The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness by Simon Wiesenthal

Author:Simon Wiesenthal [Wiesenthal, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Religion, Ethics
ISBN: 9780307560421
Google: r2THHgvTdlYC
Amazon: B000SEH8U8
Publisher: Schocken
Published: 2008-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

REBECCA GOLDSTEIN

Moral abstractions can achieve a firm universality precisely because they are abstract. The fine details that come with real life can make for obscurity, complexity, and confoundment. I trust this confoundment far more than I do the abstractions. I trust your confoundment, Simon Wiesenthal, and I admire your fierce attention to the details that engender the severe discomfort of answerlessness.

You, a victim of the mass engine of torture and murder assembled by the Nazi beast, are summoned to hear the dying confession of an SS man who seeks something from you—he calls it “forgiveness”—in order that he might “die in peace.” (He apparently feels he has the right to die in peace; perhaps this is an unquestioned assumption surviving from his earlier religious convictions.) You are summoned for no reason other than that you are a Jew, as if “Jew” were a mass term comparable, say, to “water” or “salt.” Here is a bit of water, we say, and any sample of it will do. All water manifests the same interchangeable water properties. That a Nazi should think this way about Jews is not in the least surprising. Mass terms, mass murders, mass graves: they are all of a piece.

But is the SS man who seeks your absolution in his mortal hour still a Nazi, or does his dying confession amount to a renunciation of his creed? This is one of the questions that composes the moral perplexity you present to us. For you, Simon Wiesenthal, are not at all inclined to reciprocate the mass-term thinking of the Nazi mentality. Quite the contrary, you do not relegate the speaking form before you to being just another token of the damn-them-all-to-hell type, the Nazi beast. Despite your fear and loathing, you never shrink before the task—heroic under the circumstances—of seeing a distinctly individual person before you, and you struggle, both in his death chamber and long afterward, to figure out what manner of person he truly is.

“Now I could see the figure in the bed far more clearly. White, bloodless hands on the counterpane, head completely bandaged with openings only for mouth, nose, and ears” (p. 25).

You do not see the SS man's eyes (actually, there are no longer eyes there to be seen) until years later, in an old photograph. But what you do attempt, despite the aversion which must have exceeded anything that we who never underwent your trials can possibly imagine, is to get behind those oozing bandages, behind those empty eyes.

And what do you see there? What do you show us? This SS man is one who has been susceptible to normative abstractions all his life. He is not a selfish creature who devotes himself to the gratification of his own personal desires. No, he is a dutiful sort, one who submits his will to the imperatives he sees as serving the greater good. A model boy, as his grieving mother recalls him, the parish priest's favorite.

His submissive posture before the demands of normative abstractions does not alter when he turns from Christianity to Nazi ideology.

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