Deutsche Volkszeitung

Düsseldorf

5.4.73

Never again

On "The Sunflower" by Simon Wiesenthal

"You are known to me, of course. I have read your Eichmann book and many another of yours, and now the manuscript of your new book. I read it as another in the series of many books from the time of horror..." So writes Helmut Gollwitzer, one of 43 interviewees, to Simon Wiesenthal. This Simon Wiesenthal, director of the Documentation Center of the Federation of Jewish Persecutees (Vienna), who also succeeded in tracking down Eichmann, needs no introduction. In his new story "The Sunflower" (published by Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg), the widely known author of "The Murderers Among Us" recounted a shattering incident which he could not get away from, which he obviously had to get off his chest and which he then presented to important writers from all over the world and public figures ("People of whom I believe they have something to say") with the question: "Did I behave rightly or wrongly?”

This autobiographical story is about guilt and forgiveness (which is also the subtitle). Simon Wiesenthal, a Jewish concentration camp inmate in Lemberg, is led under strange circumstances to the deathbed of a bloody young SS man in 1942, who confesses his crime to him in the hope of obtaining forgiveness from a Jew before his death. Wiesenthal, degraded to subhuman by the Nazi system, listens to the confession of the man declared superhuman by the same system – until the end, although this becomes difficult enough for him. And then? "I stand up, look in his direction, at his folded hands. Between them, a sunflower seems to blossom. I have made up my mind. Without a word, I leave the room." Wiesenthal does not accept the belongings of the now deceased the next day, but he visits his mother years later in Stuttgart as an "escaped man". He leaves her opinion of the "good boy". He often thinks of the young SS man: when he enters a hospital, when he sees a nurse, when he encounters a man with a head bandage. "Or when I see a sunflower". He saw a sunflower then between the folded hands of the dying man.

The authors' responses appended to the story (to name a few: Jean Améry, Bishop Bluyssen, Albrecht Goes, Helmut Gollwitzer, Friedrich Heer, Gustav Heinemann, Robert W. Kempner, Golo Mann, Herbert Marcuse, Martin Niemöller, Luise Rinser, Carlo Schmid, Kurt von Schuschnigg are arranged thematically, for example: "There is no answer to this question", "No one can forgive what others have suffered", "No law and justice without mercy", "Do not judge". There is – and Wiesenthal knows that – no patent solution. But it is not more important than any patent solution, the forward-pointing theme, "Such things must not happen again!?"

Friedrich Heer puts his finger on the wound in his letter, "Genocide of yesterday begets the genocide of today. A consciousness changed by the perception of yesterday's genocide would have changed conditions, would have created a different climate: a fellow human climate in which the murderous jungles of genocide simply could not flourish..." The change of consciousness did not take place, which Heer also blames on a false, mendacious Christianpseudo "reconciliationism."

After all – and this should also give food for thought – forty-two wars have been fought since 1945, as Joachim Fernau proves. In any case, and this would be a minimal program – all those who are insightful and instructed, all "humanists" – no matter where they come from – should come together worldwide in perpetual vigilance and perpetual commitment (here Bishop Bluyssen is quoted) "for a just, peaceful world order."

That would mean to have learned from history and especially from Wiesenthal's story.