Susan Neiman: Learning from the Germans: Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil

Excerpt

In Learning from the Germans, Susan Neiman sets out a range of contrasts between two historical situations that she takes to be relevantly similar. The first is that of postwar Germany’s Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (coming to terms with the past) process. Her book is filled with admiration for the manner in which Germans, in both states of their divided country, eventually overcame defensiveness and self-pity, following their crushing defeat and consequent misery, and went on to establish entirely new norms in their attitude to their recent, shameful past. Germany accepted that it had inflicted innumerable unjustifiable evils on the world, and on the Jews in particular. It sought to inform itself unflinchingly about how it had enthusiastically embraced the ideals and practices of National Socialism. Equipped with that knowledge, future generations could be vigilant in preventing any repetition of the past. They might also build a new society marked by humility, leaving no space for those comforting myths that could distort the truth about its 12 years of infamy. The fulfillment of the Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung process is seen in German willingness to give over huge numbers of its public spaces to memorialization of its victims and to provide none for its own defeated soldiers. Nazi concentration camps have been preserved as places of mournful reflection. …