A young German, grandchild of an SS soldier who was assigned to a concentration camp, one day becomes aware of what his beloved grandfather did and then resolves to make amends and a sign of atonement by working in a kibbutz. He cannot hope for forgiveness when he meets a Jewish boy there who is the grandchild of a man who died in a concentration camp. Loving his grandfather and not breaking off his relationship with him are nothing he did as an affront to the young Jew and nothing for which he could beg him for forgiveness. Correspondingly, the Jewish boy, traumatised by the victimisation of his grandfather in a concentration camp, can neither accuse the young German of it, nor forgive him for it. And yet, the correspondence based on the penumbra of guilt and the fate of the victim makes it understandable that these two young people are able to experience themselves as also being somehow intertwined, as two who have something to talk about and work out.
If entanglement comes to an end by the third or fourth generation, then the relationship between the descendants of the perpetrators and the descendants of the victims becomes more relaxed. But even after generations, it is a common notion that forgiveness must be sought, forgiveness especially for the injustices caused by imperial and colonial oppression, exploitation, enslavement, and murder. Namibia requests that Germany seek its pardon for the brutality with which the Germans suppressed the Herero uprising a hundred years ago. The Herero argue convincingly that the massacre had a permanent and irrevocable impact on their tribe. But such imprints on history are always permanent and irrevocable. The guilt of the Germans who brutally suppressed the revolt died with them long ago, and their children and grandchildren who were bound in guilt with them are also long dead. The request that the Germans of today seek forgiveness from members of the Herero tribe living today calls for an empty ritual that would show little respect for the Herero of that time. Their fight against a brutal German enemy, their heroic defeat, and their pain and suffering are all a part of their identity and dignity. It was their right and theirs alone to define their identity and dignity with clemency or resentment, condemnation or forgiveness. No one else can lay claim to that right, not even his or her descendants.
Forgiveness is something too crucial, too existential to be made into a political ritual or used as an opportunity for politicians to present themselves publicly as deeply moved and with anguished miens. A minister of the interior who seeks forgiveness for the damages the soccer fans of his country have caused in another country, a cardinal who seeks forgiveness for the suffering that the priests under his watch have inflicted on the children entrusted to their care, a chief of police who seeks forgiveness for the brutality employed by his officers on duty – they all ring hollow. Perhaps the police chief did not supervise his officers properly, the cardinal did not pay attention to the complaints lodged by children and parents, and the minister of the interior neglected the problems with rioting football fans. Then they are themselves guilty. If they would seek forgiveness for their own guilt it would have weight; to ask for forgiveness for someone else’s guilt is cheap.
My impression is that German politicians are reluctant to ask for forgiveness from Namibia not so much because it would be an empty ritual but rather because Namibia might take it as a title under which it could then claim restitution. I have heard other German politicians take a different position; asking for forgiveness and having it granted would, while unable to create a legal title, give Germany’s substantial help for Namibia’s development a different aura, an aura of bonding and commitment instead of economic technicality. I don’t know about Namibia’s intentions; maybe to get if not a legal then at least a quasi-legal title is precisely why Namibia requests that Germany seeks its forgiveness. As much as I can understand all these strategic and tactical considerations, I find forgiveness too existential to be asked for or granted as a strategic or tactical move in negotiations and contracts for restitution.
The right to withhold or grant forgiveness is the victim’s right alone as part of their relationship to the perpetrator. Whatever the victim does not forgive cannot be dispensed with through forgiveness by any other family member, descendant, friend, or, especially, politician. The burden remains on the perpetrator and those who are entangled with them in their guilt. The world is full of guilt that has never been forgiven and which can now no longer be forgiven – unless by God.
But forgiveness is not the only response to an injury that keeps it from festering and allows it to rest. Injuries can be condemned, forgotten, and have their burdensome meaning lifted through reconciliation. How forgiveness and reconciliation are similar but also different becomes apparent when we look at those who can forgive and condemn, forget and reconcile.
While only the victim can forgive, anyone can condemn. Anyone includes the victim, though that person may well be too dismayed and overwhelmed by the event to pass judgment concerning the perpetrator impartially. But to pass judgment means both to identify the crime and the perpetrator, and the determination of just punishment. While the victim may not be capable of determining just punishment, he can certainly charge the perpetrator with the crime.
Everyone is also capable of forgetting. On occasion someone is too deeply injured to ever forget the injury. But again and again one observes someone who is so grievously injured that no one believes they could ever be capable of forgetting who finally does forget.
Just as one can lose the ability to judge impartially when one is in shock or has a conflict of interest, and as one can lose the ability to forget when one is particularly seriously injured, one can also lose the right to pass judgment or to forget. Those who live in a glass houses shouldn’t throw stones – whoever has some guilt to contend with should not go around accusing and judging others. Certainly, under the rule of law if a charge is true, then it is true regardless of who made it – it can even be someone who also deserves to be accused and judged. But while this person may still have the right to accuse and judge, they have lost the credibility to do so. Their right to accuse and to judge and to condemn is not accepted unless they ensure that they recognise the precarious nature of the charge coming out of their mouth and explain why they are making it anyway. Similarly, when someone claims that they have forgotten about the crime they committed they will not be entitled to their forgetfulness, and here not even assurances and explanations will help. How can the perpetrator allow themself to forget what they have done – the reaction is speechlessness and indignation. Forgetting can make forgiving easier for the victim, but the perpetrator should not be allowed to make it easier on themself. To forget and pass judgment are the rights of others.
The circle of participants is again small when it comes to reconciliation. In the history of this concept it was not always the case; in German the term Versöhnung (reconciliation), was originally related to the term Verurteilen (to pass judgment). It included attributing the deed to the perpetrator and determining the atonement required of them in order to stave off revenge and restore public order. As atonement imposed by the legal community developed into the state-regulated system of compensation for damages on the one hand, and the system of state-imposed and -executed punishments on the other, reconciliation became a concept defined as the restoration of peace between people explicitly without state sanctions. After the end of Apartheid, as South Africa strived for truth and reconciliation, it did not want the state to sentence and punish, exclude and lock away. Instead the goal was to heal the damaged relationships between the perpetrators and victims through institutionalised, moderated encounters in such a way that they could once more live side by side with each other.
More people than just the perpetrators and victims can be involved in reconciling with each other. The children and grandchildren who share the perpetrator’s guilt and the victim’s fate can reconcile, enemies can reconcile who are simultaneously perpetrators and victims, even friends and lovers who fought and perhaps only inadvertently injured or wronged or lost each other can re
concile – simply stated, everyone whose relationships have been damaged can reconcile. While forgiveness lifts the burden of guilt from the guilty parties, reconciliation merely makes it a bit lighter. Reconciliation means that further attempts to coexist should no longer fail on account of guilt and recriminations.
At the very least, reconciliation calls for the recognition that others are human beings like ourselves, and for the insight that this equality must sometimes be sufficient to establish the foundation for living together in peace. Sometimes those seeking reconciliation can build on a broader foundation for their coexistence. Then political parties form unusual coalitions mindful of their common responsibility for the delicate state of their country – as happened in most countries at the beginning of the First World War, and in the United States when the country was made to believe that Saddam Hussein was a serious threat because he had weapons of mass destruction. Catholics and Protestants sometimes remember that more than anything else they are both Christians and celebrate the Eucharist together – it happens in hostile territory, between soldiers and prisoners of war in camps. Quarrelling lovers sometimes call to mind that their love is greater than their fight. Against all that would separate us, reconciliation emphasises the ties that bind, from equality to love.
Reconciliation requires at least two people. A third party can reconcile two people whose relationship with each other has been damaged, and there can be not just two but many who repair their damaged relationships by reconciling or being reconciled with each other. Someone may be too gravely injured to reconcile, or they may only be ready to reconcile if judgment or forgiveness has preceded it. But whenever two are ready to reconcile with each other there is no reason to argue against their ability or right to do so. When, however, politicians celebrate reconciliation as if they could heal not only their own damaged relationships but also those between peoples and parties with their embraces, it must be insisted upon vis-à-vis this pretension that reconciliation can only happen directly between those whose relationships with each other are damaged. Not even the Nobel Prize helps; when Briand and Stresemann got it, France and Germany were still not ready for reconciliation, nor were the USA and Vietnam when Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were awarded or the Israelis and the Palestinians when the prize went to Arafat, Peres and Rabin. With reconciliation there is just as little proxy as with forgiveness.
If truth and reconciliation are the goals, then truth is the prerequisite for reconciliation. In the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commissions the perpetrators were supposed to genuinely confess their deeds to the victims if they did not want to have their amnesty stripped from them – a threat that was seldom enforced against the perpetrators, just as the promised reparations for the victims seldom came through. If there was any success at all to awaken a readiness to reconcile between the participants it was not due simply to truth. Reconciliation succeeded when the perpetrator presented him- or herself genuinely, listened and provided answers, withstood the victims’ outpouring of emotion and did not hide their own feelings. In order to acknowledge the perpetrator as an equal and to reconcile with them, the victim has to understand the perpetrator, even if they can understand them only in disbelief or in disapproval. Reconciliation requires a truth that can be understood; it requires understanding.
That is not the case with forgiving and condemning – and it is obvious that forgetting and understanding are not compatible. Whoever wants to forgive someone is free to understand or not to understand them; the victim does not owe the other person any understanding. Forgiveness may help them make peace with themself more than with the other person with whom they finally wish to reach closure but without getting involved or understanding. Condemning also works without understanding: in earlier legal systems knowledge that the perpetrator committed the deed sufficed for judgment to be made against them, and today the law only requires knowledge that the deed was committed knowingly and intentionally, or sometimes negligently.
This is not to say that understanding is completely unrelated to condemning and forgiving. The more one understands, the more one is enticed into forgiveness and led away from passing judgment. A verdict without an understanding of the perpetrator, their circumstances, motivations, and limitations is not easily accepted today as a just verdict. Such understanding connotes insight, particularly into the causes of the deed that were outside the perpetrator’s control, and it becomes increasingly difficult to pass judgment against the perpetrator for the deed as an expression of their own free will. That is what is meant by the aphorism ‘tout comprendre c’est tout pardoner’. It has an even deeper meaning, since true understanding is more than searching for and finding causes. It includes putting yourself in someone else’s place, putting yourself into someone else’s thoughts and someone else’s feelings and seeing the world through that person’s eyes. How then could you condemn the other, how could you not forgive, if you empathise with them on that level?
Thus, understanding does not have only positive connotations. The aphorism is often quoted with ironic condescension and as a warning: whoever thinks and feels understandingly is giving up the distance needed to make dispassionate assessments and clear decisions; he or she gets caught up in the mire of forgiving indecisiveness and permissiveness and becomes unsuited to the necessary harshness of condemning. Condescension and irony aside – tension necessarily arises for those who want to understand the perpetrator in his or her crime. The tension exists especially for the perpetrator’s children and grandchildren; they know that their parents and grandparents should be condemned but they still love them too much, know them too well, not to want to understand them and, in their understanding, they tend towards clemency. Between wanting to understand and having to condemn they can find no really workable course of behaviour. It is as if understanding would contaminate the pure business of forgiving and condemning, and it begs the question of whether it does not discredit itself as a precondition for reconciliation.
But understanding’s weakness is exactly its strength. Connecting ourselves with the thoughts and feelings of others, although they may be completely different than ours, establishes equality; just as interpreting their rationality in the light of our own, despite major differences, creates parity. Understanding allows us to see that we are equal with others and can experience, empathise and share in their rationality, empirical and normative expectations, thoughts and feelings. We make them equal to us and us to them; we build up society when we understand. Since understanding makes us more hesitant to pass judgment and more forbearing and tending toward forgiveness, understanding brings reconciliation a step closer. The foundation for reconciliation is laid by understanding because it works against all that separates us and toward all that would bring us together.
The ground can slide away and attempts at reconciliation can collapse. While forgiving and condemning settle the consequences of a deed once and for all, and forgetting a crime settles it with the proviso that what has been forgotten can also be remembered again, reconciliation heals only as well and persists only as long as the participants understand each other and acknowledge each other as equals. When the effort at mutual understanding becomes too much for them, if an old injury remains a current source of pain or if it resurfaces through an accidental or a provoked event, or if an outside pressure to acknowledge the other as an equal falls away, then reconciliation again can fail – between peoples, within societies, and in relationships.
This is the problem of reconciliation based only on truth and understanding that forgoes the power of closure that condemning and forgiving offer. The work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commissions was often regarded with some scepticism because it was not flanked by judgments against the perpetrators who refused to cooperate and by restitution for the victims. To be sure, restitution does not have the power of closure like forgiveness, but it contains a request for forgiveness and makes forgiveness easier to grant. Passing judgme
nt does not necessarily have to be pursued through legal proceedings in a court of law in order for it to safeguard and stabilise reconciliation through its powers of closure. But without identification of the deed and its perpetrator, without a determination of guilt and imposition of some sort of sanction, without all of this happening publicly, visibly, and through an agency with real authority, it is difficult to reach closure. If passing judgment and restitution are unavailable options, then forgetting can still help and reconciliation means freedom from the wreckage of the past, allowing it to be both remembered and forgotten. But forgetting is not a reliable helper.
Restitution often goes hand in hand with rituals, condemning always does. Reconciliation, too, recognises rituals and icons and it probably needs them. When orchestras from one country perform in another, paintings from one country’s museums are exhibited in another’s country, or partnership and exchange programs are arranged, these exchanges promote mutual understanding and they are also attempts to solidify reconciliation through public ritual. Politicians who stand hand in hand at a memorial site or lay down a wreath in a cemetery are trying to tangibly express reconciliation, and sometimes they succeed: the picture of Willy Brandt kneeling in Warsaw became an iconic image of reconciliation.
Forgiving, condemning, forgetting and reconciliation – of all the ways to achieve closure in the wake of an injury, reconciliation is the most demanding and difficult. Often enough, that is the very reason why it does not happen. The German experience shows, however, that when it is seriously undertaken it has a good chance of succeeding. A resurgence of the old hostility between France and Germany is unimaginable, and it is unimaginable between Poland and Germany, although the efforts at reconciliation were less intensive and hence the positive results of reconciliation are less evident. Between Jews and Germans there is every indication that in a few generations they will no longer meet harbouring old prejudices, though they may still regard each other with special interest. Studies and questionnaires sometimes indicate that the rift between East and West Germans remains deep and is even getting deeper. Reconciliation was never seriously attempted in this case. It was not really even perceived as a necessary exercise; the thought was that under the roof of common institutions the damages in the relationship would heal on their own. But only forgetting functions on its own; it has its own dynamic and follows its own course. Forgiving and condemning become superfluous when the perpetrators are dead. The degree to which reconciliation occurs depends on the level of efforts made to achieve it. Reconciliation is an endeavour for the long term.