"Forgiveness to the Injured Doth Belong"

By LANCE MORROW

The American trajectory generally arcs into the future, not the past. The nation's promise tends to override its memories. The best life lies ahead, like a highway heading west. There are American ghosts, of course, haunted rooms, secrets in the attic. But the virtue of the New World has always been its newness. "Why drag about this monstrous corpse of your memory?" Ralph Waldo Emerson asked. Henry Ford never looked back. "History," he said, "is more or less bunk."

This spring has been the season of the past, however. It is the anniversary of almost everything. Americans have been pitched back into unstable regions of memory, back into Viet Nam and wartime Europe. Sometimes the experience has been disconcerting. The past only looks dead. Ronald Reagan, quintessential American and oldest President, did not seem entirely to grasp that. He displayed a curious insensitivity about the past, as if he did not know how important it is, or how dangerous it can be. As if he did not know that the past has monsters in it. His eyes accustomed to sunshine, Reagan did not peer carefully enough into the shadows.

Once the prospect of his visit to a German military cemetery at Bitburg stirred a violent storm, Reagan, clearly pained, insisted repeatedly that while "we will never forget" the Holocaust, the gesture was a matter not of forgiving and forgetting but of moving forward, of trying to achieve a genuine healing, a reconciliation, of celebrating the 40 years during which the U.S. and West Germany have been strong allies. In a thoroughly American way, Reagan wanted finally to clear the past off the highway, as if it were some sort of old wreck. He wished to proceed, as Lincoln said in his second Inaugural, "with malice toward none, with charity for all."

Yet the symbolism of his visit to the Bitburg cemetery, where 49 SS men are buried, clouded Reagan's goal of bringing about a healing. Before the trip, Reagan made matters worse when he said that young German soldiers were just as much victims of the Third Reich as the Jews were--a grotesque equation even if inadvertent. That statement, coupled with the visit to Bitburg, left an impression that the President of the U.S. was conferring a sort of official forgiveness upon the German army that did Hitler's work.

That is not how forgiveness operates. Once in the middle of the war, Simon Wiesenthal, a prisoner in a forced-labor camp in Lvov, found himself on a work detail in a hospital where a young SS officer lay wounded and dying. The Nazi made Wiesenthal sit and listen while he confessed his atrocities, including burning down a houseful of Jews in the Ukraine and shooting those who tried to escape by leaping from the smoking windows. The SS trooper, tormented by guilt, begged Wiesenthal, as a Jew, to forgive him. Wiesenthal turned and walked away. He survived the camps and has spent the past 40 years hunting Nazi war criminals. But he remained troubled by doubts that he had done the right thing in refusing to forgive the SS trooper. "Forgetting is something that time alone takes care of," he later wrote, "but forgiveness is an act of volition, and only the sufferer is qualified to make the decision."

Christians are taught to turn the other cheek, to forgive. The eye-for-an-eye formula of the Old Testament does not rule out mercy and forgiveness, which are highly valued in Jewish teaching as well. But in Judaism, there are two conditions for repentance: one must go in genuine contrition to the person sinned against, and one must do one's best to compensate for the wrong done. But how can a Nazi, say, compensate a Jew for exterminating his entire family? In that sense, some crimes simply cannot be forgiven.

The summary power of forgiveness resides with God alone. After that, forgiveness gets personal. Pope John Paul II could forgive Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who shot him. The bullet hole in his abdomen gave him the authority to do that. So, in a sacramental way, did his ordination as a priest. Ronald Reagan can forgive John Hinckley (the Pope and the President both being members of the brotherhood of the shot). But Ronald Reagan cannot forgive Agca for shooting the Pope. Nor can he forgive SS men for what they did in Europe while Reagan was making Army training films in Hollywood. Wrote the poet John Dryden: "Forgiveness to the injured doth belong."

There is a difference between forgiveness and reconciliation, but the distinction between the terms never was very clearly made during the President's trip. Forgiveness implies a kind of moral embrace, a clearing of the books, that is difficult if not impossible in the context of Nazi Germany. Reconciliation is a transaction that can occur between two nations. But forgiveness is between individuals, or between an individual and God. Just as one rejects the notion of collective guilt, so one recoils at the idea of collective absolution. Deeds are done by individuals and must be judged individually. One of the evils of the 20th century has been the practice of totalitarians who create collective categories of people (the "bourgeoisie," for example, or "enemies of the people") in order to legitimize expropriation, imprisonment and mass slaughter.

If Reagan meant to set the past to rest, Bitburg brought it back to angry life. Yet there were many voices muttering, "Must we hear about the Holocaust again?" There have, after all, been other great tragedies in history--the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians, Stalin's liquidation of millions of kulaks and the enforced famine in the Ukraine in 1932-33, the destruction of perhaps 2 million Kampucheans by their own Khmer Rouge countrymen.

One cannot engage in a contest of comparative horrors. Yet there is about the Holocaust a primal and satanic mystery. And no cheap grace can redeem it. The Third Reich was the greatest failure of civilization on the planet. In Freudian terms, it was as if the superego had gone crashing down into the dark, wild id.

Germany represented one of the furthest advances of the culture, yet the Third Reich profoundly perverted the entire heritage of Western achievement. It was as if Goethe had taken to eating human flesh. The scientific method, perfected over centuries, fell into the hands of Dr. Mengele and the engineers of the ovens. Hitler was not alone responsible. More than a few Germans enthusiastically followed him, saluted him and died for him. They seized the accumulated trust of 3,000 years and distilled it into unimaginable evil. They sought to extinguish not only Jews and gypsies and the rest, but all the lights of civilization. That is not easy to forgive.