Coming to terms with past evils

Susan Neiman is a U.S-born moral philosopher. Raised in Atlanta, she studied and taught at Yale, and from 1996-2000 she was associate professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University where she took Israeli citizenship. In 2000 she became director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. She has long lived in Berlin by choice, and wants her readers to know that she finds contemporary Germany a good place to be Jewish.

As I approached writing a post about Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, I checked with a friend, a German-born immigrant-American residing in San Francisco. Had she heard of this book? She hadn't, but just laughed when I told her the title. In this she confirmed exactly the author's experience:

... nearly every German I know, from public intellectual to pop star, laughed out loud when they heard I was writing a book with this title. The exception was a former culture minister who didn't find it the least bit funny, raising his voice in a Berlin restaurant to tell me I should in no circumstances publish a book suggesting there was something to be learned from the Germans. Just as it's become axiomatic for decent Germans to insist that the Holocaust was the worst crime in human history, which should never be relativized by comparison with anything, it's become axiomatic that this insight was too slow in coming. German Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung was too little, too late, and above all incomplete ...

That's a long word, unlovely to an English-speaking auditor -- it means something like "coming to terms with (a guilty) past" and it's what the generation of Germans who came up after the Nazi/World War II generation have sought to do about their history. There's no simple English translation of the concept, perhaps because the most of the people of the United States have so far not come to terms our own history of genocide against those who were here before us and of violence and torture inflicted on enslaved Africans and their descendants. Ultimately that U.S. guilt, our own national evil, is Neiman's subject. Much of this book is a tour of incomplete U.S. civil rights struggles right up through contemporary eruptions against murderous policing. She does this empathetically and observantly and there's much there. But Neiman really does believe we could learn from the Germans.

Since I have learned something, if never enough, about my own country's struggles against our embedded evils, I was most intrigued in this book by Neiman's exploration of how Germans have dealt with their past. She sees distinct and important differences between the two halves of the country, divided at the end of World War II into capitalist West Germany and Soviet socialist-oriented East Germany. Since Germany's split territory was unified in 1990, we can forget that the two Germanys had 45 years of somewhat different social and ethical evolution.

West Germany was slow to come to terms with its Nazi past, in good part because the victorious Allies -- the U.S., Britain and France -- wanted to get a prosperous capitalist state on its feet quickly and were comfortable with using many former Nazis to get the job done. The population at large experienced themselves as defeated in war, not guilty. Eighteen hundred people assembled by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno of the University of Frankfurt after the war were encouraged to speak openly:

Though the participants represented a large variety of occupations and education, their language and historical references suggest fairly high capacities for reflection. They just didn't use them. None expressed a desire to return to the good old days of the Third Reich ... but whatever memories they had of peace, prosperity and pride in the '30s were battered by what followed. Stalingrad at the front and bombed-out cities at home produced shock and shame that were amply clear in 1950. The shame, however, had no moral component. Nearly every participant ... denied any suggestion of guilt. One former soldier went so far as to deny that Germany had started the war. It was America, he said, that sent Germany to Russia so that Germany would bear the brunt of fighting communism at its source. ...

Neiman describes Germans' experience of their country's past on a time line which appeals to my historical consciousness. After enough time has past, a reckoning with guilt became both possible and necessary.

"Being German in my generation," says the prizewinning author Carolin Emcke, "means distrusting yourself." She was born in 1967. 

Exact birth dates are important in Germany. If you were born before 1910, your education was not soaked through with Nazi propaganda, and you probably knew enough Jews to inoculate you against the worst of it. If you were born after 1928, your education was in Nazi hands, but you were too young to be drafted into the Wehrmacht ... In between, you were likely out of luck. Postwar dates matter just as much. If you were born after 1960, it's unlikely that your father was in the army, though his school days would have been informed by it, as well as the memory of the bombs that fell in the course of what Goebbels called Total War. Born a little earlier, you are probably torn and frayed. I know no honest man or woman of that generation who wasn't in some unreachable place broken. If you've ever had the misfortune to learn an awful truth about your parents, you can put yourself in German shoes. ... 

They are called the '68ers, the generation born in the '40s that watched the Eichmann and Auschwitz trials on television and had epiphanies: suddenly the grim-lipped brutal silence of their parents and teachers had a cause. ...Because the parents could not mourn, acknowledge responsibility, or even speak about the war, the next generation was damned to express it ...

The consequence of these epiphanies was a serious confrontation with the meaning of society-wide anti-Semitism and a perverted German nationalism which aimed to impose itself on the world through criminal violence.

That's West Germany. East Germany was long another country, cut off from its siblings. And Neiman makes and defends an assertion, highly controversial in both reunified Germany and the West, about the split. She acknowledges the East was a grim authoritarian place but ...

*East German did a better job of working off the Nazi past than West Germany. ... East Germany's ways of working-off-the-past have been largely forgotten [since reunification].

She enumerates five facets indicating a national attempt to come to terms with a criminal past, contrasting East Germany's path with how the United States has dealt with our past. The more linear, intentional East German confrontation with its Nazi past provides a jumping off point from which to look at the weak and incomplete gestures toward working off of genocide and slavery on this side of the Atlantic.

•   "The nation must achieve a coherent and widely accepted national narrative." She contrasts the East's clarity with U.S. equivocation about whether our Civil War was about slavery or state's rights. "Although the East German narrative ... was incomplete, its tenor was very clear. NAZIS WERE BAD, DEFEATING THEM WAS GOOD. ..."

•   "Narratives start with words and are reinforced by symbols. ... Which heroes do we valorize, which victims do we mourn? The United States has hundreds of monuments depicting a noble-looking Robert E. Lee ... There are no monuments to the Nazis in Germany, East or West, but only after reunification did West Germany build significant monuments to the victims."

•   "Narratives are transported through education. What are children taught to remember and what are they meant to forgot? American textbooks have been improved since I was child, when  the heroic story of western expansion left out the genocide of Native Americans entirely, glossed over the horrors of slavery, and never mentioned Jim Crow. East German history textbooks were resolutely antifascist from the beginning. In the first decades after the war, West German children were left with the impression that history stopped after 1933 ...Today Nazism is not merely covered in history classes; it has a central place in subjects like literature and art."

•   "Words are even more powerful when set to music. So can we sing 'Dixie'? What about the German national anthem"? ... It may be time for the United States to rewrite our national anthem ..."

•   "West German justice prosecuted only a tiny number of Nazis and usually commuted the sentences of those who were convicted. East Germany tried and convicted a far greater proportion of war criminals. Both countries paid reparations, in different ways, for crimes committed in the Nazi era. As of this writing, the United States has refused to consider a congressional resolution to discuss the possibility of reparations for slavery. ..."

This is a complicated, nuanced, sprawling, deeply empathetic book. It's not about arousing guilt; it's about living in the knowledge of evil. It offers more questions than answers. I cannot recommend it too highly.

Here's Neiman's conclusion:

Germany's attempts to work off its past have stumbled many times, but compared with the efforts of other countries, they are steps in the right direction. ... self criticism is vital to the process of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. It's a process that's never likely to be finished or final, echoing Samuel Beckett's adage: "Try again. Fail again. Fail better."