The New Yorker brought in philosopher Susan Neiman this week to answer questions about the commemoration of the Confederacy in the modern United States. A few days ago I linked to another New Yorker interview with Neiman. She is an American Jewish scholar who lives in Germany and is studying how Germans commemorate the Holocaust and World War II. Her recent book Learning from the Germans has become a go-to-guide for journalists trying to make sense of the current Confederate statue defenestrations. Here are some excerpts from the article, which is in the form of a Q&A:
Your book is generally admiring of Germany’s efforts, but you present the country as taking several decades to get where it did. What changed?
Time and pressure. The pressure came in West Germany from civil society. In East Germany, it came from the leadership, who were Communists, and who recognized that the Communists had been the first group that the Nazis attacked. You had a top-down process on one side of Germany, and a bottom-up process in the other side.
I don’t idealize the process that the Germans went through in facing up to their criminal past. It was long, it was reluctant, and they faced an enormous amount of backlash. Most people outside of Germany have come to think the Nazi times were so awful that, the minute the war was over, the German nation got down on its knees and begged for atonement. And that’s just not the case. In fact, the few people who did get down on their knees, like Willy Brandt, in 1970, were vilified by the majority of their compatriots.
You are referring to the West German Chancellor who fell to his knees as a gesture of atonement, in Warsaw, in 1970.
Precisely. There is a very famous picture that went around the world, and I think that for most non-Germans it is the iconic picture of postwar Germany. But that’s not reliable. Think about Brandt himself, who, as a Social Democrat, went into exile as soon as the Nazis took power. So, personally, he had nothing to atone for. But he still felt that, as the leader of a nation, he ought to make a gesture. What we don’t know, or what most people don’t know, is that the majority of the country thought it was wrong for him to get on his knees and atone, and particularly to be submissive before Slavic people.
So the change was from seeing themselves as the war’s worst victims—and I’ve seen mouths drop open when I tell this to an American audience, but they really did see themselves as the war’s worst victims. It’s not something that Germans tend to talk about. They’ll tell you about their Nazi parents, or their Nazi teachers, but they won’t say that their parents not only went along with Nazis but thought of themselves as the worst victims of the war. And I realized it was the same trope that you hear among supporters of the Lost Cause. “Our cities were burned, our men were wounded or put in prisoner-of-war camps. Our women were violated, our children were hungry, and, on top of that, the damn Yankees blamed us for the war.” These are exactly the sentiments that you would hear in West Germany.
I think it is very natural for everyone to want to see their ancestors and their nation as heroic. And if you can’t do heroic, then the move is to see yourself and your nation as a victim. But the move from seeing oneself as a nation of victims to a nation of perpetrators is one that the Germans finally and with great difficulty made. And that’s a historical precedent.
I suppose another thing that complicates the story is that the Germans did become victims, in the sense that their cities were burned, civilians were killed, a lot of German women were raped by Russian soldiers, there were huge population expulsions of German-speaking peoples from other European countries—
Can I just interrupt you? We always hear about the Red Army rapes. All the armies raped civilian women. If you go down to the Deep South, the sense of victimization is still very strong. And it’s not entirely unjustified. I think the North has always wanted to look at the South as the locus of our problems.
In 2018, I was driving on the Turnpike and trying to keep myself awake by singing along to the radio, and a song came on. It was Joan Baez singing “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and I suddenly realized I cannot sing along to that song anymore. It would be like singing a beautiful melody to the night they drove the Wehrmacht out. And Joan Baez, she not only sang at the March on Washington, she sang in Selma, when white people were being killed….
You talked about it being a bottom-up process in West Germany, and I think the way that’s normally talked about is that it was generational. That kids in the 1968 generation started putting pressure on their parents to tell them what happened and why.
Generational change definitely played a role. But it started much earlier. It was not a huge movement. There were clergypeople who were quite involved in setting up organizations that sent young people to work in kibbutzim, or other places where help for victims of the Nazis was needed. I think one really important thing that happened was the beginning of the publication of memoirs of survivors. That presented a picture, particularly in West Germany, that wasn’t available. In East Germany, by the way, there were over a thousand books and a thousand films made about the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes. I think art has an enormous function here, as it should, in simply helping us to see things from another perspective. And I think it is playing a big role in the renewed civil-rights movement in America. I think that the work of our greatest writers, like Toni Morrison, but also many, many others, has really changed our view of what it is to be an American, and what black Americans have been through.
You also had people demanding to excavate the rotting concentration camps, and turn them into memorials—or the torture chambers of the Gestapo, which were unearthed by a group of civil-society activists in Berlin, who are now funded by the state, but at the time they weren’t. The state was not too happy about any of this.
I think travel also played a role: the fact that, within Europe, people began to realize that there are very different versions of history that they weren’t talking about. For a generation of Germans who were born either during or just after the war, history basically stopped in 1933. You just didn’t learn about it in West Germany. But it became important to develop curricula that actually show both the rise of the Nazis and what they did to their victims. Again, it’s not complete; it’s not perfect. But it was a combination of forces, which were all very important.
I wrote a piece in The Atlantic, in September, about how there were no Nazi memorials, and of course someone wrote to the editor and said, “Here’s one.” And the truth is, there are a couple, which neither I nor any of my friends knew about, because they’re off in tiny little villages. But almost all of them were removed. The Third Reich was only active for twelve years, so there wasn’t a lot of time to build monuments. And the Allies decreed what the streets and offices were to be renamed, and had swastikas taken off of the public buildings. There wasn’t that much that had to be removed, but the idea that these people should be memorialized in any way, even though you still had family members mourning for them, was just not done. What happened instead is a plethora of monuments both to people who resisted the Nazis and to their victims.
What are some of the ways in which you think the American attempt to remember our past around racial issues comes up short?
We have a ninety-year-long hole in our history. I grew up paying occasional visits to the amusement park in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and I had no idea when that gigantic monument to the Confederacy was built. I had no idea of the Lost Cause history, and the varied attempts that they made through the rewriting of history, through building monuments, through Hollywood in a really serious way. And it’s not just “Gone with the Wind” or “The Birth of a Nation.” There were hundreds of films glorifying the Confederacy, because everyone wants to be a rebel, right? So I had no idea of any of that until I began doing this research.
Even the expression “Jim Crow,” which drives me crazy, is an expression that makes what Bryan Stevenson calls the age of racial terror appear cute, caricatured. Yeah, we know there was segregation, but calling it “Jim Crow” already allows us to take it much less seriously than we should. And that’s why I never use the expression anymore. It’s like somebody named the entire Nazi period after the most anti-Semitic comic actor of the generation.
What should we be looking to do in practice?
The statues really need to go, first of all. And they’re going. It’s a symbolic act, but an important symbol. And the idea that the statues are about history or heritage is ridiculous. We don’t memorialize every piece of our heritage. We pick out what we want people to remember. Monuments are visible values. They portray the men and women who embodied the values that we want our community to share, that we want our children to learn. So they have to go. And hopefully that process should be a democratic and public one. They don’t all need to go into the harbor. Contextualization can be an option in some cases. It really needs to be decided case by case. But we have to acknowledge that we’re not upholding history, we’re upholding values, and those are not the values that we want in the twenty-first century.
We need to continue the educational processes that have begun. And when I say “educational,” schools are important, but I really think media, culture, and the arts are at least as important. There are films to be made and funded; there are books that need to be written and read.
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