Session 9: Forgiveness, Literature and Film
Chair: Jeremy Watkins

Günter Grass; The Forgiveness of Danzig
Cornelia Caseau
Department of German, Burgundy School of Business, ESC Dijon, France

Günter Grass, Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1999, has just celebrated his 80th birthday.  The German writer, born on 16th October 1927, started life in the Hanseatic city of Danzig, or Gdansk as it is known today in Polish.  Danzig, which was largely made up of German speakers, was at that time a Free City under the protection of the League of Nations.
This city, with its eventful history, always had an important role in the work and thinking of Günter Grass.  This can be seen not only in his greatest novel, TheTin Drum (1959), which described the youth of Oskar Matzerath and the coming to power of the national-socialists, but equally in the other books which make up the Danzig Trilogy, as well as more recent works such as Crabwalk and Peeling the Onion.
In The Call of the Toad which takes place in Danzig in 1989, he even described a love affair between a German man and a Polish woman (of Lithuanian origin).  They shared a similar fate as refugees that founded a German-Polish burial association to allow those who lost their homeland after the Second World War to take their final rest on native soil.  Moreover, this novel was made into a film with the same title by Polish director Robert Glinski in 2005.
Let’s not forget that Grass accompanied the German Chancellor Willy Brandt on his journey to Varsovie in 1970 where the latter knelt at a memorial to the victims of the ghettos in order to ask for forgiveness.
Grass, who left his native city at the age of 17 years to serve for a few months in the Waffen-SS, had always campaigned for the reconciliation of the German and Polish peoples.  By attesting that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS in his book Peeling the Onion in 2006, he put in danger his good relationship with the Polish and in particular his city of birth.  The Law and Justice party of the Kaczynski brothers demanded an apology from Grass and fought to strip him of the title of Honorary Citizen of Danzig.  In a referendum initiated by the mayor of Danzig, the citizens nevertheless voted that Grass be allowed to retain this honorary title.
As proof of their forgiveness, they organised a huge celebration for Grass’ 80th birthday.  And even the former president and leader of the Solidarnosc, Lech Walesa, who had broken contact with the Nobel prize winner, came to explain that the war was over, that its memory should not destroy the future and that it was up to us to build something new together.  Is this not the best pardon that the author could have asked for?   

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Forgiveness: Performing the Boundaries. An Investigation Of Staged Acts Of Forgiveness In Maxim Biller's Harlem Holocaust And Die Tochter
Daphne Seemann
University College Dublin, Ireland

The rupture of the Holocaust placed a question mark over the possibility of forgiveness. The extent of the moral and ethical transgression is unforgivable, especially given the number of victims who can no longer speak. Nevertheless, the hyper-reflexive memory culture of Germany, which is informed by a politics of reconciliation, projects forgiveness - even if impossible –as a desired outcome in the future.
My paper examines this tension between desire and impossibility as framed by two texts by a prominent contemporary German-Jewish author. As a member of the second generation of German-Jewish authors, Maxim Biller thematises and problematises the challenges that result from the belated presence of remorse on a large cultural scale (bypassing the experiential generations) for both the descendents of perpetrators and the children and grandchildren of Holocaust victims.  It is interesting in this context to address the actual right to grant forgiveness and the problematics of perceiving this right to be a matter of transgenerational heritage.
In particular, my paper focuses on the performance of the process of forgiving in Biller’s texts, while assessing the limitations and complications of a staged reconciliation in the second and third generations. The paper also looks at writing techniques employed by the author to address the issue of performance and it evaluates the effectiveness of Biller’s provocative modes of representation, which often include pathological acts of staging forgiveness. 
My paper addresses the consequences of transgenerational visions of victimization and reconciliation, and the delicate tension between a desire to remember and the possibility to forgive. Against the background of Biller’s texts, my paper further problematises the possibility of turning forgiveness into a weapon and misunderstanding forgiveness as an entitlement following acts of repentance.

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Redefining Heroism: Return of the Forgiving Hero
Sherry Sabbarwal
Department of Sociology, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India

Forgiveness may be considered from a number of perspectives. The functionalists view it as a spiritual, moral and social duty, a practice that prevents destructive thoughts from disturbing one’s own mental wellbeing, as well as, one that checks disorder and conflict in the larger social order. Those holding the non-functionalist viewpoint consider it the basis for repressive control, stressing the fact that it is an idea utilized to foster a feeling of tolerance towards the wrongdoings in the world, which go a long way in perpetuating these transgressions. Needless to say, they believe in the idea of retribution and revenge. In the opinion of the third group, which subscribes to the interpretive view, forgiveness need not be understood as either a virtue or a weakness. It is, instead, a relationship between two parties, one that forgives and the other who is forgiven. This perspective points towards a choice available to an individual who is perceived to have the capability to decide upon a certain course of action.
A historical review of the Indian Hindi cinema shows an interesting trend vis a vis the portrayal of forgiveness. In its initial phase starting in early 1900s and going up to 1960s, forgiveness was epitomized as the spiritual and moral obligation of a ‘good’ person. The decades of the 70s and 80s were dominated by cinema based primarily on the ‘revenge’ motif, where only wimps believed in forgiveness while anti-‘heroes’ wreaked vengeance on the wrongdoers. Since the beginning of the millennium, the focus has shifted to a new type of protagonist who forgives not because it is the morally superior thing to do, but because one has the choice to do so. The paper will endeavor to show through illustrations from the films from the different eras, how there has been the redefining of the ‘hero’ in terms of the protagonist’s approach to forgiveness.