The Sunflower_ On the Possibilities and - Wiesenthal, Simon copy

MARY GORDON
The Catholic-educated Nazi officer is asking to be forgiven by a Jew in the name of all
Jews whose public execution was the cornerstone of everything he pledged himself to
believe in when he became a Nazi. He is asking for private forgiveness, not from the person
he has harmed, but in the name of others. What does the Nazi expect to gain from being
forgiven?
Perhaps he imagines that forgiveness is a kind of magic eraser, a way of undoing what
cannot temporally be undone, a way of saying, “it never happened.” It becomes, then, a
narcissistic rather than a moral act because it places the perpetrator's need to be purged of
guilt ahead of the victim's need for restitution or simple recognition of having been harmed.
Forgiveness can, of course, be good for both sides, but forgetting almost never is, first
because it is a form of denial, and second because only a recognition of guilt by both sides
can begin to prevent repetition of the same heinous deed. By marking the sinner in some way
that is unmistakable, public rituals of communal penitence insure that the deed will not be
forgotten, at least for awhile.
The Nazi officer is wrong to ask Wiesenthal for forgiveness for two reasons. First, he is
wrong to ask one man to serve as a public symbol for all Jews. A symbol, by its nature, is
communal, and its status can be bestowed only by the community. There is no such thing as a
privately symbolic figure. A priest can forgive sins in the name of God, but he is acting
outside of his own biography. His role is mediator between the community and God. But it is