The Mark of Cain: Guilt and Denial in the Post-War Lives of Nazi Perpetrators

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Preview — Mark of Cain by Katharina von Kellenbach. The Mark of Cain fleshes out a history of conversations that contributed to Germany's coming to terms with a guilty past. Katharina von Kellenbach draws on letters exchanged between clergy and Nazi perpetrators, written notes of prison chaplains, memoirs, sermons, and prison publications to illuminate the moral and spiritual struggles of perpetrators after World War II.

Th The Mark of Cain fleshes out a history of conversations that contributed to Germany's coming to terms with a guilty past. These documents provide intimate insights into the self-reflection and self-perception of perpetrators. As Germany looks back on more than sixty years of passionate debate about political, personal and legal guilt, its ongoing engagement with the legacy of perpetration has transformed German culture and politics. The willingness to forgive and forget displayed by the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son became the paradigm central to Germany's rehabilitation and reintegration of Nazi perpetrators.

The problem with Luke's parable in this context is that, unlike the son in the parable, perpetrators did not ask for forgiveness. Most agents of state crimes felt innocent. Von Kellenbach proposes the story of the mark of Cain as a counter narrative.

Mark of Cain: Guilt and Denial in the Post-War Lives of Nazi Perpetrators - Oxford Scholarship

In contrast to the Prodigal Son, who is quickly forgiven and welcomed back into the house of the father, the fratricidal Cain is charged to rebuild his life on the basis of open communication about the past. The story of the Prodigal Son equates forgiveness with forgetting; Cain's story links redemption with remembrance and suggests a strategy of critical engagement with perpetrators. Hardcover , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

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Katharina von Kellenbach

This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Margaret rated it really liked it Jan 06, Marina rated it it was amazing Feb 08, ReadingRachelB rated it liked it Jan 14, Jessica Foster rated it really liked it Jun 22, John Guderian rated it liked it Dec 29, Leonora marked it as to-read Feb 10, Heather marked it as to-read Nov 25, Hanna marked it as to-read Dec 05, Her most recent book, The Mark of Cain , is an ambitious and thought-provoking expansion of the issues broached in that earlier article.

Once again, the starting point is her uncle, Alfred Ebner, an SS civil administrator who was intimately involved in the ghettoization, starvation, enslavement, and murder of 18, Jews in Pinsk, Belarus. The knowledge of mass murder, von Kellenbach writes, is bearable when it can be kept at a distance 6. But for her family, and for the families of the approximately , men and 5, women actively involved in the Nazi killing programs, the proximity to that knowledge threatened to make it unbearable 6.

The Mark of Cain

The goal of her book is to explore how perpetrators, their families, and their nation might have emerged from the weight of the guilt of their crimes in a way that would have neither denied the injury to the victim nor demanded total absolution for the perpetrator. Professor von Kellenbach is a theologian, and The Mark of Cain is a combination of theology and history. She researched the archives of chaplains who had counseled war criminals held at Landsberg prison, as well as documents left behind by war criminals.

Any consideration of guilt and forgiveness in post-war Germany necessarily raises questions of justice. Early on, von Kellenbach acknowledges the indispensability of trials in criminalizing atrocities, identifying perpetrators, and imposing punishments. She rightly concludes that as tools for creating records of atrocity and as instigators of public discourse about atrocity, trials have a key role to play in the confrontation with mass crime.

However, the judicial project is an inherently symbolic and limited one. The courts cannot process all perpetrators, no punishment is truly commensurate with the enormity of the crime, and, albeit regrettably, society needs its doctors, teachers, police officers, business people, parents, and spouses back if it is to function Two biblical paradigms serve as models in this endeavor. In the parable of the prodigal son, a man leaves his father with his inheritance but squanders it.

He returns home, and his father welcomes him unconditionally. Von Kellenbach discusses the historical tendency within Christian teaching to forgive even without any remorse from [End Page ] the sinner. The failure to acknowledge the crime and atone for it dehumanizes the victim, amplifies his or her suffering, and thereby compounds the original injury.