The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness

by Simon Wiesenthal

  Having had these personal experiences, I have tried to find some kind of explanation, justification, or rationale for why Karl deserved forgiveness. Many years have elapsed since the incident occurred, and surely now we can examine it rationally, objectively, and unemotionally. Karl was a soldier who, through conditioning and circumstance, was led to commit an atrocity. But he proved himself to be human precisely by trying so desperately to rescue his humanity through confession.

  As a Holocaust survivor myself, I unfortunately cannot generate such magnanimity. I may know something about combat training and about what war can do to a person, but I can also testify that the misery this man inflicted on his victims defies claiming any extenuating circumstance whatsoever. Karl managed to overcome the voice within him that said a person cannot murder innocent men, women, and children and still call himself a human being. He allowed himself to be changed into a foul beast who did the unforgivable. He gave up his moral life—his soul—to his leader and his state. He believed it when he was told that his victims were less than animals and that he was a superior being who was obligated to torture and annihilate them. What he did was the ultimate and irreversible denial of his humanity.

  And now, at death's door, he pleads for forgiveness. That is, he asks for readmission into the human race. But his appeal is addressed to the wrong party. Those who arguably could grant forgiveness are no longer here; he murdered them. Other Germans of that era might have the right to ask for forgiveness or even plead innocence. I do not believe in collective guilt and have long ago learned to accept Germans as responsible and conscientious beings. After all, I served a considerable part of my military career in Germany protecting them from communism. I was prepared to give up my most precious possession, my life, in that effort. But those individuals who were directly and personally involved in these atrocities deserve no mercy.

  Simon Wiesenthal was right in not granting forgiveness, for two reasons. First, he did not have the moral right to do so, and second, this savage did not deserve it. He stepped over the boundary where forgiveness is possible. That SS officer should take up his case with God. I personally think he should go to hell and rot there. I doubt very much that my God would grant him forgiveness. After all, what does it take to serve in hell?

  DOROTHEE SOELLE

  I have two contradictory replies to that which Simon Wiesenthal asks himself and us all. This contradiction is in Wiesenthal's narrative itself—between his “No, I cannot forgive you, the nice young German man and SS murderer” and “Yes, I can believe your remorse, absolvo te, go in peace”—in the silent departure, in the questioning of the other prisoners, and the visit to the elderly mother. Everywhere, one senses the no, and the necessity of finding a yes.

  Perhaps, as a German, I have the least right to say something other than no. As a Christian, whether I wish it or not, I am always as an heir to the Jewish tradition; I cannot separate myself from yes. I would like to tell of an encounter with a professor of German literature; perhaps this will clarify what I mean. In the late 1960s, I learned that this professor, whom I greatly respected and revered for his sensitivity and receptive spirit, had not only been a Nazi but had even participated in a book burning. I couldn't fathom this, and visited him at his apartment to learn the truth. Why did you do this, who commanded it, did you know which books were burned: were Alfred Döblin's, were Kafka's? I wanted to know exactly. It was an excruciating few hours. He didn't protect himself, but he did insist on the distinction between books and people—which, naturally, was the underlying issue during every moment of our conversation.

  When I asked where he stood now, he wept. He stammered something that I didn't understand. Only the word “forgiveness” was unspoken, implicit. And then something utterly extraordinary happened, something I had never experienced, before or since. He threw himself on the floor, knelt down, wrung his hands, and then folded them. I couldn't remain seated in my chair, I didn't want to leave, so I knelt beside him and we prayed aloud the Lord's prayer:…and forgive us our sins.

  I had never known before what remorse was. Many years later, I learned what the word teshuvah meant in the Jewish tradition: deliverance, changing one's ways, a new beginning. A Jewish tradition tells that teshuvah was created even before the Creation, together with the Torah, the name of the Messiah, and other mysteries. Supposedly, there is no person, time, or place where teshuvah is not possible.

  This is what I thought as I read Simon Wiesenthal. Wasn't teshuvah at work with this dying young SS man? If so, then Wiesenthal didn't have to lie, later, to the mother. Both the murderer and his mother were not alone in this one-sided conversation. God was there; together with the mother of the youth, he had awaited the murderer.

  Perhaps I would have said, No, I cannot forgive you. But perhaps the other. Oremus.

  ALBERT SPEER

  Afflicted by unspeakable suffering, horrified by the torments of millions of human beings, I acknowledged responsibility for these crimes at the Nuremberg Trial. With the verdict of guilty, the court punished only my legal guilt. Beyond that remains the moral involvement. Even after twenty years of imprisonment in Spandau, I can never forgive myself for recklessly and unscrupulously supporting a regime that carried out the systematic murder of Jews and other groups of people. My moral guilt is not subject to the statute of limitations, it cannot be erased in my lifetime.

  Should you forgive, Simon Wiesenthal, even if I cannot forgive myself? Manès Sperber assumes that you would not condemn this SS man if he had lived and remained faithful to his conviction of remorse: Well, on May 20, 1975, we sat facing one another for more than three hours at your Vienna-based Documentation Center, a meeting preceded by a six-month correspondence. It was in fact your Sunflower that led me to you: “You are right,” I wrote you earlier, “no one is bound to forgive. But you showed empathy, undertaking the difficult trip to Stuttgart in 1946. You showed compassion by not telling the mother of her son's crimes. This human kindness also resounds in your letter to me, and I am thankful for it.” You showed clemency, humanity, and goodness when we sat facing one another on this May 20th, too. You did not touch my wounds. You carefully tried to help. You didn't reproach me or confront me with your anger. I looked into your eyes, eyes that reflected all the murdered people, eyes that have witnessed the misery, degradation, fatalism, and agony of your fellow human beings. And yet, those eyes are not filled with hatred; they remain warm and tolerant and full of sympathy for the misery of others. When we parted, you wrote for me in my copy of your book that I did not repress that ruthless time, but had recognized it responsibly in its true dimensions.

  My trauma led me to you. You helped me a great deal—as you helped the SS man when you did not withdraw your hand or reproach him. Every human being has his burden to bear. No one can remove it for another, but for me, ever since that day, it has become much lighter. It is God's grace that has touched me through you.

  MANÈS SPERBER

  How I, in Simon Wiesenthal's place, would have reacted to the request of the SS man, I cannot say. Perhaps I would have yielded from weakness, from a false kindness, and uttered the words of forgiveness for which the dying man longed. On the other hand, it may be that I would have acted in precisely the same way as Wiesenthal…Yet it is true, leaving individual psychology out of consideration, that even in such a situation the individual acts in accordance with his character. As to the question of conscience placed before every reader of the epilogue to The Sunflower, one must first of all establish the following principle: it is possible for us to forget a wrong, even the worst misdeed which has been committed on us. If that happens, the question of forgiveness is superfluous. Why and through what internal process we are able to reach such a state of forgetting cannot here be discussed. Apart from any forgetting which the victim is able to achieve, there is forgetting on the part of the evildoer, an incomparably more frequent phenomenon. Certainly there is a deep psychological feeling that there can be no final oblivion. In this case
it is a question of a more or less lasting “disactualization.”

  Must one forget before one can forgive? Is it possible to retain the misdeed in one's memory and nevertheless forgive it? What are the conditions in which such a thing can happen?

  The first answer may sound cynical: the surest and most lasting forgiveness and reconciliation is when the descendants of the evildoers and those of the victims bind themselves into a collective and unbreakable unity—into a family, a tribe, a people, a nation. Ernest Renan, some hundred years ago, pointed out that the existence of nations depends on forgetting. Each nation represents the amalgamation of tribes who for many years, and possibly for hundreds of years, had inflicted the worst sufferings and griefs on each other. Each new generation discovers the truth about the frightful shattering past, but that does not destroy the consciousness of a common destiny.

  A second tragic possibility—it comes nearer our case because of the one-sidedness of the crime—is that of extreme humiliation and ruthless persecution. In order not to have their lives fatally imperiled, the victims or their descendants subject themselves to their wrongdoers and admit that their lies and excuses are true. Whence the at least temporary success of the totalitarian oppressor and tyrant.

  In both cases a purposeful “disactualization” takes place, in order to free the present and more especially the future from the heavy burden of the past. Does the forgetting in that case precede the crime, or vice versa? In each case the answer may be different. True, the old Jewish principle frequently applies: kulo chayav—all are guilty. And so all are guilty, and all may go free. Punishment would be too awful, it would endanger the existence of mankind, and mankind must not perish.

  Doubtless one could formulate the problem in another way: do the evildoers themselves forget, do they forget before they have repented and confessed their crime? Without confession and sincere repentance their forgetting is nothing more than a continuation of their crime. So do not grant pardon before you are certain that the guilty on their side will always remember their guilt. From this point of view the ethical problem facing both Jews and Germans is not a simple one, but it is completely clear—before we have the right to forget, we must be absolutely certain that the Germans on their side have not forgotten, and that they are willing to do everything possible so as not to forget the crimes committed in their name. The two peoples are bound together in startling fashion by the terrible events, just as the young SS man on his deathbed and the prisoner Wiesenthal were bound together. And Wiesenthal will be bound until his dying day. Though their misdeeds and their sufferings may make it enormously difficult to live together in lasting peace, yet nothing now can separate them from each other.

  I always rejected, both in theory and practice, the idea of collective guilt, but I do believe that there is such a thing as national or state responsibility. In this respect the reparations made by the German Federal Republic to Israel and to the surviving victims of Nazi crimes are entirely justified and significant. They replace nothing, they cannot reverse what has happened, but for the Germans they are a psychohygienic necessity. But that is no answer to the question: how can one forgive those who make it impossible for us to forget—so far as we would dare to forget—because they on their side are determined to behave as though they no longer know what there is to forgive and forget?

  If the young SS man was guilty, yet he differed from the organizers of the extermination camps and the accomplices of genocide. By his obedience to his criminal leaders he augmented the guilt which he had incurred by putting himself politically and unconditionally at their disposal. There is no question of that, but it is none less true that in the end he brought the accusation against himself. As an accused person he is condemned in our eyes and rejected, but as accuser he placed himself among the victims.

  Nevertheless Simon Wiesenthal was quite right in refusing to pardon him, at any rate not in the name of the martyrs, who neither then nor now had entrusted anybody with such a mission. But if that young man had lived and remained true to the convictions which tortured the last hours of his life, and maybe even transfigured him—if he were still among us would Wiesenthal condemn him? I think not. And I feel that I too could not condemn that SS man today.

  The corrupt autocrats forced upon their subjects a complicity from which only he could escape who followed the dictates of his conscience even when thereby he risked his life. Thus it was that millions of people were guilty. Let none of us refuse to forgive any one of them whose guilt became the irrepressible source of a tortured conscience. There can be no counter-argument against forgiveness in such a case, or indeed against a reconciliation based on pity.

  ANDRÉ STEIN

  “In our world, nothing any longer obeyed the laws of normal everyday life,…The only law that was left as a reliable basis for judgment was the law of death.…The effect on us was a mental paralysis, and…the clear expression of the hopelessness of our lot” (p. 68).

  These words of Simon Wiesenthal allow little room for controversy as to his own action. Daily life in extremis predetermined what was or was not within his psychological and moral means. Any a posteriori speculation as to forgiving a dying SS murderer is ethically questionable. In the absurd culture of the death camp where every moment was saturated with its own premature ending, all decisions were by necessity the consequence of planned randomization of meanings. Nothing could be taken for granted on the basis of a previous stock of knowledge. Any act, decision, compliance with an order could as easily be life-affirming as life-threatening. Nothing made sense. The victims were evicted from their own destiny. Often, the result was a trance Simon calls “mental paralysis” in which one's choices were likely to lead to destruction. Since in the concentrationary universe nothing survived intact from the previous lifeworld of the Jew, Simon's silence had to be a choiceless choice; it should not be argued in the lap of ordinary daily reality and with the distance of half a century.

  For me Simon's story does raise important questions about Karl's role in this matter. Did he have the right to ask for forgiveness? Can we believe in the authenticity of his repentance? Should anyone perpetrating crimes against humanity expect forgiveness? If we forgave war criminals how would such an act of questionable generosity affect the survivors and the victims’ memory?

  I am dismayed about the eagerness of many to forgive child-killers, torturers, rapists by transferring the blame onto a murderous ideology and propaganda, and, in Karl's case, onto his youthful vulnerability.

  The call for forgiveness reminds me of the words Arthur, Simon's comrade, uttered in the camp when Simon asked his opinion: “…there will be people who will never forgive you for not forgiving him…But anyhow nobody who has not had our experience will be able to understand fully.” The quote points out two truths: First, that those who cast a stone at Simon show a greater affinity with the dying murderer than with his victims. And second, that by lobbying for forgiving the young SS, they view Nazism through spuriously humane glasses. Let's remember that Karl at twenty-one was old enough to make informed choices. He could have drawn on the teachings of his faith and on the moral values of his family. Instead, he opted for endorsing a seductive myth that gave him powers nobody should have. He participated in murder. He ended up with a guilty conscience but took no action displaying genuine remorse or repentance. Thus, his deathbed confession sounds somewhat hollow.

  I am not moved by his “moral pain” any more than were Simon's comrades, or for that matter than was Simon himself. When I read his story, my heart went out to his victims, and to Simon who was coerced into this drama by the arrogance of a Nazi killer terrified of dying a dirty death.

  True repentance must include empathy toward the victim and others who share his vulnerability. Instead, Karl had the nurse bring him a Jew—any Jew—so that he could confess, get the Jew's absolution, and die in peace. The request was absurd. For a Nazi to expect that a Jew, languishing in a Nazi death camp, should muster a measure of generosity toward
a comrade of those who are likely to kill him, is not a proof of repentance. What it does prove is that Karl still thought of the Jew as an object. The fact that any Jew could have performed this miraculous spiritual rescue is evidence that for Karl, Simon was not a fellow human being but an instrument of salvation. Just before he dies, he further insinuates himself into Simon's life by leaving him his belongings, as if to say, “I will reach out to you from the grave and will not let you forget that you did not grant me, a dying man, his last wish.” Thus, Karl succeeded in claiming squatter's rights on his conscience. Indeed, the reissue of The Sunflower fifty years after the event attests to his lifelong presence in Simon's journey.

  As for Simon, he did not do anything morally reprehensible by not saying “I forgive you.” To utter that simple sentence would have been a lie anyway. Silence emerged as the only authentic means of communication. Simon had listened to the man's story with ears belonging to the dead and the near-dead— Eli, his mother, his comrades. And still, he listened and honored the man's story. At the end, his silence was an unequivocal statement: “I heard what you did, how you feel about it. I see how scared you are of dying with a burdened conscience. And this is all I can do. I am not telling you how much I hate you, for the flames of my hatred would burn me before they would reach you. I cannot forgive you not only because it is not in my power to speak for your victims but also because you have forced me to hear your story. For me this is a curse.”