In her 2019 book, “Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil,” the philosopher Susan Neiman examines the different ways in which Germany and the United States have confronted their past sins. Neiman, who grew up in the American South and now lives in Berlin, describes how Germany has reckoned with the Nazi era, through memorials, official acts of remembrance, and various forms of reparations. Indeed, just as the Nazi period has become the ultimate example of unadulterated cruelty, postwar Germany has become the paradigmatic example of a country that has fully considered its past. Could something similar be possible in the United States? As Neiman’s book seeks to answer this question, it also serves as a conscious attempt to “safeguard” Germany’s confrontation with history, at a time when the far right is on the rise there, as it is in many countries.
I recently spoke by phone with Neiman, amid renewed discussions in the U.S.—sparked in part by the killing of George Floyd—about how to remember slavery and segregation, and increasing controversy over whether Confederate memorials have any place in modern-day America. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why it took the Germans longer than many people think to come to grips with Nazism, the different ways East and West Germany approached the legacy of the Third Reich, and what the German experience with reparations can teach the United States.
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. So her civil-rights creds are as good as they come, and yet she could nevertheless record this huge hit that is an elegy for the Lost Cause. So I think it’s really important that we see that as an American problem. The South magnifies it, but it’s an American ignorance of our history.
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.
In the West, you had politicians like the former Chancellor Helmut Kohl express a grumpy attitude about the United States having a Holocaust memorial. So how much of this do you think was cynically done to make Germany more palatable to others? And then similarly, in the East, they were interested in focussing on Fascism’s crimes, because they were also running a non-democratic, authoritarian state, and wanted to focus attention elsewhere.
Politicians always do things for political motives. I think that’s what makes them politicians. Certainly, what you’re talking about in West Germany was explicit. The decision by Konrad Adenauer to pay reparations to the state of Israel and to individual Holocaust victims was explicitly made as an attempt, first of all, to make Germany acceptable to the West again. And, at the same time, there was a really quite wicked trade-off, which was, “We’ll pay some money and then we can just be silent. We’ll keep all our old Nazis in their offices,” which happened. “We won’t prosecute people. We will not talk about the past. We’ve paid our dues. That’s it.” It was Adenauer who even made a very famous statement, when he was running against Brandt for Chancellor, in 1962: “What was Herr Brandt doing abroad for twelve years?” So you had the very thing that made Brandt a good German in the eyes of the world make him a bad German in the eyes of the Christian Democrats.
Kohl is an interesting case, because I think Kohl actually evolved. I really have hardly a good word to say about the man. He was famous for saying that he didn’t have any responsibility for Nazism due to the “mercy of a late birth,” which became kind of a trope. And, of course, you don’t blame a three-year-old—he was three when the Nazis took power—but to say you have no responsibility for the nation that you’re leading is pretty problematic. Despite his feelings about the Holocaust Museum in Washington, he really fought for the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, which is surprising. I’m not entirely sure why he wanted to do that, but he did.
So there were definitely very cynical moments in West Germany. In 1985, there was a very famous speech by the then President, Richard von Weizsäcker, in which he finally called May 8th “the end of the war, a day of liberation.” Again, it had been called that for forty years in East Germany, but it was time that people stopped describing it as the Day of Defeat or the Day of the Unconditional Capitulation, which is how it was described. And I think that the combined force of these elements from civil society really did move conservative politicians like Weizsäcker and Kohl, who were not Social Democrats by any means.
The East German case is more complicated. The people who ran the country all were either in concentration camps, or they fled into exile to avoid them or avoid being killed. So their anti-Fascism was not cynical at all. It was very deep, it was very personal, and they really were committed to founding another Germany. And, of course, it was an authoritarian system. And this is not even talking about the Soviet dependence; and I’m not defending Stalinism.
I’m glad that we both agree on that.
But what one has to remember, in trying to understand what East Germany did, is these people had seen the failure of democratic institutions. They were quite scared of saying to the people who had been living under Nazi propaganda for thirteen years, “O.K., guys, just elect whoever you like.”
Just to be clear: the Soviet satellite states who were not under Nazi propaganda for thirteen years were not given the right to vote.
That’s true. I hope you were smiling when you said, “I’m glad you’re not defending Stalinism.”
Yes, I was kidding.
I knew this chapter was going to be the most controversial of the book. I know it goes so strongly against the picture that we have of East Germany. All most people know about East Germany is the Stasi. But one of the things I did to research that chapter, in addition to looking up a huge number of facts and figures, was to interview East Germans. With one exception, all of them had dissident pasts, had taken personal risks, had been demoted from jobs because they opposed the system—and these were not yes-men or -women by any stretch of the imagination. They were all part of the opposition to the authoritarian regime. And all of them said, “I can criticize this and that about the G.D.R., but the anti-Fascism was genuine.”
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.
How have German textbooks and German culture dealt with the Nazi period?
What I think we can learn from that example is that anti-racism, or facing up to your past, is not a vaccine. It’s not a one-shot option. It’s a process that you need to continue to go through, and it will change generationally. People will see history differently. Generations will have different needs. I also want to emphasize that it’s not just revision of textbooks. I really think popular culture is at least as important as what gets taught in schools, perhaps more so.
There is a question of social democracy. There’s no German who would be content with this set of social programs that Bernie Sanders was arguing for, because in Germany—as in the rest of Europe, and particularly Scandinavia—labor rights, medical care, education, paid vacations, all of those things are considered rights and not benefits. And, as soon as you conceptualize them as human rights, you have a very different social structure. Yes, we have income inequality, and even sometimes we have homelessness, but it’s just nothing like the scale that you see in the U.S. And these are not specifically racial questions. But people of color are disproportionately affected by them.
As I read your book, I was trying to think of the biggest differences between slavery and segregation and the Nazi era. And the thing that keeps sticking out to me is the difference in time. The Nazi era, as you mentioned, was over in twelve years. In American history, it’s all the way up to the present day. It seems like there’s a way in which it’s easier to say, “Oh, a twelve- year period, that’s a dozen years, but the rest of German history is glorious.” I know there are other blotches on German history, such as the First World War. But what do you think of that idea?
It’s one I’ve thought about a lot. And the first thing you could say is that this analogy is less important when you take Stevenson’s claim that slavery wasn’t ended in 1865. It evolved. And if you take the end of legal segregation, with the Civil Rights Act, in 1964, then actually we’re at about the same place where the Germans were, maybe a little later, after 1945. But you are right that there is a fundamental lie at the heart of American history. And acknowledging that is going to involve a painful reckoning. And, by the way, there was a period in cultural German history when the people that I hung out with when I first came here, in the eighties, wouldn’t read Goethe, because all of German tradition was corrupt. Because all of German tradition ended in the Third Reich.
I remember my grandfather saying he would never buy a German car.
Right. Believe me, my mother was shocked, and so were most people, when I said I was going to spend a year in Berlin in 1986. But even Germans felt that way. Even Germans said, “This culture is contaminated.” Now they’re developing, happily, a much more nuanced view, because people need some kind of a healthy view of their country’s strengths as well as its weaknesses, and what was so callous and tragic. It’s also simply hard to get past. America really is the only country in the world that didn’t claim to be founded by accident, right? You had the Teutons landing here, and the Normans landing there, and you had these tribes that came together, and eventually they developed some kind of political structure. The U.S. claims to be founded on these ideals that it violated at its conception. And that is the problem that we really have to face.
In Germany, we have a Social Democratic President whom I like very much and quoted at the end of the book. Presidencies are a somewhat formal position, but they have moral authority, and this particular President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, says a lot about these questions. He just gave a talk at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of the war, in which he said, “This is a country you can only love with a broken heart.” I think that is something we will have to say about ourselves.
Fortunately, the United States has always had this conception of the “other America.” So we have a list of people who, from very early on, tried to make America realize the ideals it claimed to follow. And I think it’s extremely significant that African-Americans were crucial in that tradition of the “other America.” And it’s striking. We might’ve thought the Back to Africa Movement would be more appealing to people who were taken against their will, and yet people were saying, “No. We are the ones who are going to make America live up to its ideals.” And there are plenty of white people in that position as well. I am not unhopeful at this moment. But we’ll have to unravel a lot of falsehoods.
Reparations is something people obviously talk about as atoning for history, and getting to a new place of understanding. How much reparations has Germany done now, seventy-plus years later? And is there anything similar that the United States could or should do?
As I said, the initial reparations were paid unwillingly and with this sort of compromise: “Can we shut up about the war if we give you this money?” That was the beginning, in the Adenauer period. At the end of the twentieth century, when we had a Social Democratic Green government, there was quite a different process that was established: a joint government and corporate reparations fund, which explicitly called itself “Memory, Responsibility and Future.” This specifically allocated funds for education.
I’m not an economist, so what I can talk about is the justice of reparations. And I was quite ambivalent when I was thinking about the question during the writing of this book. I was more drawn toward the view that people like Cornel West and Bernie Sanders were supporting, which is, “Let us get social democratic programs in for guaranteed decent wages, labor rights, health care.” That should be the priority.
And my thinking changed on the subject when I started asking myself the question, “What if a Jew coming back from exile or a concentration camp to Germany received just the same package of social rights that her neighbors did? Wouldn’t we think that something else was owed to her?” Most white Americans are descended from people who came after the Civil War, so they had nothing to do with slavery. But we certainly benefitted from things—like mortgage payments—that allowed white Americans to go into the middle class. Those are still disparities that need to be addressed.
