56 pages • 1 hour read
Simon WiesenthalA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Within the narrative portion of The Sunflower, Wiesenthal reveals that the sunflowers became a harbinger of hope and also a reminder of his own responsibility. At the point when he encounters the military grave, he believes that he is doomed to die at the hands of the Nazis alongside his fellow prisoners. However, the sight of the sunflowers, at the time, he says, “aroused new thoughts in me. I felt I would come across them again” (15). When, after the war, Simon comes across a bunch of sunflowers growing wild on a hillside, the sight prompts the memory of the soldiers’ cemetery and the afternoon he spent with the dying Nazi. The sight of these sunflowers prompts a sense of guilt, as he asks himself, “Had I anything to reproach myself for?” (84). This revived memory prompts him to go to Stuttgart to visit Karl’s mother some weeks later.
The sunflower on each grave is a symbol of remembrance for the person buried in that grave. The planting of the flower is an act of bearing witness to a single life. Wiesenthal’s book, The Sunflower, is also a gesture of bearing witness to the many lives who were taken unjustly and never sufficiently acknowledged or grieved.
The bandages that cover the entire body of the dying Nazi are a covering that hides the physical appearance of the man, while at the same time revealing the extent of his injuries. The bandages obscure his body from view, which also means that Simon is unable to read the man’s face or body languages for indications as to whether he is speaking the truth in his confession. The fact that the bandages contain yellow stains suggests that the injuries are difficult to contain. In later years, the bandages, like the sunflowers, have become for Simon a token to remind him of this experience with Karl, as he says, “every time I see a nurse, or a man with his head bandaged, I recall him” (95).
Rebecca Goldstein, one of the respondents to Wiesenthal’s question, uses the image of the bandages as a metaphor for the Nazi teachings to which Karl submitted. She says the theories were “as vilely opaque as those bandages with the yellow stains” (150). Lawrence Langer makes a similar comparison in his response, as he points out that Karl’s confession cannot ever be adequately evaluated, as it is presented to us through the recollection of Wiesenthal, “the mystery of his inner feelings remains swathed in the bandages that encase his body” (187-88).
When Simon visits Karl’s mother in Stuttgart, he sees that she has a crucifix hanging on her wall, a common religious artifact in Catholic households. Karl’s mother explains that she found it sticking out of the rubble after a bombing and has taken comfort in its presence, feeling “a little less abandoned” (89). Simon realizes, through her story of the crucifix, that she too has suffered a test of faith, a sense of being forsaken by God. The religious object then, despite its explicitly Christian associations, becomes a point of connection between the German woman and the Jewish man. The crucifix as a symbol, the depiction of an innocent man unjustly murdered, becomes an image to which Simon, as a persecuted Jewish man, can relate.