Talk:The Sunflower (book)

Karl Seidl (sic)

The Wikipedia article says under Synopsis, Paragraph 1, "Simon Wiesenthal is summoned from this work detail by a nurse to the bedside of a dying Nazi soldier, Karl Seidl (identified only as Karl S. in earlier editions)." I own, and have checked, the revised and expanded edition of The Sunflowers; it nowhere identifies the SS soldier as a Seidl, or as anyone else either. Nor do the Kirkus Review piece or the Facing History page that are cited in the Wiki article.

I've run through many other web articles mentioning the Karl Seidl identification; none of them mentions a source, much less a credible source, much less a credible source detailing Wiesenthal himself making the identification. (One scholarly article exists, by Carmen Goman and Douglas Kelley, repeating the Karl Seidl ID. It has plenty of academic references, but does not cite a source on this point.) I've ordered from interlibrary loan the apparently scholarly biography of Wiesenthal authored by Tom Segev, and when I can I'll follow up with what I find there. I'm also emailing Carmen Goman to inquire into her sources.

But I predict I'll find nothing. In short, I believe the purported identification of the young SS soldier in The Sunflowers is an urban legend and is spurious, and thus should be stricken from the Wiki article. 2601:544:C100:9EE0:7074:4976:11EC:9B33 (talk) 03:29, 1 August 2022 (UTC)

Addition, 17 August 2022:

I've now consulted the biography by Tom Segev. It is Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends (Doubleday, 2010), 482 pp. The Sunflower is the subject of Segev's chapter 13, "'What Would You Have Done?'" After 8 1/2 pages of summary and context for The Sunflower, including some discussion of noted figures who agreed to write a response to Wiesenthal's story, Segev describes a letter from German novelist Heinrich Boll, who served in the German army during the war and was wounded in action. Boll did not write a published response for the volume. Reading between the lines of Boll's reply, Segev indicates, you can tell that "... Boll's working hypothesis was that The Sunflower was a work of fiction" (p. 238). Another member of the German armed forces informed Wiesenthal that certain details of the story were certainly incorrect (e.g. the fire that constitutes the most dramatic incident in the young Nazi's confession; any German nurse's willingness to smuggle a Jew into a hospital, even at the request of a soldier). When a third correspondent questioned the incident, Wiesenthal simply replied that it was true, all of it: "Yes, of course it really happened. It happened to me" (p. 239).

Segev's analysis of the disagreements -- including the identity of the dying Nazi -- deserves quoting at length:

"Wiesenthal was the only source for the story. There is nothing among his papers that can independently confirm or refute it. He apparently never gave the SS man's full name. In the film based on [Wiesenthal's] autobiography, The Murderers Among Us, the patient mutters a name that sounds like Seidel or Seidler. In the copy of the film script in Wiesenthal's files, there is an ellipse [that is, the symbol ...] where the name would normally appear" (p. 239).

Of prime importance are these two points: (1) it's not only that no citation from Wiesenthal himself of the name Karl Seidl has been found, but that there is none to be found. And (2) there is indirect but persuasive evidence that the name Karl Seidl was simply an actor's ad lib that ended up making the film. Segev observes (pp. 355-56) that Wiesenthal had been critical of past films based on his life, but his involvement in the making of The Murderers Among Us was limited to approving the actor who'd play him, feeling "satisfied with the movie as a whole," and being content with his fee (p. 356).

I no longer see a need to contact the authors of the scholarly article, which after all was written by non-historians, so the Karl Seidl reference was just stage-setting, not closely related to their conclusions. I'll leave this up for a week and await any replies. Failing that, I plan to rewrite the section mentioning "Karl Seidl" in light of these findings. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:544:C100:9EE0:8D5A:4686:2993:7AC3 (talk) 23:03, 17 August 2022 (UTC)