Towards the future by way of the past: memories are the primordial soup of politics, says German theologian Geika Muller-Fahrenholz, and how we deal with them can determine the future ...

This is an awkward time to speak about forgiveness and healing. Just now it is difficult to look forward to the time when the processes of rebuilding can begin. But in the long term, it is always the peacemakers who must come to the fore.

I would like to explore this theme by talking about something that happened a few years ago, in a small village in Belorus.

The old German men had been in Belorus before, as young soldiers in Hitler's Wehrmacht. Now, 50 years later, they were back to build a home for children who had been affected by the fallout from the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl.

Towards the end of their stay, the men went on an excursion to Chatyn, close to Minsk, where a memorial remembers the crimes of the Wehrmacht during World War II. Afterwards, they sat down with their Belorussian hosts for supper. After the toast, one of the veterans got up, and struggled to say a few words. He described how he had fought in the war and been a prisoner of war in a Belorussian camp. And then, writes one of those present, he stopped.

`We all knew: now the moment had come when it wouldn't do simply to look back, but when something redeeming might happen. And it did happen. The man said that he was deeply sorry for what he had done personally, and what the Germans had done in Russia, and then he tried to say that this must never happen again, but his voice broke and he had to sit down because he was weeping so hard. The young people sitting around were overwhelmed, they wept too. An old woman got up, she walked over to this man, she was a Belorussian woman, she put her arms around him and kissed him.'

Forgiveness is about healing. Let me look at this story from different angles.

Memories stay alive

Memories are the medium in which our past stays alive within us. Happy memories are like a warm stream that sustains our present and protects us even in deep suffering. Painful memories, however, grab us with icy hands. If we are the subject of an evil deed, we are haunted by a sense of guilt. And when we are the object, we are haunted by feelings of hurt, helplessness and rage. Living with hurt keeps awake the memories of enforced impotence and dehumanization.

This applies both to individuals and communities. Memories are the matrix of our identity, individually as well as collectively. Our wholeness and well-being depend on whether we are at ease with our past or whether there are things we anxiously store away in some dungeon of our heart, whence they are bound to inflict us with sudden and sickening intensity. Memories are the primordial soup of politics.

In general, we do not manage our memories well. If we did, we would not need to repress and conceal so much. We are selective in our memories: we remember what we like to remember and conceal what pains us. This selective memory is the source from which wars and schemes of retaliation spring.

Struggling for words

In the story the old Germans and their Belorussian hosts have already been working together for some weeks. But the memories must have been their hidden companions.

Then, at last, after 50 years, one man stands up to face his past. Could he not have excused himself as ex-soldiers of all nations have done at all times--by saying, for instance, that he was young, and under orders?

Could he not simply have contented himself with the fact that building the children's home is in itself an admission of their guilt? Why does he have to say these words when the good intentions surely speak for themselves?

The words are needed. Memories must be named. They must be identified, or else they continue to linger on as nameless horrors, maintaining their hidden powers.

In the act of naming, this man returns to the point in his history when his guilt and pain began. He becomes the real master of his history, at the moment in which he is able to name its deepest and saddest point. He re-members: he puts together the broken parts of his life. He gives himself up, exposes himself, for all to see, a man who served a criminal regime, suffered in a Russian camp, a perpetrator, a victim, an old man, disarmed, in tears.

The woman's kiss

If someone had told the Belorussian woman that one day she would kiss a soldier of Hitler's army, she would have found this obscene. But as she sees this man struggling with the truth of his life, he is no longer the enemy, but a human being. She recognizes something of her own pain in his tears.

How many women suffer when men go to war? Are not women the first to suffer when strangers invade their homes? This woman is one of millions past and present who have to go on living, dragging their hurts along, defiled, raped, dishonoured. But at this moment she knows nothing of retaliation. She sees another human being and kisses him.

It is much more than an easy consolation; this embrace is an absolution. Its message is `I set you free'.

And the miraculous thing is that this embrace also sets the woman free. She transcends the old patterns of being nothing but the victim and she too becomes the master of her story.

Forgiveness is a double process in which both parties, the doers and the victims, need to return to the point where their pain began. Both sides have to travel back through the meanderings of guilt and hate to that point where their fate is chained together. Only when this interlocking chain is broken can both sides be free.

Priests in disguise

One man expresses what is on the mind of his entire group. He is strong enough to cry for them all. And one woman gives him the kiss of peace.

It is not necessary for all members of a group or a people to find the disarming words. There is something vicarious in both the confession and the absolution. In this little village, the unnamed man and the unnamed woman are serving as priests to their people, without knowing it, of course.

In the same way, when Willy Brandt knelt down at the memorial of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, this was a priestly act. He had himself been persecuted by the Nazis, yet as Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), he knelt down vicariously for all those who could not bring themselves to repent.

There must be some few who rise to the call of the priestly mission. There must be those who know that this mission consists not in sacrificing someone else but in offering oneself to step into the breach which evil, guilt and shame have opened up.

Chatyn and Katyn

Chatyn symbolizes the shocking `scorched earth strategy' that devastated some 400 villages in Belorus. Their visit showed the old Germans what they had been part of, as tiny particles in the machinery of destruction.

But the reaction could have been quite different. `Chatyn' sounds like `Katyn', near Smolensk, where the massacre of more than 4,000 Polish officers by Russian troops under Stalin is commemorated. Does not the very similarity of the two names invite comparison and an easy way out--by saying that all peoples all over the earth have a lot to feel sorry about?

One of the German Protestant leaders who signed the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt in October 1945 was Gustav Heinemann, who later became President of the FRG. He wrote, `What we have done to the Poles, the Greeks, the Dutch, the Jews will not be taken from us because of what other nations have done or are doing.... The only way out is the confession of guilt. About this there can be no bartering.'

When we analyse stories of forgiveness there seems to be a third factor at work. Who or what creates the trust that a confession will be received in good faith? In our case it was the overwhelming experience of Chatyn. It might well have also been the feeling of trust in the village community. In other cases there are mediators who meet with sufficient trust from both sides to be able to make proposals.

I think this third factor is decisive--and that it points to something fundamental. It indicates that our relationships are not determined, but that there is always the element of contingency. A Rabbinical teaching says that before God made creation, he created the teschuba, the Hebrew word for change. It stands for the possibility of turning, of metanoia and transformation. In the heart of history is God's offer to make all things new.

The young people

The breakdown of the old man moved the young people around him to tears. They must have sensed that the confession and the kiss meant something of a healing for them too.

The unacknowledged and subconscious pain of older generations has a contaminating impact on younger ones. The sins of the fathers affect children to the third and fourth generation, and so do their sufferings.

The liberation that occurs between the two old people has a liberating impact on the young people as well. Their re-membering opens up new ways for the young folk and makes it a bit easier for them to move forward.

I wish that more grandfathers and grandmothers had the courage to break the spell that their tales of hurt and hatred cast on younger generations and so halt the `sorry-go-round' of revenge.

Home for sick children

The old men returned to Belorus to build a home for children contaminated by the nuclear fall-out of Chernobyl. This is what classic penitential theology calls satisfactio operis or `restitution'. In post-war Germany the term used was Wiedergutmachung (making things good again). But can there ever be a making good of historical injustice?

The Germans do not attempt to repair the damage done by the German army. Rather, they try to provide a few children with a better future.

Their deed serves various functions. It expresses the seriousness of their repentance. It meets a need of the other side: so it is an expression of burden-sharing. And, thirdly, it aims at facilitating a more humane future.

By setting us free from the captivity of guilt, shame and hurt, the processes of forgiveness make space for new covenants. As long as we have not really faced the demons of our past, all our alliances will be of a provisional nature.

If politics is the art of the possible, it is forgiveness that makes the art of the possible possible.