Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

LEARNING FROM THE GERMANSSusan Neiman’s recent book is an exceptionally insightful resource for Americans dealing with racism. Unlike Americans, Germans eventually developed their own internal process to deal with Nazism - “Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung,” (working through the past.)The past five years I’ve been giving presentations on slavery. It has been revelatory how little adult Americans understand “our peculiar institution.” Disturbingly, few adults want to re-examine the uniquely pernicious form slavery developed here. Neiman’s comparative study of Germany’s Nazism and American racism is not so much paralysis of analysis of racism as a demonstration of how possibly to move forward.The word Aryan has crept into mainstream language.It has ancient roots and geography, coming from India through Iran and into Europe and eventually to America. Scholars contend it is essentially religious, cultural, linguistic in origin. Hitler popularized it and is now embraced by American white supremacists in defining their racial identity. More unsettling, the Aryan Brotherhood seeks to unite white people throughout the planet.What Nazis and Americans shared in common was the presumption of the superiority of the white race. Nazism designated Jews and others as inferior to Aryans and themselves as “the Master Race.” The planter slave owners defined black people as inferior, resulting in white people viewing themselves as superior.John C. Calhoun was one of the most powerful politicians in American history whose rhetorical virus still affects American life. He urged Whites to rally around white racial identity as did Hitler who appropriated American white supremacist thinking. When the Nazis were formulating the Nuremberg laws they looked to America, and the Nazis, in some instances, thought Americans went too far! This is spelled out in James Quitman’s “HItler’s American Model,” - The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. Nazi Germans learned the worst from America and incorporated it in the III Reich.Susan Neiman, author of “Learning from the Germans,” counters the Nazis learning from Americans, to considerour learning from the Germans “to ensure domestic tranquility,” the original hope of the Preamble. Neiman, with unique credentials as an American from Atlanta, and a resident in Germany for twenty-five years, examines common parallels and uncommon resolutions.Slavery and Nazism were vehicles which drove a racial superiority/inferiority hierarchy. Nazism crashed in WWII but the effects of slavery live on in American society. The current administration is in overdrive to “ensure domestic tension” and succeeding alarmingly.Nazism in German existed for only 12 years. By one metric, it had a short life span in which to sink deep roots. America began to set racism’s roots in 1619. America touts exceptionalism. With slavery, America has been exceptional in how long it has endured, and how pervasive its offshoot, racism, affects American’s psyche with a post traumatic syndrome.Up to the Civil War the slave South, to justify its “Peculiar Institution” seriously sought to create a Procrustean Bed by rationalizing theology, philosophy, the law, science and cultural symbols. It forced these sources to fit the bed of its own making - racial inferiority and superiority, despite America’s boast of equality. The planter and politician, James Hammond declared, “Equality is a lie.” Not every American, then and now, bought into “All men are created equal.” As a result, Americans have lived with cognitive dissonance for centuries.The 1857 Dred Scott decision by the U.S. Supreme Court canonized this pervasive effort in declaring not only was the enslaved Dred Scott not a US citizen but property of his owner, and declaring, beyond judicial reach, black persons had “no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” Had Calhoun only lived to see Justice Taney’s declaration! The 120 years since has been a relentless battle in America to resist black persons being respected equally as white citizens. The 120 years since the Civil War has been the crucial difference between America and Germany. There was no concerted effort to work through the past. In the brief period of Reconstruction, according to W.E.B. Dubois, “The slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery."In the 75 years since Germany’s military collapse, with a divided east/west nation, it has succeeded where America failed, which Neiman details in fresh, penetrating scholarship. With a philosophical academic background she brings investigative tools that look at the “why” and not only the “how” a society functions.After the collapse of Nazism, Germany was divided by the Allies. The press in the West allowed less analysis of how East Germany dealt more directly and effectively with Nazism than West Germany. East Germany under Communist dominance, as opposed to American, British and French control, prejudices us against East Germany. Neiman’s analysis here alone makes the book worth its weight and price. The West lagged and resisted its Nazi past. East German was a more aggressive leader.In courses on Reconstruction, I note that in the collapse of Germany in WWII, a March 5, 1946 directive of the Pentagon, “Law 104 for Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism,” ordered removal from the public all monuments, memorials or movements associated with Nazism. It was an order for “ethnic cleansing of Nazism.”My German is very limited as was my time spent in Germany. Neiman is German speaking, has spent most of her adult years there and is exceptionally equipped to analyze this law’s limitation and ramifications. While it did achieve removing Nazi items from public prominence, it was resented by the German public as imposed from the outside. She demonstrates effective de-Nazification had to come from within, and it would - eventually. Germans would develop their own internal process, “working through the past.” It would be a long process, from the ground up and the top down, and on different tracks in East and West Germany. Eventually, it would reach a degree of change that rooted out Nazism more than Americans have upended racial inequality. Her work can serve as a primer for those who are committed to a “more perfect society” here.Part Two of her work focuses on the current pulse of reconciliation efforts in the U.S. Reparations has recently resurfaced here. She expends considerable analysis on the issue of how Germany dealt with reparations toward its victims. Reparations for slavery is currently experiencing some momentum. The conservative writer, David Brooks, published “The Case for Reparation” - a slow convert to the cause, acknowledging seriousness rather than dismissing injustice. This is cause to hope. Other conservative American writers as Charles Krauthammer and Ross Douhaut reconsider this moral obligation toward the descendants of those whose labors made America financially great. In the way of reparation, Germany has led the way in making them to the State of Israel for the descendants of those whose lives and livelihoods its Nazi compatriots exterminated and exploited. Germany’s leadership in this instance has led the way for reparations to be considered in a number of cases where injustices have been unaddressed.Neiman seeks to break the logjam on racism here by detailing Germany’s working successfully through its Nazi past. While reading this unique study of Nazism and racism gave me a shot of adrenalin to the possibility of overcoming racism here, I am less sanguine. Nazism had a 12-year run in Germany, racism has had centuries here.I describe America’s unique experience with slavery as pernicious. Pernicious anemia is a bodily condition that is easily remedied if attended to in time. If not, it can attack bodily organs with deadly consequences. I contend racism is pernicious here and has attacked vital parts of our body politic. This warrants a detailed exposition which space doesn’t permit here.One example is the corrosive role the law and, especially the Supreme Court demonstrated by its resistance to ensuring domestic tranquility in its consistent denying all citizens full integration in every aspect of American life. Briefly, beginning with the dreadful Dred Scott decision which anchored racism, further acerbated by the 1873 decision thwarting implementation of the 14th amendment. The 1895 SC judgment canonized segregation altogether. In 1954 the SC sought to overturn segregation, but immediately violent white resistance solidified ongoing rejection of integration. And Trump’s judicial nominees are refusing to endorse the Brown decision.Voting which is integral to equality in a democratic society has been under persistent assault since the 15th amendment. The 2013 SC decision struck down section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Gerrymandering to curtail equal access to voting is now the order of the day.The law, which historically was one of the first vehicles to maintain a separation of races, beginning with pre-colonial legislation, is the continuous thread still woven by those resistant to true equality of all. The law and the courts are vital organs of the body politic and have become atrophied by the pernicious institution of American slavery.In personal communication with the author, Susan Neiman contends we have a moral obligation to resist resignation to this situation. Otherwise we are lost. She has written extensively on the issue of evil. Unfortunately, I reluctantly agree with Augustine that humanity is depraved altogether at its core. The evil embedded in racism here is far more deeply rooted in the American psyche than Nazism in Germans. We haven’t the desire to work through our racism with a tool such as a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. There is zero leadership from on high, and zero to one among American citizens. William Dean Howells, the Dean of American Letters, was prescient when he noted, “Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself.” We’re a diseased body politic and it is questionable if invasive surgery is too late. Nonetheless, Susan Neiman demonstrates with an engaging writing style how Germans, working through Nazism, has ensured at least more domestic tranquility for their country.

Condition was as good as advertised and arrived a week before it was promised.

Susan Neiman’s “Learning From the Germans” is an ambitious venture to explore the concept of Vergangenheitsaufarbeiting - working-off-the-past, as practiced for the past nearly 75 years by Germany to come to realistic and accepting terms with the horrors of the Nazi regime. To understand why, how and where this was implemented to derive the present day re-unified Germany that can feel shame and regret for their past sins, while being ‘proud’ to have the Enlightenment values to do so. Neiman could have given us a tour of Vergangenheitsaufarbeiting alone and it would have made for a valuable book. Yet as a philosopher not shy of complex human frailties and virtues, she chose to explore whether the lessons of the German maturing process since the Second World War might be a model for Americans to come to terms with our original sin: the legacy of slavery and racism. While the first third of the book deals almost exclusively with the German ‘working-off-the-past,’ the second third explores the history and impacts of chattel slavery, white supremacy/racism, and the struggles of the African American in the United States. While her prose was quite engaging in the first third of the book, it slipped some in the second third. It felt like there were too many sub-stories she wanted to tell that were told in a somewhat repetitive manner, bogging the flow. The remainder of the book is initially aimed at connecting Germany and the United States in terms of forward movement and our current shared upsurge of right wing nationalism (with accompanying racism and xenophobia). The first part is tightly written and argued strongly, but the book ends with a more esoteric philosophical debate the author ended up having with herself. Though a generally strong book full of solid information and quite good analysis it loses some of its impact when it went so ‘high brow at the end (and this comes from an academic who enjoys high brow literature). Overall this is a good book but it won’t engage all readers unless they can tolerate relatively deep philosophy. 3.5 Stars.

Philosopher Susan Neiman, who grew up in Atlanta during the 50s-60s and has lived three decades in Berlin, has produced a brilliant and meticulous comparison between Germany's relationship to its Nazi past and America's relationship to its slavery and Jim Crow past, with implications for today's world. Having grown up in Atlanta at the same time as she, having traveled in similar circles without having known her, having lived in Europe for several years, and having trained in philosophy, history, and law, I nevertheless did not know much of the historical detail that she presents and I had not thought through the past as clearly as she presents it. Her extensive use of interviews with many persons from varied backgrounds and views and her placement of challenging historical issues (how a region or nation comes to terms with evil, the cultural and political memory of it, modern traces and reactions to it, including the responses of persons today to the legacy that produced them) in a modern context give the book an important practical value. Her work is immensely relevant to today's politics. It is also extremely readable, drawing upon sophisticated philosophical works and theories while conveying and applying them in clear and non-jargonistic prose. I found the book slow to read only because it stimulated so much reflection and insight that I wanted to absorb it slowly.

This book will change your thinking about certain aspects of post WWII Germany and coming to terms with atrocities. The second half, about Emmitt Till and American efforts to atone for an horrific past, is also enlightening. I grew up in Mississippi in the 70's so the USA's (shockingly minimal) efforts to acknowledge its own shortcomings was not a total surprise, but interesting to see from this perspective. Absolutely worth the purchase and read.

Good book

This is a thought-provoking and brilliantly researched book. It also has a very original premise. Every nation has a past in which there is at least one event or period of which they can be ashamed. For Germany, of course, it is the unique horror of the Nazi period and the Holocaust. For the United States it is Slavery and the failure, post the Civil War, to establish effective civil rights for all. Susan Neiman does not equate Germany’s Nazi past with the institutionalised discrimination and lynchings of the Southern States of the US. But she does suggest how today’s Americans can and should “confront Race and the Memory of Evil” – by using Germany as the precedent. “Learning from the Germans”.For me there were many new things in this book. I know Germany fairly well but had not realised that the determination to record and explain the Nazi period is a relatively recent thing. The museums, school curricula, memorials and other records of the evils of the Third Reich have only really come into place in the last thirty years. Under the immediate West German governments of Adenauer and his successors there was little attempt made to feature anywhere the years 1932-1945 or to make reparations to those who suffered. Interestingly the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was different and young East Germans were far more likely to know of Germany’s recent past than their West German compatriots. Today across Germany there are outstanding museums of the Nazi era and the Holocaust. In part, of course, these are driven by accumulated guilt and it took a generation that was too young to have been guilty or not yet born to create these memorials.The post-Civil War period in America which in the Southern States maintained and expanded discrimination and it endured until well into the 1960s and, arguably, it hasn’t entirely gone away today. White Supremacists raise their fetid heads from time to time and have in Donald Trump a “President” who doesn’t seem over-bothered by them. Ms Neiman records some of the infamous cases of murder carried out by the Klu Klux Klan post war – and chilling stories they are as well. She points out how the “Confederacy” states like Georgia the State of her birth were segregated. The Civil Rights heroes of the 1960s had to fight not just the racist extremists but even many of the Southern Democrats who didn’t want to lose the white vote! But the CIvil Rights Act of 1964 was passed with full support from the Texan President Johnson - and act of considerable moral courage because he knew it would be a vote loser. Ms Neiman visits Mississippi and finds bigotry still present but where there are also encouraging signs. Museums of Slavery have been built and the horrors of segregation are more a matter of record today. She quotes Stanley Cavell who said “History will not go away, except through our perfect acknowledgment of it” – this is perhaps the main driver of Ms Neiman’s book.I am British and found this retrospective on German and American evil and how later generations have addressed it very instructive. Here in the United Kingdom whilst we are happy to wallow in the perceived greatness of our past we are largely unwilling to address our errors, many of which were venal. Susan Neiman says that in Britain “… there is no monument remembering the victims of colonial famines and massacres…” – she’s quite right about this. There is no “Museum of the British Empire” (one in Bristol closed through lack of support) and teaching in schools and universities on the subject is minimal. Britain’s involvement in slavery, our appropriation of lands overseas that were not ours, our discrimination against and often murder of native peoples needs to be addressed just as much as the Germans and Southern Americans are addressing their pasts.At over 400 pages “Learning from the Germans” is a long read and a moving and timely one. So much of modern society around the world revolves around discriminating hierarchies which self-select on the basis of race, colour, nationality, absence of disability, gender or creed. Sammy Davis Junior once called himself "the only black, Puerto Rican, one-eyed, Jewish entertainer in the world." Almost a full house! In my country there is now open nationalism and xenophobia in Government. In the White House it’s the same. If Trump could read and if Boris Johnson could be bothered to they should look at Susan Neiman’s book. The holocaust historian Laurence Rees called his definitive book on the Third Reich “The Nazis - A Warning from History”. Ms Neiman’s book is that as well – but it also shows how by “Learning from the Germans” we can do something about that lesson.

I found this book fascinating and the echoes of today are disturbing. In both Britain and the USA our politicians are doing their best to fan the flames of nativism and populism, mirroring what happened in Germany before the war. And as in German, Congress/Parliament is part of the problem, abjuring their constitutional responsibility. I wish we would learn from the Germans because it could happen here.

It's a book so I'll use it for reading

Very interesting read. Prompt delivery