LEARNING FROM THE GERMANS: Race and the Memory of Evil by Susan Neiman published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2019) $30.00 Hardcover $14.99 Kindle
Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil by Susan Neiman is part personal memoir, part traveler’s essay, part philosophical examination of the discernment of truth and evil, and part study of historical memory. It is both provocative and stirring, and at times disappointingly incomplete. Its driving force is the challenging idea that white Americans have something to learn from Germans about remembering the horrors of the past.
Neiman grew up as a Jewish girl in the South. She writes that Emmett Till’s cousin, Rev, Wheeler Parker told her that; “There’s an old saying. If I was Catholic and I lived in the South, I’d be worried. If I was Jewish, I’d be packing up. If I was black, I’d be gone.” She recalls her own experience of passing for white in Georgia, and facing rejection once people realized that she was Jewish. Her synagogue in Atlanta was firebombed by the violent white nationalists of that era.
As an adult, Neiman has spent considerable time living in Germany. While there she became convinced that Americans have something to learn from the Germans in how they confront the evil embedded in their past. She writes that modern Germans are the first to say that their grandparents’ descent into evil is uniquely horrible and unmatched. She does not try to compare American slavery to Auschwitz or the Civil War to World War II. She writes that “most every German I know rejected the comparison between the crimes of the Nazis and those of American racists—even after the 2017 demonstrations in Charlottesville showed they now use the same symbols and are equally ready to kill. That rejection, I’ll argue, is itself a sign of how far Germany has come in taking responsibility for its criminal history.”
When Neiman moved to Germany, she learned a word that Germans had created after the war, Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, or “working off the past.” Germans who were born or grew up in the 1940s and 1950s used the concept in their confrontation with their parents’ distorted memory of the decade of Nazi rule. She says that there is no similar word used by Americans to describe their struggle with a history of violent racial oppression.
As an American who grew up in the second half of the 20th Century, I have visited many Holocaust memorials and museums. These are scattered across the American landscape, thousands of miles from where the events they commemorate took place. Their erections were often community projects nearly universally supported. But what of the memorials to the victims of slavery? Where can they be found? Why can Americans memorialize the victims of one human rights debacle, but not another? Is it because we can’t bring ourselves to imagine that our society could see slavery as acceptable and our economy could find human bondage profitable? Yes, the Nazi Decade in Germany was worse than any period in American history, but while the Nazis were in power for twelve years, America had slavery and Jim Crow’s near-slavery for three and a half centuries.
Neiman points out that this is not just an American problem. Britain, for example, has memorials to the Holocaust, but little mention of the victims of British colonial policies in Ireland, Africa, or Asia. She says that; As the former British Museum director Neil MacGregor put it, “What is very remarkable about German history as a whole is that the Germans use their history to think about the future, where the British tend to use their history to comfort themselves.” British schoolchildren learn that Britain abolished slavery before America did, but rarely about British responsibility for the slave trade. Most college students there are vaguely aware of a problem called Ireland, but lack the most basic knowledge of which part of the country belongs to the Crown. And the history of British imperialism—we built them roads and weren’t half as bad as the Belgians!—is so small a part of public consciousness that even educated Britons can be surprised to learn that their country is generally considered to be part of the history of European colonialism. (p. 31)
The author writes that while it is good that there is near-universal agreement that throwing Jews into gas chambers is evil:
The problem is that a symbol of absolute evil gives us a gold standard by which other evil actions can look like common coin. The focus on Auschwitz distorts our moral vision: like extremely nearsighted people, we can only recognize large, bold objects, while everything else remains vague and dim. Or, to put the matter in psychoanalytic terms, the focus on Auschwitz is a form of displacement for what we don’t want to know about our own national crimes. (p. 31)
How many times have I been told by the defenders of American historical policies towards Native Americans and Blacks that “it was not as bad as the Nazis.” Sure, but that is not the point. We can’t avoid examining our past because it is not as bad as Germany’s. As Neiman says, having the will to face shameful aspects of our history comes from strength and is not a confession of weakness.
While Germany today seems like a country more willing to face its past than almost any other on earth, it was not always so. Most of the post-war leadership of the country below the very highest governmental level included former Nazis and Nazi collaborators. These men and women wanted the past to be forgotten, and like many in post-war Japan, wanted to focus on the Nazi period as a “tragedy” in which ordinary Germans were the victims of Hitler, Allied bombing, and Soviet atrocities. Unlike the American South after the Civil War, the Allied occupiers fought ideologically against this German reassurance of innocence.
The German schools were not allowed by the occupiers to teach that their political and military leaders of 1933 to 1945 were great men. While post-Civil War Southern schools inculcated white children with the belief that Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were the ideal men of their age, Hitler, Goering, and Rosenberg were not held up as exemplars to German schoolchildren after 1945, because to do so would invite Allied anger.
While Neiman says that Germans’ changed view of their history could not come exclusively through the intervention of outsiders, the changes in the school system at least blocked the reproduction of Nazi views among the young. These same young people challenged their country’s, and their own parents’ histories when they came of age in the 1960s. This generational challenge did not happen in the South in the decades after Reconstruction. Young white Southerners in the 1880s and 1890s did not challenge the morality of their slave-owning ancestors, the willingness to use violence to preserve slavery of their Confederate fathers, or the rampant racism of their own society. Instead, descendant groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans erected monuments to those men most associated with the Confederate cause and imposed curriculums on Southern schools that valorized the white South’s violent resistance to ending slavery and promoting Black equality.
Oddly, while the Civil War was fought 75 years before the Second World War, the generation of white Southerners who began to challenge their region’s racial history arose at the same time as those who were calling for Germany to face its past, the 1960s generation. The re-examination came at the same times in both countries, but in America, this was a century after the worst had taken place. When the country’s history of racial domination was raised, the response often was “Slavery ended a hundred years ago, why are we still talking about it now?” Formerly-Nazi parents could not so easily turn aside the confrontation with their own children. This forced German society to begin working out its past long before Americans did.
There are, of course similarities between the German experience and the Southern White experience. For the first couple of decades after World War II, Germans saw themselves more as victims than as perpetrators. The same with Southern whites. Neiman writes that the same story was told in both communities:
…you can hear the same litany: the loss of their bravest sons, the destruction of their homes, the poverty and hunger that followed—combined with resentment at occupying forces they regarded as generally loutish, who had the gall to insist their suffering was deserved. (p. 63)
However, because the German veterans were never able to legally organize, they could claim to be victims, but not heroes. Nor could their cause ever be publicly called “noble” or “just,” claims made routinely by Confederate veterans.
This book provides less of a thesis for the working out of the American past, and more of a series of essays describing how people in Germany and the United States deny or come to terms with the past. I liked the book and learned from it, but I found it sometimes surrendered intellectual rigor to the temptations of anecdote. It does point out the need for Americans to take a more comparative approach to the memory of atrocity and the reparative justice that is necessary to move forward, towards Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung.
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