A certain eagerness has introduced itself in the wake of a greater motivation to deal with atrocities committed in the name of nationalistic, ethnic, racial or political ideologies. We have left a century behind marked by man’s uncanny capacity to humiliate and kill his fellow man for the sake of particular ideologies. Man is able to support the organised killing of certain groups in the name of ideas about reality that creates a new reality. Ideas can easily turn into deadly convictions. 

For example, the Nazi-regime in convinced its followers that the true potential of the German people could not be fulfilled as long as one single Jew remained alive on earth. The Stalinist regime in the former Soviet Union was convinced that the future happiness of the working masses had to be secured by the mass killing of imagined and real political enemies. 

At the beginning of the last century, during World War I, the Turkish nationalists were convinced that the building of a Turkish state depended on the massacre of close to one million Armenians in the heartland of the nation. Armenians who had lived there for ages were suddenly considered a threat to national unity. When crimes of such proportions are not recognised they tend to become embedded in the nations structure, a systematic fault that tends to emerge in new forms, as it now does in ’s treatment of the Kurdish minority. 

When a national trauma is met with denial, it is more often then not doomed to be repeated in new disguises.A necessary prerequisite for reconciliation is the full acceptance of reality however painful it is to one’s idealised national self-image. And accepting reality involves pertinent questions: what have we done to the other and how have these acts affected us? 

The same holds true for many nations of today. The has not successfully dealt with the guilt accumulated by building the nation by the killing of vast numbers of the original inhabitants and destroying their culture. The unwillingness to face this historical fact, to my mind, still fuels the fears behind the ’ unwillingness to recognise the International Court in The Hague as a court that can try its citizens for war crimes. 

As a son of the tiny little group of Jews who survived the war inside I have been impressed by how successfully deals with these issues. Until the unification of one could also notice how the former in a perverse way evaded all the painful issues by proclaiming their part of as an innocent victim of the Nazi era. Their state, they argued, was anti-fascist and had no responsibility for the atrocities of the Nazi regime. This hypocritical stance has after the unification become even clearer as a contrast to the impressive work done in the western part. has still to give up its soothing myth of being “Hitler’s first victim”. Anybody familiar with history has not forgotten the immense enthusiasm of the Austrian victims. 

We can now add other countries where national traumas will be embedded in their future historical course: , and the former , just to name a few. When denial gains the upper hand and deforms the future, ideas of revenge and revitalised perversion of historical memory will ensue. That is the foundation of further bloodshed – when one brutalises the mind, cruelty will follow. 

The need to find roads to reconciliation is urgent and need to be developed. As the area of social and politically induced trauma and its aftereffects have received full attention only in recent decades some of the problems that arise have to be delineated. One is the temptation to look for quick solutions. Experience seems to point at decades of reconciliatory efforts rather than years. Another problem is the need for support from the influential members of the political and intellectual classes in the society concerned. The process of reconciliation must have this support otherwise it will fail. Nelson Mandela is an outstanding example of a political leader whose authority made such a process possible. Justice and truth needs national and international inquiry and an international court of justice. 

Reconciliation involves psychic work of an immense order containing both cognitive and emotional transformation. As long as revenge and bitterness have the upper hand such psychic work is almost impossible. These feelings need to be articulated in the initial stages of trying to overcome them. Reconciliation involves the process of mourning depending heavily on having one’s sufferings recognised. Of course that cannot happen when a region or country is deeply involved in denying what has occurred. Under such circumstances the trauma turns into an open wound affecting not only the victims but also those who need to deny what has happened. When nations or groups cannot acknowledge their guilt openly it continues to increase in strength under the surface. That makes reconciliation even more difficult and stimulates further violence. 

To my mind the deepest effect of a successful reconciliation ends with a mutual acceptance, not of what has happened, but that it has happened, that the suffering is mutually recognised. Reconciliation is in that respect directed to the future, not the past.Without the work of reconciliation the past persists as a menacing presence that refuses to become past. It is admittedly painful, even on a national level, to withdraw hostile projections directed towards a particular group. In some instances it must involve a collective depression, the result of losing a cherished idealised national self-image. That is one of the reasons why the tension persists between national states and the persecuted groups in it. I think reconciliation on a lager scale than the individual case is greatly reinforced by the creation of international institutions with the responsibility of bringing the organisers and perpetrators of ethnic cleansing and mass murder to justice. Reconciliation demands a lot of psychic work on both individual and group level. Therefore it needs a social and political structure that can support it. 

Forgiveness, on the other hand, is to my mind a weaker form of activity closer to magical thinking. I find forgiveness useful only with children as the relief of forgiveness has more to with a magical gesture that wards off the threat of losing the love and respect of a person you are dependent upon for your self-respect. It involves little psychic work: no need to work over the painful truth about one’s actions and evades the full acceptance of the guilt involved. The need for being forgiven can of course be propelled by guilt and regret. But the act of forgiving does not involve the psychic transformation necessary for both perpetrator and victim. In that respect forgiving is a more superficial psychic act compared to reconciliation. I would also maintain that there are human acts that are unforgivable. These are precisely the kind of acts that need the painful process of reconciliation more than anything else. If that effort fails, only revenge remains – followed by even more violence.