The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness by Simon Wiesenthal
What can we learn from all this? I think it is that rationality without compassion and compassion without rationality are both ineffective when it comes to grappling with ethical problems. If only compassion would have counseled Wiesenthal, an empty forgiveness might easily be granted when in fact forgiveness was not only out of place but in truth impossible. Reason alone might suggest that the suffering of the SS man was well deserved and prompted Wiesenthal to treat him inhumanely. Reason prevented the sentiment of compassion from degenerating into sentimentality and compassion prevented unmodified reason from prompting a less humane act. In dealing with the mother, on the other hand, reason (helped along, perhaps, by a desire for revenge) could easily have led Wiesenthal to divulge the truth. Compassion prevented bludgeoning the mother with the naked truth and reason allowed Wiesenthal to hold his compassion in check. Without reason compassion could readily have led to a more active form of lying and transformed an SS villain into a hero. Since some personal contact with her dead son had been established, perhaps Wiesenthal left the mother more capable of bearing her grief. Humanity, once again, became shared.
I cannot judge Wiesenthal or his actions wrong under these circumstances. If, God forbid, I should ever be in a similar situation I could only hope that I would have the strength to act in a similar fashion. I am afraid I might not.
HERBERT MARCUSE
I think I would have acted the way you did, that is to say, refused the request of the dying SS man. It always seemed to me inhuman and a travesty of justice if the executioner asked the victim to forgive. One cannot, and should not, go around happily killing and torturing and then, when the moment has come, simply ask, and receive, forgiveness. In my view, this perpetuates the crime.
By the way, the question transcends the Jewish problem. As a member of the National Liberation Front, would one forgive a Marine sergeant the killing and torturing of one's friends, wife, children? Is anyone justified, entitled to forgive?
I still remember the traumatic shock I had when I read that, after the assassination of Rathenau, his mother went to the assassin's mother and comforted her!
I believe that the easy forgiving of such crimes perpetuates the very evil it wants to alleviate.
MARTIN E. MARTY
What would I have done?”
The author's final question is designed to haunt. The word that leaps, nags, and accuses is “I.” Here there is no thought of categorical imperatives or universal principles. What would I have done? Ortega reminds us: “I am I and my circumstances.” My circumstances are unimaginably different from his. It is difficult, then, to imagine an answer to his question.
Almost two thousand years after the early Christians were martyred by the Romans we Christian children were taught to prepare ourselves. We, too, might be called upon to witness even unto death. Strange how powerful a story can remain for two millennia. So it shall be with the recall of the Holocaust for the descendants of Jews. Astute teachers would remind us that martyrdoms continued. Even as we sat in school, Christians were dying for their faith in Russia, Germany, and elsewhere. At the time I was in third grade Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Christian who was later to die in one of Hitler's camps, was writing a book on discipleship. Its first line told us that when Jesus Christ calls a man he calls him to die.
Without doubt I prepared myself intellectually as a child for such discipleship. I am not sure that if my circumstances called me to such extremes I would be ready. I, who cower in the dentist's chair and shrink from minor pain—would I be able to stand torture? I, who have been trained or who have trained myself to look past or to overlook injustices and suffering every day—would I be ready to witness? “What would I have done?” I do not know. But the author's question pursues beyond that first evasion.
“What would I have done?” becomes “What should I have done?” But to answer that question would identify me again with the author and his circumstances, something that is impossible for me to do. Even the author's fellow prisoners do not satisfy him with the counsel they offer. Were I to respond directly, it would be necessary for me to get almost as close as they, to share the experience of the author's people. But is there then a single prescription, a single “ought” or “should”? His committee of counselors sometimes seems to imply that there is. To act one way would be to deny the Jewish people. To act another way would be to affirm them. I prefer his lifelong uncertainty to their counsel. To say that all persons in a people must act a specific way is to routinize them, to program them, to deprive them of elements of their humanity.
Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived the death camps, has pondered the question of exceptionality there and thenceforth. Why did some prisoners who knew they were to die that day still spread comfort and share bread? He could not answer, but he did note that they demonstrated that one freedom cannot be taken away: the freedom to choose one's own attitude in the face of any circumstance. The author chose the attitude of perplexity and bemusement. He chose to let himself be haunted all his life. Who is to say that his choice is inferior to the counselors’, for they were more sure of themselves and the impact of peoplehood.
Speaking of peoplehood and circumstances, one more thing must be said. I am a Christian, and I hear the question framed against Wiesenthal's experience. So it sounds like this: “What would/should a Jew have done?” I cannot imagine being asked to this symposium except for the fact that I am a Christian. So I hear, “What does a Christian say?” And in that way of stating it I can only respond with silence. Non-Jews and perhaps especially Christians should not give advice about the Holocaust experience to its heirs for the next two thousand years. And then we shall have nothing to say.
This does not mean that the Holocaust has to be set apart qualitatively from the experience of all other genocides and victimizations in history. To do so would be to dishonor innocent sufferers elsewhere. Modern Armenians, tribesmen in Africa, peoples of the Asian subcontinent have all experienced hatreds and madnesses as have the Jews. They may appear on statistically smaller scales, but I do not begin to comprehend the Holocaust if I say that others’ suffering was less meaningful or less valid. But it happens that the Holocaust is webbed into “our” history—Western and Western religious history. This circumstance impels silence. Cheap instant advice from a Christian would trivialize the lives and deaths of millions.
Forget, then, the author's circumstance and keep the essence of his question for me. Is there any kind of situation in which the offense is so gross and enormous that I should withhold forgiveness in the face of what appears to be true penitence? My answer would be that in every circumstance that I can picture, more value would grow out of forgiveness than out of its withholding. But I must ask what am I afraid of or concerned about, and what is it that causes me to hem and hedge, to shuffle and clear my throat, to be suspicious of that answer?
First, I am afraid of “cheap grace,” as were The Sunflower people. W. H. Auden's Herod parodies a version of Christian forgiveness. He sees every corner newsboy remarking that he likes to commit sins and God likes to forgive them so the world is admirably arranged. No. Nothing should happen that would let haters or murderers off the hook by assuring them that grace is readily available. The author's silence in that hospital room was a guard against the cheapening of grace.
A second fear: crimes against a people will be taken less seriously if individual persons start forgiving in their name. The question is here raised, then, whether latter-day Germans who do express repentance should be allowed to feel forgiven. Here I must raise the question whether it is always valuable to prolong a people's sense of guilt. As a white, they tell me that I must always feel guilty and grovel over what whites in the American past did when they killed Indians and enslaved blacks. And, to a measure, I do. But I have sufficient guilt for my own faults in relation to the heirs of the Indians and blacks, and to many other people. Is there not a limit to the good that can be achieved by my groveling, my self-hate, my loss of pride in the
The third reason for pause: if grace be cheap and splattered at random, will we not soon forget to tell the story? Theodor Adorno and Alexander Solzhenitsyn have both reminded us that to forget to tell the story is to deprive past sufferers of the meaning of their act. But there are many ways to tell the story. Wiesenthal's ambivalence stays in our mind because he has taken pains to tell us of it. So would other attitudes, if there be storytellers to broadcast them.
We do not want cheap grace, a casual people, or a forgotten victim. What do we want? I am on a search for grace in the world. While my colleagues write on the phenomenology of evil or of the will, I want to see what grace feels like. As a Christian I am told that God is a gracious Other, but I also need to be a gracious brother. Gracelessness helps produce totalitarianisms as much as cheap grace might. If there is to be grace, it must be mediated through people. We have to see potentials in the lives of even the worst people, have to see that it is we who can dam the flow of grace. I do not for a moment claim that this insight is mine because I am a Christian; phenomenologically speaking, such a concept of grace is shared by people of many faiths and of no clear faith. Reportorially, it often has not been visible on Christian soil. But that does not mean that a turn cannot now be taken.
If I forgive in the face of true repentance and new resolve, I am free. Wiesenthal successfully works on the basis of his uncertainty; it motivates him. But I can let my being haunted preoccupy me so that I do not notice “the other.” Forgiving and being forgiven are experiences that allow me to be free for a new day. I cannot say that I would be more free or more creative than is Wiesenthal. That is because I cannot say what he should have done but only what I would like to think I would want to do.
CYNTHIA OZICK
Notes Toward a Meditation on “Forgiveness”
1. THE USES OF JESUS
The SS man had a Catholic education. As a boy he was a “server in the church.” Should not a Christian education make it impossible for a child to grow up to be an SS man? Should not a sentence like “The SS man had a Catholic education” be so thoroughly a contradiction of its own terms that the words come out jabberwocky?
The words do not come out jabberwocky; the SS man did have a Christian education.
Does the habit, inculcated in infancy, of worshiping a Master—a Master depicted in human form yet seen to be omnipotent—make it easy to accept a Führer?
2. THE SOURCES OF PITY
Pity is not “felt,” as if by instinct or reflex. Pity is taught. But what is the original source of pity? What teaches it? The Second Commandment—the one against idols.
Every idol is a shadow of Moloch, demanding human flesh to feed on. The deeper the devotion to the idol, the more pitiless in tossing it its meal will be the devotee. The Commandment against idols is above all a Commandment against victimization, and in behalf of pity.
Moloch springs up wherever the Second Commandment is silenced. In the absence of the Second Commandment, the hunt for victims begins.
The Second Commandment is more explicit than the Sixth, which tells us simply that we must not kill; the Second Commandment tells us we must resist especially that killing which serves our belief.
In Germany, did the Church say, “Hitler is Moloch”?
Moloch's appetite for victims cannot be stemmed. Begin by feeding it only Jews, and in the end it will eat even the little boys who are servers in their church.
There are no innocent idols. Every idol suppresses human pity. That is what it is made for.
3. VENGEANCE AND FORGIVENESS
Is the morally obsessed human being more drawn to vengeance or to forgiveness?
What is vengeance, what is forgiveness?
Often we are asked to think this way: vengeance brutalizes, forgiveness refines.
But the opposite can be true. The rabbis said, “Whoever is merciful to the cruel will end by being indifferent to the innocent.” Forgiveness can brutalize.
You will object, “Only if it seems to condone. But forgiveness does not condone or excuse. It allows for redemption, for a clean slate, a fresh start; it encourages beginning again. Forgiveness permits renewal.”
Only if there is a next time. “I forgive you,” we say to the child who has muddied the carpet, “but next time don't do it again.” Next time she will leave the muddy boots outside the door; forgiveness, with its enlarging capacities, will have taught her. Forgiveness is an effective teacher. Meanwhile, the spots can be washed away.
But murder is irrevocable. Murder is irreversible. With murder there is no “next time.” Even if forgiveness restrains one from perpetrating a new batch of corpses (and there is no historical demonstration of this in Nazi Germany), will the last batch come alive again?
There are spots forgiveness cannot wash out. Forgiveness, which permits redemption, can apply only to a condition susceptible of redemption.
You will object: “If forgiveness cannot wash away murder, neither can vengeance. If forgiveness is not redemptive, surely vengeance is less so, because vengeance requites evil with an equal evil, thereby adding to the store of evil in the world.”
But that is a misunderstanding. Vengeance does not requite evil with evil; vengeance cannot requite, repay, even out, equate, redress. If it could, vengeance on a mass murderer would mean killing all the members of his family and a great fraction of his nation; and still his victims would not come alive.
What we call “vengeance” is the act of bringing public justice to evil—not by repeating the evil, not by imitating the evil, not by initiating a new evil, but by making certain never to condone the old one; never even appearing to condone it.
“Public” justice? Yes. While the evil was going on, to turn aside from it, to avoid noticing it, became complicity. And in the same way, after three or four decades have passed and the evil has entered history, to turn aside from it—to forget—again becomes complicity. Allowing the evil to slip into the collective amnesia of its own generation, or of the next generation, is tantamount to condoning it.
You will object: “Here you are, naming vengeance as public justice because it does not condone evil. But forgiveness too does not condone evil. It doesn't matter that it may sometimes appear to; the fact is it doesn't. And you have already demonstrated that there are some evils forgiveness cannot wash away. Yet now you say that vengeance, like forgiveness, neither condones nor washes away the evil. How, then, do vengeance and forgiveness differ?”
In this way: forgiveness is pitiless. It forgets the victim. It negates the right of the victim to his own life. It blurs over suffering and death. It drowns the past. It cultivates sensitiveness toward the murderer at the price of insensitiveness toward the victim.
What is always characterized as “vengeance”—which is to say, a justice that enlightens the world as to the nature of evil (and by “nature of evil” I do not mean something philosophical or metaphysical, but the exact conduct of the evildoer: what precisely was done; when and where; by whom; to whom)—this so-called vengeance is fired by the furnaces of pity. This so-called vengeance—justice in apposite dress—generates fire after fire of pity.
I forgot for a moment where I was and then I heard a buzzing sound. A bluebottle…flew round the head of the dying [SS] man, who could not see it nor could he see me wave it away.
“Thanks,” he nevertheless whispered. And for the first time I realized that I, a defenseless subhuman, had contrived to lighten the lot of an equally defenseless superman, without thinking, simply as a matter of course. (p. 37).
The young man who will become Simon Wiesenthal, who will become the world's “Nazi-hunter,” waves a fly from the wound of the dying Nazi “without thinking, simply as a matter of course.” A hand striking out for pity. At that moment the SS
Vengeance, only vengeance, knows pity for the victim.
You will object: “Oratory! And if he had forgiven the SS man, he would not have waved away the fly?”
He would not have noticed it at all. Whoever forgives the murderer blinds himself to the vastest letting of blood—how then should he see the smallest mite?
It is forgiveness that is relentless. The face of forgiveness is mild, but how stony to the slaughtered.
4. MORAL TENDERNESS, MORAL RESPONSIBILITY
Consider this dying SS man. Is he not unlike so many others? He, at least, shows the marks of conscience, of remorse, of sickness at his life. He is not arrogant; he is not self-justifying; he feels disgust at everything he has witnessed, he recoils from everything he has committed. He is a man at a moral turning. Ought he not to be delivered over to his death—to use the old Christian word—shriven? He is penitent, so many others are not—should the penitent be treated like the impenitent? Should a revived goodness, a recovered cleanliness of heart, be dealt with exactly as one would deal with the recalcitrance of an unregenerate brute?
Consider now the brute. He exults in his brutishness. Remorse never touches him; even in memory, even thirty years after those butcheries of his, he exults in them. His mind, dim for other matters, is a bright and secret screen on which he renews and replenishes these triumphs of his old lost barbaric power over the weak. He was a great man then; he was like an angel, he served in fact the Angel of Death, lives were in his hands and under his feet, his boots were on the necks of the doomed. As he never experienced regret then, so now he never dreams of wishing away the old sensations and reminders.