After-words: Post-Holocaust Struggles with Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Justice

3 / Forgiveness after the Holocaust

3 Forgiveness after the Holocaust didier pollefeyt in his Christian Theology after the Shoah, James Moore writes, “The question becomes for Christians, can we talk about forgiveness in the same way even in everyday situations now that we see how forgiveness can crumble in the face of enormous atrocity? . . . At least, the shadow of Auschwitz looms over this central Christian theological category.”1 Moore’s inquiry makes me ask: Isn’t evil such a serious thing that every tendency to put the evildoer in another perspective becomes an inhuman act because it does not take human responsibility seriously enough? Even more concretely, isn’t it possible that human beings—take the Nazis, for example—have destroyed their own humanity so fundamentally that every restoration through forgiveness (human or divine) becomes impossible ? As this essay wrestles with those questions, it focuses not so much on the question of forgiveness for Auschwitz as on the possibility that forgiveness has been so compromised that it is no longer authentically conceivable after Auschwitz. the problem of giving forgiveness At the outset, consider Emmanuel Lévinas’s warning: “A world where forgiveness is almighty becomes inhuman.”2 Easy and omnipresent forgiveness destroys human responsibility and opens the way for new injus55 tice. Especially for Christians, it is a touchy matter to speak about forgiveness after Auschwitz. As Dietrich Bonhoeªer correctly argued, Christianity has often advanced a discourse of “cheap grace,” which especially ignores the victims of atrocity.3 Cheap grace permits perpetrators to continue their evildoing or to leave the scene of their crimes without moral anguish. Even during the Holocaust, perpetrators could and did participate in rituals of reconciliation (rituals that stressed forgiveness for sexual sins at the expense of attention to political evil). After the Holocaust, the Roman Catholic Church’s document “We Remember” (1998) asked forgiveness for the sins of “her sons and daughters” in regard to the Shoah. However, by locating the roots of Nazi anti-Semitism outside of Christianity , the Catholic Church has failed to make an unqualified confession of its particular guilt. the problem of refusing forgiveness After Auschwitz, not only giving forgiveness but also resisting or rejecting forgiveness has become problematic. Without the possibility of forgiveness , one easily becomes merciless. Persons and communities get locked up in their personal and collective evil; there is no possibility for them to escape that fate or to transcend that identity. Refusing to grant or to receive forgiveness also obscures the potentiality and reality of evil in oneself and one’s communities. An ethical system without forgiveness becomes Manichean. It rigidly separates good and evil in ways that often prove to be heartless. Nazism can be understood along these lines; it was a dualistic worldview in which forgiveness was not needed because supposedly everything was determined by clear categories of good and evil, light and darkness. To be a prostitute or a homosexual, for example, was unforgivable, and the ensuing persecution was ruthless. Rücksichtslose Härte (relentless hardness) was a Nazi virtue. By rejecting forgiveness after Auschwitz, one could create a universe with remarkable analogies to the Third Reich’s dualistic and pitiless rule. From this perspective, Emil Fackenheim’s imperative against granting Hitler “posthumous victories” could also mean to reinterpret the concept of forgiveness as a post-Holocaust category. 56 Part One: Forgiveness moral anger and justice as appropriate reactions to evil No human being is merciful by nature, especially when he or she is a victim of or witness to acts of evil. In confronting extreme forms of evil, such as those embodied by the Holocaust, the first human reactions nearly always involve strong feelings of disgust, anger, rage, and hatred. Rarely are forgiveness and reconciliation the immediate responses. The most common first feelings, such as disgust and anger, reflect not only evil’s devastation but also our human desire for goodness. They even open a way to meet God, who, as Lévinas aptly urges, may be revealed in the midst of evil as protest against evil. Any religion that asks people to overcome their immediate feelings because they are inhuman or un-Christian risks facilitating moral indiªerence. As the Dutch Jew Etty Hillesum wrote in the diaries she kept in the Nazi camp at Westerbork, moral anger is a necessary “protection against evil. The soul stands up and resists evil with deep indignation . . . . If we had no longer been capable of being angry, we would have become like ‘moral cows’ in our ponderous...