The Sunflower_ On the Possibilities and - Wiesenthal, Simon copy

The “disappearing criminal” is one of the most dangerous and lamentable legacies of the
Holocaust experience. Ironically, in asking forgiveness of a Jew, the SS man transfers the
weight of moral decision from himself to one of his potential victims. This dynamic,
unfortunately, recurs in numerous testimonies of Holocaust survivors who, in the absence of
real malefactors like the dying SS man, sometimes blame themselves for acts or
consequences of which they are perfectly innocent. For me, the SS man's request betrays his
utter failure to understand the nature of his crime: it seems a desperate last gesture to escape
his guilt, though we will never know what his buried motives were. He may not know them
himself.
Words like “wrong” and “misdeed” grew up in a universe of discourse oblivious to
places like Auschwitz and Majdanek, where gas chambers and crematoria flourished. The
long list of exonerating terms that appear in The Sunflower—atonement and expiation,
repentance and absolution, guilt and forgiveness—to me reflects a valiant but misguided and
ultimately doomed effort to reclaim for a familiar vocabulary an event that has burst the
frame of conventional judgmental language. Jean Améry's classic study of his ordeal at the
hands of the Gestapo and in Auschwitz, At the Mind's Limits, had for its original German
title Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (Beyond guilt and atonement). Améry not only promotes
Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (Jenseits von Gut und Böse) to modern times, but also
invites us to reconsider the terminology with which we will evaluate the most hideous crime
of the twentieth century.
Deep in the bowels of Dante's Inferno is a sinner whose presence must have confounded
Dante's readers, because they believed that this sinner was still alive. In fact, he was; but
Dante the poet invents the heretical idea of acts so outrageous that they condemn the soul of