility simply because he was American himself.
His position unsettled me not because it denied responsibility, but because it refused moral contamination by identity. In that refusal lay something instructive. It exposed my own inconsistency. I accepted his distinction without hesitation. I struggled to grant the same autonomy to the women in the bunker. That gap, uncomfortable as it is, marks the space where ethical vigilance must operate, and where my own behaviour still calls for scrutiny and rejection.
Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) was a German philosopher who lived through the Nazi era while married to a Jewish woman, and therefore permanently exposed to danger. He was barred from teaching, forbidden to publish, and survived the regime in what later came to be called “innere Migration”: physical presence within Germany combined with moral and intellectual withdrawal from the state. He did not flee. He did not collaborate. He endured.
Shortly after the war, Jaspers published his reflections on German guilt in Die Schuldfrage, attempting to think through what responsibility could possibly mean after a catastrophe of that magnitude. Jaspers proposed a classification of guilt that remains unsettlingly relevant. He distinguished between four kinds of guilt. Criminal guilt belongs to those who committed crimes and can be judged in a court of law. Political guilt applies to citizens of a state, who bear responsibility for the actions carried out in their name, regardless of personal involvement. Moral guilt concerns individual conscience: what one did, failed to do, or allowed oneself to accept. And finally, metaphysical guilt, the most demanding category of all, refers to a responsibility toward other human beings simply by virtue of shared humanity. If injustice occurs and one survives, there is, according to Jaspers, an inescapable residue of responsibility.
What is striking is what Jaspers does not do. He does not collapse these categories into one. He insists that political guilt must not be confused with moral or criminal guilt. To do so, he argues, is not only unjust but dangerous. Collective criminal guilt is a fiction that destroys the very possibility of ethical judgment. At the same time, he refuses the comfort of total innocence. To be a citizen is to be implicated, but implication is not the same as culpability.
While being toured around in Tito’s bunker I was confusing political responsibility with moral guilt. I was translating justified condemnation of a state into suspicion of individuals. Jaspers would likely have rejected my thinking out of an acute awareness of where such thinking leads. He had seen how quickly moral generalizations harden into exclusion, and how easily exclusion becomes violence. However, my frustration with silence, with passivity, with people who appear untouched by the actions of their governments, does not evaporate under his framework. It is given a different address. The question is no longer who deserves my resentment, but what kind of responsibility can reasonably be expected of individuals under vastly unequal conditions of freedom, risk, and coercion.
Perhaps this is where Leila’s silence finally makes sense. As someone shaped by the wreckage of ethnic absolutism, she seemed uninterested in collapsing persons into categories. Her neutrality was not indifference but restraint. Jaspers would have recognized it as ethical discipline: the refusal to say more than one can justify, the refusal to let judgment outrun responsibility.
Jaspers does not resolve the discomfort at the heart of collective guilt. He sharpens it. He insists that living with it is the price of moral seriousness. The task, then, is not to purge oneself of resentment, nor to indulge it, but to keep it under continuous interrogation. To resist the seduction of tribal ethics, even when outrage feels earned. Especially then. If there is an ending here, it is not reconciliation, but vigilance. A recognition that the line between responsibility and condemnation is thin, mobile, and easily crossed. And that crossing it may offer emotional relief, but at the cost of precisely what ethics is meant to protect: the irreducibility of the individual.