Forgiveness is a powerful and vexing pursuit. For to forgive is, in a critical sense, to absolve, to wipe clean the slate of past wrongs in hopes of normalizing relations between perpetrators and victims. Considering that, by and large, more is gained from friendship than from enmity, such a normalization is beneficial to both sides, draining from an emotional wound that ugliest of poisons which harden our hearts and calcify our grudges.
Such logic, however, depends upon the perpetrator being, to some degree, sane. It depends upon him grasping the incentive not to wrong in the future. It depends upon the wrong not reaching the level of the heinous. For how can we forgive the unforgivable? How can we allow our most wicked crimes to be absolved with but a few heartfelt words? Are some sins not too grievous, too nihilistic, for forgiveness? Mr. Wiesenthal compellingly ruminates on this question in this short but moving work.
The year is 1943 and much of Europe is awash in war. Though Nazi Germany has recently endured two decisive defeats in their efforts to conquer Great Britain and Russia, their ubermensch war machine churns relentlessly onward in hopes of realizing its Fuhrer's dreams for an Aryan world. In the path of that terrible destiny stands Simon Wiesenthal, a young, European Jew, whose life is irrevocably altered when he is condemned to unimaginable deprivations in the Lemberg concentration camp for no better reason than he is Jewish.
While at the camp, as he and his fellows suffer, Mr. Wiesenthal is approached by a nurse who leads him to a wounded Nazi soldier. Over an afternoon, the blinded warrior describes, to Mr. Wiesenthal, the circumstances and the tragedies that lead him to this moment, asking, at the culmination of his tale, for the Jewish man's forgiveness. Struggling with this burden, Mr. Wiesenthal solicits the opinions of others in the camp, agonizing over his responsibilities in a matter both consequential and insignificant. After all, one soldier's appeal for forgiveness does not absolve the Nazis. And yet, is it not a key piece of information in the understanding of how this horror came about and how it can be made right in the future? Haunted, Mr. Wiesenthal is liberated from the camp and seeks out the soldier's mother, in hopes of finding some cruelty there that will ease his conscience, but when she only has sadness and regret to offer him, his search must go on.
The Sunflower is a momentous and disturbing search for the truth to an unanswerable question. What are the limits of forgiveness? Harnessing the malevolent energies of perhaps the worst, most systemic crime in human history, Mr. Wiesenthal, a man who would eventually become a noted hunter of Nazis, confronts the notion that forgiveness might well be too small, too soft for crimes against humanity. For when faced with a collaboration of men and women intent upon the arbitrary extermination of a people, what can be gained by forgiveness? What future is there after the apologies are made and closure found? The dead remain. The atrocities remain. History cannot be undone, nor paved over. Some stains cannot out.
And yet, there must be an end sometime. The burdens conveyed by such wicked crimes must be laid down. For to clutch close such pain is to allow ones life to continue to be ensnared by the cruel ideologies that once sought to be dominant in the world. They cannot be forgotten, but nor can they be allowed to rule what time the victim has left. If forgiveness can be a means through which peace can come to the victim, and it seems to me a necessary component to the finding of peace, then it must be granted, if only as a means of smoothing the victim's return to something resembling normality.
As a piece of literature, The Sunflower is intriguingly composed. Divided into two parts, it first relates Mr. Wiesenthal's experience and then answers that with essays from prominent figures who have consumed the story, digested its philosophical nourishment and provided, in turn, their individual answers to his ultimately subjective question. Can one man grant a regime absolution? Does forgiveness even matter in a secularist world? How do we weigh the need to move past horror against our need for justice? All such thorny aspects to this persistent problem are raised and addressed by the luminaries, both light and dark, who speak to Mr. Wiesenthal's brief but telling experience with his wounded captor.
There are no limits to forgiveness. There cannot be. For what has been done cannot be unmade. What has past cannot be rewritten. It is. It must be met, assimilated, and, finally, fatefully, laid to rest. To not forgive is to be consumed by the crime, to extend the suffering conveyed by it. there must be an end.
Moving and provocative work... (4/5 Stars)
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