Forgiveness and Resentment in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity: Jewish Voices in Literature and Film

Forgiveness and Resentment in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity: Jewish Voices in Literature and Film is situated within two fields of academic research of growing interest: reconciliation studies and Holocaust studies. Reconciliation studies assesses the impact of measures, practices, and policies aimed at restoring decent relationships following violent wrongdoings, especially in the wake of crimes against humanity. Rather than emphasizing quantitative or procedural elements (such as reparation agreements, treatises, or retributive justice focused on punishing perpetrators), reconciliation studies particularly values the role of qualitative elements such as the role of religions, cultures, emotions, and media, in healing damaged relations. Holocaust studies focuses on the Holocaust as a central event in constructing a discourse on violence and collective trauma in shaping many different cultures of memory worldwide. This applies as much to the social groups directly involved (and their subsequent generations) as it does to the international community.Idit Alphandary's monograph is articulated along this dual track. While it is structured by the model of forgiveness/resentment and thus undoubtedly is close to reconciliation studies, the book equally draws from Holocaust studies, taking as its primary reference two Jewish thinkers, Hannah Arendt and Jean Améry, who each devoted substantial work to the Holocaust, defining it as an unprecedented event that imposes a revision of an entire series of categories proper to Western thought. To this end, Alphandary aptly rearticulates Améry's notion of “negative possessions,” (Améry [1966] 1980) echoing that of “negative Symbiosis” later proposed by Dan Diner in reference to the Holocaust as a landmark event for the Federal Republic of Germany's self-narration and for Jewish-German relationships (Diner 1986). According to Alphandary, the work of active appropriation of traumatic experiences—stemming from suffering crimes against humanity—in terms of “negative possessions” is a moment within identity and agency restoration processes, which is crucial for victims of heinous wrongdoings and far more effective than any form of hasty “forgiving and forgetting.”Noteworthy and innovative, then, is the fact that the author does not place forgiveness and resentment in a disjunctive either/or antithesis, as is often the case in reconciliation studies. On the contrary, her hermeneutic effort is aimed at showing how these two emotions are sources of moral deliberation, and thus of performative gestures, because they are deeply related, interdependent, even complementary. Convincingly, Forgiveness and Resentment in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity shows how Arendt's effort to think about forgiveness (in particular, in its highly problematic correlation with love, constantly exposed to the risk of worldlessness) actually originated from the outburst of radical evil that took place in the Holocaust, in such a way that there is no sociopolitical meditation on forgiveness which can avoid dealing with the burden of those crimes—which, as Arendt herself wrote (Arendt 1958), exceed both the human capacity to forgive and to punish. Turning to Améry, through an original and fruitful comparison with Heinrich Böll, Alphandary identifies resentment as a way of addressing the outgroup of German perpetrators. Resentment, understood as an exhortation to the other to assume more responsibility in the moral sphere, and as a demand for historical justice, thus becomes a way of reaching out to the other, of initiating communication, even a reaffirmation of the structural interdependence between victims and perpetrators. Such interdependence, which is inevitable even before any judgment on its desirability can be made, is something that reconciliation processes cannot ignore.This volume stands in open continuity with the “multidirectional memory” thesis elaborated by Michael Rothberg. Building on the relevance of the Holocaust in the discourse of victims of historical wounds worldwide, Alphandary enters into dialogue with different scenarios: first, with the theory and practice of nonviolence in contexts of colonial oppression (Mahatma Gandhi's India) and racial segregation (Martin Luther King Jr.’s United States); then, she focuses on the added value of implementing non-Western epistemologies in intergroup reconciliation processes (such as the notion of Ubuntu, which rises to a pivotal principle of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission leading to post-apartheid South Africa); finally, she reflects on the discourse underlying the US Black civil rights movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through an analysis of Raoul Peck's documentary I Am Not Your Negro. Such a perspective is not only consonant with a multidirectional memory but also makes use of a transdisciplinary and multimedia approach. Indeed, Alphandary places philosophical authors, mainly belonging to Jewish thought of the previous century (the aforementioned Arendt and Améry, and also Vladimir Jankélévitch and Jacques Derrida, as well as Holocaust survivors such as Primo Levi and Paul Celan), in close dialogue with “extra-philosophical” sources pertaining as much to literature (novels and poems) as to cinema, valorizing them as practices capable of giving voice to painful, even traumatic experiences, to an extent that is often more effective than the rational and argued discourse proper to philosophy. Here the author's hermeneutic operation shows a further trait of originality. A paradigmatic example is the way in which Alphandary approaches the film Phoenix by German director Christian Petzold: she contemplates it through the lens of the works of philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, as well as that of writer W. G. Sebald, poet Paul Celan, and the director Alain Resnais. Alphandary also builds bridges between the moral-performative valence of emotions (love, hate, shame, guilt . . . ) as propulsive for social change in J. M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace and their role in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission's sessions.In conclusion, Alphandary's monograph is a particularly eloquent and authoritative account of the fruitful proximity between reconciliation studies and Holocaust studies, and it enriches both disciplines by shedding new light on the possibility of thinking forgiveness and resentment in a complementary and non-disjunctive perspective, to create a bridge over the chasm—the moral abyss that separates the societies of victims and their perpetrators. Finally, the ethical solicitude underlying the work is appreciable: in the face of the repetition of violence that bloodies history, the author is constantly striving to identify new beginnings and new values for generating genuine change.