I found the Question to be not just ignorant but extremely offensive. It's the first time I've flagged a Question asking for it to be deleted. My reaction to the Asker's request to explain why I am disgusted is a mixture of elements: (1) incredulity that I should have to explain why the Question was offensive; (2) [this is off-topic for german.SE]; (3) [also off-topic for german.SE]. I have nothing further to add.
EDIT TO ADD: I will break my vow not to add anything further, due to the comment from user "jambjo" below.
It is absolutely not clear to me why you are offended by the question
In a word, decency.
In her speech before the German Bundestag on Holocaust Remembrance Day last Thursday, Inge Deutschkron describes how she and her mother furtively watched from their hiding place how the Nazis rounded up the last remaining Jews in Berlin on October 16, 1941. Her family, her friends, the blind brush makers, the WWI veterans with service medals on their lapels: none were spared.
She then adds [my translation]:
I would lie awake at night seeing them in my mind's eye, thinking
about where they were and what was being done to them. I began to feel
guilty. What right, I asked myself, did I have to hide, to elude a
fate that should have been mine, too? This feeling of guilt would
pursue me and never let go of me again.
A year after the war ended, my mother and I received permission to
enter the United Kingdom. Accompanied by [other] emigrees, my father
came to pick us up from the train station in London. Immediately I saw
that for the emigrees, who were fighting back tears, we were like
delegates of their murdered loved ones.
By being there, we had made it official that their families had lost
their battle to survive in Nazi Germany. Again my feeling of guilt
surfaced.
At times in postwar Germany this feeling would give way to speechlessness
when people said to me, "Why won't you forget," if they could not
shut me up. "Isn't it high time to forgive," they asked me and added, "It
happened such a long time ago."
[ . . . ]
Suddenly I realized what duty my guilt imposed on me: I had to write
it down. The truth, unvarnished and unredacted, as I had seen it with
my own eyes. It was not about getting the guilty and those who had
remained silent to find some way to atone to the Jewish people.
[ . . .]
I, on the other hand, was obsessed by the idea that nothing comparable
must happen again. That never again should human beings deny other
human beings the right to life -- irrespective of the color of their
skin, their religion, or their political opinions: not here and not
anywhere else.
[ . . . ]
What, pray tell, is unclear about these words? Where do they betray an inability of Ms. Deutschkron, a professional writer all her life, to use the German language correctly? What motivates an individual to write that the use of the word guilt "seems wrong" to him and to wonder whether Ms. Deutschkron had "mixed up" shame and guilt? How low can you go?
The offense, dear jambjo, is twofold. One, this GLU user gratuitously cast aspersions on the professional writing skill of a journalist and author who is a thousand times more accomplished a writer than he. But more importantly, this "Question" betrayed a mindset of thuggish insensitivity -- a lack of ordinary decency -- and his reactions since then have deepened this impression.
I do not believe this user belongs on GLU. For the most part, I have come to this conclusion because of what I observed of his behavior here. He goes out of his way to be offensive and get under people's skin. Moreover, I have had the misfortune to see him hold forth on various web sites outside of StackExchange. I will not characterize what I saw there. However, his personal blog is only two mouse clicks away from his user page on GLU. I believe that this individual has a political agenda that he is trying to push. GLU is a language web site. His agenda does not belong here.
Previous attempts by other users to get "user unknown" expelled from GLU have failed. I know better than to be the third person to try and be rebuffed. However, I did exercise my right to flag that Question as, if I remember the wording next to the radio button right, "Not Welcome In Our Community". Unfortunately, Takkat only closed the Question but did not delete it. I still believe that it has no place on StackExchange.
EDIT #2:
Although I don't participate in "chat", I can read, and the last few days have seen so much ugly, nasty talk from this individual, so much willful refusal to get the point, that I consider him a real threat to the maintenance of a civilized online environment.
Just for the record and for the benefit of non-German-speaking visitors who chance upon this thread, "user unknown" is highly disingenuous in characterizing his Question. Back to Ms. Deutschkron's speech: Although it employs very simple language -- anyone with a high-school education can understand it without need of a dictionary -- that does not mean it is completely artless. On the contrary. The word "guilt" and its permutations occurs five times in the speech. The first four times it applies to herself. This sets up a tension: while any empathetic person can "understand", on an almost visceral level, how the pain of seeing her friends, relatives, and co-workers rounded up and carted away to a grim future tore her up inside and made her feel guilty for not being there to share their fate, at the same time the listener wants to cry out, No, it isn't you who is the guilty one! The Nazis were!
Then this tension is resolved: "It was not about getting the guilty and those who had remained silent to find some way to atone to the Jewish people. Oh no, that wouldn't have made any sense. The German people during the first post-war years were protected by their first chancellor who claimed in an address to the parliament that most Germans had opposed the crimes committed against the Jews; and that many had even helped the Jews to escape their murderers. If only that had been the case!" This is the fifth and final time that she mentions "guilt".
And second, she describes how she threw herself into working for a democratic and free postwar Germany, making sure that neither the victims nor the few heroes who helped them would be forgotten, and trying to determine the causes of the Shoah so that nothing similar would happen again, to any people, anywhere. Thus she managed to wrest something productive from the feeling of guilt, even if it may never have left her entirely.
Not every listener of her speech will have analyzed it in such detail. However, anybody with a sense of common decency will have understood what Ms. Deutschkron was about, no learned commentary required. To insist that she wrongly used the word "guilt" is not so much stupid as it is cruel and inhumane.
