Evil is what others do. Our people are always very fine people. In the ancient world, an evil action could pollute the community without being intentional, as the story of Oedipus reminds us. Even those who subscribe to the doctrine of original sin in the abstract tend to ignore it when things get particular. We have a natural impulse to believe that we, and our tribe, may make mistakes, but nothing that merits a word like evil. The impulse is just as strong toward evils past as evils present. We want our ancestors to be honorable, and honored. My grandfather died for the homeland he loved; what’s criminal about that? My great-uncle wasn’t a racist, he was simply defending his home. If you followed the debates over the removal of Confederate flags and monuments that began to swell after nine churchgoers were massacred in Charleston in 2015, you will recognize such remarks. Some were made by white supremacists who, enraged by the presence of a black man in the White House, knew exactly why they wanted to keep Confederate flags flying. Those who were less malicious, if also less honest, clung vaguely to family tradition. As those debates continue, you will hear variations on that theme from Richmond to New Orleans.
Unless you’ve lived a long time in Germany, you’ll be surprised to learn that descendants of the Wehrmacht made the same claims as the descendants of the Confederate Army. Not only in the dark, shell-shocked days that followed the unconditional surrender outside Berlin in 1945; such remarks continued to be made in public through the end of the twentieth century, when the Wehrmacht Exhibit broke West Germany’s final taboo. Created by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, the exhibit used soldiers’ letters and photographs to reveal that Nazi military crimes were not limited to elite SS units, nor confined to a few bad apples. The institute, which organized the exhibit to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end, never expected the reactions it provoked. After all, the claim that the Wehrmacht systematically committed war crimes seemed—to foreign observers and even most German historians—about as controversial as the claim that the earth is round. But the gap between historical scholarship and ordinary public memory proved tremendous. With eighteen million members, the Wehrmacht included a broader scope of German society than any other Nazi organization. Every German had a father, a son, or a brother who served in it, if they didn’t serve themselves, and reactions to the exhibit showed how many still believed the myth that the Wehrmacht was clean, even gallant. Those brave men who defended their homeland against the Bolshevik menace were no better or worse than millions of soldiers before or after them.
Originally planned as a limited project, the exhibit was seen in thirty-three cities by nearly a million viewers. It ignited media discussions, filled talk shows, and eventually provoked a debate in parliament. Protesters balked at what they saw as an attempt to drag their forebears through the mud. In Munich, five thousand neo-Nazis carried signs bearing slogans like GERMAN SOLDIERS—HEROIC DEEDS. In German it rhymes. The good news was that even in Munich, the Nazis’ original stronghold, ten thousand counterdemonstrators turned out to protest them.
The furor revealed how hard it is for scholarship to penetrate personal memory. For decades, German historians had worked to provide a detailed reckoning with the Nazi period, but there were layers of popular consciousness that work had not reached. The impact of the Wehrmacht Exhibit was profound; as its initiator, Jan Philipp Reemtsma, told me, the claim that the Wehrmacht was a criminal organization, so controversial at the time, now is self-evident. The exhibit became part of the history of postwar Germany; no German listening to the media at the time, or studying postwar Germany since, can fail to know something about it. When people point to Germany’s attempts to come to terms with its criminal past, the Wehrmacht Exhibit is Exhibit A.
“But surely…” said a sweet-tempered sixtyish man in Mississippi after I’d explained that the first generation of postwar Germans sounded like nothing so much as the defenders of the Lost Cause version of Confederate history, “Surely they knew—at the latest when they opened the camps—that what they’d done was pure evil?”
They did not.
This book shows how the German people worked, slowly and fitfully, to acknowledge the evils their nation committed. Many books have been written urging us to draw lessons from the Holocaust, some of them dubious. My interest is in what we can learn from Germany after the catastrophe was over. The story should give hope, particularly to Americans currently struggling to come to terms with our own divided history. Here’s a key to understanding contemporary Germany: 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 that I should under 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 itself was far too slow in coming. German Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung was too little, too late, and above all incomplete, as the defensive reactions to the Wehrmacht Exhibit revealed. Don’t I know how long it took for Germans to make the switch from viewing themselves as Worst Victims to viewing themselves as Worst Perpetrators? Don’t I know that many of them never made the switch at all? Don’t I know there’s still racism in Germany, currently represented by the AfD, the first radically right party since the war that won enough votes to be seated in parliament?
Having spent most of the last four decades in Berlin, I do know these things. I’m a philosopher, not a historian or a sociologist, but for reasons that were deep and urgent I’ve been straining to gauge the temperature of this once-fevered nation since 1982—most crucially, to determine whether it was a place fit for raising Jewish children. In 1988, I decided it was not. By 2000, I had changed my mind, for the changes that tentatively began in the ’80s had taken root.
In fact, it’s the failures of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung that should give hope to other nations facing similar problems, but that’s only an apparent paradox. Social justice activists in the South, for example, who are struggling to force their neighbors to face the ways their racist history informs the racist present, are above all aware of how hard it all is. The acknowledgments are too defensive, the racism too tenacious, the impulse to insist on one’s own victimization too strong. Learning that it took decades of hard work before those who committed what are arguably the greatest crimes in history could acknowledge those crimes, and begin to atone for them, brings enormous relief to those working toward similar acknowledgment in the United States. If even those raised in the heart of darkness needed time and trouble to see the light, why shouldn’t it take time and trouble to bring Americans—nurtured for years on messages of their own exceptional goodness—to come to terms with homegrown crimes? The mechanisms and mistakes of the postwar German experience show a slow and faulty process that reflects the tentative steps America is taking toward justice and reconciliation.
Failures foster hope where it’s clear that they lead not to final solutions, but to progress that can be gauged by real differences in people’s lives. For a few, the differences were lives made worse: in Frankfurt am Main and Philadelphia, Mississippi, men were finally sent to jail for murders committed in times and places where the murders were not considered crimes. For many more, lives were made better. A million refugees were welcomed by cheering Germans eager to reverse the racism of their forebears, and the later backlash does not change that fact. And two terms in a row, my president was black. The achievements of Obama’s presidency, especially impressive in the face of massive opposition to every move he made, undermined the last rationalizations for white supremacy—which is just what provoked the massive backlash that led to the election of the least qualified man ever to approach the White House. Obama’s term in office could not overcome the wave of hatred he and his family endured with such grace. But the fact that it was possible is a fact to be cherished, for if the hopes it raised were possible, they are possible again. I will argue that the 2016 election resulted, in large part, from America’s failure to confront its own history.
In American and British life, the symbolic importance of the Nazis stands in inverse relation to common knowledge about them. Nazi just means: the black hole at the heart of history, the apex of evil, the sin for which no expiation is possible, no condemnation sufficient. There is, of course, a wealth of scholarship about the Nazi period produced by American and British historians, upon which I have often drawn in addition to German sources. But my interest is public memory: what every half-educated member of a culture knows in her sinews, for it seeped into them in ways she can hardly remember. Things like your country’s geography: few Americans need pause to consider whether Colorado is west of Connecticut, as few Britons have to wonder whether Leeds is north of London. If you’ve forgotten everything else from your school days, you’re likely to remember that.
Britons and Americans know that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, as they know that Henry VIII had six wives or George Washington chopped down a cherry tree, but the absence of detail makes the Holocaust more of a mystery than anything else. There’s detail aplenty about the mechanisms of murder; the appetite for yet another description of life within or on the way to the death camps seems insatiable. But with little knowledge of what led to fascism in Germany, and next to none of what happened after it, it’s unsurprising that Nazi is simply a term of abuse that has been applied to everything from Obamacare (by Ben Carson) to Saddam Hussein (by George Bush). Bill O’Reilly even used it to describe Black Lives Matter. No wonder a comparison between the violence inflicted on Jews by the Nazis and the violence inflicted on African Americans by Caucasians raises hackles, even indignation. “Tendentious” is the mildest objection white people raise. Slavery was wrong, but it was an economic issue. How can you compare it to the deliberate murder of millions?
Who has the right to make comparisons? This is not a trivial question. The first people to compare Nazi racial policies with American ones were the Nazis themselves. It’s noxious enough to learn how frequently those comparisons were made after the war in wretched attempts at exoneration. Even in playground brawls, He did it first! is a miserable excuse. It’s considerably worse when the genocide of Native Americans is invoked to justify the murder of millions of Slavic peoples. Alas, historians have shown that Nazi interest in American racial practices was present not only after the fact but considerably before it. In the 1920s, Nazis looked to the American eugenics movement to support their own bumbling race science. Hitler took American westward expansion, with its destruction of Native peoples, as the template for the eastward expansion he said was needed to provide Germans with Lebensraum—room to live. Nazi jurists studied American race laws extensively, particularly concerning citizenship rights, immigration, and miscegenation, before drafting the notorious Nuremberg Laws. Chillingly, those jurists found American racial policies too harsh to apply in Germany, and replaced the infamous “one drop of blood” model by which American law determined race with more lenient criteria, allowing Germans possessing but one Jewish grandparent to count, shakily, as citizens. On the other hand, they appreciated the ways in which American legal realism “demonstrated that it was perfectly possible to have racist legislation even if it was technically infeasible to come up with a scientific definition of race.”1 The best of those jurists dug up the worst quotes of Lincoln and Jefferson in support of racist policy. None of this suggests that American racism was the cause of German racism. Racism is a universal phenomenon that takes many forms. The fact that the United States had the world’s best developed racist legislation, which the Nazis eagerly studied in the 1930s while formulating their own, is disturbing enough without causal connections.
After the war had leveled their cities, Germans were no less inclined to compare. Wasn’t the massive Allied bombing of civilians a war crime as severe as anything the SS had committed? While the focus was usually on the firebombings of Hamburg and Dresden, which were seared into postwar memory, references to the “atomic holocaust of the Japanese” can still be heard in Germany and Austria, but only from those whose political allegiances tilt far right. Those comparisons were always central for Germans who tried to exonerate Germany by arguing that Wehrmacht war crimes were no worse than those of the Allies, Nazi genocide no worse than the European genocide of Native Americans.
I do my best to follow Tzvetan Todorov’s wise injunction: Germans should talk about the singularity of the Holocaust, Jews should talk about its universality. You can derive the principle from Kant, but it’s also a variation on an idea we should have learned in kindergarten: if everyone cleans up her own mess, we won’t have to worry about anyone else’s. Todorov’s claim will only be problematic for those who think statements are exhausted by their truth value. In fact, as ordinary language philosophy has taught us, statements are often forms of action. A German who talks about the singularity of the Holocaust is taking responsibility; a German who talks of its universality is denying it. Germans insisting on universality are seeking exoneration; if everyone commits mass murder one way or another, how could they help doing it too?
Germans were not the only ones to compare their own racist crimes with those of others. In the early ’60s, before the Holocaust became sacrosanct, many African Americans did so too. When W.E.B. Du Bois visited the Warsaw ghetto in 1949, he was shaken by the parallels he drew with what he’d called the century’s greatest problem, the color line. After the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, James Baldwin said that white Americans share collective guilt for the persecution of black Americans as Germans did for their silence during the Nazi persecution of Jews.2 Our history isn’t bloodier than others, he continued, but it is bloody.3 In conversation with Baldwin shortly after the Eichmann trial, Malcolm X remarked, “What was done to the Jews twenty years ago keeps us on the edge of our seat wanting to kill Eichmann. No one tells them to forget the past.”4 The comparisons were made by the civil rights hero Medgar Evers, who risked his life in the fight against fascism at Normandy, and even by the NAACP president Roy Wilkins, who was hardly known for radical views. Tellingly, no African American I met while researching this book found the comparison problematic. But after white nationalist demonstrators screamed “Blood and Soil” in Charlottesville, does the comparison require further argument? “Blut und Boden” is a Nazi slogan. Nor is there anything neo about them: What’s new about torchlight parades, Heil Hitler salutes, and swastikas—except their increasing appearance on American soil?
A Jew who insists on what Todorov called the universality of the Holocaust need not argue for exact equivalence between the Holocaust and the crimes of other nations; it’s a matter of taking responsibility for the latter. Though I have spent almost as many years of my life outside the United States as in it, I remain at heart an American Jew. (Readers who belong to neither tribe should note that there are as many ways to be American as there are to be a Jew.) As such, I write appalled by my country’s procrastination in confronting our own national crimes. A mixture of secondary school education and a steady stream of popular movies, television, and radio programs insure that you needn’t be a historian to know basic facts about Auschwitz. Indeed, to avoid information about Auschwitz, you must have spent the last thirty years in a hermitage. Unless you’re a historian specializing in contemporary Germany, you are unlikely to have learned much about what Germans have done over the past seventy years to contend with the shadow Auschwitz cast.
Germany’s relationship to its history is complex enough to have spawned several long compound words. Though they’ve been called Germany’s most distinctive export, there is no real translation of any of them, but working-off-the-past is a reasonable approximation. The German word for debt is the same as the word for guilt; both, it seems, can be worked off with sufficient effort. More recently, all those words are being replaced by the much vaguer term Erinnerungskultur—memory culture—to suggest that the debt can never be paid. In this book I will use the older term, working-off-the-past, since there is no other point to the exercises in memory. Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung came into use in the ’60s, an abstract polysyllabic way of saying We have to do something about the Nazis. Outside Germany, many still think the Nazis’ strength depended on illiterate mobs, a view unfortunately reinforced by the dreadful book and subsequent movie The Reader. In fact, the highest proportion of Nazi Party members came from the educated classes. Their children demanded that their institutions be overhauled from top to bottom.
For several decades, that overhaul has included not only legal examinations and school curricula; it has dominated public debate; created countless works of art, film, literature, and television; and changed the landscape of many German cities. In addition to the famous Holocaust Memorial, built on the most prominent piece of empty space in reunited Berlin, there are more than sixty-one thousand much smaller but more unsettling stumbling stones, which the German artist Gunter Demnig has hammered into sidewalks in front of buildings where Jews lived before the war. Each small brass plaque lists a name, and dates of birth and deportation.
For comparison: Imagine a monument to the Middle Passage or the genocide of Native Americans at the center of the Washington Mall. Suppose you could walk down a New York street and step on a reminder that this building was constructed with slave labor, or that this site was the home of a Native American tribe before it was ethnically cleansed? In the past few years, some universities have begun to mark the relationship between some of their spaces and the labor of slaves. What about the rest of the country?
Both Washington’s Mall and London’s Hyde Park devote space to commemorating one instance of evil: the Holocaust. It’s puzzling that an event that happened in Europe should assume such a prominent place in American or British national symbolism—particularly when the United States did so little to save Jewish refugees before the Holocaust and so much to insure that former Nazis emigrated to the U.S. after it. And though a majority of British citizens favored changing visa restrictions in order to admit Jewish refugees, Foreign Office memoranda reveal that policy makers feared that the Germans might “abandon extermination and aim instead at embarrassing other countries with floods of alien immigrants” if they did so.5 Can the resources devoted to commemorating an evil that neither country did much to prevent be simply motivated by guilt?
The question is seldom raised openly, for the only intelligible answer seems to be an anti-Semitic reference to the Jewish lobby. But as often in history, Jews can be used on the front line of many agendas. The prominence of the Holocaust in American culture—and to a lesser but significant extent in Britain—serves a crucial function: we know what evil is, and we know who was responsible for it. Though it’s no secret that genocidal slaughter didn’t begin or end with the Nazis, the claim that rounding people up and sending them to gas chambers is evil is the only claim that commands nearly universal moral consensus today. In a world where every moral claim is viewed with increasing skepticism, any agreement at all may be welcome. The problem is that a symbol of absolute evil gives us a gold standard by which other evil actions can look like common coin. The focus on Auschwitz distorts our moral vision: like extremely nearsighted people, we can only recognize large, bold objects, while everything else remains vague and dim. Or, to put the matter in psychoanalytic terms, the focus on Auschwitz is a form of displacement for what we don’t want to know about our own national crimes.
Until very recently, the amount of material about the darker sides of American history has been far easier to overlook. The information was there, but it took work to seek it out. Once confined to university libraries and departments of African American or postcolonial studies, the history of slavery and the Jim Crow reign of terror are now part of general history curricula and popular culture. (Though its critics overlooked the references, at least one turning point, Quentin Tarantino’s film Django Unchained, was influenced by German memory culture that the director witnessed while in Berlin to make his previous movie.) British public discussion is more hesitant. As the former British Museum director Neil MacGregor put it, “What is very remarkable about German history as a whole is that the Germans use their history to think about the future, where the British tend to use their history to comfort themselves.”6 British schoolchildren learn that Britain abolished slavery before America did, but rarely about British responsibility for the slave trade. Most college students there are vaguely aware of a problem called Ireland, but lack the most basic knowledge of which part of the country belongs to the Crown. And the history of British imperialism—we built them roads and weren’t half as bad as the Belgians!—is so small a part of public consciousness that even educated Britons can be surprised to learn that their country is generally considered to be part of the history of European colonialism.
Is an American’s attempt to examine her country’s crimes by the light, or the dark, of German history an exercise in self-hatred? Before you conclude this, you should consider that self-hatred is a running theme of the German right, which routinely refers to efforts like the Wehrmacht Exhibit as “dirtying one’s nest.” In fact, they’re better described as Herculean acts of nest-scrubbing, which make cleaning stables look simple. What readmitted Germany to the family of civilized nations only decades after the Holocaust and allowed it to become the leading power in Europe was the recognition of its crimes. Having the will to face your shameful history can become a show of strength.
Evil isn’t a matter for competition, though it is often treated as one.
The deliberate high-tech murder of millions is worse than the economically driven exploitation of slave labor!
But more people died in the Middle Passage that brought captured Africans to the New World than were murdered at Auschwitz!
If you want to focus on form, you could add that the Nazis went to great lengths to murder Jews even after it was clear that trains and troops were desperately needed for the war effort; Nazi devotion to genocide was so great that it outrode even instrumental interests of reason. (You should, however, remember that the gas chambers accounted for less than half the murders of European Jews, and none of the twenty million Slavic peoples. The rest were killed by low-tech means: more or less organized shooting, burning, and bludgeoning were the preferred ways of killing on the Eastern Front.) If you want to focus on number, you could argue that the number of hours captured Africans spent crammed into the holds of slave ships was higher than the number of hours spent by Jews pushed into cattle cars. Examples like these show the folly of entering into an Olympics of suffering. Quite apart from the fact that competitive suffering is bad for the soul, we have no means to measure evil’s scale. Trying to determine which evil is worse than another is a political project, not a moral one, and weighing evils against each other for political purposes is morally unacceptable. Today there’s at least this much consensus: both the Holocaust and slavery and its aftermath were evil. Now what?
This book is about comparative redemption, not comparative evil. Suppose you accept the view that the racism that led to the gas chambers and the racism that led to slavery and terror can be compared. Still, you may wonder: Can we compare the processes that are meant to heal the wounds of such different historical events? Postwar Germany was ravaged and occupied by four victorious armies. Contemporary America is not. Even those who acknowledge that both have been infected with murderous racism may wonder about the cure. With such very different circumstances in the present, how can one attempt to overcome the past provide lessons for another?7
Let’s begin by counting the differences.
1. Germany was an occupied country for forty-five years; not until 1990 did a peace treaty declare the war to be over. As a thoroughly defeated nation, Germany had no choice but to acknowledge its crimes. The United States, by contrast, emerged from World War II not only victorious but as a victor whom even pacifists acknowledged had been on the side of truth and right. Who could force them to admit they had sins to repair?
The dates are incontestable. What’s also never contested is the fact that the denazification imposed by the Allies in West Germany was a consummate failure. (As I’ll show, the situation in East Germany was more complicated.) Like defeated Southerners under Reconstruction, postwar West Germans initially chafed under what they called victors’ justice, and they mocked Allied attempts to impose a change of consciousness. From the Nuremberg Trials to the forced visits to Bergen-Belsen accompanied by posters screaming YOU ARE GUILTY OF THESE CRIMES!, official efforts to insist on acknowledgment were almost uniformly despised. The best-selling West German novel of the ’50s was The Questionnaire, one right-wing author’s use of a denazification questionnaire to frame his own life story in a way that sneers the Allies are too stupid to get it on every page. Admitting the failure of reeducation programs and eager to put aside past enmities in the service of the Cold War, Western Allies discontinued those programs in 1951. Working-off-the-past is not something that can be imposed from without. Only the internal confrontation, begun in the late ’60s by the children of those who opposed any confrontation with the past at all, would have a chance.
The history of racism in America is longer than the history of racism in Germany. The first slave was brought to Jamestown in 1619; in 1951, a delegation of clergymen visiting the White House with a letter of support from the ailing Albert Einstein failed to convince Harry Truman to make lynching a federal crime. This would have left it subject to federal rather than local prosecution at a time when local justice officials were often part of lynch mobs, and certainly disinclined to prosecute them. Politically dependent on the support of white Southern Democrats, Truman said the moment was inopportune. With murderous racism so deep and long-standing, how can Americans hope to work off a past that the Germans have already begun to master?
Once again the dates will stand, but they need to be complicated by others. German racism has a long history too. As in other European nations, Jews were forced to live in ghettos, and rarely free from fear of pogroms, through the late Middle Ages. They gained citizenship status only when Napoleon carried the principles of the French Revolution eastward on swordpoint, and the vaunted German-Jewish symbiosis was as late as it was wobbly. Though hailed in his day as the German Socrates, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn was denied membership in the Prussian Academy. One hundred and fifty years later, Einstein’s membership was secured only after a recommendation assured that august institute that he was “free of all unpleasant Jewish characteristics.” The year was 1914; he had already discovered relativity theory. The question is not which racism was longer, stronger, and more devastating. But rather: Did the forms it took in America preclude the sort of atonement that has taken place in Germany?
2. The Civil War was over in 1865; World War II concluded eighty years later. If Germany has already proceeded quite a way down the path to redemption, what’s taking the United States so long?
Dates, once again. Diane McWhorter, author of a Pulitzer prizewinning history of the Birmingham civil rights movement, suggests that we should start counting from the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. For however many forms of racism still continue, that was the moment racist policy was banned by law. De facto racist policies continue to this day, but their de jure abolition marked a dividing line. If you accept that reckoning, we are only fifty years from zero hour, about the place where Germany was when the Wehrmacht Exhibit provoked the kind of backlash that the removal of Confederate monuments provoked in New Orleans.
There are several reasons for American slowness in facing our history, and one is fairly simple: there’s a hundred-year hole in it, and few white Americans are even aware of that. For most of us, the period between the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott is a vague and cloudy blur. My own ignorance was enormous before I began work on this book. Even as knowledgeable a politician as Hillary Clinton managed to confuse Jim Crow and Reconstruction on the 2016 campaign trail. With all due allowance for campaign exhaustion, you should not have to think in order to be clear about the difference between them, any more than you’d have to think about whether Memphis is the same thing as Montana. Excellent work by Michelle Alexander, Edward Baptist, Douglas Blackmon, Eric Foner, Bryan Stevenson, and others has made us conscious of the ways that chattel slavery turned into slavery by other means. I will sketch that work in chapter 8. Until this becomes the kind of knowledge that is mandatory in our classrooms and visible in our public spaces, we’ll continue to hear the refrain: Slavery ended in the nineteenth century, why are we still talking about it in the twenty-first?
There are sinister explanations for the presence of this hole in American memory, beginning with the concerted efforts of the defenders of the Lost Cause narrative of Confederate history, but one explanation is perfectly innocent: Americans prefer narratives of progress. Call them happy endings. Our stories are more aspirational than actual. We may acknowledge that wrongs were committed in the past, but we want to believe they were righted in a roughly straight line. Shortly after Trump’s election, President Obama tried to cheer us with the remark that American history zigs and zags, but while the metaphor may have been soothing in a moment of national anxiety, it’s too abstract to describe the turns America has taken. Frederick Douglass, the former slave turned abolitionist, said it early on: racist violence occurs most often when black people advance.8 The Klan was founded in the wake of Reconstruction, the brief period following the Civil War when African Americans began to enjoy the rights that the Union victory had assured them. Decades later, black men proud to serve in the U.S. Army came home from world wars to face lynch mobs. Some scholars argue that fury over Brown v. Board of Education played a role in the murder of Emmett Till. The Confederate flag was raised in South Carolina and the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial completed in Georgia in response to early successes of the civil rights movement in the ’60s. And there’s no doubt that the presence of a black family in the White House enraged a sufficient number of Americans to insure the election of a swindling, violent successor whose policies, such as they are, are at odds with the interests of all but a handful of billionaires. This is not an elegy for the possibility of progress. Barack Obama’s election fulfilled dreams we didn’t dare to dream in that most hopeful of decades, 1960s America, and it stirred hopes and hearts around the world. Until we realize, however, that the zigs and zags are not accidental, but have a clear and particular structure, we will be unable to make systematic progress again.
3. The Jewish community of Germany may be the fastest-growing one in Europe, but it’s still far below what it was at the time of the Nazi takeover—when it was less than 1 percent of the population. However you count them, the Jewish population of Germany will never be close to the 14 percent of the U.S. population African Americans make up.
Jews in Germany are very hard to count because the only way to be counted is to join the official Jewish Community. Doing so automatically tithes 1 percent of your income, but even those undaunted by the tax often feel alienated by the Community, which is both strife-ridden and conservative. None of the thousands of Israelis currently living in Berlin take that step, and hence remain uncounted. As do I. It’s undeniable that African Americans are far more present in American life than Jews are in Germany, but that cuts both ways. The fact that so many Americans of African descent refuse to be anything but a vital part of American culture is also an advantage. Germans have been mourning the holes in their own culture since they drove out the Jews, and those of us who came, or came back, after the war cannot make up for those losses. Since Frederick Douglass, at the latest, the great majority of African Americans have rejected proposals to return to Africa. Instead, they have insisted on remaining to claim their full rights as American citizens. The American economy was built on the backs of enslaved men and women who cleared the land and tended the crops that created the wealth that was the foundation of U.S. prosperity. Equally important, American culture is unimaginable without the contributions of generations of black artists who forged forms of expression the world has come to know as quintessentially American. African Americans are inextricably part of American life, past and present, and that is a reason for hope. Forty million voices with four hundred years of history cannot be swept aside.
4. Perhaps not. But that argument cuts two ways as well. For white racism continues, and continues to be deadly, throughout America: it’s not just a matter of an unexamined past but of a pounding, brutal present. In Germany, by contrast, there are no longer enough targets left for racism.
In Germany, to some extent, Turks and other people of color became the target of the venom once directed toward Jews. Nine of them were randomly murdered by young neo-Nazis between 2000 and 2007. The trial of the one accomplice who remained alive after a self-made bomb blew up the others shocked Germany, and the National Socialist Underground murders were not the only attacks of violence against brown people committed in Germany in recent years. It was disgust at an attack on a refugee asylum in 2015 that drove thousands of Germans to protest by streaming onto railway platforms to welcome trainload after trainload of incoming refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan; it was fear over that welcome that gave seats in parliament to the first far-right party in Germany since the war. There is no doubt that vigilance will be needed for the foreseeable future. The past continues to seep into and infect the present. Working-off is never finished or final.
And for all the work that’s been done to face anti-Semitism, even that hasn’t entirely disappeared from Germany. My friends say I don’t hear the worst of it; few Germans would tell a public intellectual who’s known to be Jewish the things they say behind her back. I’m sure my friends are right, since I do hear the softer sorts of insult: the suspicion that my professional success in Germany is a result of affirmative action will haunt whatever I do, as it haunts many an African American in the United States. But what matters most is change over time. I left Berlin in 1988, largely because I wanted my son to grow up with a sense of normality that seemed impossible in a land with so many ghosts. One day-care worker had told me, “If I’d known he was Jewish, I wouldn’t have taken him. Not because I have anything against Jews, they can’t help what they’re born as, but I couldn’t have treated him like any other toddler.” At least she was honest. Twelve years, two children, and a change of government later, I returned to Berlin convinced that past and prejudice had been sufficiently worked off to allow Jewish children to grow up without feeling they had to remain in hiding. Two of them, now adults, still live in the city that welcomes more foreigners every day. This is significant change. I would not have taken them to a place where they, or I, would be forced to live in fear. Put slightly differently: I would not have taken them to a place where they’d be forced to walk past Hans Wehrmacht statues or flags flying swastikas.
In sum, the circumstances surrounding racism in Germany and America, past and present, are not the same. How could they be? History is just as particular as the individuals who make and are made by it; what worked in one place can’t be straightforwardly transferred to another. Seen in one light, the differences between German and American racist histories are glaring. Seen in another, what’s clear is what the similarities can teach us about guilt and atonement, memory and oblivion, and the presence of past in preparing for the future. Many of the similarities are cross-cultural, as relevant for thinking about British as about Dutch colonization, though every attempt to work off past debts must attend to each nation’s particular history. Forget the past and move on isn’t even helpful in the realms of individual psychology; as political advice, it is worthless. When pasts fester, they become open wounds.
What’s common to both starts with language: in Germany, as in the southern United States, “the War” is a singular reference. Everybody knows that one was decisive, and its repercussions are with us today. This knowledge is more conscious in a Deep South that was occupied, and almost as devastated as Germany, than in the rest of the United States. Still, many authors have argued for the continuing influence of the Civil War in American life, and some even claim that mainstream American political culture is a reflection of Southern attempts to win the war by other means.9
The centrality of the Civil War for all the American history that came after it is less clear to most Americans than the centrality of World War II for Europe. The great historian Tony Judt rightly called his examination of late-twentieth-century European history Postwar. The title could do for post-1865 America, were anyone to undertake as magisterial a survey of it, for the Civil War has cast an even longer shadow. Rather than focusing on the details of difference, we should use whatever lessons we can gather as we seek to come out of the shade.
Germany was once proud to call itself the land of poets and thinkers. In the first angry attempts to confront the Nazi period, more than one wag suggested calling it the land of judges and hangmen. (Dichter and Denker rhymes with Richter and Henker.) Initially, German thinkers absconded from what should have been a moral obligation to reflect on the Nazis’ assault on reason and right; Heidegger was merely the most prominent example. As most philosophers, like most other professors, supported the regime while it lasted, they avoided the subject once it was gone. But Karl Jaspers and his student Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno and his student Jürgen Habermas, as well as thinkers like the brilliant autodidact Jean Améry, all wrote many essays devoted to the question: What does it mean to live in the wake of past crime? German intellectual traditions prepared the way for this work in a way that American and British traditions, with few exceptions, do not. (One distinguished English philosopher told me he was no more interested in the question of why some Germans became Nazis than he’d be interested in thinking about someone who declared he was a teapot. “Both are simply mad,” he said.) Having learned much from German philosophy, my goal is to encourage a discussion of guilt and responsibility as serious as the German one—not in order to provide a set of directions, but rather a sense of orientation won through reflection that is no less passionate for being nuanced.
Rules are rarely useful in matters of moment. There, judgment, which can only be based on serious reflection about particulars, is necessary. Understanding how the Germans have confronted their past will not provide recipes for confronting a different one—even were the German confrontation without flaw. Even in a single culture there are seldom clear directions. Over lunch one afternoon the president of Berlin’s Academy of Sciences asked me if I’d come to take a look at the mosaic in the academy’s vestibule floor. He wanted a Jewish opinion, though he wouldn’t tell me about what. As I stared at the floor, I saw that it was one of those duck-rabbit designs: if you looked at it one way, you saw an innocuous pattern; blink, and you saw a series of interlocking swastikas. No one had noticed them until the president of Israel paid the academy a ceremonial visit. Pacing in the vestibule, his bodyguard saw swastikas. Since displaying a swastika is illegal in Germany, the president of the academy received a summons from the district attorney. Had the floor been laid by the Nazis, there would have been few doubts about what to do. The trouble was that the floor was laid in 1903, nearly twenty years before the Nazi Party existed. It’s an old Indian design, after all. Should they tear up the floor they had just spent part of 10 million euros to renovate? Put a rug on top of it? Put a plaque explaining the history? This is the usual solution for such questions in Berlin, and it is the one that president chose. His successor thought it better to take down the plaque and solve the problem with a rug.
Examples like these show how endlessly complicated every confrontation with the past must be. Which streets should be renamed, which statues dismantled, how those who committed crimes should be remembered and how their wrongs should be requited—none of these questions can be decided abstractly, once and for all. However similar national crimes may be, they are also relentlessly particular, and any attempt at reparation must be particular too. Only direct analyses of particular cases and contexts can help us to get the balance right.
Critical thought about history and memory is evident in recent American debates that give reason for hope, as Americans begin to see how the unexamined past forces its way into the present. It’s too soon to tell, but the process that began in Frankfurt and Berlin in the ’60s and changed the German nation may foreshadow the movement that began in Charleston and Charlottesville. However many the differences, all are animated by the conviction that our past will continue to haunt us if we do not face it down. An open reckoning with that past is a crucial step toward maturity that will allow us to envision a full-bodied future, for a grown-up relationship to one’s culture is like a grown-up relationship to your parents. We all benefit from inheritances we did not choose and cannot change. Growing up involves sifting through all the things you couldn’t help inheriting and figuring out what you want to claim as your own—and what you have to do to dispose of the rest of it.