Political books

The Dilemma of a Confession

"Eichmann Hunter" Wiesenthal and the Dying SS Man

SIMON WIESENTHAL: "The Sunflower – Of Guilt and "Forgiveness". Translation of the foreign language texts by Eva Gärtner. Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, Hamburg. 247 pages, DM 16.80.

In the case of a man who accepts the title of "Eichmann hunter" who has become known worldwide as the author of a book entitled "The Murderers Among Us" and who has contributed significantly to the uncovering of Nazi crimes by heading a documentation center, one would think that the maxim of his actions would be conclusive and free of any conflict of conscience. This is not so.

Simon Wiesenthal – born in Buczacz (Galicia) in 1908 – was working as an architect in Lviv when he became a "Kazetnik" as a Jew during the German occupation in 1941 and then had to walk the fateful path through many concentration camps of the Third Reich until 1945. In Mauthausen in 1945, emaciated to a skeleton, he arrived in the "death block" to be killed as soon as the Americans would approach the camp. "Still half an hour to freedom, but only five minutes to death"; Wiesenthal was saved.

After almost thirty years, the author reports on a strange event from 1942, with which he was confronted in Lviv at that time and which still does not let him rest in peace. His experience was: As a concentration camp prisoner he had to perform field work of the lowest kind for a few days with a work detachment in the Polytechnic in Lemberg, which had been converted into a German stage hospital. In this building, where every nook and cranny was known to the former engineering student Wiesenthal, a German nurse approached him in the courtyard while he was working and asked him – as if she had not known this anyway – whether he was Jewish. Wiesenthal nodded a "yes," and she told him to follow her.

Wiesenthal thus entered a sickroom and was left alone and with a severely injured man, of whom only his mouth and ears were visible. The head of the injured man was bandaged with a dressing that was yellow through with pus and ointment. It was a 21-year-old SS man from Stuttgart who was blinded by a bullet in the head during the fighting near Taganrog. The SS man had been laying in the military hospital in Lemberg for three months with a torn face – knowing that he would die, he wanted to leave this world in peace. But he cannot do it without first talking about an experience that torments him. This SS man must "just talk about it, maybe it will help me"; and so he asked "a Jewish prisoner" to come to him.

He had been inculcated by the Nazis in the Hitler Youth that "God" was a hateful Jewish invention; now he lies dying in the presence of a Jew, sighing in a whisper, "My God, my God". This 21-year-old SS man had taken part in terrible extermination actions against Jews in Russia and now, in the face of his death, was troubled by the Christian conscience of his youthful years. At his last breaths he desires "absolution", the pardon by a Jew.

The dying man has put his hand in front of his blindfolded eyes as if to scare away the image. "We’re shooting...o God!" During this narration, the dying man's hand had virtually clawed into the hand of the camp convict Wiesenthal, as if he wanted to find a hold here. Only with great difficulty could the latter free himself from the touch that was resisting him. The "Jewish confessor" pulled his hand away – as if he could have escaped the physical pain that overcame him when he became aware of his own experience while remembering the many murdered Jewish men, women and children. The dying man folded his hands as if he wanted to ask a Jew, "who must die", for forgiveness for the terrible.

Simon Wiesenthal gets up and leaves the room – without a word. He had made up his mind. His attitude was ambivalent, because just before he had shooed a fly away from the blind man's face – as if he had forgotten everything. Only the "thank you" of the SS man made him realize "that he – the defenseless Untermensch – had provided relief to the equally defenseless Herrenmensch as a matter of course, without thinking about it."

In the first 108 pages of his book, the author has written his account of his experience in a form that makes the authenticity harrowing and impressively believable, but does not break down the problem presented in novelistic fashion. What would have been desirable – even if final answers in the unsolvable problem of "guilt and forgiveness" – would not have arisen. The description of the camp atmosphere is artistically well done, the Job's question about the religious self-image with the formula "God on vacation" philosophically well put aside. The beginnings of dialogues about the sense or nonsense of what happened hint at the subject of a great problem novel, as one could have written it.

The author, who is obviously not satisfied with himself, chooses the unusual path of taking his question of conscience to the outside world and presenting it to "43 wise men" for an answer. Thus a symposium develops, in which clever people give all possible answers, in the end however state – as far as they take a stand at all on the problem – "that there is no answer to the question" and, as far as they want to do the questioner some good in friendship service, exculpate him. Everything that has been formulated there in 120 pages, some of it very cleverly, one would have liked to read in a novel by Wiesenthal with crafted characters as a problem – asked and answered. The author proves his ability to do this when he touches on the German problem of guilt. As a member of his people, he cannot simply get off like a passenger on a tram at any station.

The appendix of a "Symposium of the Wise" tears "The Sunflower" (the naming is well interpreted), inorganically into two parts. The answers of the "wise men" do not fit in the shaping to the impressive story and create – perhaps this is unfair and too harsh – the impression of a "publicity stunt", which "The Sunflower" does not need. A maxim seems to emanate clearly that no one – even with remorse – can forgive by accepting a confession – vicariously for six million dead. That would be reserved for God – or his "deputies". What would actually have happened to the now repentant if he had not been mortally wounded by the Taganrog shells and thus had the opportunity to commit further crimes?

In "Symposium" Albrecht Goes draws attention to sentences of Martin Buber's Frankfurt Paulskirche speech of 1953, which probably state the essence when he speaks of those who participated in the act of "organized cruelty": "I have the dimension of human existence in common with them only in appearance; they have so dimensionally removed themselves from the human realm, so transposed into a sphere of monstrous inhumanity inaccessible to my imagination, that not even a hatred, let alone an overcoming of hatred, can arise in me. And what am I that I could presume to forgive here?"

This seems to be formulated realistically enough and to be more humane than to overtax man with the postulate of a nebulous "love of one's enemies", as is so often done according to the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. The coexistence of people should be soberly and maximally effectively based on "love of neighbor". What, by the way, would have offered to the Jewish author as an answer, if already such one of others looks for it from his holy scripture – the Torah. There it says – so often overlooked –: "Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles" (Proverbs of Solomon, 24:17). Finally, Job also considered it a hypocrisy against God and a punishable crime "if I had rejoiced at the fall of my enemy or exulted that misfortune had befallen him" (Job 31:29).

The conflict of conscience, which the extraverted author presents to us, he can only solve himself, as the "survey" reveals. But his extraversion gives a hint, which nobody has pointed out so far, but which can show the author that the answer is ready for him in "The Sunflower". The relieving thing for the dying SS man Karl... was the "being able to talk" to a Jew – and not necessarily the "forgiveness". He wanted to have an alibi before God, which he got already by Wiesenthal keeping silent and "listening" to him. The author now also has his mental conflict and wishes to be "heard" by 43 wise men. This has happened and offers him relief from what presses on him. In this there is a parallelism of the conflict in the behavior of the repentant murderer with the victim threatened with death in the human realm. The answer lies with the author himself.

But still: the author belongs to the few who know how to ask. For this he deserves thanks.

Paul Arnsberg