Comment

Stan Grant
The infinity of forgiveness

This week, I watched The Eichmann Trial, a documentary edited from the thousands of hours of footage of the Nazi war criminal’s “trial of the century”, held in Israel in 1961.

It was at this trial that Hannah Arendt coined the phrase the “banality of evil” to describe the metronomic, bureaucratic nature of Adolf Eichmann’s depravity. I have never found that formulation convincing. I think Arendt reduced unmitigated, malevolent evil to the level of a factory accident, the devil to a mere office clerk.

But yes, watching Eichmann testify, there was something disembodied about him, especially when he offered his “apology” to the Jewish people after the court handed down the death sentence.

What struck me was the reaction of people interviewed at the time. While most welcomed the sentence, there were a good few who would have preferred Eichmann be set free. Justice, they said, was better served making this monster live the rest of his days in the hell of his own conscience.

Even more surprising were those few who would have preferred there be no trial at all, that the Shoah be consigned to the cold storage of history. They did not need a trial reopening the still fresh wounds.

What troubled me most was the question of justice. There is no justice for the horrors that humans are capable of committing on one another. Eichmann was punished but that was not justice.

Who am I to say what could ever atone for the Holocaust? Watching the film in 2025, in the shadow of the horror of October 7, 2023, and the subsequent devastation in Gaza, the question of justice remains pertinent.

I come from my own hard history. First Nations people still search for truth and reconciliation.

I find that also unsatisfying. History is not a place of truth or healing. It is certainly not a place of justice. I’d sooner unchain myself from history.

History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake, to paraphrase James Joyce.

One word missing from the documentary, missing from Australian truth-telling, is forgiveness. Yet forgiveness is a word that would undoubtedly taste sour in the mouths of Palestinians today.

People naturally want justice or, worse, vengeance. The two are inseparable. They can beget the very cruelty they seek to punish. Justice, as Albert Camus saw it, is always an invitation to hate.

For me, forgiveness is the highest form of sovereignty. It is the ultimate measurement of what it is to be human. Forgiveness sets aside justice. It eschews vengeance. It disavows resentment.

Forgiveness is divine and we are so sadly profane. We would sooner entomb our children in the cave of memory than allow them to walk in the light of forgiveness. “Never forget” is our mantra. History is the iron in the bloodstream of identity.

The theologian Miroslav Volf, a Croatian forged in wars of Yugoslavia and biting down hard on the bitter enmity with the Serbs, urges us to “remember rightly”. We must remember as God remembers. The wounds are borne by God, he says, who drives out the darkness.

Volf turns the question of forgiveness – something apparently beyond us – to a “non-remembrance”. In this our identity no longer comes from our past; it comes from a forgiving God. God does not take away our past; He gives it back to us.

Forgiveness is essential, Volf says, for human wholeness, or, as Nietzsche warns, the past becomes “the gravedigger of the present”.

How do we even begin to forgive? I don’t think we grasp the meaning of the word. Forgiveness is seen as weakness, when it is anything but.

The most bracing thinker on forgiveness is Vladimir Jankélévitch. The French philosopher, whose parents were Russian Jewish émigrés, says time erases all memory. The most vicious of hatreds sink into the sad. Time moves in one irreversible direction. Forgiveness is built into evolution. In time, everyone dies.

History keeps vengeance alive, but, Jankélévitch says, “memory goes toward zero”.

For Jankélévitch, forgiveness is not an act. It is not something we extend to the wrongdoer. It is not absolution. He argues that we cannot forgive conditionally or expect anything in return. We cannot apply reason to forgiveness. At that point, forgiveness itself collapses.

Forgiveness requires of us a real human connection – a relationship – with each other. That’s what is missing in a courtroom. There is a process but there is not a human being on trial. Instead, the act that has been committed is on trial.

Yes, there must be a price for the act. Someone must pay. Yet the absence of a person from the act is why I felt so numb after watching The Eichmann Trial.

Eichmann simply shuffled and tidied his papers, collected himself, and, without emotion, turned and exited the court.

The process is served but it is not justice. Eichmann dies. He is released from the world. His abomination dies with him.

Yet it doesn’t truly die. We are left with it. Then what? For me, if righteousness and justice come by the law, then Christ died for nothing. Forgiveness starts with saying Eichmann is evil, but I am not. Evil is not banal. It is inhuman. I reclaim my humanity by extending humanity, even to the evil Eichmann.

I have to ask, however: are there crimes so monstrous they cannot be forgiven?

The Austrian philosopher Jean Améry would not let go of the horrors of the Holocaust. He refused to forget what he had seen. Améry was born Hans Maier, but adopted his new name after the war. He had survived Auschwitz, where he saw many hundreds killed.

He railed against what he called “the hollow, thoughtless, utterly false conciliatoriness or the pathos of forgiveness and reconciliation”.

Jean Améry saw resentment as a virtue, a duty. It took its toll. At the age of 65, Améry, who beat the Nazi death camps, took his own life in a hotel room in Salzburg.

I must admit there is much to admire in Améry’s stance. Yet I reject it, precisely because of where it ends.

I choose life. I choose the forgiveness that Jankélévitch calls supernatural, an act of grace.

Forgiveness must be spontaneous. We can remain horrified at the actions of the guilty person, yet transform our relationship with that same human being, transfigure hatred into love.

Not easy, is it? That’s what makes thinkers such as Jankélévitch so important. He doesn’t play it safe. He doesn’t seek to feed the blood lust of the crowd. He doesn’t outsmart himself, as Hannah Arendt did.

Jankélévitch says there is nothing unforgivable. Forgiveness, he writes, is absurd, it is unjust. “Such is the miracle.”

We don’t live in an age of miracles. We keep score. Trauma is currency. Our wounds are family heirlooms. Children are supposedly born with collective memory inscribed in their DNA. History is the God we worship.

Which might be okay if it made us whole, but it doesn’t. It didn’t at the Eichmann trial in 1961 and it doesn’t now. In fact, the idea of history as healing places a burden on history it cannot carry.

Each child born should be a tabula rasa, a chance to write history anew. Instead their fate is foretold. Our historical blood feuds call us into battle. We are encouraged to live big, heroic lives, avenging ancestral crimes.

I’m more inclined to Marcus Aurelius: “Each man lives only in the present moment.”

Small is that moment, he wrote, “small too the corner of the earth he inhabits”.

We belong, he said, to a succession of “short-lived men, who will die very soon, who don’t even know themselves, let alone one who died long ago”.

Forgiveness is such a small act. No army marches for forgiveness. There are no medals for forgiveness. No politician is elected today promising forgiveness.

As I said, who am I to tell anyone how to live with the crimes committed against their own? I invite derision even talking about forgiveness. I’m certainly open to accusations of hypocrisy; I admit I struggle at times to quell an unfathomable rage.

I recognise forgiveness is a hard, lonely road, one I have chosen to walk with the likes of Miroslav Volf and Vladimir Jankélévitch. Two thousand years ago a poor carpenter said forgiveness is a cross on which we must be willing to die. It is also the cross for which we must live.

To quote Jankélévitch, “forgiveness extends to infinity”.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 21, 2025 as "The infinity of forgiveness".

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