"Vergebt mir diese meine Tugend"

This chapter proposes a new interpretation of Simon Wiesenthal’s novel The Sunflower (1969), which is the autobiographical narrative of an encounter during World War II between a Jewish prisoner and a dying repentant Nazi soldier, who asks for his forgiveness. It argues that it is possible to read The Sunflower, on the one hand, as the author’s request for forgiveness for being unable to forgive the SS man, if ‘forgiveness’ means closure, drawing the line and renouncing the demand for justice for the victims. On the other hand, however, it also argues that is also possible to read this story as an inventive, poetic gesture of forgiveness granted to the SS-man, to whom the narrator feels bound by virtue of his remorse, despite its hopeless insufficiency.